Books On Books Collection – Ellsworth Kelly

Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard (1992)

Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard (1992)
Ellsworth Kelly and Stéphane Mallarmé
Hardback, case bound in full black morocco, spine gilt-lettered. 17 x 12 1/2 in Edition of 300, of which this is #204. Acquired at Swann Auctions, 24 October 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Permission to display, courtesy of Limited Editions.

Is Ellsworth Kelly’s homage to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard an illustrated book, a livre d’artiste, or an artist’s book? It certainly resonates with and intensifies the poem’s design and imagery, but without being a spread-for-spread illustration. It is akin to the tributes paid by André Masson (1961), Jean Lecoultre (1975), Ian Tyson & Neil Crawford (1985), Jacques Vernière (1987), Christiane Vielle (1989), Ofer Lellouche (1997), Robert Bononno & Jeff Clark (2015), and Eric Zboya (2018). Some of these kindred spirits like Masson, Vielle, and Bononno & Clark intersperse artwork within the poem that evoke if not illustrate the setting and action of the sea and shipwreck. Some, like Masson, Lecoultre, Vernière, and Lellouche display images that have less to do with the poem’s imagery. Some, like Tyson & Crawford and Zboya, show more interest in capturing the poem’s numerological esotericism (LE NOMBRE). More than the others, though, Kelly builds on Mallarmé’s double-page spread principle and its structural importance for the poem.

The double-page spread is the chief design structure in Mallarmé’s poem and is essential to its workings. We know this from the differences in layouts between its first publication in Cosmopolis in 1897, its marked-up proofs Mallarmé left behind after his death, and his son-in-law’s effort with Gallimard in 1913 to reflect the poet’s plan. Just before his death, Mallarmé had been working on the volume with Ambroise Vollard, who had commissioned etchings from Odilon Redon to bring it to the status and price of the livre d’artiste, a genre he was shaping. Mallarmé was amenable to this as long as the etchings were grouped at the end of the book. He did not want the artwork to distract the reader from his careful arrangement of the text on and across eleven double-page spreads.

The fact of Ellsworth Kelly’s eleven lithographs aligns with Mallarmé’s plan for eleven double-page spreads of text, but the interweaving of the two sets of spreads runs contrary to Mallarmé’s wishes. To follow the poet’s wishes, Kelly and the book designer hired for The Limited Editions Club’s production could have been grouped at the end of the book, but they didn’t. To double down on the contravention, they added a blank double-page spread after each of the eleven spreads of text and after each of the eleven spreads of lithographs. Someone also decided to begin and end the volume with sets of four blank flyleaves. This is not mere padding to justify a deluxe price. The effect signals and enhances the importance of the double-page spread for Mallarmé’s poem. It underlines the importance of what Mallarmé called “les blancs”. More than underline it, those punctuations of blank space after each spread of text and then after each spread of image add a pace to the sequence and place an additional demand on the memory as it juggles Mallarmé’s interweaving of text in its different sizes, styles, and position across the double-page spread. The lithographs’ nature, their pattern, and their spatial relationship to everything in the book’s structure match Mallarmé’s architectural plans far more than Vollard’s impresario interventions.

Abstract as they are, Kelly’s lithographs subtly mirror the structure and content of Mallarmé’s poem. Just as Mallarmé’s first sentence begins and his last sentence ends with “un coup de dés”, Kelly reverses the image in his first lithograph to make the image in his last.

An open book displaying a blank left page and a right page featuring a black triangular shape on a white background.

A blank book opened to show two pages, one side white and the other featuring a diagonal black section.

Just as inversions are recurrent in the poem, so they recur in Kelly’s lithographs.

An open book with a blank white page on the left and a dark gray page on the right, creating a striking contrast.

An open book displaying two pages, one with a blank white page and the other featuring a black geometric shape.

The poem’s spread beginning and ending COMME SI [“AS IF“] is central to the poem physically and thematically. The sixth of the eleven spreads, it is the only one showing this spatial, syntactic, and typographic pattern. Likewise, Kelly’s sixth lithograph splits its page equally. No other lithograph depicts this equilibrium.

An open book with one page entirely blank and the opposite page divided into two horizontal sections, one black at the top and one white at the bottom.

Kelly created a separate portfolio of four lithographs: The Mallarmé Suite. This work is meant to be displayed on a wall and arranged precisely according to Kelly ‘s instructions. Despite the four shapes’ replication from the book, the portfolio stands quite apart in its introduction of color and positioning of the shapes (see Bonfitto’s essay). Its mere conjunction with the book does not imbue it with what happens in the book, and that underscores the fact that Kelly’s eleven black-and-white lithographs are not in mere conjunction with Mallarmé’s poem. The reader/viewer can imagine billowing sails, overwhelming waves, or tilting masts in the lithographs, but what matters is how Kelly makes his distinctive shapes play with one another and all the book’s double-page spreads to mirror how Mallarmé makes his words, typography, and double-page spreads play with one another. If self-reflexiveness is one of the key markers for distinguishing an artist’s book from a livre d’artiste, we have here a self-reflexive poem and a self-reflexive visual artwork punctuated by blanks within the canvas of the book structure to create a self-reflexive artist’s book.

Books On Books Collection – Isabella Checcaglini and Mohammed Bennis

2022/04/152022/07/04Books On BooksLeave a comment

POÉME: Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard (2007)

POÉME: Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard (2007)
Stéphane Mallarmé, Isabelle Checcaglini and Mohammed Bennis
Four volumes in slipcase. H380 x W280 mm, 40 pages per volume. Edition of 99, of which this is #57. Acquired from J.F. Fourcade, 7 January 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Ypsilon Éditeur’s editions of Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard bring together for the first time the three prints from Odilon Redon with the deluxe edition layout intended by Stéphane Mallarmé. Also for the first time, we have a translation into Arabic. Below, the central double-page spread of the poem is displayed in the French and Arabic editions to show how their mirror images of the layout heighten its movement.

In the additional French volume and its Arabic counterpart, Checcaglini adds a brief history about Mallarmé and Vollard’s plans for the deluxe edition and helpfully includes correspondence among them and Odilon Redon. Although the earlier edition published by Mitsou Ronat & Tibor Papp in 1980 does include Redon’s prints, they are placed in a separate folder along with other visual and textual tributes. The Redon prints may not be among his best, nor do they include the mooted but undiscovered fourth print, still at least we now have the three and the poem in relation to each other more nearly as intended, which makes it possible to compare and contrast this deluxe edition with the outpouring of works of homage to Mallarmé’s poem. Even with the prior absence of that chance, few if any of those hommageurs would be unaware of Redon’s images. Jean Lecoultre (1975) notes how his publisher’s solution to handling his soft varnish etchings honors the intended separation of text and images. By contrast, Christiane Vielle (1989) challenges Mallarmé’s layout and his unit of the double-page spread by altering the spatial relationships among lines, hiding text beneath panels and juxtaposing her artwork with the text.

The added volume with Checcaglini’s synopsis also includes a three-way dialogue among Mohammed Bennis, Isabelle Checcaglini and Bernard Noël about the light that the translation sheds on the poem.

Checcaglini’s edition also claims to have most closely reproduced the Firmin-Didot typeface that Mallarmé wished for his deluxe edition. The search for absolute fidelity to this font that has been unavailable for at least a century has been an obsession since the discovery of the poem’s proofs corrected and annotated in Mallarmé’s hand. The Further Reading provides a start for anyone inclined to join the search.

Books On Books Collection – Nicolas Guyot

2020/05/202022/04/24Books On BooksLeave a comment

POÉME: UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD par STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ (2019)

Poème: Un coup dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (2019)
Nicolas Guyot
Unique cover with silver bromide printed image on Wenzhou paper mounted on handcrafted canvas. H150 x W200 mm, 16 leaves, 11 pages of text with silver bromide printed images on 160 gm drawing paper. Edition of 76, of which this is #16 and signed by the artist.

Guyot’s livre d’artiste sits self-assuredly in a long line of works inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s seminal 1897 poem Un Coup de Dés. Unlike Ellsworth Kelly (1992) but like Christiane Vielle (1989) and others, Guyot integrates his images with the text. In print technique, his silver bromide echoes the silver gelatine of Ian Wallace (1979), but Guyot’s unique cover prints and hand binding distinguish his work from any other in the long line. His technique and layout evoke a feeling of the late 19th century, the contemporary images respond creatively to the original poem’s own cryptic imagery, and altogether the effect is a simultaneity across time, poet and artist.

Guyot writes that Alain Badiou’s Petit manuel d’inethéstique (Éditions du Seuil, 1998) and Quentin Mellaissoux’s Le nombre et la siréne (Éditions Fayard, 2014) were particularly inspiring for this work (correspondence, 21 April 2020). In addition to the artist’s book, Guyot created several paintings (H39 x W65 cm) inspired by the poem and these philosophical reflections.