Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange’s Théorbes et Bélières, illustrated with an original colour etching by Sebastian Matta and four typographical vignettes by the artist.

Published by Bernard Dumerchez at Creil and registered for dépôt légal in February 1994, some weeks before the author’s death; Le Monde published Patrick Kéchichian’s obituary of him on 29 April that year. Printed on 250 gsm white Vélin d’Arches from the Arjo-Wiggins mills, loose sheets as issued in the original printed wrapper, in its glassine jacket.

This is copy XXIII/XXX, one of only thirty Roman-numeral copies specifically reserved for the author, Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange. The justification is numbered XXIII/XXX in manuscript and signed in pencil by both Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange and Sebastian Matta.

The etching serves as frontispiece, facing the title, which reads: Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange · Théorbes et Bélières · gravure originale de Sebastian Matta · Bernard Dumerchez Editeur. The copperplate was pulled by the Atelier Dupont-Visat, Paris, with letterpress typography by the Imprimerie ukrainienne. A copy of the edition is held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France in its Réserve des Livres rares (shelfmark RES G-Z-531).

“Toute apparition devient le fruit des lieux inondés et l’alerte est donnée par des saisons parvenues à satiété.”
— the opening sentence, p. 7

The colophon of the present copy sets out the edition in full:

Il a été tiré de cet ouvrage cent vingt quatre exemplaires sur Vélin d’Arches blanc 250 gr. des papeteries Arjo-Wiggins illustrés d’une eau-forte originale et de quatre vignettes typographiques de Sebastian Matta, répartis comme suit :

trente exemplaires numérotés de I à XXX réservés à l’auteur
trente exemplaires numérotés de E.A 1 à E.A. 30 réservés à l’artiste
trente neuf exemplaires numérotés de 1 à 39 réservés à l’éditeur
et vingt cinq exemplaires hors commerce numérotés de HC 1 à HC 25 réservés aux collaborateurs et au dépôt légal.

Tous les exemplaires sont signés par l’auteur et l’artiste, l’ensemble constituant l’édition originale de THÉORBES ET BÉLIÈRES de Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange.

That is: 30 copies I–XXX for the author; 30 copies E.A. 1–30 (épreuves d’artiste) for the artist; 39 copies 1–39 for the publisher; and 25 copies HC 1–25, hors commerce, for collaborators and legal deposit — 124 in all, every one signed by both hands.

The edition was divided at issue into four expressly designated series. The present copy is one of the thirty Roman-numeral copies reserved for Fardoulis-Lagrange.

The colophon designates the complete group as the édition originale of this bibliophile edition; the text itself had previously appeared, under the same title, in the Paris review Po&sie no. 19 (1981) — an issue that also carried Hölderlin, Rilke, Jacques Roubaud, Andrea Zanzotto and Jacques Réda — and was afterwards taken up into Les Enfants d’Édom (José Corti, 1996).

Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange (Cairo 1910 – Paris 1994) was born into the Greek community of Cairo, schooled at the lycée français, and published his first stories in Greek in the reviews of Alexandria; he turned to writing in French only in 1936. Vincent Teixeira, who has devoted two university studies to him, calls him one of the most extraordinary stylists of the French language — a writer who would rewrite a single page as many as eighty times — and titles his 2004 essay, exactly, “cet inconnu majeur.”

He was close to Michel Leiris and to Georges Bataille, who sheltered him at Vézelay in 1943 and whose circle he had joined the year before; imprisoned in La Santé for a year under the Occupation, he went on writing there, and later devoted a book to the friendship, G.B. ou un ami présomptueux (Le Soleil Noir, 1969). In 1945 he founded, with Jean Maquet — and, on Dominique Rabourdin’s account, with his wife Francine — the review Troisième Convoi, whose five issues (1945–1951) carried Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Yves Bonnefoy, René Char, Georges Henein, Jean Paulhan and Henri Michaux, with plates by Brauner, Duchamp, Hérold and Ubac.

Leiris gave his work one of its earliest serious critical treatments, “Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange et le roman poétique,” collected in Brisées. Éric Losfeld called him “un écrivain superbe, de la veine de Gracq ou de Mandiargues,” known “que de mille personnes et encore.” His work has since been the subject of dedicated monographs from L’Harmattan and of university studies in France and Japan.

Roberto Sebastián Matta Echaurren (1911–2002) — “Sebastian Matta” on this book’s title page — left Le Corbusier’s atelier in 1937 to join the Surrealist movement, and from 1938 painted what he called “inscapes” or “psychic morphologies”: structures for interior rather than observed space. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection records that his painting of the 1940s “anticipated many innovations of Abstract Expressionism and influenced many artists of the so-called New York School,” among them his friends Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell. Marcel Duchamp called him the most profound painter of his generation. The Museum of Modern Art gave him a retrospective in 1957 and the Centre Pompidou in 1985; he received Chile’s National Prize for Art in 1990.

The frontispiece is an original colour etching — an intaglio print with a clear plate mark, not a reproduction. Three flame-like upright figures rise through a ground of deep teal and blue-green, their bodies flushed with ochre and crimson and incised throughout with fine scratched line; a scatter of small reserved white points hangs across the upper field. It is characteristic late Matta: the human figure dissolved into energy and vector.

The four vignettes typographiques are equally the artist’s own, and each is given a page to itself — spare black line-and-dot compositions in which small prismatic volumes cluster and radiate outward, closer to Matta’s drawn cosmologies than to any conventional printer’s ornament.

Théorbes et Bélières is the third documented Fardoulis-Lagrange–Matta book project in a sequence extending from 1964 to 1994 — and the two men worked in both directions.

A letter from Matta to Fardoulis-Lagrange of 1963 survives in the writer’s papers at the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques-Doucet, Paris (MFL C 99). The following year Matta illustrated him in Les Voix (Georges Visat & Le Point Cardinal, 1964) with ten original colour etchings with aquatint and embossing together with a blind-relief plate — eleven in all — in an edition signed by both men. That book is today in the Art Institute of Chicago, and nine of its signed plates are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Then the direction reversed. Around 1969–70 Fardoulis-Lagrange wrote Sur Matta for Pierre Belfond, accompanied in the limited edition by two original colour prints by Matta. In the documentation for its own 1985 Matta retrospective, the Centre Pompidou lists that book as one of only four monographs on Matta — alongside Roland Sabatier’s catalogue raisonné of the engraved work.

The 1994 etching was pulled by the Atelier Dupont-Visat: the third documented appearance of the Visat name in the production history of their joint books. Seen against Les Voix and Sur Matta, the 1994 volume can be situated within the broader twentieth-century tradition of the livre de dialogue, bringing writer and artist together once more in a bibliophile edition. Éditions Dumerchez placed it within its bibliophile Grand Papier production.

Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange
Théorbes et Bélières
Original colour etching and four typographical vignettes by Sebastian Matta
Bernard Dumerchez éditeur, B.P. 356 — 60312 Creil Cedex, France
Dépôt légal, February 1994 · Éditeur 037 · Imprimé en France
Folio, sheets 337 × 280 mm · 16, [6] pp., loose sheets as issued in stiff printed wrappers
Typography: Imprimerie ukrainienne, Paris · Intaglio: Atelier Dupont-Visat, Paris
Published at 1 600 F
ISBN 2-904925-36-8

The book and its predecessors. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Catalogue général, notice FRBNF35700325 (BnF copy: Réserve des Livres rares, RES G-Z-531). — Po&sie, no. 19 (Paris, 1981), for the first appearance of the text. — Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange, Les Enfants d’Édom (Paris: José Corti, 1996), in which the text was subsequently collected. — Art Institute of Chicago, The Voice (Les Voix), acc. 2014.500. — Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, plates from Les Voix, acc. 75.332.1–.9. — Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, sheets from Les Voix. — Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques-Doucet, Fonds Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange, MFL C 99.

On Matta. Centre Georges Pompidou / Musée national d’art moderne, Matta, exhibition documentation (Paris, 1985), listing Fardoulis-Lagrange’s Sur Matta among the monographs on the artist. — Roland Sabatier, Matta. Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre gravé (1934–1974) (Stockholm: Sonet / Paris: G. Visat, 1975). — Germana Ferrari, Matta. Index dell’Opera Grafica dal 1969 al 1980 (Viterbo: Staderini, 1980).

On Fardoulis-Lagrange. Michel Leiris, “Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange et le roman poétique,” in Brisées (Paris: Mercure de France, 1966). — Anne Mounic, La Parole obscure: Recours au mythe et défi de l’interprétation dans l’œuvre de Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange (Paris: L’Harmattan). — Valéria Vanguelov, Memorabilia, récit des origines de l’œuvre de Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003). — Vincent Teixeira, “Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange, cet inconnu majeur,” Bulletin of the Central Research Institute, Fukuoka University 4/4 (2004), pp. 71–89. — Éric Bourde, “Fardoulis-Lagrange et Bataille,” Ralentir travaux 15 (autumn 1999), pp. 43–46. — Dominique Rabourdin, “Troisième Convoi, 1945–1951,” La Revue des revues 37 (2005). — Marina Galletti, “I ‘voyageurs’ del «Troisième Convoi»,” in Narrazione e rappresentazione nel Novecento (Venice: Marsilio, 2001).

Matta and Surrealism · modern and post-war prints · the livre d’artiste and livre de dialogue · French avant-garde literature and the post-war reviews · signed and limited editions · contemporary French fine-press and bibliophile production.

Very good. Loose sheets as issued in the original printed wrapper, preserved in its glassine jacket; the glassine creased and lightly rubbed at the edges and extremities, as visible in the photographs, the printed wrapper beneath clean and unmarked. The Matta etching is a strong, fresh impression with clear plate mark and unfaded colour. The manuscript numbering and both pencil signatures are crisp. Light tan toning to the fore-edges of the sheets; text and plate otherwise clean throughout.