[Cover title:] Correspondances. Poémes par André Salmon. Images par Étienne Farkas

Paris: Éditions des Chroniques du jour, 1929. First edition. Signed copy. Limited, numbered (1/185/200). In later cloth-covered folder, with printed title vignette on the front panel. Each plate numbered in the verso. Browning to outside of first and last pages. ALmost condition.. First edition. Signed copy. Limited, numbered (1/185/200). In later cloth-covered folder, with printed title vignette on the front panel. (4) p., and 20 plates (10 coloured pochoir plates and 10 plates of poems). Page size: ca. 305 × 420 mm. Composition size varies, approx. 220 × 290 mm. István Farkas' scarce modernist portfolio which he created together with the French art critic and poet, André Salmon.

The portfolio, which was titled after Baudelaire's poem of the same title, contains the reproductions of ten tempera paintings by the Hungarian painter, István Farkas, (1887-1944) along with the reproductions of the manuscripts of André Salmon's poems, which he wrote for Farkas's pictures.

Farkas created the body of work for this portfolio over the course of four years that he spent in Paris between 1925-1929. His exotic still lifes were created in a unique style which Farkas developed while turning from synthetic cubism towards a surrealist world. The finest examples of his endeavour are his "sous-marin" compositions, some of which are also featured in Correspondances, in which he evoked a mysterious, underwater world. André Salmon, who was also the monographist of Farkas, stressed the painter's "ability to express dreams with the most complete symbols of reality" and wrote that "Farkas is unlike anyone else. He comes from one school only: his own."

The portfolio was made in the finest quality in the workshop of Jean Saudé, one of the greatest masters of the pochoir technique of the time.

István Farkas was a Jewish-Hungarian painter, who started his career in Nagybánya, the cradle of modern Hungarian painting. He continued his studies in Paris at the Académie de La Palette before World War and entered the painter's circle of the Cubist. After the war, he returned to Paris in 1925 where he became part of the art scene at the Café de la Rotonde, and one of the prominent Eastern European painters in the École de Paris. In the interwar period, Farkas created a remarkable body of work and had several solo exhibitions in Paris, Belgium and Budapest. He was regularly featured at Marcelle Berr de Turique's legendary Galerie Le Portique, along with Matisse, Chagall, Modigliani, and Utrillo. After his father's death in 1932, Farkas moved back to Budapest where he continued to paint besides running the family publishing house. Despite his friends urging him to flee, Farkas remained in Budapest even after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. A month later he was arrested and sent to a deportation camp in Hungary. Some weeks later Farkas was deported to Auschwitz where he was gassed upon his arrival. Farkas' work was rediscovered by the art community outside Hungary in the mid-'80s. Since then, he has been the subject of many exhibitions including solo shows in Rome, New York and Amsterdam.

André Salmon (1881-1969) was a French poet, art critic and writer. He was an early defender of cubism, and one of the most important critics of the first half of the twentieth century in Paris. Besides working for newspapers and magazines, he also pursued a career as a poet. He was a close friend of Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso. Salmon also organized exhibitions for the leading French fashion designer Paul Poiret, such as the exhibition L'Art Moderne en France in 1916, which, among others, featured the works of Amedeo Modigliani, Moïse Kisling as well as Pablo Picasso, who showed The Young Ladies of Avignon for the first time in this exhibition.

Scarce.

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