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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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'International Surrealist
Exhibition', New Burlington Galleries, London, 1936.
Standing left to right: Rupert Lee, Ruthven Todd, Salvador Dali, Paul
Eluard, Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, E.L.T. Mesens, George Reavey and
Hugh Sykes Williams.
Seated left to right: Diana Brinton Lee, Nusch Eluard, Eileen Agar, Sheila
Legge and an unidentified friend of Dali
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CHAPTER E I G H T
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Festivals of the imagination
Kurt Seligmann
Leonora Carrington
Richard Oelze
Dora Maar
Esteban Frances
Gordon Onslow-Ford
Kay Sage
Brassai
Valentine Hugo
Jean Hugo
Jacqueline Lamba
*
See on the next page:
Intellectual
heroes of the surrealists :
Hegel, Sade, Baudelaire, Freud, Novalis, Lautreamont,
Helene Smith,
Pancho Villa,
Paracelsus
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The surrealist artists
did not confine their originality to their works : it was also evident in
their methods of presentation. They always took the view that one-man and
group shows should be something more than a series of paintings displayed
on a gallery wall; each of their shows was embellished and given
individuality, at least in the catalogue, by some new poetic discovery.
They could imagine nothing more boring than the usual long line of
visitors to a museum walking slowly and impassively past a collection of
works of art.
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Cadavre Exquis,
Oscar Dominguez,
Esteban
Frances,
Marcel Jean and
Remedios Varo
Untitled
1935
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For them, an exhibition
was an opportunity to invite the public to a festival of the imaginary
which would excite and confuse them, so that all taking part would be torn
between amusement and anger, enthusiasm and indignation. It was a matter
of creating a stimulating environment, an atmosphere which would enhance
the spectator's receptiveness and arouse in him at the same time laughter,
revulsion and desire, so that he was bound to approach the painting and
sculpture in a state of emotional disturbance.
When he opened the Galerie Gradiva in
the Rue de Seine in 1937,
Breton had already hopes of making it 'a place from which it may
be possible to overcome the retrospective viewpoint that people are
accustomed to adopting with regard to true creativity in the arts', in
other words, 'a timeless place, no matter where, so long as it is outside
the world of reason'. It would also contain books, but 'the shelves to
hold them must really be rays of sunlight' (the French word rayon
means both 'shelf and 'ray'). All the painters in his circle helped Breton
to do up the building :
Duchamp designed a door in the shape of a double human silhouette,
while Tanguy,
Paalen and others
decorated the mouldings with emblems.
The 'Exposition Internationale du
Surrealisme' which was held at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in
January 1938 provided an opportunity for the movement to make a collective
statement which outdid anything that it had hitherto undertaken. The
visitor's first surprise was in the courtyard, where he encountered
Dali's Kainy
Taxi,
a ramshackle vehicle inside which rain
poured down on two dummies'a blonde covered with snails and a chauffeur
with a shark's head. Next the visitor entered the Rue Surrealiste, a long
corridor with street signs marking out the different sections; these were
given either the names of actual streets of historical significance - the
Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, where Nerval committed suicide, the Rue
Yivienne where Lautreamont lived - or names which were purely imaginary :
Rue de Tous-les-Diables (All Devils' Street), Rue Faible (Weak Street),
Rue de la Transfusion-du-Sang (Blood Transfusion Street), Rue Cerise
(Cherry Street), etc.
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'Exposition Internationale du
Surrealisme',
Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Paris 1938 : the pool ; one of the
four beds ;
The Horoscope, an object by Marcel Jean ; paintings by
Paalen,
Penrose and
Masson
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'Exposition
Internationale du Surrealisme',
Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Paris 1938 :
Never,
an object by
Dominguez ; the brazier ; the sacks of coal
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Dali
Kainy Taxi
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At intervals along this corridor,
visitors were received by shop window dummies of women - mannequins -
each one created and clothed by one of the painters.
Max Ernst's mannequin
was dressed in black veils and trampled the figure of a man underfoot;
the one designed by
Paalen
was covered in moss and fungi and had a bat on her head;
Man Ray's
wept crystal tears, and wore a headdress of pipes with glass bubbles
emerging from them;
Duchamp's figure wore a man's jacket with a red
electric light bulb in the breast pocket in place of a folded
handkerchief. The most spectacular of all was
Masson's
Girl in a black, gag with a pansy mouth ; she had her head in a wicker
cage and wore a cache-sexe covered with glass eyes.
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Masson
Girl in a black, gag with a pansy mouth
Mannequin for
the
Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme,
Paris, 1938
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Masson
Girl in a black, gag with a pansy mouth
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Then the visitor reached the central
hall, which had been designed with masterly success by
Marcel Duchamp,
the 'generator-arbiter' of the exhibition;
Breton and Eluard were
the 'organizers', with
Man Ray as 'master of the lights',
Paalen
in charge of 'water and brushwood', and
Dali and
Max Ernst
as technical advisers. The hall was arranged to resemble a grotto - the
floor was covered with a carpet of dead leaves; 1,200 sacks of coal hung
from the ceiling. In the middle stood an iron brazier,
symbolizing the gathering of friends round a hearth, and in each of the
four corners an enormous bed offered an invitation to dreams and love.
Part of the area was cut off from the rest by a pool with water-lilies and
reeds. A number of astonishing objects, such as
Seligmann's
Ultra-furniture (a stool made of four female legs) contributed to
the spectacular effect.
On the opening day, after a speech made
by Paul Eluard wearing a frock coat, a dancer gave a performance entitled
The Unconsummated Act, which she interpreted first on the edge of
the pool, and then in it. The atmosphere was pervaded with 'scents of
Brazil': the smell of roasting coffee. It was announced that the automaton
Enigmarelle would walk across the Gallery 'in false flesh and false
bones', but this was only a hoax designed to arouse a sense of
anticipation. A
'concise dictionary of surrealism' (Dictionnaire
abrege du surrealisme), which appeared at the time of the exhibition,
contained some strange definitions (lie - a parasol on a muddy
road; Moon - a marvellous glazier; Rape - a love of speed),
and a curious comment on himself by
Breton : 'His dearest wish was
to belong to the family of the great undesirables'. It caused a great
sensation, but the remarks of the press showed that the underlying reason
behind this behaviour was sometimes misunderstood. It was less that the
surrealists were set on originality for its own sake than that they wished
to introduce a sense of adventure into the confrontation between the
spectator and the work of art.
At about this period, a number of
newcomers joined the ranks of the originators of surrealism.
Max Ernst
had met
Leonora Carrington, a young upper-class Englishwoman, in
London, and from 1937 until 1940 she lived with him at Saint-Martin-d'Ardeche,
in a house which he decorated himself with frescoes and bas-reliefs. The
black humour and strange inventiveness of her fantastic stories, such as
La Maison de la Peur (1938), is echoed in her paintings, among them Lord
Candlestick's
repast (1938) and What shall we do tomorrow, Aunt Amelia ?
(1938). Whimsically confused memories of her own earlv life, such as the
scenes in which she depicts herself as a white horse, lend particular
charm to her painting.
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Leonora Carrington
Big Badger Meets the Domino Boys
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Leonora Carrington
The House Opposite
1945
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Richard Oelze, a German painter
who had studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar, came to Paris in 1932 and threw
in his lot with the surrealists. In his paintings he managed to create
unexpected effects from day-to-day realities, as in Expectation
(1935) and The Dangerous Desire (1936). He made use of 'frottage'
in a very individual way, and although he was obliged to give up his work
for ten years, he took up his experiments after the war along exactly the
same lines.
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Valentine Hugo began her career
with a series of twenty-four wood engravings (1926) for an edition of
Romeo and Juliet designed by Jean Hugo. She then attracted attention
with a number of lithographic portraits, of Raymond Radiguet, Princess
Bibesco, Georges Auric, and others. She took part in the surrealist
movement from 1930, and was noted particularly for her illustrations, in
which she created an intangible world with pastels and gouaches, as in the
illustrations for Les Chants de Maldoror (1932-3) and Achim von
Arnim's Contes bizarres (1933). For Paul Eluard's Les Animaux et
leurs bomines (1937) she used drypoint. She also produced a series of
allegorical paintings based on the Rimbaud legend.
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Valentine Hugo
(French Painter, 1887-1968)
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Valentine Hugo
Premier tirage des "manière noire"
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Valentine Hugo
Marquis de Sade, Eugénie de Franval
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Valentine Hugo
Marquis de Sade, Eugenie de Franval |

Valentine Hugo
La Passion de Jeanne D'Arc
Editor: Carl Theodor Dreyer; art directors: Hermann Warm and Jean Hugo;
costume designer:
Valentine Hugo
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Jean Hugo
(French, 1894-1984) |
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Jean Hugo
Les plaisirs de la plage 1928
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Jean Hugo
La Mort
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Pablo Picasso
Dora Maar |
Dora Maar was a painter and
photographer of Yugoslav origin; she was for some time
Picasso's 'muse', and
then joined the surrealists from 1935 to 1937, but later turned her
attention towards mysticism. Maurice Henry came into the movement in 1932
and produced humorous drawings, mainly on the theme of ghost stories,
which foreshadowed the graphic experiments of his later albums
Les
Metamorphoses du Vide
and Les 32 positions de l'Androgyne.
Esteban Frances was a
Spanish painter whose use of the technique of 'grattage' resulted in a
pure automatism which was much admired.
Gordon Onslow-Ford,
an English painter who had spent some time in the Royal Navy, became
interested in surrealism in 1937; his subsequent development soon led him
towards abstraction.
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Esteban Frances
El lago
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Gordon Onslow-Ford
Future of the Falcon
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Kurt Seligmann was born
in Switzerland, where he had made a collection of documents concerning
witchcraft and had written a history of magic. He exhibited at Basle and
Berne, and then published a series of fifteen etchings entitled Cardiac
Protuberances (1934). While working with the surrealists, he was
particularly interested in creating objects, and many of his drawings were
inspired by heraldic emblems. In some of his paintings he gives a highly
mannerist interpretation of classical mythology, using automaton-like
figures.
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Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy |
Kay Sage was American and had
studied painting in Milan, where she held an exhibition of abstract works
in 1926. She arrived in Paris in 1937, and concentrated on creating
representations of the fantastic; she attracted the attention of
Yves
Tanguy, whom she married, and with whom she returned to live in the
United States in 1939. Her treatment of imaginary towns was particularly
striking, as in Tomorrow is never (1955, New York, Metropolitan
Museum).
Minotaure,
founded by Albert Skira, had become
surrealism's official publication. The 'review with a beast's head' first
appeared in May, 1933, the month which saw the last issue of Le
Surrealisme аu service de la Revolution. On account of its luxurious
format and its wit, Minotaure provided an opportunity for the
beauty of surrealism to be defined more clearly than ever before. At
first, under Teriade's editorship, it dealt with classical and modern art
in an eclectic manner, but
Breton soon imposed on it his own
particular line.
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Kay Sage
Tomorrow is never
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Brassai
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Minotaure
set out to stimulate interest in the
unexpected in art, the study of rare documents, anything off the beaten
track. In their photographs,
Brassai,
Man Ray,
Raoul Ubac
and Dora Maar succeeded in using reality as a trap in which to
capture the marvellous. The first signs of surrealism in the past were
outlined in articles on the baroque,
Gericault,
Botticelli,
Urs Graf,
Uccello and
Piero di Cosimo. Maurice
Heine, the defender and exponent of the ideas of the Marquis de Sade, contributed items on the illustrations of the English Gothic
novels and those of the works of Sade's contemporary Restif de la Bretonne,
in which the engraver Binet depicted an idealized 'Sylphide' type
of woman; on Jean Duvet's Apocalypses; and on the Tibetan
gods.
Many surrealist artists had great interest
in the Marquis de Sade. The first Manifesto of Surrealism
(1924) announced that "Sade is surrealist in sadism." Guillaume
Apollinaire found rare manuscripts by Sade in the Bibliothèque
Nationale in Paris. He published a selection of his writings in
1909, where he introduced Sade as "the freest spirit that had ever
lived." Sade was celebrated in surrealist periodicals. In 1926 Paul
Eluard wrote of Sade as a "fantastique" and "revolutionary." Maurice
Heine pieced together Sade's manuscripts from libraries and museums
in Europe and published them between 1926 and 1935. Extracts of the
original draft of Justine were published in Le Surréalisme
au service de la révolution.
The surrealist artist Man Ray admired Sade because he and other
surrealists viewed him as an ideal of freedom. According to Ray,
Heine brought the original 1785 manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom
to his studio to be photographed. An image by Man Ray entitled
Monument à D.A.F. de Sade appeared in Le Surréalisme au
service de la révolution.
(From Wikipedia)
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The 'united front of poetry and art' which the surrealists sought to
establish was given support in Paul Eluard's article 'Physique de la
poesie', a study of painters who illustrated the works of poets. By means
of his collection of postcards, 'those treasures of nothingness', Eluard
also helped to draw attention to minor art forms which throw unexpected
light on the meaning of beauty.
Breton showed a collection of
mediums' drawings, while Peret contributed poems singing the
praises of armour, ruins and automatons.
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Brassai
"Bijou" of
the Montmartre cabarets
From "Paris by Night"
1933
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Brassai
Transmutation NO. VIII "Tentation de
Saint Antoine"
1934-50
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Brassai
Washing in Brothel
1932
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Brassai
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born September 9, 1899, Brassó,Transylvania,
Austria-Hungary [now Romania]
died July 8, 1984, Eze, near Nice,France
Original name Gyula Halász , French Jules Halasz Hungarian-born French
photographer, poet, draughtsman, and sculptor, known primarily for his
dramatic photographs of Paris at night.His pseudonym, Brassaï, is derived
from his native city.
Brassaï trained as an artist and settled in Paris in 1924. There he worked
as a sculptor, painter, and journalist and associated with such artists as
Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and the writer Henry Miller.
Although he disliked photography at the time, he found it necessary to use
it in his journalistic assignments and soon came to appreciate the
medium's unique aesthetic qualities.
Brassaï's early photographs concentrated on the nighttime world of
Montparnasse, a district of Paris then noted for its artists,
streetwalkers, and petty criminals. His pictures were published in a
successful book, Paris de nuit (1933; Paris After Dark, also published as
Paris at Night), which caused a stir because of its sometimes scandalous
subject matter. Hisnext book, Voluptés de Paris (1935; “Pleasures of
Paris”), made him internationally famous.
When the German army occupied Paris in 1940, Brassaï escaped southward to
the French Riviera, but he returned to Paris to rescue the negatives he
had hidden there. Photography on the streets was forbidden during the
occupation of Paris, so Brassaï resumed drawing and sculpture and began
writing poetry. After World War II, his drawings were published in book
form as Trente dessins (1946; “Thirty Drawings”), with a poem by the
French poet Jacques Prévert . Brassaï turned again to photography in 1945,
and two years later a number of his photographs of dimly lit Paris streets
were greatly enlarged to serve as the backdrop for Prévert's ballet Le
Rendez-vous. Many of Brassaï's postwar pictures continued the themes and
techniques of his early work. In these photographs Brassaï preferred
static over active subjects, but he imbued even themost inanimate images
with a warm sense of human life.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York City held a retrospective exhibition
of Brassaï's work in 1968. His Henry Miller, grandeur nature (Henry
Miller: The Paris Years) was published in 1975, and a book of his
photographs entitled The Secret Paris of the 30's in 1976. Artists of My
Life, a collection of his photographic and verbal portraits of well-known
artists, art dealers, and friends, was published in 1982.
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Finally, Minotaure decided to
demonstrate that even fashion was a subject worthy of the attention of
poets and painters, and it published some extracts from La
Derniere Mode, the women's magazine founded by Mallarme. Crevel
discussed the connection between fashion and fantasy, while Tzara,
who had made his peace with Breton after the Second Manifests and
now supported surrealism with the same zeal with which he had launched
dadaism, wrote an unusual article on the unconscious mechanisms governing
a woman's choice of a hat : 'D'un certain automatisme du gout'.
Dali
expounded a theory of the 'new colours of spectral sex-appeal'.
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Trotsky dead |
In the spring of 1938, before leaving
for a trip to Mexico,
Breton addressed the readers of his review as
follows : 'Follow Minotaure, and in addition : beware of
imitations, rubbish from the second-hand market, hot-air balloons.'
In Mexico he met Leon Trotsky and the
painter Diego Rivera, who had designed the impressive frescoes on
the Palacio Nacional and many other public buildings. With them he wrote
the manifesto 'For an independent revolutionary art' (Pour un art
revolutionnaire independent), which set out in eloquent terms all the
ideas he had fought for over the years. In the face of the current threats
of war and oppression,
Breton demanded an 'artistic opposition' to
be manned by all the available artists in the world. But he emphasized
that such an opposition would be effective only if the powers of
imagination were allowed free rein : 'To those who would persuade us, now
or in the future, that art should submit to a discipline which we consider
totally incompatible with its methods, we reply with an unconditional
refusal, and our determination to adhere to the
principle :
all freedom in art.'
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With this in mind,
Breton created, on his
return to Paris in July, 1938, the International Federation of Independent
Revolutionary Art (F.I.A.R.I.), whose short-lived publication Cle
had as its editorial secretary Maurice Nadeau, who was later to write a
Histoire
du surre'alisme.
The Second World War brought this
spiritual quest to a temporary halt, and gave the surrealists an
opportunity to define clearly the role of art in such circumstances. At
the end of 1940 they gathered at the Chateau Air-Bel, near Marseilles,
under the auspices of the American Committee for Aid to Intellectuals;
there, despite the uncertainty and disturbance they all felt, they set
about inventing a new set of playing-cards.
Breton had stated :
'Historians of the playing-card all agree that throughout the ages the
changes it has undergone have always been at times of great military
defeats'. They therefore evolved a system in which the four suits were
replaced by symbols representing their chief preoccupations : Love
(Flame), Dream (Black Star), Revolution (Wheel and blood), and Knowledge
(Keyhole). The cards consisted of Ace, Genius, Siren, Magus, Ten, etc.,
and portrayed some of the intellectual heroes of the surrealists
: Hegel, Sade, Baudelaire, Freud, Novalis,
Lautreamont, Helene Smith (the medium), etc. These cards were
made by Frederic Delanglade from designs by Jacqueline Lamba,
Andre Breton,
Andre
Masson,
Victor
Brauner,
Wifredo Lam,
Jacques
Herold and
Oscar Dominguez. They illustrate the
desire constantly proclaimed by the surrealists to preserve, in the face
of everything, even in the most tragic circumstances, the delicate flower
of inspiration which is the chief adornment of life.
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Man Ray
Jacqueline Lamba
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Jacqueline Lamba
(1910 - 1993)
Studied decorative arts in Paris. Married
Andre Breton in 1934 and was the subject of many of his poems of those
years including "La Nuit de Tournesol' which anticipated their
meeting.
Began exhibiting objects and drawings with the Surrealists. Arriving
in New York, she developed automatism into a series of intense
prismatic paintings close in spirit to the abstract work of Matta and
Masson.
Separated from Breton in 1943 and later married the American sculptor
and photographer David Hare.
First one-woman
exhibition at the Norlyst Gallery, New York, in 1944. Also exhibited
at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1946) and Galerie Pierre,
Paris (1947).
In her later years,
lived as a recluse in her Paris studio. Developed Alzheimer's Disease
in the last five years of her life.
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Jacqueline Lamba
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Andre Breton,
his wife, Jacqueline Lamba,
and Max Ernst |

Jacqueline Lamba
In
Spite of Everything
1942
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Jacqueline Lamba
Ville-Paris-Panorama
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Jacqueline Lamba
Le jeu de Marseille:
Projet de carte:
As de la Révolution; la roue
(et sang)
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See on the next page:
Le jeu de
Marseille
Intellectual heroes of the surrealists :
Hegel, Sade, Baudelaire, Freud, Novalis,
Lautreamont,
Helene Smith,
Pancho Villa,
Paracelsus

Jacqueline Lamba
Behind
the Sun
1943 |

Jacqueline Lamba
Behind the sun
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