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**80 carats but with a flaw**

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso

Description

Signed manuscript by André Breton, dated 2^nd November 1961. 

Breton set himself a difficult challenge at the end of October 1961: in Picasso, to whom he devoted a boundless admiration, he had to acknowledge a flaw – a ‘heart’ flaw? – not in his work, whose authority was a given for the boldest of contemporary artists, but in his public life, given his support for Stalinism. During these years of the early 1960s Breton, a long-standing opponent of Stalinism, could see his position being gradually adopted by the rise of a non-communist left that would soon be labelled ‘anti-totalitarian’. Is this a long way from aesthetics? No, because what Picasso had betrayed was his own lesson in freedom, a freedom that ought to be the first and last principal of any human life worthy of the name. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005] 

Signed handwritten manuscript, 2^nd November 1961. 
3 numbered in-4° manuscript pages, dated and signed by Breton, with a few deletions and corrections of this text devoted to the work of Picasso.  
“I discover my youthful vision when I call to mind my first encounter with Picasso’s work, at second hand, through an issue of Apollinaire’s Les Soirées de Paris which included rather hazy reproductions of five of his latest still lifes (the date was 1913) [...] On the artistic level, the attitude of surrealism towards Picasso has always been extremely deferential, and on many occasions his new proposals and discoveries have recharged the magnet which has drawn us towards him. [...] Later on, Picasso moved voluntarily in the direction of surrealism. […] The proof of his adherence lies in part of his artistic output during 1923 and 1924, a number of the works he produced from 1928 to 1930, the metallic constructions of 1933, the semi-automatic poems of 1935 and, more recently, his 1943 play Desire Caught by the Tail. What has proved to be a lasting obstacle in the way of a more complete identification of his viewpoint with our own is his indefectible allegiance to the external world (of the ‘object’) and the blindness on the oneiric and imaginative level to which that predisposition has led. […] Picasso a ‘distinguished visitor’? I wish it were as simple as that. The fact remains that, today more than ever before, a body of work of such immense scope must inevitably be affected, in any final evaluation of it, by the behaviour of its author […] especially when this behaviour involves a flagrant contradiction with the message emanating from the work in question [… which] is equally flouted by the unremitting attentions of the Stalinist leaders who have continued to use Picasso for their own ends, not only during the lifetime of the dictator but even after Budapest as well. [...] It is almost incredible that […] he has nevertheless yielded to their entreaties and peopled their atomic skies with so many fallacious, anaemic doves.” [Auction catalogue, 2003]

Bibliography

André Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Gallimard, 1965.

André Breton (Édition publiée sous la direction d'Étienne-Alain Hubert avec la collaboration de Philippe Bernier et Marie-Claire Dumas), « Pablo Picasso, 80 carats... mais une ombre », Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Œuvres complètes, tome IV, Écrits sur l'art et autres textes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 2008, p. 489-492, notice p. 1286-1287.