I stumbled upon this photo on the net today and fell in love with it, a quick search and turns out Paul was one of René Magritte closest friends, and founding member of the Belgian communist party. ( Explains why my grandfather loved René so much 🙂
titled "love is in the air "
Magritte and Paul on the right ( Belgium summer day 1929 🙂
Les Bras Révélateur
Birth of an Object
Coat suspended in space
Here is some information on Paul I dug up on the world wide web 🙂
Paul Nougé (February 13, 1895- November 6, 1967) was a Belgian poet
and philosopher. He was one of the most influential members of the
Surrealist school in Belgium. He was a friend and associate of fellow
artists Louis Scutenaire, Marcel Mariën and René Magritte. His poetry
influenced Magritte. A number of his poems have been translated into
English by Robert Archambeau and Jean-Luc Garneau, and appear in
Samizdat (poetry magazine).
Portrait of Paul Nougé by René Magritte 1927
A founder member of the Belgian Communist Party, Nougé brought an
austere and trenchant intellect to the service of Surrealism, founding
the review Correspondance in 1924 with Marcel Lecomte and Camille
Goëmans and masterminding a collective strategy for the Brussels group,
whose diplomatic deflection of Parisian influences fostered a deceptive
blend of seeming modesty and occasional abrupt assertiveness. A
biochemist by training, Nougé wrote aphoristically, producing tracts,
open letters, and theoretical essays, gathered in Histoire de ne pas
rire (1956). His assiduous commentaries on the surreal canvases of his
friend René Magritte, printed as Les Images défendues in 1943, are as
gnomic and provocative as the paintings.
"Paul Nougé, however, famously "vomitted Dada", and with the
merging of Mesens and Magritte with the Correspondance group towards the
end of 1926, Nougé assumed the leadership of the nascent surrealist
group; Mesens' role was correspondingly reduced and the Dada influence
was replaced by that of Parisian surrealism. Breton, Eluard and Morise
had visited Nougé in Brussels in the summer of 1925 and, as a theorist
and intellectual, he was clearly perceived by the Parisians as the
leading figure of the Belgian group. The final issue of Marie – Adieu à
Marie – therefore assumed a very different character, less Dadaist in
tone, and rather closer to surrealism. As a purely Belgian, francophone
production it marked a shift from the Dada cosmopolitanism of the
previous issue and was more concerned with establishing a cohesive
Belgian group. While the review also looks more serious, it nonetheless
retains an air of Dadaist provocation, with Mesens staging a powerful
pairing of images of menacing clenched fists (Comme ils l'entendent, et
comme nous l'entendons, 1926) , photographed by Roland de Smet, using a
simple process of inversion, where the same object, a knuckle-duster, is
simply inverted. The result is a rather brutal and somewhat anarchistic
message, further reinforced by Nougé's poem 'les syllables muettes',
which begins: "Our mouth is full of blood. Our ears ring with blood. Our
eyes light up with blood." [7]" From Neil Matheson's article ELT
Mesens: Dada Joker in the Surrealist Pack.
David Sylvester, Magritte's biographer suggests that "The Theatened
Murderer" and the 1927 "Girl Eating Bird" were scripted by René Magritte
from a set of violent and erotic poes by Paul Nouge finally published in
1956. The poems were written circa 1926-1927 when both Magritte and
Nougé were working together designing catalogues for Samuels, a fur
company
