Drypoint on cream wove paper, folded frontispiece/title page sheet, 1949. 350x241 mm; 13 3/4x9 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.
