{"id":298052,"date":"2025-05-05T12:12:09","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T12:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/05\/the-last-surrealist\/"},"modified":"2025-05-05T12:12:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T12:12:09","slug":"the-last-surrealist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/05\/the-last-surrealist\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Surrealist"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It was Paris in the late 1950s, and Jean-Claude Silbermann<\/a> knew where the Surrealists met every evening from 5 to 6 p.m. He waited outside Le Musset, a cafe between the Palais Royal and the Louvre, until Andr\u00e9 Breton \u2014 the writer and poet who led the fluctuating, anarchic group \u2014 emerged with about 15 of his acolytes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t know how to do anything. I hadn\u2019t even written any poems,\u201d Silbermann, now 90, said. \u201cIt was ridiculous, but I went straight over to him and said: \u2018You are Andr\u00e9 Breton. I am Jean-Claude Silbermann. I\u2019m a Surrealist.\u201d At the time, and now, Silbermann thought of Surrealism as a frame of mind, a way of being in the world, and at its heart is revolt. Breton told the young man to join the nightly meetings whenever he wanted.<\/p>\n

Born in 1935 in Boulogne-Billancourt, on the western outskirts of Paris, Silbermann cut ties with his family as a teenager, leaving home to try his hand at poetry instead of joining his father\u2019s successful hat making business. \u201cI loved poetry since I was a little boy. At 18, I read \u2018Alcools,\u2019 by Guillaume Apollinaire. I opened the book, and when I closed it, the world had changed,\u201d he told me, his French gallerist Vincent Sator<\/a>, and the critic and art historian Philippe Dagen<\/a>, on a recent sunny afternoon in Paris at Galerie Sator in the Marais, where some of the artist\u2019s enigmatic works hung on one wall.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n