Premier semestre.

A very rare erotic work in a magnificent binding by Jean de Gonet.

A year after its creation in 1928, the Belgian magazine Variétés began to experience financial difficulties. The director Paul-Gustave Van Hecke, who had done much to promote the work of Belgian avant-garde artists, decided that the best way to save the magazine would be to publish an erotic book featuring his own poetry. Thus the present work, which contains four original erotic photographs by Man Ray, each captioned with a season and accompanied by the poetry of Benjamin Peret and Louis Aragon, was born. In one of the scenes, the woman depicted is clearly Man Ray's lover, Kiki de Montparnasse.

The 1929 edition is extremely rare, as many copies were seized and destroyed by French customs officers on their delivery to Paris. The present copy was displayed as part of the Tate Modern's exhibition Surrealism desire unbound in 2001, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2002 (p. 336 in the exhibition catalogue), though it had yet to be bound at that time. This copy on green paper was printed aside from those mentioned in the colophon, which was limited to 215 copies, and of which no other copies are known.