2024-08-06 23:02:44
She never stopped exploring the dark side of our society, writes Le Monde about the French poet and essayist Annie Le Brun. The surrealist and literary critic, whose poetry was illustrated by the Czech artist Toyen, died last week at the age of 81.
The Gallimard publishing house reported on the death. A native of Rennes, she joined the French surrealist group in 1963 after meeting André Breton. She remained a member until its disbandment six years later, although she did not abandon the starting points of this direction striving for the liberation of the imagination until her death. In 2004, she last published a collection of poetry Shadow for Shadow. Nevertheless, according to Le Monde, he leaves behind a work that is still relevant.
Annie Le Brun dealt with the legacy of the philosopher Charles Fourier, the writer Alfred Jarry, the Martinique author Aimé Césair, the classic Victor Hugo and especially the Marquis de Sade. She lectured about it in Prague, among other places, and in 2014 prepared a large exhibition on this topic in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Since the 1970s, Annie Le Brun sharply criticized the current wave of feminism. However, the daily Libération now describes her primarily as one of the last representatives of surrealism, whose 100th anniversary is being celebrated in France this year. “She was one of the last guardians warning against our collective stupidity,” French writer Jean-Baptiste Del Amo said on Instagram.
Czechs knew Annie Le Brun thanks to her friendship with the artist Toyen, who went to France in 1947. In exile there, the Czech veteran illustrated several collections of poetry by a budding young author. They ended up seeing each other for about 15 years.
The French woman remembered her meeting with Toyen three years ago, when she came to Prague on the occasion of the exhibition Dreaming Rebel as one of its curators.
A documentary film was made about the life and work of Annie Le Brun in 2015. | Photo: Profimedia.cz
At a lecture at the French Institute, she described how she met Toyen in 1963 through the Croatian poet and playwright Radovan Ivšič. Annie Le Brun was just starting to live with him, later they got married.
“We found each other and became close when she was 61, Radovan was 42, and I was 21. But with her and Radovan, revolt had no age limit. Age didn’t matter: it was about showing the freedom of being despite everything. That’s how my special friendship began with Toyen,” recalled Annie Le Brun of the artist who “believed, like us, that love outweighs the weight of the world.”
It was in the company of authors one or two generations older that she decided to write on her own. “When Toyen offered to illustrate my first poems and then the ones that followed, she amazed me. To this day, I remain amazed at how far she was able to develop what I intuitively suspected,” thanked the French author, about whom in her book last year Toyen’s biography is also written by Andrea Sedláčková.
After Toyen’s death in 1980, it was Radovan Ivšić and Annie Le Brun who organized her funeral. Just two years later, they prepared an exhibition dedicated to the native of Smích and her friends Jindřich Štyrský and Jindřich Heisler in the Center Pompidou in Paris.
Six years later, Annie Le Brun remembered Heisler in the New York gallery Ubu, and in 2007 she and Ivšič came to Prague again for a retrospective of the works of Jindřich Štyrský.
During the conversations with Toyen, Annie Le Brun, according to her own words, asked, among other things, what kind of relationship Toyen has with the homeland, from which she fled shortly before the communist coup. “She didn’t deny anything, but the past was the past to her. She was quiet and reserved, but she lived the present intensely. The past only existed through her passionate friendships,” answered Annie Le Brun.
According to her, Toyen was disappointed that the Paris of the 1960s or 1970s was practically ignorant of Central Europe. “She was constantly amazed at what Parisians didn’t know. She had baroque and avant-garde Prague in her, that was also a part of her, even though she then lived fully in Paris,” said Annie Le Brun.
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