The Indomitable Wall of André Breton

It is a bright afternoon in March of this year, and we are walking with Anne-Marie Pereira, a representative of the press department, through the non-public areas of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, up in one lift and then down in another, looking for André Breton's Wall. The last lift into which we step is the largest one of all. It is huge in size, quite dauntingly so, and painted a brilliant red. 'This one is for moving the works,' Anne-Marie tells me, smiling slightly apologetically. Out of the 5^th floor window at the back of the building we can see the centre of Paris stretched out beneath me - Notre Dame, the Rue St Jacques and all points south - languishing in the early afternoon sunlight of a lovely Spring day. But where is Breton today? And why is he proving so difficult to find?

Floor Five is usually devoted to the Pompidou's permanent collection, but at the moment the space is entirely empty, quite eerily so. A new re-hang is in the offing. A few handymen are re-painting the walls white, sawing wood, and shifting bags of tools about. Anne-Marie has a word with a young man, who points. We follow in the direction of his pointing finger. The emptiness is not quite empty after all.

We pass into another gallery, and there it is, the only unbudgeable display on this entire floor, an entire wall of objects behind glass, all treasures once owned by André Breton - paintings, tribal masks, drawings; a tremendous visual fuss of folkloric objects and 20^th century art by best friends and some of his most prized enemies.

This wholesome clutter of sculptures, Inuit objects, paintings, engravings and drawings by the likes of Picabia, Arp, Duchamp, Miro and Kandinsky, was the wall of art that once reared up behind that desk in his apartment in the eighteenth arrondissement, and it includes some of the greatest prizes of an entire lifetime of collecting, by the founder, arch-mage, chief theoretician and principal advocate of Surrealism. How had it got here?

*

In April 2001 one of the great literary/artistic sales of the century took place here in Paris. The collections of André Breton, poet, novelist, polemicist, founder and chief apologist for Surrealism, were disposed of in eighteen frantic days of selling at a famous Left Bank auction house not too far from here called Hotel Drouot. The presentation opened with a suitable rhetorical fanfare: 'The poet left his table one autumn evening in 1966. The doors of Rue Fontaine closed behind him. They open again today…'

The different categories into which the lots were divided were as follows: books (there were 3,000 of these, which included Breton's own works, together with books inscribed to him by the likes of Trotsky, Freud and Apollinaire) and manuscripts (500 lots, including various files on 'surrealist games' and the manuscript of his novel Nadja); popular art and numismatics; modern paintings (450 works, including examples by the likes of Magritte, Arp, Miro and Picabia); primitive art (150 Oceanic and Amerindian objects, from Haida masks to Hopi dolls); photographs (500 lots, including works by Man Ray and Hans Bellmer) and popular art (from waffle irons to baptismal fonts and statuettes). The boxed set of catalogues ran to 2,200 pages and cost 280 euros.

Yves Bonnefoy, France's greatest living poet, vehemently condemned the disposal of Breton's possessions in the pages of Le Monde as a national scandal, possessing the sheer vulgarity of a 'department store' sale. 'La France should not allow the contents of André Breton's apartment to be sold on the open market like Marilyn Monroe's culottes or Fred Astaire's cane,' thundered La Revue des Ressources.' Poet Mathieu Benezet, author of a book on Breton, and organizer of a public petition against the dispersal of the collections, was even more vehement in his opposition. 'It is completely monstrous,' he told me. 'This man was a figure of enormous intellectual importance and his collections represent a unique archive of the history of Surrealism.' Why had it been allowed to happen then?

To answer that question, we need to re-visit some of the circumstances of Breton's life. André Breton (1896-1966) lived in the same modest, three-room apartment in Pigalle - his address was 42, Rue Fontaine - from 1926 until his death. After his death, his widow Elisa left it virtually untouched, and continued to live there for many years on her own. (She died in 2000). During the years of her tenancy, the apartment became an unofficial research centre. Photographs from the years of the Bretons' tenancy together show the extraordinary creative clutter of that small interior: the walls were filled with paintings by the likes of Tanguy, Picasso, Picabia and Man Ray. Every surface was covered with sculptures and miscellaneous objects of every kind - Breton, like the wife of Bertolt Brecht, was a passionate buyer from flea markets. 'My father had as much passion for a piece found on the bank of a river as for an important painting in his collection, commented his daughter, Aube Elléouët. Breton loved Oceanic art most of all. 'The very first object he ever acquired was an Easter Island piece he bought when he was fifteen years old, with money that he was given for achieving good results at school,' said Pierre Amrouche, an advisor to the auction. After Breton's death, the family made repeated attempts to create a foundation for the preservation of the collections in situ. After all, Paris has many small museums devoted to artists and writers, often created in the spaces they themselves inhabited - think of Debussy's in St Germain en Laie, Delacroix's studio on the Left Bank, the Musée Gustave Moreau, the Musée Zadhkine or the George Sand Museum. Could not something similar have been created for Breton?

Aube Elléouët, Breton's daughter by his second marriage, described the problems and the frustrations. 'For thirty-five years we tried to find and tried to find a solution,' she told me from her home in Tours. 'We wanted to establish a foundation, but the problems in the end proved to be insurmountable. My father himself had never expressed an opinion on the subject, which is a big mystery to me - but then I suppose that it was his everyday passion…'

And did not the government try to help in some way? After all, France is said to be passionately devoted to the idea of preserving its patrimoine for posterity.

'The Ministry of Culture did not give us any help. A lot of interest was shown from time to time - Jack Lang and Mitterrand both visited the apartment - but nothing happened. Perhaps they did not consider it important enough.'

Marcel Fleiss, an art dealer in the Rue Bonaparte who helped to compile the inventory of the photographs and paintings, and who was responsible for the production of three of the lavish catalogues, saw it slightly differently.

'There were various issues here,' he told me. 'One had to do with the apartment. The Breton family did not own it, and the owner wanted it back. After Breton's death, his widow lived in it for many years, but she died in 1990, and the apartment was unoccupied for six or seven years. Eventually the bailiffs had to break down the door. The second had to do with money and the sheer volume of objects in the apartment.' Yes, there were many attempts to interest museums in the collections, and even to create a private foundation, but the fact is that no museum would have wanted to take them in their entirety. 'The apartment itself could not have been opened as a museum because it was too small, and there would have been problems of access. It was also terribly crowded. Only ten per cent of the collection was even seeable - much of it was stuffed into drawers. There were many works of an indifferent quality too. What is more, the government could not possibly have matched the figure that will be realized by the sale.'

According to official estimates from Calmelscohen, the auction house which was responsible for the sale, the total receipts were likely to be in the region of 30-40 million euros. In fact, the sale made 46 million euros.

'And do not forget,' continued M. Fleiss, 'there have already been many gifts from the collections to the state. The wall behind his desk, which was crowded with paintings and many other works of art, was donated to the Centre Pompidou in lieu of death taxes. Just the other day three more paintings were donated, including an early Miro.' (Best not to give too much though, he might have added, or it ends up in the vaults, rescued from dispersal to some private collector, and then - o cruel fate! - consigned to oblivion.) 'And then there was the correspondence. Breton stipulated that he wanted it to be preserved together for posterity. It has all been deposited at the Bibliotheque Doucet.'

'And it was Madame Elléouët herself who authorized the sale, and who stands to benefit by it?'

'Exactly.'

I put that point to Madame Elléouët.

'Money is not the problem,' she told me. 'My daughter and I have enough money.'

A Parisian art historian who was also a friend of Madame Elleouet took up the story.

'Aube would have given it free to the Ministry of Culture. They had a meeting about it relatively recently, but he didn't ask her. And anyway, it is all too late now. It should have happened many years ago. You see, she did not know what to do. She is a very shy person, and the fact is that every art dealer in Paris has been waiting twenty years for this moment. The auction house was putting enormous pressure on her to sell. They seduced her. The whole thing has been very manipulative. Marcel Fleiss has mounted exhibitions of her work at his own gallery…'

'What kind of work does she do?'

'Very bad Surrealism.'

'And you are saying that he did that in order to curry favour with her?'

'Marcel Fleiss is an honest and well trusted man, let us be in no doubt about that,' he replied, becoming suddenly aware of the nakedness of his own back. 'But you must be aware of this. This is a very, very commercial operation. There are no reserve prices on anything - which is most unusual - so everything will be sold, absolutely everything. The auction house offered to do a DVD of the apartment before the collections were broken up. It was written into the contract. The cost of that - it is in the region of one million francs, I understand - will be paid by Madame Elléouët herself. That DVD is supposed to be an historical record - the visuals are interspersed with conversations with Breton himself - but anyone who has some knowledge of the subject will see immediately that there are many, many mistakes in it…'

Madame Elléouët herself was wearily resigned to the sale. The process was irreversible. Her dream of a foundation would not be realized. 'It is not the best solution,' she told me, 'but I can take a little comfort from the fact that it will all be sold at Hotel Drouot, where André bought lots of the things in the first place. And I have had many kind letters of support from people, including a lovely letter from Claude Lévi-Strauss, in which he said to me: don't be sad. I had to sell my own collections years ago. Wherever they go, all his things, they will always have the empreinte of André Breton upon them.'

Still curious, and with a number of unanswered questions in my head, I went to find Breton's old apartment in the Rue Fontaine. It was just two minutes walk downhill from the Moulin Rouge, in one of the small streets that fan out from Place Blanche. Thanks to a helpful - or inadvertently careless - au pair with her baby, I managed to gain entrance to the dog-leg-shaped, cobbled inner courtyard at the back of the apartment buildings. There were three entrances, A, B and C. The au pair, seeing my bewilderment, suggested I consult the concierge, who was out. Luckily, beside her door there was an old notice behind glass, showing the names of all the tenants. There was his name - M. Breton - wedged between Melle Buri and Mme de Szechy - the name of a man who, by the time I visited in 2003, had already been dead for thirty-seven years. As I approached the entrance to Building B, I saw an old lady leaning out of her window, watching me. I walked up and up the narrow spiral staircase to the third floor. She was standing at her door, half waiting for me. Breton's door - newly locked and secured with steel supports - was next to hers.

Yes, she had known him all right. He was a charming man, she told me, who always used the stairs by which I had ascended - the service stairs. Every week he took out the dustbins for Mme Breton… And then she suddenly remembered something which fired her. 'Do you know about the fire?' she asked me. No. 'About fifty years ago it must have been, there was a fire on the staircase!' Her eyes were shining.

'What, against M. Breton?' I asked her.

'Oui, Monsieur!'

*

That detail set me thinking. Breton was a difficult man, all his life, and Surrealism in general was a thorn in the side of the political and literary establishments from first to last. What is more, Breton did not even manage to remain friends with his own like-minded allies. Paul Eluard was ruthlessly expelled from the movement, as were Louis Aragon and Salvador Dali. You would have looked in vain for any books by Aragon in the sale, and there was only one tiny, post-card size collage by Dali. Breton was vehemently opposed to colonialism and the Algerian adventure. He had been a friend of Trotsky's… What is more, he died relatively recently. Many of his opponents, many of those he insulted and derided during his own lifetime, would still be in positions of power and influence to this day. Could it be for this reason perhaps that the powers-that-be never quite managed to offer a helping hand to Madame Elleouet? Is there not an old saying to the effect that a prophet is seldom honoured in his own country?

And today we can stare at André Breton's wall on the fifth floor of the Centre Pompidou, and think back to the arguments surrounding the legacy of the founder of Surrealism. There was fierce debate at the Pompidou about whether or not Breton's Wall should become part of the permanent collection. It was not the sort of thing that a museum of contemporary art usually acquired. Eveentually, it was accepted, with enthusiasm, and now it is on permanent display there, indomitable. Even when other things get shifted back and forth, André's monument abides. He is not to be shouted down by posterity.