Liberté: J’écris Ton Nom (Liberty I Write Your Name),
Paul Éluard and Fernand Léger, 1953
This accordion was published a year after Paul Éluard’s death in 1952, and was commissioned by the French publisher, Pierre Seghers who invited Éluard’s old friend and fellow communist to illustrate his famous resistance poem. Seghers wished to publish Liberté in honor of the memory of this esteemed French poet and former member of the French Resistance.(1)
Paul Éluard (1895-1952) was one of the founding members of the Surrealist movement and who emerged at the end of WWII as a national hero not only for his resistance activities, but more particularly for the psychological and moral uplift that his poem Liberté gave to the French nation in their time of need during the German occupation.(2)
Written in the summer of 1941 and first published a year later in an underground publication Poetry and Truth (1942), the poem was also printed in leaflet form and dropped by the Royal Air Force over the occupied territories in France. The poem however, was never intended to become a symbol of resistance but started its life as a twenty-one quatrain titled Une seule pensé and was originally dedicated to Éluard’s second wife Maria Benz (aka Nusch). Éluard takes up the story:(3)
I thought of revealing at the end the name of the woman I loved and for whom this poem was intended. But I quickly realized that the only word I had in mind was the word Liberté. Thus, the woman I loved embodied a desire greater than her. I confounded it with my most sublime aspiration, and this word Liberté was itself in my whole poem only to eternalize a very simple will, very daily, very apt, that of freeing oneself from the occupation. (4, 5)
One important element of this accordion, and a feature that often does not get mentioned, is that it utilized the pochoir printing method. In this example it was Albert Jon who created the stencils and hand applied the pigments, and this accounts for the vividness and texture of the blocks of color, and the work’s overall vitality and presence.(6)
Examining this accordion within its larger cultural context, it’s clear that this collaboration between writer and artist falls within the genre of books that came to known as as Livre d’Artiste or Livre de Peintre. This genre of books by famous authors, accompanied with illustrations by equally well-known artists’, was a practice that developed in France in the mid-1890s. This market for deluxe editions coincided with the period's growing art market and these books appealed to the new audience for the fine arts. While the majority of these books did not transcend their status as illustrated books of poetry and writing, they did establish the livre d’artiste as the forerunner of what we now call “artists’ books’” in the post-WWII period. Johanna Drucker, an artists’ book historian, in the following text examines what she sees as the key differences between a livre d’artiste and an artists’ book when she writes that ‘livre d’artistes’:
“…stop at the threshold of the conceptual space in which artists’ books operate. First of all, it is rare to find a livre d’artiste which interrogates the conceptual or material form of the book as part of its intention, thematic interests, or production activities. This is perhaps one of the most important distinguishing criteria of the two forms, since artists’ books are almost always self-conscious about the structure and meaning of the book as a form.”(7)
Furthermore, she notes that “…the standard distinction between image and text, generally on facing pages, is maintained in most livres d’artistes,” while noting the often excessive production values and materials used in their creation. In conclusion, she pinpoints the differences between the two kinds of books stating that in livre d’artistes “the images and text often face each other like new acquaintances across the gutter, wondering how they came to be bound together for all eternity in the hushed, mute, interior of the ponderous tome.”(8)
The question that now begs to be asked is whether Liberté is a livre d’artiste or an artists’ book. While there is no doubt that this accordion falls within the tradition of the livre d’artiste, I would assert that it’s also balanced on the edge of being an artists’ book. A number of features about this accordion leads me to this conclusion. Firstly, there are three elements to this work, Léger’s portrait of Éluard, the poem itself, and the pochoir by Albert Jon. What, arguably, differentiates this publication from a livre d’artiste is that all these three elements have been fused together within the unique space of the accordion, and a key feature of this unity is how they’ve been brought together through a judicious use of the pochoir technique.
While this accordion might not reach the threshold that Drucker claims for an artist’s’ book, I believe that it moves beyond the typical formal features of the traditional livre d’artiste and in binding together all its formal elements into an indivisible whole it moves closer to a definition of an artists’ book. Aside from these formal considerations it’s clear that this book also served a larger symbolic role for French audiences as a metaphorical flag for both human freedom and individual liberty.
To further complicate matters regarding the definition of this publication, I want to turn to a small invitation card issued by the publishing house inviting people to the public reception for this book. The text reads:
M. Louis Carré et M. Pierre Seghers, éditeur,
ont l’honneur de vous inviter à la présentation
du poème-objet
Liberté
de
Paul Eluard
illustré par
Fernand Léger
le Vendredi 23 Octobre 1953 à 16 heures
What particularly interests me about this invitation is the description of this accordion as a poème-objet, or in English ‘object poem’. André Breton coined this phrase to describe his works that combined both text and poetry with three-dimensional objects. Breton defined a poème-objet as, “…a composition that tends to combine the resources of poetry and the plastic arts, and to thereby speculate on their power of reciprocal exhilaration.”(8)
In its moving cry for liberty and resistance to the occupation Liberté combines both painting (pochoir) and poetry, two of the features of Breton’s definition of the poème-objet”, and when we shift focus to the “objet” of this poème-objet we can only conclude that it is the accordion itself.
Stephen Perkins, 2024
note: footnotes at end of document
Footnotes:
1. The title of the poem, Liberté: J’écris Ton Nom, translated into English is, “Freedom: I Write Your Name.” The accordion had a second printing in 1953 and then other reprints in 2016 (French and European Publications Inc.) and 2022 (Pierre Seghers). Other versions with different artists’ illustrations have been published in 1998 and 2012. The present 1953 version was printed in an edition 238 copies.
Eluard’s birth name was Eugène Émile Paul Grindel, and Eluard was a name derived from his maternal grandmother.
2. This poem still has an honored place in rallying the national psyche of France. When the terrorist attacks took place in Paris on November 13, 2015, the Centre Pompidou hung an enlarged copy of the accordion’s front cover with Leger’s portrait of Eluard and the work’s title on the front of the building in response to the massacre.
3) Gramatzki, Susanne, Poetry in dialog: Paul Éluard’s Liberté as a fanfold, in: Christoph Benjamin Schulz (editor), Die Geschichte(n) Gefalteter Bücher: Leporellos, Livres-Accordion und Folded Panoramas in Literature und Bildender Kunst. [The Histories of Folded Books: Leporellos, Accordion Books and Folded Panoramas in Literature and Fine Art], Georg Olms Verlag: Hildesheim, Zurich, New York, 2019, pgs. 203-223.
4. https://www.trioletrarebooks.com/pages/books/2243/paul-eluard-ill-fernand-leger/
liberte-jecris-ton-nom, accessed 3.5.24
5. Below is the poem translated by Ben Platts-Mills: www.benplatts-mills.com/post/ on-freedom-paul-%C3%A9luard-s-poem
Freedom
On my school notebooks
On my desk and on the trees
On the sand on the snow
I write your name
On pages already read
On all the white pages
Stone blood paper or ash
I write your name
On golden icons
On the weapons of warriors
On the crowns of kings
I write your name
On the jungle and the desert
On the nests on the broom
On the echo of my infancy
I write your name
On the wonders of night
On the white bread of days
On the beloved seasons
I write your name
On all my blue rags
On the pond weeded sun
On the lake living moon
I write your name
On the fields on the horizon
On the wings of birds
And on the mill of shadows
I write your name
On each puff of dawn
On the sea on the boats
On the crazed mountain
I write your name
On the froth of clouds
On the sweat of the thunderstorm
On the thick insipid rain
I write your name
On the glimmering forms
On the clamour of colours
On the stubborn truth
I write your name
On the wakened trails
On the routes deployed
On the overflowing squares
I write your name
On the lamp that shines
On the lamp gone out
On my home regained
I write your name
On the halved fruit
Of my mirror and my room
On my bed empty shell
I write your name
On my greedy and tender dog
On his prickling ears
On his clumsy paws
I write your name
On the sill of my door
On familiar things
On the flood of blessed fire
I write your name
On any willing flesh
On the foreheads of my friends
On each hand held out
I write your name
On the window of surprise
On attentive lips
High above the silence
I write your name
On my ruined asylums
On my fallen flares
On the walls of my boredom
On the emptiness without desire
On naked solitude
On the marches of death
I write your name
On health returned
On vanished risk
On hope without memory
I write your name
And by the power of a word
I recommence my life
I was born to know you
To name you
FREEDOM
6) Pochoir (“stencil” in English) was a printing technique used widely in France during the early part of the 20th century, indeed Léger had collaborated with Blaise Cendrars and he’d also created pochoir illustrations for his 1919 novel titled “La Fin du mode filmée par l’ange N.-D”. By the 1930s and ‘40s pochoir was declining as the master practitioners were fading away along with the rise of photomechanical reproduction. For more about this stencil based method of applying powdered colors by hand follow this link to an Metropolitan Museum exhibition catalogue titled “Pochoir by Painters” (1989):
https://libmma.contentdm. oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll10/id/190871/
7) Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, Granary Books, New York City, 1995,
pg. 3-4
8) Ibid, p. 4
9) See: https://www.andrebreton.fr/en/work/56600100199560?, accessed 3.27/24.
From, André Breton's autographed manuscript dated 27 February 1942 and published in Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (‘Surrealism and Painting’) in 1965. Breton writes that the first object poem was presented in 1929.
