[NEO-DADAISM AND SURREALISM] Les Réverbères. Nos. 1 to 5 (all published), with other related ephemera inserted, including a scarce folded broadside announcing one of the group's events

Paris: self-published (Imprimerie des 2 Artisans), April 1938 to March 1939. Quartos (33 × 25.2 cm). Original printed self-wrappers; 8 pp. each, and every issue with a full-page graphic print as well as four issues with a second print version (by Michel Tapié, Roger Sby, Pierre Minne, Aline Gagnaire, Ulrich Senn), one of which with hand-coloring and autograph signature. Also included is a leporello-style broadside, folded three times, announcing an evening titled "Hommage à Dada" on May 4, 1938, involving Erik Satie, Poulenc, and others. About very good; minor overall wear; one issue with stain to text.

Complete run of the important pre-war neo-Dadaist journal, which promotes an anti-Surrealist point of view throughout, starting with Bureau's open letter to André Breton on the front page of the first issue. Rare, especially with the second print version of the graphics. Other issues are subtitled "Démobilisation de la Poèsie." "Entartete Kunst" (concerning the notorious German exhibition of "Degenerate Art"), "Art Poétique," and "6 Manifestes." The group provided much energy to the Parisian avant-garde circle just prior to World War II and promoted a wide variety of performances, including jazz by Django Reinhardt and stage performances by the likes of Ribemont-Dessaignes and Apollinaire, as well as exhibitions of visual art. "Les Réverbères" was founded in December 1937 by Michel Tapié, Jean Marembert, Jacques Office, Pierre Minne, and Henri Bernard. Among other events, the group also organized "Tribute to Dada" soirées, which featured readings of texts by Tristan Tzara, Ribemont-Dessaignes, and others. In "Art of the Defeat: France 1940-1944," Laurence Bertrand Dorléac asserts that the group still met for several gatherings retaining the spirit of the 1930s even after the German occupation of France in June 1940.

The Neo-Dadaist activities around Michel Tapié have not been explored to any significant degree and are only occasionally mentioned in passing in the literature on Dada and Surrealism. One exception is Michel Fauré's Histoire du surréalisme sous l'Occupation (1982). The reason for this dearth of research is likely the scarcity of these experimental, elaborate avant-garde publications, most of which were produced in very small editions during the occupation and are not widely held in institutions. Moreover, it is unclear how many copies of the journals, which circulated in the narrow circle of avant-garde artists and writers in "inner exile" or in the artistic underground, still exist (and how many were actually printed). There is no doubt, however, that Tapié's work is relevant to art history; after all, he is one of the most important figures of the European avant-garde after the end of the Second World War. Today, he is known to a wider circle above all as an important critic and theoretician who not only contributed significantly to the reception of Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, and Jean Dubuffet through his publications, but also played an active role in the development of the "Informel" and "Tachism" tendencies after 1945. His text "Un art autre", published in 1952, is still discussed as one of the formative contributions. In it, "Dada" marks the decisive turning point for Tapié, comparable to Nietzsche in philosophy. "Dada" is described as the great, shattering break after which nothing in art could be taken for granted. (Michel Tapié, Un art autre, German transl. in: Laszlo Glozer, Westkunst. Zeitgenössische Kunst seit 1939, Cologne 1981, p. 158ff). In the second manifesto of "Nouveau Réalisme", the important group around Yves Klein, Michel Tapié is named as the "guarantor of a new art movement" after the end of the war, since he upheld the "Dada myth" as a necessary "zero point," as a "tabula rasa." (See: Second Manifesto of "Nouveau Réalisme", 1961, in: ibid., p. 246).

Michel Fauré, Histoire du surréalisme sous l'Occupation, Paris 2003, appendix "Bibliographie", I.