This is our last Masterclass of Surreal Artists, and our last person to learn about is...
Paul Eluard and his wife, Gala.
I have to tell you that when I started this two months ago, I had no idea any of these artists were so strongly connected to one another. When I started writing the post about Max Ernst and found out about his relationship with Paul Eluard, I had a "AH Ha" moment...I realized that all their life stories had come around full circle...back to the the first post I wrote when I started this months ago. Picasso began the circle until it ended with Eluard. Their lives, their art, their loves...everything about them was connected! Surrealist Artists, all of them living, working, and creating art, finding one another and establishing this elite group of Surrealist Masters!! Picasso, Dali, Kahlo, Diego, Tanning, Magritte, Eluard. They reminded me of a group of artists...just as the Impressionists had done a hundred years before. It was time for a change. When society and culture begin to change, artist's reflect that change in their work no matte how controversial it seems.
Who was Paul Eluard?
Eluard is known as one of the founders of the Surrealist Movement. He did not paint but he was a famous poet. Being a member of Dada, he was a pillar of Surrealism by opening the way to politically express opinions through artistic action. He was also a member of the Communist Party. (As we will remember, so was Magritte Ernst, and Picasso).
He was known worldwide as the "Poet of Freedom" because he used his poetry to speak out against war and political injustice.
At the age of 16, he contracted tuberculosis and went to Clavadel Sanitorium near Davos. There he met a Russian girl by the name of Helena, Diakonova, who he nicknamed Gala. (Gala, as you will remember, was married to Salvador Dali.)
Paul told her of his dream of becoming a poet, of his admiration for "poets dead of hunger, sizzling dreams". They became inseparable. She believed in him and gave him the confidence and encouragement he needed to write. She became his muse and listened to his verses, often being completely honest with him and telling him which verses worked and which needed to be changed. She told him, "You will become a great poet!" Paul's parents were against the romance between Paul and Gala and forbid them to be together because they did not want Paul to pursue a career in writing poetry.
Gala
In 1914, Paul and Gala were declared well and heathy and they were immediately separated from each other. Paul was sent back to Paris and Gala sent back to Moscow. Soon Europe was on the brink of WWI and so Paul was called for duty. In spite of his past health problems, he passed his health exam and was sent to the Auxiliary services. He began to suffer from migraines, bronchitis, cerebral anemia, and acute appendicitis and spent most of 1915 under treatment in a military hospital not far from home. His mother came often to visit him. He slowly began to try and change his mother's mind about Gala. He talked about Gala for hours trying to persuade his mother to drop her hostile feelings towards her by describing to his mother about Gala's faithfulness and love for him. His mother's hardened views slowly began to vanish, and she started playfully calling Gala the "Little Russian". Paul's father did not relent, and he refused to allow them to see one another. He forbid her to come to Paris.
Gala refused to listen to anyone who told her to stay away from Paul and was convinced that her love for him gave her an unshakable faith that they would be reunited again someday. She wrote to Paul's mother to ask if she would aide her in trying to convince Paul's father to allow them to be together so she could come to Paris. She begged her stepfather to pay for her to go to school in Paris and so he finally relented and sent her to the Sorbonne to study.
Paul and Gala
In 1916, Paul was sent to one of the military hospitals where he would write at least 150 letters a day to families to tell them of the loss of their sons to the war. At night he dug the graves to bury them. Shaken by the war, he began to write poetry again and sent them to Gala for approval upon which she promptly send him a letter back encouraging him to continue in his endeavors to write and reminded him that a bright future waited for them after the war.
In 1916, he married Gala in spite of his father's disapproval. He announced to his family and his new wife, two days after the wedding, that he would be returning back to the war and on to the Front Line, in the trenches with the "real soldiers". Gala protested and threatened to go back to Moscow to become a nurse and station herself on the Russian front line. Paul for once resisted her and said, "Let me live a tougher life. One of less like a servant, less like a domestic." The conditions on the front line were horrible. They went for days without water or bread. No shelter. Daily exposure to the weather and the raw elements took its toll on his health. He became very ill and was taken to military hospital and treated for pleurisy. While Paul was convalescing at the hospital, Gala gave birth to a baby girl and named her Cecile. She did not want children and had no motherly instincts. She was known to have never paid Cecile much attention throughout her life.
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In 1919, Paul wrote Gala, " The war is now coming to an end. We will now fight for happiness after having fought for life." He sent his poems he had been writing to various personalities of the literary world that took a stand against the war. He was referred to three young writers who had started a new journal called, "Literature". One of the young writer's name was Anton Breton, (the same Anton that became one of Frida Kalo's best friends and organized her famous art exhibition in Paris).
The young writers like what they read and quickly published two of his poems. Wounded and scarred from the war, he joined up with these three poets and found solace in their friendship. They talked about living a life of bohemia after the war. They refused the bourgeoises middle class aspirations of money and comfort and rejected its moral codes. They hated politicians and the military or anyone with ambitions of power. They only wanted freedom and felt that they had already paid the price for it. Revolted and passionate, they were looking for a new idea, something very far detached from the current political programs.
When the war was finally over, Paul and Gala moved just outside of Paris and found the much-needed solace Paul yearned for in Dadaism. They had already met Max Ernst and Paul felt a kinship with him that he had never felt before with any of his other artist friends. He insisted that Max leave Cologne and come to live with them in Paris. Max used Paul's passport and fake identity papers and successfully crossed the border into Paris. Gala possessed a very strong sexual libido and soon after Max moved in with them, they entered into a ménage a trois relationship that eventually caused Paul much distress and anxiety. He refused to challenge Max because of the respect he had for their close friendship, so he spent many nights trying to drink away the jealousy and heartache he felt toward Gala. Her well-being still mattered to him above all else, so he spent his nights in clubs drinking his anxiety away. He finally decided to leave Paris and went without telling anyone where he was going, not even Gala knew where he was. Then four months later, he wrote to her explaining why he left and that their threesome tortured him so much that he could not endure it anymore and had to leave. She bought a ticket and left Paris searching for him until he was found in Saigon. He agreed to come back home with her to Paris.
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One of Paul's books of poetry, called Repetitions. Max Ernst drew the illustration on the front of the book.
Paul met Pablo Picasso during the time he was supporting the Moroccan Revolution and was inspired to publish more poetry as anti-war propaganda. He encouraged Picasso to join the French communist Party. They began a friendship that would last throughout the rest of their lives. They collaborated their work through many exhibitions, combining poetry and art together. Paul once said that "with Picasso the walls come down".
Paul told Picasso, "You hold the flame between your fingers and paint like fire."
Picasso's painting of Eluard
Picasso said of Eluard that he was the only poet in the world that he could converse with an and exchange ideas with.
In 1928, Paul had to put his political activism aside to deal with another bout of Tuberculosis. He returned to the Clavadel Sanatorium with Gala. It would be their last winter together.
Dali and Gala
Gala met Salvador Dali and began an affair with him. She left Paul and married Dali. Dali said of Gala, "It is mostly with your blood that I paint my pictures." She remained with Dali the rest of her life. Dali's high sexual libido was equal to that of Gala's and they both had a series of affairs with other people throughout their entire married life. At that time, Gala was known to still have relations with Paul.
Dali's painting of Gala
Here is one of Eluard's poems that he wrote during his stay in Mexico during a new peace conference he attended.
The Phoenix
I am the last on your path
The last spring, the last snow
The last battle not to die
And here we are, low and higher,
than ever.
There is a bit of everything in our pyre
Pine cones, vine shoots,
But also flowers stronger than water
mud and dew,
The Flame is beneath our feet,
the flame crowns us
At our feet, insects, birds, men
Will fly away
Those who will fly land.
The sky is bright, the earth is dark
But the flame goes to the sky
The sky has lost all its fires,
The flame remained on the earth
The flame is the cloud of the heart
And all of the branches of blood
It sings our tune
It dissipates the fog of our winter. Sorrow blazed in horror and nocturnal.
The ashes bloomed in joy and beauty,
We always turn our backs to the sunset.
Everything has the color of dawn.
I asked myself, after learning about all of these famous artists and their extraordinary lives...now...what should I do with what I have learned? How do I apply this to my life? How can this experience make me a better artist...a braver, more courageous artist...can I take risks they took and not concern myself with what others think of my artwork? Can I reform my ideas of creativity and art like the artists I have learned about?
The answer was simple...yes!
This is what I know...each of these fine artists were completely human, flawed, some beyond redemption, most of them marked by great tragedy, great scandal, mental illness, a multitude of health problems, and yet....with all the problems they faced throughout their lives, they had a choice to make... a choice to give into their fate or to do nothing...a choice to give up as most people do in bad situations and settle for half a life or push beyond the peril and blindly allow their ambition and talent to guide them through the darkness and into the light of personal success and freedom!
They had a choice! They could have wallowed in self-pity, become a burden to all that knew them, or make the decision to rise above the calamity and live their lives in another world of their own making. A world of their own choice. They understood that through hard work, determination, and great imagination, they would have to believe enough in themselves and their talent to become what they knew they should be. In doing so, they became much more than most humans can imagine in one lifetime! They used their talent and their imagination to take them to places that did not exist before but certainly do now! Those odd, new worlds they created hang like majestic kings in every art museum on the planet. Every painting a testimony to what the sheer will of human spirit combined with the magic of imagination can accomplish!!! To combine hope and blind ambition with the obsession to never give up, even when situations occurred where it seemed they would never become the well-recognized artists that they are today, They kept on dreaming and painting and dreaming some more until they became what we all know in our culture today as the Great Masters of Art...every one of them a Genius of their own making!!
Art has that way of becoming an obsession, a crutch, a soothing balm, a healing medicine, an addiction! No one said it better than Diego Riveria when Frida asked him if she had any talent, he replied, "You will paint because you have to. You will not want to do anything else." He also said, "I do not believe in God, but I believe in Picasso."
We create because we have to...we have no choice! Those of us lucky enough to take advantage of the mystical powers of the Arts can find and create our own little world, just for ourselves, every day! It is a world I am privileged to be a part of because I know so many wonderful artists who create for the same reasons I do and they never cease to amaze me and truly inspire me! I have known for years that I cannot exist one day without creating something ...anything...everything!!!!
But the real question here is this...are we utilizing the modern tools of today's technology to surpass the Masters of yesterday? I wonder what Picasso, Dali, Pollack, Ernst, Tanning, Kahlo, would create if they had the modern technology of Photoshop? We have the ability right at our fingertips to create anything...there is no limit to what we can do through Photoshop and the AI Technology of today. The question is... what would the artists of yesterday create with the same technology? We will never know but maybe that task has been left up to us to fulfill! All it takes is some imagination and the perseverance to make it happen! So, with what we have learned and what we have available to create art with, then we must incorporate the same philosophy of the Great Masters and combine that with our own personal style to create our own fabulous masterworks!
Now is the time... we begin and dream and work and dream some more and what we create will tell the rest of the story!!!
Your challenge this week is to interpret Paul Eluard's poem, "The Phoenix" in the Surrealist Style to use as a anti-war propaganda art piece. Use as many descriptive images as you can to bring his words to life that suggests political revolt to the horrors of war.
Here are my Phoenix Creations!
Digital art created from Pixabay, Wikipedia Photography of the Holocaust, and Miriam's Digital Kit Scraps
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