Lot n° 88
Estimation :
8000 - 10000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 8 060EUR
André BRETON, Robert DESNOS et Benjamin PÉRET.
The Court of Miracles. [How beautiful it is!] No place or date [December 1922- January 1923].
Two-handed autograph manuscript of 11 pages in-4, typescript of 2 ½ pp. with autograph additions: supple wine-leather cowhide à la Bradel, vertical zig-zag stitching at center of boards, slipcase (Monique Mathieu, 1982).
Remarkable two-handed autograph manuscript of a surrealist play signed by André Breton, Robert
Desnos and Benjamin Péret.
It is essentially based on remarks of hypnotic sleep recorded by Breton on December 14, 1922.
The manuscript was used to compose the text. Jointly written by André Breton (7 ½ pages) and Robert Desnos (3 pages), it contains nine autograph corrections. La Grande Ode au Silexame, the last tableau of the play, is in typescript form, with autograph additions and corrections in the hands of Breton and Desnos. The play appeared in February 1923 in the journal Littérature, Nouvelle série, n° 9, under the title "Comme il fait beau! What was to remain one of André Breton's rare stage projects was never staged.
A collective exploration of collage.
The writing of the play, dedicated to Max Ernst, was inspired by the collage technique: "In 1923, after several years of more or less consistent practice of automatism, the revelation constituted by Max Ernst's collages, and the work on language carried out in particular by Desnos, the aim was still subversive, but it had been expanded. The technique of verbal collage is used here quite deliberately and at all levels of the text [...].
Just as in the plastic arts the material surface [...] allows for the assembly of elements that are far from each other, so the virtual stage of the theatre serves as a meeting place for unrelated scenes, between which a very loose link has been introduced after the fact. The action is nothing more than the association of units of language born independently of each other, at the whim of the assemblers who seem to have been Breton and Desnos.
The characters are only supports giving an appearance of continuity and coherence to these free sequences where the arbitrary becomes the rule. [...] All in all, the interest of "Comme il fait beau!" is not only in the humor, subverting the forms, that it manifests, nor in the diversity of tones that it uses, mixing humor, anguish, poetry ; It is also in what it teaches us about the complexity of this collective writing, in which come to be confused with the absurd remarks of the sleepers, verbal games, elements of culture, parody, that the technique of collage succeeds in integrating into a trap-frame, semantically empty, but able to continuously create the effect of surprise" (Marguerite Bonnet in : Breton, Complete Works I, pp. 1418-1420).
The Jacques Doucet Library holds the manuscript of a primitive state of the play, from the Breton sale. It assembles heterogeneous elements, including the framework of the present manuscript, essentially in Desnos' hand.
An autograph letter signed by Max Ernst, 1 page in-4, addressed from Briançon on 29 January 1929 to friends, is bound at the top of the page: "I'm leaving Briançon as soon as possible, because it's a disgusting place, and in Montgenèvre there is no hotel for the moment, as Madame Picabia's hotel is not yet open...".
The manuscript is preserved in a beautiful soft cowhide binding by Monique
Mathieu.
Provenance: Daniel Filipacchi (catalogue I, 2004, n° 45) then René Alleau (2009, n° 57).
(Breton, OEuvres complètes I, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1988, pp. 439-448; with mention of the present manuscript on p. 1421.)
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