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The Surrealist Artist's Book: Beyond the Page

Article  in  The Princeton University library chronicle · June 2009

DOI: 10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.70.2.0265

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 The Surrealist Artist’s Book
Beyond the Page
elza adamowicz

Within libraries’ frighteningly opaque walls, certain books

are doors. — p a u l l u a r d 1

W hat is the surrealist book? There is no single model for the

surrealist book, just as there is no single model for surrealist
painting.2 The terminology used—artist’s book, livre de peintre, illus-
trated book, book object, or simply surrealist book—reflects both the
openness of the concept and the range of its materializations. Indeed,
the surrealist book can be an imaginary or a real object. It can be
open, as in René Magritte’s painting The Submissive Reader (La lectrice
soumise, 1928), or mysteriously and tantalizingly closed, as in Giorgio
di Chirico’s The Child’s Brain (Le cerveau de l’enfant, 1914). In its extreme
forms, it can appeal not only to the eyes, but also to the sense of touch
or smell: the cover for the exhibition catalogue Surrealism in 1947 at
the Galerie Maeght, produced by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) and
Georges Hugnet (1906–1974), features a rubber breast with the cap-
tion “Please touch”; the first thirty copies of Hugnet’s Oeillades ciselées
en branches, with illustrations by Hans Bellmer (Paris: Editions Jeanne
Bucher, 1939), were impregnated with perfume! The book can be
stepped on: the stairs designed for the same 1947 exhibition were

This article is a revised version of the lecture given at Princeton University on March
9, 2008, to open the exhibition curated by Julie L. Mellby in the Leonard L. Milberg
Gallery for the Graphic Arts, “Notre livre: À toute épreuve: A Collaboration between
Joan Miró and Paul Éluard.”
1
Paul Éluard, “Espérer réaliser la véritable lisibilité,” in Oeuvres complètes, 2 vols.
(Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1968), 2:812.
2
Renée Riese Hubert based the title of her excellent study Surrealism and the Book
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988) on Surrealism
and Painting (Paris: Gallimard, 1965) by the surrealist leader André Breton (1896–
1966). Founded in Paris after World War I and inspired by Karl Marx and Sigmund
Freud, Surrealism was a literary and artistic avant-garde movement that promoted
freedom, global revolution, and the exploration of the unconscious against all forms
of social and aesthetic constraints.

265
 The cover of Le surréalisme en 1947 (Paris: Pierre à Feu, Maeght, 1947). Rare Book
Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University
Library. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ars), New York /adagp, Paris / Succession
Marcel Duchamp.

made up of the spines of the Surrealists’ favorite books, from Nietz-

sche to Fourier and Freud. The surrealist book can also be a bound
object, as in the example of Hugnet’s binding for Valentine Hugo’s
Herbe à la lune (Paris: g.l.m., 1935)]; a found object, such as Léonor
Fini’s Cover of a book found on the seabed (1936); or a box, for example,
Duchamp’s Boite alerte, missives lascives, in the shape of a letterbox, pro-
duced as a catalogue for the 1959 Surrealist exhibition at the Daniel
Cordier Gallery in Paris.

266
Postcards, telegram, and other contents of Boite alerte, missives lascives, Exposition
internationale du surréalisme, 1959–1960 (Paris: Galerie Daniel Cordier, 1959).
Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. © 2009 Artists
Rights Society (ars), New York /adagp, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp.

267
 In what follows I should like to focus on surrealist books that
combine a text (poems, essays, narrative) and images (lithographs,
gouache, woodcuts, etchings, engravings). Princeton University Li-
brary’s magnificent recent acquisition, À toute épreuve (Geneva: Gérald
Cramer, 1958), which combines poems by Paul Éluard (1895–1952)
and woodcuts by Joan Miró (1893–1983), will be at the center of my
discussion. It is, arguably, the most beautiful of surrealist books and
the most successful of interart dialogues. As Douglas Cooper wrote in
his preface to the catalogue for the exhibition of À toute épreuve (Paris:
Berggruen Gallery, 1958), “I consider [this book] to be one of the
most perfect, moving and significant works in Miró’s entire produc-
tion, as well as one of the real treasures of modern bibliophily.” 3
I should like to situate this splendid example of collaboration be-
tween a poet, an artist, and a publisher within the wider context of
the surrealist artist’s book. Two central aspects of the surrealist book
will be explored. The first section will present an overview of the
surrealist book as a material collaboration—between an artist and
a poet, but also a publisher, a printer, or a binder—and will focus
on the structure and fabrication of the book. Second, the page of
the book will be considered as a site of dialogue where a written text
echoes or confronts, clashes or simply cohabits with a visual image.

the materia l b ook

The art dealer, collector, and publisher Ambroise Vollard (1865–

1939) was among the first to produce luxury limited editions of the
livre de peintre, for example, an edition of Paul Verlaine’s Parallèlement,
with lithographs by Pierre Bonnard (1900). The market for these
books developed as an extension of the market for painting and draw-
ing. Artist and poet did not necessarily actively collaborate, however.
Indeed, often a text from an earlier century was illustrated by a mod-
ern artist, such as the Vollard edition of Honoré de Balzac’s Le chef-
d’oeuvre inconnu, which included thirteen etchings and seventy-seven
wood engravings by Pablo Picasso (Paris, 1931).

3
A year later, James Thrall Soby wrote: “Miró’s book has now been issued and
constitutes one of the most triumphant feats of book illustration in our century.”
Soby, Joan Miró (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959).

268

s hort
Pablo Picasso, woodblock engraved for but not used in Honoré de Balzac, Le chef-
d’oeuvre inconnu (Paris. A. Vollard, 1931). Printing Blocks and Plates Collection,
Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Prince-
ton University Library. Gift of Elisabeth Roth in memory of Karl Kup. © 2009 Es-
tate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York /adagp, Paris.

It was the art historian and gallery owner Daniel-Henry Kahn-

weiler (1884–1979) who turned the illustrated book into a real dia-
logue, or collaboration on equal terms, between an artist and a poet.
Under the imprint of Éditions de la Galerie Simon he published
about eighty illustrated books, bringing together avant-garde au-
thors and artists, and produced some of the early surrealist illustrated
books, such as Simulacres (1925), with poems by Michel Leiris and
seven lithographs by André Masson. From 1926 the Surrealists had
their own imprint, Les Éditions Surréalistes, which published about
sixty books, mainly at author’s expense, with subscriptions for limited
first editions. Other publishers of surrealist books include Guy Lévis
Mano (and his imprint g.l.m.), the surrealist poet and bookbinder
Georges Hugnet (Éditions de la Montagne), Iliazd (the Georgian
publisher Ilia Zdanevich), and Gérald Cramer (who published À toute
épreuve). From the 1940s, the art dealer and publisher Aimé Maeght
also produced a number of surrealist books. His edition of Parler seul
(1950), combining a 1945 poem by Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) and

269

short
seventy-seven color and black-and-white lithographs by Miró, was
produced during the long gestation of À toute épreuve. In such ventures
publishers used specialist printers for the illustrations, such as Féquet
& Baudier for wood engravings, Lacourière & Fréhaut for engravings
and etchings, and Mourlot Frères for lithographs.
In its simplest form, collaboration consisted of the artist provid-
ing a frontispiece for a book of poems or an essay, as Salvador Dalí
(1904–1989) did for René Char’s Artine and for André Breton and Paul
Éluard’s L’immaculée conception, both published in 1930 by the Éditions
Surréalistes. In more substantial collaborations, text and image are
juxtaposed on facing pages, as in Max Ernst (1891–1976) and Éluard’s
collaborative book, Les malheurs des immortels (1922), discussed below.4
Although in this instance the collages were actually produced before
the texts, the eye travels back and forth between text and image with-
out privileging one over the other. Very rarely, texts and drawings are
superimposed, as in the erotic volume by Georges Hugnet and Oscar
Dominguez, Le feu au cul ([Paris: R. J. Godet, 1943]), in which the
explicit sexuality of the drawings is (partly) veiled by the text.5 More
often, text and images are juxtaposed on the same page, as in Fa-
cile (Paris: g.l.m., 1935), which combines Éluard’s poems with Man
Ray’s solarized photographs, or in Miró and Éluard’s À toute épreuve.
Finally, the same artist sometimes provided both texts and images.
Miró paired his poem Le lézard aux plumes d’or (Paris: Louis Broder,
1971) with fifteen original lithographs, and Max Ernst’s collage-
novels La femme 100 têtes (Paris: Editions du Carrefour, 1929) and Rêve
d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel (Paris: Editions du Carrefour,
1930) combine collages and captions.6
Surrealist books generally had small print runs. Sometimes the
4
Éluard also collaborated with Ernst on Répétitions (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1922);
Au défaut du silence (no publisher, 1925); and A l’interieur de la vue (Paris: Seghers,
1948), in which Éluard illustrated eight “visible poems” by Ernst (1931).
5
Other surrealist erotic books include: Louis Aragon’s Le con d’Irène, with illustra-
tions by André Masson ([Paris: René Bonnel], 1928); Louis Aragon and Benjamin
Péret, 1929, with photographs by Man Ray ([Brussels: Paul-Gustave Van Hecke],
1929); and Satyremont [Benjamin Péret], Les rouilles encagées, with illustrations by
Yves Tanguy (Paris: Eric Losfeld, 1954). Some of these books were published with
pseudonyms or without place or publisher’s name.
6
Ernst’s collage-novels were translated as The Hundred Headless Woman (New
York: Braziller, 1982) and A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil (New York: Braziller,
1982).

270
The original edition of À toute épreuve (Paris: Éditions Surréalistes, 1930), at actual
size. Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections,
Princeton University Library.

original edition of a text was published with no illustrations and fol-

lowed later by a luxury edition illustrated by an artist. This was the
case of À toute épreuve, which was first published in 1930 by the Édi-
tions Surréalistes in a tiny format (7 × 11 cm) in a print run of only
30, before its 1958 publication with Miró’s woodcuts (32.5 × 25 cm)
in a print run of 130. It should be stressed, however, that the surrealist
book was not merely a commercial endeavor; it was also an aesthetic
object, preserving the uniqueness of the book at a time of its grow-
ing commodification. This conception gave rise to special categories
of limited edition. The personalized livre truffé (literally, the “stuffed”
book; in English, the “Grangerized” or extra-illustrated book) was a
271
single copy of a book or an edition of two or three at the most, owned
by the author or given to close friends. A fine example is the manu-
script of Arcane 17 (1944), which Breton produced for Elisa, his wife,
in a binding by Lucienne Thalheimer.7 It includes maps, train tick-
ets, letters, drawings, leaves, and other documents linked to the events
recounted—a kind of scrapbook, a memento of the couple’s journey
across Canada. Other examples include Éluard’s own copy of Bret-
on’s Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité, with an original binding
by Paul Bonet (1931), which incorporates a signed frontispiece fac-
simile of his horoscope cast by Breton. Éluard’s copy of L’immaculée
conception includes a photograph of himself, photomontage portraits
of himself and Breton, two original drawings by Dalí, the manuscript
of a text, and a unique photomontage binding by Bonet.
The binder’s role is important here. Bindings, in single copies or
limited editions, enhanced the quality of the surrealist book as a ma-
terial object and, of course, as a commercial product. Several Surreal-
ists commissioned their own bindings from craftsmen like Paul Bonet
(1899–1971). Breton’s own copy of Éluard’s L’amour la poésie (1932)
was bound by Bonet in tan half-morocco with horizontal bands of
inlaid moroccos and black and gold decorated flyleaves; bound in
were autograph manuscripts of seventeen of the poems by Éluard.
The recurrent image of the hand on Bonet’s bindings underscores the
tactile quality of the book as an object. It appears in the photomon-
taged binding of his own copy of Éluard’s Capitale de la douleur (1926)
as well as in René Char’s copy of Breton’s Nadja (1934), in three-quar-
ter black morocco binding, a large glove in red box calf, and onlays
of three photographs of Breton by Man Ray (1890–1976).8 The motif
of the hand also figures in Mary Reynolds’s binding for Ernst and
Man Ray’s Les mains libres (1937), a binding in tan morocco, with a
kid glove slit open on the front and back covers. These bindings were
an invitation to go beyond the sense of sight, the sense traditionally
privileged in the context of the book, and to turn to something more
material, to touch or smell. Georges Hugnet, surrealist poet, essay-
ist, and bookbinder, produced some notable covers for books by his
7
Reproduced in Surrealism: Desire Unbound (London: Tate Publishing; Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 127.
8
Both books are from the former collection of Renaud Gillet. Reproduced in the
sale catalogue From Stendhal to René Char: Le cabinet de livres de Renaud Gillet (London:
Sotheby’s, 1999), 151 and 139.

272
Bindings by Paul Bonet for
Andre Breton, Najda (Paris:
Gallimard, 1928), and Paul
Éluard, Capitale de la douleur
(Paris: Gallimard, 1926).
Illustrated in Paul Valéry
et al., Paul Bonet (Paris:
A. Blaizot, 1945), 168, 173.
Graphic Arts Collection,
Department of Rare Books
and Special Collections,
Princeton University
Library. © 2009 Artists
Rights Society (ars),
New York /adagp,
Paris .

273
fellow Surrealists; indeed, his book creations are sculptural objects
or, as the surrealist poet Benjamin Péret put it, “ghostly constructions
around books.” 9
Clearly, any consideration of the book as material object has to
address the central question of the actual fabrication of the book.
The following examples highlight the importance of the collabora-
tion between poet, artist, and publisher in the making of the surreal-
ist book.
In 1922 artist Max Ernst and poet Paul Éluard worked together on
Les malheurs des immortels (Innsbruck: Librairie Six), which consists of
twenty poems and twenty collages. Ernst produced the collages using
fragments of wood-engraved illustrations cut out from nineteenth-
century popular scientific journals and commercial catalogues. He
assembled them with great care. All traces of the gluing process were
eliminated, and breaks were disguised on the engraver’s plate to pro-
duce a formally homogeneous image, which was then reproduced
photomechanically. The texts were created jointly by Ernst and Élu-
ard, the former in Cologne, the latter in Paris. Each would write a
fragment of text, which was then sent to the other, who modified or
added to it. The collated texts formed a verbal collage that mirrored
the collage processes of the engravings. As Ernst later described the
collaboration between artist and poet: “The systematic fusion of the
thoughts of two or more authors in a single work … can also be con-
sidered linked to collage.” 10 In Les malheurs, for example, the collage
titled “Rencontre de deux sourires” (Meeting of Two Smiles) is ac-
companied by a text that begins: “In the kingdom of hairdressers, the
happy don’t spend all their time being married.” While it alludes to
the visual collage—a pastiche of The Marriage of Figaro—its humor
and inconsistencies reflect the disjunctive image produced by Ernst.
Close collaboration between artist and publisher constitutes my
second example, Max Ernst and Iliazd’s Maximiliana, or, The Illegal
Practice of Astronomy (1964), published in Iliazd’s own imprint, Le degré
Quarante et un. Iliazd had already published futurist books in limited
editions, printed on fine papers from type handset by Iliazd himself
or under his close supervision. For Maximiliana, he researched the
life of the little-known nineteenth-century astronomer and lithogra-

 9
Benjamin Péret, “Livres-objets par Georges Hugnet,” Minotaure 10 (1937).
10
Max Ernst, Ecritures (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 266.

274
“Rencontre de deux sourires,” in Max Ernst and Paul Éluard, Les malheurs des immor-
tels (Paris: Éditions de la Revue Fontaine, [1945]). Rare Book Division, Department
of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

pher Ernst Wilhelm Tempel, who had discovered a new star, which
he named Maximiliana. Tempel was an illuminary, more interested
in inner vision than in scientific observation of the planets, and it
was for this reason that he fascinated both Iliazd and Ernst. Iliazd
himself designed the typography, layout, setting, sequence, printing,
and binding. The text is made up of fragments from Tempel’s jour-
nal, letters, poems, and observations, laid out in geometric shapes
(squares, rectangles, circles, and hexagons) or arranged like constella-
tions or shooting stars. These were juxtaposed with etchings and in-
vented writing by Ernst. The etchings combine natural shapes (blue
and red clouds, suns and stars) and mechanical forms (spirals and
clockwork shapes), and the mysterious ideograms, midway between
pictorial and verbal form, suggest a secret language.11
11
See the analysis of this book by Anne Hyde Greet, “Max Ernst and the Artist’s
Book: From Fiat Modes to Maximiliana,” in Max Ernst, Beyond Surrealism: A Retrospec-
tive of the Artist’s Books and Prints, ed. Robert Rainwater (New York: New York Public
Library; Oxford University Press, 1986).

275
276
A representative spread from Max Ernst, Maximiliana, ou, l’Exercise illégal de
l’astronomie (Paris: Ilizad, 1964). Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Man-
uscript Library, Yale University.

277
 À toute épreuve provides without doubt the finest example of the sur-
realist book as the product of the close collaboration between poet,
artist, publisher, engraver, and printer.12 It was Éluard who suggested
to Geneva-based publisher and bibliophile Gérald Cramer that his
poems should be “illuminated” by his friend Miró. It took ten years
for the project to be realized. The title—no doubt unwittingly—may
have been tempting fate: it means proofs in printmaking, but also un-
failing and foolproof! Viewed from a different perspective, ten years
was perhaps not too long. According to Miró, “It’s not a question of
producing illustrations … but of producing a book, which is not at
all easy.” 13 In his letters to Cramer, he compared the fabrication of
the book with the organic process of a plant growing or the mechani-
cal precision of clockwork. Their correspondence provides detailed
information about the stages in the process. Why, for instance, did
Miró choose to use the very slow, complex technique of woodblock
printing?14 The possibilities of wood engraving are infinite, he ex-
plains, much greater than metal engraving and in the spirit of his
painting. The wood was found on Brittany beaches, in the forests
near his home in Montroig, and at a furniture factory. Working with
the engraver Enrique Tormo, who assembled the wood and glued it
onto rectangular typographical supports, Miró produced 233 wood-
blocks, drawing onto the blocks either with lines in relief or forms cut
out with a saw. Printer Jacques Frélaut from the Atelier Lacourière
in Paris hand-inked and printed the woodblocks, using up to seven
blocks to print one page for the trial proofs, produced in 1950. The
eighty wood engravings use basic colors and simple recurring shapes
(circle, arch, sun, moon).
12
For details of the production of this book, see Ann Hyde Greet, “Miró, Éluard,
Cramer: À toute épreuve,” Bulletin du bibliophile 2 and 3 (1983), 223–42 and 346–68, re-
printed (abridged) as the preface to the facsimile edition of À toute épreuve (New York:
George Braziller, 1984), 7–22. See also Annick Ehrenström, Un éditeur genevois: Gérald
Cramer au fil de ses archives de 1942 à 1986 (Geneva: Bibliothèque Publique et Universi-
taire de Genève, 1988). These publications draw on the substantial correspondance
between Miró and Cramer. Cramer’s archives in Geneva include documents relat-
ing to the collaboration.
13
Quoted in Greet, “Miró, Éluard, Cramer” (1983), 229.
14
Miró had used woodcuts for his illustrations of Lisa Hirtz’s Il était une petite pie
(Paris: Jeanne Bucher, 1928) and Tristan Tzara’s L’arbre des voyageurs (Paris: Editions
de la Montagne, 1930).

278

s hort
Title page and collage from À toute épreuve; gravures sur bois de Joan Miró; pre-
mière édition illustrée (Geneva: Gérard Cramer, [1958]). Graphic Arts Collection,
Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
Purchased with matching funds provided by the Marquand Library of Art and Ar-
chaeology and the Rare Book Division and Graphic Arts Collection. © 2009 Artists
Rights Society (ars), New York /adagp, Paris .

279
 Éluard and Cramer, who both greatly admired the original edition
of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (Cos-
mopolis, May 1897), with its innovative typography, chose the type-
face Didot for the text, which was printed in black or gray in vari-
ous sizes on Arches vellum. For Miró the typographical layout and
the poem were central to his graphics: “I start with the architecture,
with the typography which is very important to me. I enter into the
spirit of the poet. I think a great deal about it. Both things simultane-
ously: the architecture of the book and the spirit of the text.” 15 Con-
sequently, he changed some of the woodcuts in relation to the text. In
1949 he wrote to Cramer: “I knew … that I should have to change
even successful designs, that a single comma on the preceding page
or the dot of an i on the page following could shatter what I had done
separately.” 16
The text, printed on the left-hand or the right-hand page, more
rarely across both pages, was combined with woodcut illustrations
that extended over the spread. Double-page woodcuts were used be-
tween each of the three sections of the text, giving the book a rhyth-
mic dimension, alternating between what Miró himself described
to Cramer as “pages of shock, pages of rest.” 17 Printing the eighty
pages of woodcuts took a year and 42,000 impressions. Torn papers
( Japan pelure paper or butcher’s paper) and collages from nineteenth-
century wood engravings were sometimes glued onto the page after
it had been printed, further underscoring the materiality of the
product.

th e page

A book that results from the creative complicity of artist and poet,
publisher, printer, and bookbinder is not only a material object. It
also raises important questions about the relations between words and
images on the page. What sorts of dialogues are created between con-
vergent media? What clashes arise between divergent media? And
what is the position of the reader-viewer in such encounters?
Until the mid-nineteenth century the descriptive or imitative
15
Joan Miró and Georges Raillard, Ceci est la couleur de mes rêves (Paris: Seuil, 1977),
152.
16
Quoted in Greet, “Miró, Éluard, Cramer” (1983), 229.
17
Quoted in Greet, “Miró, Éluard, Cramer” (1983), 351.

280
model—Horace’s ut pictura poesis (as is painting so is poetry)—pre-
dominated in book illustration. Illustrations were largely dependent
on and subordinated to the text, the illustrator generally providing a
graphic translation or paraphrase of an episode of the narrative. This
hierarchical relation began to break down with Mallarmé and Arthur
Rimbaud in poetry and Paul Cézanne in painting, freeing the poet
from the constraints of linearity and the painter from the imperatives
of representation, allowing them to explore new concepts of poetic
space and pictorial autonomy. Mimetic repetition and submission to
a text or image were replaced by the poem or the image’s freedom to
transpose, expand, or simply cohabit with the other medium. The
encounter between word and image, on equal terms, now predomi-
nated. Thus cubist and futurist books focus on the simultaneity of
text and image, as in the artist Sonia Delaunay and the poet Blaise
Cendrars’s collaboration, La prose du Transsibérien (Paris: Editions des
Hommes Nouveaux, 1913). Likewise, Dada books privilege simple
juxtaposition over mimetic or metaphorical interplay. For example,
De nos oiseaux (Paris: Editions Kra, 1923) brings together poems by
Tristan Tzara, with their innovative dada typography, and ten full-
page woodcuts by Jean Arp.
The juxtaposition of divergent elements lies at the heart of surreal-
ist painting and poetry, and the image conjured by the comte de Lau-
tréamont, “Beautiful like the chance encounter, on a dissecting table,
between an umbrella and a sewing machine,” is widely considered
the model of surrealist aesthetics in general. It is also, I would like to
suggest, appropriate to the word-image interface in particular.
In surrealist encounters, text and image are separate and autono-
mous, yet interlinked. As Éluard explained, “In their collaborations,
painters and poets declare themselves free. Dependency is degrading,
preventing understanding and love. There can be no model for him
who looks for what he has never yet seen. Finally, nothing is as beau-
tiful as a chance resemblance.” 18 The “chance resemblance” Éluard
refers to is less the aleatory encounter of dada works than Surreal-
ism’s “objective chance.” This is chance in a productive or creative
sense, as the encounter between an inner desire and an outer real-
ity. Such encounters are considered by the Surrealists themselves in
terms of “illumination” (Miró and Éluard) or “revelations” (Ernst
18
Paul Éluard, “Physique de la poésie (2),” in Oeuvres complètes, 1:983.

281
and Éluard). Let us, then, explore some examples of this “chance re-
semblance” of word and image on the page of the surrealist book.
First, I should like to look at books where word and image merge or
interact closely on the page, on both the visual and the semantic lev-
els. When, for instance, Éluard “illustrated” Man Ray’s photographs
in Facile (1935), his five poems were printed on the same pages as Man
Ray’s eleven photographic variations of the nude body of Nusch, his
professional model and Éluard’s second wife. The techniques Man
Ray used included cropping, negative printing, overexposure, mul-
tiple exposure, and, above all, solarization, whereby the positive print
is exposed to light during the printing process, which results in the
partial inversion of tonalities and produces a black edge to solid ob-
jects. The nude body of Nusch is thus decapitated, doubled, cropped,
and fetishized.
To Man Ray’s de-naturalization of the female figure Éluard re-
sponds in his poems with the sur-realization of the image of Nusch.
Through their dense metaphorical textures, the texts figuratively ex-
tend, expose, and veil the female figure. Thus the presence of image
and text on the same page gives rise to multiple exchanges between
the two media. The minimalism of the contours of the body reduces
it to a graphic sign, echoed in the outline of the text, while the over-
exposed photograph merges the figure with the printed page.
The interaction of image and text is further suggested in the words
of the poem, which opens with the lines: “You rise the water unfolds
/ You lie down the water unfurls.” 19 As a consequence the contour
of the female body is transformed into a line of water. Elsewhere the
female figure is metamorphosed into an image of flowing water, cre-
ated in the fold of the book (“You rise the water unfolds”), literally
here in the very gesture of opening the page. The photographic image
of Nusch, when juxtaposed with the poems, is thus transformed into
a landscape (“On a sea which has the color of your body”),20 creating
a third space at the limits of the photographic and the graphic spaces,
a metaphoric or metamorphic space of running water, fertile land-
scapes, avalanches, and mountains. Moreover, Éluard evokes the cre-
ative power of woman in metaphors that link her to movements of
unfolding, germination, and multiplication in the natural world and

19
“Tu te lèves l’eau se déplie / Tu te couches l’eau s’épanouit.”
20
“Sur une mer qui a la couleur de ton corps.”

282
Photographs by Man Ray and poems by Paul Éluard in their collaboration Facile
(Paris: Éditions g.l.m., 1935). Sylvia Beach Collection, Rare Book Division, De-
partment of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Pre-
sentation copy to Sylvia Beach. © 2009 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society
(ars), New York /adagp, Paris.

283
expand to cosmic dimensions (“You are everywhere you abolish all
roads”),21 just as Man Ray’s images appear to extend, unconfined, be-
yond the limits of the page.22
Such a perfect balance and reciprocal illumination of text and
image are rare in surrealist collaborations, however. More often,
and this will be my second category, the poet responds to the artist,
the artist to the poet, by following his own poetic or pictorial trajec-
tory. Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonder-
land (1969)—an etching and twelve gouaches reproduced as helio­
gravure—respond to the text with the artist’s own recurrent imagery.
His characteristic melting watch, recalling the Mad Hatter’s watch,
is imaginatively transformed into a table for the Mad Hatter’s tea
party; the girl with a skipping-rope in the frontispiece etching skips
not only through the gouaches to represent Alice, but also through a
number of his paintings. Thus Carroll’s text is both an invitation to
Dalí to enter a magical world, and a pre-text for Dalí to repeat, tire-
lessly, his own iconography.
In some cases it is the poet who is provoked by a set of images to
pursue his own obsessions, as in the book published by Éluard with
the German artist Hans Bellmer, Les jeux de la poupée (1949). Éluard
chose fifteen hand-colored silver gelatin prints to which he added
short poetic texts. Texts and photographs are kept separate, the pho-
tographs printed on the right-hand page, the texts in the lower half of
the left-hand page. Bellmer fabricated his articulated dolls from dis-
assembled and re-assembled doll parts. He then photographed them
in mises-en-scène of sexual perversity and violence, like a sequence
of pornographic images with unrelenting variations. Their theatri-
cality is underscored through the artifice of the photographs, which
are carefully framed, dramatically lit, and hand-tinted in deliberately
non-naturalistic colors. The “jeu” of the title refers less to a game’s
pre-established rules than to a form of open play. Indeed, in his
introduction to the book Bellmer defines “the game” as a form of
“experimental poetry” and the “toy” as a “provocative object … with
multiple applications and accidental probabilities.”
How did the photographs provoke Éluard, the partner—or perhaps
more precisely, according to Renée Riese Hubert, the “opponent”—
21
“Tu es partout tu abolis toutes les routes.”
22
Éluard and Man Ray also collaborated on Les mains libres (Paris: Éditions Jeanne
Bucher, 1937), with drawings by Man Ray and poems by Éluard.

284
One of Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonder-
land (New York: Maecenas Press and Random House, 1969), 87. Cotsen Children’s
Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University
Library. © 2009 Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation / Artists Rights So-
ciety (ars), New York.

285
286
Poem by Paul Éluard and photograph by Hans Bellmer in Les jeux de la poupée
(Paris: Les Editions Premières, 1949). Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Yale University. © 2009 Artists Rights Society
(ars), New York /adagp, Paris.

287
in this erotic game? 23 There is a shift in his text from the theme of
games with the doll as an object to the games of the doll as a subject
(a shift reflected in the ambivalence of the book’s title). Éluard’s doll
resists the limited functions, restricted spaces, and overt sexuality of
Bellmer’s dolls. Indeed, his poem rejects the adult’s discourse on the
child: “all you can say about her restricts and limits her,” he writes in
the opening poem. While Bellmer’s doll is perceived as both child and
adult, victim and perversely alluring, Éluard’s doll is located squarely
in the world of childhood, sidelining the sadomasochistic implica-
tions of Bellmer’s photographs, focusing instead on the innocent sex-
uality and inner world of the doll-as-child. His ever-renewed meta-
phors, linking the doll to the natural world, free her from the confined
spaces inhabited by the photographed doll. Éluard’s texts are thus
both a response to and a departure from the photographs. Provoked
by his fascination for Bellmer’s photographs, Éluard pursued his own
heady poetic trajectory, producing a text that refers only indirectly to
the photographs that had initially seduced him.
The question of both the freedom of each medium and their inter-
dependence is crucial to my last category of the word/image “illumi-
nation” on the page. Parler seul by Miró and Tzara (1950) combines
a poem written by Tzara in 1945 and seventy-three color and black-
and-white lithographs by Miró.24 The text, with its absence of punc-
tuation or capitalization, its paradoxical and disjunctive images, its
free associations, served as a stimulus to Miró, whose own open, un-
defined forms, between drawing and writing, respond to Tzara’s ver-
bal dynamism with abstract graphic forms that capture and extend
the spirit of the text rather than its detail. The relation is one of dia-
logue and exchange: word and image both collude and collide on the
page in a relationship of simple and powerful co-presence, grounded
on the Foucaldian principle of difference or différance.25
The complex exchanges between word and image enacted on
the page in À toute épreuve appear to combine the different types of
mutual “illumination” I have discussed. Like Éluard provoked by a
photograph by Bellmer or Dalí reacting to the text of Alice, Éluard’s
poems acted as a stimulus for Miró, generating a response that ex-
23
Hubert, Surrealism and the Book, 145.
24
Tzara and Miró had already collaborated on L’arbre des voyageurs (Paris: Éditions
de la Montagne, 1930), with four original lithographs by the artist.
25
For an analysis of this book, see Hubert, Surrealism and the Book, 288–89.

288
Tristan Tzara and Joan Miró, Parler seul (Paris: Maeght; printed by Mourlot Frères,
1950). Courtesy of the author. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ars), New York /
adagp, Paris.

tends the dynamism of the text yet pursues its own pictorial trajec-
tory. As in Facile, where Éluard’s metaphors both echo and transform
Man Ray’s photographs, analogical links can be drawn between im-
ages and poems in À toute épreuve. In her meticulous analysis of the
book, Anne Hyde Greet explores the thematic associations between
poem and woodcut, the interplay between male and female forms,
between reality and dream, creation and destruction. Annick Ehren-
ström draws a parallel between the fragmented images and torn pa-
pers and the theme of the breaking up of the couple in the poems.26
Finally, produced at the same time as Tzara and Miró’s Parler seul,
the book shares its paradoxical structure. The convergence and di-
vergence of word and image on the page underscore the role of the
surrealist book as both signifying object and material object. On the
one hand, Miró responds to Éluard’s polyvalent verbal signs with his
own open pictorial signs. On the other hand, the page celebrates the
material co-presence of two divergent media, words and woodcuts.

26
Greet, “Miró, Éluard, Cramer” (1983); Ehrenström, Un éditeur genevois.

289
Moreover, Miró provides less an illustration of Éluard’s text than a
response to the poet’s creative gesture via another, pictorial, gesture.
The desire to imitate Éluard’s poetic processes—rather than the prod-
uct—by finding a pictorial equivalent results in images that, far from
having a simple illustrative role, have a performative function, re-
calling Roland Barthes’s response to the work of artist Cy Twombly,
whose pictorial signs he described as vectors setting off his own verbal
or graphic response. In Barthes’s words, they place the viewer “in the
steps of the hand of the artist.” 27

beyond th e pa ge

“Unbelievable conspiracy / Of discoveries and surprises.” 28 Élu-

ard’s words could aptly summarize the nature of the collaboration
that produced the surrealist book. The “unbelievable conspiracy” is
that established between individuals—an artist, a poet, a publisher,
a printer, a bookbinder—who share a similar passion, whether art-
ist Max Ernst and publisher Iliazd’s fascination for a little-known as-
tronomer, or Miró and Éluard’s shared passion for the fraternity of
the arts and the fusion between poetry and painting. The “discover-
ies and surprises” represent the “illuminations” or “revelations,” the
analogies and exchanges, produced by the juxtaposition and inter-
weaving of a poem, an illustration, a page design. Illustrating a text
or a visual image is in the final analysis a conspiratorial gesture par-
allel to the original text or image, but equally against and beyond the
image, resisting, displacing, and disorienting it.
For the Surrealists, the book was a door opening. Éluard refers to
the absence of closure of the book when he claims, “Certain books
are like doors,” giving on to imaginary worlds beyond the book.29
Breton uses a similar image when he states that his sole interest is in
books “like doors that one leaves ajar and for which one doesn’t have
to look for a key.” 30 The image of the surrealist book opening on to
27
Roland Barthes, “Cy Twombly ou Non multa sed multum,” in L’obvie et l’obtus:
Essais critiques III (Paris: Seuil Essais, 1982), 158.
28
“Incroyable conspiration / des découvertes et des surprises.”
29
Éluard, “Espérer réaliser la véritable lisibilité,” in Oeuvres complètes, 2:812.
30
“livres qu’on laisse battants comme des portes, et desquels on n’a pas à chercher
la clé.” André Breton, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade, 1988), 651.

290
 a space beyond the page, beyond the book itself, is also suggested by
the poet Benjamin Péret when he writes about Georges Hugnet’s sur-
realist object-books: “Nothing can prevent the book from spreading
out its tail feathers like a peacock and sweeping along in its wake the
thousand gulls of desire approaching its chosen island.” 31
The reader too, we should not forget, is an integral part of this
“unbelievable conspiracy.” She is an active agent, colluding with the
artist and poet, moving freely between text and image, open to the
“discoveries and surprises” of the surrealist book. In her turn, she is
provoked to imagine, to dream. The artist’s book in general, and the
surrealist book in particular, have contributed to the radical modifi-
cation of our reading habits.32 It is first an invitation addressed to the
reader-viewer to consider the book as a material object, to relate to
the sculptural quality of the page or the book, engaged as both a vi-
sual and a tactile object. It is also an invitation to consider the book
as a signifying object, where image and text confront each other in
an enriching dialogue. Above all, perhaps, the surrealist book entices
readers to go beyond the page and, indeed, through their active com-
plicity, beyond the book itself. As Éluard writes:
[The painter] in front of a poem is like the poet in front of a picture.
He dreams, he imagines, he creates. And suddenly, the real object
gives birth to a virtual object, which becomes real in its turn, and they
form an image linking one reality to another, just as a word is linked
to all other words.33

31
“Rien ne s’oppose plus à ce que le livre, faisant la roue, entraîne dans son sillage
les mille mouettes du désir approchant de son île d’élection.” Péret, “Livres-objets
par Georges Hugnet.”
32
See Clive Philpot, “Reading Artists’ Books,” in The Art of the Book (Philadelphia:
University of the Arts, 1988).
33
Éluard, “Physique de la poésie (1),” in Oeuvres complètes, 1:938.

291

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