Deux poèmes
Photographic portrait of Éluard as frontispiece and cover illustration by René Char, heightened with watercolor.
One of the first 50 copies on Japanese paper, this copy no. 3.
Signed presentation inscription: “pour Edmée Maus, ces poèmes fraternels. René Char.”
In 1937, Paul and Nusch Éluard came to join René Char at Le Cannet, where he was convalescing with his wife, Georgette. It was there that the two poets wrote “Neuve” and “Paliers,” texts that were not published until 1960 under the title Deux Poèmes, with a cover design by René Char entitled “La Torche du Prodige.”
The publisher Jean Hugues also issued two other collections by Char: Arrière-histoire du poème pulvérisé, in 1953, with a lithograph by Nicolas de Staël, and Se rencontrer, paysage avec Joseph Sima, in 1973.
A copy presented by the poet to Edmée Maus, who assembled in Geneva one of the most important book collections of the 1950s–1960s, in the tradition of the great late nineteenth-century libraries. Having first collected eighteenth-century illustrated books, she turned in the early 1950s to early printing as well as contemporary editions and bindings. This volume later passed into the collection of Bernard Loliée.
Fine condition.