Blaise Cendrars (Text)
Compositions en Couleurs par Fernand Léger
Paris Éditions de la Sirène 1919
Orig. stiff brown-paper covers (corners, edges & parallel to the spine, slightly stained)
60 pages with 22 line-block illustrations heightened with watercolour in the pochoir method by ateliers Richard
including 7 full-page, 4 vignettes, 5 ills. for chapter titles & 3 illustrations over two pages
First leaf (french-title) with a slight stain caused by an earlier inserted piece of paper
Design including both covers, all illustrations and typography by Fernand Léger
Typeface: Morland corps 24
Copy nr. 47 of 1200 printed by Frazier-Soye on vélin Lafuma
Text in French
Exceptionally clean, well preserved, tight copy of this beautiful, revered, and sought-after masterpiece of the French avant-garde
Price: € 6500.00
Originally conceived as a screenplay by Blaise Cendrars, 'La Fin du monde' was instead published as a novel when funding for the film fell through. The story is a satire in which God, in the guise of a cigar-smoking American businessman, promotes an apocalyptic war on earth as entertainment for the god Mars. In book format the illustrations by Léger become integral to conveying the filmic progression of the text. Amid his illustrations, Léger includes fragments of Cendrars's text as boldly coloured stenciled and block letters; the dynamic, fractured compositions create a simulation of the moving images of film as the pages are turned.
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