MAPPLETHORPE, Robert (photo.); RIMBAUD, Arthur.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

A Season in Hell. First edition thus, number 345 of 1,000 copies signed by Mapplethorpe and Schmidt. This copy retains the publisher's 4-page "Limited Editions Club Letter", loosely inserted as issued, and also includes a six-page flyer from the Hayward Gallery's major 1996 retrospective of Mapplethorpe's photography.Originally self-published by Rimbaud as Une Saison en Enfer in 1873, this prose poem was finished in a frenzy after the break-up of his relationship with Verlaine, who wounded him with a revolver in the summer of that year. Schmidt calls the poem "a work of adolescent passion - not the passion of exuberance, but passion as suffering. It is the record of a failed attempt to create a new identity by creating a new world" Mapplethorpe's sensual photographs "illuminate the smoky density, the nerve-edge screams, the sulphurous flicker of this little book" (p. vii).

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