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.

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (1997)
Stéphane Mallarmé
Ofer Lellouche (and Uzy Agassi, ed.)
Full black leather binding over marine plywood with dice, on a stand. H760 x W560 mm, 28 pages with 9 engravings. Edition of 40, of which this is #6. Acquired from Ido Agassi, 28 February 2022.
Photos: Courtesy of Ido Agassi; Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of Ido Agassi and the artist.

Ever since his “brick wall” encounter with Un Coup de Dés and its white-on-black, black-on-white aesthetic, Ofer Lellouche has felt its influence on his art — including self-portraiture, the figurative and landscapes. When first approached by the publisher Ido Agassi (Even Hoshen) to create an artist’s book, he considered working from the ground up with a contemporary but that longstanding influence turned him to Mallarmé.

The homage consists of marine plywood covered in black leather, dice embedded in the spine and stand, trim size of H760 x W560 mm, Arches 250gsm printed in 22 pt Times New Roman and 9 etchings by Lellouche. The pages of text replicate those of the then-current Pléiade edition of Mallarmé’s Complete Works. Obviously from the size of the work, the pages have been scaled up. The replication of those pages means that the layout is not precisely as Mallarmé designated in the proofs for the deluxe edition. It also means that page numbers appear, and it accounts for the use of Times New Roman. But there are underlying reasons for the scaling up and replication despite the variance from Mallarmé’s plans.

First, the scale accommodates the size of Lellouche’s largest prints. Tellingly, they require a double-page spread. The use of double-page spreads pays homage to Mallarmé’s elevation of the double-page spread over the single page as a basic structural unit in Un Coup de Dés.

Second, the replication of the Pléiade pages begins a set of interconnected allusions and indirect homage to Mallarmé. Picasso was rumored to have used his copy of Mallarmé’s poems as a sketchbook. By replicating the Pléiade pages for his artist’s book, Lellouche inverts Picasso’s habit, draws Mallarmé’s double-page spreads into his artist’s book rather than drawing on them, and thus pays homage to both LES MAÎTRES. Also, through Picasso as inheritor of Mallarmé’s “invention” of modern art’s conception of space (according to Marcel Broodthaers), Lellouche pays a further indirect homage to the poem. The interconnectedness does not end there.

Considering that the main figure in the poem is LE MAÎTRE (the captain of the shipwreck), the fact that Lellouche’s prints pass from an abstract human figure to self-portraits implies Lellouche’s identification with LE MAÎTRE. When the self-portraits give way to the first full double-page spread (the seventh image, an abstract seascape or image of the abyss to which the poem refers), the shift confirms that self-identification, for LE MAÎTRE likewise seemingly succumbs to l’Abîme. But it is not merely the captain with whom Lellouche is identifying. LE MAÎTRE is the term by which Mallarmé’s contemporaries referred to him. Still it is not so much that Lellouche identifies himself with Mallarmé the poet and social lion as it is that he identifies with the paradoxical and impersonal creative process that lies at the heart of Un Coup de Dés. Indeed, it is through his own process that Lellouche asserts the identification. Beginning with black on white and progressing through aquatints to white on black, the self-portraits allude in an inverted way to Mallarmé’s paradoxical les blancs. The blank white space means as much as what it surrounds on the page, or rather it makes meaning along with the semantic and typographic elements that it surrounds.

Neither the poem nor the prints end with a definitive yielding to the abyss. The poem progresses to UNE CONSTELLATION. In Mallarmé’s case, the constellation comes at the end of the sentence RIEN N’AURA EU LIEU QUE LE LIEU / EXCEPTÉ PEUT-ÊTRE UNE CONSTELLATION (Nothing will have taken place but the place, except perhaps a constellation). In Lellouche’s case, the constellation takes the form of the multiple female figures ranged white on black across the two final double-page spreads. Again, Lellouche mirrors Mallarmé’s semantic and typographic juggling of symmetry and asymmetry across the center line of the double-page spread.

This brief note about this addition to the collection comes nowhere near exhausting Lellouche’s interaction with and interpretation of Un Coup de Dés. The artist’s book is also only one instance. Later etchings not in the collection underline this. By courtesy and with permission of the artist, here are three in which Lellouche pays even more direct homage to Picasso’s act of sketching on the pages of his copy of Mallarmé’s poems and by which he explores his own identification with this poem.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Ofer Lellouche

Books On Books Collection – Ellsworth Kelly

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

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Ofer Lellouche

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD
(1997)

Further Reading

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

Further Reading

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD(1997)

Further Reading

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD
(1997)