IL – Brunelleschi – Contes du Temps Jadis.

One of 400 numbered copies, imprint signed by Brunelleschi, bound in a signed master binding. Printed on Japon paper. Contains five fairy tales: La Belle aux cheveux d’or – L’Oiseau bleu – Gracieuse et Percinet – L’adroite Princesse – Le Prince chéri. With striking colour ilustrations by Umberto Brunelleschi (1879-1949) active as fashion, costume and stage designer in Paris. The beautiful master-binding correspond with the lovely illusstrations. The binder Lucien Durvand (1852-1924) operated one fo the finest workshops in turn-of-the-century Paris. In 1900 he was awarded a silver medal for his bindings at the Universal exhibition, and, according to Flety, he was devoted to improving the craft of binding rightup to his death. An almost untouched, breathtaking copy of this splendid book. Umberto Brunelleschi was a brilliant Italian painter, book illustrator and fashion designer, probably best known nowadays for his erotica. Here, though, he applies his bold flair with color and his puissant imagination to fairy tales, and resulting is something truly extraordinary! This material would seem his true calling, for here his sensual proclivities are expressed with none of the lurid excess that one might find in some of his other work. And the images are sheer delight which enchant and arrest the eye. The costuming and elegance of the figures depicted are evocative of dance, and the images surely benefit from Brunelleschi’s fashion career. And there is still the languid androgyny that spills forth the erotic sensibility. This, and the immersion in atmospherics, make the pictures also squarely belong to the high Art Nouveau fancy, an association reinforced by the foliate borders, which curiously, have a formal lineality not necessarily affiliated with that fin-de-siecle aesthetic movement. What is most conspicuously Art Nouveau, it should be recognized, is the panache of the whole book production represented here. This is truly a book that in and of itself is artwork.