The original version of these poems has been by the Greek-French publisher Tériade in 1948. Result of the longstanding friendship of Picasso and Pierre Reverdy (1889–1960), this book with the poet’s handwritten text and Picasso’s elemental lithography is considered as one of the most important “livre de peintre” of the 20th century. Nevertheless these poems of one of the most influent French avant-garde poets, written with a deeply depressed feeling at the fi nishing Nazi occupation of France, had never been completely translated into German. Whereas in North America Reverdy had a real audience in the “beat generation”.
Johannes Strugalla tried to fill the gap for the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death and entered totally into the fragmentary language of his “Cubist poetry”. As an homage to that outstanding friendship and collaboration between the painter and the poet, Strugalla, “revisiting” Picasso’s elemental vocabulary, cut paraphrases of his brushed red signs in plywood and printed them with bright red ink on one side of a translucent Japanese paper. On the other side he printed with a dark gray his own additions of lines that remind us of the gestures involved in writing. So the transparency is producing unexpected compositions.

Original titel: Le Chant des Morts
43 poems by Pierre Reverdy. Bilingual French/German. German translation, woodcut, book-design by Johannes Strugalla, digital realization by Françoise Despalles.
136 pages, 32,5 × 20,3 cm, hardcover. 29 original woodcuts on Japanese (Kawashi) and Arches paper, text by Ultrachrome inkprint on Arches.
Edition: 88 signed and numbered copies, 7 deluxe copies with the complete suite of the single woodcuts on Thai paper.
Mainz / Paris 2011