THE TABLE AND THE COMMA

through

John Suquet

Editions Bourgois, Paris, 1976, (12 x 20 cm), 128 pages.

First edition printed on a laid edition paper, and enriched with an autograph dedication signed by Jean Suquet. 

Cover partially discolored, interior very good, tape attached.

Jean Suquet (born June 22, 1928 in Cahors, Lot - died November 1, 2007 in Cassis) was a French writer, poet and photographer. He is one of Marcel Duchamp's specialists.

In 1948, enrolled in Paris to study medicine, Jean Suquet met the surrealist group there to which he joined. He was thus among those who signed, in February 1949, the “Letter from the Surrealists to Garry Davis”.
It is part of the project of Citizens of the World and the organizers, with André Breton, of the Cahors Mundi event on June 24 and 25, 1950.
André Breton, then Marcel Duchamp were decisive in its formation.
One day in the spring of 1949, André Breton, suspecting a relationship between the thought of Jean Suquet and that of Marcel Duchamp, he suggested that he write a book on the work of the artist. He introduced her to Mary Reynolds and Jacques Villon, brother of Marcel Duchamp.
In the early 1960s, he produced photographic work on the letters traced in the sky by advertising planes. For this, he uses a Leica M3 and fast emulsions (Kodak Tri-X or Ilford HPS).

In his first letter to Duchamp (Paris, July 15, 1949), Suquet wrote: “If I have to write about you and your work, it will not be as a critic but as a poet. Duchamp replied, from New York, on August 9: “I completely agree with your project. And as you say, 'as a poet' is the only way to say something. »
Along with a letter of December 12, Suquet sent him some forty pages. Duchamp responds immediately (December 25, 1949). It ends with nothing less than: "After all, I owe you a great debt of exposing my bareness... […] You probably know that you are the only one in the world to have reconstructed the gestation of glass in its details, with even the many intentions never carried out. »
The first Duchampian works by Suquet (1949-1956) were however not published at the time, except for "Le Signe du Cancer", in La Nef, Paris, special issue "Almanach Surréaliste du demi-siècle", in Mars 19503 .
In the 1950s Jean Suquet became a photographer. In 1963, he won the Niépce prize, the members of the jury are Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Henri Cartier-Bresson whom Jean Suquet estimates for this quarter of an hour of glory will not prevent him from throwing his medal in the Seine before returning his home.
In 2002, he burned the majority of his production, ie 35,000 negatives and negatives, retaining only around a hundred photographs which he deemed worthy of the "viewer": including his major work, "Pierre Vive". This set constituted the main part of the exhibition at the Pierre-André-Benoit museum-library in Alès in 2006.