Transmutations: tentation de Saint-Antoine (1934-35)

To accompany the 1967 portfolio of the 1934-1935 Transmutations series, Brassa wrote an introduction for the work. The following are several excerpts from his text. "What impulse did I obey, what temptation overcame me, when I seized several glass plates to engrave them? Respectful of the image printed by the sun, hostile to any 'intervention', had I in spite of myself, come under the influence of the surrealists I was seeing so frequently at any time? Who knows? What we have been becomes so foreign to us with the passing of decades that our acts and even their motives often escape us. I have written elsewhere of how, in re-charging my plate-holders at Picasso's, I forgot one unused plate and left it in his studio in the rue la Botie, and how he, having found it, attacked it with an etching - needle to trace an image of Marie-Thrse. Probably the episode of this little forgotten plate is the origin of my engravings...Nevertheless, that which attracted me in this adventure was not the process itself, no doubt less rewarding than etching or dry point, but the possibility to introduce something indefinable to me which belongs only to photography...Photography became the raw material, the point of departure for the mutations and transmutations and which then had nothing more to do with it." (op. cit., Brassa, From Realism to Art Informel, p. 201.)

Early prints of images from the series Transmutations, such as this and the following two lots printed before the 1967 portfolio, are considered rare.