Benoit Éditeur

Pierre André Benoit (1921-1993) was a wildly creative and prolific French publisher, book designer, and poet who worked with many of the most famous artists and poets of the 20th century. This exhibition focuses most closely on Benoit's editions with Pablo Picasso, showcasing the pair's spontaneous approach to art making. Both were poets as well as artists, and they shared an uncanny ability to match art with literature and capture emotion. Like Picasso, Benoit's output was profuse, with hundreds of editions under his PAB imprint over the course of his career. In Température (1960), the tiniest of several miniature books on view, Picasso illustrates a short poem by his wife, Jacqueline Roque, in a format measuring less than an inch by an inch-and-a-half. At the other end of the scale, VIIIe Pythique is a deluxe oversize volume that includes four large-scale illustrations by Picasso. The exhibition also includes two PAB editions illustrated by artist Jesse Reichek (1916-2005), who taught design at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1953 to 1986.