Illustrated with Original Impasto Gouaches

Histoire d’oublier [Unique Artist's Book]

Faure, Emilia

Publication: (N.-pl.): 1980.

Notes: In Histoire d’oublier (“A Story of Forgetting”), Emilia Faure (1924–?) constructs a tactile meditation on memory and erasure. The work unfolds across 26 hand-assembled fascicles, enclosed within the modified covers of Louis Dimier’s 1926 "Histoire de la peinture française ...1627 à 1690." Faure deliberately incorporates the history of French art in this work, while also destroying it by converting some of the original plates into collage elements and backgrounds for her art. The word “Histoire”, like the history itself, remains partially visible through a precise cut-away in the original cover.

These 36 individual works—collages, photographs, and impasto gouaches—pair poetic and prose fragments with visual images. Twenty-three of the pieces are abstract gouaches, most layered thickly with pigment. Many are mounted within paper frames, some repurposed from the original book. Some fascicles incorporate salvaged pages from the original Dimier text. The text in three of the fascicles is embroidered on paper. The fascicles themselves are sheets of Arches paper folded in half and toned.

Faure is best known for her abstract gouaches painted in the 1950s and 1960s. The style of these works are similar, but perhaps with even less geometry. Whether she made other book-objects is not known to your cataloguer. The colophon of this book describes it as an "exemplaire unique."

Unique work, 26 fascicles housed in altered binding. 10-1/2 by 13-1/2 inches.

Edition + Condition: Near fine to fine. Most of the fascicles are toned; there is some offsetting of paint onto the few untoned sheets. Signed by the artist on the colophon.

PROVENANCE: Paul Destribats

Item No: #362565

Price: $3,500