Breccia - Lot 218

Breccia ALBERTO BRECCIA Original illustration created in 1988, for the Italian reprint of Umberto Eco's novel of Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose published by Edizione Club in 1992. Signed. Mixed media on heavy cardboard 70 × 42 cm (27.56 × 16.54 in.) Considered one of the great masters of the comic strip, Alberto Breccia produced a series of color illustrations in 1988 for an edition of Umberto Eco's celebrated novel The Name of the Rose. A self-taught virtuoso, the Argentinian artist achieved critical success with Mort Cinder and L'Éternaute in the 1960s, before turning to the adaptation of writers' texts in comics, at a time when his country was falling under the yoke of a bloody dictatorship. These four illustrations, painted a few years before his death, are a true synthesis of his various graphic experiments in Les Mythes de Chtulhu (after H. P. Lovecraft) and in his very free transposition of Dracula: the expressionist style with violent contrasts between colors, the use of several techniques, the recourse to abstraction... Through a contamination effect, this work is reminiscent of his masterpiece Perramus, a dark, hallucinatory fresco on the Argentine military dictatorship, completed two years earlier. Acquired by the Maison de l'Amérique Latine and exhibited during Alberto Breccia's visit to Paris in 1991, these illustrations are a unique opportunity to own a piece of the brilliant work of the man then known as El Viejo. Emilie Fabre