Deluxe issue with signed print. The deluxe issue of Brassai's last book, specially bound and with a signed gravure print: 'Henri Matisse drawing from the Nude, 1939'. Brassai had a great gift for cultivating friendships and got to know many of the most significant artists of his day. He dedicated this book to Harper's Bazaar Editor-in-Chief Carmel Snow and her Art Director Alexey Brodovitch, with whom he worked closely for over 25 years beginning soon after the publication of Paris de Nuit (1932), and for whom a number of these photographs of artists were originally made.

The artists featured in the book are Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Salvador Dali, Charles Despiau, Raoul Dufy, Alberto Giacometti, Oskar Kokoschka, Henri Laurens, Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Aristide Maillol, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Hans Reichel, Germaine Richier, Georges Rouault, Jacques Villon, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and Ambroise Vollard. The book ends with a short piece on l'Academié Julian, the renowned art school in Saint-German-des-Prés, founded in 1860 and attended by Gaugin, van Gogh, Edouard Vuillard, Matisse, and many others. Brassai was awarded the Prix de la Société des Gens de Lettres in 1983 for this book.

First edition, deluxe issue, signed, number 140 of 150 copies with a signed hand-pulled dust-grained gravure; 4to (285 x 230 mm, 11 ¼ x 9 in); 142 black-and-white photographs printed in offset duotone; publisher's deluxe binding of patterned paper over oatmeal cloth-covered boards, titles to spine in silver, front board incorporates a folding section, secured with an acrylic pin, holding a mounted original gravure (paper: 264 x 198 mm, 10 ½ x 7 ¾ in; image: 208 x 158 mm, 9 ¼ x 6 ¼ in) which is numbered in pencil and also signed by Brassai in black ink in the mount, fine; [ii], 223, [1]pp.