DOUANIER ROUSSEAU,

Lot 260
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Estimation :
20000 - 30000 EUR
Result with fees
Result : 23 400EUR
DOUANIER ROUSSEAU,
La Vengeance d'une orpheline russe, autograph manuscript signed [1899], 88 pages and a quarter in-folio on ruled paper. Ivory parchment bradel, gilt title on the spine. (Marginal restorations on the first cover and first page with damage to some letters). Drama in 5 acts and 19 paintings (unpublished) by "Madame Barkowsky and Mr Henri Rousseau", "completed January 5, 1899". Precious autograph manuscript mounted on tabs, the only one known, of this play by Douanier Rousseau. The painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), known as the Douanier because of his employment at the Octroi de Paris, unsuccessfully proposed his play to the director of the Châtelet theatre, the playwright Émile Rochard, whose name is still on the back cover. An excerpt of the text was published in 1929 in No. 2 of the revue Orbes by Jacques-Henry Lévesque and Olivier de Carné, but it was not until its complete publication by Tzara in 1947 (Geneva, Cailler) that the play came out of obscurity: it was then created in 1948 by René Dupuy for the Centre d'apprentissage d'art dramatique du Théâtre de l'OEuvre, and then performed at the Studio des Champs-Elysées in 1949. "Rousseau was deeply penetrated by the conception of the total artist," wrote Tristan Tzara in the preface to the 1947 edition, "he played the violin, the flute, he was a composer, poet, playwright and above all a painter. To each of his activities he had to assign equal importance; his idea of art embraced them all without distinction. It must be said that the seriousness with which he considered them and the application he brought to them excluded any dilettantism. Le Douanier thus composed three plays, one of which remained unfinished L'Etudiant en goguette (before 1889), and two completed plays, Une Visite à l'exposition de 1889 (1889) and the present Vengeance of a Russian Orphan (1899). Tzara compares Rousseau's work to film cutting. "One could multiply the examples," he wrote,
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