Surrealistic record
ARTinvestment.RU   26 мая 2008

€ 3,6 million for the manuscript of the manifesto Surrealism André Breton (Supplement)

€ 3,6 million for the manuscript and corrections manifest Surrealism Andre Breton - the result of bidding in the Paris office of Sotheby's. Beaten the world record in the manuscripts of literary works of all times and peoples.

expert auction house Sotheby's Tom Bompar praised the manuscript in the € 200-300 thousand followed by seven more school notebooks with the amendments and additions to the manifest. First, the manifesto and each enclosure experts wanted to sell separately. And even managed to start selling. Manifesto of the price reached € 740 thousand but then suspended the auctions by offering customers acquire and manifest, and the amendment with one lead from € 300 thousand to € 550 thousand for everything. Hall happily responded to the proposal. The result is known.

Sotheby's expectation of success, but to imagine that the creation of Andre Breton beat the record of 2001, when the manuscript Selina «Journey to the edge of the night» left almost € 2 million (12.18 million Swiss francs), could not even they are. The result is all the more surprising that this is a rare sale of such magnitude that almost did not have any media support. The sale announced just the day before, but not for a few days and weeks before the event, although the bid was known in March.

The reason is very simple. All of French society remember April 2003. Tired of empty promises and expectations to create a fund Andre Breton, his heirs put to tender all of the legacy of the pioneer of surrealism. Then for nearly two weeks in the halls of Drouot auction house Calmels-Cohen sold the manuscripts, photographs, a library of 3500 volumes, pictures of almost all the pillars of painting the first half of the twentieth century ... At the tender has not been exhibited only a historic apartment in the street Fontaine, as well as a few decades earlier the State had received it as a tax on inheritance.

In the months preceding the sale, writers, philosophers, professors and academicians in all ministerial knocking doors, trying to ensure that the state has become invaluable in terms of the French and world culture collection. It was written appeal, signed by 2500 of a culture of France. The efforts proved futile. Today on the sale of remembering is not accepted. All that remains of the extensive collection, - DVD, which show all the lots (24 of 800 images) and recorded a virtual tour of the historic house.

On auction today will remember, and remember with pleasure. The buyer was the Paris museum of manuscripts and letters. Put in a special showcase your trophy the director of the museum has already promised in June. However, the general public has seen these neatly painted blue ink at the page «surrealism revolution» in 2002, the Pompidou Center.

The only complete manuscript copy of the manifesto of Surrealism, Andre Breton completed in 1924 resulting in heavy fighting. In the original battle took a lot of buyers but very quickly they were only five. Three behind the handset, while the two fought right in the room. The buyer - the director and founder of the Museum of manuscripts and letters - was one of those who openly declared their intentions to get the manuscript. «I am very, very, very happy», - this is all that has been able to tell Mr Gerard Lerete at the end of auction.

The fact that the May 21, sold Sotheby's, once belonged to the first wife of Andre Breton Simone Collin. Breton met with mademoiselle Kahn in 1920, the Luxembourg Gardens on the bench. Soon they married and settled down in the street Fontaine, 42. The family lived happily for almost 11 years. Then the wife divorced. The former Mrs. Breton fully fight for communist ideals, and later married and became Mrs. Collin's largest owner and galleries of contemporary art. From her former husband as a gift go to the nine manuscripts, which came on the market just now.

Source: www.newsru.com , http://www.ap.org/