Siné (1928-2016) Rare set of 37 original drawings and 7 letters or handwritten notes from Siné to Philippe Grumbach, director of L'Express, circa 1960 Felt pen, pencil and Indian ink on paper In the early 1960s, Siné wrote the "Débloque-Notes" column for L'Express, an ironic reference to the "Bloc-notes" column written by the very conservative François Mauriac. He stayed at L'Express for about two years, not really in tune with the "JJSS" (Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber) editorial line, before embarking on the Hara-Kiri adventure. During this period of "compromise", he did not give up his anarchist convictions, and regularly clashed with director Philippe Grumbach, as these letters show. Siné tried to place clearly pro-communist, anti-fascist and anti-Gaullist cartoons in a turbulent period where events in Algeria and the Bay of Pigs episode in Cuba were colliding. The cartoonist would call Grumbach out, rant, threaten and storm, defending his convictions tooth and nail. This magnificent collection of drawings, most of which have probably never been published before, contains some ferociously humorous nuggets, such as this portrait of De Gaulle in the middle of a speech to a sparse crowd, where one of the spectators asks nonchalantly: "Who is that big thing? Reading the letters to Philippe Grumbach, with their vigour and caustic style, is all the more delicious when you realise, as was recently revealed, that Grumbach was in fact... a Soviet agent. All of which adds to the historical interest of this rare collection!