In the words of Salvador Dalí, fellow Surrealist René Crevel had “the sullen, deaf, Beethovenesque, bad-angel face of a fern shoot”. Dalí was just one of numerous artists to capture the French writer’s compelling features, from the great Belle Époque portraitist Jacques-Émile Blanche to the godfather of artsy homoerotic photography, George Platt Lynes. Crevel’s father hanged himself while Crevel was still a teenager, and suicide was a recurring preoccupation of his writings. Tormented by illness and addiction, troubled by his sexuality and tossed about by the ideological cross-currents of Surrealism, Crevel took his own life on this day in 1935.
Berenice Abbott
Dora Maar
George Platt Lynes
André Dürst
Christian Bérard
Jacques-Émile Blanche
Man Ray
Rogi André
Salvador Dalí
Pavel Tchelitchew
Further reading
Pearls: René Crevel
Circles: Erika and Klaus Mann
(and visit the essential Paris/Berlin for more Crevelian eye candy)
