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The Birth of Belgian Surrealism: Excerpts from Correspondance (1924-25)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jan Baetens  and
Michael Kasper
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Extract

Correspondance was a belgian surrealist magazine, from the earliest years of the movement, that can be read as a Challenge to the notions of surrealism promoted in André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism of 1924. It was a self-published periodical comprising twenty-two one-page tracts, written and distributed over seven months in 1924 and 1925 by three francophone Belgian writers, Paul Nougé, Camille Goemans, and Marcel Lecomte. The most important of these was undoubtedly the one who published least: Nougé, the intellectual leader of the Brussels surrealist group. In addition to scattered publications of startling originality throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he was at that time also a key promoter of René Magritte's art; at weekly meetings of the group (whose members had day jobs and could only gather on Sunday), Magritte's latest paintings were discussed, and Nougé, mostly, proposed their enigmatic titles.

Type
Little-Known Documents
Information
PMLA , Volume 128 , Issue 2 , March 2013 , pp. 452 - 467
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by The Modern Language Association of America

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