Facile
One of 1,200 copies on vélin (no. 807).
Mounted at front: a photographic portrait of Nusch by Rose Adler (125 x 175 mm); and the original invoice from Georges Hugnet for the binding of the poet's own copy of Facile.
Facile is one of the finest illustrated books ever produced. “Facile est bien”: the phrase speaks for itself, given the sensuality reinforced by the deep blacks of Man Ray’s photographs. After Au défaut du silence, entirely devoted to Gala, Éluard composed for Facile four poems evoking Nusch (1906–1946), his second wife, whom he had met in 1929. These are echoed, through a subtle interplay of layout, by Man Ray’s nudes, in which the body is never shown in its entirety: the whole head appears only once, the eyes never. It was onto these images that the poet wrote his love poems, published in a masterly layout by the poet-typographer Guy Lévis Mano, hailed by Bachelard as an “ouvrier total,” marking in this year of 1935 his entry into Surrealist publishing.
Man Ray followed every stage of the production of this refined book very closely.