Arsenal

Arsenal follows Les Cloches sur le cœur (1928) by little more than a year and is the young Char’s second collection, written while he was doing his military service at Nîmes.

First published in 1929 (printing completed on 29 August, in 26 copies) alongside his review Méridiens, the collection reflects the poet’s growing interest in Surrealism. His “Profession de foi” appeared in La Révolution surréaliste, while the dedications paid tribute both to his early patrons (Cayatte, Courtois-Suffit, Dupeyron, Bounoure, Salmon, Soupault, Supervielle, Daniel-Rops, Fombeure, Émié, Parrot) and to the Surrealists, led by Éluard (and Nusch) and André Breton.

The edition was published in two stages. This second version marks Char’s formal acceptance into and fellowship with the Surrealist group: it is dedicated to Paul Éluard and illustrated with a drawing by Francesc Domingo. It contains fourteen of the sixteen poems from the first edition, slightly reworked, with five new, previously unpublished texts added by Char.

A copy of fine provenance, at the crossroads of the Surrealist network active between Paris and Brussels: Camille Goemans, a key figure of Belgian Surrealism, was at the time a poet, critic and gallerist, close to Nougé, Lecomte and Michaux, co-editor of Le Disque vert, and director in Paris of the Galerie Goemans in 1929, which represented Arp, Magritte and Tanguy and organized Dalí’s first Paris exhibition, also showing Ernst and Man Ray.

A fine copy.