ANDRE GIDE.

ASSOCIATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY MAURICE SACHS TO ANDRE LHOTE, THE ARTIST WHO ILLUSTRATED JEAN COCTEAU'S "ESCALES" - Small octavo, 6-5/8 inches high by 4-3/8 inches wide. Softcover, perfect bound paperback, bound in red & white wrappers illustrated with a portrait of Gide on the front cover. The covers are slightly soiled. 124 pages plus the colophon, illustrated with 5 full-page photographic illustrations. The pages are uniformly toned and darkened. Good. First trade edition.A wonderful association copy, inscribed by the author Maurice Sachs to Andre Lhote, the illustrator of Jean Cocteau's "Escales" (Paris 1920). "A Andre Lhote, et malgre nos desaccords passes avec admiration et sympathie / Maurice Sachs" [To Andre Lhote, and despite our past disagreements, with admiration and sympathy].The French-Jewish author Maurice Sachs (1906-1945) was born to a Jewish family of jewelers. He converted to Catholicism in 1925, intending to become a priest but his plans were thwarted upon his meeting a young man on the beach at Juan-les-Pins. He lived in London for a year before returning to Paris and briefly traveled to New York City as an art dealer. A member of Paris' gay community, he associated with the leading writers and personalities of the period including Cocteau, Gide, Max Jacob, Violette Leduc, and Coco Chanel, working for both Cocteau and Coco Chanel at times. He frequented "Le Boeuf sur le toit", the celebrated Parisian cabaret-bar, founded in 1921 by Louis Moysswhich, which was frequented by the avant-garde. Mobilized by the French army at the start of the Second World War, Sachs was discharged for homosexuality. He made a living helping Jewish families escape to the unoccupied zone, though he is said to have been an informer for the Gestapo in a few instances. He was subsequently imprisoned at Fuhlsbuttel. Sachs was shot and killed by the Germans when he was unable to continue on the long march which the prisoners were forced to undertake by their German captors when British troops advanced. In her March 11, 2017 podcast "Une Vie, Une Oeuvre" Irene Omelianencko colorfully describes Sachs as "un mondain, un futur ecrivain, un seducteur, un amoureux des garcons, un voleur, un tricheur, un voyageur, un alcoolique, un homme tente par le mysticisme (il se convertit au catholicisme avant de renoncer)." [a socialite, a future writer, a seducer, a lover of boys, a thief, a cheater, a traveler, an alcoholic, a man tempted by mysticism (he converted to Catholicism before giving up).]The French Cubist painter Andre Lhote (1885-1962) was born in Bordeaux where he apprenticed to a local furniture maker to learn to sculpt in wood. He studied decorative sculpture at the Bordeaux Ecole des Beaux-Art from 1898 to 1904, where he began painting in his spare time. First influenced by Gauguin and Cezanne, he held his first one-man show at the Galerie Druet in 1910. Moving to Paris, his style shifted from a Fauvist style towards Cubism. He exhibited at the Salon de la Section d'Or in 1912 alongside Gleizes, Duchamp, Metzinger and others. He served in the First World War, interrupting his work which he picked up again upon his discharge in 1917, under the patronage of Leonce Rosenberg who supported several Cubist artists. Lhote co-founded the art journal "Nouvelle Revue Francaise" in 1918 and went on to teach at l'Academie Notre-Dame des Champs and other Paris art schools. He founded his own school in Montparnasse in 1922 and the school counted among its students such luminaries as Henri Cartier-Bresson and others. He traveled to lecture throughout the world and was awarded the Grand Prix National de la Peinture in 1955 and was appointed president of the International Association of Painters, Engravers and Sulptors by the UNESCO commission for sculpture. First Edition.

Product Info

Publisher: Paris: Denoel et Steele, 1936.

Year: 1936.

Type: Used

Binding: Softcover

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