Vincent FitzGerald & Company – Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill – The Seven Deadly Sins of the lower middle class.
(FitzGerald, Vincent) The Seven Deadly Sins of the lower middle class. By Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Translated by Michael Feingold. Etchings and Lithographs by Mark Beard. [New York. ] 1992. n.p. 21″ x 13″. Printed on Rives paper. Watercolored. Lithography editions by Agnes Murray. Etchings editioned by Marjorie Van Dyke and Vincent FitzGerald at The Printmaking Workshop. Silkscreen editioned by Colorgirls. Collage executed by Zahra Partovi and Vincent FitzGerald. Letterpress printed at Wild Carrot Letterpress in Garamond. Calligraphy by Jerry Kelly. Bound by Zahra Partovi in association with BookLab. in a nineteenth-century Hub style with black leather and dacron polyester zebra-striped fabric in purple and black. Boxed. No. 3 in an edition of 50 copies signed by the artist and the translator. Fine.
“FitzGerald … remembered … Feingold … had translated The Seven Deadly Sins of the lower middle class, a short “ballet with songs” by Kurt Weill that dealt with the iconography of America. The story, which seemed perfect for Beard [to illustrate] concerns the moral tension between two sisters as they struggle to achieve their dream of building their pietistic family a home on the Mississippi River in Louisiana. Seven gatefolded pages introduce the personifications of each sin – anger, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride and sloth. All elements of architecture and setting are etched, embossed and collaged behind the theatrical figures, which are executed in lithography. More than one hundred prints embellish the tale. A separate map made with pigment embedded into the paper by Dieu Donné, showing the continuous United States and identifying the seven cities of sin, the Mississippi River, the mansion in Louisiana, all silkscreened after an original watercolor by Beard, is cut, folded and bound separately. … FitzGerald wanted the reader to be involved in the telling of the story,…
“The project [took] four years to realize. … The song text and scenario of each “sin” are printed in twenty different colors, keyed to the psychological and moral tone of the writing; this required forty-six letterpress forms. …Beard specified the large size of the book … which is elaborately bound …” – A Catalogue Raisonné of the first 26 books published by Vincent FitzGerald & Company from 1981 – pages
Related items: Artists' Books, Catalogue 37 - Summer 2009, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Vincent FitzGerald