Jacqueline Lamba, peintre rebelle, muse de l’amour fou

She was one of André Breton’s three wives, maybe the one that counted the most in his intellectual itinerary, and the mother of his daughter Aube. Jacqueline Lamba, who died in 1993 at the age of 83, had a chequered itinerary as befits a woman in her position. She lost her father in a car accident in Cairo, then her mother when she was still a teenager, and she made a living as a nude swimmer in a club on the Champs-Elysées… before seducing André Breton in a café on place Blanche. The paintings by the woman who befriended the Surrealists then abstract Expressionists through her second husband, sculptor David Hare, deserve our interest. But it was rather her itinerary, her friendships, her love affairs and her rivalries that fascinated. Picasso, Eluard, Dora Maar, as well as Trotsky and Frida Kahlo during a trip to Mexico, then Peggy Guggenheim, Sartre, Victor Serge, Claude Lévi-Strauss, or even doctor Ferdière, who cared for Antonin Artaud, who all at some point were very close to her. The whole exhibit draws up a true portrait in relation to the culture of the first half of the XXth century.

•Jacqueline Lamba, peintre rebelle, muse de l’amour fou, by Alba Romano Pace, Gallimard, 2010, 320 p., 23,50 €