Precious corpse exquisite surrealist BRETON, ARAGON, ÉLUARD, CHAR...

André BRETON – Louis ARAGON – Paul ÉLUARD –

René CHAR – Georges SADOUL – Marcel NOLL

Collective autograph manuscript.

One page in-4° on gray-blue paper.

Slnd. [around 1930]

“Poets sleep standing up…”

Precious exquisite corpse written collectively by the founders of surrealism.

The document was written, in order, by: André Breton (lines 1 and 2), Louis Aragon (lines 3, 4, 5 and 6), Georges Sadoul (lines 7 to 11), Paul Éluard (lines 12 to 15), Marcel Noll (lines 16 and 17) and René Char (lines 18 to 22).

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The almond that gave birth to the Philippine Islands

Was greener than the sea

Dead

Isn't green

Told Philip IV the Fair the essence of Neroli

Who had just received a money order for a hundred flowers

Difficulty

Louis Eight Le Hutin

Astragalus

The Sonnet

The bed

And all the boats at the ticket office

And back

When the employee hangs on his buttonhole

A lighthouse where deserters don't get bored

It – the lighthouse – has nothing to do with it

His guardian is sleepwalking

He – the guardian – It is best

To return this poem to a later date

Poets sleep standing

Ah the fashionable restaurants of the years

leap years

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Among the many testimonies to the creativity of the Surrealists, the fruit of the games constitutes material which sheds light on the intimate side of the history of the movement, its life and its workings. At the center of these games, there is one more emblematic than the others and passed down to posterity: the “exquisite corpse”. André Breton places his invention in 1925 and its probable authorship is attributed to Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy.

In the Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism, published in 1938, André Breton and Paul Éluard give us the following definition: “ EXQUISITE CORPSE. – Folded paper game which consists of having several people compose a sentence or a drawing, without any of them being able to take into account the previous collaboration or collaborations. The example, which has become classic, which gave its name to the game, is contained in the first sentence obtained in this way: “ The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine. »

In 1929, surrealism was at its peak and established itself as an artistic and literary movement. The end of 1929 and the year 1930 will be the period of many twists and turns and changes of direction for the surrealists, opening onto a time when each member experiences the surrealist revolution in their own way.

The Second Manifesto of Surrealism was published on December 15, 1929. André Breton declared the exclusion of the surrealist group of Robert Desnos, Jacques Prévert, Raymond Queneau... while newcomers joined him: René Char, Salvador Dali, Georges Sadoul, René Magritte… Paul Éluard stands alongside André Breton in this crisis which is splitting the movement in two.

A major malaise broke out at the end of 1930 with the “Aragon affair”. Accompanied by Georges Sadoul, Louis Aragon participated, in November, in Kharkov, in the second congress of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers: there he pledged to submit his literary activity to the directives of the Communist Party and signed a self-critique of surrealism by which he dissociates himself from the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, and its Freudo-Trotskyist “drifts”. The break between the two will be definitively consummated in 1932.