The Last Surrealist

It was Paris in the late 1950s, and Jean-Claude Silbermann knew where the Surrealists met every evening from 5 to 6 p.m. He waited outside Le Musset, a cafe between the Palais Royal and the Louvre, until André Breton — the writer and poet who led the fluctuating, anarchic group — emerged with about 15 of his acolytes.

“I didn’t know how to do anything. I hadn’t even written any poems,” Silbermann, now 90, said. “It was ridiculous, but I went straight over to him and said: ‘You are André Breton. I am Jean-Claude Silbermann. I’m a Surrealist.” At the time, and now, Silbermann thought of Surrealism as a frame of mind, a way of being in the world, and at its heart is revolt. Breton told the young man to join the nightly meetings whenever he wanted.

Born in 1935 in Boulogne-Billancourt, on the western outskirts of Paris, Silbermann cut ties with his family as a teenager, leaving home to try his hand at poetry instead of joining his father’s successful hat making business. “I loved poetry since I was a little boy. At 18, I read ‘Alcools,’ by Guillaume Apollinaire. I opened the book, and when I closed it, the world had changed,” he told me, his French gallerist Vincent Sator, and the critic and art historian Philippe Dagen, on a recent sunny afternoon in Paris at Galerie Sator in the Marais, where some of the artist’s enigmatic works hung on one wall.

From the leafy suburbs of Paris, the young Silbermann traveled to Oslo and then Copenhagen, where he hitchhiked, worked on cargo boats and sometimes read palms to make a meager living. “It was a con, but it paid for my cigarettes, my room and my food,” he said. “It was a very pleasant life.”

Back in Paris a few years later with a wife and a child, he acceded to pressure from his father to work in the family trade but was miserable with his bourgeois lifestyle. “I gained 15 kilos in three months,” he said. “Fifteen kilos of anxiety. Fifteen kilos of anguish.” His fateful meeting with Breton brought him back to poetry and, later, painting, both of which remain critical in life.

In 2024 Dagen introduced Silbermann to Sator, whose grandmother Simone Khan was Breton’s first wife. She was an active member of the Surrealists and opened her own gallery after World War II, to champion the movement’s artists. And from May 8 to May 11, at Independent, the art fair in Manhattan — just over 100 years after Breton wrote his first “Manifesto of Surrealism” — Sator is showing Silbermann’s colorful works filled with dreamlike imagery in the United States for the first time.

Last fall, Silbermann’s canvases, which are mounted on wood and cut into various shapes with a saw, were shown at the Pompidou’s blockbuster “Surrealism” exhibition, one of many global exhibitions to celebrate the movement’s centenary. The show eschewed chronology for a spiraling maze of themes — dreams, the chimera, political monsters, the night, eros and more — that traced Surrealist tendencies all the way back to ancient Greece.

“Listen, I was very happy I was the only Surrealist alive in the exhibition. All the others were dead,” Silbermann told us in the gallery when asked what it was like to be part of a momentous historical retrospective. “Maybe not for long, but still, I was the only one alive, and that was a lot of fun.”

He insists that Surrealism — “an attitude toward the world, not a stamp you put on a passport,” he said — is not over. The museum, the past, can only teach you so much: It is “a great tomb, we have to do something else. Me, it’s over, but the young people will interpret Surrealism in new ways,” he said humbly. “I am the last Surrealist alive, but not the only living Surrealist.”

Sator said that he will be showing “young works,” with nearly all paintings made from 2021 to 2024. Only “Vous Partez Déja?” (“You’re already leaving?”) is from earlier. That 2009 work shows a bright yellow bird, its feathers flecked with light, clutching two dusky pink and purple skulls as it takes flight. Golden foliage sprouts from the feathers atop its head.

“I have a taste for intellectual provocation,” Silbermann said. “I never know what I’m going to do when I start working. This is not extraordinarily original. But I stop working when I don’t understand it, when it escapes me. That’s when I tell myself that it’s over, because all of a sudden, I don’t understand anything about it.” He has trouble with titles but is happy with “You’re Already Leaving?,” which he realized after it was finished must be a portrait of himself and his wife, Marijo.

When I asked who the bird is, he laughed and did not answer. He and Marijo now live on the island of Port-Cros and Sannois, a Paris suburb.

Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious has been important to Silbermann, as it was to many of his peers. He also talks about ideas like intuitive knowledge over reason, of the importance of the unknown, of being entangled in your life and art, and of having the profound desire, as well as the courage, to pursue art. “There are better things to do with your life,” he said of his art practice, “but I couldn’t do anything else. I didn’t have a choice. I had to be an artist. Surrealism is courage, fantasy, liberation, revolt.”

In some works, figures move through fantastical scenes, locked in ambiguous courtship, becoming one with animals or landscapes, as in “L’Attente et Le Moment du Fruit Orange” (“The Wait and the Moment of Orange Fruit,” 2024), or “L’Attente et Le Moment du Blason” (“The Wait and the Moment of the Shield,” 2021-2022).

Other pieces may be read as psychological stages both pained and transcendent. “L’Attente et Le Moment de La Nuit” (“The Wait and the Moment of Night,” 2023) and “L’Attente et Le Moment de L’Arc-En-Ciel” (The Wait and the Moment of the Rainbow,” 2022) feature writhing, nightmarish figures. “La Nuit” is ominous, while “L’Arc-En-Ciel” has a sense of release: The monsters take up only the lower half of the image, which is otherwise serene, with two men hovering weightlessly.

These artworks appear slight from afar, but up close they possess a quiet luminosity and — even when dark — a sense of combinatorial play and tongue-in-cheek titles that also defined Silbermann’s early work. In 1965, he created the centerpiece for the 11th International Exhibition of Surrealism. Entitled “Le Consommateur” (“The Consumer”), the giant sculpture was a figure made from what he called a “disgusting pink mattress” with a siren for its head, an open fridge for its back and a washing machine for its gut, in which daily newspapers tumbled over and over.

Silbermann said that he is political in his life as a citizen, but not in his art. The stories he tells of his life bear witness to the violence and turmoil of the 20th century, and yet carry humor, amazement, modesty, optimism. He told of the French German Dadaist Hans Arp, who evaded conscription in World War I by filling in his papers with the correct details but then adding them all up in a vague column of nonsense — “a recipe for imbecility.”

To Silbermann this was not just chance or fate but play in the face of life and death. “It’s beautiful,” he said. He told of the relative of a friend in the World War II French Resistance who made a daring escape from the Gestapo. At the end of the war, Silbermann, who is Jewish, and his extended family were hiding in a house in the hills while his father served in the Resistance. German soldiers arrived and burned the house to the ground, giving the group just 10 minutes to escape. Silbermann described the fire as transfixing, Sator told me.

In 1960, along with many other French intellectuals, Silbermann signed the “Manifesto of the 121,” an open letter opposing the Algerian War, in which he refused to serve. Wracked and disoriented by the conflict, Silbermann was nearly driven to suicide, he said. He was ill for three years and couldn’t write poetry any longer. At the suggestion of a friend, he began to paint. During our interview, he smiled and said it came more easily than poetry, quoting an old jazz standard: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”

Then he adapted the sentence, perhaps so it covered the relationship between art and life: “if you don’t have this thing, you don’t have anything.”