Paul Eluard (born Eugène Grindel)

Poet Paul Eluard, along with André Breton, was one of the founders of the Surrealist movement. He was also an important collector of African, Oceanic, and modern art throughout his life, enthusiastically buying works when his financial means would allow then selling them when he was desperate for money. Eluard was active in the secondary art market, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, which earned him an income that was occasionally large enough to finance his literary projects.

Like Breton, Eluard began to collect by buying Cubist works at the sequestration sales of the Galerie Kahnweiler, organized by the French government between 1921 and 1923. No documentation of those purchases exists today, but the catalog of the sale of his own collection, held at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris on July 3, 1924, helps to identify the works that he bought at these sales. Included in the 1924 sale were Eluard’s most important Cubist and Surrealist works, including twelve by Pablo Picasso, two by Georges Braques, and four by Juan Gris. He had acquired most of these at the Kahnweiler sales, including Picasso’s papier collé The Glass (1914; Berggruen Museum, Berlin).

Eluard’s wife Gala managed the July 1924 sale, which financed a trip she made to Vietnam with Max Ernst to meet Eluard, who had fled there. Eluard returned to Paris in September of the same year and shortly thereafter resumed dealing art. He sought buyers for works by Giorgio de Chirico that had been put up for sale while he was abroad, and bought many works by Picasso in the November 1924 sale of dealer Georges Aubry’s collection at the Hôtel Drouot, including a painting that would later enter the collection of fashion designer, Jacques Doucet: Guitar, Ace of Clubs, Bottle of Bass, Glasses (“Ma Jolie”) [1914; Private collection, Daix 740].

After the death of his father in 1927, Eluard’s inheritance allowed him to further develop his collection of African, Oceanic, and modern art. However, bad investments combined with the 1929 stock market crash ruined him within only a few years. The economic crisis coincided with his separation from Gala, who had fallen in love with Salvador Dalí. When dealer Charles Ratton offered to organize a sale of Breton’s and Eluard’s collections of African and Oceanic sculptures, they took the opportunity to sell three hundred objects at auction on July 2–3, 1931; it is unclear how many of these belonged to Eluard. At the time both Eluard and Breton also worked as intermediaries to sell Picasso works from the collection of the late John Quinn to the Belgian collector René Gaffé, including the Cubist portrait Wilhelm Uhde (1910; private collection).

From the beginning of the Spanish Civil War until his death in 1952, Eluard wrote anti-Fascist poetry. In 1942 he rejoined the Communist Party, from which he had been expelled in 1933, and served from 1949 as the delegate of the World Peace Council. During World War II, he became closer to Picasso, who helped Eluard by regularly providing him with artworks to sell on his behalf. The last and most important sale from Eluard’s collection occurred after he cut ties with the Surrealist group in June 1938. He sold one hundred works to Roland Penrose in order to finance the publication of an unknown manuscript by Federico García Lorca owned by the writer José Bergamín. Although by this time Eluard’s collection included mainly Surrealist, African, and Oceanic art, he still owned ten works by Picasso, including the Cubist construction Still Life (1914; Tate Modern, London).