Ulysses-Alphabet.
Frankfurt, Berlin and Vienna: Propyläen, 1973. Folio. (30)ff., + 26 plates laid in. One of sixty copies. Each plate is signed and numbered by the artist. The twenty-six color etchings each depict a letter of the alphabet in a bizarre, fantastic, and sometimes grotesque manner fitting the excerpt from Joyce's Ulysses that appears in English on the facing page. The plates themselves are not in alphabetical order, a further bafflement. The quasi-serious nature of the etchings mirrors the tenor of Joyce's famed text, embodying a similar coy realism reliant on a tangled stream of consciousness, physical existence, and permeability between intellectualism and superstition. Fritz Janschka was a student of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, a movement closely related to Surrealism and which similarly applied the technical proficiency of old masters to abstract compositions. Bound in full gray cloth with leather title inlaid to upper cover. Housed in matching dropback box. Fine. Item #30733
Price: $1,500.00