This is a chronicle of Europe, unrelated to the central dossier, of which I give the complete text below. The exhibition "Philippe Soupault, Magnetic Traveler" was held in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis), Exhibition Center, January 8 – February 28, 1989.
PHILIPPE SOUPAULT
The Magnetic Traveler
You first write your epitaph, in the manner of nursery rhymes, lullabies or children's counting rhymes:
Philippe in his bed born on a Monday baptized on a Tuesday sick on a Thursday agonizing on a Friday dead on a Saturday buried on a Sunday That's the life of Philippe Soupault
and there you have poetry mounted in a loop. It only has to turn by itself, from the initial movement. You are free for eternity. You set off to discover all worlds, like your godfathers. Apollinaire and Cendrars, with the sound of jazz and cinema images full in your head. A piece of advice beforehand: abandon the bourgeois family, don't attach yourself to anything but friendship! They were three musketeers who, together, explored the various paths of our modernity fighting for the queen of faculties, imagination: Aragon, Breton, Soupault. The latter, the only survivor, remains the least known, while he has, to the same extent as his companions and sometimes before them, discovered William Blake and Lautréamont, invented surrealism with The Magnetic Fields which, without him, would not have seen the light of day, animated Dada in Paris. He found himself one of the first excluded from surrealism, with Artaud and Vitrac, because he loved his freedom too much. He believed too much in poetry to admit that it could be the object of a collective orientation. He gave a new tone to La Revue Européenne, welcoming his lifelong friends, Aragon, Breton, Eluard, Desnos, Péret, Tzara, Ribemont-Dessaignes... exploring foreign letters to bring back translations of Gorki, Sherwood Anderson, E.E. Cummings, the Mann brothers, Essenine, Alfonso Reyes, Gomez de la Serna... This is the time of his very great novels, which one rediscovers with a pleasure always new: The Good Apostle, En Joue!, The Negro, The Great Man etc. which are more testimonies than fictions, of great economy of means, where the sentence is only the emerging part of an iceberg of feelings, and revolts. Then Philippe Soupault traveled the world for the great press, as a lucid observer of all state perversions. A free man, Soupault fought, with his means, for freedom. Animator of Radio Tunis, he is incarcerated by Vichy. It is no coincidence that the first gesture of the Free France envoy to New York is to have him come to assist him (the document is in the Diplomatic Archives). Upon his return to France, he will still animate, tirelessly, broadcasts on poetry that we still remember, in the contemporary media desert. The Montreuil exhibition is on the scale of the character. On a considerable space of 3,000 m2 arranged like a steamship hold, we enter in turn into immense wooden containers, marked with a stencil of a poetic formula. There are gathered the artists that Soupault loved, of whom he spoke with passion: Delaunay, Arp, Masson, Picabia, Man Ray, Toyen and, more unexpected, Posada, the Mexican painter of laughing skulls, or Dubout! At each era are confronted the paintings, the photos of the time, and in display cases, perfectly readable, the rarest documents, letters, journals, manuscripts, dedicated books, recreating this permanent dialogue of the poet with his distant or present friends. Nothing is more difficult to conceive and realize than a writer's exhibition: however rare they may be, papers do not move the masses. We must praise the Montreuil team, assisted by Serge Fauchereau, for having been able to gather so many works that speak at the same time to all our senses. Henri BEHAR
The exhibition "Philippe Soupault, the Magnetic Traveler" was held at the Exhibition Center of the city of Montreuil in January and February 1989.
See: Catalog
Serge Fauchereau, Philippe Soupault, Magnetic Traveler, Paris, Édition du Cercle d'Art, 1989 1 vol., 168 pages, 23x29 cm.
This book, produced on the occasion of the exhibition devoted to Philippe Soupault, presents, from Bérénice Abbot to Stephan Zweig, a dictionary of encounters, friendships and passions of the discoverer of automatic writing and co-founder of surrealism that was Philippe Soupault.
See also BnF edition: Portrait(s) of Philippe Soupault | Editions de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (bnf.fr)
Biography of Ph. Soupault in the Maitron, SOUPAULT Philippe notice by Daniel Grason.
Philippe Soupault, Europe, No. 769 May 1993.