Robert Lebel (1901–1986) was an outstanding poet and novelist, a refined art critic, an expert on antique painting, and an eccentric collector. Today he is remembered primarily for his celebrated monograph on Marcel Duchamp that came out in 1959, after ten years of intense dialogue with the artist across the Atlantic. However, if we were simply to describe him as a Duchamp scholar, we would risk overlooking the many facets of this important witness to the culture of his time.
This first collection of writings on Surrealism, composed by Lebel between 1943 and 1984, aims to rectify a partial view of his career by illustrating the complexity and depth of his ties with the movement founded by André Breton. The selection of theoretical texts, monographic essays and critical notes is accompanied by photographs, most of which have never been published. The writings fully conveys the protean nature of an intellectual who dons, in turn, the guise of the reluctant adept, the stubborn viewer and the impartial commentator on Surrealist adventures, in order to render the vicissitudes and controversial relations of its protagonists, starting from the time of his American exile.
Lebel is like a loose cannon, but still able – thanks to his humour and irreverence – to maintain an independent viewpoint, due to a deep aversion to any form of militancy or collective action. But this detachment does not stop him from turning his “hyperlucid” gaze on an artistic universe filled with truly subversive characters – from Roberto Matta to Isabelle Waldberg, Yves Tanguy and Jean-Pierre Duprey – attesting to its passions in a sumptuously classical and free style. In revealing both the brilliant and frightening aspects of a seminal movement of the 20th century, Lebel is not only motivated by a desire to show us the less familiar side of the works by the artists,such as Lam, de Chirico or Ernst. He also seeks to respond, at every stage of his life, to a question put to him one day, which we now ask ourselves again: At what point are we with Surrealism?
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