Derrière le miroir

This is the first issue devoted to Georges Braque, one year after his meeting with Aimé Maeght, his future dealer. Braque had met Char in 1947 and immediately agreed to contribute a text in May for the first issue of Derrière le miroir devoted to the artist, on the occasion of Braque’s first exhibition at Maeght’s gallery in Paris (Derrière le miroir, Georges Braque, no. 4, June 1947). After the exhibition, Maeght published the Cahier de Georges Braque, 1917–1947, the culmination of his reflections on art. Char and Braque first met in September, on the margins of the first Avignon Festival founded by Jean Vilar with Char’s help, at the exhibition of modern art organized by Yvonne Zervos. The two men’s rapport was immediate. Braque stayed that autumn at Les Busclats, Char’s home, and in turn invited the poet to Varengeville-sur-Mer, the Normandy house he owned with his wife Marcelle.

A remarkable document: this photograph is the earliest known image of the two men together, and this print is previously unpublished. It was taken by Mariette Lachaud, the daughter of the Braques’ cook. “One day the painter gave her a camera,” recalls Joanne Snrech, curator at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen. “Mariette Lachaud then began photographing daily life at the house. There is a largely unexploited body of material. The photographs are not always of great technical quality, but she was there every time, at just the right moment. She captured very intimate moments. It is a precious record.” A variant of this photograph is known, in which Char looks at Braque; it was used fifteen years later in the edition of 21 copies of Ainsi va l’amitié, published by PAB in 1962, which contained four photographs by Mariette Lachaud — the only published record of the friendship between the poet and the painter.

This fifth print, of which only this original print exists, was given to Char to enhance his copy. He promptly captioned and dated it, responding to his friend’s inscription. The “wake” invoked by Braque would become more than a figure of speech, leading the two men toward a lasting mutual friendship and several major collaborations. The first came the very next year, inspired by the stay at Varengeville: Braque’s illustrations for Le Soleil des eaux (Matarasso, 1949), which introduced the motif of the bird. Just before, Char had written a preface to Héraclite d’Éphèse (Cahiers d’Art), on a text by Yves Battistini, illustrated with an etching by Braque. This was followed in 1950 by the important text “Sous la verrière” (in Derrière le miroir, no. 25–26, January 1950), a “sovereign conversation” in which Char established a dialogue between poet and painter, one who “lets a little light into” his painting, which the poet likened to a “truth […]. Along the way, what matters is to found a new love out of beings and objects hitherto indifferent.” There followed La Bibliothèque est en feu (Louis Broder, 1956), À Braque (PAB, 1956), Jeanne qu’on brûla verte (PAB, 1956), Cinq poésies en hommage à Georges Braque (PAB, 1958), Le Ruisseau de blé (PAB, 1960), Nous ne jalousons pas les dieux (PAB, 1962), and of course the culmination, Lettera Amorosa (Engelberts, 1963), their last collaboration, presented at the Georges Braque – René Char exhibition at the Bibliothèque Doucet: the book crowned a friendship in which, as Georges Blin notes in his preface, “the mutuality of understanding answers that of listening.” Braque died on 31 August, and by 5 September Char had already written a marvelous short tribute, Songer à ses dettes, published in the NRF in October, then by PAB in January 1964. In it he expressed grief and gratitude toward the man who had shown him where his duty lay, if not his demand: “he who will have placed our hands above our eyes to teach us to look better.”

The following year Braque received the Grand Prix of the 24th Venice Biennale, the first held since the war.

A fantastic copy.