Maurice HENRY.

Letter-collage addressed to André Breton. Heidelberg, April 12, 1960. 4 pages large in-8 square, with 11 original collages. Superb letter illustrated with eleven reproductions, about the abstract painting of the 1960s and the misuse of the notion of surrealism. Nothing agitates me as much as the incredible swamp of painting. Is it really enough that an artist scratches color on a canvas, sprinkles it with squirts or drips and declares that his process is automatism, the painting therefore represents his inner landscape [...] There is only one step to take in order to refer to surrealism and it is taken every day without any protest being raised. To Duvilliers and Degottex, he opposes the works of Magritte, Toyen or Tanguy. What along the way we let fall in the public domain, it is the skin of the surrealism, the Dali of the 5th avenue, the Eluard of the provincial ladies, today the unspeakable and suave palette of the informal. Attention to the painting, we said formerly. Attention to the color! [You have written better than anyone about painting; and only you would be able to decide, today, in the middle of this unprecedented confusion. I believe that it is necessary to help some beings to resist to the bogging down. The spirit will lose its powers, to compare a tachist painting to another informal painting, to look for the unusual in France-Soir, to remain the nose stuck to the daily political events. [...] A magazine from Cologne, discovered here three days ago, tries to demonstrate that Dada is now in the street. No and no. The skin of Dada, only. The peelings. Peels, peels. The essential remains. Throughout his letter, photographic reproductions are pasted, in black or in color, for example the advertisement of a Dali soap, a sewing machine on the page evoking Degottex and Magritte, the silhouette of a woman in a guêpière on which he has pasted a large mouth, or iguanas on the last sheet.