Liberty I Write Your Name ,
Paul Eluard 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 unique 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 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 just at the threshold of the conceptual space in which artists' books operate. First of all, it is rare to find an 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 livre 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 stencil 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 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:
Mr. Louis Carré and Mr. Pierre Seghers, publisher,
have the honor to invite you to the presentation
of the poem-object
Liberty
by
Paul Eluard
illustrated by
Fernand Léger
Friday, October 23, 1953 at 4 p.m.
What particularly interests me about this invitation is the description of this accordion as a poème-object, 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 defines a poème-object 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-object", and when we shift focus to the “objet” of this poème-object we can only conclude that it is the accordion itself.
Stephen Perkins, 2024
note : footnotes at end of document
