Portfolio I. An International Quarterly. First Edition
Washington, DC: The Black Sun Press, 1945. Folio. 16 x 11.75 inches. Sheets loose as issued. No cover. ...23 of 26 plates, lacking 1, 13 and 21. Broadsides by Henry Miller, Karl Shaprio, Romare Bearden et al.
Poet and publisher. She was born Mary Phelps Jacob, later became Polly Peabody, and finally Caresse Crosby. She received a patent for a design for the first modern brassiere which gained wide acceptance. Along with her second husband, Harry Crosby, and after his suicide, on her own, she published and promoted many of the early modernist writers. Their Black Sun Press produced works by D.H. Lawrence, Kay Boyle, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Hart Crane, among others. She was born in New Rochelle, New York into a prominent New England family. She was the first to design and patent an undergarment named 'Brassiere,' derived from the old French word for 'upper arm'. On November 3, 1914, the U.S. Patent Office issued a patent for the 'Backless Brassiere'. In 1915, at age 24, she married Richard Rogers Peabody. They had two children and divorced. On September 9, 1922, at age 28, she married Harry Grew Crosby....In 1937, at age 47, she married Selbert Young, a football player nearly twenty years her junior. She opened an art gallery in Washington D.C. and started Portfolio, a magazine about art and literature. She also was politically active and founded the organization Women Against War. In 1950, Caresse divorced Selbert Young and moved to Rocca Sinibalda, Italy, where she planned to create an artist's colony. She published an autobiography in 1953 called The Passionate Years. In the last years of her life, she tried to build a world citizen center that would bring together political leaders and the artistic community in Greece and then in Cyprus. Frustrated by political obstacles, she died in Rome of heart failure in 1970 at age 79, before its completion. Item #51-4112
Price: $225.00