Album primo-avrilesque  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel at Night (1882) by Paul Bilhaud, here shown in the 1887 version appropriated by Alphonse Allais as published in Album primo-avrilesque (April fool-ish Album)

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"Album primo-avrilesque" (April Foolish Album)[1][2] is a portfolio of seven monochromatic images by French artist Alphonse Allais, published by Paul Ollendorf in 1897.

It was Paul Bilhaud who invented in 1882 the first "monochroïde": Combat de nègres pendant la nuit. Alphonse Allais generalized the concept.

List of plates

• Récolte de la tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de la mer Rouge (rouge) (1884)
  • Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes on the Shore of the Red Sea (Study of the Aurora Borealis)[3]
• Stupeur de jeunes recrues de la Marine en apercevant pour la première fois la Méditerranée (bleu)
  • The Stupor of Young Recruits, on Perceiving for the First Time your Azure, o Mediterrenean!
• Des souteneurs, encore dans la force de l'âge, le ventre dans l'herbe, buvant de l'absinthe (vert)
  • Some Pimps, known as Green Backs, on their Bellies in the Grass, Drinking Absinthe.
• Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige (blanc)(1883)[4]
  • First communion of chlorotic young girls in the snow.
  • Title of an entirely white painting exhibited at Expositions des Arts Incohérents 1884-5 organised by Jules Lèvy.
  • chlorosis, a form on anemia. Also cf. the later "white paintings" by Robert Rauschenberg.
• Combat de noirs dans un tunnel, la nuit (noir)
  • Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel by Night.
  • Title of an entirely black painting.
• Manipulation de l'ocre par des cocus ictériques (jaune)
• Bande de pochards poussiéreux dans le brouillard (gris), Band of Greyfriars in the Fog