Giacometti, Alberto, illus.; Pierre-Lucien Martin, binder

Paris sans fin.  Paris: Tériade, 1969



Folio (16 1/2  x 13 in.; 420 x 330 mm).  150 lithographs by Giacometti on Arches wove paper, printed by Mourlot, text printed by L'Imprimerie Nationale, Garamond Corps 28 typeface, some blank pages for text left incomplete at the artist's death.   Full gray morocco by Martin (1971), lettered in blind on spine, covers with gray morocco onlays forming a geometric pattern in relief, edges gilt, grey suede liners.  Half gray morocco chemise, slipcase; minimal wear.

Henri Paricaud (bookplate)

Bonnefoy 481–502; Logan Collection 150; Lord, Giacometti: a Biography, pp. 473-74, 505; Lust 204–353; Manet to Hockney 145

Folio (16 1/2 x 13 in.; 420 x 330 mm). 150 lithographs by Giacometti on Arches wove paper, printed by Mourlot, text printed by L'Imprimerie Nationale, Garamond typeface, some blank pages for text left incomplete at the artist's death. Full gray morocco by Martin (1971), lettered in blind on spine, covers with gray morocco onlays forming a geometric pattern in relief, edges gilt, grey suede liners. Half gray morocco chemise, slipcase; minimal wear.
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Copy 97 of 250 numbered copies (of a whole edition of 270), signed by Giacometti.

A fine copy of one of Giacometti's greatest graphic achievements, in a superb and sympathetic binding by Pierre-Lucien Martin.  As James Lord writes in his biography of the artist, "Among the major undertakings of the final years was one especially close to the artist's heart.  It united him with an old friend and with the city that had helped him to become Alberto Giacometti.  Paris was a pole of his existence and he wanted to make a monument to it.  This was to be a volume of one hundred and fifty original lithographs, printed and published by his friend Tériade, editor of Verve.... For Tériade it would be a milestone, the last great publication he would see through the press....Urged by Tériade...and by time, [Giacometti] consented to create a volume if he alone could decide its contents and title.  Paris without End appeared posthumously.  It stands as a kind of testament: artist, man, and city brought together to witness an act of love."

The 150 lithographs are "a profoundly interpenetrating view of Giacometti's experience of Paris."  These lithographs were begun in 1957 and done on transfer paper to allow the artist the freedom to sketch throught the city.  He selected the plates and determined their order.  The Paris here depicted consists of the artist's studio, both his wife's and his mistress's flats, cafés he frequented, Saint-Sulpice, the Eiffel Tower, bridges across the Seine, parked cars, and portraits of his brother Diego, wife Annette, mistress Caroline, and strangers in cafés and on the street.  A text of twenty pages was planned, but the artist did not live to complete it.  What Giacometti did complete would become his final definitive writings. He describes a dinner at the Coupole, followed by "drowsiness chasing me home."  "The quiet, I am here alone, outside the night, all is motionless and sleep comes over me. I know neither who I am nor what I'm doing nor what I desire, I know not whether I'm old or young, I have perhaps a few hundred thousand years still to live until my death, my past disappears into a gray chasm, I was a serpant and I see myself a crocodile, with gaping jaws; I was the crawling crocodile, jaws agape.  Scream and howl so the air trembles at it, and the burnt matches here and there on the floor like warships upon the gray sea." 

Pierre-Lucien Martin's beautifully executed binding, suggesting the walls and shadows of late-night Paris cannot be bettered for evoking Giacometti's gray chasm.