Surréalisme

1934 · réf. 88369 — Paris: Gallimard 1934. First French Edition. Octavo. 19cm. Publisher's cream colored card wraps titled in black and red to spine and front cover. Glassine dustjacket. 251pp.;1. Strong and tight a little soiling and marginal wear to the wraps and some staining and discoloration to the glassine jacket; internally clean ownership signatures of Monique Fong and Michel Tavriger to the front flyleaf dated 1949 and 1950 numerous collage additions to the text throughout. A very good copy with some fascinating artistic additions from the early surrealist movement. From the library of Nathaniel Tarn noted poet translator and anthropologist who during the period 1945-1950 was resident in Paris living and working under the name Michel Tavriger before adopting the name Nathaniel Tarn Tarn being the name of a French river. He was intimate with a large swath of Parisian artistic intelligentsia including Breton Octavio Paz photographer Serge Jacques and surrealist muse and intellectual powerhouse Monique Fong. In all probability he was most likely also a member of the surrealist ex-Vichy collaborationist "Cercle D'Etudes Metaphysiques" presided over by Raymond Abellio Bernard Noel Raymond De Becker and the like who numbered Cocteau and Jean Paulhan among their friends and contributors. Improvised collage is a factor of several branches of Fong's correspondence with friends like John Cage so it is most probably that the photographic collage elements inserted into the volume are the work of Fong. They are mostly black and white clippings from fashion or art magazines mostly occupied with nudes with several pages devoted simply to naked breasts they range in complexity from a simple uneven clipping to a rather more complex arrangement of vertically sliced elements arranged together covering a whole page to the rear of the volume. Fong stated in an interview before her death: "I'm a very rare person at this point. Not because I'm 95 but because I think there are only three people left in this world who have known both Breton and Octavio Paz. I was a member of the Surrealist group as was Nathaniel Tarn - under another name at the time - when we were 23 24 something like that. And all of our contemporaries died before the age of 70 which is really not old. There are very few survivors. If you knew Octavio Paz you did not necessarily live in France. People knew him in Mexico in India in the States. I'm pretty sure that the only people to know both Paz and Breton are at this point Jean-Clarence Lambert Nathaniel Tarn and me." https://caesuramag.org/posts/interview-with-monique-fong-surrealism. Gallimard unknown