ZÖTL: LE BESTIAIRE D'ALOYS ZÖTL (1831-1887) text by Julio Cortázar

Franco Maria Ricci, 1976, First edition, 155 pp., 9 1/2" X 14", Hardcover

Fine (limited to 3000 copies, this being # 1681)

Fabulous bestiary! Aloys Zötl was born in Freistadt in Upper Austria. He is notable for his painting of fantastical animals and other natural history subjects. These beautiful watercolors come from a series of exquisite paintings of various animals undertaken from 1831 through until his death in 1887. Decades after his death in 1887 in Eferding, Zötl's work was re-discovered by surrealist André Breton, who recognized a surrealist aesthetic in it. Breton wrote: "…Lacking any biographical details about the artist, one can only indulge one's fantasies in imagining the reasons which might have induced this workman from Upper Austria, a dyer by profession, to undertake so zealously between 1832 and 1887 the elaboration of the most sumptuous bestiary ever seen.