Envers l’ombre, ou les iconotextes de Vincent Bounoure et Jean Benoît

This is the very first study on the surrealist work Envers l’ombre (1965), a collection of 14 poems by Vincent Bounoure with some illustrations by Jean Benoît. Firstly, we will recall both the historical context and the affective co-text underlying the cooperation of the two artists, as well as the role they had in the continuation of collective surrealist activities after the alleged end of “historical surrealism” decreed by Schuster in 1969 and henceforth maintained by literary criticism. Then, we will propose a philological reconstruction of the compositional stages for some iconotexts of the collection on the basis of several unpublished documents from Bounoure’s archives, never explored before. We will present in particular the examination of some poems by Bounoure and Benoît’s illustrations that accompany them. Finally, we will analyze the variants of an unillustrated poem: “Scepter”, one of the most complex at the interpretative level.