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On Arthur Cravan

[Note on Arthur Cravan]

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Arthur Cravan, Mina Loy, Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso

Description

Manuscript of an article by André Breton devoted to Arthur Cravan and published in the first issue of VVV, June 1942.

From one war to another... In 1942, Breton devoted an article in the magazine VVV to Cravan, the emblematic representative of a "heroic era" - not for his battles in the trenches, but for the "struggles around Cubism, Futurism, Orphism"... It is Cravan's completely Rimbaldian intransigence that Breton celebrates, seeing in the boxer poet "genius in its raw state". [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Signed autograph manuscript, undated [1942].

- 1/2 page in-4° handwritten and signed in green ink by André Breton:

"In him Rimbaud's determination is fulfilled without compromise: ‘It is necessary to be absolutely modern’... His actions during these few years were developed in an atmosphere of absolute irreverence, provocation, and scandal that heralded Dada. Cravan disappeared in 1921 during a boat trip in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Published in VVV in June 1942. [Auction Catalogue, 2003]

Bibliography

- André Breton, (Édition de Marguerite Bonnet avec la collaboration de Philippe Bernier, Marie-Claire Dumas, Étienne-Alain Hubert et José Pierre), [Note sur Arthur Cravan], Œuvres complètes, tome III, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, pages 125-126.
- VVV, n°1, juin 1942, p. 55.