The Last Days of New Paris

In our timeline, the designs were published in the Surrealist journal VVV in 1943, in New York, some reworked a little. Mostly this was just a matter of tidying up the images, but there were more substantial changes. The Ace of Revolutions, for example, became a wheel seemingly balanced on a spatter-pattern of blood, rather than, as in Lamba’s original design, a waterwheel churning blood. The radical-melancholy and foreboding sense of blood as a motor for change was thus, uncharacteristically for the movement, bowdlerized away.

In the reality of New Paris, the cards were never published, though they did, obviously, appear within the city, in card form no less, as immensely powerful manif items, capable of invoking their geniuses, their sirens and magi. Thibaut claimed to me that it is not just the face cards but the aces and number cards that were present in Paris. What they manifest, and how, he did not know.

“A lobster. With wires…”: It would be surprising if Salvador Dalí’s absurdly iconic Lobster Telephone of 1936 did not appear in Thibaut’s reconfigured world.

scratch-figures etched with keys: In the 1930s, Brassaï famously photographed the images scrawled on and scratched crudely into Paris walls. In New Paris, the faces (as they mostly were) he obsessively captured in black and white are live, and full of motion. If, Thibaut said, you put your ears close to the walls, they move their scratch mouths, and whisper to you in a cementy language no human understands.

a great shark mouth…smiling like a stupid angel: This manif is from a text by Alice Rahon, from 1942, in which she describes, at the horizon of the city, “a great shark mouth appear[ing] with the smile of a stupid angel.”

It is a sandbumptious: The sandbumptious is a freakish beast manifest from the work March 7 1937—4 (Sandbumptious) by the extraordinary Grace Pailthorpe. Pailthorpe, now an obscure figure, was described in 1936 by Breton as “the best and most truly Surrealist” of the British Surrealists (which could be read, admittedly, as damning with faint praise). She had been a surgeon in France during the First World War, and went on to be a pioneer in British psychoanalysis. Born in 1883, she turned to painting late, at the age of fifty-two, when she met the artist Reuben Mednikoff, who was to become her partner (in another overlap between the worlds of the occult and Surrealism they met at a party hosted by Victor Neuberg, a Satanist and one of Crowley’s lovers). Pailthorpe and Mednikoff were expelled from the London Surrealist Group in 1940 in a bout of toxic infighting (Conroy Maddox called Pailthorpe an “Ogre”) but the spirit of her work clearly remained allied enough in spirit to be made manifest in New Paris after the S-Blast.

the Lion of Belfort: The Lion of Belfort is one of the Parisian sites irrationally embellished in 1933, but none of the suggestions from the article exactly concord with Thibaut’s description here. The stone figures through which Thibaut walked seem, rather, perhaps to be refugees from the “Lion of Belfort” section of Max Ernst’s collage novel Une semaine de bonté.

the Statue of Liberty: The semi-living replacement of the — real — statue in the Jardin du Luxembourg is manifest from a grotesque 1934 collage of the Statue of Liberty by Czech Surrealist Jindřich Štyrsky.

where the Palace of Justice once was…sawdust swirls from the windows and doors of Sainte-Chapelle: The form taken by the Palace of Justice in New Paris is a combination of the “irrational embellishments” suggested by Benjamin Péret, who proposed that it be replaced by a swimming pool, and by André Breton, who wanted it replaced by a huge graffito visible from planes above. It was Tristan Tzara who proposed that the Sainte-Chapelle be filled with sawdust.

the squat square towers to either side of its sunburst central window: The two towers of New Paris’s Notre-Dame have been irrationally embellished somewhat as per Breton’s suggestion: he suggested they be replaced by glass containers full of blood and sperm. Why the blood appears to be a blood-vinegar mix, and why the towers are silos, rather than the giant bottles of his suggestion, Thibaut did not claim to know.

Arno Breker’s looming, kitsch, retrograde marble figures: Josef Thorak and Arno Breker, the Austrian-German and German “official” Nazi artists, were sculptors specializing in grandiose sinister “Aryana,” held to be the antipode of “degenerate,” especially “Jewish” art.