THE FABLES OF AESOP
ACCORDING TO SIR ROGER L'ESTRANGE
WITH FIFTY DRAWINGS BY ALEXANDER CALDER
Alexander Calder [Illustrator]
Alexander Calder [Illustrator]: THE FABLES OF AESOP [ACCORDING TO SIR ROGER L'ESTRANGE / WITH FIFTY DRAWINGS BY ALEXANDER CALDER]. Paris and New York: Harrison and Minton, Balch and Company, [1931]. First edition [limited to 595 copies on Auvergne hand-made paper], mechanically numbered copy 591. Tall thin 4to. Original beige paper covered boards covered in blue form fitted illustrated dust jacket [A Gnat Challenges a Lyon], in original chemise and slipcase with paper labels. 124 pp. 201 fables illustrated with 52 line block reproductions by Alexander Calder. Uncut page edges. Former owner tiny inkstamped surname to front free endpaper. Faint mottling to uncoated blue dust jacket. Tiny inkstamp faintly repeated inside chemise flap. Red chemise spine uniformly sunned. Paper covered red slipcase lightly edgeworn with lower tongue starting to split. Slipcase label nicked at bottom corner. A nearly fine copy of this elaborate production, one of the great Artists' Books of the 20th century.
25 x 19.5 cm irregualr page sized book in dust jacket and matching chemise and slipcase with printed lables. Alexander Calder's first book, and the fifth publication of Harrison of Paris. Printed by Aime Jourde, Paris; designed by Monroe Wheeler; and typeset in French Round Face.
In the summer of 1931, [Calder] produced some of his finest graphic work and a masterpiece of American book illustration, the Fables of Aesop for Harrison of Paris. — James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder
From "Beyond the Mobiles" by Benjamin Genocchio [the New York Times, December 18, 2009]: "In the last few decades, Alexander Calder (1898 - 1976) has quietly risen to almost mythical status in the pantheon of mid-20th-century American abstract artists -- no mean feat in a milieu where figures like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Tony Smith are the competition. What distinguishes Calder from these other giants of art history may be his extraordinary versatility as an artist.
"Calder was primarily a sculptor. Soon after moving to Paris in 1926, he met Fernand Leger, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso and other members of the European avant-garde and developed a body of inventive sculpture that owes much to Surrealism, especially the work of the Spanish artist Joan Miro. It was also in Paris that he took up printmaking, after befriending Stanley William Hayter, an expatriate British artist and influential printmaker. It was to remain a lifelong passion . . .
"It is easy to assume that Calder, born in Philadelphia to a family of artists, was destined to be an artist. Not so, for he initially received a degree in mechanical engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, only later attending the Art Students League in New York, where he took classes in etching and lithography . . .
"While living in Paris, Calder continued to produce prints and illustrations for books and journals. His many projects from this period include delightful pen-and-ink line drawings of animals for a 1931 publication of Aesop's fables . . .
"There is no denying that a certain stylistic and iconographic continuity exists between Calder's sculptures and his prints. Some of the prints, clearly, are studies relating to sculptures and paintings. They are mere facsimiles of his three-dimensional works. But others exist as stand-alone works of art, intended not only as literary illustrations or poster designs but as independent compositions.
"The best of Calder's prints have a tremendous sense of vitality, combining bold shapes and broad sections of color in dynamic, intuitive ways . .. the forms occasionally overlap, creating the illusion of depth and even motion." [xlist_2018]