Pampelune

Eduardo Malta: Mestre do Retrato

1943 · 3300 — No place given: Bertrand Irmaos 1943. Limited Edition. Softcover. Fair to Good. Folio 12 color plates plus 1 black-and-white plate and 4 leaves of text email us for a more detailed description. A fair to good smoker's copy with much of the spine missing and the leaves rather loosely holding together. Still clean and bright internally with just one flattened crease to one of the tipped-in illustrations. This is copy number 85 of an unstated limitation. A presentation copy SIGNED and INSCRIBED by the artist on a blank leaf: "A Sua Excelencia o Senhor Embaixador dos Estados Unidos em Lisboa Henry Norweb com a profunda simpatia e muita admiracao de Eduardo Malta. Novembro 1944 Lisboa." Norweb was a notable figure in American history having secured through negotiations with Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar the right to build an American Air Force base in the Azores in the very same month November 1944 that this book was inscribed. Malta the artist would eventually become the director of the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporanea in the years before his death and was well-known as an opponent of "modern art." He also painted some rather important figures in far-right politics including Spanish falangist Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera. A scarce book with fewer than half a dozen copies in worldwide library holdings and even scarcer signed we know of no other exmples. Bertrand Irmaos unknown