Portrait photographique

The manuscript of Liberté, given by Éluard to Max-Pol Fouchet in May 1942, was from then on kept in Algiers, in the offices of Fontaine. The two men, who continued their collaboration through 1943 and 1944, would not see each other again until the Liberation. It was probably at that time that Éluard presented this photograph, inscribed with the following note:

“pour Max-Pol Fouchet, au nom de tout ce qui nous unit et nous libère. Paul Éluard,”

an evident reference to poetry and to liberty — the liberty that had come, and the one written two years earlier by the poet.

Max-Pol Fouchet immediately had an ensemble made up: the two leaves of the poem flanking the photograph on either side, framed and hung in the room that served as his study in Algiers, above his bookshelves, over his bed. A photograph showing Max-Pol Fouchet posing in front of this arrangement bears witness to it.

Max-Pol Fouchet settled in Paris in the autumn of 1944 and gradually moved the journal there. Fontaine thus arrived in metropolitan France with the full prestige of the constancy and strength of its wartime opposition to Vichy and the Nazis; Max-Pol Fouchet was appointed to the steering committee of the Comité National des Écrivains, as representative of the literary journals, and for a few months wrote the literary column for Les Lettres françaises.

It is not known whether the Algiers frame crossed the Mediterranean as such: no photograph or account attests to how the documents were kept from Algiers onward.

The ensemble was displayed, in a new arrangement, at the exhibition devoted to Max-Pol Fouchet in 1976 (Le Monde de Max-Pol Fouchet, organized by the Bibliothèque municipale de Vichy). The catalogue reproduces a photograph in which the two manuscript leaves flanking the photograph can be clearly seen, in a smaller frame. The ensemble was subsequently kept as such in Vézelay, in the house where he had lived since 1957. It remained there until his death.

This little-known portrait is rare, and few prints of it exist. It is the work of the Hungarian photographer Rosa Klein (known as Rogi André) and was taken in 1934, in Paul Éluard’s apartment. Rosa Klein was for a time the wife of André Kertész, who had introduced her to photography in the 1920s.

Only two other prints are recorded in public collections: one at the BnF (40299995), a period print, and the other, a later print from 1982, at the Centre Pompidou (AM1983-429). We have been unable to find any other prints or mentions of this photograph, including in the collections or reference works devoted to Paul Éluard.