FOIRADES / FIZZLES

First edition. Signed by the author and the artist. Limited edition. "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" (Johnson and Stein: Artists' Books in the Modern Era 1870-2000). Complete. Five texts by Samuel Beckett in both French and English. Illustrated with 33 etchings by Johns (including 26 lift-ground aquatints, five etchings with mixed media, one soft-ground etching, and one aquatint), together with two colour lithographs used as endpapers. Tissue guards present. The plates were drawn by Johns and proofed and printed by hand at the Atelier Crommelynck in Paris between 1975 and 1976. The paper, watermarked with Beckett's initials and Johns' signature, was handmade by Richard de Bas in the Auvergne. The type, set in Caslon Old Face 16-point, was hand-printed by Fequet and Baudier in Paris. Housed in the original grey linen portfolio case with purple silk tassel, the interior lined with a colour lithograph. A fine copy. The binding square, clean and bright. The contents, with some offsetting from a couple of the darker plates to the opposite page (as in all copies seen), are bright and fresh throughout.

Issued in a limited edition of 250 copies, this example is numbered 105 and signed by Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns on the limitation page. The five prose texts that comprise Foirades were written by Samuel Beckett in French in 1972 and translated into English by the author in 1974 specifically for this collaborative publication. In response, Jasper Johns produced a suite of 33 etchings derived from his four-panel painting Untitled (1972), now held in the collection of Museum Ludwig in Cologne. As the critic Christian Geelhaar noted, Johns had already developed "a set of images unsurpassed in their intuitive realisation of Beckett's texts", despite not yet having read them. The four panels introduced imagery new to Johns' practice. The left panel features a field of stripes or cross-hatching, recalling markings he once observed on a car passing along the Long Island Expressway. The two central panels derive from a wall he had seen on a building in Harlem, painted with rock-like forms in red, white and black. The final panel incorporates wax casts of fragmented body parts affixed to wooden boards. These motifs are developed across the prints through combinations of etching, aquatint and drypoint, rendered predominantly in black and grey. Johns' characteristic stencilled numerals precede each of Beckett's texts, while the endpapers, depicting cross-hatching and rock or flagstone imagery, are printed in colour. The project also marked a technical shift in the artist's printmaking practice. Having previously worked largely in lithography, he was encouraged by Paul Cornwall-Jones, founder of Petersburg Press, to experiment with etching. Cornwall-Jones introduced Johns to the master printer Aldo Crommelynck, who had collaborated almost exclusively with Pablo Picasso during the previous decade. Following Picasso's death in 1973, Crommelynck's Paris studio became a centre for artists associated with Petersburg Press, including Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin and Jim Dine. Johns first visited the studio in 1974, and their collaboration over the next two years resulted in the extraordinary etchings encountered here.