Lot n° 2
Estimation :
500 - 1000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 1 896EUR
Bertal [sic] & Léfix - Lot 2
Bertal [sic] & Léfix
Les Omnibus. Peregrinations burlesques à travers tous chemins. Decorated with numerous and varied illustrations by M. Bertal. Stations, at all booksellers. Conducteur Ildefonse Rousset, Paris, 1843-1844.
8 issues bound in an in-8° volume, complete collection (21.3 x 14 cm).
Binding: Green half-chagrin with corners, gilt fillets, spine ribbed, gold head, six of the eight covers.
Complete collection of the short-lived magazine that published the very first monochromes in the history of art (a black rectangle for Vue de la Hougue - Effet de nuit, and a framed white canvas).
Issues were devoted to Hugo (Les Buses-graves, for the Burgraves), women, comets, health, etc., but it's the seventh issue of this short-lived satirical magazine that has gone down in history, for the presence of the first monochromatic sketches ever published, notably: Vue de la Hougue - Effet de nuit, showing an all-black rectangle, nearly half a century before Paul Bilhaud's famous black rectangle (Combat de nègres pendant la nuit) exhibited at Arts Incohérents in 1882 in Jules Lévy's apartment (a painting that inspired, Kasimir Malevitch for his Carré noir sur fond blanc of 1915), followed by the seven monochrome plates in Alphonse Allais's Album primo-avrilesque (1897), heralding in derision what others would much later call the modern art revolution! Another monochrome reproduced in the same issue is a framed white canvas.
This seventh issue was devoted to the Salon of 1843.
Bertall, pseudonym of Charles Constant Albert Nicolas d'Arnoux de Limoges Saint-Saëns (1820-1882), was an illustrator, caricaturist and pioneer of photography. The anagram of his third given name gave him his pseudonym (he still bears only one "l"), but he was also known as Toru-Goth. A favorite illustrator of Balzac from 1842 onwards, the following year saw his first publication, Les Omnibus. Forty years later, Bertall was unable to attend the opening of Arts Incohérents on October 1, 1882 and see the black rectangle exhibited by Paul Bilhaud: he had died on March 24.
Provenance: Private collection.
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