Paris sans fin.

£32,500 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

The first edition of Paris sans Fin, Giacometti's testament to art and modern life in his beloved city. For the publisher, Tériade, it would be a milestone, the last great publication he would see through the press. The two men [Tériade and Giacometti] had maintained a close friendship ever since the Surrealist Years. The one hundred and fifty lithographs are a profoundly interpenetrating view of Giacometti's experience of Paris. He selected the plates to be printed and determined the order of their relationship, numbering each one. The frontispiece shows a nude figure of a woman plunging forward, as though diving into space, and is immediately followed by a quantity of views of city streets, then of interiors familiar to the artist. We come upon views of his studio, of the cafes he frequented, of Annette's apartment in the rue Mazarine and Caroline's in the Avenue du Maine, strangers at cafe tables, passers by, parked automobiles, the towers of Saint-Suplice, bridges across the Seine, The Eiffel Tower. To accompany the hundred and fifty plates, a text of twenty pages was planned, but the artist never got further than a few rough drafts. True, he was a devotee of words, Paris sans fin, however, said too much to the eye to be in need of other symbols (James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography). First edition, this copy unnumbered, from a total edition of 270; large 4to (42.2 x 32 cm); artist's signature stamp to limitation page, 150 lithographs after Giacometti, loose as issued in p

• Binding: Hardcover

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