Surrealism for Sale

["Gilles d'Aymery" <aymery@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Sometimes I do not feel too good about being a Frenchie...]

December 17, 2002
Surrealism for Sale, Straight From the Source
By ALAN RIDING


PARIS, Dec. 16 ? In photographs André Breton is rarely seen smiling. As the 
founder and undisputed leader of the Surrealist movement, he evidently took 
himself seriously. Between the 1920's and 1950's he alone defined the
 rules of Surrealism and tolerated no challenge to his authority. He encouraged 
rebellion against prevailing artistic and social norms, but artists and poets 
who fell out of his favor were summarily expelled from the move
ment.

On the other hand, he must have had loads of charisma.

Over the years, in addition to the artworks he bought, notably primitive 
sculptures from Oceania, hundreds of paintings, drawings, photographs and books 
were given to him by friends, followers and little-known artists see
king his blessing. When Breton died at 70 on Sept. 28, 1966, his small 
apartment at 42 Rue Fontaine in the Pigalle district of Paris was a veritable 
treasure trove. He had lived there since 1922. His heirs ? his widow, El
isa, and his daughter from an earlier relationship, Aube ? decided to touch 
nothing. "My stepmother lived there, and it was her family environment," Aube 
Breton Elléouët, 67, explained. "For 35 years we looked for an answ
er to what could be done with this collection. My father had never expressed 
himself on the subject."

Now, two years after Elisa Breton's death, with the French government unwilling 
to buy the collection, the largest single record of the Surrealist movement is 
to be sold next spring at the Hôtel Drouot-Richelieu, where Pa
ris auctions are held. One measure of the size of the sale is that the auction 
house, CalmelsCohen, plans at least six catalogs to cover the 5,300 lots. The 
auction, from April 1 to 18, is expected to raise $30 million to
 $40 million.

Books, which account for 3,500 of the lots, include some dedicated to Breton by 
Freud, Trotsky and Apollinaire as well as art catalogs and journals. Among the 
500 lots of manuscripts are originals of some of Breton's writ
ings as well as records of Surrealist "games" and experiments. Modern art is 
represented by 450 paintings, drawings and sculptures and 500 lots of 
photographs. And there are 200 examples of popular art and 150 works of pr
imitive art, mainly from Oceania. (A description of the collection is online at 
breton.calmelscohen.com.)

To compensate for the inevitable dispersal of the collection, the entire 
contents of 42 Rue Fontaine have been recorded digitally and will be made 
available through a CD-ROM. "Everything," explains a news release by Jean-
Michel Ollé and Jean-Pierre Sakoun, who prepared the database. "Paintings, 
objects, photos, manuscripts, books. Everything from the least important to the 
most, the historic and the everyday, the private and the public."

The principal item not included in the auction is what is known as Breton's 
Wall, literally the cluttered wall behind his desk that was featured in many 
photographs and came to be considered a work of art ? the art of col
lecting ? in its own right. The wall was given by Mrs. Breton Elléouët to the 
National Museum of Modern Art at the Georges Pompidou Center in lieu of death 
duties owed to the government by the Breton estate.

The wall's shelves are crowded with dozens of Oceanic sculptures as well as 
Inuit objects and pre-Hispanic figures from Mexico. On the wall itself are 
paintings, engravings and drawings by the likes of Francis Picabia, Al
fred Jarry, Roberto Matta, Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, Joan Miró and 
Wassily Kandinsky. And tucked among them is the odd personal item, like a 
photograph of Elisa Breton.

Yet the collection to be sold in the spring reveals more about Breton's 
approach to art, since it includes not only major works, but also lesser works 
by long forgotten artists and even objects that Breton bought at aucti
ons and flea markets or simply found while out strolling.

"My father had as much passion for a piece found on the bank of a river as for 
an important painting in his collection," Mrs. Breton Elléouët said.

Still, the auction will not lack important works, notably "Danseuse Espagnole" 
or "Spanish Dancer," by Miró, Matta's "Poster for Arcane 17," Magritte's "Woman 
Hidden in a Forest," an untitled work by Arshile Gorky and "Da
nger, Dancer," a painting on a photograph on glass by Man Ray. It also includes 
scores of less valuable works by equally famous artists, among them Picasso, 
Picabia, Arp, Duchamp, Max Ernst, Wilfredo Lam, Victor Brauner a
nd André Masson. More than 100 original prints by Man Ray dominate the 
photography collection.

Notably absent is any work by Giorgio de Chirico, the Italian Metaphysical 
painter, with whom Breton fell out. And a postcard-size collage and gouache is 
the only work in the sale by Salvador Dali, easily the most famous
Surrealist painter, who was expelled from the movement by Breton. The auction 
also includes no book by the poet Louis Aragon, another friend turned foe. The 
evidence is clear: Surrealist rebels were expurgated from Breton
's life.

Breton himself, while he dabbled with collages and wrote poetry of considerable 
merit, was most famous simply for being Breton. He was above all immensely 
curious, his early poetry and interest in psychoanalysis serving a
s a springboard for Surrealism's constant exploration of the connections 
between poetry and life, chance, love and sexuality. To describe Surrealism as 
a sect is to ignore its enormous influence, but Breton himself was ve
ry much its guru.

"I believe it is into my thought that I put all my daring, all the strength and 
hope of which I am capable," he wrote in a letter to the art collector Jacques 
Doucet in December 1924, shortly after publication of the Surr
ealist Manifesto. "It possesses me entirely, jealously and makes a mockery of 
worldly goods."

Certainly while Surrealism today is best remembered through the works of Dali, 
Magritte, Miró and Ernst, visual art was not central to Breton's vision of the 
movement. Yet he undoubtedly had an eye for innovative art: it
was at his insistence that in 1924 Doucet bought one of the landmark works of 
20th-century art, Picasso's "Desmoiselles d'Avignon," now a jewel in the 
collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

As an inspiration for Surrealism, though, Breton was drawn principally to 
Oceanic art, which he described as "one of the great lock-keepers of our 
heart." While African art was the rage in Paris at the time, he felt it wa
s too linked to human rituals and animals. He preferred Oceanic art "for its 
immemorial effort to express the interpenetration of the physical and the 
mental, to triumph over the dualism of perception and representation."
 Put more simply, he considered it more mystical.

"Oceanic objects were Breton's companions all his life," said Pierre Amrouche, 
an expert on primitive art who is an adviser to the Breton auction. "It was his 
family, a tribe of which he was the chief. The very first obje
ct he acquired was an Easter Island piece bought when he was 15 with money he 
was given for good school results." (The most valuable Oceanic work in the 
auction is "Uli," a four-foot-high wooden ancestor statue from the S
outh Pacific island New Ireland, with a sale price estimated at $600,000 to 
$800,000.)

When Breton traveled to Mexico in 1938 to visit the exiled Trotsky,
he discovered pre-Hispanic art. And when he was himself exiled in
the United States during World War II, he further developed his
interest in American Indian and Inuit art, which also joined his
collection. From 1941 to 1945, with Ernst, Dali, Matta and other
Surrealists also in exile, New York became the temporary capital of
Surrealism, although Breton never felt at home there: he never
bothered to learn English.

His own political views were always on the left, but he was a true
militant only of Surrealism.

[...]
Full text at
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/arts/design/17BRET.html?8bhp

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