André Breton

Dora Maar, Paris (acquired directly from the artist in 1937 and sold by the estate: Piasa, Paris, Les Livres de Dora Maar, October 29, 1998, lot 226)
Acquired at the above sale

London, Tate Modern; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Surrealism: Desire Unbound, 2001-02

The work is presented in a perspex box. The cardboard lid and box are mounted on perspex stands. There are signs of wear and some surface dirt to the lid and the box. The assemblage objects (inlcuding a blue glass flacon, pipe cleaners and a white painted sea horse) are mounted on a carboard. There is some light surface dirt and minor staining in places. Some paint flaking to the sea horse. The work is in good overall condition.
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André Breton, the literary figure under whom the Surrealist movement coalesced, likewise contributed wonderfully bizarre objects to the Surrealist roster of sculpture and assemblage. Poème-objets, a format of his own invention, were Breton's signature juxtapositions of text and found object. He defined these works in his 1928 book Le Surréalisme et la peinture as follows: "The poème-objet is a composition which tends to combine the resources of poetry with those of sculpture and to reflect on their reciprocal powers of exaltation." This concise and compact assemblage technique allowed Breton to rapidly drum up uncannily fantastic situations. The facility with which objects could be juxtaposed and presented in a box in assemblage made the medium ideally suited to the Surrealists in their quest for the marvellous and the imaginary. In the roughly twelve poème-objets he constructed in the 1930s and early 1940s, the artist achieved the succinct visual and verbal language of absurdity so desirable to his circle.

Breton's poème-objets had a profound impact on the history of art, and riffs on his lyrical combinations permeate artists' practices through the 20th Century. Joseph Cornell, for one, was greatly influenced by Breton's sculptures. His resulting oeuvre comprised dozens of hauntingly beautiful assemblage boxes (see fig. 2).

While many of Breton's poème-objets appeared as simple text-object combinations, the present work is a particularly lavish example. This Chanson-Objet was in the collection of Dora Maar, Pablo Picasso's lover and herself a successful Surrealist photographer and painter, for sixty years. Maar received the work from Breton in 1937, the year after her relationship with Picasso began. Maar, who became increasingly imbricated with the Surrealist group through the 1930s, was a close friend of Breton's second wife, the painter Jacqueline Lamba, from their days together at art school.

The present work is inscribed with a poem by Breton that reads:

Sur un banc de liège
En plein Méditerranée
Tandis qu'elles riaient
Tordant les draps sur leur piano 
Pour faire des vagues
O vieux registre de l'amour
12.2.1937.

Fig. 1 The present lot is accompanied by its headdress-box lid (left).

Fig. 2 Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Dovecote), circa 1953, mixed media, sale: Sotheby's, New York, Monday, May 9, 2011, lot 10, $1,426,500