Paul Éluard. Anthologie des écrits sur l’art - 1952-1954. Part One

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Paul Éluard
Anthologie des écrits sur l’art.
Part One

Collection Diagonales - Paris, Editore Cercle d’Art

(review by Francesco Mazzaferro) 

[Original Version: February-March 2016 - New Version: April 2019]

Fig. 1) The 1952 original edition. Volume one

An Anthology between art literature and other disciplines

The Anthology of Writings on Art [1] in three volumes of the French poet Paul Éluard  (1895-1952) is one of the most unique, and at the same time most fascinating sources of art history that I have ever come across with. "I would like to prove above all – as wrote the author - that artists first of all have, almost always, shown their ability not only to manifest their intentions but also to explain how and why they were able to realize them. Their theories have the credit which their works deserve." [2]

Éluard’s anthology of art history sources is ordered by theme (and not by chronology); moreover, the texts of the artists (painters only) are combined with those of writers, critics and aesthetics philosophers (including some political theorists). The author was an important poet for the French and world literature, actually one of the founders of the surrealist poetry.

His association with art and artists was long and uninterrupted. Éluard  was a close friend and collector of many painters (Picasso and Max Ernst were very close friends of him); he dedicated some of his poems to many of them (among others, Picasso, Arp, Klee, Braque, Miró, Dalí, Ray, Magritte and de Chirico). His relationship with painting has been discussed in essays, some of which also explain the role of the Anthology [3] in his literary activities. To my knowledge, however, this is the first occasion where the three volumes are discussed from the perspective of art literature.

The publishing house that printed the Anthology was Cercle d'Art, a publisher still in business [4]. Founded in 1949 at the suggestion of Pablo Picasso, it was a prestigious brand, which specialized in modern and contemporary art. At least at that time, the publisher was close to the circles of the French Communist Party. In 1952-1954, therefore, the Anthology was one of the first publications of great importance in its catalogue, a few years after its creation.

The Anthology of Writings on Art offered extracts in an almost random order, without any chronological or hierarchical track, as a precise choice of the author. The three volumes appeared respectively in 1952, 1953 and 1954. Only the first one preceded the death of the writer. Some of the material had already been published by Éluard, between 1951 and 1952, in the magazine Lettres françaises, the monthly cultural supplement to L'Humanité, the official newspaper of the French Communist Party, in sixteen successive episodes. It must be said that the same procedure had been used a few months before, when Éluard  had published the two volumes of the “First living anthology of past poetry” (Première anthologie vivante de la poesie du passé), again first in Lettres françaises and later on as books with the publisher Pierre Seghers (in 1951). In short, the anthology of writings on art was, chronologically, the immediate follow-up of the anthology on the history of poetry. Éluard cultivated the project to offer his readers the tools to direct interpret the world history in the two fields of knowledge under his care: poetry and painting.

Fig. 2) The number 389 of Lettres françaises, dated November 15, 1951, with Paul Éluard ’s first article,
titled "The sighted brothers – An illustrated anthology of writings on art. The nostalgia of total light"

Paul Éluard  died on November 18, 1952, after the publication of the first volume. After the author's death, the second volume was already in an advanced state of preparation, while the third was still incomplete (in the last weeks of life, as Jean-Charles Gateau wrote, the author - now certain of the imminent death - desperately tried to achieve some progress in the drafting with the assistance from his wife [5]). The publisher released the second volume in 1953 and was able to ensure the publication of a third one in 1954. Éluard  had also originally planned a fourth volume (it was due to be called Au niveau de la vie, or "At the level of life"), but – in the absence of enough materials to reconstruct the structure – the publisher gave up.

The first volume (1952) is titled Les frères voyants (Sighted brothers) and collects the testimonies of those artists (or on the artists), who used painting to understand the relationship "between world and man, and between world and society". Éluard’s introduction explains that the ophthalmologic hospital in Paris called 'sighted brothers' the sighted guides, or more precisely "the sighted husbands of blind wives", and therefore, those who provided blinds, indirectly, the capacity to see. The painter offers the same service to ordinary citizens, giving them his eyes to understand the world. The second volume (1953) is titled Lumière et morale (Light and moral), and contains passages on the relationship between light in painting and the light of the moral, placing that bond at the very centre of human existence: "the truth of beauty and the beauty of truth" [6]. The third one (1954) is La passion de peindre (The passion of painting), and testifies in particular painters’ moral capacity to rise from the miserable reality of everyday life to seek for the absolute. The fourth volume Au niveau de la vie should aim at resolving the conflict between "the opposite sides of the imaginary and real", reconciling them "for the good of hope and action".

Instead of following the usual path of art criticism, the succession of volumes and their structuring according to themes are explainable with a substantially poetic / philosophical / ideological narrative, which follows its own red thread, but moves within what the French poet Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711) already defined in the Baroque period as a 'beautiful mess, effect of art' (Un beau désordre est un effet de l'art). Indeed, Éluard  wrote in the preface to the first volume: "The inevitable disorder of my extracts is somehow a natural order. The logic cannot force myself any chronology, any hierarchy."  [7] And he added in the preface to the second volume: "How could I indicate a route when I move myself along a large amount of unexpected paths?" [8]

It is as if Éluard  wanted to compose a literary work with an artistic subject, by borrowing texts of artists (and other writers on art) in a kind of literary collage of third parties’ texts, thereby using the well-known collage techniques of surrealism (think of Breton and Ernst). Indeed, in the thirties Éluard  himself had made thirteen surrealist collages [9] and many others with André Breton and Suzanne Muzard [10].

All in all, in the three volumes of the Anthology are cited 238 authors, a quarter of whom are painters. The texts (especially those of the artists) are often very short extracts. The preference for short quotes also hides the desire to offer a 'opinionated' vision of art: artists’ passages are cited in support of the ideas of Éluard , who, in fact, openly acknowledges it: "Since I will not hide my bias: I will not hide I have sometimes freed, extracting, from confused and perhaps even contradictory texts, what helped the cause of youth, the cause of the renewal that is indispensable for me to live.” [11]

If the content is quite atypical, the three volumes were published in an elegant classical style edition. The first tome was released with 52 plates in black and white, definitely chosen very carefully by the curator: "But if I have present in mind many critical texts by poets, painters and writers, it is not easy to circumscribe the choice of illustrations, of masterpieces and minor works, that I would like to present to the reader. I was forced to give me a limit, and to display only the typical canvases of painters who are called into question by the texts cited. Moreover, even the choice of the texts has been influenced by my own preferences for certain painters, by the more or less vivid impression that they have left in me and that the texts have then reiterated." [12] In fact, originally, in the Lettres françaises the work was mentioned as an 'illustrated anthology’. It is striking that the iconographic apparatus consisted of very classic artworks, from Roman times to neo-impressionism, presented in chronological order (and therefore traditionally) and not according to the same free thematic approach of the text, and without any paintings by any representative of the aesthetic avant-gardes (especially Surrealism) to which Éluard  belonged. The only contemporary painter, who was shown by way of exception, is Picasso: in the Anthology were displayed Guernica and images of some classically inspired watercolors and etchings.

Both in the second and in the third volume were printed, alongside numerous plates in black and white, 12 colour plates. The choice of the 24 colour pictures had the editorial value of the identification of true icons. In the second volume there were works by Giotto, Velázquez, Vermeer, Rembrandt, George de la Tour, Claude Lorrain, Rubens, Turner, Van Gogh, Renoir, Seurat and Leger. In the third volume, colour tables included works of Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, El Greco, Le Nain, Poussin, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso. In short, the reader who browsed the three volumes, in a nice library in Paris rive gauche, made his mind on whether to buy them or not on the basis of a fully 'classic' editorial offering (including photos). Moreover, the idea that common structural elements characterises art making over the centuries was confirmed in the introduction to the first volume: "The prehistoric man, as a Catalan primitive, an Egyptian artist, or as Leonardo da Vinci, Holbein, Vermeer, Hokusaï and Utamaro, Van Gogh and Henri Rousseau are telling us that there are in us, always, the same opportunities and the same power.” [13]

The Anthology was a publishing success (perhaps because it was released in coincidence with the disappearance of a so important reference poet). In 1966 it was re-released in paperback, with the title Les Frères Voyants: anthologie des écrits sur l'art, in a single volume by Gonthier Publishers [14].

Fig. 3) The Gonthier paperback edition of 1966

In 1967, the three separate volumes were published in Spanish; they were printed by the Proteus Editions in Buenos Aires (obviously a publication in Franco's Spain was not feasible).

The significance for the history of history of art sources

Although it is difficult to classify precisely this work in the canons of fiction or non-fiction, from a point of view of artistic literature the Anthology reveals specific characteristics.

First of all, the Anthology confirms that, after the Second Word War, 'art literature' was primarily considered in France as a branch of literature; as such, it was only logical that the best passages of "the writing artists" (to use the terminology artistes-écrivains in vogue in France from the early decades of the twentieth century) was collected by a poet as testimony of pure beauty.

Éluard’s three volumes show, however, that art literature was not either considered self-sufficient to understand art (and even less the reality of the world, in a philosophical sense). For him, painting was in fact a language that had a moral and social value, and had also to be interpreted by writers and poets, philosophers and art critics.

If painting was regarded as an intellectual language to understand reality, even art literature itself could not be only an aesthetic expression of writing (and of “art for art”, which indeed was considered by Éluard  "a lie" [15]), but it had to be part of a theory of political analysis and action.

The condition under which art literature could help understand art and reality was however to be purified of every biographical and narrative aspect. Those collected by Éluard  were pages of the artists about art in a general sense, not about their lives.

Éluard provided an ideological (in this case Marxist) interpretation of art literature. This interpretation seems entirely new in France, if one considers that until then the French anthologies of art history sources were all originating from conservative and perhaps even reactionary circles (Paul Ratouis de Limay, Les Artistes Écrivains, 1921; Pierre du Colombier, Les Plus Beaux Écrits Des Grands Artistes, 1946).

Finally, Éluard  made use of art literature to confirm an interpretation of art history that focused on the continuity of long-term phenomena, almost entirely in the context of French painting (Poussin-Delacroix-impressionists-Cézanne, ending with Picasso, whom he saw as the climax of art), though with strong roots in Italian classical art.

In the French tradition of art literature, it further dominated the idea that writing was the necessary counterpart of painting as an aesthetic expression of beauty. Of the chosen extracts, in fact, Éluard appreciated particularly the plain writing, without second thoughts, and therefore not their capacity to be part of an artist's communication strategy: "I tried to delete from my citations every complexity, every paradox, every gleam." [16]

It is somewhat surprising that these words were written by a poet with a surrealist background: he gave up here every special effect, every “aberration of the glorified useless" [17], and returned to an almost romantic concept of revelation. Is it perhaps the sign that, with time passing, the aesthetic taste of the rebel poet was about to normalize?

And yet, in the same French tradition (think of M.me de Stäel, which considered writing as a "sensitive philosophy") writing itself was becoming a way of understanding the world. Thus, the writing painter must also be by definition a philosophising painter (peintre-philosophe was the definition with whom Poussin was praised since the eighteenth century).

We are therefore in a field that actually seems very far from literary surrealism. A writing artist must be an artist who thinks and therefore a rationalizing artist. The last work of Éluard  seems to bring him back in the realm of Cartesians and the enlightened thinkers.

The 1972 edition and the reinterpretation of the Anthology

Twenty years after the death of the poet, in 1972, a new edition of the three volumes (now collected in one volume) was released. It was a very demanding editorial endeavour, led by the founder of the publishing house Cercle d'Art in person (Charles Feld) [18].

Curiously, two identical versions were published, however with a different cover: one was on behalf of the Cercle de l'Art and the other of the Livre Club Diderot, a cultural association linked to the French Communist Party. This choice was probably determined by the fact that the two publications were intended for different distribution channels. For the purpose of content, therefore, it was to all effects a single edition. It should be said that the version of 1972 was not just a celebration opportunity to remember the author, but gave rise to a critical review and an editorial repositioning of the anthology.

What is striking is the total transformation of the layout and of the apparatus of pictures of the 1952-1954 version. The 24 color plates and 150 black and white pictures of the previous version, with a system centred around a classical selection of artworks, disappeared and were replaced by 197 color plates outside the text (and numerous drawings in black and white in the text), entirely representing works made by contemporary artists who were related to Éluard. In many cases, they were portraits of the poet or art drawings made by his friends; in other cases were displayed paintings or drawings collected by Éluard, and produced by a long list of authors: besides Picasso (with many works), also Arp, Balthus, Beaudin, Bellmer, Braque, Debuffet, Chagall, Dali, de Chirico, Delvaux, Dominguez, Erni, Ernst, Fenosa, Fini, Friedlaender, Giacometti, Gris, Klee, Valentine Hugo, Labisse, Laurens, Léger, Lurçat, Magritte, Marcoussis, Masson, Picard Doux, Ray, Marc Saint Saens, Scottie, Tanguy, and Ubac. Therefore, the editorial image offered to the reader, a generation after the first publication, was entirely renewed: no longer a classic anthology, aimed at capturing cross-time elements of continuity in art literature, albeit poetically, but an anthology of avant-garde, made out by an intellectual placed at the very centre of French modern art.

The tone of the preface also changed. The brief autograph text of Éluard  (reproduced in part two of this post) was replaced by a more challenging writing of the literary critic and philosopher Jean Marcenac (1913-1984). Frankly, it is a rather unsympathetic text, whose author wanted to negate any intention or ability of the poet to write on art: "Éluard  as an art critic? Just saying it makes me smile. Whatever he writes, in the uncertain light of the time, his words pulsate as the shadow, moving on the ground, of the index of a giant poplar. His words follow the curve of the indivisible sun of people." [19] Éluard ’s judgment is questioned: "I am not here to defend Éluard  from having been taken, sometimes, in a trap" [20], though it seems that the problem was definitely not the choice of artists ("I am defying anyone to name a single artist that he loved and that today is unbearable to us") [21]. Marcenac's language was, if possible, even more hermetic than certain pages cited in the anthology and certain verses of the poet: perhaps it was modesty, and the author simply wanted to avoid including in his writing what was obvious to most people, but today is now difficult to grasp for me.

What are the traps in which, according Marcenac, the author of the Anthology had fallen? Are they purely aesthetic questions? Were his classicist approach and his negative attitude toward abstract art no longer shared in the seventies? Éluard  certainly did not like the drift of art to abstraction (in France painting imposed themselves in those years the lyrical abstraction á la Georges Mathieu - inspired by Jackson Pollock - and the different conjugations of Art informel, informal art). It was no coincidence that the very first pages of the Anthology theorized an art, whose task was to dive into people’s reality and to interpret it in a creative way (the Anthology’s first pages host a crucial reference to a passage of Poussin on the role of sight and on the different ways the brain can observe nature). In the introduction to the third volume Éluard  added: "Painting is a language, a communication means which is entirely similar to speech, a tool for relationship: a proof of the existence, but also of trust in existence. And if we exclude some paintings (and with them the desire for total abstraction) of a desperate denial and therefore similar to suicide, to nirvana, there is neither unrealistic nor pessimistic painting, and this is one of the indisputable superiority of painting to poetry." [22] But it is difficult to make final judgments: this theme had to be deepened in the fourth volume (Au niveau de la vie), never realized, where the author intended, as it has already been said, to propose the reconciliation between nature and imagination, in the supreme name of hope and action. In the preface to the third volume, just a few traces of this issue are mentioned. Here is another one: "Painting is a sovereign art that combines the whole prestige of the real to the most absolute possibility of exaltation and transformation. The Dove of Picasso is not a utopian bird. It raises on its wings at the same time our reality and our ideal." [23]

Éluard, the communist

However, it is possible that Marcenac’s introduction, while matured within the same cultural milieu in which the first edition was produced, wanted to distance himself from the most orthodox political positions of Éluard . After all, we are confronted with a poet who had written and read a short film in 1949, titled "Stalin, the man we love the most", and in 1950 had even composed a "Ode to Stalin". Although Éluard  was certainly not the only one to be in that situation (think of the portrait that Picasso had made in March 1953, in the occasion of his death) it was still necessary to justify his passion for Stalin.

If Éluard  did not endorse (and did not include in the Anthology) the hard proclamations of Louis Aragon (the greatest poet and theorist of communist aesthetics, director of the aforementioned Lettres Françaises) in favour of socialist realism and against abstract art, Éluard  was still tied to him by fraternal friendship, and, certainly, did not condemn the purges against a number of French artists expelled from the party [24].

Fig. 4) The French edition of 1972 in the Cercle d'Art version

Whatever drifts had to be corrected posthumously in 1972, it is this new French edition that was published in Italy by Editori Riuniti, the publishing house of the Italian Communist Party, in 1973, with the translation of Ottavio Cecchi and Fabrizio Grillenzoni. In the excellent review in the daily L’Unità, reproduced in part two of this post, the art critic Dario Micacchi did not report to the reader any of the problems discussed here. Also the last French edition of 1987, again published by Cercle de l'art, made no mention of the reasons for the intervention of 1972.

Fig. 5) The French edition of 1972 in the Livre Club Diderot version

End of Part One

Go to Part Two 

NOTES

[1] Of the Anthology, I consulted the French version of the 1952-1954 and the Italian one of 1973. French version 1952-1954: (1) Éluard , Paul - Anthologie des écrits sur l’ art. 1 Les Frères Voyants , Paris, Édition Cercle d'Art, 1952, 135 pages, with 52 plates in black and white in the text; (2) Éluard, Paul - Anthologie des écrits sur l’art. 2 Lumière et Morale, Paris, Édition Cercle d'Art, 1953, 172 pages, with 12 color plates and 50 plates in black and white in the text; (3) Éluard , Paul - Anthologie des écrits sur l’art. 3 La passion de peindre, Paris, Édition Cercle d'Art, 1954, 164 pages, with 12 color plates and 48 plates in black and white in the text. Italian version: Éluard, Paul – Antologia degli scritti sull’arte, Translation of Cecchi Ottavio and Fabrizio Grillenzoni, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1973, 212 pages.

[2] See the preface of the first volume in the second part of this blog. The quotation is taken from the Italian version of the preface, on page 18.

[3] Among these, I would like to recall a volume of Albert Mingelgrün of 1977, and two volumes of Jean-Charles Gateau of 1982-1983. Mingelgrün, Albert - Essai sur l'evolution esthétique de Paul Éluard. Peinture et langage, Paris, Edition Lage d'Homme, 1977; Gateau, Jean-Charles - Paul Éluard et la peinture surréaliste (1910-1939), Paris, Librairie Droz, 1982; Gateau, Jean-Charles - Éluard, Picasso et la peinture (1936-1952), Paris, Librairie Droz, 1983.

[4] See: http://www.cercledart.com/

[5] Gateau, Jean-Charles, Éluard, Picasso et la peinture (quoted), p. 316

[6] Éluard, Paul, Antologia degli scritti sull’arte… (quoted), p. 77.

[7] See the preface of the first volume in the second part of this blog. Éluard, Paul - Anthology of writings on art, (quoted) p. 18.

[8] See the preface of the second volume in the second part of this blog. Éluard, Paul - Anthology of writings on art, (quoted) p. 77.

[9] Gateau, Jean-Charles - Paul Éluard  et la peinture surréaliste, (quoted), p. 220

[10] See the exhibition “André Breton, Paul Éluard & Suzanne Muzard: 33 Collages” at the address http://www.ubugallery.com/exhibitions/33-collages/.

[11] See the preface of the first volume in the second part of this blog. Éluard, Paul - Anthology of writings on art, (quoted) p. 18.

[12] See the preface of the first volume in the second part of this blog. Éluard, Paul - Anthology of writings on art, (quoted) p. 17.

[13] See the preface of the first volume in the second part of this blog. Éluard, Paul - Anthology of writings on art, (quoted) p. 17.

[14] Éluard  Paul - Les Frères voyants, Paris, Gonthier, 1966, 155 pages.

[15] See the preface of the first volume in the second part of this blog. Éluard, Paul - Anthology of writings on art, (quoted) p. 18.

[16] See the preface of the first volume in the second part of this blog. Éluard, Paul - Anthology of writings on art, (quoted) p. 18.

[17] See the preface of the first volume in the second part of this blog. Éluard, Paul - Anthology of writings on art, (quoted) p. 18.

[18] Feld was a leading exponent of the French Resistance, working to direct the clandestine publications.

[19] Marcenac, Jean – The lezione dello sguardo (The lection of gaze), in Éluard, Paul, Anthology of writings on art (quoted), p. 11.

[20] Marcenac, Jean – The lezione dello sguardo (The lection of gaze), in Éluard, Paul, Anthology of writings on art (quoted), p. 11.

[21] Marcenac, Jean – The lezione dello sguardo (The lection of gaze), in Éluard, Paul, Anthology of writings on art (quoted), p. 11.

[22] See the preface of the third volume in the second part of this blog. Éluard, Paul - Anthology of writings on art, (quoted) p. 146.

[23] See the preface of the third volume in the second part of this blog. Éluard, Paul - Anthology of writings on art, (quoted) p. 146.

[24] On the other hand, one cannot remain silent on what reported by Jean-Charles Gateau: in 1954 (when the poet was already dead), the Communist Party had intervened with the publisher to avoid the inclusion in the third volume of an excerpt by François Le Lionnais. Le Lionnais - a writer who survived the concentration camps of Dora-Mittelbau - had recounted in his "La Peinture à Dora" that the memory of the great masterpieces of art had helped him to survive. However, he had fallen out of favour within the Party, so that the passage - which was due to conclude the third volume, and therefore was important to the economy of the work - had actually been expunged in the edition of 1954, before being returned to it only in the edition of 1972.