Madrigaux

This first edition of Mallarmé’s Madrigaux is illustrated with 25 full-page compositions by Raoul Dufy, all heightened with pochoir coloring by the artist himself. These lithographs, Dufy’s earliest, opened a graphic venture he would continue six years later with Apollinaire’s Le Poète assassiné.

Under the direction of Jean Cocteau, then literary director of La Sirène, the choice of Dufy to illustrate the Madrigaux seemed self-evident: Cocteau had been won over by his woodcuts for Le Bestiaire d’Apollinaire, and that same year entrusted Dufy with the sets for Le Bœuf sur le toit. Mallarmé’s playful poems — occasional madrigals, society verse — would appear the following July at the NRF under the title Vers de circonstance, but it is here that, for the first time, they take shape in this typographic setting, further enhanced by a remarkable binding by the great artist Nobuko Kiyomiya.

Talvart XIII, 124; Mahé 78; Monod 7674.