The Artist’s Book from yesterday to today: sixancestors of the contemporary Artist’s Book. Firsts approaches and immediate precedents

Abstract

This article shows the firsts approaches and immediate precedents of Artist’s Book and exposes the origins of the transformation process that it will expreriment during the Twentieth and Twentifirst Century in order to mean its contemporary development. We will analyze the decisive influence in the development of the Artist’s Book that have meant the etching series of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri (c. 1745) and Francisco de Goya’s Caprichos (1799) regarding their conception as a single work, William Blake´s novel and experimental use of etching joining poet and artist’s task in his book Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), William Morris’s ideology reflected in his lecture “The Ideal Book” (1893), the enigmatic poem Un Coup de Dés (1895) from Stéphane Mallarmé standing for a typographical plasticity and sound and the seminal importance of Ambroise Vollard as an editor that conceived the book as the consequence of the interdisciplinary collaboration between poet, artist and publisher.