Katharine Conley about Slavko Kopac

In 1954, Slavko Kopac and André Breton together created a poem-object that bears witness to the friendship and artistic rap port they had developed five years earlier. Their collaboration had begun in 1949, during Kopac’s first Parisian exhibition at the Galerie Messages, for which they produced a limited-edition calligraphed booklet. This booklet combined a handwrit ten poem by Breton, ‘Au regard des divinités’ (‘In the Eyes of the Gods’, composed in 1923), with drawings by Kopac. The 1954 poem-object can be seen as a transposition onto wood of that earlier work originally created on paper. It reprises the same poem, copied out in Breton’s own hand, along with variations of Kopac’s drawn motifs: ‘While I was making the drawings and showing him what the page layout could look like, he was doing the writing, and we ended up signing it together. It was a brilliant moment’, Kopac later reminisced. 

For the poem-object, the drawings and poem are inscribed and varnished onto a piece of wood he may have found in the street, where he found ‘lots of things’, according to Annie Le Brun. W ith i ts a rrow-like silhouette, it bears a resemblance to other objects in Breton’s collection, specifically a Haida totem pole from British Columbia he had acquired from Julius Carlebach during the five years he lived in self-imposed exile in New York City during World War Two. Although taller than the poem-object by nineteen centimetres, the Haida pole has some of the same qualities: an arrow like shape, carvings – not drawings – of humans and animals, and it would have been made to commemorate kinship or a family event. Kopac and Breton’s poem-object may be understood as an homage to this and other Amerindian objects Breton had in his apartment, created less through an act of cultural appropriation than as a parallel act of commemoration to their kinship through friendship and their shared anti-colonialism.

From the book accompanying the exhibition Slavko Kopac: The Hidden Treasure. Informal Art, Surrealism, Art Brut. 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2025

Read the full essay in the book available at the link provided below:

https://www.fivecontinentseditions.com/en/p/slavko-kopac/