The Songs of Maldoror

Le Comte de Lautreamont was the nom de plume of Isidore Ducasse (1846-70), a Uruguayan-born French writer and poet whose only surviving major work of fiction, Les Chants de Maldoror, was discovered by the Surrealists, who hailed the work as a dark progenitor of their movement. It was in Les Chants de Maldoror that Andre Breton discovered the phrase that would come to represent the Surrealist doctrine of objective chance: 'as beautiful as the random encounter between an umbrella and a sewing-machine upon a dissecting-table.' Artists inspired by Lautreamont include Man Ray, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, Andre Masson, Joan Miro, Yves Tanguy, and, in particular, Salvador Dali, who in 1933 produced an entire series of illustrations for Les Chants de Maldoror. Twenty of those illustrations are included.