Francis Ponge et Eugène de Kermadec: histoire d’un compagnonnage (review)

This book explores the creative companionship between the poet and art critic Francis Ponge and the artist Eugène de Kermadec, from their first meeting in May 1946 at the Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris through their entire thirty-year friendship. It stems from Madeline Pampol’s desire to give greater prominence to Kermadec, who is less well known than many of Ponge’s chosen artists, and it draws on her work as archivist of Ponge’s correspondence, an occupation affording her unparalleled knowledge of the author’s private writings. A number of extracts from these are published here for the first time. The book also draws on Pampol’s conversations with the children of both poet and painter. It traces in minute detail the life, career development, and aesthetic evolution of each man prior to their meeting, focusing on factors that made the connection between them likely. Pampol underscores a painterly quality in the diaries of even the very young Ponge and suggests that Kermadec’s rigorous visual experimentations echo the preoccupations of the poet. Of particular interest in their evolving relationship is a three-month stay in Sidi-Madani (1947–48), which saw Ponge and Kermadec engaged in fertile interchange with each other and with the landscape and environment of Algeria. Ponge’s ‘Pochades en prose’ and ‘Le Porte-plume d’Alger’ are thus seen to find echoes in Kermadec’s watercolours of the period. The high point of the men’s collaboration comes with the 1949 édition de luxe entitled Le Verre d’eau, in which Ponge’s notes on the glass of water and Kermadec’s lithographs each deter-minedly seek a language for their shared object. Pampol analyses this work as a joint meditation on, and illustration of, questions related to creative method and process. She makes astute observations on time, simultaneity, and perception as they relate to the livre d’artiste and explores the ways in which Kermadec’s lithographs ‘travaillent avec le texte et le font travailler’ (p. 202). The numerous colour plates reproduced in the book’s final section are a valuable supplement; they allow the reader to linger over Kermadec’s paintings and lithographs, as well as over Pampol’s claims about them. This visual appendix also contains a reproduction of seven pages from Le Verre d’eau. Pampol’s book, aimed at specialists with an existing interest in Ponge and his artists, is a slightly uneven read. It occasionally loses narrative momentum and analytic focus because of the author’s overly forensic insistence on archive material (footnotes are too numerous and too detailed). Further, the book’s first sections, which deal separately with the (creative) biographies of Ponge and Kermadec prior to 1946, are less analytically rich and intellectually adventurous than the subsequent study of the fascination each showed for the other’s work. The book’s third section, ‘Ponge et Kermadec, face à face’, is thus its most successful. There are nevertheless many insights available throughout this scrupulous labour of love, and Pampol writes with sensitivity about the work and creative method of both painter and poet.