Bold, experimental, extravagant, and unbound, both literally and in the creative minds that produced them, livres d’artiste had no precedent. At the turn of the 20th century, they revolutionized the book as an art form. Livres d’artiste attracted many famous practitioners—Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí among them—but they were also deeply collaborative ventures. Authors, publishers, designers, and printmakers played essential roles in bringing them to life.

This exhibition introduces the imaginative world of this form through a group of extraordinary works by Spanish artists. Visitors can explore how images, words, and typography intersect, often in intricate ways that defy expectations. Some artists interpreted foundational texts, as Dalí did in his 1974 illustrations for Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism; others partnered with writers to devise images and words in harmony at the outset, as in Juan Gris and French poet Pierre Reverdy’s Au Soleil du Plafond (1955). Rarely on view, and resisting easy categorization, these livres d’artiste invite visitors into a world of artistic ambition in which creativity and the power of collaboration led to some of the most singular and compelling achievements of publishing in the 20th century.