Prévert, rue du Château with Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duhamel and the Surrealists.
In 1925 he joined the Surrealist movement, but left it five years later, in 1930, after a disagreement with its founder André Breton.
After receiving his primary education certificate, Prévert left school at the age of 14 and held several odd jobs, such as working in a department store on Rue de Rennes. During his military service (March 1920-March 1922), which he did mostly in Istanbul, he struck up two close friendships: with the future painter Yves Tanguy and the future publisher Marcel Duhamel (who, in 1945, created Gallimard’s “Série Noire”). In 1924, the three friends moved to 54, Rue du Château, near the Montparnasse train station, in the former shop... of a rabbit fur merchant. This address became a privileged gathering place for a generation of young artists.
In 1925, Prévert and Tanguy closely followed La Révolution surréaliste and gravitated towards André Breton’s group. The Rue du Château was home to the birth of “exquisite corpses,” the Surrealist game whose name arose from the first one ever, written by Prévert: the poet chose these two words for the beginning of a sentence and passed it on for his friends to complete (“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine”). The Surrealists loved a good scandal: on May 18, 1926, Prévert, Duhamel, Tanguy, Aragon, Breton, Crevel, and Desnos took part in the Surrealist demonstration that disrupted the premiere of a performance by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes –Roméo et Juliette, with sets designed by Miró and Max Ernst. A leaflet accusing them of “taming the dreams and the revolts of physical and intellectual famine for the benefit of the international aristocracy” was handed out and a banner with the message “Long Live Lautréaumont” was unfurled. In January 1928, Prévert stepped onto the stage of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier to slap an actor reciting a text by Jean Cocteau, and also participated in the group’s main activities, such as the survey on sexuality.
In 1927, he co-wrote the leaflet Permettez! addressed to the Ardennes dignitaries attending the unveiling of a new bust of Arthur Rimbaud in Charleville-Mézières. In 1929, Prévert appeared in the photo-booth group portrait chosen to frame Magritte’s painting Je ne vois pas la femme cachée dans la forêt.
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Summary