?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000
THE GREAT JOHNS-BECKETT COLLABORATION (JOHNS, JASPER) Beckett, Samuel. Foirades / Fizzles. Separate title pages and text in French and English. 26 lift-ground aquatints and 5 etchings with mixed media, 1 soft-ground etching, and 1 aquatint, by Jasper Johns, plus 2 color lithographs used as endleaves; all on handmade wove Auvergne Richard de Bas paper, watermarked with Beckett's initials and Johns's signature. 329x249 mm; 12x9 inches (sheets), full margins, printed at Atelier Crommelynck. Oblong folio, publisher's ivory wove paper binding with aquatint endpapers, bound in accordion fold around support leaves; publisher's beige linen solander box with purple tassel, lined with colored lithograph. Paris and New York: Éditions de Minuit & Petersburg Press, 1976
number 174 of 250 copies signed by johns and beckett from a total edition of 300. "The short story Beckett provided for this book is printed in English and French, doubling the amount of pages and opportunities for the addition of the artist's imagery. Johns' contributions are mostly based upon the composition of one of his paintings. Confronting sets of the English and French names of objects in that painting, shown as if in a magic translating mirror, combine the artist's interest in ready-made letters with ambiguity of how they are used"--Castleman 174; Field 215-248; ULAE 173; From Manet to Hockney 156: "The author described his method of producing Fizzles as `breaking wind quietly, hissing, spluttering; a failure of fiasco'."
