Jun 17, 2026
Join Rachel Mustalish, Sherman Fairchild Conservator in Charge of Paper Conservation at The Met, for a close examination of a unique volume containing the 1919 printed book and original maquette for "La Fin du monde filmée par l’ange N.-D.," a collaboration between the novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars and the artist Fernand Léger. Housed in a leather binding created in 1975, Leger’s original illustrations and the final printed product offer a glimpse into the artist’s bold choices of composition and color as well as the creative process shared between writer and artist.
Featured Object:
Blaise Cendrars (author) and Fernand Léger (artist). “La Fin du monde filmée par l’Ange N.-D.,” 1919. Illustrated book with twenty-two pochoirs published by Éditions de la Sirène, Paris, and eleven compositions in gouache and pencil, in embossed leather binding, 13 3/8 × 11 1/8 × 1 5/8 in. (34 × 28.3 × 4.1 cm). Collection of the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Library, Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art (PN1997 .F465 1919 LALRC Quarto)
So this volume is an interesting object in that it is both the printed book as well as a maquette
with original illustrations that were then going to be used to make the final printed product.
This is a 1975 binding by someone named Larue who really took this graphic approach as well
as a three-dimensional approach to making this very deluxe leather binding and it has the title
on the cover and on the back cover it has the title again in this incredible relief as well
as in the relief at the top so it's really quite a elaborate masterpiece. You can see it has this
incredible brightly colored suede end papers which is an interesting and artistic and unusual choice.
And then each page of the printed version was separated and then what's called guarded in and
you can see along the center here this white edge which makes it very easy to turn and preserves the
edge which often gets really sort of beat up in all sorts of magazines and serials and things
that are soft covered and passed around. The title page which gives all the information as well as
the fact that it was printed in Paris in 1919 and this is the opening page and you can see how vivid
this is and it does something really interesting in terms of how it combines both the printed
lettering which is very very common but with an illustration that does not have the boundaries of
a plate of a outline of a border or of a tipped-in page which was very typical of book making at the
time in book production but absolutely not what these artists and many other avant-garde artists
who were doing printed materials and doing books and mixing graphics with text there was no borders
there was no delineation and you can see really clearly here the combination of these two things.
And so the colors were incredibly vivid in these volumes like this and I think as you
can see as I turn the page just how much they pop off the surface. So what makes this volume
not only special because it has this terrific book and you can see actually what would have
been the spine edge of the printed piece they actually cut out and put in here so it preserves
the information and you would have known how this would have looked along the spine
but there is a maquette in here and now maquettes were used by many artists particularly in the
the design but the colors and then also gives the chance for the printers to figure out how they get
from the artist's idea or the color idea to printing. This is on this thinner less expensive
paper and this is where the color was applied to the printed black and white so that the print
makers could know what colors were designed what the design should be you can see a lot of the
process in terms of the changing of the ideas you can also see the color of the paper is different
because it is in fact an actual different piece of paper that ages differently and being in the
studio and being in the print makers it also has more dirt it has more wear but that's to
be expected. This is a super page to show the process because not only does it have the printing
the graphite the stencil marks you can see but it also has notes about the types of color for
instance this yellow here and this type of red to be used here written in as notes for the print
maker. This is a really nice example of the hand-drawn illustration that you see printed in
the final book which has the map of Paris and I do love that scrawled in the blue ink is Paris and
then the the border here didn't quite materialize correctly and then much like the beginning of the
book the end of the book also has these end pages to give some security and some finish to the end
of this sort of luxury item.
