“Where are the Lovers?”

Aube Breton Elléouët began making collages in 1970, ten years after settling in Saché, France, with her husband Yves Elléouët.1 Characterizing her work as “romantistique” rather than “surrealist,” she nonetheless acknowledges the influence of Surrealism in her life as the daughter of Jacqueline Lamba and André Breton, explaining that she was “fed on surrealism from the cradle.”2 In 1940, Breton Elléouët left her native Paris for New York with her parents, due to the disruption of World War Two, only to return to France at age eleven. In the exhibition catalogues of her work published by Marcel Fleiss’s Galerie 1900–2000 in 2000, 2006, and 2012, she singles out the year that she and her mother spent in Frida Kahlo’s Blue House in Mexico when she was eight. Kahlo appears in Frida’s Tree, a collage published by Fleiss in Aube Breton Elléouët, Collages (2017).3 Tere Arcq recounts how Breton Elléouët remembers in a letter how she would climb into Kahlo’s bed in the mornings and listen to the fantastic stories Kahlo would tell her and how they would laugh together over Edward Lear’s limericks.4

Breton Elléouët’s first solo exhibition was held in 1974 in the nearby city of Tours. Critics began publishing appraisals of her work three years later with her first exhibition in Paris at the Galerie Le Triskèle. Her next three solo exhibitions were held in Paris at the Galerie 1900–2000, starting in 2000. In the compendium of her Collages published by Fleiss in 2017, the collage greeting card Timbre (2016) or “stamp” appears on the last page.

Composed as a postage stamp identified by the running text across the top, République Française, La Poste, this particular collage greeting card is also tied to visions of “the world” as reflected by the addition of the text “LE MONDE” dropping down outside its outer right edge. Inside the collage on the right sits an owl looking out at the viewer with the artist’s name outlining its feet: Aube ’16. The handwritten text at the bottom announces that this world is populated by lovers: “où sont les amoureux?” (Where are the lovers?) while still asking “où est le diable?” (Where is the devil?). These words evoke the medieval world of Breton Romances, tying this card representing a moonlit night sky with many of the other greeting cards Breton Elléouët has created that conjure the coastal landscape of Brittany. This collage greeting card “stamp” poses a puzzle according to which the world is filled with lovers waiting to be found, or to be tempted into the astral depths of new experiences.

The owl leans against an embossed artificial hand across whose palm lines of fate have been outlined and annotated. Anchoring the lower left-hand corner opposite the owl strides a constellated horse, perhaps an actual constellation in the moonlit sky. What might be the “devil” in the handwritten puzzle-question, a bearded monk-like head with eyes and mouth agape staring up towards the full moon above the horse, disappears completely in the faint copy of the collage on the verso side of the card, possibly suggesting the “devil” has less importance than the “lovers” in question. Where are they? The choices range between a series of male and female acrobats leaping across the night sky and a set of three intertwined nudes in various forms of sleep lounging together, linked by long hair and languid limbs hooked around the forefinger of the embossed fortune-telling hand.

Just as the surprised “devil” figure disappears on the verso side of the card, the side onto which Breton Elléouët will write her annual greeting, so do the multiple “lovers” appear in enlarged format: the sleeping nudes, two female and one male acrobat, the full moon, the horse constellation, along with the hand and the owl, a familiar figure in her collages. This world that is so lively at night is full of “lover” figures, full of promise. While the night setting might indicate that Breton Elléouët is conjuring a surrealistic dream world, this “romantistique” artist extends her collaged world beyond somnolence and dream life. As Peter Kral wrote about her collages in 1979, their components drawn from recycled magazines, lithographs, and advertisements maintain “close ties with the real,” despite their “fantastic appearance.”5 She “plays with images from the world in order to invent another world” observed François-René Simon in 2012, in collages that blend the real and the imagined, “dressed only in a sea wind.”6

The comprehensive Surréalisme exhibition in at the Centre Pompidou (4 September 2024–13 January 2025) marking the centennial of the publication of her father’s Manifesto of Surrealism, included Aube Breton Elléouët’s exquisite collage Elseneur (1979). 7 Referencing the Danish port where Shakespeare’s Hamlet lived in her choice of title, the composition of this large collage combines an imposing black-and-white gothic manor house interior with bright blue shards and insect wings raining down upon four figures in front of a massive fireplace; a fifth Ophelia-like figure appears to lie dreaming in a watery dragon-fly gondola in the foreground. The colored shards flow from erupting volcanic mountains by the sea in the background while a winged figure near the fireplace stares upwards at a triple-masted ship sailing away through the floor-to-ceiling mullioned windows. Her 2016 collage card Timbre similarly fuses realistic yet fantastic elements blending legends with everyday life to instill a quality of motion and surprise across both minute and epic collage details that together invite unexpected associations and imaginings. “Where are the lovers?’ she asks in Timbre? Why, they are everywhere in her richly imagined world.