Paris 80 Photographies

Paris: Éditions 7L, 2004. Facsimile edition. Softcover. vg to fine. 800/1000. Quarto. Unpaginated. 6pp (text), 80pp (photographs), (2)pp. Original photo-illustrated dust-jacket over blind wrappers, with blue lettering on cover and spine, housed in gray cloth clamshell box with black lettering on paper label laid to debossed square on cover; black lettered paper label on spine. Facsimile reproduction of "Paris" by Moshé Raviv-Worobeichic (Moï Ver) from copy No. 1 of the first edition published in 1931 by Editions Jeanne Walther.

Introduction by Futurist Fernand Léger. Facsimile edition of "this revolutionary work which introduced Moï Ver to the world is a striking tour de force of photomontage utilizing Bauhaus style photography and design. Its 80 pages of avant-garde photomontages evoke a modern form of Paris through his visualizations. The method in which Moï Ver chose to present his material, in its kaleidoscopic layering and frenzied repetitiveness, emphasizes an experimental approach to picture-construction. In this sense, Paris remains the author's quintessential avant-garde book object. The jacket's front cover superimposes factory smokestacks upon a classic stone colonnade, thus setting up familiar juxtapositions: art and industry, antique and modern, beauty and banality. Moï Ver's Paris is a metropolis pulsating with fast-paced daily life, moving almost out of control. Cobblestone streets, bustling crowds, facades, railway tracks, bridges, the glittering river, and countless monuments shift and shatter here" (Andrew Roth: "The Book of 101 Books," pp. 70-71). It is interesting to note that Karl Lagerfeld's facsimile edition of this work features the photographs in a different order, which seems to indicate that the legendary designer's copy was at some point disbound, with pages mixed up, and rebound without following the original pagination. Provenance: the legacy of French painter Charles Marcel Jean Picart Le Doux (1902-1982). Text in French.