THE GRADIVA GALLERY

par Renée Mabin

It was through Sigmund Freud's essay Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva that the surrealists discovered the character invented by the German writer based on an ancient bas-relief. Gradiva, "she who walks," becomes for them an ideal feminine figure. It is this name that André Breton chose for the small gallery he opened in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in 1937 to evoke the beauty of the future that he wanted to make known through objects, paintings, and books. The commercial enterprise quickly ended in failure. But the gallery brought together a new group of artists around someone who was not an art dealer, but a discoverer, ahead of his time. It is therefore revealing of the surrealists' interests in the immediate pre-war period.

In his radio interviews with André Parinaud in 1952, fifteen years after the gallery adventure, André Breton gives the reasons for its opening. He is, in 1936-1937, in an "extremely critical material situation" that he does not want his daughter to live through [1]. He recalls the letter to "Ecusette de Noireuil," published in Mad Love, addressed to Aube who was then only eight months old, where he speaks of accepted misery. But tensions arise with his wife Jacqueline who later evokes these "years deprived of money, surrounded by a priceless collection" [2]. To provide for his wife and daughter's needs, Breton first solicits a mission abroad through Jean Giraudoux. But the Ministry of Foreign Affairs opposes a refusal. In desperation, he accepts, in January 1937, the proposal of one of his friends to run a gallery. On January 14, Éluard announces to Gala that Breton "is going to open a store of objects, paintings, and books for which funds are being lent to him. [3]" Indeed, it is thanks to Edmond Bomsel's generosity that Breton can launch this project.

Edmond Bomsel is indeed a long-time friend, who will remain so, as proven by the letters Breton still addresses to him in 1961. A lawyer in Versailles, he is a bibliophile and co-owner of the Sagittaire editions where Philippe Soupault is literary director. He is also an enlightened art collector who lends works for certain surrealist exhibitions. Breton is grateful to him for having revealed "the beauty of popular imagery through its wonderful vicissitudes. [4]" Bomsel is also one of the founders of the Compagnie de l'Art brut instituted by Dubuffet. It is therefore with some enthusiasm that Breton launches into the search for premises. After the war, sending his friend a photo of the gallery, he reminds him: "Do you recognize this setting that owed its existence to you and that we had wanted to enchant?" [5] He inquires with the gallery owner Pierre Loeb, the founder of the Pierre gallery, who gives a favorable opinion, although the price of premises has clearly increased [6]. The market has indeed recovered, while from 1929 to 1936, galleries sold nothing [7]. Breton therefore thinks that the enterprise can succeed and even "that it would fill a very real gap from the point of view of interest and curiosity. [8]" His research then leads him to a store located at 31 rue de Seine.

Breton begins by choosing the name Gradiva for the gallery. The surrealists know well the heroine of the novella by German writer Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva, a Pompeian Fantasy, published in 1903, which inspired Freud's study, published in 1907. Max Ernst may have read this text in German before 1920 and drawn inspiration from it for one of the murals in Éluard and Gala's house in Eaubonne. It is in 1931, when Marie Bonaparte's translation appears in France, that the text becomes accessible to other members of the surrealist group and fascinates them all the more as Freud starts, not from the words of a patient, but from a sculpture and fiction, to reveal the role of repressed memories and desire in the elaboration of the delusion of the Austrian archaeologist Hanold, in love with a Pompeian woman who disappeared in antiquity. Dali in particular immediately undertakes paintings and drawings on this theme. Gala, who has left Éluard, is for him Gradiva, since, as in Freud's analysis, she is the therapist, the living woman who succeeds in healing him. The ancient sculpture with the pleated robe and raised foot then embodies for the surrealists the ideal woman, the one who allows the emergence of desire, the passage from dream to reality, from death to life. Her gait is the symbol of this metamorphosis. It is this image that Breton chooses to highlight in his collection Communicating Vessels, as early as 1932, by inscribing the last sentence of Jensen's novella: "And slightly lifting her robe with her left hand, Gradiva Rediviva, Zoé Bertgang, enveloped in Hanold"s dreamy gaze, with her supple and tranquil gait, passed to the other side of the street. [9]"

This name receives the general approval of the surrealists and Jacqueline, to whom Breton has asked for her opinion [10]. Dali, in a letter to Breton on March 27, proposes calling the shop Café Gradiva and giving it the external appearance of a butcher shop with fake marble and golden horse heads as signs from which hang hair like at hairdressers [11]. But the signs made disappeared quickly, as they were stolen at night [12]. So only the letters GRADIVA remain, affixed above the window and joined by the word "like" repeated to a series of surrealist women's first names: Gisèle, Rosine, Alice, Dora, Inès, Violette, Alice, among whom we find Gisèle Prassinos, Alice Rahon, Dora Maar, and Violette Nozière. It is therefore placing a place of sale of objects under the sign of woman, because Breton's relationship to the object is passionate. Moreover, the gallery door suggests a couple's story, as in Jensen's novella: Marcel Duchamp has indeed drawn and had executed a glass door, whose opening, behind two small columns, "silhouetted as their shadow might do, a man of powerful stature and a woman noticeably smaller, standing side by side. [13]" Jacqueline Lamba is therefore associated with the adventure, just like the shadow of the Pompeian Gradiva who, in Hanold's delusion, passes through walls. The external decoration of the gallery is completed by vertical frescoes by painter Wolfgang Paalen, erected on both sides of the window.

The interior is more modest, but Breton hopes to enlarge the small room by renting the back shop that belongs to Robert Duncan. He has arranged a few tables to allow reading. He is concerned with material details, chooses fine tracing paper for the gallery's letterhead. He writes to Picasso hoping to obtain a very small drawing of Gradiva to reproduce on this paper and on the labels [14]. He has in any case an oval stamp bearing the mark of a foot in profile that is affixed to the prospectus announcing the gallery's opening. This prospectus on mauve or chamois paper looks more like an art article than a commercial text. Gradiva is indeed defined there as "the beauty of tomorrow" which sometimes betrays itself in works of the past and present, like Nerval's Delfica, Seurat's The Models, or a jungle by the Douanier Rousseau. Breton seeks to apprehend this modern beauty in popular art and the spirit of childhood, in books, from Mad Love that he has just written to artists' books, in paintings and objects. Shortly after the surrealist exhibition of objects at the Charles Ratton gallery, Breton stops at all categories of objects that can be shown there, even apparently useless or worthless, but capable of revealing to each his own desire. He wishes for a place outside of time, outside the world of reason, illuminated by its content, placing itself under the sign of dream [15].

André Breton can then install in his gallery works from his personal collection; he also asks for some from his friends and the artists he loves. On March 15, in a letter to Picasso, he tells him of his desire to present one of his works for the opening. He has exhibition projects, one of Magritte who hastens to accept [16], the other of Brauner [17]. A series of photographs shows the opening preparations. Jacqueline works with the artists on the layout. Yves Tanguy and Marcel Duchamp install the famous door, Dominguez joins them from his studio at 83 boulevard Montparnasse to paint the storefront, Paalen climbs on a stepladder to fix his frescoes. But Breton and his wife don't really look like sellers when Dora Maar, Picasso's companion, a friend of Jacqueline's, takes their photo lying on the sidewalk with Max Ernst, for a surrealist action in front of the gallery [18]. Moreover, as early as May, Paul Éluard shows his skepticism: "His store is not progressing. Breton is not made for this kind of enterprise, Jacqueline neither. [19]" Certainly, tensions exist between the two men. But in April, clients don't rush in and income is insufficient to consider vacations, Breton himself writes [20].

The inaugural exhibition is planned for May. Yves Tanguy is active in obtaining works, which gives him "crazy work"; he waits for example for the one that Bellmer has announced and which risks arriving after the opening day [21]. He also takes charge of arranging the objects, with Paalen's help. Breton has had printed an invitation card with black letters on brown paper. He has gathered books, Oceanian sculptures, paintings by essentially surrealist painters: Arp, Bellmer, Chirico, Dali, Dominguez, Duchamp, Ernst, Giacometti, Hayter, Klee, Dora Maar, Marcoussis, Miro, Oelze, Paalen, Picabia, Picasso, Man Ray, and Tanguy. A photograph by Jean Devoluy shows the gallery interior a little later. On the wall, a painting by Magritte is surrounded "by savage objects," according to Breton's classification, masks and fetishes, placed side by side, to create the shock of their reunion. Surrealist objects are also offered there, like Miro's The Object of Sunset or Dominguez's wheelbarrow upholstered in pink satin which was sold to Marie-Laure de Noailles. Dominguez has also lent Never, a phonograph painted white from which women's legs emerge, and Paalen his chair covered with ivy of which two versions are made. Breton also borrows from Marcel Jean The Specter of the Gardenia, which is placed facing the door, so that the black figure winks with its zipper eyes at the clients who enter. But no one buys it [22].

A new group of surrealist painters is thus gathered around the Gradiva gallery. If some entered the movement very early, like Yves Tanguy, the others have joined recently. The Viennese Wolfgang Paalen, after a passage through Abstraction, became surrealist in 1935, like Kurt Seligmann, born in Basel and passionate about alchemy. Dominguez, originally from the Canaries, organized a surrealist exhibition there as early as 1934, while Esteban Francès arrives from Spain in 1937. André Breton, in the article "On the Most Recent Tendencies of Surrealist Painting," shows that their creativity "operates a marked return to automatism," through the invention of new processes, Dominguez's "decalcomania without preconceived object," Paalen's "fumage," Esteban Francès's "grattage." Thus, "absolute automatism makes its appearance on the plastic plane. [23]" Decalcomania in particular, which allows obtaining strange landscapes through color drips, resembles a child's game, to which Breton and Jacqueline devote themselves. The works obtained are published in the journal Minotaur, n° 8.

The women who join the surrealist movement in the thirties are the artists' companions, but they are also creators who have received artistic training. Jacqueline Lamba, very sensitive to poetry and painting, followed courses at the École centrale des Arts décoratifs and frequented André Lhote's studio in Montparnasse, with Dora Maar. At this time, Jacqueline creates objects for the group's exhibitions and makes drawings. Dora now turns to photography and exhibits her work at the Beaune gallery. Leonora Carrington, a very young girl from good society, met in London, during the opening of her exhibition at the Mayor Gallery, in 1937, Max Ernst who for her left his wife Marie-Berthe Aurenche. Leonora began painting in Italy, then in London at the Ozenfant academy, and her paintings are then populated with animals and influenced by the tales of her childhood. André Breton is seduced by her astonishing beauty and her nonconformity [24]. Remedios Varo also arrives in France in 1937 with the poet Benjamin Péret whom she married in Barcelona where she met him in 1936. She then participates in surrealist activities. She is also a painter, but they are without money, and it is only later, in Mexico, that she will be able to realize her work.

While the rupture is consummated between Éluard and Breton and Max Ernst takes his distance and settles in Saint-Martin d'Ardèche, André Masson renews with Breton. The painting Gradiva testifies to his interest in this theme, in a sort of collaboration that continues when he illustrates with an engraving Breton's poem, "Bearer without Burden," born in 1941, from the gait of Martinican women [25]. But above all, Breton discovers in his gallery a new artist. The young architect Roberto Matta left Chile for Europe in the thirties, and met in Spain the poet Lorca who gave him a letter of introduction for Dali. In 1937, in Paris, a jack-of-all-trades for the realization of the Spanish pavilion at the Universal Exhibition, he comes into contact with Picasso, then Esteban Francès who advises him to meet Breton. On October 9, armed with a letter from Dali who says he likes his pencil drawings [26], Matta arrives at the Gradiva gallery. The Anglo-American writer Patrick Waldberg, a friend of Tanguy's, witnesses the scene. Matta who has brought about thirty drawings, talks a lot. Breton understands nothing of his discourse, but immediately buys two drawings. The meeting is decisive for Matta: "I was very young, I knew nothing, and they told me: 'you are surrealist!' I didn't even know what that meant. [27]" This is the starting point of Matta's choice of painting who, as early as the summer of 1938 in Trévignon, in Brittany, finds his way. He is accompanied by Gordon Onslow Ford, an English naval officer who resigned to paint, met by chance in Paris. Introduced to Breton, he also frequents the small gallery.

But the place seems to have allowed more meetings of artists than buyers. Indeed, despite the surrealists' goodwill, the help of the poet and journalist Robert Rius who comes almost every day, the gallery quickly experiences difficulties. According to Leonora Carrington, "no one entered the shop, except the surrealists. [28]" There are however collectors of "savage objects," since the beginning of the 20th century and great dealers, like Paul Guillaume, one of the first to have organized an exhibition of African art, Charles Ratton who owns a gallery on rue de Marignan, is also an expert, and has prepared with Louis Carré, the sale of the Éluard collection, Breton, Sculptures of Africa, America and Oceania, at Drouot, on July 2 and 3, 1931. Pierre Loeb, founder of the Pierre gallery, is also well known to the surrealists. Certainly, Oceanian art, surrealist objects and later Gallic medals are less known than African art, but doubtless the gallery is too recent, and its director a beginner in the art market. He has constituted a collection at the best price, because he is capable of discovering beauty where it is not expected, but he does not have the art of selling.

Visitors are not well received in the gallery. Peggy Guggenheim finds that Breton "resembles a lion going back and forth in a cage. [29]" And this is not an isolated opinion. Marcel Jean, a friend of Dominguez and Yves Tanguy, recounts in his collection of memories that Breton tolerates rather poorly the visits of the curious, even surrealists, who then take refuge in Georges Hugnet's bookbinding workshop, located on rue de Buci [30]. All opinions agree. Neither Breton nor his wife are made to "sell objects regularly, even very beautiful ones [31]," writes Huguette Lamba, Jacqueline's sister who herself admits "that they sold nothing, being merchants neither one nor the other," which Éluard perceived immediately. Thus, only 100 copies of Mad Love find buyers. In fact, Breton does not want to part with his objects, with which he maintains a constant dialogue. He lives the sale as the suffering of a separation. Moreover, management is not his forte. In August, he asks Simone Collinet, his first wife, who now runs a gallery, "to entrust him with some paintings and drawings, because he doesn't have enough things to sell. [32]" Indeed, by the end of August, the gallery is in difficulty; in October, he fears not being able to rent the back shop and has problems with heating [33]. In fact, Jacqueline and André Breton must face the evidence: it's failure. They then resume collective activities, like the preparation of the 1938 surrealist exhibition.

At the end of February 1938, André Breton abandons the Gradiva gallery. The intervention of Saint-John-Perse and Henri Laugier allows him to obtain from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs a mission of lectures in Mexico. Breton is delighted to be able to realize "one of the great aspirations of his life." He prepares his departure and charges Yves Tanguy with the liquidation of the gallery with the Commercial Court and the transfer of works to the Bucher-Myrbor gallery: an exhibition of the contents of the Gradiva gallery is planned there from April 27 to May 12. Breton leaves France on March 30. Tanguy accomplishes his task and informs his friend by mail addressed to the French legation in Mexico: everything is going well at the Jeanne Bucher gallery, and Bomsel guides him for administrative procedures. On April 28, in a new letter, he asks Breton for signatures for the cessation of Gradiva commerce [34]. At closing, the door is stored, then destroyed at Marcel Duchamp's request. In 1952, a photographic reproduction of this door appears for the first time. In 1968, during the collective exhibition Doors, at the Cordier gallery, then Ekstom in New York, a plexiglass replica reproduced on the invitation card designed by Duchamp is presented. It therefore has the status of a work of art. This door indeed fits into Duchamp's research, from the door installed in his apartment on rue Larrey, to Given, a massive wooden door with an opening dating from 1966, passing through The Large Glass.

Thus the Gradiva gallery never really functioned and André Breton is largely responsible. But the name of Gradiva has allowed the surrealists to reflect on the role of the object, in Freud's footsteps. The place has brought together another generation of artists who have renewed automatic practices, have sought to approach primitive works, and revealed the painter Matta. But it has not allowed the works to be sold, nor to be made known. It lasted too short a time for this group of painters to associate durably, especially since the war quickly separated them, some leaving for North America, like Masson, Tanguy and Matta, others towards Mexico, like Remedios Varo and Péret, Paalen and Leonora Carrington. The gallery is now only a buried memory like those that gave birth to Hanold's dreams. The hopes it carried have not materialized. But this has allowed André Breton and Jacqueline Lamba to escape commerce and the reign of money, which was doubtless their deep desire.

    1 — . Interviews with André Parinaud. André Breton, Complete Works, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, III, p. 547. ↩

    2 — . Letter from Jacqueline Lamba to J.-C. Blachère October 27, 1984 in Les totems d'André Breton, Paris, L'Harmattan, 1996, p. 138. ↩

    3 — . Paul Éluard, Letters to Gala, Gallimard, Paris, 1984, February 14, 1937, p. 275. ↩

    4 — . Letter from Breton to Bomsel, 1955, private collection. ↩

    5 — . 2nd letter to Bomsel, 1955, private collection. ↩

    6 — . Letter from Breton to Bomsel, February 4, 1937, published in the catalog André Breton, la beauté convulsive, MNAM, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1991. ↩

    7 — . Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler- Francis Crémieux, Interviews, Gallimard, L'Imaginaire, Paris, 1998, p. 144. ↩

    8 — . Letter from Breton to Bomsel, February 4, 1937. ↩

    9 — . A. Breton, Communicating Vessels, OC II, p. 103. ↩

    10 — . Letter from A. Breton to J. Lamba, March 31, 1937, OC II, p. LII. ↩

    11 — . Id., ibid. ↩

    12 — . Letter from Breton to Bomsel, private collection. ↩

    13 — . A. Breton Interviews, op cit. p. 547. Photographic reproduction II p. 675. ↩

    14 — . Letter from Breton to Picasso, March 15, 1937, Picasso Museum Archives. ↩

    15 — . Prospectus published in La clé des champs, A. Breton, Complete Works, op. cit. II p. 673. ↩

    16 — . Letter from Magritte to Breton, May 1937, B L J. Doucet, Breton Fund. ↩

    17 — . Letter from Breton to Brauner, May 1937, MNAM Archives, Victor Brauner Fund. ↩

    18 — . Alba Romano Pace, Jacqueline Lamba, Gallimard, Paris 2010, p. 78, "Witnesses of Art." ↩

    19 — . Paul Éluard, letter to Gala, May 1, 1937, op cit., p. 281. ↩

    20 — . Letter from André Breton to Jacqueline Lamba, April 1937, B L J. Doucet, Breton Fund. ↩

    21 — . Letter from Yves Tanguy to Bellmer, May 19, 1937, private collection. ↩

    22 — . Marcel Jean, Au galop dans le vent, éditions Jean Pierre de Monza, 1991, p. 69. ↩

    23 — . André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, Gallimard, 1965, p. 145. ↩

    24 — . André Breton, OC II, Anthology of Black Humor, p. 1163. ↩

    25 — . A. Breton, Martinique Snake Charmer, OC III, p. 383. ↩

    26 — . Letter from Dali to Breton, B L J. Doucet, Breton Fund. ↩

    27 — . Matta Catalog, Centre Pompidou, 1985, p. 267. ↩

    28 — . Mark Polizzoti, André Breton, Paris, Gallimard, Biographies, 1995, p. 503. Author's interview with Leonora Carrington, April 25, 1986. ↩

    29 — . Peggy Guggenheim, My Life and My Follies, Paris, Perrin, 2004, p. 130. ↩

    30 — . Marcel Jean, Au galop dans le vent, op cit, p. 69. ↩

    31 — . Huguette Lamba, Unpublished Memoirs, in: Jacqueline Lamba, op cit. p. 288. ↩

    32 — . Letter from Breton to Simone Colinet, Sator Archives. ↩

    33 — . A. Breton, OC II, p. LIII. ↩

    34 — . Letter from Yves Tanguy to André Breton, B L J. Doucet. ↩