Album du repérage
One of the first 10 deluxe copies on Rives paper (no. 6), signed, with an original watercolor by Dezeuze.
The edition is limited to 335 copies: 10 deluxe copies on Rives paper, 100 copies on Vidalon and 225 on Bouffant.
Signed presentation inscription: “[name of dedicatee erased] avec les respects & la sympathie des auteurs, Dezeuze, mai 1950,” countersigned by Albert Dubout.
A rare album conceived and published privately by Georges Dezeuze, with a preface by Francis Ambrière and texts by Poulain, Dezeuze and Quencez. It was produced for veterans of the 6th regiment of the G.A.A. (Groupe autonome d’artillerie), the principal French artillery-spotting regiment.
Artillery spotting locates enemy guns from their own firing, using two complementary techniques developed from the First World War onward: sound ranging and ground observation. Spotting thus became an indispensable tool of artillery intelligence. The first unit was created in 1921 and took the name 6e GAA in 1924; it concentrated all the matériel and manpower of this “new arm” and survived until the Second World War — sixteen years during which it was garrisoned at the Quartier Sully in Saint-Cloud. It was there that Dubout did his military service, in the late 1920s.
After the war, the painter Georges Dezeuze — of the same year-group as Dubout — conceived the idea of assembling an album of drawings by veterans of the regiment, calling on all his well-known fellow soldiers who had served between 1924 and 1942. Francis Ambrière, for instance, joined the regiment in September 1937 as a reserve sergeant; his novel Les Grandes Vacances, awarded the 1940 Prix Goncourt (given in 1946), would later revisit this period.
Dubout’s contributions — all in India ink, including the cover design — are recorded in L’Œuvre intégral de Dubout (IV, pp. 294–295).
Old pinholes to the cover.