fizzles

http://www.joshuahellerrarebooks.com/catalogues/32/9.html

(Jasper Johns) Foirades/Fizzles. [Texts in French and English.] Five prose fragments [”Foirades”] by Samuel Beckett, selected from his Pour finir encore et autre foirades. Original prints by Jasper Johns. Petersburg Press S.A. London. 1976. 13.5” x 10.5”.  57 pages [on double leaves]. 13” x 10”. Twenty-six lift ground aquatints (most with etching, soft ground etching, drypoint, screenprint and/or photogravure); five etchings (some with soft ground etching and/or drypoint); one soft ground etching and one aquatint. Color lithographs for endpapers and box lining on Richard de Bas Auvergne paper. Text pages handprinted at the Atelier Crommelynck, Paris, on handmade Richard de Bas Auvergne paper watermarked with the initials of Beckett and the signature of Johns. In a beige linen-covered solander box, with purple silk tassle. With an internal case lining of color lithographs by Jasper Johns. With original interleaving tissues. One in an edition of 250 copies. Signed by both Beckett and Johns. There are also 30 artist’s proofs and 20 “hors-commerce.” 

“Two of the most enigmatic artists of our time, Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns, collaborated on this complex yet elegant artist’s book. Originally written in French ..., the brooding essays were rewritten in English by Beckett for this project. Nevertheless, Johns decided to include both texts that expanded his own involvement to thirty-three etchings and aquatints plus color lithograph endpapers. Johns’s imagery is based on a major four-panel painting, Untitled (1972), along with his classic imagery related to numbers and body parts. This cerebral volume that provokes more questions than it answers is considered one of the greatest artists’ books of the second half of the twentieth century.” -Artists’ Books in the Modern Era 1870-2000, The Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books, p. 254-5. “The prose pieces of Beckett in Fizzles were mostly written in French in the 1960s and early 1970s, some of them for Jerome Linton’s periodical Minuit. Beckett’s links with Linton went back to 1951, when the Editions de Minuit published Molloy and Malone Meurt. The author described his method of producing Fizzles as ‘breaking wind quietly, hissing, spluttering; a failure or fiasco.” - From Manet to Hockney, Modern Artists’ Illustrated Books, p. 354. Considered one of the great artists’ books of the latter half of 20th Century, Fizzles developed an international reputation for its complexity.  It was included in the important Museum of Modern Art exhibition, A Century of Artists’ Books (1995). Copies are in major institutions worldwide.

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Joshua Heller Rare Books, Inc. PO Box 39114, Washington DC 20016-9114 USA.

Joshua & Phyllis Heller