Seen briefly in yesterday’s film about René Magritte were some of the artist’s 77 illustrations created for a 1948 edition of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror published by Éditions “La Boetie”, Brussels. The examples here are from various auction sites, and they can’t be counted among Magritte’s best work which probably explains why they’re not reproduced very often. Salvador Dalí’s set of engravings for a 1934 edition were appended last year to a new English translation by RJ Dent for Solar Books. And from French publisher La Baconniere there’s this recent edition with a set of fresh illustrations by TagliaMani (also here).
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• René Magritte by David Wheatley
• Frans De Geetere’s illustrated Maldoror
• The art of Sibylle Ruppert
• Maldoror illustrated
These illustrations were done during Magritte’s “Impressionist” period during the war years, thus the swirly lines.
I quite like much of his work from this period.
He returned to his usual style in the late forties and early fifties after the even wilder “Period Vache”.
I have some of the “Vache” paintings in one of my Magritte books, always admired his audacity in doing those. The drawings here remind me a little of Mervyn Peake’s from the same period.
The Reverse Mermaid appears on a Rod Serling Night Gallery episode. It seemed a lot scarier when I saw it as a kid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z6uJ43eDtA