Lot 133: BONET, PAUL. 1889-1971. Gouache and pencil on watercolor paper highlighte

BONET, PAUL. 1889-1971. Gouache and pencil on watercolor paper highlighted with silver paint, Jeanne d’Arc, being a fine binding design, 254 x 254 mm, on larger paper, n.d., very good condition. Provenance: Vente Paul Bonet 1er Juin 1990 stamp on verso. Paul Bonet was one of the great modern masters of French bookbinding. He evolved an entirely new style of book decoration- #NAME? a mouvement radiant. His great swirling designs are so ingeniously drawn that, although they are carried out on a flat surface, they represent a third dimension purely through an illusion created by the drawing....Paul Bonet, in my opinion, is without a rival today (Diehl, Bookbinding: Its Background and Technique, 1946, p 108). It has been suggested that this graceful Art Deco design was intended for the volume on Jeanne d’Arc in the series of important figures in French history issued by Frants Funck-Brentano, Paris, in 1912. It incorporates the Croix de Lorraine which has come to represent Joan of Arc because she came from Lorraine; and it today symbolizes defiance and liberation. During World War II, it became the emblem of General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces.