The Notebooks of Captain Georges. Translated by Norman Denny Boston: Little, Brown and Company, [1966].
First American edition. Presentation copy, warmly inscribed by Renoir on the half-title: “Jean Renoir/A Paul Jordan Smith/mon souvenir reconnaissant./Jean Renoir/May 24 – 1967.â€
Octavo. [iv], [1]-316 pp. Publisher’s full cream cloth, spine lettered in metallic blue and pink, dust jacket. Jacket spine slightly sunned, some mild wear to lower extremities of jacket (with a few tiny creased tears and small stains on verso), some rubbing to panels and upper extremities, light rubbing and browning to cloth spine. Still, a near fine copy.
Jean Renoir (1894-1979) was a film director, actor and author. His father was the renowned painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose definitive biography Jean wrote in 1962. As a film director, he gained international acclaim for his movies (most were in French, but several were made in English) such as: Nana (1926), Tire au flanc (1928), On purge bebe (1931), Madame Bovary (1933), La Grande illusion (1937), The Southerner (1945), and French Cancan (1955).
Paul Jordan Smith (1885-1971) was a writer, journalist and editor. He produced an all English-language edition of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Perhaps he is best known for his famous hoax of founding the “Disumbrationist†school of modern painting in 1924, posing as “Pavel Jerdanowich.†It had begun when his wife had ridiculed one of his realistic still life paintings he was entering in an exhibition against one of her paintings at the same exhibit. To get even with her, he entered a badly painted work of a Tahitian woman holding a banana skin to an exhibition jury, using the name “Jerdanowich,†and touting the new painting style. To his surprise, his purposely inept painting won accolades, and the jurors belittled his wife’s superior work. He produced several other silly canvases, over the next few years, until 1927, when he eventually confessed the hoax to the Los Angeles Times.
ID:
3279
$
350