René Crevel

Abbott took up photography in 1925 while working as Man Ray's photographic assistant in his Paris studio. It was there that she made her first portraits, using his equipment. Her subjects were the expatriate artists and writers within her own immediate circle as well as members of the Parisian avant-garde, including the young Surrealist writer René Crevel (1900-1935), whom she may have met through Man Ray. She made this elegant portrait of the dapperly attired Crevel at her studio on the rue Servandoni in Montpanasse. The photograph, in which Crevel is posed in profile against a plain backdrop, captures his far-off gaze, delicate features, and an errant cowlick, revealing an introspective artist with an eccentric edge. Identified by André Breton in his first Surrealist Manifesto as a performer of acts of "absolute surrealism," Crevel participated in the earliest Surrealist dream experiments and developed a bizarre and imaginative writing style with which he critiqued the capitalist bourgeoisie, the Catholic Church, and post-WWI European society in numerous books, essays, and poems. In the 1930s Crevel battled tuberculosis and became increasingly devoted to the principles of Communism. On the eve of the Parisian "Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture," which he helped organize, the ailing 34-year-old committed suicide citing his disgust over the political quarreling between the Surrealists and the Communists.