André Breton – Page 5 – { feuilleton }

Philippe Caza covers

As usual, one thing leads to another. Research for yesterday’s post turned up a Caza book cover I’d not seen before. Les Miférables was published by Éric Losfeld in 1971, a year after producing Caza’s eyeball-searing psychedelic comic book Kris Kool. The author sounds like a character, a friend of André Breton who wrote a handful of novels inspired by his peyote experiences. As should be evident from the cover, Duits’ novel for Losfeld is more concerned with sex, described by this page (which is also the source of the cover art) as being “a kind of mixture of Eastern spirituality and unrestrained pornography”.

Caza’s art is often concerned with sex even if the subjects are the inhabitants of other planets. Many of the French comic artists of the 1970s produced covers for books and magazines but Caza alone seems to have been very popular as an artist for SF paperbacks. Noosfere has many examples from which I’ve chosen a small selection. (I’ve also had to hunt around for larger copies.) I wouldn’t mind seeing a collection of this artwork without the unsympathetic typography that spoils so many French novels.

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Angkor in Paris, 1931

Searching for old photos of the Boi de Vincennes turned up some startling images from another exposition that I’d not come across before. The Paris Colonial Exposition filled a corner of the city’s largest park with a variety of exhibits and pavilions intended by the government of the day to show the colonial enterprise in a positive light. Among the replicas of buildings from overseas there was this spectacular reconstruction in plaster of the temple at Angkor Wat, built to represent the French presence in Indochina. No one would dream of creating such an exposition today, of course, and the idea was controversial at the time. To their credit, the authorities did allow the Communist Party to stage their own exhibit showing the damaging and exploitative nature of colonialism.

Politics aside, I’m fascinated by the idea of a full-scale Cambodian temple materialising in the heart of Paris. The Exposition Universelle of 1900 had its share of replicas: the Swiss exhibit was a miniature mountainside populated with a chalet, cows and milkmaids, while one bank of the Seine was taken over by Albert Robida’s reconstruction of medieval Paris. Neither of those seem as surprising as this resurrection of Angkor, especially in the spotlit night shots. I’ve been wondering what the Surrealists would have made of this and the juxtapositions presented by the other reconstructions. André Breton was a member of the Communist Party at the time (they expelled him in 1933) so I’d expect from his point of view at least the exposition would have been dismissed as bourgeois propaganda.

Among the many web pages with photos of the exposition this Flickr set of Dutch tourist pictures is particularly good. Traces of the pavilions still remain, including some of the Nagas from the avenue leading to the temple.

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Palais Idéal panoramas

The oft-recounted story behind the extraordinary Palais Idéal in Hauterives, France, is that rural postman Ferdinand Cheval (1836–1924) found an unusually-shaped stone on his route which compelled him to spend the next thirty-three years building an elaborate architectural fantasy from cement and more stones collected on his rounds. The structure is aptly named if you consider it the ideal to which Edward James may have been aspiring with Las Pozas. James could hardly be unaware of Cheval’s work since it was praised as a Surrealist precursor by André Breton, admired by Picasso and inspired a collage by Max Ernst.

These panoramas came via a link at the official Facteur Cheval site. As usual, Flickr is the place to go for detailed views.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Las Pozas and Edward James

The art of Aloys Zötl, 1803–1887

Le caïman (1849).

Two things that everyone seems able to tell you about Austrian artist Aloys Zötl is that his idiosyncratic bestiary was hailed by André Breton as a Surrealist precursor, and that Zötl’s paintings were published in a lavish edition by Ricci in 1977 with accompanying text by Julio Cortázar. Typically for a Ricci book, those editions now sell for excessive sums so we’re left to scour the web for his pictures. Considering their age and Surrealist connections its surprising that there isn’t a decent online collection anywhere. A number of prints can be found on those auction sites which blight the pictures they don’t own with watermarks. Better to look at the examples on this blog or this page at the André Breton site where the copies are small but include quotes from the Ricci volume.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fantastic art from Pan Books

Dalí in Wonderland

I’d only seen one or two of Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland before but you can see the complete (?) set here. These date from 1969 when Dalí was well past his prime as an artist but they’re still worth a look to see how he tackled each chapter, using the skipping girl motif from earlier paintings as his Alice figure. The attraction of the Alice books for the Surrealists is no surprise; Max Ernst produced a rather enigmatic series of Alice-themed lithographs while André Breton had earlier made Alice the “Siren of Stars” in the set of Surrealist playing cards he designed in the 1940 (below). I’d imagine there are other connections I’ve missed; leave a comment if you know of any. (Thanks to Charity for the tip!)

For more Dalí, here’s something I neglected to link to a while ago, the legendary Dalí meets Disney short, Destino.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Virtual Alice
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• Dalí and Film
• The Illustrators of Alice
• Surrealist cartomancy