Lucien COUTAUD (1904-1977) - Lot 157

Lucien COUTAUD (1904-1977) Bullfighting, 1953 Etching, numbered 10/35, signed and dated lower right. 33 x 42 cm. Stains. We join. ARMAND DESARZENS (1942-2016) Mutations Aquatint, numbered 2/10 on the lower left, and signed on the lower right. Carries an autograph of the artist to René de Obaldia for you Obaldia with all my admiration. 32 x 27,5 cm. René de Obaldia - Biographical note René de Obaldia has always approached the account of his life with defiance. For the poet, novelist and playwright, existence is inexact by nature, it unfolds beyond the ordinary facts and overflows from the self, as he writes in his Exobiography. Isn't living first of all an attempt to get over being born? René de Obaldia was born in Hong Kong on October 22, 1918 to a Panamanian father and a French mother, one a Panamanian consul and descendant of an illustrious family that included two Presidents of the Republic, the other the daughter of the head cashier of the Printemps store. The unwanted child comes into the world covered with wounds, he is given only a few hours to live. He persisted, however, until the age of 103, attending the sessions of the Académie française almost to the end, after having asked for his whisky. A family disaster altered his trajectory. We find him lost in a Picardy countryside in the process of being electrified, piously raised by his grandmother Honorine Peuvrel, then in Amiens and at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. The general mobilization of 1940 ruined his literary aspirations. Armed with a simple Lebel rifle, he faced the advance of German tanks, took the wrong direction and advanced towards the enemy, which saved his life. Prisoner of war for four years in Poland at the Sagan camp (Silesia), he wrote his first texts, poems later named Innocentines and corrosive sketches to entertain his stalag comrades, narrowly avoided deportation to Rava-Ruska and was repatriated to the Val-de-Grâce as a sick man. Such events invite one to distance oneself from reality. As Jérôme Garcin notes, "Obaldia is the incredulous spectator of a play that he did not write, that a director has staged without his knowledge and in which he plays the title role: his life. He will draw a pronounced taste for fiction, as well as various avatars such as the nickname of Monsieur le Comte, an enigmatic character in his premonitory novel Le Centenaire, a brief appearance as a policeman alongside Louis Jouvet, or the flamboyant Maurice Igor, author of pseudo-naïve songs that Luis Mariano interprets. But it is especially in the theater that his break with everyday life is consumed. He discovers this art by accident, while wanting to cheer up the assistance of the International Cultural Center of Royaumont. Supported by Jean Vilar, he then undertook to put on a real counter-world show, a poetic antidote to the ambient absurdity and a full-scale attack on the human comedy. Genousie, Le Général inconnu, Du vent dans les Branches de Sassafras, Le Cosmonaute agricole, Monsieur Klebs et Rosalie, Les Bons Bourgeois... Each of his plays oscillates between gravity and humor on a background of entropic disorder, embodied by actors like Michel Simon, Jean Marais, Rosy Varte, Fanny Ardant and Michel Bouquet. Covered with awards and honorary medals, and amazing titles such as Knight of the Order of Balboa, the French Academy welcomes him in 1999 in the chair of Julien Green. He found an elective family there, asked his cousin Michèle Morgan to chair his Committee of the Sword, gave a speech on virtue, mocked himself and learned colleagues alongside his accomplice Jacqueline de Romilly. To an admirer who questions him about his presence in this so academic place, he reassures him. The worm," he replied, "is in the fruit. At the end of his life, he regretted that his last wife, Diane, was not there to close his eyes. In the hushed atmosphere of his Parisian apartment at 54 rue Saint-Lazare, everything seems to breathe eternity. His favorite authors such as the poet Oscar Milosz and Master Eckhart, his silver box of cigarillos, his knick-knacks brought back from his travels, his letters from Jean Cocteau and Olivier Messiaen, his diary filled with notes, his Olivetti typewriter Lettera 32... Nothing is missing from this decor, which is not very exterior, where the past tunes of a huge phonograph sometimes resound.