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To Visitors

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Author André Breton
People cited Nicolas Blondeau, Alcide Bonneau, Georges Bataille, Daniel Cordier

Description

Manuscript by André Breton for the Exposition internationale du surréalisme at the Daniel Cordier gallery in December 1959.

Strictly speaking, this notice, "To Visitors", constitutes Breton's preface to the Exposition internationale du surréalisme organised at the Daniel Cordier gallery in December 1959. From the outset, Breton discredits the assumption that the work on exhibition relates to ‘licentiousness’. The text makes reference to Georges Bataille, his enemy of old, to whom he had grown increasingly closer over the previous decade. Reworked in this way, eroticism appears as the perfect place of a mystery that only the most demanding art, in a movement reminiscent of the Symbolist experience, can both cultivate and attempt to penetrate. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Autograph manuscript, (1959)

1 1/2 pages in-4°, a manuscript in ink titled by André Breton with erasures and corrections on the back of E.R.O.S. headed notepaper of the text which appeared as an introduction to the catalogue for the E.R.O.S. exhibition.

... "It goes without saying that, from the beginning, the surrealist conception of eroticism proscribes anything that might be of a ‘licentious’ nature. As Georges Bataille observed, this ‘has a sense of inhibited eroticism, transformed into a furtive discharge, into pleasant dissimulation, into allusion'. Its inexpiable wrong is to profane the greatest mystery of the human condition"... [Sale Catalogue, 2003]

Bibliography

André Breton, « Avis aux visiteurs », in Catalogue E.R.O.S. pages 5 et 8.

Exhibition place