White Thunder

White Thunder; Dane Rudhyar; Hazel Dreis Editions, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1938. #89 of 400 copies. Signed presentation to Lawren Harris. Dane Rudhyar (1895 – 1985), born Daniel Chennevière in Paris, was an American author, modernist composer, painter and humanistic astrologer. He was a pioneer of modern transpersonal astrology. During this period from 1917 to 1919, spent partly in New York City, partly in Canada, and partly in Philadelphia he adopted the name "Rudhyar" a cognate of several attractive Sanskrit words including the name of the god Rudra. Rudhyar learned astrology during a period when he was also studying the psychological writings of Carl Gustav Jung, and he began to think in terms of bringing astrology and Jungian psychology together. At first, he called his new interpretation "harmonic astrology" and as the ideas matured renamed it "humanistic astrology," the subject of his monumental volume, The Astrology of Personality, published in 1936. Dane Rudhyar joined the Transcendental Painting Group in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1938 and 1939. The Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) was an artist collective, established in 1938 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The group's goal was to provide an alternative to the prevailing currents of social realism and regionalism that dominated art in the 1930s United States. Under the leadership of Raymond Jonson and Emil Bisttram, the artist group consisted of Agnes Pelton, Lawren Harris, Florence Miller Pierce, Horace Pierce, Robert Gribbroek, William Lumpkins, and Dane Rudhyar. This is where Rudhyar became friends with Lawren Harris, one of the founding members of the highly esteemed and important Group of Sever painters in Canada. This book of poetry has one of Rudhyar’s drawings “Storm Gods” that certainly seemed to reflect inspiration from the Transcendental Painting Group. The publisher, Hazel Dreis was an internationally recognized American master hand bookbinder, publisher, and printmaker. She played a prominent role in fine-press printing and book arts in San Francisco, Berkeley, and later Santa Fe, working with famed printers like the Grabhorn Press and binding iconic artistic folios. She hand-bound the ultra-rare 1930 fine-press edition of Taos Pueblo, featuring original photographs by Ansel Adams. She moved her studio to New Mexico in 1939, where she and her protégé, Edward McLean, created unique art bindings and ran private publishing ventures like Hazel Dreis Editions. This book is a wonderful example of an American private Press, featuring the well-known Dane Rudhyar and a wonderful association copy to the famous Canadian painter Lawren Harris. All three stalwarts gathered in the famous artistic community of Santa Fe at the same time. This book, 101 pages plus the colophon, is in near-fine condition. The only faults with the book are an inch of fading at the top of the boards and a smudge towards the bottom of the back board.…