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The Viking's Wife

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Hyeronimus Bosch, Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud, Max Walter Svanberg, Ludwig Achim von Arnim

Description

Manuscript signed by André Breton and dated 6 March 1955.

Momentarily brought back to his native Sweden by this fiery comparison with the Vikings, Max Walter Svanberg saw two texts devoted to him during 1954 and 1955. In the first (‘Homage to Max Walter Svanberg’) Breton evokes the ‘fascination’ (a word he rarely used and that appeared quite late in his critical vocabulary) he felt before a work that plunging its viewer into an ‘ultimate danger’. The second, written at the time of the painter's exhibition at the L'Étoile scellée in March-April 1955, establishes subtle analogies between the ‘acidity’ of Paalen's work and what the artist has preserved of popular art. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Hand written and signed manuscript, dated 6 March 1955.
- 1/2 page in-4° handwritten first draft, titled ‘The Viking's Wife’, dated and signed by Breton, with some erasures and corrections from the preface by André Breton for the Svanberg exhibition in 1955 at the gallery L'Étoile scellée.

- 1 page in-4° handwritten, titled and signed by Breton from the second state of this text:
‘How much worse it is for those who, having become accustomed (in every sense) to the ‘harmonies’ of the École de Paris, close their minds as they argue about supposed tonal dissonances which seem to me to possess here a different, and entirely Nordic, orchestration of the Night. [...]

In this way of being outside of time rather than anywhere at all, Svanberg stands marginalised from those artistic fashions that are today driving people away. Even if his only debt is to the pungency of wild berries, it is a pungency preserved for us by a popular art that is sheltered from the seasons. Here woman is truly at the centre of the universe, under all the arrows of what has ‘never been seen’. She rivals the most beautiful nude ever depicted: ‘The Star has wept rose in the heart of your ears.’ [auction catalogue, 2003]

Bibliography

André Breton, « Le hasard humainement / secrètement influencé ? », Inédits, Œuvres complètes, volume IV, Écrits sur l'art et autres textes, (Édition établie par Marguerite Bonnet et Étienne-Alain Hubert avec les contributions de Philippe Bernier et Marie-Claire Dumas), Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 2008, p. 1138-1139, notice p. 1471

Exhibition place