Poetic Illumination: René Char and his Artist Allies (review)

René Char’s œuvre is noted for its compressed enactments of a Promethean poetic sensibility, yet his artistic presence was nonetheless a remarkably social and sociable one. Of importance throughout his writing life was a rich and varied engagement with the visual arts, both through the active contemplation of certain historical works and in the exchanges made possible by his associations and friendships with a wide range of contemporaries, many of them major figures. Coining the denomination alliés substantiels for these fellow artists, Char hinted at the multifaceted nature and functioning of artistic collaboration, solidarity, and interpellation. In her examination of a selection of cumulative engagements with such figures, Rosemary Lancaster has identified a corpus of great value for aesthetic, political, and sociological reflection on intermedial artistic processes in twentieth-century France. Her study opts for an essentially chronological structure in its presentation of a selection of Char’s ‘alliances’ in the visual arts. Hence an opening consideration of Kandinsky — an early provider of visual accompaniment to the published writing of a younger poet he admired — is grouped (inter alia) with Courbet, the encounter with whose 1849 painting The Stone Breakers was decisive for Char’s artistic development. Subsequent chapters discuss significant involvements with Picasso, Braque, Miró, de Staël, and Vieira da Silva, all contemporaries whom Char knew personally and with whom he interacted artistically in different ways. Primary focus is on Char’s writing in relation to each of these figures: this goes beyond the cardinal scenario of the livre d’artiste, for which Lancaster’s governing term ‘poetic illumination’ is particularly apt, to include the hommages and éloges at which Char was adept, the poetic writings that resonate with the work of the artist in question, and the miscellaneous collaborations, realized or abortive, undertaken in common. Consideration is also given to each allied artist’s perspective, with attention to its complementarity with Charian poetics (rather more than to any dissonances, divergences, or tensions). A difference that does appear in the work, albeit somewhat smoothed over, is that between ‘alliances’ with these contemporaries and Char’s relations with works and figures (the Lascaux cave paintings; La Tour, Corot, Courbet, Van Gogh) from which or from whom he derived inspiration and sustenance. It is arguable that this group, itself highly differentiated, is significantly unlike the others in terms of the issues posed. Among the most compelling parts of Lancaster’s study are the discussions of Char’s readings of and projections on to these œuvres — generally at critical junctures in his own life and work. The reader is helped considerably with respect to both contemporaries and precursors by the inclusion of twenty-nine colour plates covering the full range of artists discussed (in fact the study might become the basis of a very worthwhile art book). Poetic Illumination will be of interest not only to students of Char and of his ‘allies’, but also to those interested in text–image relations in twentieth-century France, and indeed in the broader conditions of artistic sociability that made these relations possible.