First edition, 15 issues in 15 separate instalments, abundantly illustrated with black and white photographs. Complete with the special issue “Hommage à Picasso” (#3, 1930) and the index for the year 1929, published as a separate 8-page stapled booklet. Some spines slightly faded not affecting the text, occasional minor foxing along the margins of certain covers

Presented in a custom slipcase with a flat spine in blue morocco, title stamped in palladium and spine framed in palladium, decorative blue paper boards, sky-blue suede doublures; a handsome ensemble signed Boichot. 

Complete series of this legendary and non-conformist magazine founded by Georges Bataille, which gave voice to “fields of art and knowledge unrecognised by official culture or considered controversial: popular literature, jazz, cabaret, advertising, everyday life” (Annie Pirabot), along with so-called primitive art and objects.

Texts by Jean Babelon, Jacques Baron, Georges Bataille, Alejo Carpentier, Arnaud Dandieu, Robert Desnos, Carl Einstein, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Marcel Griaule, Juan Gris, Eugene Jolas, Marcel Jouhandeau, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Marcel Mauss, Léon Pierre-Quint, Jacques Prévert, Raymond Queneau, Zdenko Reich, Paul Rivet, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges-Henri Rivière, André Schaeffner, Roger Vitrac, among others.

Numerous full-page artistic contributions by Hans Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Giorgio De Chirico, Alberto Giacometti, Juan Gris, Henri Laurens, Fernand Léger, André Masson, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Joseph Sima, etc.

The journal’s pioneering and interdisciplinary approach established it as one of the most important publications of the century: a dissident voice against the doctrinaire surrealism of André Breton, Documents was conceived as a “war machine against received ideas” in Bataille’s own words, and gathered an eclectic array of contributors—academics, ex-Dadaist and Surrealist painters and poets, philosophers... It remains renowned for its striking juxtapositions: “Rather than assemble documents from separate fields, rather than uphold the usual subordination of image to text, the journal gives photography, drawing, and image the privilege of being the most primal substance or the most original trace of human expression” (Georges Sebbag).

Ethnography

Documents is remembered above all for Bataille’s radical ethnographic stance, focused on the material and detached from aesthetic criteria and the usual fascination with exoticism. These groundbreaking views foreshadow the Collège de sociologie that Bataille would later found with Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois, and Jules Moncrot. They are also reflected in the journal through numerous photographs of masks, stones, and other non-Western artistic creations (Siberian, Chinese...) set alongside modern artworks, including drawings by Klee and paintings by Picasso. Bataille also collaborated with the notorious Hans Bellmer (who would go on to illustrate the famous second edition of Histoire de l’œil) to create a terrifying portrait of the Hindu goddess of destruction, Kali.

photography

The journal places particular emphasis on photography. Among its most celebrated contributions are the close-up photographs of toes by Jacques-André Boiffard, accompanying Bataille’s essay on the foot in issue no. 6: “The point of this article lies in an insistence on directly and explicitly challenging what seduces, without relying on poetic contrivances, which ultimately amount to little more than diversion,” Bataille concludes. His fascination with the abnormal and the destructive is also evident in Boiffard’s fetishistic and sadomasochistic photograph of a woman wearing a leather mask, used to illustrate Michel Leiris’s “Caput Mortuum” (No. 8, 1930). Also noteworthy are the contributions of Éli Lotar, the journal’s principal photographer alongside Boiffard, notably his macabre slaughterhouse series. The extraordinary botanical photographs by Karl Blossfeldt are equally remarkable—five previously unpublished images accompany Bataille’s essay Le Langage des Fleurs (The Language of Flowers) (No. 3, June 1929).

Popular culture

Throughout its issues, Documents affirms its interest in what Robert Desnos called “modern imagery” (No. 7, December 1929): pulp fiction, early comic strips—”Quetzalcoatl, who enjoys sliding down the mountainside on a small board, has always seemed to me, more than anything else expressible through the feeble means of everyday language, to be a Pied Nickelé,” Bataille would write in the introduction to his essay on the comic Pieds nickelés (n° 4, 1930). Cinema also plays a major role in the journal’s anthropological discourse, notably with the 30 film stills from Carl Eisenstein’s The General Line arranged across a double-page spread (No. 4, 1930). The journal discusses the innovative cinema of Buñuel and the release of Un chien andalou in 1930, American cinema, as well as the burgeoning critical reception of jazz: “one of the contributors to Documents [Michel Leiris] began to consider jazz as an aesthetic phenomenon [...] For him, jazz became the very essence of art and urged the West to rethink what that notion truly meant” (Diane Turquety).

Rare complete set of this revolutionary journal, upholding a certain Dada spirit and a pioneer in ethnographic discourse.