Vienna: Dorothy Simpson Krause, 2018. Number 4 of four copies signed by the book artist. Dorothy Krause is a painter, collage artist and printmaker who incorporates digital mixed media into her art. Her work is exhibited regularly in galleries and museums and featured in numerous current periodicals and books. In her artist's statement she says: "My work includes large scale mixed media pieces, artist books and book-like objects that bridge between these two forms. It embeds archetypal symbols and fragments of image and text in multiple layers of texture and meaning. It combines the humblest of materials, plaster, tar, wax and pigment, with the latest in technology to evoke the past and herald the future. My art-making is an integrated mode of inquiry that links concept and media in an ongoing dialogue – a visible means of exploring meaning. In this poignant book, Krause recounts the mostly sorrowful life of the beautiful Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, nicknamed Sisi. At the age of 15, Sisi was married to her cousin the Hapsburg Emperor Franz Joseph. Stifled by the protocol of the court, she wrote in her diary, “I have awakened in a dungeon, with chains on my hands.” An especially beautiful, unhappy woman and a restless, obsessive traveler, she carried a hypodermic for cocaine, threatened suicide and, at the age of 61, and was stabbed by an anarchist in Geneva in 1898 and died. The book presents the sad details of her tragic life, with the text in a handwritten font printed in black on orange paper. With six color images of Sisi taken from photographs and paintings. It has a drum leaf binding with the cover of black watered silk over board. Housed in a black paper covered box with a title label on the cover and the title in orange on the spine. In fine condition. Measures 7.25 x 5.25 x .25 inches. Unpaginated [10 pages.] ARTB/051923. More