Lithograph on vélin de Rives paper. Paper size: 14.5 x 10.75 inches. Excellent condition. Inscription: hand signed and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the folio, Variations sur l'imaginaire, 1972. Published by Philippe Lebaud, Éditeur, Paris; printed by Mourlot Frères, Paris, March 15, 1972. Excerpted from the volume (translated from French), The circulation of this work from the collection Variations has been limited to 190 examples which are justified as follows: twenty examples on Japon Nacré, numbered from 1 to 20 to which was attached a suite on Rives des lithographies and an original gouache; thirty examples on Auvergne numbered from 21 to 50 to which a suite on Rives des lithographies was attached; one hundred and forty examples on Rives numbered from 51 to 190. A non-commercial example marked 0 was drawn for each of the employees of the edition. Completed on March 15, 1972, the edition was produced under the direction of Alain Bosquet and Philippe Lebaud with the collaboration of Jacques de Cornulier and Jean-François Fouquereau and the contribution of Pierre Jean Mathan for typography. The lithographs of Cremonini, Fred Deux, Delmotte, Hélion, Herold, Masson and Peverelli, were drawn at the workshops of Fernand Mourlot; the lithographs of Coutaud and Labisse at the workshops of Jacques Desjobert; the lithographs of Aillaud, Dufour, Ferrer, Man Ray and Monory at the workshops of Clot, Bramsen and Georges; the lithographs of Leonor Fini, Lamy, Lepri and Rohner at the workshops of René Guillard; the lithographs of Baj and Lunven at the workshops of Michel Cassé. The binding was executed by Jacques Ebrard based on a model by Paul Mc Lennon. The texts and lithographs bear the autographs of their authors. MARCEL DELMOTTE (1901-1984) was a painter, draftsman, watercolourist and Belgian sculptor. He studied drawing from nature at the the University of Labor in Charleroi with the painter Leon Van den Houten. A realist painter at first, he was influenced by Expressionism of the beginning of the century, before turning to the symbolic style and developing his great compositions with mysterious landscapes and futuristic architectures. One of his first paintings, "The Agapes", (1919), reproduced the layout of large Venetian scenes and degraded texture of Gustave Moreau. In the first half of his career, Delmotte was influenced by models of the Italian Renaissance, Rubens or Ingres, and represented large and sculptural nudes, illustrating scenes from mythology, the Divine Comedy or the Bible. From the 1950s, Delmotte developed his own style with large symbolist paintings representing mysterious and jagged landscapes. Using the technique of “grattage” with a knife like the painter Max Ernst did in the 1920s, Delmotte created interesting textures highlighting a fantastic universe of eroded rocks and lush vegetation. The artist painted his landscape on several levels, occupying the entire space of the canvas, with rocky landscapes seeming to float on the horizon.