PICASSO, Pablo; Claude ROY. La Guerre et la Paix.

PICASSO, Pablo; Claude ROY. La Guerre et la Paix.Picassos War and Peace PICASSO, Pablo; Claude ROY. La Guerre et la Paix. Paris: Editions Cercle DArt. 1954. Folio. Publishers oatmeal cloth, with orange belly band printed in black and white, no dust jacket (as issued), spine and upper board lettered in burgundy; pp. 153 (i. e. 151), [1], [2 (colophon, blank)], with the two large folding plates in pocket to rear board; slightly shaken; else a very good copy. First trade edition, one of 6000 copies, of

Picasso’s War and Peace

PICASSO, Pablo; Claude ROY. La Guerre et la Paix. Paris: Editions Cercle D’Art. 1954.

Folio. Publisher’s oatmeal cloth, with orange belly-band printed in black and white, no dust-jacket (as issued), spine and upper board lettered in burgundy; pp. ‘153’ (i.e. 151), [1], [2 (colophon, blank)], with the two large folding plates in pocket to rear board; slightly shaken; else a very good copy.

First trade edition, one of 6000 copies, of this monumental work on Picasso’s enormous two-panel La Guerre et la paix (War and Peace) – even larger than Guernica – for the deconsecrated Romanesque chapel of the the Château de Vallauris, published five years before the chapel was officially opened to the public and instrumental in publicising the work.

There were also one hundred copies of the édition de tête with an original lithograph by Picasso. To accommodate the vaulted ceilings of the deserted chapel – which Picasso aimed to turn into a ‘temple of peace’ – he structured the panels on thirty-two pieces of hardboard. He made over two hundred and eighty preparatory drawings, several of which are reproduced here. Between 1952 and 1959, the installation ‘remained largely unknown. Claude Roy’s book on La Guerre et la paix [...] brought these large panels to wider attention before the chapel’s public opening’ (Forest, trans.).

Jean Cocteau, who saw the work being created in Picasso’s studio at Fournas – along with, amongst others, Françoise Gilot and Claude Roy, author of the present work – wrote that ‘the first impression [of La Guerre et la paix] is that of a nave, a church; it seems that everyone who enters [the studio] takes off their hat. I take off my hat’ (ibid.). Picasso left the drips of paint as they were, arguing that ‘one doesn’t advise an unhappy person to wipe away their tears’.

Goeppert 67. See Forest, ‘Picasso, la guerre et la paix’, in Michel and Vandenbussche eds, L’idée de paix en France et ses représentations au xxe siècle (2018), pp. 349–54.

SKU: 2124890