Desnos

1929 · 88960 — Paris: Documents 1929. Fine. ""Documents . was made into a laboratory a genesis a crucible a rebellion a ‘madness’ in short an avant-garde."" Jean Jamin Documents Paris 1929-1930 nº 1 à 7 avril 1929 - décembre 1929 ; nº 1 à 8 janvier 1930- octobre 1930 22 x 27.50 cm 15 volumes brochés sous coffret First edition 15 issues in 15 separate instalments abundantly illustrated with black and white photographs. Complete with the special issue “Hommage à Picasso” #3 1930 and the index for the year 1929 published as a separate 8-page stapled booklet. Some spines slightly faded not affecting the text occasional minor foxing along the margins of certain covers Presented in a custom slipcase with a flat spine in blue morocco title stamped in palladium and spine framed in palladium decorative blue paper boards sky-blue suede doublures; a handsome ensemble signed Boichot. Complete series of this legendary and non-conformist magazine founded by Georges Bataille which gave voice to “fields of art and knowledge unrecognised by official culture or considered controversial: popular literature jazz cabaret advertising everyday life” Annie Pirabot along with so-called primitive art and objects. Texts by Jean Babelon Jacques Baron Georges Bataille Alejo Carpentier Arnaud Dandieu Robert Desnos Carl Einstein Roger Gilbert-Lecomte Marcel Griaule Juan Gris Eugene Jolas Marcel Jouhandeau Michel Leiris Georges Limbour Marcel Mauss Léon Pierre-Quint Jacques Prévert Raymond Queneau Zdenko Reich Paul Rivet Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes Georges-Henri Rivière André Schaeffner Roger Vitrac among others. Numerous full-page artistic contributions by Hans Arp Constantin Brancusi Giorgio De Chirico Alberto Giacometti Juan Gris Henri Laurens Fernand Léger André Masson Joan Miró Pablo Picasso Joseph Sima etc. The journal’s pioneering and interdisciplinary approach established it as one of the most important publications of the century: a dissident voice against the doctrinaire surrealism of André Breton Documents was conceived as a “war machine against received ideas” in Bataille’s own words and gathered an eclectic array of contributors—academics ex-Dadaist and Surrealist painters and poets philosophers. It remains renowned for its striking juxtapositions: “Rather than assemble documents from separate fields rather than uphold the usual subordination of image to text the journal gives photography drawing and image the privilege of being the most primal substance or the most original trace of human expression” Georges Sebbag. Ethnography Documents is remembered above all for Bataille’s radical ethnographic stance focused on the material and detached from aesthetic criteria and the usual fascination with exoticism. These groundbreaking views foreshadow the Collège de sociologie that Bataille would later found with Michel Leiris Roger Caillois and Jules Moncrot. They are also reflected in the journal through numerous photographs of masks stones and other non-Western artistic creations Siberian Chinese. set alongside modern artworks including drawings by Klee and paintings by Picasso. Bataille also collaborated with the notorious Hans Bellmer who would go on to illustrate the famous second edition of Histoire de l’œil to create a terrifying portrait of the Hindu goddess of destruction Kali. photography The journal places particular emphasis on photography. Among its most celebrated contributions are the close-up photographs of toes by Jacques-André Boiffard accompanying Bataille’s essay on the foot in issue no. 6: “The point of this article lies in an insistence on directly and explicitly challenging what seduces without relying on poetic contrivances which ultimately amount to little more than diversion” Bataille concludes. His fascination with the abnormal and the destructive is also evident in Boiffard’s fetishistic and sadomasochistic photograph of a woman wearing a Documents hardcover