La prose du transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France

La prose du transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, poem by Blaise Cendrars, accompanied by the “simultaneous colors” of Mme Delaunay-Terk, published in 1913, by Editions des Hommes nouvelles, 4, rue de Savoie in Paris – personal address of Blaise Cendrars.

Announced print run of 150 copies, but sales did not exceed sixty copies. Under a cover by Sonia Delaunay, the work is presented in the form of a leaflet approximately two meters long, divided into two columns. To print his four hundred and forty-five verses, Blaise Cendrars uses a dozen fonts, varying sizes, styles and colors: blue, green, red, orange. Dialogue with the text, Sonia Delaunay’s large abstract stencil composition uses eighty different inks.

Robert and Sonia Delaunay then developed research on the simultaneous contrast of colors that Sonia applied to Cendrars’ poem. The colors of the spectrum combine with the colors of the text in the “first simultaneous book” comparing plastic and typographic compositions. The colors penetrating the column of text, permeating the letter, “drench the poem with light,” in Cendrars’ words. “Blaise Cendrars and Mme Delaunay Terk made a first attempt at written simultaneity where color contrasts accustom the eye to read the whole of a poem at one glance, like an orchestra conductor reads at one glance. suddenly the notes superimposed in the score, as we see in one go the plastic and printed elements of a poster.” Guillaume Apollinaire, “Simultanéisme – Librettisme”, Les soirées de Paris , nº25, June 15, 1914, p. 324.

Subscription form in handwritten characters : “Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France / représentation synchrone / peinture simultanée/ Mme Delaunay-Terk / texte Blaise Cendrars”