Six signed original etchings for Ulysses.

New York: The Print Club,, 1935. We are in complete agreement" - Matisse's classical compositions for Joyce's masterpiece Signed limited portfolio, number 61 of 150 sets of six plates, each of which are signed numbered and titled by Matisse. The plates comprise the artist's illustrations for the first illustrated edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, published by the Limited Editions Club the same year. Within weeks of the lifting of the US ban on Ulysses (6 December 1933), the Limited Editions Club impresario George Macy approached Joyce about a special edition of the book, and by February 1934 he was en route to Paris to speak to Matisse about illustrations. Matisse accepted, and produced etchings for six of the eight episodes of Ulysses that have their counterparts in Homer's Odyssey: "The Calypso Episode"; "Aeolus, Cave of the Winds"; "The Cyclops" (described by Aragon as "the only true image of pain in Matisse's work"); "The Episode of Nausicaä"; "The Circle Episode"; and "Symbolic Landscape: Ithaca". While Joyce was delighted with the idea of Matisse illustrating his masterpiece, he was apprehensive that the artist might not have read Ulysses. Matisse had been given a copy of the French translation by Joyce scholar Stuart Gilbert, but his neighbour, the writer Dorothy Bussy, remarked that he was "in a complete fog about it" (Goodwin, p. 91). She lent him a copy of Gilbert's seminal James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study (1930). Regardless of whether Matisse read Ulysses in its entirety, Joyce approved of his decision to emphasize the classical source text: "I telephoned Joyce and spoke to him. We are in complete agreement regarding the character that I want to give to the illustration" (Matisse, letter to Simon Bussy, 11 August 1934). Folio. Six soft ground etchings printed on Arches vellum paper, each separated by original tissue guards. Sheet sizes: 41.3 x 31.5 cm. In the brown cloth folding portfolio, as issued. Housed in a black quarter morocco solander box by the Chelsea Bindery. Spine of portfolio worn, joints tender. Contents clean. Aragon, p. 198; Henri Matisse, L'oeuvre gravé, 235-240; Slocum & Cahoon, 22. See William Goodwin, "'A Very Pretty Picture M. Matisse But You Must Not Call It Joyce': The Making of the Limited Editions Club Ulysses", Joyce Studies Annual Vol. 10, Summer 1999, pp. 85-103.