“DEPTH, TRANSLUCENCE, TRANSPARENCY, IMPENETRABILITY, AND OTHERWORLDLINESS”: CLASSIC EROTIC NOVEL, RÉAGE’S HISTOIRE D’O, ILLUSTRATED BY LÉONOR FINI

(FINI, Léonor) REAGE, Pauline. Histoire d’O. Paris: La Compagnie des Bibliophiles, au Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1962. Large folio (12 by 15 inches), original cream paper wrapper, 28 loose gatherings, as issued uncut and unopened, 16 loose plates, original black velvet slipcase and chemise, vellum spine label.

Limited large-paper edition, number 79 of only 350 copies, of one of the most famous and controversial erotic novels ever published, with 16 provocative full-page color lithographs and numerous in-text illustrations by surrealist Léonor Fini.

When Anne Desclos’ (aka Pauline Réage) Story of O was first published in 1954 in Paris by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, it became the most widely translated French novel in the world. “It describes in cool, elegant language the experiences of a young woman as she willingly enters a dark maze of perverse sexual practices within a clandestine amoral society. Revelling in pure fantasy, its theme is total submission through love to excesses of sadism and masochism, and the bond of ‘ownership” (Doris Kloster). The book’s content sparked so much controversy that the Department of the Interior brought obscenity charges against the publisher and its mysterious author— but the case was eventually thrown out of court. “Leonor Fini’s art offers a woman’s take on surrealism, which large dealt with male fantasies, by offering a female view of the female body and of erotic pleasures” (Spaightwood Galleries). In her representations for O, Fini focuses on female submission and the brutality of sexual assault. “Raised in the ‘Bohemian’ salons of a radically changing Europe between the two World Wars, her precociousness manifested in the creation of a persona of incredibly strong will and intense sensitivity” (Neil Zukerman). In Paris she was quickly adopted by Max Ernst and René Magritte, and during a car trip through Italy she befriended famous photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. In her book illustrations, “her desire to ‘resignifier les mots existants’ [give different meanings to existing words ] would indicate a systematic departure from conventional literary communication based on things as they are. No doubt, her female characters undeniably originate in some remote reality… In every way, they remain at a distance we cannot bridge. A smilar principle govern the colors of her paintings. Their unusual tones, tend to enhance the entire pictorial surface, revealing simultaneously depth, translucence, transparence, impenetrability, and otherworldliness” (Renée Riese Hubert).

Fine condition.