The last surrealist – New York Times

Paris was in the late fifties, and Jean Claude Silberman He knew where the Syrians met every evening from 5 to 6 pm, waited outside if I had touched, a café between the Royal Palace and the Louvre, until André Bretton – the writer and poet who led the volatile chaotic group – with about 15 of his oxides.

“I didn’t know how to do anything. I didn’t even write any poems,” Silberman, 90, said. “It was ridiculous, but I went directly to him and said:” You are André Breton. I am Jean -Claude Silberman. I am surreal.

He was born in 1935 in Boulogne-Billancourt, on the western suburbs of Paris, Silbermann cut ties with his teenage family, leaving the house to try his hand in hair instead of joining his successful father’s hat in business. “I loved poetry since I was a young boy. At eighteen, I read” Alcools “, written by Guillaume Apollinaire. I opened the book, and when I closed it, the world changed,” he told me, his French halls. Vincent SaturAnd the historian of the critic and art Philip todayIn the last sunny afternoon in Paris in the Sater Gallery in the Maris, where some of the artist’s mysterious works were hung on one wall.

From the paper suburbs in Paris, Silberman traveled the young man to Oslo and then Copenhagen, where he was fixing, worked on shipping boats and sometimes read the palm for a little life. He said: “It was a deception, but it paid a price of my cigarettes, my rooms and my belongings.” “It was a very enjoyable life.”

Returning to Paris a few years later with a wife and a child, he took pressure from his father to work in the family trade, but he was miserable with his bourgeois lifestyle. He said: “I gained 15 kilograms in three months.” “Fifteen kilograms of anxiety. Fifteen kilograms of pain.” He returned his fateful meeting with Bretton to poetry, and then, each of them is still decisive in his life.

In 2024, Dagen Silberman came to Sater, whose grandmother Simon Khan was the first wife of Breton. She was an active member of the surrealists and opened her own exhibition after World War II, for the movement’s artists. From May 8 to May 11, in Independent, Art Gallery In Manhattan – after a little more than 100 years after Breton wrote first A “surrealist statement” SATOR displays the colorful Silbermann works full of dream -like in the United States for the first time.

Last fall, Silbermann paintings, which are installed on wood and cut into various shapes with the saw, were displayed “Surrealism” exhibition, One of the many international exhibitions to celebrate the centenary of the movement. The exhibition avoids the time sequence of a maze of a vortex of topics – dreams, hamjira, political monsters, night, aerial, and more – which followed surreal inclinations throughout the way to ancient Greece.

“Listen, I was very happy because I was the only surrealist in the exhibition. All others have died,” Silbermann told us at the exhibition when asked what was the case in being part of the important retroactive impact. “Maybe not for a long time, but still, I was the only one alive, and that was very fun.”

He insists that surrealism – “a position towards the world, and not a seal that puts it on a passport,” he said – has not ended yet. The museum, the past, can not teach you much: it is “a wonderful grave, we have to do something else. It has ended, but young people will explain surrealism in new ways,” he said with humility. “I am the last surrealist alive, but not the only living surrealist.”

Satur said he will display “young business”, with almost all panels made from 2021 to 2024. Only “Vous Partez Déja?” (“You are already leaving?”) From the earlier. This work for the year 2009 shows a bright yellow bird, its heir filled with light, and holds two darker pink stars as it is immersed. Golden foliage from feathers over her head.

“I have an intellectual provocation,” said Silbermann. “I never know what I will do when I start working. This is not unusually original. But I stop working when I don’t understand it, when he escapes from me. That’s when I tell myself that it is over, because it suddenly, I don’t understand anything about it.” He has a problem with titles, but he is happy with “You are already leaving?” And what he realized after completion should be a picture of himself and his wife, Marigo.

When I asked who was the bird, he laughed and did not respond. He and Marjo now live on Port Cross Island and Senno, a suburb of Paris.

Sigmund Freud’s theory of the subconscious was important for Silberman, as it was for many of his peers. He also talks about ideas such as the intuitive knowledge about the mind, the importance of the unknown, about being intertwined in your life and your deeds, and you have a deep desire, as well as courage, to follow art. He said about his artistic practice: “There are better things for your life, but I could not do anything else. I had no choice. I had to be an artist. Surrealism is the courage, imagination, liberation and revolution.”

In some works, characters move across fictional scenes, closed in mysterious flirting, and become one with animals or landscapes, as in “l’tente et le momentu du fruit Orange” (“Waiting and Orange Fruit,” 2024), or “l’thnte et le stint du Blason” (“waiting and moment The stairs, “2021-2022).

Other pieces may be read as both painful psychological stages and transgressive. “

These artworks look slight from afar, but they are closely quietly calmly-even when darkness-a feeling of consensual play and tongue titles that also defined early Silbermann’s work. In 1965, he established the eleventh international exhibition of surreal. The giant sculpture, titled “Le Consommateur” (“Consumer”) was a figure made of what he called “disgusting pink ranked” with sirens for her garment, an open refrigerator for its back and a washing machine for its intestine, in which the daily newspapers have repeatedly retreated.

Silbermann said that he is a politician in his life as a citizen, but not in his art. The stories he tells about his life attest to violence and turmoil in the twentieth century, yet humor, amazement, humility and optimism. He said about the French -German Dadaist Hans ARP, who escaped from recruitment in World War I by filling his papers with the correct details, but then adds them all in a mysterious column of nonsense – “a recipe for clearance.”

For Silbermann, this was not just an opportunity or fate but rather playing in the face of life and death. “It is beautiful,” he said. He said soon a friend in World War II, the French resistance, which has been escaping from the Justabo. At the end of the war, Silbermann, a Jew, and his extended family, were hiding in a house in the hills while his father served the resistance. German soldiers arrived and burned the house on the floor, giving the group only 10 minutes to escape. Satur told me that Silbermann described the fire as transfixing.

In 1960, along with many other French intellectuals, Silbermann signed “Bayan 121”, an open message opposing the Algerian war, in which he refused to serve. He said that Silbermann was distorted and confused, he was almost leading Sarperman to suicide. He was ill for three years and could not write the hair anymore. Based on a friend’s proposal, he started drawing. During our interview, he smiled and said that he came easily more than hair, quoting the old jazz standard: “This does not mean anything if he does not have this swing.”

Then he adapted the sentence, perhaps the relationship between art and life may have covered: “If you do not have this thing, you will not have anything.”