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Enquiry (for Le Figaro littéraire)

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Karel Appel, Vassily Kandinsky, Pierre Mazars, Edvard Munch, Arthur Rimbaud, Henri, dit le Douanier Rousseau, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Georges Seurat

Description

Manuscript signed by André Breton and dated 5 June 1955.

Responding to an enquiry in Le Figaro littéraire about the distortions to which women’s faces are subjected in Picasso's work, Breton is careful to distinguish between what might wrongly appear to be a pathology peculiar to the Picasso as a man and what relates to an aesthetic quest. Woman, he explains, is treated plastically as an object, independent of any moral considerations - separating art and politics, the battle of the late 1930s, thus becomes separating painting from morality. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Original manuscript signed by André Breton and dated 5 June 1955.

- 1 page in-12 handwritten, titled and signed in ink by André Breton, with erasures and corrections, a text relating to Picasso's painting in response to an enquiry in Le Figaro.

“It would be a mistake to suppose for a moment that, in Picasso, the extreme variations in the interpretation of the female face are the product of inner movements of exceptional scope and bear witness to a particular agitation in regard to women. The truth is that woman is here considered not as a subject, but as an object, like a guitar or a lollipop... I don't care if I'm one of the few people to consider a work of ‘feeling’ like Guernicato be a failure. To attribute secret intentions to Picasso's distortion of the female face is, in my opinion, more than a little risky...”.

- 1 page in-12 handwritten first draft of the same text with erasures and corrections.

Published in Le Figaro Littéraire, 11 June 1955. [Auction Catalogue, 2003]

Bibliography

André Breton (Édition publiée sous la direction d'Étienne-Alain Hubert avec la collaboration de Philippe Bernier et Marie-Claire Dumas), « Pablo Picasso, Réponse à une enquête », Le Surréalisme et la Peinture III, Œuvres complètes, tome IV, Écrits sur l'art et autres textes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 2008, p. 487-488, notice p. 1285-1286.