Marcel Mariën

Marcel Mariën (1920 - 1993) is a surrealist writer Belgian, Poète, Essayiste, Photographe, Cinéaste, creator of joinings and objects strange.

Biography

Marcel Mariën was born with Antwerp the April 29th 1920, of a mother Wallon and of a Flemish father . He enters in 1933 to the college of Antwerp where he has difficulties of adaptation, teaching there being entirely given in Flemish. The day of its fifteen years it is placed like apprentice in a photographer and tests itself with photography. The same year he attends the higher popular School for the workers and meets in an exposure two tables of Rene Magritte. In 1936 it discovers the books and the surrealist reviews, starts to write poems in their spirit. Dispach rider and penpusher in a stockbroker of which it diverts some sums, it will see in 1937 with Brussels Rene Magritte, thus meets Paul Colinet then Louis Scutenaire, Irene Hamoir, Paul Nougé, and takes part in September in the surrealist exposure organized by E.L.T. Mesens to London. It exposes to it its first object, untraceable the (title given by Magritte), its glasses, which it has just broken, reduced with only one glass and two branches.

Making as from January 1939, for seventeen months, its military service in Antwerp, Mariën collaborates in January 1940 in the collective Invention of Magritte and Ubac. During the invasion of Belgium, it looks after the casualties at the hospital of Antwerp before being evacuated in May, transporting with him two large bags faggots of books from which it will succeed in not separating. Folded up on Dunkirk and Berck, it is made prisoner, regaining with Antwerp foot then crossing Belgium in the truck, carried out in the train to Nuremberg then to the camp of Görlitz into High Silesia, affected close to Hohenelbe (Vrchlabi, in Czech) to the deforestation and the earthwork. After nine months of captivity, it is in 1941 released in Antwerp, finds in Brussels (in the bicycle) Magritte, Nougé, Scutenaire, Ubac and meets Christian Dotremont. It founds the editions then the magnetized Needle (name given by Nougé) which publishes in particular Moralité of the sleep of Paul Éluard, with three drawings of Magritte, and becomes acquainted with “Elisabeth” which will be during ten years one of its most durable passions.

Mariën takes part quickly with Scutenaire and Nougé in the invention of the titles of paintings of Magritte. From 1942 it frequently goes to Paris transporting clandestinely for an illegal trade of the fabrics of Renoir, Picasso, Leger, Chirico or Magritte. “Of 1942 with 1946, I sold a big number of drawings and tables, allotted mainly to Picasso, Braque and Chirico, all made by Magritte" , he writes itself. He can thus publish several works under the sign the inaccurate Mirror . Around the review the Hand with feather , it meets in Paris Queneau, Leiris, the painter Dominguez. In August 1943 it publishes the first biography of Magritte of which it will defend in 1947, in the natural corrections , the “Renoir period”. With Leuwen he pronounces with Dotremont a conference on surrealism. In 1945 Mariën collaborates in the review the Blue sky with Colinet and Dotremont, starts to publish with Magritte a series of leaflet and mystifying and subversive leaflets ( the imbecile , the bloody nuisance and the enculor ), publishes the ground is not a vale of tears (Breton, Char, Colinet, Dominguez, Dotremont, Eluard, Irene Hamoir, Magritte, Picasso, Queneau, Scutenaire, Ubac) and, in 1946 and 1947, publishes the collection the inaccurate Mirror .

In 1948 Mariën settles as secondhand bookseller in Brussels ( With the Mirror of Elizabeth ), surviving thanks to work of typewriting. In 1951 it engages with Rotterdam like boy of mess on “Silver Ocean”, leaf house Swedish, cargo liner equipped with refrigerated holds for the transport of the fruits. It thus makes the shuttle between the the French Antilles (Fort-de-France or Low-Ground) and the Normandy (Rouen or Dieppe), practitioner the smuggling of cigarettes and perfumes. Of return to Brussels in 1953 it saw some time with a prostitute of the district of the station of North, writing of the articles for the cultural adviser Soviet, runs out on the proposal of Rene Magritte, with his brother Paul Magritte, a stock of 500 counterfeit bills of one hundred francs Belgian which it ensures in his memories to be drawn and engraved by the painter. Having broken with Magritte in 1954, it founds with Jane Graverol and Nougé the review the naked Lips , subversive, anticlerical and stalinist, which publishes in particular the poetic and theoretical writings of Nougé.

Mariën still tells in its memories a swindle of which it with the idea in 1958. With the contest organized by the company in which he works and sponsored by a powder mark of detergent, he saves, having the knowledge of half of the answers, important sums to comparses. The contest is however quickly suspended like component an infringement with the regulation of the games of chance. With its illicit profits produced Mariën and in 1959 carries out the film the Imitation of the cinema , in which Tom Gutt takes part, joke érotico- freudienne against the Church, which causes a scandal followed by a lodged complaint to the parquet floor of Brussels. The film is still projected in Liege, Antwerp in a village hall and in Paris with the Musée of the Man then, the request for pushed back authorization, prohibited in France. In 1962 Mariën makes against Magritte the leaflet Grande fall , illustrated of a ticket of one hundred francs to the effigy of the painter, who presents a final scale of his works at ridiculous prices and mystifies until André Breton. It leaves at this time to the the United States to try to join, in vain, a young niece of “Elizabeth”. It embarks the following year for the Japan then Saigon, not without taking part in the passage to a traffic of ingots of gold, Singapore and Hong-Kong. From September he works during sixteen months with Beijing as corrector of the propaganda sheet China in construction , crosses In-lay Chou, Tchen Yi and Teng Siao-ping, taking a “horrified” conscience quickly, will write he, of “the monumental trickery of the pseudo Chinese Communism” and “the condition authentically made with the man” under his mode.

Returned in Brussels, it publishes very many new texts of the surrealist Belgians in the naked Lips then, of 1968 with 1975, in the collection the accomplished Fact (135 numbers), in particular the writings of Magritte and the Journal of Nougé. A first exposure presents in 1967 its joinings, of erotic nature for the ones, pornographic for the others, and its objects, composed starting from 1966. The foreword provocante which Scutenaire writes then, Mariën answers in 1972 by a wild satire of the author of the Inscriptions . Mariën Marie in 1969 then divorce. It composes and publishes in 1979 the reference book on the history of surrealism in Belgium. In 1983 Georgette Magritte brings to him a lawsuit following the publication of the Radeau of the memory , in which he tells his adventures with Magritte, and in 1988 Irene Hamoir after the edition of elements of the correspondence of Scutenaire (in connection with the exclusion of the group of André Souris). Mariën, which each time answers by leaflets, does not publish of it less in 1990 the whole of the letters that Scutenaire addressed to him between 1936 and 1976. All this will encourage its follower Jan Bucquoy has to burn a painting of Magritte at the time of a Happening in 1991.

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