La Symphonie pastorale

Published in 1919, La Symphonie pastorale takes the form of a diary kept by a pastor, centered on Gertrude, a blind young girl he has taken in, whose spiritual, emotional and “visual” awakening — through music — gradually exposes the narrator’s own blindness.

Marianne Clouzot’s sixteen original etchings offer one of the most compelling graphic interpretations of Gide’s novel, which had been adapted for the screen a few years earlier, in 1946, by Jean Delannoy. Awarded the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, the film starred Michèle Morgan as Gertrude and Pierre Blanchar as the pastor.

A very fine copy, in a rare binding by Lucienne Thalheimer. A binder who was “Surrealist par excellence,” she stands as a singular figure in creative bookbinding, from the last years of Art Deco through the postwar avant-gardes. Active from 1925 to 1960, she shifted the art of binding toward a dreamlike territory through her play of inlays, laces and daring assemblages. Yves Peyré summed up her achievement: “she advances in her own way into oneiric vertigo. Her approach is at once simple and extremely bold… She is absolutely a bookbinder, yet a Surrealist through and through, admired by Breton, whom she enchants.”

“Recognition of these ‘women’s bindings’ came late, no doubt owing to an ‘androcentric reaction,’ as Jean Toulet put it. He went further, cum grano salis: ‘Apart from a few collectors bold enough to indulge their whims and disregard the disapproval of the “real” bookbinders, it is clear that they could not work for “serious” collectors, unwilling to risk their books in such gracefully light hands’” (Jean-Claude Vrain, Reliures de femmes de 1900 à nos jours, 1995, p. 6; Yves Peyré, Histoire de la reliure de création, 2015, p. 51: “Lucienne Thalheimer is the Surrealist bookbinder par excellence. She marks a great date in the history of bookbinding; she is one of those talents who set the direction of an art.”) (in Gloses et glanes. Cahiers Lautréamont, Garnier, 2019).

From the library of the Baron de Nervo (bookplate).