Contree - Robert Desnos, Eau-forte de Picasso ("Femme Assise - Dora Maar")

Pablo Picasso

A book of twenty-five typeset poems by French Surrealist Robert Desnos (1900 - 1945). Contree translates to "Against the Grain" and is Desnos' compilation of poems addressing the German occupation of France, his call to defeat the invaders, and his memories of life before the war. An active member of the French Resistence, he would be arrested by the Gestapo on Februrary of 1945 - less that a year after the book was published - and would die of typhoid in the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia just one month after the liberation of the camp, but before he could be transferred out. Contree is dedicated to his wife, Lucie "Youki" Basnos.

This softcover quarto book has retained its original glassine dustwraps embossed with spiderwebs. An original etching by Pablo Picasso, "Femme Assise - Dora Maar" - a Cubist portrait of his lover - serves as the loose frontispiece which has then been lithographically reproduced in fragments throughout the book.

The typeset colophon reads (in French): "Of this work, completed on the thirty-first of May nineteen hundred and forty-four under the direction of Robert Godet on the presses of Durand in Paris, two hundred and ten copies were printed as known: three nominative copies on Arches by hand reserved for the author, illustrator and publisher. Ten copies on Arches by hand comprising a state of the etching in black, states of it in color and a state of the barred copper. These copies are numbered from I to X. Two hundred copies on pure Lafuma vellum with an etching in black. These copies are numbered 1 to 200."