Art: WORDS & PICTURES: The New Art Portfolios

FROM the days of medieval illuminators, a reverence for word and picture has gone hand in hand. The modern counterpart to the illuminated manuscript is the limited edition. Where the average gallerygoer is happy with fine reproductions on coated stock, the limited-edition bibliophile demands a creation as much portfolio as book, with each copy numbered, signed and printed on finest handmade paper.

Long a near monopoly of French publishers, the practice of wedding word and image in sybaritic luxury is now being tried experimentally in the U.S. with startling success. In Los Angeles, Painter June Wayne, 41, took a flyer by publishing the poems of 17th century Poet John Donne, illustrated by 14 of her own lithographs. The lithographs were pulled in Paris, the text printed in Berlin. At $225 a copy, Lithographer Wayne’s edition of 110 seems likely to be a sellout by year’s end.

In Manhattan, Gallery Owner André Emmerich has published A Preface and Four Seasons, which combines the pleasant, anecdotal reveries of Novelist Irwin (The Young Lions) Shaw with five signed lithographs by fast-rising U.S. Abstractionist-in-Paris John Levee, 35. The text accompanying Levee’s Images of European Summer (see color) draws on Shaw’s own expatriate ramblings, summons up visions of “the sea calm, the sun hot. Everybody lazy and on holiday.” Offshore a party on an aircraft carrier makes “the final perfect touch against the violet horizon.” Sales to date: eight (which included a signed gouache) at $250; 60 of the regular edition (limited to 140 copies) at $150.

Ambitious as such fledgling U.S. enterprises are, they barely hold a candle to the soaring prices now being fetched in Paris. An edition of 197 copies of Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyages Fantastiques, illustrated by Bernard Buffet, recently sold out within 48 hours at prices up to $15,500. More ambitious yet was Don Quichotte illustrated by Salvador Dali with “divine splashes” from an ink-filled snail shell. For the regular edition, Publisher Joseph Foret set the price at a mere $300 a copy. But one copy, billed as “the most expensive book in the world,” was tagged at $25,000. The Frenchman who succumbed (he insisted on anonymity) got a volume of 200 parchment pages that had required the skins of 100 sheep, plus eight watercolors that originally served as models for Dali’s lithographs, plus three extra sets of lithographs on special papers. Publisher Foret is quite reconciled to having this rare volume drop out of sight for years, expects it will be seen by only a handful of sympathetic souls. As Foret explained last week, “The real bibliophile never shows his book, except to another bibliophile—a man who vibrates as he does.”