Thank you for your card, and Corrections naturelles.[1]
All the subjects in this book are as current in 55 as they were in 47, and we approve all the conclusions except for the really minor value of the current methods of the communist parties and the assimilation of Cheval with Rousseau the tax collector.[2]
If the grotesque pedestal is common to their enterprises, it seems to us that one cannot judge them equally as far as the objective results, because Rousseaus painting was indeed a formal reaction against the impressionist revolution, while [Cheval's] Palais idal is not a reaction against the baroque architecture of the period, but its supercession. In a domain so rigorously sheltered from the poetic revolutions by unchanged economic conditions conditions obviously more paralyzing in architecture than in painting the translation . . . in the complete purity, the contrary to all aesthetic pretension, of a profound need to act upon the world appears to us to possess the value of a collective demand, which the facile graphic activity of a child or a madman, without social consequences, doesnt know how to make.
I regret not having had your book a year ago. I would have given it to several young disciples of Andr Breton who then manifested a certain intellectual honesty. These people only survive due to ignorance. And, in the most recent issue of Medium,[3] the only clear and coherent text demands a radical return to absolute automatism, which alone does not disappoint its loyalists.
Here are the most usable addresses in Italy.[4] Signor Enrico Baj (Milan); Signor Oreste Borri (Florence); Libreria Schwarz (Milan); Signor Mario Colucci, Academia di Belle Arti (Naples); and the editorial committee of Numero (Florence).
Please accept our cordial salutations, and please pass them on to Jane Graverol[5] and [Paul] Noug.
Guy-Ernest Debord[1] The Natural Corrections, Marcel Marien (Brussels, Selection Bookstore, 1947).
[2] Translator: Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924), a French postman and amateur architect, and Henri Rousseau (1844-1901), a French tax collector and painter.
[3] Medium, new series, a surrealist journal that appeared from November 1953 to January 1955.
[4] Translator: street addresses have been removed.
[5] Jane Graverol (1905-1984), a painter and co-founder of the journal Les Levres nues.
(Published in Guy Debord Correspondance, Vol "0": Septembre 1951 - Juillet 1957: Complete des "lettres retrouvees" et d l'index general des noms cites by Librairie Artheme Fayard, October 2010. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! February 2011. Footnotes by the publisher, except where noted.)