Author Event: Saturday, May 14, 2022 from 11am to 2pm

Please join us on Saturday, May 14, 2022 from 11am to 2pm when authors Charles Harley and Marika Esarey will be featuring Cut-Outs From Paper.  

From Folk Art to High Art, To Walla Walla from Warsaw

When Charles Harley decided to publish a translation of a book produced long since in Poland about styles of paper cut-out unique to that country’s folk art, he sought expert help and guidance from friends in Walla Walla. The original work, though by a Pole and published in Warsaw, was written in French. Harley requested and received criticism of his translation from his neighbor, Martine Purcell. Harley mentioned to Shanna Fledderjohann of Kingfisher Gallery his need for someone fluent in Polish to translate an inscription on the cover of the book, write letters, and address copyright and bibliographic issues relating tothe new edition. Shanna put him in touch with one of her clients, Dominika Dickerson, who took care of those concerns. To realize his project, Harley above all needed an expert in book design, making, and conservation.

Cut-Outs from Paper preserves as much as proved practicable of the character and format of the book it translates, Les Decoupures de Papier, which was issued as a large paperback, in Warsaw, in 1928. To photograph its color plates for Harley’s English language version, the Warsaw edition had to be taken apart­–and afterward put back together, complete with hand-stitched spine. The spines of the English edition–in this regard fortunately a very limited edition!–are also hand stitched.

The new offering, besides reproducing all the lithographs and plates of the original, also reproduces its front cover, which bears an inscription by the author, Dr.Eugenjusz Frankowski, sometime director of the Warsaw Museum of Ethnography, which Dickerson kindly translated as,‘To Miss Betty, a delightful lady, I offer this gift.’

‘Miss Betty’, travelling by train between the French Riviera towns of Nice and Hyeres, struck up a conversation with a fellow passenger, Lydia  Delectorskaya, who revealed that she modeled for, and managed the studio of, Henri-Emile Matisse.Miss Betty, recently returned from her sojourn in Poland, was en route to Hyeres to meet her father. Lydia, enjoying a day off, was going to Hyeres to view the town’s magnificent palm trees and, at the request of Madame Matisse, to buy a box of scrumptious nougat, for the making of which Hyeres also is renowned.

The young women hit it off. On Betty’s showing Lydia her copy of Les Decoupures de PapierLydia asked whether she might borrow the book on behalf of Matisse, who, Lydia explained, had recently been experimenting with paper cut-out techniques and themes. Betty agreed to this proposal and Lydia promised that the book would be returned to her.

That one and only encounter between the Anglo-French Betty and Lydia, self-exiled from Soviet Russia, took place in the spring of 1935. In 1940, Germany’s invasion of Poland jolting her memory of her promise to return Betty’s book, Lydia belatedly kept her word.

The Germans’ destruction of Warsaw accomplished the loss in its entirety of the Warsaw Museum of Ethnography’s collection of the country’s paper cut-outs. The 1928 edition of Les Decoupures de Papierwasits sole edition and today the book is scarcely to be found. Harley’s Cut-Outs from Paper offers for wider, contemporary consideration the images of many of the finest examples, created during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and so barbarically incinerated in World War II, of a folk art form unique to Poland.

Harley hopes that his reissue in English of Dr. Frankowski’s work will gain support for his contention that illustrations in the book Lydia Delectorskya borrowed for Matisse’s consideration to some degree inspired the French master’s demonstration–innovative technically, thematically and functionally–of what the paper cut-out could achieve, which in turn promoted acceptance of the form as an artistic endeavor distinct and valid as any other.

In response to Harley’s assertion that Matisse was inspired by Polish paper cut-outs, John Klein, author of Matisse and Decoration, writes,‘The book you sent is exceptionally beautiful… It is true that Matisse was interested in popular arts of all kinds and I have little doubt that he was drawn to the illustrations in Les Decoupures de Papier. Who can say what residual impact they may have had on him?’ ‘Matisse,’ Professor Klein continues, ‘had already used paper cut-out forms as maquettes for large paintings… But in the mid 1930s he had not yet turned to the medium of the cut-out to make independent art works. Perhaps when he cut out white seagulls to be pinned to his wall during nights of insomnia in the mid 1940s he was creating distant echoes of the birds that seem to be a popular motif in that Polish tradition.’

Harley believes that the influence of Polish paper cut-outs on Matisse’s transformative development of the form is demonstrably stronger than Professor Klein concedes. Harley is, however, eager to insist that, unlike Professor Klein, he is by no means an internationally acclaimed specialist in the French master’s work. 

It was over the tea-table, just under sixty years ago, that Harley learned how, as recounted here, the original Polish edition of Cut-Outs from Paper was brought to Matisse’s attention.  With Harley that tea time were ‘Miss Betty’, who as well as being ‘a delightful lady’ was his mother, and his grandfather, Henry-Emile Sevrez, who besides having forenames in common with Matisse had passed his boyhood within a few miles of Le Cateau-Cambresis, the artist’s hometown.

Marika Esarey is the craftswoman to whom Harley entrusted the design and making of Cut-outs from Paper, and the disassembly and putting back together of Decoupures de Papierher task entailed. This commission Esarey, artist, bookbinder, book creator, carried out at Sacred Artisanship, her Walla Walla studio. Esarey has made a magnificent clamshell box that, open wide, simultaneously reveals the book in its Walla Walla and its Warsaw edition. This box and the books it contains will be on display when Esarey joins Harley for a discussion of their collaboration at Book & Game, 38 East Main, Walla Walla, Saturday 14 May, 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. All are welcome!