ANDRÉ BRETON (1896-1966) DU SURRÉALISME EN SES... Lot n° 7

ANDRÉ BRETON (1896-1966) OF SURREALISM IN ITS LIVING WORKS. AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT SIGNED AND TYPESCRIPT. Paris May 1953, 4 pages in-4 in ink and a horizontal autograph strip. Manuscript of first draft dated and signed, with numerous erasures and corrections. Published in 1955 by the Sagittaire publishing house in 'Les manifestes du surréalisme followed by Prolégomènes à un troisième manifeste du surréalisme ou non du surréalisme en ses œuvres vives and d'éphémérides surréalistes'. ...'It is now common knowledge that surrealism, as an organized movement, was born in a large-scale operation on language. On this subject one cannot repeat too much that the products of the verbal or graphic automatism that it began by putting forward, in the spirit of their authors, did not raise at all the aesthetic criterion. As soon as the vanity of some of these had allowed such a criterion to find a hold - which was not long - the operation was distorted and, to top it off, the "state of grace" which had made it possible was lost... ...'This need to react in a drastic way against the depreciation of language, which was affirmed here with Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé at the same time as in England with Lewis Carroll - has not ceased to manifest itself imperiously since then. One has for proof the attempts of very unequal interest, which correspond to the "words of the freedom" of the futurism, to the very relative "spontaneity" dada, while passing by the exuberance of an activity of "games of words" connecting itself all that badly to the "phonetic cabal" or "language of the birds" (Jean-Pierre Brisset, Raymond Roussel, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Desnos) and by the unleashing of the word of a "revolution of the word" (James Joyce, E.E Cummings, Henri Michaux) which could not make less than to lead to the "lettrism". On the plastic level, the evolution was to reflect the same concern... The typescript of Surrealism in its living works with some variants and autograph corrections in ink of André Breton, 8 pages. AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT, SIGNED AND TYPESCRIPT. Paris, May 1953, 4pp. ink on paper, 4to and a horizontal autograph strip. First draft manuscript dated and signed, with numerous erasures and corrections. Published in 1955 by Editions du Sagittaire in "Les manifestes du surréalisme suivi de Prolégomènes à un troisième manifeste du surréalisme ou non du surréalisme en ses œuvres vives et d'éphémérides surréalistes". ...'It is now common knowledge that surrealism, as an organized movement, was born in a large-scale operation concerning language. On this subject one cannot repeat too much that the products of the verbal or graphic automatism that it began by putting forward, in the spirit of their authors, did not raise at all the aesthetic criterion. As soon as the vanity of some of these had allowed such a criterion to find a hold - which was not long - the operation was distorted and, to top it off, the "state of grace" which had made it possible was lost... ...'This need to react in a drastic way against the depreciation of language, which was affirmed here with Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé at the same time as in England with Lewis Carroll - has not ceased to manifest itself imperiously since then. One has for proof the attempts of very unequal interest, which correspond to the "words of the freedom" of the futurism, to the very relative "spontaneity" dada, while passing by the exuberance of an activity of "games of words" connecting itself all that badly to the "phonetic cabal" or "language of the birds" (Jean-Pierre Brisset, Raymond Roussel, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Desnos) and by the unleashing of the word of a "revolution of the word" (James Joyce, E.E Cummings, Henri Michaux) which could not make less than to lead to the "lettrism". On the plastic level, the evolution was to reflect the same concern... With the typescript of Surréalisme en ses œuvres vives with some variants and autograph corrections in ink of André Breton, 8pp. Footnotes: Provenance Private collection, France. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com