In 1980 an exhibition of the Illuminated Manuscripts of René Char held in Paris took the artistic and literary worlds by surprise. It featured illustrations by twenty-eight artists of an array of Char’s hand-written poems. Char’s artistic associations, spanning seven decades, remain remarkable today. Not only was he amply illustrated by those he called his “substantial allies”; the dedicatory poems and prose pieces they inspired, written with revelatory flair, constitute a unique corpus in the history of art and poetic enterprise.
This book brings together an exemplary number of the artists Char prized over time: Dali and Kandinsky in the early years; later, Picasso, Braque and Miró; yet later, Vieira da Silva, Nicolas de Staël and Alexandre Galperine. It also considers the poet’s fascination with Corot, Courbet, La Tour, Van Gogh and the cave art of Lascaux.