THE DRAWINGS OF BERTRAND

This beautiful volume presents a comprehensive selection of the drawings and paintings of a contemporary French artist whose sensuous fantasy and surrealistic obsession have paid homage to the female body in a series of works which has no equal in modern art. The Drawings of Bertrand is composed of 88 black-and-white drawings and a sixteen-page four-color signature of his paintings. "The body," says Emmanuelle Arsan in her introduction, "is beautiful only if it is invented." In this collection of drawings and paintings, Raymond Bertrand invents a female unlike any ever beheld by human eyes. The efflorescent bodies that he [Bertrand] draws out of an invisible humus are the only nature that we belong to here...the wide-open gazes that he gives his amorous algae--gazes more transparent than any pearly sheen beneath their innocent eyelashes--have only themselves as their objects. The flaring nostrils, the pouting, already swollen lips, the careless poses are there, doubtless, to make us realize that our pleasures cannot concern the absent souls of these complete strangers. Condition: Fine. Small corner bumps.