Artine

Paul Éluard and René Char met in the autumn of 1929, and, in jest, Char told Éluard that his poetry was too elegiac, calling him the Lamartine of Surrealism, a “Lamartine sans lame” [Lamartine without a blade]: the name Artine was thus found, and Char gave it to the collection he was then preparing. Written by Char with the collaboration of André Breton and Paul Éluard, the publisher’s insert opens with the exclamation “Femmes qu’on ne voit pas, attention !” [Women who cannot be seen, beware!], which appeared as a small advertisement in a Paris newspaper and had quite an effect: that very evening, two young women appeared at Char’s door. Artine, a dreamed woman or rather a waking-dream woman, would recur throughout Char’s work, named again in Ralentir travaux, La Parole en archipel and Sous ma casquette amarante: a superimposition of two figures, that of “a young woman drowned, Lola Abba,” and that of “a young girl I had met three or four years earlier, on the lawn of a racecourse, a fascinating place I frequented as though it were magnetic ground” (René Char, Sous ma casquette amarante). The connections between the two titles are clearly manifold, coincidences that were, for the Surrealists they then were, a true windfall.

Artine marks the decisive rapprochement between Char, Breton and Éluard, to whom Arsenal had just been dedicated. Once the text was published, Char made Éluard the finest of gifts: he gave him the manuscript of Artine, written on yellow paper. Éluard kept it until his death, after which Char recovered it and kept it for many years at Les Busclats.

A very fine copy, of remarkable provenance. Complete with its publisher’s insert.

From the collection of Régine and Bernard Loliée (Sotheby’s, April 2016, lot 134).

PAB, Bibliographie des Œuvres de René Char, no. 4, p. 15; Sebbag, Les Éditions surréalistes, 17.