MARX Roger La Loïe Fuller. Estampes modelées par Pierre Roche.

Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book 1700 to 1914, no. 386.

First edition.

Illustrated with 19 prints modelled in colour by Pierre Roche, including the one on the cover, in two parts extending to cover both covers, and most remarkable for its cream and bronze tones. The book is a vibrant tribute to the famous American dancer, who fascinated the world with the colourful lights and veils she used to accompany her dances. As well as being her favourite portraitist, Pierre Roche was the dancer’s artistic confidant and inspiration from 1894 onwards.

A pupil of Rodin’s, Pierre Roche, whose real name was Fernand Massignon, was a talented sculptor (a gigantic work by him is to be found in the Luxembourg Gardens), medallist and ceramist, and the inventor of a new process he called ‘gypsography’; this is a kind of embossing based on a plaster cast, onto which a moistened paper is pressed with the hand (the thumbprints are sometimes visible), which, while absorbing the ink, also follows the shape. The resulting effects are astonishing, bizarre and precious all at once, and are as much sculpture as engraving. This embossing of an image illustrating a printed text may seem paradoxical, given that cohesion and beautiful architecture on the page are usually the essential beauty of a book (see Bersier in : La gravure, les procédés, l’histoire). After taking an interest in ceramics and working with melted lead, he turned his attention to the arid task of printing on metallised paper and produced numerous gypsographs. Among the last and most successful of these are the illustrations for Roger Marx’s Loïe Fuller, a real bibliophilic tour de force, given the difficulties of layout and printing. (see Edouard-Joseph: Dictionnaire des artistes contemporains).

This book is also the first application of the typeface designed by Georges Auriol in ‘Italic’, engraved and cast by Peignot. Unique edition of 130 numbered copies (this one printed for Roger Galichon) on wove paper.

Strangely, the name of the Société des Cent Bibliophiles does not appear; all that is mentioned on colophone is the name of their president, Eugène Rodrigues (who also wrote a catalogue of the engraved works of Ferdinand Rops under the name Ramiro). However, this work, published a year after Auguste Lepère’s A Rebours by the same society of bibliophiles, with a similar print run, is much more difficult to find.

Unique copy

The presence of 12 separate prints of the gypsographs in the supplement is therefore particularly valuable, especially as they vary in colour and size: for example, the full-page print on the supplementary plate is in a larger format, signed by the artist in pencil and bears the fine red stamp of a collector with the monogram HL inscribed in a heart; these are probably added trial proofs, corresponding to pages 7 to 16, and 20 to 25. An enclosed autograph card signed by Roger Marx to André Marty in which he mentions L’Estampe originale, which the latter edited, the work La Loïe Fuller on which he is working, and the American dancer’s arrival in Paris in a fortnight’s time.

“This little-known volume is like nothing of its time. Published for les Cent Bibliophiles under the patronage of Eugène Rodriguez; is illustrated with ‘sculptural prints’ after Pierre Roche, apprarently from relief plaster models, printed with touches of color against grey background. The most substantial and impressive of its design is that for the cover. The dancer, who had come to Paris in 1892, figures frequently in the posters of Chéret, Toulouse-Lautrec, and other artists of the period. Fifty years later Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann wrote of Loïe Fuller who, whirling on her own axis like a corkscrew or a spinning top, with countless yards of veil-like materials shining in colored light like an iridescent Tiffany vase, became in her increasingly audacious serpentines, a gigantic ornament’. In other words, she was the very symbol of Jugendstil, the embodiement of Art Nouveau” (Ray).

Provenance: Roger Galichon (this copy printed for him). Roger Galichon (1856-1918) bequeathed to the Louvre the collection of drawings of his father, Émile-Louis Galichon (1829-1875), owner of the famous Gazette des Beaux Arts, which he acquired in 1863.

A very good copy.