César [avec] Une bonne nouvelle [avec] trois poèmes

Autograph manuscripts, signed, comprising two humorous tales and three poems, written in blue ballpoint pen and violet ink, on both sides of a single sheet of ruled paper.

A few cancellations and ink smudges; minor soiling.

Coming from a working-class background with no artistic education, Gaston Chaissac was associated with the Art Brut movement. Self-taught, the artistic and literary knowledge he nonetheless acquired led Jean Dubuffet himself - who had originally placed him within that category - to question the validity of the classification. Gaston Chaissac, a total artist, carried his artistic vision, slightly naïve yet above all imbued with an unfailing optimism, over into his literary output. Unlike the artists generally associated with Art Brut - marginal figures of every kind, often afflicted with psychiatric disorders - Gaston Chaissac was well integrated into Parisian artistic and literary life. Even after settling in the Vendée, he maintained close ties, chiefly by correspondence, with several celebrated figures: Otto Freundlich, Raymond Queneau, Jean Dubuffet, André Lhote, Jean Paulhan, and Gaston Gallimard, with whom he regularly exchanged letters embellished with drawings, poems, and literary compositions.

The present leaf, comprising two short tales and three poems, offers a rare concentration of Gaston Chaissac's writings. Set down with occasional spelling mistakes, in a slightly childlike hand as dancing as the figures in his paintings, these literary compositions exude a joie de vivre. Faintly surrealist, they give voice to inanimate objects and stage guileless, dreamy characters.

The tale entitled César recounts the amusing misadventure of a man who fell into a well, "I could not say how, he himself has no idea". "After a short while that felt to him like eight days", a young girl passing by attempted to help him, "but she could not pull him out; only, as she had a good head on her shoulders, she threw into the well a small empty cask that lay nearby. Receiving it on his head, César was half stunned, but he was able to prop himself up on it and take a less tiring position". The story had a happy ending: César was rescued, and "as he is very sturdy, he did not even catch cold"; he then had installed "a ladder running down to the bottom of his well, so that he might climb back up alone should such an adventure happen to him again". The tale is signed "Gaston chaissac, orfèvre en vieux cuir" ["Gaston chaissac, goldsmith in old leather"], a poetic formula recalling the trade the artist had inherited from his father.

Separated from César by a horizontal line, a charming two-line poem signed "Gaston chaissac" closes the first side of the leaf:

"Un tapis rouge groseille avait la nostalgie

du butin des abeilles à la lueur des bougies."

The second side of the leaf opens with a touching tale entitled Une bonne nouvelle, signed "Gaston Chaissac", a bittersweet reflection on the end of the Second World War, celebrated by every creature on earth. Monsieur Trope, who had fallen asleep in his armchair after smoking a cigarette, did not hear the Angelus ring and "continued his loud snoring, irritating to those who were not asleep". His friend Galucha came in and woke him to tell him the war was over, news which Monsieur Trope greeted with a somewhat muted enthusiasm, no doubt owing to the weariness brought on by the war: "« The war is over? That doesn't surprise me, after all this time we'd been expecting it, it was bound to happen, said Monsieur Trope » and he packed his pipe without stinting - every last scrap of tobacco he had left went into it". Yet even nature could not remain indifferent: "The vine leaf, having overheard the conversation between the two friends, told the great news to a butterfly that alighted upon it".

The manuscript closes with two poems signed "g. chaissac" and "gaston chaissac", separated from the tale and from each other by lines. Here Gaston Chaissac's passion for rare words comes to the fore - words he appears to have discovered while leafing through the Larousse, his tool of predilection: "ânnoner", "sbire", "rosser", etc. One also recognizes his pursuit of a liberation of the French language, freed from strict grammatical and orthographic rules.

"Et pour descendre

Jusqu'au lupanar

De Marie-Rose-Pompon

Bâti sur pilotis

Fallait prendre la route

qui dévalait comme un tapis."

This literary and poetic expression, freed from convention, fits harmoniously into the career of an artist as humble as he was touching.