About this artwork
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s international bestselling novel Night-flight comes to life in Mary Reynolds’s inventive binding. She encased the book in a night-blue cover and included one of Marcel Duchamp’s rotorelief designs on the endpapers. Duchamp’s rotoreliefs were a series of inventively printed discs designed to create optical illustions when spun on a turntable. This one, titled Corolles, features a spiral motif that evokes a sense of vertigo, foreshadowing the moment in the novel in which a pilot gets lost in a cyclone.
Although the bookbinding’s design is simpler than Reynolds’s other creations, it nonetheless conjures a sense of unease. Readers might feel as if they’re falling through the cover’s indigo night only to be swept up in the typhoon of Duchamp’s spinning optical illusion.
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Status
- Currently Off View
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Department
- Ryerson and Burnham Libraries Special Collections
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Artist
- Mary Reynolds
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Title
- Night-flight
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Place
- Paris (Object made in:)
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Date
- 1932
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Medium
- Full navy, vegetable-tanned sheepskin; endpapers of trial proofs for Marcel Duchamp's 1935 cover of Minotaure
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Dimensions
- H.: 17 cm (6 3/4 in.)
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Credit Line
- Mary Reynolds Collection, Ryerson & Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago
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Reference Number
- 2024.860
Extended information about this artwork
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