Tarot playing cards by Andre Breton, Rene Char, Oscar Dominguez, Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, Jacques Herold, Wilfredo Lam, Andre Masson, Benjamin Peret. 1940-41.
“In 1939 Breton was mobilized as a doctor, and attended a school for pilots in Poitiers. Peret had joined his regiment, but would soon be imprisoned in Rennes for anti-military Trotskyist propaganda within the army… At the time of the armistice, and exodus, Ernst and Bellmer being German were taken to Le Camp des Milles. The other Surrealists met at the Air-Bel residence near Marseilles (in the “Free Zone”) after their discharge. They would remain housed there during the winter of 1940-41, taken care of by an American committee for aid to intellectuals, the Emergency Rescue Committee. Breton, Char, Dominguez, Brauner, Ernst, Herold, Lam, Masson, Peret would kill time by playing cards — Tarot, “the Game of Marseille.”
-From Surrealism by Rene Passeron
Read more about Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee.
I had missed ShigePekin’s post on the cards from Sept. 2009. Visit his site to see more.
