Avant-garde art and poetry on the page

French artists’ books came into vogue as a new format for combining the poetry and visual arts of Parisian Modernists. Picasso, Matisse and Manet were among the early contributors.

By merging free verse with Impressionism, Cubism and successor movements in various-sized volumes of limited editions, the French avant-garde broke away from established book publishing. The artistic collaborators aimed for equality of texts and illustrations, but the visual elements resonate most.

Virtually all the masters of Modernism are represented in an exhibition of 126 French artists’ books from 1874 to 1999 at the New York Public Library. The show opens today and is on view through Aug. 16, the only U.S. stop after England and France.

“French Book Art: Artists and Poets in Dialogue” presents an array of works from Bibliotheque Litteraire Jacques Doucet, a Paris literary archive, and the New York Public Library’s own stacks, along with items from private French collections. The books feature a variety of bindings, typography, imagery, paper and other design elements.

Line drawings, woodcuts, watercolors and etchings from luminaries such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Dubuffet, Fernand Leger, Joan Miro, Alberto Giacometti and Rene Magritte are represented, along with works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Edouard Manet.

The poets include Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Blaise Cendrars, Max Jacob, Andre Gide, Paul Eluard and Andre Breton.

Related drawings, posters, etchings and manuscript pages flesh out their cooperative efforts in art and literature. Augmenting the show is a portrait gallery of many of the artists and poets by such masters as Brassai, Man Ray and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Yves Peyre, the exhibition curator, said the artists’ books represent “an exceptional moment in art and literature.” The authors “tested each other mutually, supporting, confronting, harmonizing with each other within the unique space of the page, their only rule being the desire to invent together.”

The abandonment of fixed form, meter and rhyme in poetry led to the rearrangement of words on the page, opening up new possibilities of merging free verse with visual arts, each enhancing the other.

Manet, a father of Impressionism, and symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme pioneered the artists’ book format when they collaborated on a French version of Edgar Allan Poe’s haunting poem “The Raven,” published in 1875.

Manet’s six illustrations and Mallarme’s translation are seminal in the history of the artists’ books. Printed in an edition of 240, the work was a financial failure but an artistic triumph.

The following year, Manet’s woodcut images combined with Mallarme’s words in “The Afternoon of the Faun,” which became the model for all subsequent artists’ books, according to the exhibit.