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[Le Figaro litteraire in its next issue…]

Letter dated 19 December 1953

Correspondence

Author

Author Pierre Mazars
Letter to André Breton
People cited Eisenhower, Elizabeth d'Angleterre, Moisson, Mossadegh

Description

Letter from Pierre Mazards dated 19 December 1953 regarding an enquiry by Le Figaro littéraire to be published on 2 January 1954.

This response to an enquiry by Le Figaro littéraire, reproduced at the end of Alentours II in the third volume of the Œuvres complètes, attests to the growing interest Breton had from the early 1950s in Gallic and Gallo-Roman antiquities. The treasure of Vix, the circumstances of whose discovery he narrates with a voracious pleasure, appears to him to represent a kind of revelation, in any case of those he would have liked to have attended. In 1955, he organised the great exhibition Perennity of Gallic art with Charles Estienne, in the preface of which he links this forgotten aesthetic to the non-retinal art imagined by Marcel Duchamp. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Typescripted letter, 19 December 1953.
1 page in-4 typescript, dated and signed Pierre Mazards, on Figaro littéraire letterhead.
In a typescript letter signed Pierre Mazars asks André Breton to choose from a list of 12 events that occurred in 1953, ranging from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth to the descent of the bathyscaphe, the death of Stalin, the ‘premiere’ of the Himalayas and the discovery of the Treasure of Vix. [sale catalogue, 2003]

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

Bibliography

André Breton, « [Réponse à une enquête du Figaro littéraire] », Œuvres complètes, tome III, (Édition établie par Marguerite Bonnet et Étienne-Alain Hubert avec les contributions de Philippe Bernier, Marie-Claire Dumas et José Pierre), Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, p. 1104, notice p. 1467

Place of origin