Annette Messager (25 April-2 June 1974)

Black & white illus. throughout. [12] leaves. Small 8vo, stiff printed wrappers, staple-bound. Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1974.


Rare Annette Messager (b. 1943) exhibition catalogue, published for her exhibition Messager Collectionneuse. This was her first solo show at a major French museum, and the first of many at the Musée d’art moderne in Paris. The book presents her “collections” of “babies with eyes crossed out,” “how my friends would draw my portrait,” “voluntary torture,” “bodyguards,” “my jealousy,” “my needlework,” “my clichés temoins,” “collection to find my best signature,” with a list of further collections (truncated) assembled but not depicted herein.


Near fine copy.


❧ A. Moeglin-Delcroix, Esthétique du Livre d’Artiste: Une Introduction à l’art contemporain (2nd ed.: 2012), p. 223-”Annette Messager is undoubtedly the artist whose behavior was, for a while, most conforming with that of the collector strictly speaking. Collecting so completely characterizes her work of the years 1972 and 1973 that she put by her name ‘collectionneuse’... She is attached to the thematic aspect of collecting as far as the cumulative. Annette Message collectionneuse filled around 60 notebooks, binders and albums, each with its own specific central interest. Only a small number were published later on, although published only partially and more often in the booklets taking the place of exhibition catalogues (Les Tortures volontaires, 1974; Mes jeux de mains, 1975) than in the form of true books...”. (Inventory #: 9184)