Gaston Chaissac & Jean Paulhan, 1944-1963
Gaston ChaissacJean Paulhan“The alarm will be given and in the meantime receive hello from the land of dreams from Mr. Jean Paulhan”
“I painted like others get fucked.
Many times it's useless. »
(Gaston Chaissac to Jean Paulhan, April 25, 1947)
It was thanks to the painter and critic André Lhote that Jean Paulhan (1884-1968) discovered the “modern rustic painter”; » Gaston Chaissac (1910-1964), who, “shoemaker in partibus” », lives isolated in the Vendée countryside: this “spontaneous Klee [...] writes poems without spelling which are sometimes quite curious. I advise him, adds Lhote, to send you some. » Through Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss – companion of the painter Otto Freundlich who introduced him to painting in the 1930s – Chaissac transmitted a tale to Jean Paulhan at the beginning of 1944, who spoke about it to his friend, the painter Jean Dubuffet.
Between these three men a complex game of circulation of letters and complicity of projects was established: like, for example, in 1947, the Chaissac exhibition at the Arc-en-Ciel gallery in Paris, imagined by Paulhan and organized by Dubuffet, or the release of Hippobosque au bocage, a collection of writings by Chaissac, brought together by Dubuffet between 1946 and 1948 and published in 1951 by Paulhan, who considered them “very astonishing”; "...
If Chaissac formed a strong friendship with Dubuffet (“It must annoy the critics when we no longer paint like this”), his relations with Paulhan remained only epistolary. Having become his main editor, he published it in Les Cahiers de la Pléiade in 1948, then in La NRF from 1954 to 1960.
Not only did Jean Paulhan give Gaston Chaissac, who wanted to be more of a writer than an artist, a certain legitimacy in literature, but, just like Raymond Queneau, he liked to defend him. Thus, he advises André Gide: “Ah, what you should read in the Cahiers [de la Pléiade] is not the famous, but the young, Solier, Dubuffet, Mandiargues, Boissonnas, Chaissac and the others. » And to René Etiemble, he confided: “I must admit that Chaissac’s letters enchant me; ".
This volume contains 125 “enchanting” letters. » from Chaissac (whose spelling was respected) to Paulhan. And it doesn't matter that only 10 letters from his correspondent were found, because Chaissac, feeling "several individuals swarming" in him, is immediately revealed: “Perhaps you are unaware that one of my goals is to excite, to stimulate writers and artists of my contemporaries to produce, to create and I also gain from it because writing them letters teaches me to write. » (November 7, 1946).
Edition established, introduced and annotated by Dominique Brunet and Josette-Yolande Rasle (also responsible for the edition of Correspondance 1946-1964 by Jean Dubuffet & Gaston Chaissac, to be published by Gallimard in early August 2013). Book published with the support of the La Poste Corporate Foundation.
Coll. «Correspondence of J. Paulhan ".
58 color and n. illustrations and facsimiles. & bl. in-text. Index of Names Cited.
First edition, printed in 1000 copies, on Gardapat 13 Klassica paper, 100 gr., under cover filled with Antalis "Bier Paper", 250 gr.
On sale: May 30, 2013.
13 x 21.5 cm. 336 pp.
ISBN: 978-2-912222-42-8.
RRP: €44.
Publication on the occasion of the exhibition “Chaissac-Dubuffet, Between feather and brush” at the Musée de la Poste (May 27-September 28), 34, bd. de Vaugirard, 75015 Paris.
Publisher : Claire Paulhan