Warja Lavater - Imageries - 1965-1982

Imageries

By Warja Lavater

Maeght, Paris, 1965-82, 1st illustrated edition

Hardcover 16x11 cm, 40 pp. in leporello

Each tale in an acrylic case and all in a hardcover slipcase

6 tales: Le Petit Poucet, Blanche-Neige, Le Petit Chaperon rouge, La Fable du Hasard, La Belle au Bois Dormant, Cinderella (sic).

Warja Lavater (1913-2007) was a Swiss designer, a pupil of Ernst Keller, both interested in the communicative action of signs, formats and visual structures.

She resided in Moscow, Athens, Zurich, Stockholm, Basel and New York. Once there MoMA published her two first Imageries in 1962; three years later she did the same for the dealer Maeght, creating a set of classical children's books as never seen before, without letters, without figurative illustrations (something that may be common depending on edition) but, and this is the most surprising and unheard-of: without letters, without text, with a single legend of signs written. All the tales are dramas based on a pictographic diagram printed lithographically, in an accordion fold, which the reader must traverse and actively reconstruct.

These pictographic publications, true artist’s books, show a clear influence from the work of the also Swiss Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Deulanay: La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, 1913 (and this in turn influenced the folding map in the Transiberian Tourism brochure). The set, not reaching the myth of that publication, furthermore so limited that it is believed only 30 copies exist of the 150 planned, surpasses it in certain aspects of abstraction and conception. They are also, due to their larger edition, more affordable than the Prose du Transsiberienne whose last copy fetched, at auction, a price of 185,000 (auction Pierre Bergé).

Lavater’s pictographic tales have been the subject of a multimedia production in 1995 by France 3, Maeght, and the Pompidou Museum with music by Pierre Charvet.

Here are offered Le Petit Chaperon rouge, Le Petit Poucet, Cinderella (in Spanish !), Blanche-Neige, La Belle au Bois Dormant, La Fable du Hasard. All lithographed with their acrylic case, cloth covers and label, and in perfect condition.

The case is also original and its condition is good. Exceptional set, complete and in good condition, of an artist’s work which, with the years, will only grow in importance and recognition.