Facile

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Facile

Artist Man Ray American, 1890-1976

Publisher Éditions G.L.M. (Guy Lévis Mano), Paris, 1935

Printer text: Éditions G.L.M., Paris reproductions: Breger, [s.l.]

Author Paul Éluard French, 1895-1952

Date1935

Dimensionsbook: 9 5/8 x 7 3/16 in. (244 x 182mm)
page: 9 1/2 x 7 1/16 in. (241 x 179mm)

MediumReproductions: 13 photolithographs of photographs, incl. cover Text: letterpress Paper: ivory wove paper

ClassificationBooks

Credit LineMolly and Walter Bareiss Art Fund

Object number

1987.9

Not on View

Collections

Works on Paper

Published Referencescf. Castleman, Riva, A Century of Artists Books, New York, 1994, p. 183 cf. Johnson, Robert Flynn, Artists' Books in the Modern Era 1870--2000: The Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books, San Francisco, 2001, no. 108Exhibition HistoryBetween the Wars; Sept. 5 2008 through Dec.31 2008Label TextPublisher Guy Lévis Mano produced books from 1923 to 1974 under the name G.L.M. He turned to publication of the Surrealist poets in the 1930s. G.L.M. offered a limited number of each book with an original print or photograph. These sold well and subsidized trade editions without original artwork. One of the finest editions to come from G.L.M. was Facile, a collaboration between the American photographer Man Ray and French poet Paul Éluard. The book features images of Man Ray’s model, Nusch, whom Éluard married in 1934. Éluard’s poems are love poems, and Man Ray captures both a charm and sensuality in Nusch’s poses and in the integration of text and image. In the photographs, her nude body is variously superimposed, backlit, and solarized. The forms drift across the pages, as if in a dream. Éluard and Man Ray, both Surrealists, explored sexual liberation as part of the liberation of the mind. As so often in Surrealist art, however, women's role here is confined to those of passive muse and object of desire.