Bravo for the action in favor of Guglielmi![2] The Americans will buy his paintings: that is their role. But you have dared to demand his freedom, by interpreting his gesture as reasonable: that is our role.
A thousand congratulations for the victory in Milan, after Turin. It is a beginning and industrial painting will no longer be stopped.
Maurice Wyckaert has also written me concerning Drouin. I think that we can, up to a certain point, accept entering into the pleasantry that he proposes, so as to mix into it our serious statements of opinion.
But I find the proposed slogan -- "Pinot, slave of the Machine," or something like that -- to be troubling. It is not necessary that one makes you a new [Salvadore] Dali or a para-[Georges] Mathieu. It is not necessary to accept placing you, you alone, in a ridiculous role. I propose something like this: "Pinot Gallizio, director of the efforts towards the construction of an ambiance (from the 10th to the 30th of October)," etc.
But perhaps Asger [Jorn] is right when he says that Drouin fears [Jacques] Soustelle. This is the whole question: one fears the situationists as a movement.
Yesterday the police interrogated me for a long time concerning the journal and the situationist organization. This is only the beginning. One of the threatening principles that appeared quite quickly to me in this discussion: the police want to consider the Situationist International as an association dedicated to bringing disorder to France. I protested by emphasizing that no artistic tendency has ever been legally constituted by moral people in a declared association. Not being [officially] declared, the SI can not be officially dissolved, but one can clumsily try to intimidate us. One seems to take us for gangsters!
Thus, perhaps we will not be able to do anything at the Drouin Gallery, so as not to make a "maudlin" demonstration. Capisci?[3]
But then it would be necessary to do something more courageous at Loeb's[4] or somewhere else, or especially less compromised by Tapie-Mathieu-Hantai.[5]
I expect Asger here some day soon.
I hope to see you soon in Alba.
Regards to you all,[1] Translator: abbreviation for grande e nobile amici: "great and noble friend."
[2] Translator: Nunzio Van Guglielmi, Italian painter who was arbitrarily interned after having lightly damaged a painting by Raphael. See the tract that Debord and Gallizio published on 4 July 1958: Defend Freedom Everywhere.
[3] Understand?
[4] Loeb Gallery, rue de Seine.
[5] Simon Hantai, a French painter.
(Published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volume 1, 1957-1960. Footnotes by Alice Debord, except where noted. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! October 2005.)