Robert Desnos (Paris, 1900 - Terezin, Czechoslovakia, 1945) “Le Bain avec Andromède” Artist's book with illustrations by Félix Labisse and texts by the French poet Robert Desnos. Printed by Imprimerie Kaap in Vannes. Published by Éditions de Flore. Paris, 1944. Book size: 33 x 25,5 cm.   Robert Desnos was an influential and pioneering French poet and journalist. The creator of automatic writing and poetry, surrounded by his Dadaist and, later, Surrealist colleagues, he starred in trance performances that attracted attention for being surprising and unpredictable and which his partner until 1929, André Bréton, defined as “psychic automatism in its purest form,” as reported by Samuel Johnson in his file for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.    We can divide Desnos' short artistic life—one of the many lives usurped by Nazism—into two stages: before and after his artistic and ideological separation from Bréton. During the 1920s, after two years of compulsory military service in Morocco, our poet triumphed with his experiments in automatic writing, as we mentioned, and “was extremely productive, writing poetry, prose, reviews and essays on contemporary cinema, as well as screenplays and adaptations for films,” as the Metropolitan explains. At that time, he was a key figure in the nascent Surrealist movement and a highly influential figure in the drafting of Breton's “First Manifesto of Surrealism” in 1924.   However, as the museum points out, 'despite Desnos' importance in 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 surrealists there is only one reality, complete and open to all.’'   His artistic and communication interests were not limited to paper, and during the 1930s, already distanced from Breton's surrealism and while continuing to write poetry everywhere, he explored and confirmed the powers of influence of the only established mass media of the time: radio. Quoting the Poetry Foundation's author file, “Desnos shifted his attention from the individual unconscious to the social world.” Among other things, in 1933 he wrote La Grande complainte de Fantômas, a radio play directed by the influential theater creator Antonin Artaud; and between 1938 and 1939 he presented the radio program La clef des songes (‘The Key to Dreams’), in which he interpreted the dreams of the program's listeners. During those years, which would be the last of his short but intense career, his artistic activity was combined and complemented by his anti-fascist political commitment. During the Nazi occupation, Desnos was an active member of the French Resistance and was consequently arrested by the German Gestapo in February 1944.    The connection between our artist and Picasso, made explicit during the German occupation, is fascinating. As Johnson explains in his article for the Met, 'Three months after his arrest, a collection of his poems, Contrée, appeared with a frontispiece engraved by Picasso'. Prior to his arrest, Desnos had been a frequent companion of Picasso and composed a brief introduction for a book of Picasso reproductions. The text, 'Les Sources de la création: le Buffet de Catalan', praised Picasso's art for teaching that 'life does not measure its intensity solely in terms of the distance separating birth from death', a lesson equally evident in the poet's own dazzlingly brief career. Finally, we quote fellow French poet and novelist Louis Aragon, who described the experimental sessions of self-hypnosis and automatic writing as follows: “In a café, amid voices, a bright light, jostling, Robert Desnos has only to close his eyes, and speak, and between the teapots, the saucers, the whole ocean collapses with its prophetic hubbub and its vapors decorated with long silk streamers.”   Reference bibliography: - Johnson, Samuel, 'Robert Desnos,' The Modern Art Index Project (July 2017), Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://doi.org/10.57011/GIBW2968 - Poets.org. (s.f.). 'Robert Desnos'. https://poets.org/poet/robert-desnos - Poetry Foundation. (s.f.). 'Robert Desnos'. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-desnos