Click here to enlarge

Click to order the image

Image

• 
• 

For the catalogue of Konrad Klapheck

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited René Descartes, Sigmund Freud, Fulcanelli, Konrad Klapheck, J. Schmit, Jacques Vaché, Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Cros, Oscar Dominguez, Alfred Jarry

Description

Manuscript of a preface dated February 1965 and intended to present Klapheck's exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery.

Dated February 1965 and intended to introduce Klapheck's exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery, this is the last preface Breton wrote for an artist. He had met Konrad Klapheck and bought a painting from him entitled Liberté, amour, art [‘Liberty, Love, Art’]. Breton was sensitive in this painter’s work to a certain way of re-enacting the relationship between man and machine, which seemed to him to refer in particular to Jarry. Not least, Klapheck's titles, which often refer to facts of moral life and avoid confining the work to a simple pastiche, were pleasing to Breton. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Autograph manuscript signed, Paris, 7 February 1965.

1 1/2 page in-4° manuscript titled, dated and signed in ink by André Breton, with erasures and corrections, of this first draft of a text dedicated to the painter Konrad Klapheck:

"Unmasked or not, as long as the world maintains its appetite for technical progress, one cannot expect the machine to renounce its role as ‘vamp’... In relation to machines, Konrad Klapheck strikes the attitude - and shows all the resourcefulness - of a charmer: playing a melody passed to him in secret, he has the power to make the snake dance under a great lustre of songbirds.” [Auction Catalogue, 2003]

Exhibition place