Cortege is bold, both in text and image.  With Andre Lanskoy’s collages being so visually loud, there was a large margin of error in creating a balance between word and image. I think that the way Pierre Lecuire chose to approach this potential relationship between text and image was successful.  This success, in many ways, was due to Lecuire’s creative direction.  Lecuire pushed Lanskoy to use collage instead of his traditional method painting, and thus Lecuire could better anticipate the visual relationship between his poetry and Lanskoy’s work.

I found Cortege to be overwhelming, but not necessarily in a bad way. The text is so large, but it had to be to stand against the strong geometric color of Lanskoy’s collages.  The text almost acts as another visual collage of sorts becauseof the way it takes up the entire page.  On some pages, the shapes of the large capital letters are mimicked in the forms that comprise the accompanying collage. This subtle harmony may or may not have been intentional, but due to Lecuire’s involvement in every aspect of his books’ production, I would assume he was hyperaware of the nuances of connections between text and image.

While Cortege is a collaborative work, Lecuire definitely had a clear creative vision.  From what I gathered from the Giroud reading, Lecuire’s books were less collaborative than other Livre D’Artistes.  Lecuire wrote, designed and published his books and I got the feeling that he employed, rather than collaborated with, the artists he chose.  This style ultimately produced very cohesive works, but there was less diverse conversation between text and image.

As I don’t speak French, I can only comment on the visual relationship between text and image in Le Chef-d’oevre Inconnu (though I did do a little research on this book, and will include it in this post, I acquired this knowledge after my initial experience with the book).  The layout of Le Chef-d’oevre Inconnu was a good balance between the heavily integrated text/image of A Toute Epreuve and the physical separation of text/image of Cortege.  Each folio presented a different juxtaposition of text and image; some pages were mainly text interspersed with smaller images, while others were dedicated to Picasso’s drawings entirely. A second relationship, that between image and image, was also present in Le Chef-d’oevre Inconnu, which gave the book a multidimensional feeling.  Often there was the coupling of stylistically different images on one page spread.  This encouraged the reader to find parallels and relationships between content on a deeper level.

I discovered through my research that Picasso’s illustrations do not serve as a literal depiction of Balzac’s text but rather are inspired by Picasso’s identification with the main character from Le Chef-d’oevre Inconnu.  As was traditional of Vollard’s publishing style, Picasso had free range to interpret the text as he saw fit.  The collaborative aspect was most prevalent between publisher and artist, as Vollard acted as a stand-in or representative for Balzac who died in 1850.