Les Transparents
One of 60 copies on Rives paper, signed by Picasso and PAB (no. 12).
Copy enriched with 2 additional prints of 2 of the engravings, one bearing a signed presentation inscription:
“Pour Char, Picasso,” the other signed by the artist.
The PAB edition is the last to be devoted to Les Transparents, a text that had already gone through numerous editions since its first appearance in 1949 at Mercure de France. Before Picasso, Louis Fernandez, Vieira da Silva and Nicolas de Staël had each attempted to illustrate it.
For Char, the Transparents were figures from his childhood, characters gradually vanishing from the rural landscape: as many as seventeen — all men — appear across the various editions the poet produced, among them Toquebiol, Joseph Puissantseigneur, Laurent de Venasque, Crillon le brave, Odin le Roc and Raymond de Ridet, forming a strange and revered company of wandering figures.
Picasso contributed four striking portraits here, using a technique new to him but one he had seen Georges Braque employ with PAB: “A flat or corrugated cardboard, flexible or more rigid, is cut, torn, incised or scraped by the artist, then fixed by the printer onto a support at typographic height, and finally inked and printed” (Coron, Le Fruit donné, p. 39). This “cartalégraphie” technique developed out of celluloid engraving, which Picasso had already practiced with PAB. Using this process, PAB printed eight books by Braque, the first in 1959, Dans vos jardins. After Picasso, Joan Miró was won over to the technique in 1975, producing five cutouts, three of which were used in Pour 1971.
An exceptionally enriched copy, preserved in a delicate box by Julie Nadot.
From the libraries of R. & B. Loliée (bookplate) and Didier Pineau-Valencienne (bookplate).
Bloch, 1236.