Lise Deharme

• Name — Lise Deharme • Born — 1898 • Birthplace — Paris • Died — 1980 • Occupation — French writer • Movement — Surrealism

Deharme was born in Paris in 1898. Her father was a famous doctor. In January 1925, she visited the Paris Bureau of Surrealist Research. As a result of an incident that occurred during her visit, which is recorded in André Breton's Nadja, she would become known as the "dame au gant," or the Lady of the Glove. In 1927 she married Paul Deharme, the radio pioneer who worked with surrealist Robert Desnos. Using the pen name Lisa Hirtz, she published her first book: Il était une petite pie [There was a little magpie] (with 8 pochoirs by Joan Miró) in 1928. Until recently, the legacy of Lise Deharme has been told in the margins of books on Surrealism and Surrealism's father, André Breton. She is remembered as the "first impossible mad love dreamed of by André Breton". However, her social and political influence on Surrealism extends far beyond the novel, and beyond her influence as Breton's "notorious muse". In recent years, historians such as Marie-Claire Barnet, Mary Ann Caws, Renée Riese Hubert, Andréa Oberhuber, and Penelope Rosemont, have begun to un-do the "reducing" of Deharme to "a failed love story". These scholars have set out to establish a more dynamic conception of Deharme's reputation. In her lifetime, she gained "celebrity as a hostess". Specifically, she was a prolific organizer of Surrealist salons. Man Ray once described Deharme's house, where she held her salons, as "a rambling affair, filled with strange objects and rococo furniture". Amidst these rambling salons, Deharme's subversive publication, Le Phare de Neuilly, emerged in 1933. Le Phare de Neuilly provided space for radical juxtapositions of works by contributors such as "Natalie Barney, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Jacques Lacan" and was poignantly political and subversive. As the curator of Le Phare, Deharme personally "[blended] ethical and aesthetic issues to address the socio-political troubles of the early 1930s". In the late 1930s, Deharme collaborated with Claude Cahun on the book Le Cœur de Pic. After publishing Le Cœur de Pic in 1937 Deharme, alternatively, came to be known in the Surrealist circle as "la Dame de Pique" [the Queen of Spades]. Around this time she was closely connected to André Breton, Paul Eluard, and Man Ray. She is featured posing in one of Man Ray's photographs as the Queen of Spades. Marie Clare Barnet describes the significance of Deharme's new nickname: