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Canadian Surrealist artist, born on 27 August 1922 in Quebec City, died in August 2010 in Paris.

Life

Jean Benoît met Alfred Pellan in 1940 and became his pupil; he helped him make theatre costumes and remained in correspondence with him. At the École des beaux-arts in Montreal he met the painter Mimi Parent. In 1948 he signed the manifesto Prisme d’yeux, married Mimi Parent and moved with her to Paris. From 1949 he took ethnology courses at the Musée de l’Homme, and he was to make many journeys to New Guinea and the Pacific islands.

His meeting with André Breton in 1959 was decisive: he joined the Surrealist group and shared its activities until it dissolved. In December 1959, at the time of the EROS exhibition, he gave his performance Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade at Joyce Mansour’s home: dressed in a mechanical costume which Mimi Parent stripped from him layer by layer, he ended by branding the word SADE on himself with a red-hot iron. Breton praised his work on several occasions, notably in Le Surréalisme et la peinture.

The work

Neither a sculptor nor a painter in the strict sense, Jean Benoît created objects and costumes that condense his vision of the world. In 1996 the Galerie 1900-2000 gave him his first solo exhibition, accompanied by a book by Annie Le Brun.

In 2024 the gallery showed the costume for the Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade, unseen since 1959, as well as L’Or du temps (1994, mixed media on panel, 200 x 150 cm), a tribute to André Breton and the poets connected with Surrealism, made after the Breton exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1991 and shown only once before, at the gallery in 2001. The work bears the inscription: “Qui vive, Qu’il vive, Qu’il survive, Qu’il revive ! Signé : Le fer à conviction”.

Exhibitions and collections

• Galerie 1900-2000, Paris, 1996 (first solo exhibition)
• National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa: tribute to Seurat, 1948, oil on canvas, 175.5 x 127 cm
• The Hold of the Senses, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, Paris, 11 February to 19 March 2022
• At the Sources of Convulsive Beauty, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 6 September to 19 October 2024, as part of Paris surréaliste
• The Subversion of Images, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 24 January to 8 March 2025

French writer, film critic, filmmaker and collagist, born on 12 December 1926 in Port-Lyautey (now Kenitra, Morocco), died on 20 October 1996 in Paris.

Life

Robert Benayoun joined the Surrealist movement in 1948 and entered André Breton’s inner circle. He contributed essays, poems and collages to the group’s reviews: Médium, Le Surréalisme, même, Bief, La Brèche, L’Archibras.

In March 1951, with Ado Kyrou, Gérard Legrand and Georges Goldfayn, he founded the Surrealist review L’Âge du cinéma, of which he was editor-in-chief until it folded in 1952. In 1954 he joined the editorial board of Positif, to which he remained attached for more than thirty years, and there waged a long polemic against Cahiers du cinéma and the New Wave, notably with the article “Le roi est nu” (The Emperor Has No Clothes, 1962).

He turned to directing himself with Paris n’existe pas (1969), selected for the Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival, then Sérieux comme le plaisir (1975), co-written with Jean-Claude Carrière. He is buried in the Montparnasse cemetery.

The work

His writings cross Surrealism, humour and nonsense: Anthologie du non-sens (1957), Érotique du surréalisme (1965), Le Nonsense (1977), Les Dingues du nonsense, de Lewis Carroll à Woody Allen (1986). He devoted books to animated film (Le Dessin animé après Walt Disney, 1961) and to filmmakers: John Huston (1966), Jerry Lewis (Bonjour Monsieur Lewis, 1972), Alain Resnais (1980), Buster Keaton (Le Regard de Buster Keaton, 1982).

Alongside his writing, he practised collage, published in the Surrealist reviews.

Exhibitions and collections

• Surrealist Prelude, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, Paris, 7 June to 6 July 2024

German draughtsman, printmaker, photographer and sculptor, born on 13 March 1902 in Kattowitz (now Katowice, Poland), died on 24 February 1975 in Paris.

Life

Hans Bellmer first worked as a draughtsman for his own advertising agency, until 1926. In 1933, in Berlin, he built his first doll, now lost and known through some twenty photographs. He self-published ten of them in 1934 in Die Puppe, a French version of which, La Poupée, appeared in 1936.

Having come to Paris in 1935, he became friends there with Paul Éluard among others. In 1938, after the Nazis branded his work “degenerate art”, he left Germany for France, where he lived until his death. From September 1939 to May 1940 he was interned as a German national in the Camp des Milles, near Aix-en-Provence; during the war he forged papers for the Resistance.

In 1954 he met Unica Zürn, who shared his life until her suicide in 1970. They lie together in the same grave in the Père-Lachaise cemetery.

The work

The doll, staged in photographic tableaux, is at the heart of his work, which extends into erotic drawings, prints, photographs and paintings. He made the etchings for the 1940 edition of Histoire de l’œil and in 1957 published L’Anatomie de l’image.

The gallery has shown, among other works, Nu à la feuille (c. 1937, pencil and gouache, double-sided drawing, 29 x 25 cm), in The Hold of the Senses in 2022, then in the gallery’s 25th anniversary exhibition in 2026.

Exhibitions and collections

• The Hold of the Senses. Erotic Variations, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, Paris, 11 February to 19 March 2022
• Surrealist Prelude, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 7 June to 6 July 2024
• The Gallery’s 25th Anniversary, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 22 May to 19 June 2026

Painter, draughtsman and illustrator, born in 1901 in Kharkiv (Russian Empire, now Ukraine), died in 1968 in Paris.

Life

Miron Maurice Baskine, known as Maurice Baskine, came to Paris with his family in 1905. In 1933 he discovered occultism and alchemy, which shaped all his work. In 1944 he escaped from the Todt Organisation camp at Martigues, joined the maquis and enlisted in the French Forces of the Interior.

He began exhibiting in 1945, notably at the Salon des surindépendants. He joined the Surrealist group in 1946. For the exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947 at the Galerie Maeght he designed the thirteenth altar, L’Athanor, and the same year illustrated André Breton’s Arcane 17. In 1948 he organised the exhibition Comme, for whose catalogue he wrote the preface.

In 1951 he left the group while remaining close to it, and pursued alone his research into what he called Fantasophy, a pictorial thought nourished by alchemy. His large triptych Fantasophe-Roc ou l’édification de la pierre de Fantasophopolis (5 x 2 m) was shown in 1957 at the Galerie Furstenberg.

The work

Hermetically inspired painting, Baskine’s work is built around Fantasophy. For the exhibition Surréalisme (2024), the gallery lent the Centre Pompidou a Sans titre in oil and plaster on panel (116 x 89 cm), from the Arturo Schwarz collection and reproduced in the catalogue.

After his death, Monique and Jean Saucet, custodians of the works, organised several tributes, including a presentation at the Venice Biennale in 1986 and a retrospective at the Grenier du Chapitre in Cahors in 1990. Most of the holding was given to Cordes-sur-Ciel, which devoted a retrospective to him in 2003.

Exhibitions and collections

• Le Surréalisme en 1947, Galerie Maeght, Paris, 1947
• Le Surréalisme, sources, histoire, affinités, 1964
• Trésors du surréalisme, Knokke-le-Zoute, 1967
• Venice Biennale, 1986
• Surréalisme, Centre Pompidou, 2024 (loan from the gallery)
• The Gallery’s 25th Anniversary, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 22 May to 19 June 2026
• Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou: La Mère folle, 1946-1950, oil on canvas, 86 x 126 cm (gift of Jean Saucet, 2003)
• Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Cordes-sur-Ciel: Fantasophe-Roc and most of the holding

Hungarian painter and printmaker, born on 27 October 1914 in Budapest, died on 3 May 1986 in Budapest.

Life

Endre Bálint grew up in a family of Jewish intellectuals in Budapest; his father, Aladár Bálint, was an art critic. From 1930 to 1934 he studied commercial graphic design at the School of Applied Arts in Budapest, then in 1935 and 1936 attended the private studios of János Vaszary and Vilmos Aba-Novák. There he met Lajos Vajda, with whom he formed a decisive friendship. For a time he was associated with the artists gathered in Szentendre.

A first three-month stay in Paris, at around twenty, introduced him to modern painting. In 1938 his first solo exhibition, at the Tamás gallery in Budapest, caught the attention of the critic Ernő Kállai. In 1945 he was among the founders of the European School group. In 1947, with André Breton’s help, he took part in Paris in the International Surrealist Exhibition and the Réalités nouvelles salon.

Later classed among the banned artists, he could no longer exhibit in Hungary until 1956. After the uprising he lived in Paris from 1957 to 1962; there in 1959 he produced a set of more than a thousand illustrations for the Bible. Back in Hungary he gradually gained recognition and, in the last decade of his life, received many honours, including the Kossuth Prize.

The work

His early work combines Surrealism, Constructivism and references to Hungarian folk art. His work draws on Dada, Surrealism and abstraction. As well as painting, he practised collage, montage, linocut, plaster engraving (a series devoted to Don Quixote), theatre design and illustration. He also published several volumes of writings and memoirs.

Exhibitions and collections

• International Surrealist Exhibition, Paris, 1947
• Ferenczy Museum, Szentendre (some ten works)
• Surrealist Prelude, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, Paris, 7 June to 6 July 2024