“ONE OF THE GREATEST ARTISTS’ BOOKS OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY” BY “TWO OF THE MOST ENIGMATIC ARTISTS OF OUR TIME”: FOIRADES/FIZZLES, ONE OF ONLY 250 COPIES SIGNED BY BOTH BECKETT AND JOHNS

JOHNS, Jasper. BECKETT, Samuel. Foirades / Fizzles. (London and New York: Petersburg Press), 1976. Folio (10 by 13 inches), original self-wrappers, endpapers designed by Johns, sheets folded accordion style. Housed in original cloth clamshell box with original color lithographed paper lining designed by Johns.

Signed limited first edition of this renowned artist’s book, a collaboration between two greats of 20th-century modernism, with five texts by Samuel Beckett accompanied by 33 original etchings by Jasper Johns (many also utilize aquatint and drypoint; six double-page, two printed in color forming the endpapers). This copy number 186 of only 250 signed by both Beckett and Johns.

“Foirades/Fizzles is not a standard collaboration. Beckett and Johns did not know each other and neither initiated the project. The collaboration was conceived by Vera Lindsay, and in 1973 in Paris, Beckett and Johns met and discussed it. Johns wanted to work with new material, and Beckett suggested five unpublished prose fragments, which, for the collaboration, he would translate into English… All of the etchings in Fizzles are based on Johns’ [major, four-panel] 1972 painting Untitled… The variations on Untitled are perfect visual counterparts to Beckett’s stories of closed places, passages, and darkness. Johns matches Beckett’s fragments with fragments thick with references to burial and entrapment, to art, and to past and future time” (Judith Goldman). “Foirades/Fizzles by Samuel Beckett was Jasper Johns’ first attempt at matching his images with a text in a book. His work in prints has been known for its inventiveness as well as its important place in the artist’s oeuvre… Confronting sets of the English and French names of objects in that painting, shown as if in a magic translating mirror, combine the artist’s interest in ready-made letters with the ambiguity of how they are used” (Castleman, 65, 215). This is one of 250 numbered copies, from a total edition of only 300 (30 artist’s proof copies and 20 hors commerce copies were also printed). Johns’ etchings and aquatints were printed by Crommelynck. With 32-page illustrated booklet produced by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to accompany a 1977 exhibition of the prints and texts used for this work laid in. Castleman, 214-15. Logan, 162. From the collection of renowned editor and publisher William Targ and his wife, literary agent Roslyn Siegel Targ.

Fine condition.