Facile.: Poèmes de Paul Eluard. Photographies de Man Ray.

Paris: Editions G.L.M.,, 1935. This small photobook has come to be regarded as one of the iconic French photobooks of the 1930s First and limited edition, number 851 of 1,175 copies. One of the most important works in the photobook canon: "Although Man Ray participated in and produced hundreds of fruitful collaborative works in his life, Facile must be ranked among the most successful. The book combines Paul Éluard's love poems to his wife Nusch with Man Ray's photographs of her in an extremely elegant design, integrating Man Ray's solarized, superimposed, double-exposed and negative images into the page spreads in a way that makes image and text appear to intimately embrace. It is a fluent but not at all facile collaboration between the poet, the photographer, the model and muse, and the publisher Guy Lévis Mano. Nusch Éluard had become one of Man Ray's most important models... and was also one of Picasso's favourite models. She had just married Éluard the previous year. The Éluards remained in Paris throughout World War II and were very active in the Resistance. In 1943 they were forced to hide out in the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital, where, weakened and demoralised, Nusch Éluard died of exhaustion in 1946. In Facile, she lives" (Roth). Quarto. Original photographic wrappers with unbound signatures. Housed in a black cloth flat-back box by the Chelsea Bindery. With 12 heliogravure images by Ray. Wrapper edges slightly rubbed, with a couple of small creases to head of spine. Parr & Badger I pp. 104-05 ("this small photobook has come to be regarded as one of the iconic French photobooks of the 1930s by virtue of its inclusion in many exhibitions devoted to the Surrealist movement"); Roth, 101, pp. 86-87; see also Renée Riese Hubert, Surrealism and the Book, 1988, pp. 73-83.