UTW 51

Robert Desnos, French anti-Nazi resistance activist

Sorrows of Love and the intolerable absence of powerful emotion (la Pathétique) in our lives. In memory of poet and anti-Fascist, anti-Nazi resistance activist Robert Desnos and his love for love, writing, life and the need to speak out when justice is silenced.

Art: 2003
Media: India ink, pencil, gouache, colored pencil on paper mounted on wood
Size:  23 7/8 inches H x 36 W [60 x 91.4 cm]. Framed in five-sided wood frame, embellished w/ old metal plate fasteners in each corner

A 57 sec. video of the drawing and a 2012-13 drawing of Primo Levi, installed in an exhibit at Seattle Central College, 2013

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A 5 min. 41 sec. video overview of the Desnos drawing

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A 7 min. video overview & background to the Desnos drawing

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A 24 min. video compilation with Holocaust art and students; teachers; 2 retired librarians; a rabbi and an imam; and the artist at the Seattle Central College exhibit, 2013

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Desnos was a French surrealist poet, a novelist, a film, art, record & literary reviewer, a songwriter, radio playwright and the writer of 3,000 radio commercials.

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His last days while being tended to by a young Czech. medical student with no medical supplies is poignantly recounted in Ann Weiss's wonderful book ‘The Last Album: Eyes From the Ashes of Auschwitz’ (2001).

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Desnos was born in 1900. Active in anti-Nazi resistance activities, he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp and at Auschwitz. He died of typhus in 1945 at Terezin. /

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In Kulik's preface to the Collected Poems book he states Desnos had fallen desperately in love with Yvonne George, a music-hall singer whose songs, he said, constantly expressed the sorrows of love and the intolerable absence of powerful emotion (la pathetique) in our lives. In 1928 Yvonne George was in a Swiss sanatorium dying of tuberculosis.