Special envoy to Lille (North)
"What do you dream about at night?" "With whom is France at war?"
André Breton, assigned in July 1916 to the Neuropsychiatric Center of Saint-Dizier (Haute-Marne) as an auxiliary military doctor, asked these questions to soldiers returning from the front.
Just look at the
Mask of a British Tanker
(1918), in leather and metal with its loophole eyes and chainmail beard, a beautiful monster that opens the route of the LaM in Villeneuve-d'Ascq, near Lille, to grasp the madness of war.
In the responses of these wounded, horrified, lost men, the future “pope of surrealism” (1896-1966) perceives a spark, the creative power of madness.
“Breton in his insane hospital is moved and terrified to see the insane poets greater than him”
, writes his friend Théodore Fraenkel, a student and auxiliary doctor at the front, in his
Carnets 1916-1918
.
Breton read
The Psycho-Analysis of Neuroses and Psychoses
by Doctors Emmanuel Régis and Angelos…
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