À toute épreuve is one of the most celebrated artist’s books of the 20th century — a project born of friendship, driven by immense ambition, and brought to completion with a patience that earned the admiration of all who witnessed it.
It all begins in 1929, when Paul Éluard writes these poems in the anguish of a двойble loss: Gala, his wife, leaves him to join Salvador Dalí, while Nusch, whom he begins to love, enters his life. These surrealist texts — fragments, proverbs, lyrical bursts — are published in 1930 by Éditions surréalistes. It is in 1947, during a meeting with the Geneva-based publisher Gérald Cramer, that the idea emerges to bring them into dialogue with Miró’s work.
Miró takes hold of the project with a fervor that surprises everyone. In 1948, he writes to Cramer: “I am completely absorbed by this sacred book — I hope to achieve something sensational, the most important work in wood engraving since Gauguin.” Inspired by Gauguin’s woodcuts and by Japanese prints, he deliberately chooses this ancient and demanding medium, carving 233 woodblocks and subjecting them to 42,000 impressions at the Atelier Lacourière in Paris. The work would take eleven years. Éluard, who died in 1952, would not live to see the book completed.
What Miró achieves here goes far beyond illustration in the traditional sense. He does not read the poems in order to translate them — he inhabits them, focusing on the space occupied by the words, their visual rhythm, their tension across the page. Woodcut becomes sculpture, color becomes language, and the book is transformed into a total work in which two poetics — that of Éluard and that of Miró — immerse themselves in one another without ever merging.
This color woodcut on BFK Rives, numbered and hand-signed by Miró, belongs to the independent suite published alongside the original book for collectors. Referenced as Dupin 235, it carries the full density of a work that print historian Riva Castleman described as “one of the most original and beautiful books of the century.”
