Poetic Illumination (René Char and his Artist Allies)

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.