Valentine Hugo’s Contes Bizarres

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Looking around at the weekend for drawings by Valentine Hugo (1887–1968), I was reminded of a defunct bookselling blog which hosts scans of the illustrations that Hugo created in 1933 for Contes Bizarres, a collection of stories by Achim von Arnim (1781–1831). I posted a link to this place in the past but since neglected sites have a tendency to abruptly vanish I thought it worth bumping the illustrations into the future here. Valentine Hugo never seems to receive the same attention as the other well-known women Surrealists despite her evident talent and closer connections to the original Surrealist group than those who came later. Her careful renderings are easy to recognise, often done with pastel or crayon on textured black paper or card. This edition of Contes Bizarres was a collection of translations by Théophile Gautier with an introduction by André Breton which suggests the stories are bizarres enough to be considered Surrealist precursors. Not having read any of them I can’t say much about them but Max Ernst counted von Arnim among his favourites poets. André Breton, meanwhile, favoured German Romanticism enough to make Novalis the Magus of Flames in the Jeu de Marseilles card deck but Achim von Arnim is one such writer who still seems to be more popular in France than he is in the Anglosphere. Valentine Hugo apparently illustrated an edition of Les Chants de Maldoror around the same time as Contes Bizarres. If this is the case I’ve yet to see the illustrations anywhere.

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The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine

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From One Dough (1996) by Martin Stejskal, Jan Svankmajer, Eva Svankmajerová.

From A Dictionary of Surrealism by José Pierre (Eyre Methuen, 1974):

Exquisite corpse. The most famous of the surrealist games takes its name from the opening sentence that materialized: “Le cadavre—exquis—boira—le vin—nouveau” (1925) (The exquisite corpse—will drink—the new wine). It was produced by five players writing in turn subject, adjective, verb, object, complement, each folding over the paper so that the next player could not see what had been already written. The violent whiff of strangeness and the droll effects obtained by these verbal collages reappeared in the drawn “exquisite corpses” in which Surrealist poets and painters often combined. Despite the fact that each contribution—especially in the case of painters—is relatively identifiable, the total effect (mostly in the form of a “personage”) results from the combined elements. In this, the “exquisite corpse” can claim to have scored a victory for collective invention over individual invention and over the “signature”.

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Nude (1926–27) by Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, Man Ray.

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Exquisite Corpse (1927) by André Masson, Max Ernst, Max Morise.

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Exquisite Corpse (1928) by Man Ray, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Max Morise.

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Exquisite Corpse (1928) by Man Ray, Max Morise, André Breton, Yves Tanguy.

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Edward James: Builder of Dreams

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The Pleasure Principle (Portrait of Edward James) (1937) by René Magritte.

I was reading a book about Surrealism recently that I won’t shame by naming even though it was a bad piece of work: rambling, repetitive and with one section padded out by unfounded speculation. I managed to get a third of the way through before losing my patience when the author began to refer repeatedly to the wealthy British art patron “Edward Jones”. Edward James, as he’s more usually known, is a name guaranteed to turn up eventually in histories of 20th-century Surrealist art; despite not considering himself a collector James managed to amass the largest personal accumulation of Surrealist art in the world. For several years he was a patron of many artists including Dalí, Magritte and Leonora Carrington, becoming a life-long friend of the latter when they both moved to Mexico. He was also the model for some of Magritte’s paintings, including the very influential Reproduction Forbidden. The book that misnamed him was from a major British publisher, one who I usually regard as reliable which makes an error such as this especially annoying.

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Anyway…much of the history of Edward James’s involvement with the Surrealists is recounted in this hour-long documentary made in 1995 by Avery Danziger and Sarah Stein, a run through James’s charmed life, from gilded youth as an aristocrat and inheritor of vast wealth, to his old age as “Uncle Edward”, a benevolent eccentric living in the Mexican jungle at Xilitla where he spent many years constructing his own work of art, the concrete fantasia known as Las Pozas. Substantial portions of the documentary are lifted from Patrick Boyle’s The Secret Life of Edward James, a TV profile made in 1978 that caught the man at a time when Surrealism in Britain was briefly trendy again thanks to a large retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. Danziger and Stein’s film is a kind of supplement to Boyle’s, showing us a more complete Las Pozas while fleshing out the impressions of James via new interviews with his friends and colleagues. Not everyone who gets thanked at the end made the final cut, so there’s no Leonor Fini unfortunately, but Leonora Carrington is present via shots from the Boyle film and extracts from a taped interview.

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One aspect of Las Pozas that seldom gets mentioned (although I think George Melly might have made the connection) is the degree to which the place fits into the tradition of folly-building by wealthy British aristocrats. Follies are a familiar architectural feature of Britain’s stately homes, and being architectural caprices they come in all shapes and sizes. Most tend to be small one-off constructions, often taking the form of towers or fake ruins. The only folly comparable in scale to Las Pozas is Portmeirion, the pastiche Mediterranean town built by Clough Williams-Ellis on the coast of north Wales. Williams-Ellis, like James, spent decades tinkering with his pet project, and both locations have ended up supporting themselves by offering hotel facilities to tourists. Portmeirion, however, lacks the strangeness of the cement anomalies at Las Pozas; the only thing that’s strange about the place is its departure from vernacular Welsh architecture. Imitation and trompe-l’oeil are common elements among British follies. The closest that Portmeirion came to Surrealism was in the 1960s when it was used as a location for The Prisoner TV series. I imagine James would have found Williams-Ellis’s architectural taste rather too neat and refined. Las Pozas is a wild place that must require continual attention to prevent it from being consumed by the surrounding jungle. One of the houses there is named after Max Ernst (Danziger and Stein interview the owner), and it’s the fantasy jungles in the paintings of Ernst and Henri Rousseau that Las Pozas takes as its model.

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Eco del Universo
The Secret Life of Edward James
Palais Idéal panoramas
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Return to Las Pozas
Las Pozas and Edward James

First Papers of Surrealism, 1942

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As I was saying a couple of weeks ago, Surrealism will be 100 years old this year, if you mark the movement’s birth from the first manifestoes (there were two different ones) published in October 1924. Surrealism doesn’t really have a definite beginning, however, either in 1924 or earlier on; the movement evolved over several years, with different factions competing for followers while squabbling over intentions. After a great deal of ferment the manifestoes from the opposed groups led by Yvan Goll and André Breton were a declaration that something substantial had been happening that required definition. I’m not sure why all of this interests me as much as it does just now, but I’m looking forward to seeing where the interest leads. Don’t be surprised to see more posts on the subject in the coming months.

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So, then… Fast-forward to 1942 and First Papers of Surrealism, an exhibition of paintings staged in New York City by the Coordination Council of French Relief Societies in October of that year. The exhibition was curated by André Breton with the assistance of Marcel Duchamp, Breton having recently arrived in the United States after escaping from Nazi-occupied France together with a small group of Surrealist artists, some of whom were represented in the show. Duchamp’s main contribution was His Twine, an installation of a large quantity of string threaded around the exhibition space through which the visitors had to peer in order to see the paintings. Duchamp also invited a group of children to play ball games inside the gallery on the opening night. This wasn’t the first Surrealist exhibition to be held in New York—Julien Levy had introduced the city to the latest art movement at his own gallery in 1933, and had been showing Surrealist paintings and Joseph Cornell’s artworks in the years that followed—but First Papers on Surrealism was an important event, with many major artists represented.

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What you see here are pages from the exhibition catalogue, a publication which is more like one of the smaller Surrealist magazines than a mere list of the pictures on display. Marcel Duchamp designed the die-cut cover (those holes make me wonder whether these were also originally threaded with string), while the catalogue interior contains an intriguing collection of quotes, captions, photographs and illustrations. Breton’s “Great Transparent Ones” raise their invisible heads again, while the artists and curators are all depicted in a series of “compensation portraits” which stand in for an absence of suitable photos.

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Echoes of de Chirico

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The Song of Love (1914) by Giorgio de Chirico.

His art studies, begun in Athens, were continued in Munich where he discovered the work of Max Klinger and Arnold Böcklin, not to mention the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, whose influence is perceptible in the paintings he went on to produce in Florence and Turin. In addition, his melancholy temperament lay behind the works that Guillaume Apollinaire labelled “metaphysical,” works in which elements from the real world (deserted squares and arcades, factory chimneys, trains, clocks, gloves, artichokes) were imbued with a sense of strangeness.

Keith Aspley, Historical Dictionary of Surrealism


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The Enigma of a Day (1914) by Giorgio de Chirico.


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Plate II from Let There Be Fashion, Down With Art (Fiat modes pereat ars) (1920) by “Dadamax Ernst”.


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The Birth of an Idol (1926) by René Magritte.

Some time during the latter part of 1923 [Magritte] came face-to-face with his destiny, in the form of a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, who was one of the painters most admired by the Paris Surrealists: Le Chant d’amour (The Song of Love, 1914); to be more precise, a black-and-white reproduction of that painting in the review Les Feuilles libres, a very contrasty reproduction, as Sylvester has it, which only heightened the drama of the outsize objects suspended in the foreground of one of de Chirico’s “metaphysical landscapes”… He was shown it by Lecomte, or Mesens, or both. He was overwhelmed. […] Magritte always spoke of de Chirico as his one and only master. As a rule, he was exceedingly parsimonious in his assessment of other artists, past and present. In his own time, de Chirico (1888–1978) and Ernst (1891–1976) appear as the only two he admired, more or less unconditionally.

Magritte: A Life by Alex Danchev


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Sewing Machine with Umbrellas in a Surrealist Landscape (1941) by Salvador Dalí.

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