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         Annie Le Brun: Darkness and Method                                  FRANÇOIS-RENÉ SIMON     Mentioning Annie Le Brun in the context of this publication cannot be done without recalling her preference not to participate in it. This “distance” she maintains — which she places before any attempt to localize  or reduce her ”way of thinking to any particular ism, even surrealism — has a certain effect. Even though she once gave it her full support and it remains a major reference. It is, moreover, in this sunny light—the radiance of our youth—that I allow myself, not without a certain levity, this almost haphazard stroll through one of the most substantial, solid, and necessary bodies of work of these last fifty years.       Surrealism. This word, especially in its adjective form—and this is no accident—has become such a  band-aid for ...
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HARRY SMITH CELESTIAL HOBO

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HARRY SMITH:  CELESTIAL HOBO   By ERIK VOLET March 5, 2024     Harry Everett Smith (May 29, 1923 - November 27, 1991) spent the larger part of his life in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. He was a polymath whose interests and work extended into the arts, humanities, social sciences and beyond. His interest in creating idiosyncratic models for organising and combining disparate fields of knowledge had much in common with the figure of the ‘Renaissance-man’ or magician of times past. Simultaneously rooted in his own time Harry Smith was an American Magus of the twentieth century. In the midst of reading Harry Smith American Magus [1], I discovered that a major exhibition was on at the Whitney in New York,  Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: the Art of Harry Smith [2]. To my knowledge this is the first major exhibition devoted to his work that ran from October 4, 2023 to January 28, 2024 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Harry Smith is best known publicly fo...
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  “At the Ruined Tower”                                                       Surrealism and the Templar Legend “Why this hand of fire ?"                  Nadja - André Breton      “…the Prince of Aquitaine in his ruined tower …”            The Chimaeras - Gérard de Nerval At first glance, the Templars are not very present in the surrealist imagination, which can easily be explained to the extent that they are, as Jean-Pierre Lasalle writes, an order of “Knights of military religions , soldier-monks , combatants and priors, shock commandos but also professed ”(1) to be linked, in addition, and notwithstanding the anachronism, to an occupation of the colonial type …Precisely what the surrealists had always rejected with the greatest force! Seen from...
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