She never stopped exploring the dark side of our society, writing Le Monde about the French poet and essayist Annie Le Brun. The surrealist and literary critic, whose poetry was with the Czech artist Toyen, died last week at the age of 81.
About death informed Gallimard Publishing House. A native of Rennes, she joined the French surrealist group in 1963 after meeting André Breton. She remained a member until it was dissolved six years later, although she did not leave the starting points on this side struggling to free imagination until her death. In 2004, she published a final poetry collection, Shadow for Shadow. Still behind according to Le Mondu it leaves work that is still relevant.
Ann LeBrun she dealt with the legacy of the philosopher Charles Fourier, the writer Alfred Jarry, the Martinique author Aimé Césair, the classicist Victor Hugo and especially the Marquis de Sade. She gave a lecture about it in Prague, among other places, and in 2014 she prepared a large exhibition on this subject at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Since the 1970s, Annie Le Brun has been a strong critic of feminism. The newspaper Libération now pointing out especially for one of the last representatives of surrealism, whose 100th anniversary is being celebrated in France this year. “She was one of the last customers to warn of our general corruption,” said on Instagram French writer Jean-Baptiste Del Amo.
The Czechs knew Annie Le Brun thanks to her friendship with the artist A toy, who went to France in 1947. As a refugee there, the Czech veteran showed several collections of poems by a young young author. They ended up seeing each other for about 15 years.
The French woman recalled her meeting with Toyen three years ago, when she came to Prague during an exhibition Rebel dream as one of its guardians.
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 explained, 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 married.
“We found each other and became close when she was 61, Radovan was 42, and I was 21. But with her and Radovan, revolution had no age limit. Age didn’t matter: it was about showing the freedom to be in spite of everything. That’s how my special relationship with Toyen began,” remembered Annie Le Brun of the artist who “believed, like us, that love is greater than the weight of the world.”
It was in the company of authors a generation or two older that she decided to write herself. “When Toyen offered to illustrate my first poems and the ones that followed, she surprised me. To this day, I am amazed at how far she can do things that I suspected to develop,” he thanked the French author.
For example, according to Andrea Sedláčková, who published a great biography of Toyen last year, the Czech painter was somewhat reserved for the young French woman.
” Toyen found someone who takes care of her, and Radovan Ivšić together with Annie Le Brun, an author who sanctifies their poetry collections with her name. Nevertheless, the painter keeps a certain distance , she gets with Radovan, she fights Annie until the end of her life,” writing in her publication Sedláčková. Even according to her, Toyen helped both friends again to establish themselves.
After Toyen’s death in 1980, Radovan Ivšić and Annie Le Brun organized her funeral. Just two years later, they prepared an exhibition dedicated to native Smích and her friends Jindřich Štyrský and Jindřich Heisler in the Center Pompidou in Paris.
Six years later, Annie Le Brun remembered Heisler at the New York gallery Ubu, and in 2007 she and Ivšič came to Prague again for a retrospective of Jindřich Štyrský’s works.
During the discussions 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 denied nothing, but the past was the past to her. She was quiet and reserved, but she lived intensely on the present. The a past there but through her passionate friendship,” answered Annie Le Brun.
According to her, Toyen was disappointed that the Paris of the 1960s or 1970s was almost ignorant of Central Europe. “She was always surprised by what Parisians didn’t know. She had baroque and avant-garde Prague in her, that was a part of her too, even though she lived completely in Paris,” said Annie Le Brun.
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