Le pays des mines Introduction de Jean Fréville [Eugène Schkaff]

Paris: Les éditions Cercle d'Art, 1951. Portfolio. 1 portfolio (4 pages of letterpress text + 12 color plates). 15.25 x 11.25 in. Semi-stiff boards wrapped in printed chemise with three folding flaps (the lower flap detached but present); cover title in red and black. Edges worn and chipped, front cover soiled with dust and ink stains. Complete portfolio containing twelve chromolithograph plates reproducing selections from a series of paintings and sketches of miners in Pas-de-Calais in northern France, completed in a highly detailed, socialist realism style. The images include portraits, still lifes, and landscapes showing the lives, homes, work, play, and land of coal miners. Fougeron, then one of the most famous painters associated with the French Communist Party, was commissioned in 1947 by Auguste Lecoeur, part a member of the French Communist Party serving in as Under-Secretary of State for coal production as part of a coalition government. Fougeron lived with miners for eighteen months. Forty of these paintings were shown in the Beirnheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris in 1950 and the exhibition then toured throughout the country the next year. The portfolio perhaps drew inspiration from UNESCO's Archives of Colour reproductions with debuted in 1949. A long introductory essay was written be Jean Freville, pen-name of Eugene Schkaff, a prolific Marxist author.