Near fine, the slightest of darkening to covers and rubbing to extremities, slight offsetting to text and image, slipcase a little rubbed, but overall a wonderfully attractive and clean copy.
Responses to the first staging of Tristan Tzara’s La Coeur a Gaz in 1921 ranged from bemusement to outright derision, exactly as Tzara intended. Created as an irreverent exercise in biting his thumb at traditional theatre, the play marked the breaking point between Andre Breton’s surrealists and Tzara’s Dada movement.
The second performance, in 1923, went even further. Sonia Delaunay’s avant-garde costumes, rendered in painted cardboard, were both strikingly chic and thoroughly absurd, reminiscent of Picasso’s designs for Parade, and would become one of the essential visual reference points of the period. The rigid costumes also rendered the actors almost entirely incapable of movement, a fact which became particularly problematic when the almost inevitable riot ensued during the performance; André Breton taking to the stage in outrage, lashing out wildly at the actors with his walking stick and breaking the arm of the writer Pierre de Massot.
The present 1977 edition, published by Jacques Damase, marked the first time that Tzara’s text was united with Delaunay’s designs in print.
