Click here to enlarge

Click to order the image

Image

• 

Miguel G. Vivancos

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
Person cited Miguel Garcia Vivancos

Description

Breton’s text of a presentation about naive painter Miguel Garcia Vivancos for written an exhibition in April 1950.

Very active as a critic at the beginning of 1950, André Breton introduced an exhibition of the naive painter Vivancos held at the Mirador gallery in April. Originally from Spain and discovered by Picasso, Miguel Garcia Vivancos, a former officer in the Spanish Republican army, was both a hero and a saint in the eyes of Breton, who saw him as ‘the child forever on the shoulders of man’. The text would be included in the final edition of Surrealism and Painting in 1965. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Handwritten manuscript signed, 6 April 1950.
- 1/2 page in-4°; handwritten, titled, dated and signed in green ink by André Breton, with some erasures and corrections of this text dedicated to the painting of Miguel Vivancos:
‘The painting of Miguel G. Vivancos is an indiscernible lesson of candour and strength. As a gift it goes far beyond what we ordinarily discern in art to consecrate life lived most intensely, offering the highest possibility for life to be recommenced.’ [sale catalogue, 2003]

*This entry was translated from the French by Michael Richardson.

Bibliography

André Breton (Édition publiée sous la direction d'Étienne-Alain Hubert avec la collaboration de Philippe Bernier et Marie-Claire Dumas), « Miguel G. Vivancos », Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, Œuvres complètes, tome IV, Écrits sur l'art et autres textes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 2008, p. 708-709