MARCEL LECOMTE, APPLIED SURREALIST IN DISCRETION

par Alain Delaunois

January 11, 2018

An exhibition and a publication recall in Brussels the memory of Marcel Lecomte, a discreet actor of surrealism in Belgium, writer, poet, art critic, author notably of The Man in Light Gray Suit and The Notebook and the Instants.

Marcel Lecomte's (1900-1966) place within surrealism in Belgium and other avant-garde movements is one of the most particular there is: at 18, he already frequents the Belgian dadaist poet and engraver Clément Pansaers, author of Pan-Pan at the Ass of the Black Nude. A little later, through his intermediary, Lecomte publishes a first collection at Paul Neuhuys in Antwerp. Then he finds himself, with Paul Nougé and Camille Goemans, one of the three signatories of the Correspondence tracts (1924-1925), before being harshly ejected, because too inclined to make literary work in Nougé's eyes. From 1922, Lecomte had met René Magritte, who illustrates his collection Applications in 1925, and whom Lecomte will accompany, despite a period of quarrel, throughout his career as a painter and magazine editor. Concerned with Taoism and Chinese thought, steeped in spirituality and occultism, as well as the different tendencies of modern art, the writer (Nougé had not been mistaken) also approached the works of Léon Spilliaert, René Guiette, Henri Michaux, Rachel Baes or Jane Graverol. He is still just there to spot the becoming of a certain Marcel Broodthaers. He has given numerous articles and chronicles on literature and the arts in an impressive number of Belgian publications – besides a series of international politics articles, pre-war in Le Rouge et le Noir, and post-war, in the popular daily La Lanterne, more must be said, for alimentary reasons than for his skills as a political analyst. And one could continue, emphasizing that he was from the 1930s sufficiently close to Jean Paulhan for the latter to publish him in the N.R.F., and still preface in 1964 his book of stories The Notebook and the Instants...

Despite a title that seems more sensational than necessary (The Alcoves of Surrealism...), the exhibition devoted to Marcel Lecomte by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, in Brussels, manages to situate quite accurately, through the use of chapters grouping works and documents, the journey in multiple networks of this man as unknown as he is atypical. A discreet figure within Belgian surrealism, which he never quite managed to leave and whose polemics he avoids, Lecomte was often noticed (and mocked) for his ungrateful physique, and for his speech of a slowness all ceremonial. The surrealist writer Irène Hamoir (and companion of Louis Scutenaire), in one of her short stories from The Infernal Vat, has barely transformed him, under the character of Marcel Marquisat, "who carried his head straight, haughty gaze, papal gaze, dominating the group or the individual." Lecomte is also at the center of a famous "petrified" painting by Magritte, Memory of a Journey (1955), which can be seen today at MoMA in New York. The exhibition offers many interesting archives, and fished from good sources since the author of The Accent of the Secret ended his life as a reader-writer of cards and notices in the archives department of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts. A function that suited this tireless curious man well, a man of letters of the old school plunged into the bath of modernity, concerned with unearthing in every work, plastic or poetic, the character of its "spectrality."

The publication that surrounds this exhibition also adds interest to the project. Concocted by Philippe Dewolf, a meticulous researcher to whom we already owe the rediscovery of Lecomte's literary and artistic chronicles (at Labor, The Ways of Literature, in 1988 and The Gaze of Things, in 1992), this book-catalog is enriched with beautiful iconography, as well as a series of texts by Lecomte, and letters, some unpublished, addressed by Magritte to Lecomte, from 1923 to 1966. Throughout the pages, one crosses numerous accomplices, more or less close to Lecomte according to the periods, of the surrealist adventure in Belgium: Magritte obviously, Louis Scutenaire, Irène Hamoir, Paul Colinet, the photographer Georges Thiry. But Lecomte is decidedly a man to seek the synthesis of elements, sometimes even diametrically opposed (thus he collaborates with P.-L. Flouquet's Journal des Poètes, abhorred by Mariën and Magritte). Paul Aron, in a text devoted to the unique issue of the magazine Réponse (1945), emphasizes for his part how Lecomte had succeeded in constituting, in his quest for a "magical experience" of writing, a collection of disparate contributions, animated by what Lecomte called "an elaborated internal criticism." "Beyond all contradictions, writes Paul Aron, throwing bridges between Brussels and Paris, between Christian mysticism and the secular marvelous of surrealism, only Marcel Lecomte could organize their improbable encounter."

Marcel Lecomte. The Alcoves of Surrealism. Texts by Paul Aron and Philippe Dewolf, letters from René Magritte, preface by Michel Draguet. Notebook n° 22 of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, 144 p., 20 euros.

Exhibition until February 18, 2018 at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, rue de la Régence, 3, 1000 Brussels.