Description

 

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905 – 1980)

A marvellous large autograph quotation signed by Jean-Paul Sartre, apparently unpublished, written on a large approximately 12″ X 14″ sheet, opening, ‘In a society of statues we would be very bored; but we would live there according to justice and reason’. He goes on to compare the place that the face and the body would have in a society of statues with that occupied in contemporary society. He notes that the body and face, particularly those of women, are reified and denatured: “In human societies, faces reign. The body is serfed, we swaddle it, we disguise it, its role is to carry like a mule, a waxy relic… A woman knows it, her face is an erotic altar, it has been overloaded with dead victims, fruits, flowers, massacred birds; on his cheeks, on his lips we traced red signs. Society of faces, society of wizards.’

The present manuscript was apparently written in 1949 on the occasion of Robert Lapoujade’s exhibition 50 Drawings at the Chardin gallery, and is close in substance and form to The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, published that same year.

Together with an original drawing of Sartre, apparently drawn by Robert Lepoujade himself, on a 9″ X 12″ sheet, pasted onto an adjoining page. The two could be exhibited side by side.

Quite rare and desirable in this format.