Album primo-avrilesque

Album primo-avrilesque is a monograph by French writer, artist and humourist Alphonse Allais. The slim volume of 26 octavo landscape pages, 18.5 by 12 centimetres (7.3 in × 4.7 in), bound with card, was published by Paul Ollendorff () in Paris on 1 April 1897, and was sold for one franc. The work is generally known by its French title, which may be translated into English as "April Fool-ish album".

The artist's book includes eight printed pieces: a series of seven monochrome artworks, each a solid block of a single colour – black, blue, green, yellow (or brown), red, grey, white – displayed within an ornamental frame, followed by the score for a silent funeral march, with blank staves covering two pages. Each piece was given a humorous title in French.

The booklet also includes two prefaces in French, one for the monochrome artworks and one for the funeral march. In the preface to the monochromes, Allais wrote that other painters were "ridicules artisans qui ont besoin de mille couleurs différentes pour exprimer leurs pénibles conceptions" [ridiculous craftsmen who need a thousand different colours to express their painful conceptions] and that his ideal artist employed "pour une toile une couleur ... monochroïdal" [for one canvas one colour ... monochromatic]. In the preface to the funeral march, for "un grand homme sourd" [a great deaf man], Allais wrote that "les grandes douleurs sont muettes" [great pains are silent].

Allais exhibited his first monochrome artwork at the second Salon des Arts Incohérents in Paris in 1883: his all-white Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par temps de neige [First communion of anaemic young girls in snowy weather] – a blank sheet of white Bristol paper, attached to a wall with four drawing pins. He showed another monochrome work, the all-red Récolte de tomates sur le bord de la mer Rouge par des cardinaux apoplectiques [Apoplectic cardinals harvesting tomatoes on the shore of the Red Sea], at the third Incoherents show in 1884, along with his silent funeral march. The exhibition catalogue notes that the red monochrome is an offering of Peter's pence to Pope Leo XIII.

...
Wikipedia