The Ghosts of my Friends

Fifteen years before Rorschach, Ghosts of my friends attracted the attention of prominent artistic circles of the early twentieth century. Famous dancer Loïe Fuller owned a copy of Ghosts of my friends signed by Auguste Rodin. This curious book even fell into the hands of the Dada avant-garde: Francis Picabia had Marcel Duchamp sign his copy. The album inspired Picabia to create a key work from around 1921, consisting of his own name written twice on a sheet, the first being “a heavily ink-soiled version of his surname” (Aurélie Verdier, Aujourd’hui pense à moi. Francis Picabia, Ego, Image, p. 162). This precious copy with the finest turn-of-the-century artist signatures comes from the salon of Yvonne Redelsperger, who moved within the Paris literary milieu from her childhood. Granddaughter of the former owner of the Medieval Cluny collections — now museum — in Paris, she was the daughter of playwright Jacques Redelsperger and married the famous publisher Gaston Gallimard in 1912. The writer Jacques Rivière fell hopelessly in love with her and described their relationship in his first novel Aimée published by… Gallimard in 1922.

This interactive autograph album intended as a parlour game for salon evenings represents one of the first graphic explorations of the unconscious, and illustrates the growing interest in the imaginative perception of stains, traces and arbitrary marks: “For these embodied signatures are both signifier and signified. Fascinating hieroglyphs, their obliquity is impossible to translate yet astonishingly seductive: they demand interpretation in loud cries” (Ann Cooper Albright, Traces of Light, p. 42). It was a divinatory game consisting of signing a sheet with a heavily loaded pen, then folding the sheet in half to obtain two symmetrical ink-blots. The result, when viewed vertically rather than horizontally, produces a flesh-like signature resembling a Rorschach test.

Since Antiquity through to the Renaissance of Leonardo da Vinci, painters and poets recognised the potential of such stains to create visual experiences almost freed from human intervention. At the end of the 1850s, the so-called activity of “tachisme” (tache meaning stain) became a divination trick through the popular game of “Blotto”. Players attempted to interpret the meanders of ink on paper like tea-leaves in the bottom of a cup. The most famous Blotto player was the young Hermann Rorschach nicknamed “Klecks”, or “ink-blot”, who repurposed this parlour game to develop his famous psychological test (Psychodiagnostik, 1921). Victor Hugo took an early interest in the technique and produced thousands of dark and tortured works by folding and pressing ink. The German poet and spiritism enthusiast Justinus Kerner was the first to see spectres in blotograms. His posthumous work Klecksographies (1890) certainly influenced the creation of the present album The Ghosts of my friends published from 1905 onwards. The title of this album assigns a morbid virtue to this process of folded autographs, as though through writing the soul (ghost playing on its dual meaning) could resist death by its embodiment in the blurred signatures left by friends. On the title-page, an epigraph by Shakespeare from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, highlights the ghostly nature of the activity (“The best in this kind are but shadows”). It was also, like Rorschach ahead of his time, an attempt to decipher the personality behind the signature. Following Picabia and his Sainte Vierge formed by an ink-blot, the avant-garde seized on this mysterious and provocative process to give rise to surrealist transfers... and finally to cadavres exquis, also made by writing and folding. 

Handsome and unique copy of this divinatory game of “mystical graphology”, containing the ink-shadows of illustrious French artists.