Paul Éluard Online Exhibit

Born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel in Saint-Denis, France, in 1895, he was an only child. Born into a lower middle class family, Éluard studied at École Supérieure de Colbert. At age 16, he contracted tuberculosis and was sent to the Clavadel sanatorium in Switzerland for two years to recuperate. There he met and fell in love with Elena Ivanovna Diakonova (Gala), sharing a love of poetry. They married in 1917 after he enlisted during World War I. In 1918, they had one daughter, Cécile.

In 1916, he chose the name Paul Éluard, borrowing the literary pen name from his maternal grandmother. He entered World War I as a medic and infantryman, but even after suffering a gas attack, he chose to work near the front lines in a military hospital. He witnessed firsthand the devastation and horror the War unleashed.

In response to the War, in 1924 Éluard helped found the surrealist movement with poets André Breton, Louis Aragon and Phillippe Soupault. While Gala would leave him for Salvador Dalí in 1929, she remained his muse long after their divorce. In the late-1930s, Éluard abandoned Surrealism to support of the French Communist Party. He became an active member of the French resistance during the Nazi occupation.

Éluard died of a heart attack in 1952, and is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France. His funeral was attended by thousands, leading French poet Robert Sabatier to write: “the whole world was mourning.”

“Surrealism…is a state of mind that strives to reduce the differences between people.”
– Paul Éluard, 1936

Following World War I, Paul Éluard found himself drawn to revolutionary ideas. He crossed paths with three young French poets – André Breton, Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, who shared his love of the French modernist poetry and his horror of what they witnessed during the war. All became key members of the avant-garde Paris Dada Movement, then Surrealism in 1924, which Éluard helped Breton found.

Surrealism employed experimental art techniques, explored the Freudian unconscious and dreams, and was politically motivated against traditional notions of family, church and state. Éluard became one of Breton’s closest lieutenants and a key ambassador of Surrealism around Europe.

He developed a lifelong friendship with German surrealist painter Max Ernst. Together they published two collaborative books – Répétitions and Les Malheurs des immortels (“Misfortunes of the Immortals”). Their collaboration helped establish Surrealism as both a verbal and visual art movement.

In the late 1920s, Éluard helped Surrealism find ways to engage with Communism. In 1930, he and Breton collaborated on the key surrealist work, The Immaculate Conception, and he met Salvador Dalí, whom Gala would leave him for. Despite this, Éluard remained close to Gala, and was a major friend of Dalí. An avid art collector and critic, he wrote essays about many of his friends, including Ernst, Dalí and Joan Miró, and helped organize important surrealist exhibitions.

Despite his years as a surrealist, Breton often found his poetry too conventional. By the mid-1930s, the two became estranged. Éluard severed his affiliation with Surrealism following the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition.

“Éluard struck me as a legendary being. He drank calmly, and appeared completely absorbed in looking at the beautiful women.”
– Salvador Dalí, on first meeting Éluard in 1929

One of Paul Éluard’s most important contributions to literature was his poetry of love and eroticism. He was charismatic, had an open marriage and was devoted to free love. Éluard championed the surrealist ideal that women were a gateway to the Marvelous, and saw love as the greatest human triumph.

Long before Salvador Dalí arrived in Paris, Éluard met Elena Ivanovna Diakonova when they were teenagers in a Swiss sanatorium for tuberculosis. They fell in love, married and had one daughter, Cécile. Éluard was responsible for giving her the nickname “Gala,” and she became his lifelong muse.

In 1917, he dedicated the following lines of his poem “One Being” to her:

A single being
Caused the pure snow to melt
Made flowers grow in the grass
And the sun is set free

Gala had other lovers with Éluard’s encouragement, but in 1930, she would leave him to become the muse, partner and eventual wife of Spanish surrealist Dalí. Despite this, Gala continued as Éluard’s muse. His ongoing obsession with Gala is documented in the posthumous publication, Letters to Gala. The frank sensuality of Éluard’s letters to Gala, written between 1924 and 1938, reveal the carnal nature of their relationship years after their separation.

Paul Éluard lived in pursuit of new romances, and he had many trystes during his years with Gala. In 1930, after she left, Éluard fell in love with an Alsatian acrobat named Nusch (Maria Benz). They became inseparable and were married in 1934. Her beauty was celebrated by photographers including Man Ray, Lee Miller and Dora Maar. Éluard collaborated with Man Ray to publish Facile, a collection of erotic poetry woven around Man Ray’s nude photos of Nusch. The 1932 poem “In a New Night” provides some of the flavor of his Nusch-inspired work:

Woman with whom I have lived,
Woman with whom I live,
Woman with whom I shall live;
The same woman always,
You must have a red cloak,
Red gloves, a red mask,
And black stockings;
Reasons, proofs
For seeing you quite naked;
Unsullied nakedness, O adorning dress!

Breasts, O my heart!

Nusch became part of Éluard’s surrealist social circle, collaborating on surrealist drawing games and making photomontages. She formed close bonds with key surrealist muses including Leonora Carrington, Lee Miller and Ady Fidelin. She frequently wore Elsa Schiaparelli designs influenced by Surrealism.