Robert Desnos

Poet, radio celebrity, and journalist Robert Desnos was a founding member of the Paris Surrealists and pioneer in the technique of automatism. After breaking from André Breton in 1929, Desnos practiced his own version of Surrealism throughout the 1930s, proclaiming that “surrealism has fallen into the public domain.” During the German occupation, Desnos was close to Picasso and each contributed to the other’s publications. In 1944 Desnos was arrested by the Gestapo and died the following year at Theresienstadt concentration camp, a few weeks after the camp was liberated by the Russian army.

A native of Paris, Robert Desnos was born into a working class family in the Marais neighborhood. Young enough to avoid the draft during World War I, Desnos began his compulsory military service in 1920 as an infantryman in the Haute-Marne. He and his friend Benjamin Péret met André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Louis Aragon in a bar in the Passage de l’Opéra while on leave in the spring of 1921. Following the completion of his service in 1922, he became involved with the Paris Dada circle.

Desnos distinguished himself for his automatic poetry as the Paris Dadaists and Breton began to experiment with mediumistic activities. At the first such event, on September 25, 1922, eyewitnesses described how Desnos fell into a trance and began to scratch the table before him uncontrollably; at a second event days later, a pencil was placed in the young poet’s hand, which produced the first automatic writings of the future Surrealist group. Two years later, Breton would refer to Desnos’s talent for trance-like performances in his definition of Surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state.” In 1926 Desnos moved from the maid’s quarters above his parents’ apartment in the Marais to the Rue Blomet studio formerly inhabited by André Masson, and in the process became close with the circle who regularly gathered there, which included Masson, Michel Leiris, and Georges Bataille. Breton chastised these dissident Surrealists as his own artistic activity became increasingly oriented toward the Communist Party. Despite Desnos’s importance to the founding of the movement, he was excommunicated from the group by Breton’s “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” in 1929. In response, Desnos published his own “Third Manifesto of Surrealism” (1930), in which he declared that “For the surrealists there is only one reality, complete, open to everyone.”

Throughout the twenties, Desnos reported on film, photography, and jazz for a variety of Paris publications, an activity which Breton viewed as ideologically compromised. He also covered the last of the Kahnweiler sequestration sales for Paris-Journal in May 1923, remarking upon the general chaos of the proceedings. To prove his point, after purchasing what he thought was an unsigned Braque charcoal, Desnos turned out to be the owner of a painting signed by Picasso. In the thirties, he explored the potential of radio as a popular medium, hosting a program that interpreted listeners’ own dreams, entitled “La clef des songes” (The Key of Dreams), for sixteen months in 1938–39.

A committed anti-Fascist from the mid-1930s, Desnos was active in the French Resistance during the German occupation and was arrested by the Gestapo in February 1944. Three months after his arrest, a collection of his poems, Contrée, appeared with an etched frontispiece by Picasso. Prior to his arrest, Desnos had been Picasso’s frequent companion and composed a short introduction for a book of Picasso reproductions. The text, “Les Sources de la creation: le Buffet de Catalan,” (The Sources of Creation: the Catalan Buffet) praised Picasso’s art for teaching that “life does not measure its intensity merely according to the distance which separates birth from death,” a lesson equally evident in the poet’s own dazzlingly brief career.