Belgian writer, poet and painter Christian Dotremont was born in Tervuren in 1922. In 1940, he discovered the Surrealist magazine "L'invention collective" published by Raoul Ubac and René Magritte in the window of a Brussels bookshop. He decided to send his poem "Ancienne Éternité" to the...

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  Biography of Christian Dotremont

  Belgian writer, poet and painter Christian Dotremont was born in Tervuren in 1922. In 1940, he discovered the Surrealist magazine "L'invention collective" published by Raoul Ubac and René Magritte in the window of a Brussels bookshop. He decided to send his poem "Ancienne Éternité" to the editorial board, and received an enthusiastic response. It was his first contact with Surrealism.
  Christian Dotremont was to become a practitioner of revolutionary art, intent on translating into action Lautréamont's maxim that "poetry must be made by all". Recognized early on by the Surrealists, first in Brussels and then in Paris, he soon claimed to be a "revolutionary Surrealist" of stricter obedience, multiplying his interventions (pamphlets, leaflets, posters) and co-founding the magazine "Les Deux Soeurs" in 1947. Returning to Belgium, then Denmark, he became the founder of CoBrA (acronym for Copenhagen - Brussels - Amsterdam), one of the most influential European avant-gardes of the 20th century (1948-1951). This experimental art movement, which saw itself as "wild in civilization", was based on the principle of close, spontaneous collaboration between writers and painters.
  Dotremont wrote extensively on and with painters (Corneille, Asger Jorn, Serge Vandercam, Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, to name the best-known). It was in contact with them, in the crucible of painting, that he invented, in his native Tervuren, the gesture that would mark his originality in the history of art and literature: the "logogram" (1962). Through his various modes of expression, he worked on synthesizing his means of expression in what he called "the verbal-graphic unity of inspiration"; a spontaneous writing gesture, a kind of primitive logos, the "logogram" concentrates Christian Dotremont's quest for freshness and freedom, painting and exhibiting his writing, sometimes, more rarely, collecting it in book form (Logbook, 1972).A great traveler, faithful to his tropism for the North, he visited Lapland twelve times between 1956 and 1978, in the village of his "second birth", Ivalo. It was here that he began writing-painting on the snow (logoneiges and logoglaces) and joined the ephemeral prehistory (or eternal avant-garde) of art he had always sought.Suffering from tuberculosis as early as 1951, he spent many months in sanatoria in Denmark and Belgium. His stay at the Silkeborg sanatorium and his passion for Bente Wittenburg, who inspired almost all his poems, are the themes of his only published novel (La Pierre et l'oreiller, 1955). Dotremont was a militant of experimental art as well as a great lyricist.Christian Dotremont died in 1979, aged 56, at the "Rose de la Reine" sanatorium in Buizingen.
  
  

  

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