Berquet Gilles Iizawa Kotaro (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Fine. 1st Edition. 1st Printing. Unpaginated. Published in 1994. Collection of female nudes, presented as an Artist Book. One of the most beautiful erotic art photography books of our time. The true First Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions, particularly the 1995 and 1998 French Editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now rare. A brilliant production by Taro Kaneda: Regular-sized volume format. Glossy pictorial hard boards with titles on the cover and spine, as issued. Photographs by Gilles Berquet. Text by Kotaro Iizawa in the Japanese original and felicitous English translation. ALL of Treville Publishing's promotional materials laid-in. Original glassine obi-band intact. Printed on pristine-white, thick coated stock paper in Tokyo, Japan to the highest standards. The reproduction quality is exemplary in every respect. Without DJ, as issued. Presents, in its First Edition format, Gilles Berquet's "La Solitude des Anges". Solitary angels. An Artist Book-designed, beautifully printed volume of the cult French photographer's female nudes. Fetishistic and sado-masochistic images that are characterized by paradoxically French elegance and refinement insofar as this is at all conceivable about bondage-imagery that abides by Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty. Iizawa (and others) traces Berquet's roots to the "private universe" worlds of Hans Bellmer and Pierre Molinier, which is a valid point. But it also misses the whole point about Berquet's own art: It is an AESTHETE universe, not a private, crazy one, dedicated to the sublime beauty of the female form, and to the very idea of what beautiful is. Hence its appeal to the Japanese sensibility. Neither Bellmer nor Molinier (nor, for that matter, Mapplethorpe, their gay successor) gave precedence to beauty over sex, but rather made sex = beauty. It's not a fine point, and it answers such questions as, Has anyone ever made a woman pissing on a wooden floor look so elegant as Berquet does? No. Precisely because his is an aesthete's world-view. An absolute "must-have" title for Gilles Berquet collectors. This title is an erotic art photography classic. Laid-in are all of Treville Publishing's promotional materials. The original glassine obi-band is intact. As far as we know, this is the only copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Copies available online are the 1995 and 1998 French Editions, have serious flaws, or are missing the glassine obi-band. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare copy thus. Lavishly lllustrated with color plates. One of the most brilliant photographers of the female nude. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO HANS BELLMER AND PIERRE MOLINIER TITLES IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 4845709457. no.