Her first artist's books appeared in 1962 under the title "Folded Stories" with Basilius Presse in Basel. With these small books began her social critical and philosophical treatises. Each book has a theme that preoccupies her. In particular, the behavior of people in a metropole like New York, working - sleeping - working - sleeping, or partying, getting provided for or fighting were her important themes. Unfortunately, the Basilius Press threw away all the original drawings so that the books could not be reprinted. With these books she was already able to create her own niche, selling them in bookstores as well as in galleries. The first Leporello William Tell was published in English by the Junior Council of the Museum of Modern Art in 1962, and in 1964 it received a second edition. The story of William Tell is told visually in a captivating symbolic language. The pictures are no longer classical illustrations, but a choreography of the plot notated in reduced-abstract sign language. The realism of conventional depictions is suspended in Lavater's artist's books.
Imageries
Beginning in 1965, the renowned Parisian art publisher Adrien Maeght Editeur published Lavater's Imageries. The artist's books based on Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm - "Little Red Riding Hood" (1965), "The Story of Happiness" (1968), "Snow White" (1974), "Cinderella" (1976), "Thumbelina" (1979), and "Sleeping Beauty" (1982) - published by Maeght are probably Lavater's best-known works, even if they are only a small selection of her oeuvre, which is characterized by thematic diversity and a wealth of creative ideas. These six fairy tales were published in a lavish complete edition in 1982 and filmed in 1994 (IRCAM, Centre Pompidou). Lavater used the term Imageries for these fairy tales and gradually extended it to almost all of her artist's books. The Imageries replaced the Folded Stories (1962-1968), marking a change in editors and the cultural language space in which they appeared.
Little Red Riding Hood - Le Petit Chaperon Rouge
As Warja Lavater notes in her work diary, the draft for "Little Red Riding Hood" (1960) is her first Leporello. The literary model of the Grimm fairy tale serves as a foil for a radically new creative idea: to tell a story exclusively in colored dots. In Little Red Riding Hood, green, red, blue, and black dots are arranged into graphic-visual scenes; as protagonists, they are part of a purely visually depicted plot. To decipher the scenes, a character legend inserted on the first pages of the fanfold serves as an aid. The colored dots are explained in the form of a list: the red dot stands for Little Red Riding Hood, the black for the wolf, the blue for the grandmother, the brown for the hunter, the yellow for the mother, and the green for the trees of the forest. A brown rectangle also represents the house and a brown angular line in the shape of a U represents the bed. Through the abstract, graphic-visual realization of a well-known fairy tale, the artist succeeds in leaving behind the mimetic modes of representation of conventional illustration.
