91 - Robert GANZO. Orinoco. Illustrated with eleven color etchings by Jean Fautrier.

Robert GANZO. Orinoco. Illustrated with eleven color etchings by Jean Fautrier. Paris, Librairie Auguste Blaizot, 1942. Folio, loose-leaf, cloth-bound. First edition. Printed in a run of 84 copies: one of 50 on Auvergne paper (no. 47). The book, printed during the Occupation, was not actually sold until after the Liberation: hence the enclosed flyer announcing the book’s publication on October 15, 1945. The illustrations consist of 11 original color etchings by Jean Fautrier. The cover is also illustrated with an original etching. A recent reinterpretation of Fautrier’s illustrations, etched and published in 1942, attributes a protest character to these abstract works: “Jean Fautrier’s eleven abstract etchings of the decapitated body and severed head, disguised as the flowing waters of a river in the artist’s book *Orénoque*, are landmark symbols of protest against the wartime atrocities in France. Commissioned by French publisher Georges Blaizot during the German Occupation, Fautrier’s etchings transformed Robert Ganzo’s nostalgic poems about the rivers and forests of his Venezuelan childhood into an instrument of cultural resistance. Using the book as a vehicle and Ganzo’s poems as camouflage, Fautrier circumvented the barriers of fear and censorship imposed by the Occupation. The text and images coexisted independently within the same book, each telling a different story, in a reinterpretation of the modernist and “degenerate art” that had been condemned. (Swan, “Orénoque as a Book of Cultural Protest: Fautrier’s Brutal Etchings Camouflaged by Ganzo’s Poetic River”).