BENAYOUN, Robert. Imagomorphose d’ Charles Baudelaire. [France, c.1955-56].

BENAYOUN, Robert.
Imagomorphose d’ Charles Baudelaire.
[France, c.1955-56].

Original black-and-white photocollage (Image: 125 × 80 mm / 4.92 × 3.15 in). Framed.

Robert Benayoun was a French surrealist, film critic, and director. He co-founded and edited L'Âge du cinéma in 1951 and was a regular contributor to Positif where he famously attacked the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) filmmakers associated with Cahiers du cinéma as 'a school of ultra-bourgeois expression', denouncing the directors who 'refuse to commit themselves' and 'escape into formalism’.

In the mid-1950s he created a series of photocollages, each constructed of two parts, one the reverse of the other. He called these portraits ‘Imagomorphoses’ as he felt they realised an ephemeral but significant projection of the subject's psychic identity. Thirteen of these works were published to accompany his article ‘Boniment du Miroir de Poche’ in Le Surréalisme même issue 1 (1956). These included the portrait of Baudelaire together with others including Salvador Dali, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, and Lewis Carroll. In 2000 three of his photocollage portraits of Andre Breton and one of Max Ernst were shown in the exhibition 'À travers le miroir de Bonnard à Buren' at the Musée des beaux-arts de Rouen.

Le Surréalisme même issue 1 pp.50-57; À travers le miroir de Bonnard à Buren Catalogue pp.214-219.

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