Culture
Words by Michel Wlassikoff
“La Septième face du dé”, Hugnet and Duchamp’s hidden surrealism gem
With only 270 copies printed, Georges Hugnet’s La Septième face du dé, published in 1936 with Marcel Duchamp’s assistance, remained somewhat obscure. Hugnet’s poems are paired with vignettes and photomontages; its cover, designed by Duchamp, uses a 1921 ready-made and an “alphabet lapidaire monstre” reimagined with Surrealist names, marking an interesting collaboration in the surrealist and typographic art world.
With only 270 copies printed, Georges Hugnet’s La Septième face du dé, published in 1936 with Marcel Duchamp’s assistance, remained somewhat obscure. Hugnet’s poems are paired with vignettes and photomontages; its cover, designed by Duchamp, uses a 1921 ready-made and an “alphabet lapidaire monstre” reimagined with Surrealist names, marking an interesting collaboration in the surrealist and typographic art world.
Designed by Georges Hugnet, with the assistance of Marcel Duchamp, La Septième face du dé was published by the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in 1936. The work includes twenty poems in verse by Hugnet, typographed and accompanied by vignettes dating from the 19th century reproduced in line, placed on left-hand pages. While on the right-hand pages are installed twenty photomontages where pieces of images and textual fragments taken from newspapers and magazine pages are combined; these plates of “cut-out poems”, also by Hugnet, are reproduced in collotype, in black and white and in color.
The cover is by Marcel Duchamp. He presents a photograph of one of his ready-mades, Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy?, dating from 1921. In this case a box comprising 152 small blocks of white marble, placed in a bird cage where there is also a cuttlefish bone and a thermometer. The work appears in the surrealist exhibition organized by Charles Ratton in Paris in 1936. It should be noted that for the typography of the title, Marcel Duchamp appropriated the “alphabet lapidaire monstre”, by Jean Midolle, published in 1830, but by substituting for the names of the writers and musicians that Midolle had inscribed in the thick rectangular serifs of the letters, those of the Surrealist Pantheon: Arnim, Sade, Lautréamont, etc.
The work was printed in 270 copies; part of it is bought by surrealists: André Breton acquires three copies in particular. The Surrealists practiced collage poems, thereby also extending games like cadavre exquis, but they did not publish them, with a few exceptions. As Hugnet was little known to the public, the work was not widely known and was not republished. In 1942, the publisher Jeanne Bucher returned the remaining copies to him.
