Chronique des temps héroïques
Illustrated by Pablo Picasso with 3 original color lithographs and in black (slipcase, cover and frontispiece portrait), 3 original drypoints, and 24 previously unpublished drawings engraved on wood by Georges Aubert, recalling the illustrations of Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu.
Unique printing of 170 copies on Montval laid paper, this one of 30 copies numbered in Roman numerals, accompanied by 2 states of the lithograph for the slipcase (copy no. II), signed by Picasso.
Max Jacob offers here a first-rate testimony, that of his literary and artistic recollections of Montmartre.
He met Pablo Picasso in Paris in 1901, and their fraternal friendship made him an almost daily witness to Picasso’s work, whom he named as his hero — alongside Apollinaire — when he came to write about the rue Ravignan years. After the death of the dealer Paul Guillaume, his widow asked Jacob for a preface to a volume of her husband’s memoirs. This project became the founding impulse for the text that would grow into this fundamental account of Cubism: La Chronique des temps héroïques. Alongside Picasso and Apollinaire, the book brings in the Futurists and the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Arrested and deported to Drancy, where he died on 5 March 1944, Jacob never saw the publication of these pages, written in 1936–37.
Louis Broder took charge of the edition, based on a complete manuscript of the eight chapters, and Pablo Picasso was honored to illustrate it: he produced a lithograph on transfer paper, three drypoints, and two color lithographs for the cover and slipcase; twenty-four woodcuts in the text by Georges Aubert after Picasso’s drawings. A unique copy on Japanese paper, made for Louis Broder, should also be noted.
There is no testimony as vivid and direct as this one on the adventure of modern art, from Montmartre bohemia to the escapades of the Roaring Twenties.
Complete with the subscription form.
Skillful restorations to the chemise-slipcase.