ANONYMOUS | GANT DE FEMME (LISE DEHARME)

Acquired in Italy circa 1980s

André Breton, La Beauté convulsive (exhibition catalogue), Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1991, illustration of another cast p. 277

El objeto surrealista (exhibition catalogue), Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Centro Julio Gonzáles, Valencia, 1997-98, illustration of another cast p. 33 

La Révolution surréaliste, (exhibition catalogue), Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2002, illustration of another cast p. 440

Surrealismus—1914/1944 (exhibition catalogue), K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, 2002, illustration of another cast p. 462

In October 1924, André Breton encountered Lise Deharme at Shakespeare play in Paris. Intrigued by Deharme, Breton invited her to the “Centrale Surréaliste,” a Surrealist center in Paris. After the visit, Breton asked Deharme to leave one of her pale-blue suede gloves with him as a symbol of the Surrealist movement. She became known as the “Lady of the Glove” due to this incident. Breton described these events in his iconic novel, Nadja: “I also remember the playful suggestion… proposing that she give the ‘Centrale Surréaliste’ one of the amazing sky-blue gloves she was wearing… Yet this did not assume its greatest, its true proportions…until the moment when this woman proposed to come back and lay on the table, on the very spot where I had so fervently hoped she would not leave the blue glove, a bronze glove that she possessed and which since then I have seen at her home” (quoted in André Breton, Nadja, Paris, 1928, n.p.).