It was Paris in the late 1950s, and Jean-Claude Silbermann knew where the Surrealists met every evening from 5 to 6 p.m. He waited outside Le Musset, a cafe between the Palais Royal and the Louvre, until André Breton — the writer and poet who led the fluctuating, anarchic group — emerged with about 15 of his acolytes.
“I didn’t know how to do anything. I hadn’t even written any poems,” Silbermann, now 90, said. “It was ridiculous, but I went straight over to him and said: ‘You are André Breton. I am Jean-Claude Silbermann. I’m a Surrealist.” At the time, and now, Silbermann thought of Surrealism as a frame of mind, a way of being in the world, and at its heart is revolt. Breton told the young man to join the nightly meetings whenever he wanted.
Born in 1935 in Boulogne-Billancourt, on the western outskirts of Paris, Silbermann cut ties with his family as a teenager, leaving home to try his hand at poetry instead of joining his father’s successful hat making business. “I loved poetry since I was a little boy. At 18, I read ‘Alcools,’ by Guillaume Apollinaire. I opened the book, and when I closed it, the world had changed,” he told me, his French gallerist Vincent Sator, and the critic and art historian Philippe Dagen, on a recent sunny afternoon in Paris at Galerie Sator in the Marais, where some of the artist’s enigmatic works hung on one wall.
From the leafy suburbs of Paris, the young Silbermann traveled to Oslo and then Copenhagen, where he hitchhiked, worked on cargo boats and sometimes read palms to make a meager living. “It was a con, but it paid for my cigarettes, my room and my food,” he said. “It was a very pleasant life.”
Back in Paris a few years later with a wife and a child, he acceded to pressure from his father to work in the family trade but was miserable with his bourgeois lifestyle. “I gained 15 kilos in three months,” he said. “Fifteen kilos of anxiety. Fifteen kilos of anguish.” His fateful meeting with Breton brought him back to poetry and, later, painting, both of which remain critical in life.
