Livre d’artiste by Yvon Taillandier

[France : probably between 1970 and 1980]. A unique object created by Yvon Taillandier by overpainting the pages of a nineteenth century copy of the published score to the opera Lara by Louis-Aimé Maillart (1817-71), the volume measuring 275 x 200 mm, with 295 pages. Taillandier has painted 7 full-page and 34 double-page paintings within the first 81 pages of the musical score, some leaves painted recto only but most painted both recto and verso, to create a suite of works highly representative of the artist’s distinctive absurdist style. The exterior of the book is rubbed and the spine perished, the book is signed by Taillandier in pen in the first image.

Taillandier’s imaginary landscapes are populated by fantastic figures: multi-limbed, contorting, sphinx-like hybrids, by turns menacing and self-devouring, playful and humorous, or sexual and fetishistic. Tallandier once described himself as “a writer who paints”, and language is indeed integral to all his painting. The artist’s fascination with both the abstract nature of words – their layers of poetic meaning – and their concrete, glyphic quality, is evidenced by his repeated isolation and highlighting of individual words and phrases within the libretto of this musical score, transforming them, along with the musical notation, into part of the painting’s dynamic.

Yvon Taillandier – writer, critic, painter and sculptor – was born in Paris in 1926. His first solo exhibition was held in Lyon in 1942, but in 1950 he abandoned painting to concentrate on writing. He published numerous landmark studies on artists as diverse as Giotto, Rodin, Cézanne and Miró, and in 1949 was appointed secretary of the artistic circle the Salon de Mai, a position he held for the next five decades. Taillandier returned to drawing and painting in 1969, and through the 1970s began to develop his own pastiche style which involved painting on various media. The present work probably dates from this period.

Provenance: From the estate of Jacques Damase, publisher and art historian, and close friend of the artist.