Contemporains pittoresques

It was in the pages of Les Marges, the review run by his friend Eugène Montfort, that Guillaume Apollinaire first turned his attention to his female contemporaries, writing under the pseudonym Louise Lalanne on Judith Gautier, Anna de Noailles, Renée Vivien and Colette. He then produced, this time under his own name, a series of portraits gathered as the “collection des Contemporains pittoresques”: Jarry, Moréas, Ernest La Jeunesse, Mendès, Ponchon — a series reflecting his fascination with exceptional, singular individuals, each in himself a kind of proof of the richness and infinite diversity of the human species.

From the library of Raoul Simonson, with bookplate.

This binding, a rare instance, is not recorded in the Carnets. Bonet would later, in 1942, bind the autograph manuscript of the articles, with this comment: “Ah! How much pleasure I take in binding the works of this spiritual guide of an entire era…” The present volume almost certainly belongs to the series of half-bindings that Bonet designed at the very start of his career for Simonson, in the early 1930s. They may be compared with the series he made for André Breton and Paul Éluard, using identical motifs.