Aristophanes (446 BC – 386 BC) was the greatest comic playwright of ancient Athens, who arguably remains unsurpassed, with the exception of Shakespeare, as the greatest comic playwright of all time. His ridicule could be scathing, his criticisms influential, and his insight into the world he lived was second to none. He is known to have written at least 30 plays, with eleven of them surviving through the ages in a nearly complete fashion. His work remains greatly influential from an artistic standpoint, and also as a window into the classical Athens world. His best known plays are The Birds, The Frogs, and Lysistrata. 

The basic plot of Lysistrata is one of the most popular and famous in all of literature.  In 411 B.C., the twentieth year of the Peloponnesian War between rival Greek states Athens and Sparta, an Athenian housewife (Lysistrata) devises a plan to end the conflict.  She calls a summit of Athenian women and women from the surrounding states involved in the conflict to meet at the Acropolis where she proposes that they withhold sex from the men until Athens and Sparta agree to a truce.  Upon seizing the Acropolis and locking themselves in the Parthenon’s Temple of Athena (where the treasures necessary to fund the war were kept), they are challenged by a group of old men who threaten to set fire to the Temple and smoke them out.  A series of spirited comedic dialogues and conflicts ensue with the comedic highlight (lowlight?) occurring when a group of Scythian guards, under the direction of the President of the Senate, challenge Lysistrata who threatens them in return.  When the soldiers return from combat expecting sexual gratification from their wives they are denied and eventually acquiesce into calling an end to the conflict. The play concludes with a celebration of feasting, drinking and dancing between the men and women.

In the extensive Limited Editions Club (LEC) pantheon, only the edition of Ulysses signed by both Henri Matisse and James Joyce generally gets more at auction than their 1934 edition of Lysistrata of Aristophanes, illustrated with 40 pencil drawings and six copperplate etchings by Picasso (who also signed the edition). In both cases, it is the signatures themselves that drive the value of the books, as neither edition comes close to the production heights achieved in many other LEC books (especially of the Shiff era). Having said that, the LEC’s Lysistrata is nicely done, and unlike the case of Matisse’s work on Ulysses, Picasso’s work is contextually relevant, apropos, and entertaining while staying properly within the bounds of complementing the book itself.

Concerning the illustrations, in the Monthly Letter (ML) announcing this edition, the founder and director of the LEC, George Macy wrote:

Each plate, each drawing, bears witness to his mastery of method and technique, His line is sure, confident; it cries out to the world that the man who drew it knew what he was about. And the line is pure, it is that sort of line which even the Greeks used to say that this is “pure Grecian line”…Each picture is full of action, full of vibrancy; each pictures lives. All of them are done with upmost simplicity, a simplicity so great that we can already visualize letters from some of our members proclaiming the fact that they have children of six who can do better. On behalf of Pablo Picasso, we ask you to remember that simplicity is not necessarily infantile!  It is our conviction that these drawings and these etchings are mature and excellent pictures; that they will continue to give you  pleasure and joy long after you have tired of looking at the pretty-pretty, stiff and formal pictures in many of our own books; that they represent superb work from a man who is justly considered a great artist.

I agree Picasso’s work here is excellent, though not everyone agrees. In the 1959 LEC Quarto-Millenary critic Thomas Craven wrote in “The Books: As Illustrated Books – An Appraisal” that:

Picasso’s line drawings for ‘Lysistrata’ were once acclaimed by the cognoscenti; but I doubt that the cognoscenti would acclaim them now — not if they examined them dispassionately. Picasso is essentially an ornamentalist, an inventor, a pictorial gadget-maker of genius; and, if he had confided his capacities to the department in which he excels, he might have created appropriate and original decorations or the Greek comedy. Some of his line drawings are amazingly skillful, some are madly decorative; but, as illustrations, they do not come to life. The drawings have no references to the play, but to the ancient vase-painters whose style he imitated with an ingenious archaism.

In fairness, Craven was well-known as one who very much dis-liked modernism. In that same Quarto-Millenary critic Edward Alden Jewell says that Macy:

…triumphed with his decision to use, not Picasso’s etched plates alone, but also the artist’s spirited drawings in sanguine.These drawings, so in the spirit of the text as rendered, give a coruscating lift to the numerous type pages on which they have been placed.

Once again, I agree. Especially when put together with Seldes’ text, the overall work is lifted to heights which alone, the text or the illustrations, would not attain. Is it not this synergy of text and illustration that should be the goal of the illustrative arts? This actually takes me to a diversion that I think fits here. Often modernism in illustration is frowned upon by classicists (classicism which I myself favor, by the way). Macy discusses this in a manner as relevant today as it was 80 years ago when he wrote:

For, if ever an international movement in painting depended on taste, the modern movement depends solely on taste. You may look at one of the modern paintings, and insist that it is infantile, that you have a boy of six who could do better, does do better. This only means, to the man who liked that painting, that you don’t know what you are talking about.

It is easier to dispraise a painting than to praise it. You may say “That picture is rotten!”, and you have dismissed it from your mind forever. But the man who likes that picture must set out to tell you why he likes it; he must tell you that he likes the way in which the painter mixes his oils, that he likes the way in which the painter draws, that he likes the way the painter sees various objects, that he likes the method, he likes the technique. But he can only end by insisting that the painting gives him pleasure, he gets joy from looking at it. And, if you don’t get that same pleasure and that same joy, your taste differ from his.

All art is an attempt to express the inexpressible (Shakespeare?). And the language of art like the language of music, cannot be explained in the language of words — or it would not be a distinct language. So, to like any modern art, you must develop a taste for the language. The modern artist says he will not copy anything. You must therefore decide that you like Picasso’s personal manner of distorting reality, or you will never think there is value in Picasso’s work.

The man who likes paintings by Matisse will sneer at you if you say they are no good, by telling you that you haven’t developed the proper taste. But paintings by Matisse are symbolic of something, they have meaning, they are representational. The very man who likes them is not likely to like a painting by Braque. For Braque is the leader of the Abstractionists. His paintings are an exercise in abstract design, and are not supposed to symbolize anything at all. The man who likes an abstraction, who finds pleasure and joy in looking upon a round blob of red superimposed on a square blob of blue, will sneer at the  man who has only got far enough to like Matisse, and will insist that he hasn’t developed the proper taste…

I am of two minds here. Macy’s focus on the role of personal taste makes tremendous sense to me, though I still struggle with an inherent relativism that must exist when anyone’s taste is as legitimate as any others. I may not be able to define it, and certainly claim not to have the sole ownership of such, but I do believe in absolutes that should be striven towards. Whether modernists, or abstractionists, or whatever the latest movement is, is taking us closer or further from such absolutes is an interesting question, well outside the purview of this article. I quote Macy at length above mostly to suggest to those who immediately and viscerally dislike and the ignore such works to open their minds in terms of trying to acquire at least some contextual appreciation within the confines of the assumed taste of the artists and fans thereof. As Macy says, which I believe a laudable goal:

All of these paragraphs are printed here because the directors of this Club believe that much of the unusual work done by these modern artists must some day be wedded to the making of books. They are anxious that you, if you do not understand what modern art is all about, should learn more about it.

I am certain I will always retain a strong preference for more classical styles. But trying to look at works through the lens of a purveyor of tastes different from my own often helps me understand, if not appreciate, what the artist and publisher created and why.

Back to the edition at hand. In the ML, Macy discusses their interaction with Picasso:

It required a great screwing-up of courage for us to ask Picasso to illustrate a book for us. It required much cash, much manipulation, much pulling of strings, and a great deal of heartache and headache in getting the work out of him after he had agreed to do it. He is a charming person to talk with, a horrifyingly difficult person to do business with….He finally delivered his work to us six months after his contract had gone up in smoke; our original intention, to have the resulting edition printed in Paris, we were forced to abandon in order to get the book finished in time to put into your eager hands during the publication of this Fifth series.

Furthermore, in the Quarto-Millenary, we are told that when Macy got a hold of Picasso in Paris he found that Picasso was:

…willing to illustrate a book for any American publisher who would pay a stiff price. I paid the very stiff price. I was in Paris again when Picasso had finished the plates, and sought to take them from his apartment….He made me send to America for the money with which to pay him, he made me hand him the actual cash with my left hand while he handed me the plates with his left hand.

Macy was known for being a tough businessman, so it would be interesting to know what Picasso thought of him and his interactions with the LEC, but I am not aware of such.  In any case and despite such difficulties as mentioned above, Macy called Picasso’s work here “wonderful illustrations” and said that “this book will, I think, go down into history as one of our best.”

As for the text itself, Macy decided to use the 1932 successful and bawdy stage adaptation of Lysistrata from the influential American cultural critic Gilbert Seldes. Seldes, who was editor of the modernist magazine The Dial, often wrote for publications such as Vanity Fair, Collier Weekly, Saturday Evening Post, and London’s New Statesman, and later made films and became involved in television. As stated in the Wiki article about his life, Seldes “advocated a democratic aesthetic culture” and “sought only to distinguish well-executed art from that which was not.” He staunchly defended American culture and art, including popular culture (such as Jazz and television), while eschewing the notion that “only European trappings conferred cultural legitimacy.”  From that standpoint, Macy’s use of Seldes’ text together with the modernist work of Picasso is a masterful demotion of a classically ‘highbrow’ work into an evolving  popular American culture of the time. An excellent essay by Emily B. Klein concerning Seldes and his Lysistrata (including the controversy around obscenity which plagued the production, which in turn contains a humorous aside of the Los Angeles police searching for the nefarious author Aristophanes!) can be found here.

Macy designed the edition himself and the work was printed at what had been the printing shop of Richard W. Ellis, known as The Georgian Press (one can see the press as it was since it was used as a set in the 1933 movie “The Animal Kingdom” in which it was called The Bantam Press.) The Georgian Press printed all the books of Cheshire House (of Walter Chrysler Jr.). With the closure of Cheshire House, Ellis was forced to surrender his printing shop, which the LEC took over. Lysistrata was the first book the LEC printed ‘in-house’, though Picasso’s etchings were pulled by the Photogravure and Color Company (printed by hand by Charles Furth of New York). Picasso’s pencil drawings were printed in sanguine (we are told “to approximate the color used by any artist who makes pencil drawings with an artist’s sanguine pencil“).

The edition was set in 18 point linotype Caslon. Macy says of Caslon:

Caslon is the sort of type which is called an all-purpose type. It charms the eye, whether used in setting a book or a catalog or an advertisement. It was designed by William Caslon, who was born in England in 1692 and established his letter foundry in 1720.Until William Caslon began to make types, practically all types used by English printers came from Holland. Caslon therefore adapted Ducth letter design to his own uses; but he was such a master that is is his differentiation from the Dutch letters which make Caslon of permanent value.

If you look at each letter, you will have the feeling that each is sharp and precise. Yet, when all the letters are set on a page in mass, they give the eye the feeling of charm which comes from the presence of pleasant crudities, which comes from looking at things done, ever so slightly crudely, by hand. Compare the weight of the line in the drawing of a t; it does not seem possible that so heavy a comma would please the eye when associated with so light a t; yet, when they are set together, they have a great charm.

The paper used was a 100% rag, mould-made paper called Valfrey, from Rives paper mill in France. Macy says that the paper has “a warm deep tone to its color….It is a paper of class; and a paper of charm.”  The book was bound by George McKibbin & Son in boards covered with pattern paper, built in three colors out of the Picasso drawings, the design having been made for the designer of this book by LeRoy H. Appleton.

I do wish the production of the edition was done with a bit less cost consciousness (i.e., hand-set type on hand-made paper would be nice, perhaps some cool endpapers, better binding materials, etc), though I suppose since Macy paid ‘dearly’ for the illustrations themselves, and taking into account the now ridiculous price of LEC’s in the 1930’s ($10), one can understand that he had to make some sacrifices. Keeping in mind that the book now runs from $5,000 – $8,000 and up, let me close with Macy once again:

…we ask you to note the restraint with which we have failed to harp on the actual cash value of the book!  We could call to your attention the fact that you are getting a book illustrated by Picasso at almost one-tenth the price at which any Picasso book has previously been issued. We could call to your attention the fact that you have in this book six hand-printed etchings by Picasso, prints for which art dealers might be willing to pay you considerable sums. We could call these things to your attention. But we won’t. For we feel that we are giving you this month a book full of fine drawings by the king of modern artists, a book of typographic charm and pictorial beauty. And we herewith assever with desperate righteousness, that the charm and the beauty of a book should be more important to its possessor the its commercial value….

{Ed. Note: There is a very nice 1926 edition of Lysistrata from Fanfrolico Press that was reviewed a few years back in Books and Vines here.}

About the Edition

• Designed by George Macy
• New English version by Gilbert Seldes (in 1930)
• Introduction for this edition by Gilbert Seldes
• Illustrated with 40 pencil drawings and six copperplate etchings by Picasso
• Etchings printed by hand by Charles Furth of New York, pulled by Photogravure and Color Company
• Set in 18 point linotype Caslon type
• 100% rag, mould-made paper called Valfrey, from Rives paper mill in France
• Book printed at the Printing-Office of the LEC in Westport, Connecticut, which was created by Richard W. Ellis
• Type printed in black, pencil drawings printed in sanguine (to approximate the color used by any artist who makes pencil drawings with an artist’s sanguine pencil)
• Bound by George McKibbin & Son in boards covered with pattern paper, built in three colors out of the Picasso drawings, the design having been made for the designer of this book by LeRoy H. Appleton
• Enclosed in a double slipcase
• 9 1/4″ by 11 1/2″, 120 pages
• Limited to 1500 copies, signed by Picasso

Pictures of the Edition

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