Lithograph on vélin paper. Paper Size: 15 x 11 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the folio, Derrière le miroir, N° 250, Hommage à Aimé et Marguerite Maeght, 1982. Published by Galerie Maeght S.A., Paris; printed by l'Imprimerie moderne du Lion, Paris, 1963. Excerpted from the folio (translated from French), This special issue of Derrière le miroir was designed and defined by Aimé Maeght in the fall of 1980. He envisioned its publication as a celebration with which artists and writers published since 1946 were to be associated. He also chose François Chapon, president of the Reverdy Committee, to write the presentation. This Derrière le miroir number 250 took the form, after its disappearance on September 5, 198I, of a tribute to Aimé Maeght and his wife Marguerite Maeght who died four years earlier. XXIV artists agreed to create an original graphic work for this issue which includes the general table of all issues as well as excerpts from texts by XXXII writers. Finished printing on June 2, 1982 on the presses of the l'Imprimerie moderne du Lion in Paris. CL examples were printed on Arches vellum, numbered from I to CL, and some non-commercial examples constituting the original edition. Additional notes: Excerpted from a Christie’s, New York lot essay, The life span of Derrière le Miroir was thirty-five years. Publication began in 1946. Aimé Maeght, initiator of Derrière le Miroir, had already made few attempts to start publications illustrated with fine printed lithographs in colours in the years prior to the launch of Derrière le Miroir. The name, Derrière le Miroir was suggested by Jacques Kober, manager of Galerie Maeght. The gallery had opened in 1945; the first number of Derrière le Miroir was released a year later. For this first issue Geer van Velde was invited to create lithographs to illustrate the publication. The lithographs in the first issue was printed by Mourlot, Paris. The first three issues of Derrière le Miroir were unsuccessful for Maeght as far as the edition size—the initial print-runs were far too large. From 30,000 for the first issue, the number was taken down to 10,000 for numbers two and three, until Derrière le Miroir number four was published in an edition of 1500. Maeght instituted a policy whereby unsold issues were recycled and used for the fabrication of new paper for the coming editions—this served to both conserve resources and also usually result in ultimate edition sizes far less than 1,500. With number four, the permanent format for Derrière le Miroir was established. Lithographs in colours were key; text was limited to comments on the featuring artist's exhibition taking place in the Galerie Maeght, and this catalogue format was defining to Derrière le Miroir. Galerie Maeght took on the leading role in Paris and presented all main artists including Braque, Matisse, Chagall, Léger, Bonnard, Chillida and many more. So too did Derrière le Miroir. The idea of a magazine was meanwhile still on the mind of Aimé Maeght. He found an insert as a solution. Two, and later four, pages of art review were inserted from 1952 onwards. In 1968 this find had ripened to independency and the dream of Aimé Maeght was now a tangible fact named l'Art vivant. Derrière le Miroir was on it's own again. Over 250 issues in a row. At that point publisher Aimé Maeght wished to make a mark with the publication of an hommage to all who once contributed to the magazine which came in the form of issue number 250, but was delayed by the death of Aimé Maeght. It was published after number 253 in 1982 and became a tribute to Aimé and Marguérite Maeght and 35 years of friendship with artists and poets. The era of Derrière le Miroir was closed with that final publication.
VALERIO ADAMI (1935) is an Italian painter. Educated at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, he has since worked in both London and Paris. His art is influenced by Pop Art. Adami was born in Bologna. In 1945, at the age of ten, he began to study painting under the instruction of Felice Carena. He was accepted into the Brera Academy (Accademia di Brera) in 1951, and there he studied as a draughtsman until 1954 in the studio of Achille Funi. In 1955 he went to Paris, where he met and was influenced by Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam. His first solo exhibition came in 1959 in Milan. In his early career, Adami's works were expressionistic, but by the time of his second exhibition in 1964 at Kassel, he had developed a style of painting reminiscent of French cloisonnism, featuring regions of flat color bordered by black lines. Unlike Gauguin, however, Adami's subjects were highly stylized and often presented in fragments, as seen in Telescoping Rooms (1965).
In the 1970s, Adami began to address politics in his art, and incorporated subject matter such as modern European history, literature, philosophy, and mythology. In 1971, he and his brother Gioncarlo created the film Vacances dans le désert. In 1974 he illustrated a Helmut Heissenbuttel poem, Occasional Poem No. 27. Ten Lessons on the Reich with ten original lithographs {Gallerie Maeght}. In 1975, the philosopher Jacques Derrida devoted a long essay, "+R: Into the Bargain", to Adami's work, using an exhibition of Adami's drawings as a pretext to discuss the function of "the letter and the proper name in painting", with reference to "narration, technical reproduction, ideology, the phoneme, the biographeme, and politics". There were four retrospective exhibits of Adami's work between 1985 and 1998. They were held in Paris, the Centre Julio-Gonzalez de Valence (Spain), Tel Aviv, and Buenos Aires. In 2010, the Boca Raton Museum of Art devoted a special exhibit to Adami's paintings and drawings. In November 2023, Valerio Adami's painting, Le vasche da bagno, sold for $438,931 USD at Versailles Enchères Perrin-Royère-Lajeunesse, setting a world record for the artist.