je parle de qui parle qui parle je suis seul
je ne suis qu'un petit bruit j'ai plusieurs bruit en moi
un bruit glacé froissé au carrefour jeté sur le trottoir humide
aux pieds des hommes pressés courant avec leur morts autour de la mort qui étend ses bras
sur le cadran de l'heure seule vivante au soleil
Without a doubt, it is her self-portraits that have aroused the greatest interest among theoreticians of contemporary culture. Here the artist uses her own image to expose, one by one, the clichés of feminine and masculine identity. Claude Cahun (née Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob) reinvented herself through photography (just as she did in her writing), posing for the lens with an acute sense of “performance,” whether dressed as a woman or as a man, with her hair short, long or shaven (which was extremely incongruous for women at this time). However, to speak of identity is also to speak, indirectly, of the body, and by the same token of the self-image that one projects and that becomes social as soon as it is shared. Unlike other artists – mainly men – who made portraits but never or very rarely exposed their own person to the lens (Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, André Kertész), Claude Cahun was at once the object and the subject of her artistic experiments. This is borne out by the care with which she chose her poses and expressions, the backgrounds she used (fabric, bedspreads, sheets, hangings), and her use of specific props (masks, capes, overgarments, glass balls, etc.) – even if the real focus of the image was still the face.
Poetry gets landed with words and can not do otherwise. It also adopts sometimes (not poetry, fake poets of course) a cowardly attitude before the biggest questions : happiness, men future, the nature of being. Poetry is more often conciliation than resolution. Is it not possible to renew the links between poetry and science?
The phantasmagoria of Valentine Penrose 's images and poems, by the clever and marvel of her writing, by the naive objectivity of her collages, make me gain confidence in myself and in the virtues of truth given.In these words Paul Eluard evokes the work of Valentine Penrose (1898-1978) in Dons des Féminines, from which he wrote the preface. The poetess and surrealist collagist had multiple lives : in England with her husband, the photographer Roland Penrose, in Spain, where she mes a guru, in India where she went to live in an ashram with the painter Alice Rahon Paalen, in Algeria where she wassent in 1944 after enlisting as 3rd class soldier. Woman of character with a beauty appreciated by the surrealists, Valentine Penrose celebrates womanish, sometimes flirting with racy eroticism.
In 1949, in a pamphlet entitled Flagrant Délit, André Breton denounced and came back on one of the funniest literary fakes of the twentieth century. On 19th May of the same year, the editor Le Mercure de France, under the leadership of Maurice Saillet and Pascal Pia, published a lost manuscript of Arthur Rimbaud : La Chasse Spirituelle. In the preface of the book, Pascal Pia put forward the parallels between the previous work of the young poet and these pages. Breton was the first to rose up and demonstrated that those writings were misleading and parody :Even if the abuse of trust lasts only a second, there is an injury to the innocence - innocence without which there can be no emotional apprehension of a art work and that leaves us with the suspicion of a trap.Le Mercure de France withdrew the book from sale and gave the profits to the Rimbaud Museum. The perpetrators of this fraud, the actors Nicolas Bataille and akakia Viala, finally came forward and explained their motivation : the theatrical show they had created in 1948, an adaptation of Une Saison En Enfer, was demolished by the critics and they wanted to trap their detractors.
In 1927, following Paul Eluard and with André Breton, his two friends from Surrealism, Louis Aragon joined the Communist Party. In 1930, he went to the USSR, to represent the Surrealists Congress of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkov. Vladimir Mayakovsky, critic of the new regime, has just committed suicide. The Communists of strict obedience suspect the surrealists to drift to Trotskyism and anarchism. Aragon took sides and, on his return to France, published a poem, Front Rouge, which broke with surrealism aesthetic. His tone is provocative [Pliez les réverbères comme des fétus de pailles / Faites valser les kiosques les bancs les fontaines Wallace / Descendez les flics / Camarades / descendez les flics / Plus loin plus loin vers l'ouest où dorment / les enfants riches et les putains de première classe/ Dépasse la Madeleine Prolétariat/ Que ta fureur balaye l'Élysée] and, in 1931, Aragon is charged for inciting to murder.
Born in 1910, Dorothea Tanning left his family in 1930 to follow the course of the Academy of Arts in Chicago. She then moved to New York and lived from advertising works. She is strongly impressed by the 1936 exhibition "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" and, in 1942, she joined the New York surrealism's group led by André Breton in exile. She met Max Ernst, who is then married to Peggy Guggenheim. She became, in 1946, the fourth wife of the German artist, during a double ceremony which also united Man Ray to the dancer Juliet Browner. In 1953, Ernst and Tanning settled in France. Two years after the death of Max Ernst in 1976, Dorothea Tanning returned in New York.
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The poet discredits the usefulness of science which consolidate a little more the divorce between man and nature :
Georges Hugnet (1906-1974) grew up in Buenos Aires where his father opened a branch of the family firm specialized in wood furniture. He moved to Paris in 1913. Man with many talents, Hugnet composed poems, wrote articles, made photo-montages, was also a publisher. In 1920, he became friend with Marcel Jouhandeau, his neighbour, who introduced him to Max Jacob. With financial support from his father, he founded the Editions de la Montagne, whose goal was to publish his own work and those of friends as Tristan Tzara, Gertrude Stein. He joined the Surrealist group in 1932 through Tzara who introduced him to André Breton. Hugnet left the movement in 1939. Breton reproached Hugnet for maintaining friendship with Paul Eluard, who distance himself with the leader of Surrealism because of their political disagreement during the Spanish Civil War. However, in occupied France, Georges Hugnet joined La Main à la plume, a group that maintained the surrealist publications while Breton went into exile in 1941. While officially out of the movement, Georges Hugnet never ceased to be a part of it.
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The return to power in 1958 by General de Gaulle, following the Algerian crisis, is seen as a fascist coup d'état by the surrealist movement. Under the guidance of André Breton, his faithful collaborator, Gérard Legrand mobilizes the new guard - including Jose Pierre, Jean Robert Benayoun and Schuster, to create the journal BIEF, a surreal junction destined to express the positions of the movement. "In the locks of Surrealism, that is to be understood once and for all that water that goes down and up stays the same, yet always renews itself: BIEF attempts to identify each month, a reflection of that water." (issue No. 1 - November 15, 1958).
"Poser sa tête sur on oreiller
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