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several old letters and envelopes are sitting on a white surfacemany letters and envelopes on a white surface
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33 - René CHAR. Three letters addressed to Henri Michaux.
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Estimate €800 - €1,000
Sale commission
Description
René CHAR. Three letters addressed to Henri Michaux. Paris, 10 November 1962; L’Isle-sur-Sorgue, 23 January 1965 and 18 September 1981. 3 signed autograph letters: 1 page in-8 for the first two and 2 pages in-8 for the third; 3 envelopes, the first marked ‘for the attention of the Cordier Gallery’. Three letters of thanks from René Char, an admirer of Michaux’s pictorial and literary work: the poet says he is swept away by the ‘seismic’ ink of the author of *Apparitions*. After visiting the exhibition at Daniel Cordier’s gallery: “I shall live on for a long time yet with your great, inspired drawings – which you have led me to my deepest refuge, the one one reaches only once or twice in a lifetime. Thank you, a thank you seldom spoken.” “Thank you for being who you are to us who love you. Thanks to you and your ‘avant-pays’, the great, silent Dentellière facing us has something essential to tell us now; something that could not have been conveyed in any other way.” After reading *Affrontements*: “No longer questioning ‘the great Voice’, having heard it from beyond and from nothingness; no longer applying ‘the blindfold’, having turned and turned the night and its babbling secrets over and over to my heart’s content, I love to meet you again like this, to rediscover you anew with your piercing, privateer-like writing—but that of a consoling privateer, cutting through the nets and unsettling the rulers, whilst men’s constructs crumble to the ground. I have only just emerged from *Affrontements*. A reading without a script or a prompter in his box, it offers, in tears, to unite fire with light by denying it… A block of tantric lava from which movement has not yet quite departed, an underlying movement of writing and drawing. And silence and speech here, as you so categorically put it, do without theatre. So much the better. The inner ear is attuned solely to its own reception, to its own suffering. My only desire was to thank you with affection and thoughtful admiration. And yet here I am, carried away in the wake of your ink, your seismic ink!” Henri Michaux no doubt received these three enthusiastic letters with a certain reserve because, as Jean-Pierre Martin points out, he shunned social gatherings and had little fondness for the company of his fellow poets. In the case of René Char, “if Henri Michaux had wanted to avoid him for ever, he would not have gone, one day in 1976, to the Point Cardinal: it was for the opening of an exhibition of Char’s poems illustrated by Wifredo Lam. An exceptional occasion.” The opening in question was that of *Contre une maison sèche* (see no. 39).
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About the sale Henri Michaux, the Sven Pitsey collection
Auction location
Auction time 10/29/2026 at 2:00 PM
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
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