Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1903 Brussels, Belgium

Died: 1971 Brussels, Belgium

Year of Migration to the UK: 1938

Other name/s: Édouard Mesens

Biography

Artist, art dealer, curator, musician, poet and writer Edouard Léon Théodore (ELT) Mesens was born in Brussels, Belgium on 27 November 1903 to French-speaking parents. Mesens studied harmony and orchestration at the Brussels Conservatory before connecting with the Surrealists and becoming one of the key figures in the movement. He first met René Magritte in 1920 at an exhibition organised by Pierre Bourgeois. In 1921, he met Man Ray through Erik Satie, and he soon became friends with Kiki de Montparnasse and Marcel Duchamp. Mesens managed L'Époque Gallery before opening his own The E. L. T. Mesens Gallery. In both venues, he focused on Surrealist work, alongside curating international exhibitions and publishing works by major Surrealist figures via Éditions Nicolas Flamel, a publishing house which he founded.

Mesens' first significant connection with the UK art world occurred in 1936, when he co-organised the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London, as part of an English, French, Belgian, Spanish, and Scandinavian committee. At the time, surrealism was less popular in the UK than the rest of Europe, and the exhibition served as the first major introduction of the movement to the broader British public, displaying works by some of its most prominent figures. André Breton, Paul Éluard, Ray, and Georges Hugnet, along with Mesens, selected pieces by international artists, such as Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Duchamp, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, and Magritte. As a result of the exhibition, the British Surrealist group was established.

Following his curation of an exhibition featuring Magritte, Ray, and Yves Tanguy at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1937, Mesens immigrated to London in 1938. Upon his arrival in Britain, he initially stayed at 21 Downshire Hill, Hampstead, the home of Roland Penrose. He leveraged the network he had built while organising the 1936 exhibition to expand his influence in the UK art world. Collaborating with Penrose and the French-born actor, director and writer, Jean-Bruno Brunius, Mesens became a prominent advocate for Surrealism in England. He soon assumed the role of director of the London Gallery (a position he held from 1938 to 1950), succeeding Lady Peter Norton, Mumbai-born of English-Scottish nationality, who had left London in 1937 to join her husband on his diplomatic posting at the British embassy in Warsaw. The gallery had originally been established in 1936 by Norton, working in collaboration with Penrose. Mesens began his tenure with a modest retrospective dedicated to Magritte, which opened on 30 March 1938. Under his leadership, the gallery became the foremost institution for Surrealism in the UK, while also showing other avant-garde and modernist artists. According to an unpublished agreement dated 27 February 1938, Mesens was employed on a weekly salary of £6, supplemented by commission (Vinzent, 2020, p. 147). This newly established gallery extended the personal collection Mesens had started in Belgium, reflecting a practice where private acquisitions and commercial inventory intertwined, mutually enriching one another (Caputo, 2020, p. 139). After relocating to England, he maintained his support for artists from his native Belgium, focusing particularly on Magritte, with whom he formalised a renewed agency agreement in 1938 (Caputo, 2020, p. 139). The gallery’s secretary, Sybil, at the time married to John Stephenson, would soon become Mesens’s wife. He also launched and, for a time, edited The London Bulletin (modelled on the Belgium art magazine Variétés, founded by Paul-Gustave van Hecke), which ran for twenty issues between 1938 and 1940, and played a significant role in promoting Surrealism in Britain. The influential American-born collector and gallerist, Peggy Guggenheim, whose Guggenheim Jeune gallery was located nearby, frequently contributed to Mesens’ publication.

In 1941, Mesens contributed to the BBC’s wartime broadcasts, arranging music for the well-known refrain: ‘Radio Paris is lying, Radio Paris is lying, Radio Paris is German.’ Additionally, Mesens worked with Penrose to translate Paul Éluard’s Poésie et Vérité from 1942 into English. In 1944, Mesens published Troisième Front Poèmes, a collection of war poetry, through the London Gallery Editions. This was followed by Pièces Détachées, which was part of a collaborative work titled Message from Nowhere, and, in partnership with J.B. Brunius, Idolatry & Confusion, a pamphlet critiquing the nationalistic tone of wartime literature, particularly that of Louis Aragon. Both in England and Belgium, Mesens’ often created Surrealist and Dada collages.

By the time the London Gallery ceased operations Mesens had about 750 works in his collection and soon left England. E. L. T. Mesens died in Brussels, Belgium on 13 May 1971. In the UK public domain his work is held by Tate and the Reiff Collection, while portrait photographs by the Russian-born photographer Ida Kar are held in the National Portrait Gallery.