NÉON - No 2 Paris, 1948
Size: 65,5 x 40 cm
In great condition
The journal Néon was a unique graphic expression of Surrealism published from January 1948 to March 1949. The idea came from the Czech poet, artist and designer Jindřich Heisler: a four-page newspaper folded to broadsheet format and constructed from collaged texts and images to give the journal a rich and complex visual presentation with great economy of means.
Néon carries an eclectic combination of poetic and literary texts, critical and review writings, polemics and faits divers. Graphic images – including line drawings by the group’s leading artists, Toyen, Victor Brauner and Jacques Hérold – turn illustration into a tango between the languages of painters and writers.
The paper was the product of many hands under Heisler’s guidance, an intense collaborative exchange embedded into the process of putting it together. Heisler’s adoption of offset printing, unusual for the time, meant that its design could take place in Brauner’s studio, a fertile space of intellectual and social encounter, rather than in private, or at the printer. The layout is not so much wantonly eclectic (the strategy of Dada design) as polymorphous and multilingual.
