Raymond Roussel & Henri-Achille Zo: 59 Illustrations for the New Impressions of Africa

“Saint Louis in his prison in Damietta”, “A house engulfed in flames …”, “A snowman, such as children build …”: The painter and illustrator Henri-Achille Zo (1873–1933) received a total of 59 instructions of this kind in the early 1930s.

An anonymous client had sent them to him via the Parisian private detective agency Goron. Zo transferred these sometimes everyday, sometimes historical, but always trivial motifs with quick strokes into drawings that correspond to the letter to the dry style of the instructions. He himself would have been less than happy to owe his posthumous fame to this commissioned work. “These are not the drawings I would have made had I known I was illustrating Raymond Roussel,” he complains to the author of Locus Solus in a letter dated October 17, 1932. By then, however, New Impressions of Africa had already been published. Considering that both men knew each other personally, the anonymous transmission seems to have had an aesthetic purpose: the greatest possible visual indifference.