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[At this point where we are...]

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Yosip Brodsky, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Nikita Khrouchtchev, Jean-Claude Silbermann, Léon Trotsky

Description

Fragment of a manuscript by André Breton dated October 1964.

On the front is Trotsky and on the back one Josef Brodsky, from Leningrad. Brodsky would later come to a position of prominence, but Breton was only aware of him in 1964 after he had been prosecuted for ‘idleness’: opposition to Stalinism is made on both political and moral levels, a defence of poetic liberty bringing together these two aspects of a struggle at the centre of Breton's life. Thus he takes the opportunity of a preface to a Silbermann exhibition (Mona Lisa Gallery, November-December 1964) to affirm against all opposition these three principles that were precious beyond measure: poetry, love, freedom. His text would be included the following year in Le Surréalisme et la peinture. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Handwritten manuscript, undated [October 1964].
- 1 page in-4°, first draft manuscript in ink by Breton, with erasures and corrections of a text pointing out the importance of Freud's discoveries:
‘The sovereign pressure exerted by Freud increasingly seems these days to have resulted in agreement that sexuality motivates the world... one could hope for an advance (a persistent rumour suggests that Swedish youth, in this respect more liberated than any other, has also become more bewildered). Systematic sexual education could be valuable only when it leaves the wellsprings of sublimation intact while giving ways to compensate for if not supplant the attraction of the second forbidden fruit.’
‘It can only be a matter of initiation, with all this implies of the sacred - devoid of anything religions, of course.’
- 1/2 page in-4°, first draft manuscript in ink by André Breton on the back of La Dragonne headed paper with erasures and corrections of this text relating to the publication in French of Leon Trotsky's Literature and Revolution:
‘Now that Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution has finally appeared in French translation, its fundamental thesis can no longer be evaded, specifically that the ideological struggle on the one hand between Stalinism and its after effects and on the other hand revolutionary anti-Stalinism is based on ‘an opposition in the general conception of humanity’s material and spiritual life’. Rejecting the servilities required by ‘commitment’, this voice proclaims that art must be free. [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), « Silbermann, à ce prix », Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Œuvres complètes, tomevIV, Écrits sur l'art et autres textes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 2008, p. 838-841, notice and notes p. 1389-1391.

Exhibition place

See also

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Silbermann

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André Breton, José Pierre

Plaquette parue en 1964 à propos de l'exposition J.-C. Silbermann organisée par la galerie Mona Lisa du 18 novembre au 31 décembre 1964.

Trois images, une notice descriptive, un lien, une bibliographie, une exposition.