George Rhoads
: George Rhoads, 1954.

A unique artist’s book by the American painter and sculptor George Rhoads (1926-2021) as a gift for his friend, the erotologist and folklorist Gershon Legman (1917-1999). The two met in Paris shortly after Rhoads’ arrival there in 1952, bonding over origami. The discipline of mechanical precision inherent in origami arguably foreshadows his later complex audiokinetic ball machine sculptures. Rhoads is known to have sent Legman letters embellished with foldings and comic drawings throughout the 1950s and 1960s (a small number of models survive in the Legman archive at the Origami Art Museum, Colonia del Sacramento), but the present volume is a substantially more ambitious and apparently earlier production, made in the opening years of their friendship, and directed squarely toward Legman’s lifelong scholarly fascination with erotic folklore and bawdy humour. The 58 leaves are each illustrated on the recto with original cartoon drawings. The first sixteen leaves carry two short erotic tales: one of ten leaves concerns the tale of a sex maniac; the second, of six leaves, recounts the adventures of “five little Fuckers and how they blew”; the remaining forty-two leaves illustrated with standalone erotic cartoons. The front cover with a colour illustrated title, the inside lower board signed by Rhoads with a decorative border, the date supplied in Legman’s hand. Of considerable research interest as a primary-source artefact of the Rhoads-Legman friendship, complementing the surviving body of gifted material preserved in the Legman archive at the Origami Art Museum. The erotic content places it at the intersection of Rhoads’ early Paris work and Legman’s lifelong scholarship on erotic folklore and bawdy humour, later culminating in his major study ‘Rationale of the Dirty Joke’ (First Series 1968; Second Series 1975). Provenance: ex the estate of Gershon Legman by descent via Neil Pearson.