Born in 1916 to a Swiss father and a Canadian mother, Brion Gysin moved to Paris at the age of eighteen in 1934. Like many rebellious young men of his time, he was drawn to the Surrealist movement. He managed to meet key figures such as Max Ernst and Henri Michaux, showing them his pen-and-ink drawings, which featured fragmented figures in desolate landscapes and carried typically Surrealist titles such as Sex Secret of a Locomotive. In December 1935, Gysin was invited to contribute some of his work to a group exhibition at the Galerie Aux Quatre Chemins, alongside renowned artists like René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso.
For his own amusement, Gysin created a street poster to mark the execution of King Louis XVI, depicting a large calf’s head in a periwig seated on a bench—a clear caricature of André Breton, the fiery leader of the Surrealists. As tête de veau (calf’s head) is slang for “fool” in French, Breton did not take kindly to the joke. When Gysin arrived at the gallery for the exhibition opening, he found Surrealist writer Paul Éluard taking down his drawings. At just nineteen, Gysin was effectively exiled from the Surrealist circle, a rejection that shaped his lifelong scepticism towards galleries and those who admired his art. As he later wrote to Paul Bowles from Paris in 1960, he had produced dozens of paintings, but “I can’t say I have been deluged with offers from picture dealers, and I have been too busy to kiss their arses.”
Despite his falling out with the Surrealists, Gysin took with him a love for their collaborative game “Exquisite Corpse”, where multiple artists contribute to a single drawing on a folded sheet of paper without seeing the others' work. The resulting creations, shaped by chance and collective effort, were called Exquisite Corpses, some of which are now displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Gysin first visited Tangier in 1950, after spending a decade in New York that was interrupted by his service in the Canadian army, where he attended a Japanese Language School in Vancouver in 1944 to study Japanese script. In Tangier, he created calligraphic paintings—three of which are in my collection—and even ran a restaurant called The Thousand and One Nights, featuring dancing waiters balancing trays on their heads. During this time, William Burroughs was also in Tangier, working on Naked Lunch, but he was put off by Gysin’s dancing boys, remarking that with their “ferret faces and narrow shoulders and bad teeth”, they resembled “a bowling team from Newark.”