Description

COMPLETE AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT SIGNED AND ILLUSTRATED WITH 8 LARGE ORIGINAL GOUACHES SIGNED.
An unpublished tale dedicated to the composer Darius Milhaud and taken from his archives. Tityre, a protégé of Artemis, leaves his home and travels, conversing in turn with a white flower, a lizard, a fig tree, the gatekeeper of the city of hunger, an old man and a wise man. But Tityre suddenly goes blind, and his grief plunges the city into destruction.

Among the original gouaches signed "AM", 6 of them, illustrating passages from the text copied in the caption, evoke both landscape and theatrical scenery, and are similar in composition and choice of colour to the models Marchand produced for the sets of Mireille at the Opéra-comique in 1939. Two final illustrations are full-length portraits of the characters of Tityre and the "belle dame", gouaches with pencil studies in the margins.

André Marchand befriended the composer Darius Milhaud, also from Aix, in Paris. In 1936, he designed sets and costumes for his ballet "Suite Provençale"; that same year, Darius Milhaud introduced him to Pierre Colle, who became his gallerist. In 1937, Marchand was awarded the Prix Paul Guillaume.
Mobilised in 1939, Marchand narrowly escaped death, retreated for a time to Aix-en-Provence, then took part in the exhibition "Vingt jeunes peintres de tradition française" (Twenty young painters in the French tradition), a demonstration organised in Paris against the Nazi ideology of "degenerate art". In the post-war period, his first exhibitions met with great success, helping to establish him as one of the leading figures in "southern" painting.

SUPERB DOCUMENT.

Provenance: Darius Milhaud estate.