Paul Nougé
Belgium (1895—1967)Trained as a biochemist, Nougé entered the avant-garde milieu as co-editor, with Camille Goemans and Marcel Lecomte, of the magazine Correspondance, while also becoming involved in the founding of the Belgian Communist Party. His engagement with Surrealism developed through his contacts with French figures such as Breton, Aragon and Éluard, and in 1926 he helped establish a specifically Belgian interpretation of the movement, conceived less as a doctrine than as an attitude, alongside Goemans, Magritte, Mesens and Souris. This approach continued through Distances, the magazine he began publishing the following year, and later informed Histoire de ne pas rire, a 1956 collection of essays written over three decades. His sustained interest in the possibilities of language culminated in L’Expérience, completed in 1966, in which he explored words, language and phonetics through poetry.
