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Tice Clara Lou s Pierre (1 results)
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Woman and Puppet. A Spanish Romance.
Published by [New York?:] Privately printed for the Pierre Louÿs Society, 1927, 1927
Seller: Peter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB., London, United Kingdom
Association Member: ABA ILAB PBFA
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First Edition Signed
First Tice edition, first printing, one of 1,250 copies only, this copy inscribed by the illustrator on the half-title, "To Con, Clara Tice" with an original drawing, presumably a self-portrait, and "presentation copy" written on the limitation. Harry Cunningham, Tice's long-time lover and artistic partner, and the book's designer, has inscribed the book beneath his printed name on the final page, "to Con, Harry". Clara Tice (1888-1973) was a notorious New York bohemian artist, known as "the Queen of Greenwich Village". She began exhibiting her art in 1910 and in 1915 her fame skyrocketed when the Society for the Prevention of Vice attempted to confiscate her works at the bohemian restaurant Polly's. "Tice was apparently so highly regarded and so instantly recognizable as one of those 'queer artists' that her role in the first Greenwich Village Follies was simply to play herself. As 'Clara,' she stepped out onto the stage at the appointed time, outfitted in one of her typically bizarre bohemian ensembles, and conducted a 'quick chalk talk of nudes, bees and butterflies'" (Sawelsan-Gorse, p. 429). Tice and Cunningham met in the early 1920s, when Cunningham was a flyer with the Lafayette Escadrille. Although the two never married, Tice referred to him as her "husband" and she quickly moved into the Cunningham family home on Pierrepont Street, where she set up her studio and "proceeded to decorate the interior from top to bottom with murals of cavorting animals, plants, and Beardsleyesque figures" (ibid., p. 430). Cunningham was several years younger than Tice and an artist himself, but "he soon selflessly devoted himself almost exclusively to assisting Clara in the execution of her work. In an early example of career role-reversals, he pulled proofs for her etchings, hand-coloured her mezzotints, stretched her canvases, and organized her work" (ibid.) Tice's striking style is well matched to Louÿs's queer erotic writing. She had illustrated his Aphrodite the previous year, and Edmund Gosse's review of the first edition of Woman and Puppet (1898) almost predicts Tice's simple, colourful illustrations: "All this is described with a delicious lightness, all the warmth and colour of Southern Spain concentrated in a few perfectly skilful sentences. [Conchita] is unique, a variety of the she-devil never before revealed to science" (quoted in the preface to the 2019 edition). Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender and Identity, 1998. Tall quarto. Original black cloth, spine and front cover lettered and decorated in red, edges untrimmed. With dust jacket. Spine sunned and a little rubbed, spine ends bumped, corners and lower edges worn, faint marks to rear cover, gutter cracked but firm to pp. 100-101; a very good copy in near-fine jacket, head of spine lightly creased, a few nicks to upper edges and light marks to front panel, remarkably sharp.
