Fizzles
RARE COPY WITHOUT USUAL TRANSFER
THAT MARS MOST COPIES
JOHNS, Jasper. Fizzles. By Samuel Beckett. Unpaginated. Illustrated with a total of 34 original illustrations, including lift-ground aquatints, dry-point etchings, and soft-ground etchings by Johns, printed by Crommelynck in Paris. Small folio, 333 x 253 mm, bound in original plain wrappers, laid into publisher's white cloth box, lined with two brightly-coloured original lithographs by Johns. [London: Petersburg Press], 1976.
This is probably the most talked-about illustrated artist's book of the past 40 years; it is the only book to have a major traveling retrospective devoted solely to it: Foirades/Fizzles, Echo and Allusion in the Art of Jasper Johns, organized by the Wight Art Gallery of UCLA.
Jasper Johns' place as an American painter and printmaker of the first rank is firmly established. "No other artist has so deeply penetrated the languages and processes of printmaking... and more than any other single work, Fizzles represents Johns' command of complex print techniques and his ability to exploit their many subtle effects" (Preface to Foirades/Fizzles, p. 10).
"There are few who would dispute either the far-reaching significance or the bewildering beauty of the more than three hundred prints Jasper Johns has executed since 1960.... So intimately does Johns enfold the content of his prints into the process of making and so deftly does he extract the majority of his meanings from the most fundamental characteristics of printmaking itself, that we are hard pressed to decide whether it is the nature of the print media or Johns' own cast of mind that has made his contributions so profound" (Richard Field, The Prints of Jasper Johns 1960-1993, A Catalogue Raisonné, introduction).
The original coloured lithographs that form the pastedowns at the front and back of the box and the original double-spread coloured aquatint endpapers at the front and back of the book were cleverly created by Johns to be the alpha and omega to the black and white in-text etchings, which possess such a subtle range of shading the entire book feels mysteriously colourful.
This is a clean copy, virtually without the detrimental offsetting that mars so many copies, except for the slightest outline on the blank page opposite one plate. Copies in this condition are becoming increasingly hard to find. One of an edition of 250 copies signed by Beckett and Johns.
Field, The Prints of Jasper Johns 1960-1993, A Catalogue Raisonné, No. 173. Foirades/Fizzles 10. From Manet to Hockney 156. Century of Artists' Books 215. Artist Books in the Modern Era 1870-2000, No. 162. American Livre de Peintre 23.
Item nr. 170435
Price:
$50,000.00