SEGURA, A SEASON WITH MARIANNE

The Last Surrealist

par Branko Aleksić

February 13, 2023

Marianne Ivsic (née Ivšić, born Nikolić in Belgrade in 1919, died in Paris in 1995), artist, at the time of revolutionary student protest in 1968, signed a protest tract that Alain Segura judges as "one of the most beautiful tracts of May 68". She claimed her friendship with André Breton and Benjamin Péret, which intimidated the group of young anarchists and situationists. Segura's book of buried memories reports the little-known facts of the relations between Guy Debord and Marianne: he called her "the last surrealist". She preferred herself as Anonymous of the 20th century. But the lines of power are fleeing: arts, thoughts, way of life – everything is encompassed in Alain Segura's project to resurrect the ghosts of old photographs, and to give a name to the past. The sensitive, very reflective writing cuts slices of the archaeology of the effervescent era of May 68, when the author was seventeen. Marianne had to dig up with a hammer and saw the joists and beams of the extravagant Parisian dwellings she chose for her studio, and where she received the circle of poet and artist friends. Joe – – projects an ephemeral monument to Charles Fourier, Segura reads pages from his novel Don Juan, which will remain unpublished... According to Marianne, the studio at 42 rue Galande houses for some time André Breton, threatened by the bomb that the OAS commando deposited in his mailbox at 42 rue Fontaine.

The main text of this book was presented in the journal A contretemps in May 2011. The entire book was propelled into orbit at the instigation of two Serbian anarchist friends, Relja Knežević and Aleksa Golijan, one a historian, the other a translator, who are planning a book of unpublished documents and poems by Marianne, to which the section "Twenty Years Later" is dedicated. The title of the foreword, "Explosante fixe", alludes to the definition of Beauty that Breton once gave in Mad Love. Marianne quotes Breton who, tired of painting exhibitions, said with irony: "It was beautiful..." It seems evident that to express Marianne's universe one needs not only a Season... by Rimbaud with "Being beautiful", but also Breton's explosante fixe. We conclude that there are beauties and more difficult beauties, they are, the more fixed they remain in memory. This is the case with Alain Segura's Rimbaldian book in memory of Marianne Ivsic.