Precious corpse exquisite surrealist BRETON, ARAGON, ÉLUARD, CHAR…
"The almond that gave birth to the Philippine islands – Was greener than the sea – Dead – Is not green"
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"The almond that gave birth to the Philippine islands – Was greener than the sea – Dead – Is not green"
Sold
André BRETON – Louis ARAGON – Paul ÉLUARD –
René CHAR – Georges SADOUL – Marcel NOLL
Collective autograph manuscript.
One page in quarto on grey-blue paper.
No place of issue. [circa 1930]
"Poets sleep standing up..."
A precious exquisite corpse, collectively written 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
Is not green
Philip IV the Fair was told about the essence of Neroli
Who had just received a money order for one hundred flowers
Evil
Louis VIII the Quarrelsome
The astragalus
The Sonnet
The Bed
And all the boats at the ticket office for departures
And back
When the employee hangs it on his buttonhole
A lighthouse where deserters don't get bored
The lighthouse – it has nothing to do with it
His guardian is a sleepwalker
He – the guardian – is better
To postpone this poem to a later date
Poets sleep standing up
Ah, the trendy restaurants of the 1980s
leap years
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Among the many testaments to the Surrealists' creativity, the games they created provide valuable material that illuminates the intimate side of the movement's history, its life, and its inner workings. At the heart of these games, one stands out as more emblematic than the others and has become legendary: the "exquisite corpse." André Breton places its invention in 1925, and its likely creation 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. – A game of folded paper in which several people compose a sentence or a drawing, without any of them being able to take into account the previous contributions. The example, which has become classic and gave its name to the game, is the first sentence obtained in this way: ‘ The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine. ’”
In 1929, Surrealism was at its peak and had established itself as an artistic and literary movement. The end of 1929 and the year 1930 would be a period of many twists and turns and changes of direction for the Surrealists, ushering in a time when each member experienced the Surrealist revolution in their own way.
The Second Surrealist Manifesto was published on December 15, 1929. André Breton pronounced the exclusion from the Surrealist group of Robert Desnos, Jacques Prévert, Raymond Queneau… while newcomers joined him: René Char, Salvador Dali, Georges Sadoul, René Magritte… Paul Éluard stood with André Breton in this crisis which split the movement in two.
A major controversy erupted in late 1930 with the "Aragon affair." Accompanied by Georges Sadoul, Louis Aragon participated in the second congress of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkiv in November. There, he pledged to submit his literary activity to the directives of the Communist Party and signed a self-critique of Surrealism, thereby distancing himself from the Second Surrealist Manifesto and its Freudo-Trotskyist "deviations." The break between the two would be definitively sealed in 1932.