Imaginary interview with Maurice Henry
by Charactorium · Maurice Henry (1907 — 1984) · Visual Arts · Literature · 5 min read
A spring afternoon, in a sunlit studio north of Milan, where unfinished canvases sit alongside old yellowed newspapers. The man who receives us has a lively gaze and hands stained with India ink. Around him, a dusty violin seems to stand guard.
—How did a young man from Cambrai end up playing exquisite corpses with André Breton's gang?
I was born in Cambrai in 1907, in the north, where the sky is low and gray like a sheet of zinc. Surrealism, on the other hand, played out in Paris, in the cafés that were our true headquarters, more real than any studio. Around 1928, I joined Breton's group, and there I learned the great game: the exquisite corpse. Each person draws a piece without seeing the neighbor's, you fold the paper, and when you unfold it, a magnificent monster emerges, a being no one intended and everyone made. That's when I understood that imagination doesn't need a master, only accomplices.
A magnificent monster emerges, a being no one intended and everyone made.
—What actually happened in those cafés that served as your headquarters?
We would remake the world between drinks, in the afternoon and especially in the evening. I contributed to a magazine with a magnificent title, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, and believe me, we took those words seriously. We discussed, we argued, we invented games to trap reason. In the morning, I stayed home at my drawing table, capturing the images of sleep before they evaporated — we granted dreams the dignity usually denied them. Then evening came, and with it lively discussions, sometimes the cinema. The café, the magazine, the dream: it was less a movement than a way of living awake without ever quite leaving sleep.
—Let's talk about that violin wrapped in bandages. How did you come up with the idea of a mummified instrument?
In 1936, we were asked for objects for the Surrealist Exhibition of Objects at the Galerie Charles Ratton. A surrealist object, you see, is a thing torn from its use to be returned to poetry. I took a violin — that instrument made to sing — and I wrapped it entirely in bandages, like a mummy. Homage to Paganini: the virtuoso of virtuosos reduced to silence, embalmed, mute. People stopped in front of it, disconcerted, searching for music in that bandaged corpse. That was exactly the effect I wanted: for the object to stop serving and start thinking. A violin that no longer plays suddenly tells you more about music than any concert.
For the object to stop serving and start thinking.
—Why choose Paganini specifically, and not just any composer, for this silent enigma?
Because Paganini, in the imagination, is the man who supposedly sold his soul to play faster than the devil. Wrapping his violin in bandages is to lock that legend in a cloth tomb. The same year, I published Les Paupières de verre (The Glass Eyelids), a collection of poems — for I always pursued both line and word. The object and the poem make the same gesture: they take a familiar thing and slip a trapdoor under its feet. A mummified violin, a glass eyelid — they are locks opening onto another world. People often ask me what it means. Nothing. Or rather: it doesn't mean, it makes you dream, and that's far more dangerous.
It doesn't mean, it makes you dream, and that's far more dangerous.
—You published thousands of humorous drawings in the press. Was it a livelihood or a vocation?
Both, and I was never ashamed of the first. I had to make a living, so I took my drawings to the editorial offices of Le Rire, Marianne, later France-Soir. My tool? A dip pen and India ink, those deep blacks that printing reproduces without betraying. But I never separated humorous drawing from surrealism: in my images, an impossible situation presents itself with the utmost seriousness, as if it were natural. That's where laughter is born — not in mockery, but in that brief moment when the reader accepts the absurd before realizing they've been tricked. The newspaper fed me, yes. But it was also my gallery, printed in a hundred thousand copies.
The newspaper fed me, yes. But it was also my gallery, printed in a hundred thousand copies.
—What distinguishes, in your view, a successful humorous drawing from a mere illustrated joke?
A joke is told and forgotten; a good drawing settles in and itches. The absurd, the one that interests me, doesn't make people laugh at someone else's expense: it deranges logic itself. In my sketchbook, I jotted down ideas that came upon waking, associations that reason would have rejected in broad daylight. After the war, from 1945, I saw this taste for the absurd take over all of French press drawing. I like to think we surrealists had something to do with it. The secret lies in few words: never explain. As soon as you explain a funny image, you murder it. The drawing must land in the reader's eye like a stone in a calm pond — and leave them with its ripples.
A joke is told and forgotten; a good drawing settles in and itches.
—You are known to be passionate about cinema. What did you find, as early as the 1930s, in American comedians?
I wrote film reviews as early as the thirties, and I went as much as an amateur as a critic. What I loved above all were the Marx Brothers. Their slapstick did on screen what we sought in our games: derail reality without warning. A serious man enters a room, and in three lines logic collapses, dead with laughter. It was surrealism in motion, projected at twenty-four frames per second. Slapstick cinema hadn't read Breton, it had no theory — and yet it achieved what we pursued with manifestos. That taught me humility: sometimes two American clowns go further than an entire magazine.
It was surrealism in motion, projected at twenty-four frames per second.
—Would you say that laughter and dreams are, ultimately, the same thing?
They strike the same spot, yes, that spot where reason lets its guard down. Dreams undo logic at night; laughter undoes it in broad daylight, and that's perhaps more heroic. When an audience bursts out laughing at a slapstick film, all those people suddenly accept an impossible thing — it's a collective consent to the dreamlike, without needing to be put to sleep. That's what surrealism sought: not to flee reality, but to create pockets of air, trapdoors. A humorous drawing, a repurposed object, a film gag: three ways of telling the world that it doesn't always have to be right. And believe me, the world needs to be reminded of that.
Dreams undo logic at night; laughter undoes it in broad daylight.
—You settled in Italy and returned to painting. What drove you toward color and volume?
The line in India ink, however sharp, remains black and white, a prisoner of the newspaper page. Around the mid-sixties, I settled near Milan, and there, before my easel, with brushes instead of a dip pen, I felt the urge to give color and body to my world. It wasn't a break: I was extending in painting and sculpture the same dreamlike imagination, only now I could finally make it breathe large. Press drawing is an arrow: swift, it strikes and disappears. Painting is a dwelling: you enter it, you linger. In Milan, I wanted to build dwellings for my dreams, instead of shooting arrows at them.
In Milan, I wanted to build dwellings for my dreams, instead of shooting arrows at them.
—After a life between Paris, the press, and surrealism, what does this Italian retreat represent for you?
A regained slowness, above all. In Paris, everything went at the pace of editorial offices, cafés, deadlines. Here, in my studio near Milan, time expands; I can rework a canvas for weeks, unthinkable for a drawing due the next morning. I sometimes think I took the opposite path from many: starting with speed and ending with patience. But the spirit hasn't changed an inch. The same taste for incongruity, enigma, and the reversal of habitual things drives me before the canvas as it drove me before the sheet. You don't recover from surrealism, you see. You carry it with you, like a violin you might have mummified, and which nonetheless continues to play, softly, inside.
You don't recover from surrealism. You carry it with you like a mummified violin that continues to play, softly.
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This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Maurice Henry's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.