One of 10 copies on Hollande paper (no. XI).
Signed presentation inscription: “[name of dedicatee erased], poète et dramaturge du subconscient, en bien sympathique hommage. Paul Dermée. X 1928.”
Major figures of the Cubist movement in their respective fields, Paul Dermée (1886–1951) and Louis Marcoussis (1878–1941) were both close to its most celebrated ambassador, Guillaume Apollinaire.
Camille Janssen, known as Paul Dermée, left Liège in 1910 for Paris, where Louis Marcoussis, born in Warsaw and already settled in the capital since 1903, had just met Apollinaire, who inscribed a copy of L’Hérésiarque to him. On Apollinaire’s advice to Frenchify his name (from Ludwig Casimir Ladislas Markus), Marcoussis joined the Cubist movement and the Section d’Or group. The artist, whom Éluard called the “poets’ darling,” painted several portraits of Apollinaire, and is likely to have attended the celebrated banquet held in honor of the “murdered poet” on 31 December 1916 in Montrouge, organized by Dermée.
Le Volant d’Artimon, published in 1922, brings together two artists whose careers were deeply rooted in the Cubist adventure. It is one of the few, and most accomplished, examples of the alliance Marcoussis alone knew how to forge between poetic text and image: a bibliophile with an innate sense of poetry, he excelled at translating written language into visual form.
This rare edition, issued in the highly avant-garde “Z” series, was published by the Russian bookseller, gallerist and publisher Jacques Povolozky, whose shop, active from September 1913 to August 1932, championed the avant-garde movements of its time. The series’ title itself recalls the single-issue review Dermée had founded two years earlier.