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Art of the 20th Century
A Revolution in the Arts
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Art Styles
in 20th century Art Map
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The Great Avant-garde Movements
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*
see also:
Surrealism - 1924
Max Ernst
"A Week of Kindness"
(A surrealistic novel in
collage)
EXPLORATION:
Rene Magritte
"Thought rendered visible"
EXPLORATION:
Salvador Dali
EXPLORATION:
Surrealism "The Dream of Revolution"
*
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CHAPTER TWELVE
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Occultation
Pierre Molinier
Enrico Baj
Alberto Gironella
Max Walter Svanberg
Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern
Jean-Claude Silbermann
Jorge Camacho
Agustin Cardenas
Ugo Sterpini
Fabio de Sanctis
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As early as the Second Alanifeste
Breton had written of his
quest for 'the profound, real occultation of surrealism', a process which
he saw accomplished in the last ten years of his life. By the
'occultation' of the movement he meant its transformation into a secret
circle, a closed group, with the task of cultivating the idea-forces of
the modern world in an ideal climate, much as the esoteric sciences were
practised in the Middle Ages. Towards the end of
Breton's life, the
freedoms which the surrealists had won for themselves had become accepted
truths, some of which had been assimilated by society, while avant-garde
artists and theorists drew benefit from all of them (without always
admitting it). From now on surrealism sought to appeal only to adepts, and
to conduct its affairs in such a wav that those who approached the
movement would be obliged to submit to some kind of initiation before they
were admitted to it. Andre Breton did his utmost to keep the revived group
to the fundamental principles of the movement, and at this level to
discuss the facts of the present and future of artistic creation.
A succession of periodicals - Medium, Le Surrealisme,
mеmе and La Breche -
are evidence of the activity of this spiritual college. They include
surveys similar to those of the early days, on strip-tease or on the
possibility of interplanetary travel. One particularly interesting survey,
'Ouvrez-vous ?' ('Will you open the door?'), asked participants what they
would do if 'noble visitors', for example, Balzac,
Cezanne,
Seurat,
Goya
or Robespierre, were to ring their door-bell. The surrealists still
carried out 'interventions', which were almost all intended to protect the
memory of some poet or artist against false interpretations. They also
invented new games, like 'Analogy Cards', which was a variant of the
Portrait Game, and in particular 'One into Another'.
Breton, who developed
this game with Benjamin Perot in his house in Saint-Cirq-la-Popie, was
very fond of it, and described the rules as follows : 'One of us went out
of the room, and had to decide on a particular object (for example, a
staircase), with which he would identify himself.
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While he was out the rest of us had to agree
on another object which he would have to represent (for example a bottle
of champagne). So he had to describe himself in terms of a bottle of
champagne, but with such peculiarities that gradually the image of the
bottle would be eclipsed and finally replaced by the image of the
staircase.' But games of this kind, aids to collective knowledge, no
longer had such clear repercussions on painting as the invention of
Exquisite Corpse had had in 1926.
During this period of 'occultation', the studies which surrealist art
pursued began to probe into magic, maybe not in the hope of deriving
direct inspiration from it, but at least to use it as a system of
reference. This transition was a result of Breton's interest in Celtic
iconography, which developed after he had read L'Art gaulois dans les
medailles (1954), by Lancelot Lengyel. He saw Celtic iconography as a
formal proof of the stupidity of the quarrel between figurative and
non-figurative artists, and as a reason for choosing works from the past
on the basis of the extent to which they were opposed to Graeco-Roman
culture. In 1955 he took part in organizing the exhibition 'Perennite de
l'Art gaulois' at the Musee Pedagogique. This exhibition included ancient
Gallic medals side by side with modern paintings which shared with them
'only a common desire to shake off the Graeco-Roman yoke'. He was aware
that this law of proximity was inadequate, whereas the idea of magic was
flexible enough to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable tendencies in
art.
Breton's book L'Art magique (1957) was an attempt to create a
movement of opinion and to purify the sources of aesthetic judgment. 'If
the epithet "magic" is deliberately applied to the word "art",' he wrote,
'this increases the scale of the demands of art'. This concept allowed the
construction of a new hierarchy of values, and a 'dignification' of the
work of art beyond the formal or intellectual criteria which normally
locate it. It also made it possible to encompass works which belong to
different categories, as the illustrations to
Breton's book show. These
include examples of the archaic arts, alchemists' signs, the Tarot
symbols, Tibetan banners, and scenes from films
such as The Bride of Frankenstein
and The Golem, Postman Cheval's Palais Ideal, and paintings by
Goya, Monsu Desiderio and
Watteau.
Breton drew a parallel between 'magic in
practice', as it was in the past, and works which have a magic power without evincing doctrine or ritual. These latter include 'all those whose power over us is
greater than might be expected from the means which they disclose'.
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One might be led to believe that Magic Art had taken the place of
Revolutionary Art, which had been the ideal proclaimed in the past, and
that surrealist art had fallen into two stages, one directed towards
Revolution, the other towards Magic. In fact Revolution and Magic are
merely dominant factors in their particular periods. 'Magic implies
protest, in other words revolt', said
Breton.
Breton does not allow the
artist to sacrifice his liberty of creation to the cause of magic : 'We
will be obliged to retain here as specifically magic art only that
which goes some way towards recreating the magic from which itself was
created.' He confesses that when he looks at ancient works which have
resulted from magic practices, he is aware above all of their power to
disconcert : 'With some few exceptions, their hold over us is not a result
of the magic with which they were originally impregnated, but of the
beauty which flows from them, even though this beauty may not have been
consciously sought, but may have arisen only incidentally.'
Revolution and Magic are the two values which surrealism used to
conceal its unconfessed raison d'etre, which was to make a religion out of poetic inspiration. These two values constantly succeeded each
other, turn and turn about, like day and night, in surrealist thought,
whose contradictions are a direct result of the impossibility of
reconciling them. Whenever the surrealists settled for one or the other of
these two values, they did so in almost identical terms; the works which
Breton regarded as magic move in the same direction as those he regarded
as revolutionary.
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One of the painters on whom
Breton counted to illustrate his conception
of a pictorial magic which would not necessarily allude to aspects of
alchemy was
Pierre Molinier.
Molinier, who was born in 1900, was proud of
his past as an adventurer and a bartender, which he had combined with his
painterly vocation; this had developed early. In 1925 he did a number of
drawings of chateaux, and in 1929 he produced his first abstract picture,
The Blonde Lady, which consists of two strokes, one yellow and the
other black. In 1940 he began to paint strange domineering women's faces.
These heroines gradually became actresses in his mental theatre,
rehearsing for a tragedy which was destined to be played out behind the
curtain.
Molinier got in touch with Breton in 1950, and
from Bordeaux kept up a
protracted correspondence with him. In 1955
Molinier's exhibition at
L'Etoile Scellee was hailed by
Breton as a triumph of surrealist art.
Breton wrote : 'The virtue
of his art, which sets out to be deliberately
magic. ... is that it breaks the law which says that every painted
image, no matter how evocative it may be, nevertheless remains an object
of conscious illusion, and cannot aspire to a plane on which it makes an
active intervention in life'.
Molinier's painting is based on a single
obsession, and evokes a kind of succuba, a radiant and cruel figure which
stretches its limbs over the world, and which, like a female octopus,
forms a single, monstrous body with the prey which it absorbs. What Breton considered to be magic in
Molinier was his demonstration that it was possible for painting to create
a confusion which disorientates ideas and directs desires.
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Pierre Molinier
The Paradise Flower
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Max Walter Svanberg
Chimera
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Max Walter Svanberg, another post-war surrealist discovery, also weaves
mottled variations of a female apparition which shows itself and then
slips aways, disguises itself or multiplies, which sometimes has several
heads, and flesh like bedecked and braided cloth. In 1948
Svanberg had
founded the 'imaginist' group in Stockholm. The group appealed to lyricism
and to the fantastic, but
Svanberg found no difficulty in leaving them
when in 1953 the surrealists noticed his painting Portrait of a Star
in a Paris exhibition, and got in touch with him. There was a tribute
to him in one number of Medium (no. 3, 1954), and an exhibition of
his paintings was held at L'Etoile Scellee in 1955. 'My painting is a hymn
to woman', he wrote, 'to that strange hybrid of visions and reality, of
convulsive beauty and chaste temptations'.
Svanberg's women are stars or
birds as well, decked out in delirious finery which seems to be made of butterflies' wings. To show them still more luxuriantly, he sometimes
made 'bead mosaics'.
Breton admitted that
Svanberg's work fascinated him, and went on to
make an admirable analysis of the effects of a 'fascinating' painting. 'It
immediately brought me into a cone of light which is blind and disturbed,
pierced at frequent intervals by a dart. In this cone all is giddiness,
and the being moves forward despite itself, moving in short stages, under
the impulse of an irresistible attraction, and inspired by absolute
danger.' In this
Breton showed his constant conviction that a painting
should be 'inhabitable', and should arouse eddies in the spectator's
unconscious mind.
Svanberg is certainly the greatest Swedish surrealist
painter, although he remained a solitary. Indeed he did not come to Paris
and meet Breton and his friends until 1964.
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Max Walter Svanberg
Portratt av en stjarna III
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Enrico Baj, an Italian painter who in 1951 was an initiator of the
'nuclear movement' in Milan, is in a different category. His painting
makes a virtuoso use or collage, and has a satirical intention. There is a
great deal that is childlike in
Baj, and this had led him to make
game of his anxieties, and to imagine a bogeyman whom he strips of his
powers by disfiguring him.
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Enrico Baj
Fire! Fire!, Al fuoco, al fuoco
1963 |
In Tralali Tralala (1955) and Little Chamber
Animal (1955), he began to introduce the character whom he named 'Signor Olo', who consists of a head and legs, but no
body or arms. He made 'ultra-bodies', caricatured figures which are both
clownish and serious in intention, from scraps of wallpaper and cloth. In
1961 he produced a series of picture-objects which are parodies of period
furniture - cupboards, tables, chests with drawers which do not open -
using rosewood veneers and marquetry, and in this way creating human
figures in the shape of furniture : an example
is Profile of an aristocratic
lady in the style of the First Empire (1961). His most famous series, and rightly so,
is that of the Generals, whom he covered in real medals from his
collections : Man with decorated nose (1961); Military parade in the
Bois de Boulogne (1963).
Baj has done some highly unconventional
illustrations for Lucretius' De Natura
Rerum.
The 'X Exposition Internationale du surrealisme' opened on 15 December
1959 at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris on a theme which had been chosen with the intention of being anti-aesthetic :
'Eros'. In his letter to the exhibitors
Breton described eroticism as 'a
privileged place, a theatre in which incitement and prohibition play their
roles, and where the most profound moments of life make sport'. He
reminded them that eroticism, 'far from necessitating the representation
of scabrous scenes, derives a great deal from equivocation and can readily
undergo many transpositions'. He supported his choice of theme by pointing
out the need to show the public that the work of art, which had been
consumed by concerns of a purely formal nature, had to rediscover the
emotional power which it had lost. 'Then - and certainly only then - can
the organic link between exhibitor and spectator, more and more
lacking in today's art, be established by means of perturbation.'
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The setting of the exhibition, which was designed by the architect Pierre Faucheux, gave the idea of 'a sumptuous ceremony in an underground cavern'. The visitor passed through a grotto, with its
walls draped in red velvet and the floor strewn with fine sand, to a
Fetishist Room organized by Mimi Parent. The ceiling/belly, one of
Marcel
Duchamp's ideas, throbbed and palpitated, and a soundtrack played back
sighs recorded by the poet Radovan Ivsic.
Meret
Oppenheim had made a
Cannibal feast in which a group of dummies representing men sat at a
table on which lay a woman with a golden face, her body covered with food.
There were two guest exhibitors,
Robert Rauschenberg
and Jasper Johns,
who showed that pop art had a bond with surrealism.
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Meret
Oppenheim
Cannibal feast
1959
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Meret
Oppenheim
Cannibal feast
1959
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The most interesting
newcomer was Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern, a self-taught German painter,
whom Bellmer had discovered in Berlin.
Schroder-Sonnenstern had begun to
paint in 1949, when he was fifty-seven. Before this he had been a canteen
hand, a stable boy in a circus and a farmworker, and had been both in
prison and in mental hospital. He worked exclusively in coloured crayons, and his drawings showed men
and women in a music hall which represented the universe.
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Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern
(1892 - 1982)
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Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern
The Demoness of Urgency
1958
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Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern
Der betende Lowe, oder Die geschandete Kraft
1952
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Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern
Untitled
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Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern
Die mondmoderne Eva
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Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern
Das Hohe lied der warme
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Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern
Dr. Phil Rabaukuss Spieszebor
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Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern
Die wendumb, signed: sonnenstern's gestalten
1948
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Alberto Gironella
Festin a Bunuel
1975
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In
Breton's entourage there was no shortage of young painters to
replace those who went off on their own as they came to maturity.
Breton
was always available to consider the claims and demands of the young
members of the group. He considered that these new artists on whom he had
passed judgment, or who had drawn their inspiration from him, were the
hopes of surrealism. Yves Laloy, who was first an architect, used a
plastic language inspired by
Kandinsky to evoke geometric constructions
and celestial buildings whose forms are no more than rhythms.
Alberto Gironella, the Mexican painter, based his work on the metamorphoses which
he inflicted on works of art of the past; on the basis of
Goya's
Queen
Maria Luisa of
Bourbon-Parma and in 1960-1 of
Velazquez' Queen Mariana, he produced a series
of picture objects, all different variations on a theme which he dissected as if he were seeking to perform a
complete exegesis.
Le Marechal began by writing poems, and in his paintings showed a
visionary universe which seems to be seen through misted binoculars, with
buildings vacillating in space at the whim of Le Marechal's apocalyptic
imagination. In 1963 another poet, Jean-Claude Silbermann, made Sly
Signs, plywood cut-outs, which are signs for imaginary shops.
Herve Telemaque, the Haitian painter, began in 1961 to paint pictures
in which his personal mythology integrates surrealism with pop art. Telemaque borrows from comic strips and posters, and enriches them with
collages and inscriptions. The Cuban painter Jorge Camacho, who came to
surrealism in 1961, paints vehement pictures which show scenes of torture.
Another Cuban, the sculptor Agustin Cardenas, made genuine totems in ebony
or marble, polished, perforated and embossed, with the aim of making them
look like naturally developed products.
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Jean-Claude Silbermann
b. 1935
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Jean-Claude Silbermann
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Jean-Claude Silbermann
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Jean-Claude Silbermann
Au grand matou, prince odieux
1964
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Jean-Claude Silbermann
La
voyante
1961
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Jorge Camacho
b.1934
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Jorge Camacho
Voyage
sur le Nil
1988
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Jorge Camacho
Ace des Tr...
1967
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Jorge Camacho
La boiteuse lubrique
1962
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Jorge Camacho
The Bird, the night
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Jorge Camacho
Histoires Natturelles
1973
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Agustin Cardenas
(Cuban, 1927-2001)
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Agustin Cardenas
Horse
Figure
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Agustin Cardenas
Elle se plaît
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Agustin Cardenas
Science et famille
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Agustin Cardenas
La
Pareja
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Agustin Cardenas
Bronze
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The XI-e Exposition
Internationale du Surrealisme' held at the Galerie de L'CEil in
Paris in December 1965, may be regarded as
Breton's spiritual testament.
The theme which was first chosen was 'the surrealist vision of woman'; it
is not without significance that this theme was later replaced by that of
'L'Ecart absolu' - 'absolute divergence'. Charles Fourier, the
nineteenth-century Utopian socialist, had used this term in La Fausse
Industrie to indicate a method based on the principle of 'using the
spirit of contradiction in a broad sense, and of applying it not to such
and such a philosophical system, but to all systems taken together, and
then to civilization which is the warhorse of these systems, and to all
humanity's present social mechanism'. L'Ecart absolu is thus a
determination to say and to do the opposite of everything which has been
said and done previously. This is the ultimate lesson that the founder of
surrealism intended to bequeath to his age; to swim against the current in
every way, not in a spirit of sterile opposition, but with the aim of
returning to the source of everything.
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This exhibition was presented as 'an exhibition of battle, which
comes directly to grips with the most intolerable aspects of the
society in which we live', an exhibition, moreover, which excluded the
'anti-surrealist idea of a detailed programme which would immediately become a source of poetic emptiness and artistic poverty'. Pierre Faucheux's design for the exhibition provided a setting for works
which showed this denial symbolically, such as the Discomputer (le Desordinateur), a machine in which a pigeon hole containing an object
was lit up when a button on a keyboard was depressed. There were also ten
compartments which contained objects made as a protest against various
aspects of the servitude of modern life, from technocracy to sport. The
public passed under an Arch of Defeat, erected as a protest against
military victories, to reach the Consumer,
a scarecrow made up of two mattresses arranged in the form of a cross,
in the middle of which was a tub full of newspapers. A series of paintings
by the newcomers; some of the major works of the masters of surrealism';
objects displayed in an open room which it was torbidden to enter; and
surprising furniture by Ugo Sterpini and Fabio de Sanctis, all testified
to the permanence of surrealist values after more than forty years of
spiritual adventure which had been so rich in varied experiences.
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Ugo Sterpini
b.1927
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Ugo Sterpini
Untitled
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Ugo Sterpini
Untitled
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Fabio de Sanctis
b.1931
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Fabio de Sanctis
Poltrona a mano armata (in collab. w/Ugo
Sterpini)
1965
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Fabio de Sanctis
Leonardo cabinet (collab. w/Ugo Sterpini)
1968
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Fabio de Sanctis
Untitled
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The death of
Andre Breton in 1966 marked the end of surrealism as an
organized movement. The number of tributes from his oldest companions
which appeared in the Parisian daily papers showed the degree to which he
had been able to be not so much the leader of a school as a director of
conscience, in the best sense of the word. Even those who had been long
divided from him by differences of every kind, men like Aragon, Michel Leiris,
Max Ernst, and the cinema historian Georges Sadoul, made public
statements of the sad nostalgia they felt. Surrealist activity without
Breton was unimaginable; now that he was no longer working in association
with Duchamp, surrealist exhibitions could only be retrospectives. It is
true enough that, over the years which followed the birth of surrealism,
some scribblers had delighted in burying
Breton. Others had made desperate
efforts to assimilate him into intellectual fashions which varied
according to the caprice of opinion, and people were shocked to observe
that he resisted the twists and turns of time. The word 'surrealist' will
continue to be used to denote any bizarre work which uses the power of the
dream to pass beyond the confines of reality. But the epithet should not
be used without due consideration.
Andre Breton always showed profound
scorn for what he described as 'applied phantasmagoria' or 'bazaar
surrealism'. He gave no credit to painters who were content merely to
imitate the methods of the true surrealists without being driven on by
their adventurous and rebellious spirit. Surrealism, as it was practised
by the group of artists and poets who began the movement, will remain an
honoured and irreplaceable model for all those creators who see art not as
the search for an aesthetic, but as the bringing into action of ineffable
states of being, mysteries of the universe.
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Andre Masson
Portrait of
Andre Breton
1941
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