Georges Limbour – The Feather-Man

by Simon Collings

The artist André Masson’s debut exhibition was held at Galerie Simon, in Paris, from 25 February to 8 March 1924. The catalogue has a preface by the French writer Georges Limbour who was a friend of Masson. I have translated Limbour’s preface (see below) as an example of his early writing, composed when he was a member of Andre Breton’s Surrealist group. As far as I am aware it has not been translated before. I have long been interested in Limbour who deserves to be better known to non-French readers.

The preface is a kind of ekphrastic prose poem which references the imagery in Masson’s work. It is entitled L’Homme-Plume, which I have rendered as The Feather-Man. Plume in French can also mean ‘pen’, and for an artist well known for his pen and ink drawings, including the ‘automatic drawings’ created in 1924, The Pen-Man might seem a more obvious translation, but the evidence suggests ‘feather’ is appropriate in this context.

Limbour became a significant art critic and later collaborated with Michel Leiris on a study of Masson’s oeuvre: André Masson and his Universe (Editions des Trois Collines/Horizon, Geneva, Paris, London, 1947). In one section of that work, Limbour describes Masson as having ‘made his entry into the world of art as a painter of everyday things,’ his colours subdued ‘as though jealous of some secret’.

He goes on to talk of the early still-lifes being touched with ‘bewitching whites…belonging to mens’ shirts, to walls, to rolls of paper, to clay pipes, to clouds and to those vague beings who are simply called “background figures”. Wine lees at the bottom of a glass, or a little area of green somewhere in the picture, shine out like damped but dangerous fires.’ 

Writing of Masson’s delicate brushwork, Limbour says: ‘Sometimes he produced a delicate downy feeling which prompted me to christen one of his figures “the feather-man”.’

Limbour also mentions the many spiral forms in the paintings which he says prefigure the more violent imagery of Masson’s later work.

(All of the quotes above are from André Masson and his Universe, page V, in the English texts section, translation by Douglas Cooper. The corresponding French texts are on pages 114/115. In the French the figure is referred to as ‘l’homme-plume’.)

The kind of imagery Limbour refers to here and in other passages in his essay clearly relates to the paintings and drawings which would have featured in Masson’s inaugural exhibition. One painting that Limbour may have had in mind is Le Repas (The Meal) from 1922.

Credit: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Netherlands

Note the ‘downy’ sweaters worn by the figures round the table. Another painting which Limbour may be referencing is The Card Trick (1923), again with figures wearing jumpers displaying a feather pattern.  All this suggests Limbour was thinking of feathers rather than pens when he named his piece. The Feather-Man of the poem can still, of course, be read as a representation of Masson the artist.Also of possible relevance for the poem is Masson’s painting Le Cimetière (1924).

The text of Limbour’s preface to the exhibition catalogue is reproduced in facsimile in André Masson and his Universe, pp. 25–27, topped and tailed by two small graphics both of which are evoked by Limbour and are reproduced here. This is my translation:

The Feather-Man

This man must have been wandering in a farmyard for he was wearing a sweater covered in down; he was also known generally by the name The Feather-Man.

Gathered around a table which leaned heavily to one side, and at which none of the guests at this pitiful reunion were seated, the companions watched wine lees settle at the bottom of their glass, and how the objects placed on the baize were sliding towards the abyss which none dared obstruct. They had to wager, in a game involving two cards, their last savings, and perhaps the milk for their child, and all of them were relieved of their money in that strange game, though none were surprised.

The Feather-Man considered the domino fortifications, ramparts made solid by the numbers, which held off for a while the assaults of madness.

But The Feather-Man illuminated the hollow of his hand with a match; then, touched by the blue trembling of the simmering sulfur, the dead fish began to rise in the bedroom. The upper bodies of the men turned away in response to the infernal odour and assumed that spiral attitude into which strips of paper form themselves when placed near to a flame without it touching them. The long knife, nevertheless, rose in pursuit of the fish into a corner of the ceiling, where they took the dying waves of tobacco smoke for an ocean favourable to natural murders.

Then, pressing his hand flat on the dominoes, The Feather-Man overturned the ramparts, and cards, pipes, dice rolled without a crash into the ridiculous funnel of perspective where for centuries one watched them fall.

A frightening landscape composed the cemetery of The Feather-Man. The space, out of a sense of propriety, never exposed itself and the eyes ceased to use the opportunity to accommodate themselves to the infinite.

The trees buckled like the twisted railings of monuments after the violent conflagration raised by an explosion, an accident having taken place at sea which one never saw. A few people, protected by hollows in the ground, retained their primitive attitude, solemn and straight, like corpses in coffins. Straight ahead, a new sun rose each afternoon behind the trees. But the chilly irony of the crows would not have imagined that one day it would be possible for several to appear and, afterwards, that the frozen fires of the stars would be visible on winter days. Undaunted, the crows died of fright.

For the noble game to awaken death and to see flight detach itself from the inanimate wing, The Feather-Man liked to place a MIGRATORY bird on a plate beside fruits so fine that his instinct would have thought them over-ripening, and the thousand scintillations of the sun-brightened seas shone solely on the triangular blade of an everlasting knife.

I am grateful to Brandon Taylor, Professor Emeritus, University of Southampton, and Senior Ruskin Tutor, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, for alerting me to the existence of this text, for encouraging me to translate it, and for his insights on Masson’s early painting. My thanks also to Ghislaine Yver for her advice on the translation.