Item #405186 Moon Ballad. Adapted from the Fairy Tale Sleeping Beauty by the Brothers Grimm. Warja LAVATER.
Moon Ballad. Adapted from the Fairy Tale Sleeping Beauty by the Brothers Grimm

Moon Ballad. Adapted from the Fairy Tale Sleeping Beauty by the Brothers Grimm

New York and Paris: Juliette Halioua Ltd. and Adrien Maeght Editeur, 1973. Leporello-style accordion-form color lithograph printed by Ateliers Arte, Paris, 73 x 12 inches; 1854 x 305 mm. Folding into original cloth portfolio with color lithograph mounted on cover. A fine bright copy with a few tiny insignificant stains. Item #405186

A FINE ARTISTS BOOK. The Swiss artist Warja Lavater is best known for her accordion-form artists books, nearly all of which are re-tellings of classic fairy tales that use pictographic representations rather than text. Lavater was one of 7 women artists to attend Ernst Keller's class at the Fachklasse für Grafik an der Kunstgewerbeschule Grafik in Zurich. Her education in drawing led her to open a studio for applied design in Zurich in 1937 with her future husband Gottfried Honeggar, focusing on logos and commercial design.

After she moved to New York in 1958, Lavater was struck by American street advertising, and began to incorporate pictograms as linguistic elements in her designs. MoMA published her 'William Tell' as an accordion-form single-sheet lithograph in 1962. She, with support from her publisher Adrien Maeght, pursued this form throughout the remainder of her career, as evidenced in this treatment of the Sleeping Beauty tale.

Quite scarce: WorldCat lists only three copies (Zentralbibliothek Zürich; SUNY Buffalo; and UCLA). A single copy is recorded at auction since its publication.

Price: $650.00

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