Louis Aragon

The writer Louis Aragon was among the most prominent French intellectuals of the twentieth century. In the course of his contributions to French literature, visual culture, and politics, he assembled a personal collection that reflected his origins in Dada and Surrealism and his enduring friendships with the artists he championed in his writings. It included paintings and rayographs by Man Ray; works on paper by Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and Francis Picabia; and drawings and ceramics by Pablo Picasso. Many works were gifts from artists: in 1926, Jean Arp gave Aragon Untitled (1926; private collection) and, in 1931, Aragon received Nature morte aux feuilles et clefs (1929; private collection) from Fernand Léger.

Aragon met the poet André Breton while studying medicine during the First World War and, in 1919, they founded the journal Littérature together with Philippe Soupault and became involved in Paris Dada activities. Aragon’s early literary output, beginning with his poems published in Pierre Reverdy’s journal Nord-Sud (1917–18), expressed many of the ideas that became central to Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) though he would later call his commitment to the Surrealist quest a “youthful indiscretion.”

Like many of his Surrealist associates, including Breton, Paul Eluard, and Soupault, Aragon participated in the market for modern art in the 1920s. In the third Kahnweiler sequestration sale, Aragon purchased Georges Braque’s Grand nu (Large Nude; 1908; Centre Pompidou, Paris) for 240 francs, which he subsequently sold to Marie Cuttoli in 1928 for a handsome profit. From 1922 to 1925, Aragon and Breton were employed as art advisors and collection managers to collector and couturier Jacques Doucet. Tasked with enriching the holdings of Doucet’s library, they started an acquisitions program and created a “bibliothèque idéale” that reflected their own interests in dreams, the unconscious, and automatic practices. Though Breton’s formal employment for Doucet was all but terminated in 1925, Aragon maintained a friendship with the collector until Doucet’s death in 1929.

Aragon wrote a number of theoretical texts under the auspices of Surrealism, including A Wave of Dreams (1924), Paris Peasant (1926) and Treatise on Style (1928). In 1930 his seminal essay “La peinture au défi” (The Challenge of Painting), in which he opposed the “humble” collage to the commodity character of painting, was published in the catalogue of an important exhibition at the Galerie Goemans, which included works by Arp, Braque, Salvador Dalí, André Derain, Marcel Duchamp, Ernst, El Lissitsky, René Magritte, Man Ray, Joan Miró, Picabia, Picasso, and Yves Tanguy.

After joining the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1927, and following the first of several trips to the Soviet Union after his marriage to the Russian-born writer Elsa Triolet (the sister-in-law of the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky), he officially broke with Breton in 1932. In the 1930s he wrote for PCF-affiliated publications, including the newspapers L’Humanité and Ce soir, as well as the anti-Fascist journal Commune. During the Second World War, Aragon was a member of the French Resistance.

Aragon emerged as one of France’s most visible Communist intellectuals after the Second World War; as directing editor of Les lettres françaises, he published polemics against non-figurative art, defenses of Socialist realism, and encomiums to Stalin. He continued to write about the work of artists he had championed in the 1920s, and completed monographs on such artists as Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, André Masson, Henri Matisse, and Picasso. Several works by the artists he wrote about remained in his personal collection, including collages by Ernst, a painted relief by Arp, and paintings by André Masson. In 1979, he bequeathed Duchamp’s La Joconde (L.H.O.O.Q) (1930; Centre Pompidou, Paris) to the PCF—a work that he had identified in “La peinture au défi” as the “logical consequence” of the originary, anxious gesture of Cubist collage