255 / 462
346 PABLO PICASSO
Negre, negre, negre . . . Portrait d’Aimé Césaire
.
Drypoint on cream wove paper, folded frontispiece/title page sheet, 1949. 350x241 mm;
13
3
/
4
x9
1
/
2
inches, full margins. Edition of 219. Signed in pencil, lower right. Published by
Editions Fragrance, Paris. From
Corps Perdu
by Aimé Césaire. A superb impression.
Picasso’s frontispiece portrait of Césaire (1913-2008) as a laurel-crowned poet laureate.
Césaire, the Parisian (via Martinique) central figure of the
négritude
movement in
Francophone literature during the 1930s, met Picasso in 1948 at the Communist-led
World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace, in Wroclaw, Poland.They connected on their
shared interest in Communist politics and African art. Picasso and Césaire collaborated
on
Corps Perdu
in 1949-50. Picasso’s 32 drypoints and etchings for the work, many fusing
male and female sexual organs with plant-inspired forms, illustrate Césaire’s text which
explores society’s brutal positing of the black man as half-human, half-beast. Bloch 633;
Baer 841 Bd 2.
[4,000/6,000]