Jean-Pierre DUPREY (1930-1959) - Lot 93

Jean-Pierre DUPREY (1930-1959) Untitled Mixed media, charcoal, blurring and scraping on paper previously coated with plaster in light relief. Scattered scratches and creases on the right edge. 75 x 105 cm PROVENANCE: DBC [Daniel Bouyjou-Cordier] collection (handwritten note and inventory number on back). Jean-Pierre DUPREY (1930-1959), mythical and cursed figure of surrealism, "archangel of rebellious youth", who committed suicide at the age of 29, was a poet, painter and sculptor. Born in Rouen, he arrived in Paris at the age of 18 at the invitation of André Breton, who prefaced his first book and continued to support him, organizing his first exhibition at his gallery, l'Étoile scellée, from February 16 to March 13, 1954. Although Jean-Pierre Duprey initially devoted himself to poetry until the early 1950s, he later developed a passion for plastic art and sculpture, which he discovered with the ironmonger René Hanesse. A dark, elusive and fascinating personality, he was interned at Saint-Anne hospital in the summer of 1959, after his brutal arrest for urinating on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, an "objective" act of protest against the Algerian war. Having returned to poetry, on October 2, 1959, his wife mailed André Breton his last manuscript, La Fin et la Manière, and he hanged himself from the main beam in his studio.