LAVATER, Warja. La Fable du Hasard.

(Paris): Adrien Maeght, 1968. First edition. Hardcover. 15.6 by 11cm. Unpaginated. One of the most inventive volumes in Warja Lavater’s celebrated Imageries series. Rather than illustrating a single well-known fairy tale, this volume constructs an original visual narrative derived from Le Pauvre et le Riche of the Brothers Grimm and Perrault’s Les Souhaits Ridicules. Employing the pictographic language for which she became renowned, Lavater abandons both text and figurative illustration in favour of a system of abstract signs and colours whose meanings are explained by a key at the beginning of the volume. The story then unfolds entirely through the interaction of these symbols across a continuous accordion-fold sequence extending more than three metres when fully opened. A very good copy in the original plexiglass case. One of the key titles in the Imageries sequence and among the most sophisticated expressions of Lavater’s unique visual language.