Robert DESNOS (1900-1945) - Lot 165

Lot 165
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Robert DESNOS (1900-1945) - Lot 165
Robert DESNOS (1900-1945) 9. Will you follow Rrose Sélavy to the land of decimal numbers, where there is neither rubble nor evil? 1926 Oil on canvas, signed, dated and dedicated to Germaine Decaris lower right and titled lower left. 46 x 38 cm Provenance: Germaine Decaris (1899-1955), journalist, socialist-communist activist, pacifist, close to the Surrealists. Her friendship with Robert Desnos is confirmed by correspondence and an article published in Soir on June 18, 1928 about Man Ray's film L'Étoile de mer, illustrating a poem by Robert Desnos (1928, 15 min). Our painting is a veritable manifesto, a synthesis of poetry and painting. Its date of completion and the extraordinary allusion to the figure of Rrose Sélavy (a fictional female character created by Marcel Duchamp in 1920), project us into the heart of the Surrealist avant-garde, a hundred years on! The canvas illustrates the questioning aphorism Suivrez-vous Rrose Sélavy au pays des nombres décimaux où il n'y a ni décombres ni maux? These lines are taken from Desnos' collection Corps et biens, published in 1930 and composed of poems written between 1919 and 1929. This publication sums up ten years of Robert Desnos' work with the Surrealists, right up to his break with André Breton, and questions materiality, desire and the body. The poems in the Rrose Sélavy section are said to have been initiated by the Surrealists' automatic writing sessions under hypnosis, in which Desnos first participated on September 25, 1922, in the Certa bar in Paris, with René Crevel, Benjamin Péret, André Breton and others... Corps et biens contains one hundred and fifty writings on Rrose Sélavy, combining aphorisms, puns and spoonerisms. The one we're interested in is No. 9: Rrose Selavy 1. In an apple stucco temple, the shepherd distilled the juice of the psalms. 2. Rrose Selavy asks if the Flowers of Evil have changed the morals of the phalle: what does Omphale think? 3. Travelers, carry peacock feathers to the girls of Pamplona. 4. Is a wise man's solution a page's pollution? 5. I love you, O beautiful men in possum clothing. Question to astronomers 6. Will Rrose Sélavy long inscribe the cadastre of years on the dial of the stars? 7. O my skull, fading star of mother-of-pearl. 8. In the land of Rrose Sélavy, we love fools and lawless wolves. 9. Will you follow Rrose Sélavy to the land of decimal numbers, where there is neither rubble nor evil? 10. Rrose Sélavy wonders if the death of the seasons puts a spell on houses. 11. Pass me my Berber bow says the barbarian monarch. 12. The thundering planets in the sky frighten the quails in love with the amazing scale-leaved plants grown by Rrose Sélavy. 13. Rrose Sélavy knows the salt merchant well. [...] Among all these writings, the sentence in our painting seems to stand out from the others because of its presence on the subscription leaflets of the surrealist magazine Littérature, created by Breton, Aragon and Soupault in 1919. In the collective work edited by Marie-Claire Dumas, Robert Desnos, Écrits sur les peintres, Paris, Textes/Flammarion, 2011 (for the edition consulted), a set of drawings by Desnos is reproduced, virtually all from the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet. While the author states that: "according to André Breton, in the Manifeste du Surréalisme, Robert Desnos declared himself incapable of drawing, at least in his waking state", she doubts this assertion, while insisting on the period of hypnotic sleep (late 1922-early 1923), whose creations of great strangeness captured André Breton's attention, and specifying that "Desnos' drawing activity continued, with varied inventions, until 1928". Of the fifty or so drawings in all formats (some pencilled on pieces of restaurant tablecloth) referenced in this book, only three (8), (9) and (11) feature Rrose Sélavy's aphorisms. Paintings by Robert Desnos, fragile witnesses to his Surrealist adventure, are rare; we have located three canvases preserved in French public collections, Sans titre, 1928, in the Musée des Beaux-arts de Reims, bought by pre-emption at a public auction at Drouot in 2007, and two later canvases, La Lune et le Soleil ou Le couple astral, 1935 (from the former Youki Desnos collection) and Le livre secret pour Youki, belonging to the collections of the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet in Paris. At Germany, the Kunsthalle Hamburg houses La mort de Max Ernst from 1923. Our unique and completely unpublished painting thus appears to be the only one by Robert Desnos offering a direct textual reference to one of his poems during the most intense phase of sur
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