Jacques HÉROLD.

Lot 181
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Estimation :
6000 - 8000 EUR
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Result : 8 500EUR
Jacques HÉROLD.
Mimicry of the object. Drinking glasses: Paolo Uccello (1) Sade (2) Alfred Jarry (3) André Breton (4) Mlle de Sombreuil (5) Benjamin Péret (6). No place or date [ca. 1945-1950]. Original charcoal drawing on paper, signed and titled lower right (41.7 x 129.5 cm). Superb original drawing of six symbolic drinking glasses of Paolo Uccello, D.A.F. de Sade, Alfred Jarry, André Breton, Mlle de Sombreuil and Benjamin Péret. From the fifteenth-century Florentine painter to two of the most uncompromising figures of surrealism, Jacques Hérold has drawn the symbolic glasses of six figures, past and present, forming a kind of personal pantheon. Among them, only one woman, Mlle de Sombreuil (1768-1823): daughter of the governor of the Invalides who was to be guillotined, she agreed to drink a glass of fresh blood from the victims of the September 1792 massacres to save her father. Although the latter was finally guillotined two years later, the legend of the "heroine with the glass of blood" spread and inspired many writers, including Victor Hugo, who composed an ode entitled The Death of Miss Sombreuil: "O day when death lost its privilege,/Where, redeeming a murder at the price of a sacrilege,/The blood of the dead flowed in her virginal bosom!/Between the impure drink and the parricidal iron,/The executioners pursued the timid heroine /With a funereal insult and an infernal laugh." In contrast to Victor Hugo's righteous indignation, Jacques Hérold drew a sensually shaped glass for Mlle de Sombreuil, although it is not clear whether it is a pair of breasts or a buttock.
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