Incredibly eager to see everything in Paris after a total life experience of American Midwestern sameness; a processed and canned version of daily existence that somehow presented itself as the only real possibility of life in the ’50s and ’60s. Our desire for something more had already caused us to be fascinated with anthropology and surrealism, the idea of the reinvention of daily life. In Paris, we felt suddenly wide awake and alert in a newly discovered world.
The smell was different, a crazy brew of onion soup, crêpes, and diesel fuel; the sounds were new, a delirious French language, often stripped of its meaning because it was too fast for us and appreciated for its pure sound and music, combined with horns of frantic French drivers seemingly engaged in honking competitions, tires on cobblestones. And the darkness: Paris is actually farther north than Chicago and thus has less winter daytime.
To compensate, there are lights and mirrors everywhere, highly polished. Plenty of things to do. Commenting on the Left Bank, I wrote in a letter home, “There are more than two bookstores per block.” They all had Le Surréalisme et la peinture by André Breton prominently displayed in the center of their windows. It had just come out in a new edition. Posters announced there was being held, at this very moment, the 11th International Surrealist Exhibition, right here on the Left Bank at the Galerie l’Oeil at 3 rue Séguier, just a few blocks from our hotel. We couldn’t believe our good fortune and immediately walked over. This was December 24, Christmas Eve.
Absolute Divergence
The exhibition was called L’Écart absolu, absolute divergence; its poster and the cover of the catalog featured a portrait of Charles Fourier, the French utopian socialist; but the portrait was redone in the spirit of absolute divergence in a harmonic variation, creating an unusual pattern and compelling image; the face became a geometric form in its infinite variations, refracted as is light by a prism. Several other of these harmonic portraits invented by Pierre Faucheux were in the exhibition and catalog.
Inside, near the entrance, was a shimmering bead work by Max Walter Svanberg and an intensely dark ink drawing by Adrien Dax; standing nearby, a glass case that contained a small army of amusing bread dough figures by Reinhoud. Along the wall was the control panel of a machine, a collective object of the Surrealist Group called the “Disordinator,” perhaps the opposite of coordinator. When one pressed a button or two on the panel, special glass windows would light up containing surrealist objects; it bore a humorous analogical resemblance to the ingenious Metro machine meant to give passengers their coordinates and get them from one place to another. It was made up of ten windows or cases; some of the captions were “Critique of the Machine,” “The Conquest of Space,” “Disordination of Work,” “Disordination of Leisure.”
The exhibition contained many classic works of surrealism, Marcel Duchamp’s Why Not Sneeze? a ready-made from 1921, a small white cage filled with white marble cubes and a cuttlebone, a Max Ernst frottage from 1926, L’Jole, a Man Ray work, L’Impossibilité from 1920, even a precursor of surrealism, Gustave Moreau, with Le Sphinx vainqueur. I laughed merrily at Wolfgang Paalen’s Nuage articulé, an umbrella made of sponges.
An object by André Breton from 1931 consisted of found objects arranged in a manner that indeed fulfilled its name, Objet à fonctionnement symbolique, an exotic fetish of erotism.
The antipatriotic object, the Arc of Defeat, the famous Arc de Triomph redone with a wooden leg suggested by Mimi Parent and assembled so it filled the center of the room and stood perhaps eight feet tall.
Then in the next room, we found a huge pink robot sprouting police sirens, while the walls around it lit up with little white lights, BIP!-BIP!-BIP!, this monster, a collective surrealist object called The Consumer! Its body consisted of a pink overstuffed mattress with upholstered arms and square head encircled by cone-shaped police sirens; its one staring eye, a TV set; its stomach was a washing machine filled with daily newspapers; its back contained a refrigerator that opened revealing a bridal gown and veil, truly a fine piece, wonderful; so savagely accurate in its humorous appraisal of the “modern human,” reduced to the role of “consumer.”
In the same room was a large Alechinsky called Central Park done in 1965; years later I came across it in a book I was reading at Northwestern University and said to myself, “What a wonderful thing!” Then, I remembered where I had first seen it; it was like recognizing an old friend.
Standing motionlessly in a quiet room, looking at first glance like a suit of armor, stood The Necrophile, a work by Jean Benoît, a man’s form clothed in light gray from head to foot; its cloak and suit were gray blocks of stone, its face half mask, its mouth opened to reveal a flame-red tongue, its collar a field of tombstones. At its waist a chain hung with hammer, knife, and other tools, in its right hand was held a staff, on top of which a gray devil held a white angel, from the crotch hung a long, gray, segmented penis-tail that looped, nearly touching the floor. On its face an odd expression, ready to laugh.
Leonora Carrington was represented by a painting, El Ravarok, filled with marvelous people and animals, a carriage drawn by a woman-horse with prominent female breasts.
A painting by Toyen glowed from its dark canvas, a shell, a dark flying bat, a purse with glowing red tongue, luminous white evening gloves, a dark phantom woman’s face with golden eyelids. A work done in wood burning technique by Mimi Parent, En Veilleuse, a proud woman glowed with surrealist passion.
On a dark wall hung a cabinet by Jorge Camacho La Souriceir d’amour (1965), a cutout painting by Jean-Claude Silbermann, Au plaises des demoiselles (1964), a Konrad Klapheck sensuous machine painting, Le Visage de La Terreur, a wonderful Robert Legarde object box, Maison close sur la cour, en visite le jardin (1965).
The surrealists in the show were from all over the world; surrealism had always attracted an international following, people from everywhere joined together by their “passional attraction” for the surrealist project. “Passional attraction” was a concept of Charles Fourier, through which human society would be linked together by its desires, loves, and interests rather than the chains of nationality and religion, ghosts of a blood-soaked past.
After we went through the exhibition twice very thoroughly, we talked with the gallery managers, telling them we had come to Paris in hopes of meeting the surrealists, but that our correspondent, Robert Benayoun, seemed to be very ill when we phoned. No, they insisted, Benayoun was not ill, he had been seen very recently. They gave us Benayoun’s correct phone number.
When we got back to our hotel, we called him, rather our hotelkeeper called him, and then we talked (French phones remained difficult); he invited us over to his place at 179 rue de la Pompe.
We went over as soon as we could. My first impression was that he had a lot of books; Benayoun’s large apartment had books stacked up everywhere, on the floor, between the furniture, behind the drapes, very appealing to us book lovers; we had to suppress the desire to browse. Fortunately for us, Benayoun spoke a flawless English. Initially we talked about Positif, the film journal he was editing, and he gave us the names of several bookstores. I liked him at once. He was delightful company, we had a very fine time. A Surrealist New Year’s Eve party was being planned for December 31 at the Théâtre Ranelagh; he invited us and gave us the address. About our phone call to the Robert Benayoun who was ill, he said, “I’ll have to call and see how I’m doing.”
For us Paris was an absolute divergence, l’écart absolu from our lives up to that point. Sometimes I think about the amazing chance of it; the certainty that if we hadn’t been rejected from England, we would not have seen this international surrealist exhibition, or visited 42 rue Fontaine, and would have missed entirely so many of our other experiences in Paris. We might not have met André Breton and the Surrealist Group.