Le Livre d’Artiste: The W.J. Strachan Collection of Artists’ Books
The W.J. Strachan Collection is a collection of livres d’artiste, or artists’ books, that was donated to the Taylor Institution Library by the eponymous W.J. Strachan, who devoted much of his life and career to the collection, exhibition and study of 20th century artists’ books designed and created in France. Strachan was able to travel to Paris and witness the production of these works by artists, and published extensively on the subject. Today, the collection is housed at the Sackler Library, with selected pieces intermittently displayed at the Taylorian. Several graduate library trainees as well as other staff members at both libraries have undertaken project work on the collection, and have written on particular works or associated events; you can read about these on the Taylorian Blog (search using keywords artists’ books or livres d’artiste).
Artists’ books are interesting materials with a fascinating history. The simplest way to describe an artist’s book is that it is a work of art that utilises the form of a book. Stephen Bury, in his publication Artists’ Books: The Book As a Work of Art, 1963–1995[1], defines them as “books or book-like objects over the final appearance of which an artist has had a high degree of control; where the book is intended as a work of art in itself.” Each work is an original hand-produced piece of art which, while issued as a limited, often signed edition, has not undergone mass publication, unlike other “book-like objects.” A collection of artists’ books may include, as the W.J. Strachan Collection does, essais, or preliminary drafts and experimental pieces that the artist creates before he/she decides on the form of the final work. See, for example, Mario Prassinos’s many versions of the bird that is the subject of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven.
At the risk of being philosophical, what does it mean to be “a book-like object”? What features may an artist’s book have that would class it as such? Firstly, we should consider the physical form or structure that the work takes. Several of the works in the collection take the form of the codex, that is to say leaves of paper put together so that the pages can be turned and read in a particular order, much like the traditional book. Crucially, though, the leaves in Artists’ Books are typically gathered rather than bound – meaning that the leaves are not sewn, glued, or otherwise fixed in place, unlike a traditional book. (The final form of the book was usually determined by the owner, who would commission the binding.) Given this the W.J. Strachan collection also contains several incomplete artists’ books in which we have just a handful or even single page as that was as much as Strachan was able to collect.
Secondly, the idea of the book is inextricably linked to the idea of text, and the artist’s book is no exception to this. A key feature of the artist’s book is that it exemplifies a coupling of printed text and original images created by an artist, with the printed text (sometimes original, on other occasions a ‘classic’ work) in and of itself forming a part of the artwork as a whole.
As an art form, the livre d’artiste type has a storied history, spanning at least a century and incorporating multiple art movements ranging from Cubism to art informel. The following is only a brief overview. Artists have long been party to the process of bookmaking, as anyone who is familiar with medieval manuscripts will attest.
William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794 edition) is often cited as the earliest direct antecedent of the modern artist’s book.[2] This is the first work which demonstrates the twin concepts of integration of text, image and form, coupled with the principle of limited distribution, which remain funda-mental aspects of the artist’s book to this day. Blake is also represented in the Strachan Collection: Le Mariage du Ciel & de l’Enfer (illustrated by Yves Charnay, 1965). We can see 20th century examples of the livre d’artiste form produced as part of pre- and post-war avant garde movements[2].
The 1950s and 1960s – the ages of surrealism and pop-art – bring with them a new wave of artists’ books, radically different from the livre d’artiste interpretation; Dieter Roth, whose works systematically deconstructed the form of the book, along with his US counterpart Ed Ruscha (for example in his Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1996), are credited with defining the modern artist’s book[2]. The climate of social and political activism of the late 1960s and 1970s gave rise to the phenomenon of independently published works providing a forum for artists denied access to traditional gallery and museum establishments[2]. Artists’ books were central to the development of conceptual art in the 1970s, and contemporary post-conceptual artists have made them an important element of their practice.
The W.J. Strachan Collection contains over 200 works in varying print media, from lithographs to etchings, and in varying stages of completion. Given the provenance of the collection, it is not surprising that the texts mostly comprise a wide variety of French literary works. These range from medieval texts such as Aucassin et Nicolette (illustrated by Walter Spitzer, 1961) to well-known authors such as Gide, Rabelais and Racine, to more modern texts such as Marguerite Yourcenar’s Alexis ou Le traité du vain combat (illustrated by Salvador Dalí).
However, we can also find translations into French of passages from the Bible, such as the description of the Apocalypse in the Gospel of John; Classical texts such as Aeschylus’ Agamemnon; and translations of foreign language texts including Shakespeare’s Macbeth (illustrated by Marcel Gromaire, 1958) and Lewis Carroll’s Chiméra (illustrated by Mario Avati, 1955). Hence scholars interested in the artistic interpretation of French and other literary texts will find this collection well worth a look. If you want to know more, you can start with Strachan’s own catalogue of his collection (1987).
Erin McNulty (Graduate Trainee 2019-2020, Sackler Library)
References & Further Reading
Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985).
W.J. Strachan. Le livre d’artiste: a catalogue of the W.J. Strachan gift to the Taylor Institution (Oxford, 1987)
[1] Bury, S., 1995. Artists’ books: the book as a work of art, 1963-1995.