Rouveyre and Matisse (on Apollinaire)
Three decades after poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s death in 1918, his friends the poet André Rouveyre and Henri Matisse decided to make a book about him, suitably honoring the man who wrote visual poetry with… text and art. Between 1942-1952, the duo worked on the book with Rouveyre writing and Matisse designing a slipcase, jacket, engraving, lithographs and seven linocuts. The duck-blue dust-jacketed homage, Apollinaire, was published in 1953.
Warhol and Capote
In the same year (across the Atlantic)…a young Andy Warhol held his first solo show in New York – a series of drawings based on Truman Capote’s short stories Other Voices, Other Rooms (published 1948). Warhol had read book as a teenager, and was captivated by Capote, writing to him weekly (Capote described the interest as ‘obsessive’). The artistic overlap was to continue – in the seventies Warhol interviewed Capote for Rolling Stone and painted his portrait in exchange for Capote contributing articles to Warhol’s Interview magazine monthly for year.
Goldin and Cave
In Nan Goldin’s survey tome The Devil’s Playground, Nick Cave provides the bulk of textual entry points, accompanied by other contributors, interspersing the photographs. Goldin describes Cave as an ‘inspiration’, and the book’s sections charting through different themes – love, loss, suffering and death, are each imbued signature Cave-esque tones, with the use of his words and lyrics.