Paul Éluard

Paul Éluard was born in Saint-Denis, near Paris, in 1895. In 1912, tuberculosis forced him to interrupt his studies and enter a sanatorium near Davos, Switzerland, where he met Helena Diakonova, known as Gala, whom he married in 1917. Mobilised during the First World War, he served at the front and continued writing, publishing Le Devoir et l’inquiétude in 1917 and Poèmes pour la paix in 1918. After the war, he joined the Dada movement and became close to André Breton, Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, founders of the journal Littérature. In 1921 he met Max Ernst, with whom he developed a close friendship and artistic collaboration. Éluard also became close to Man Ray and Pablo Picasso. In 1937 he wrote La Victoire de Guernica in response to the bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. During the Second World War, he joined the French Resistance and contributed to the clandestine poetry collection L’Honneur des poètes, published in 1943. After the death of his second wife, Nusch, in 1946, he published Le Temps déborde in her memory the following year. He died in 1952.

André Breton / Max Ernst / Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) / Pablo Picasso