Lost Profiles: A Parisian Dada Salon

This event is part of the 2016 Dada World Fair, presented by City Lights Booksellers & Publishers.

For more information on the Fair, go to dadaworldfair.net.

The Mechanics' Institute Library is located at 57 Post St. in San Francisco.

About Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism:

A French literary classic since its 1962 publication, Lost Profiles is a retrospective of a crucial period in modernism, written by co-founder of the surrealist movement, Philippe Soupault. Beginning with a reminiscence of the Parisian branch of the international Dada movement in the late 1910s, and its transformation into surrealism, Lost Profiles ushers readers into encounters with a variety of literary lions. We meet an elegant Marcel Proust, renting five adjoining rooms at an expensive hotel to "contain" the silence needed to produce A Remembrance of Things Past; an exhausted James Joyce putting himself through grueling translation sessions for Ulysses; and an enigmatic Apollinaire in search of the ultimate objet trouvé. Soupault sketches lively portraits of surrealist precursors like Pierre Reverdy and Blaise Cendrars, a moving account of his tragic fellow surrealist René Crevel, and the story of his unlikely friendship with right-wing anti-Vichy critic George Bernanos. The collection ends with essays on two modernist forerunners, Charles Baudelaire and Henri Rousseau. With an afterward by Ron Padgett recounting his meeting with Soupault in the late '60s and an informative translator's preface, Lost Profiles confirms Soupault's place in the vanguard of twentieth century literature.

Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) served in the French army during WWI and subsequently joined the Dada movement. In 1919, he collaborated with André Breton on the automatic text Les Champs magnétiques, the foundation of the surrealist movement. In the years that followed, he wrote novels and journalism, directed Radio Tunis in Tunisia, and worked for UNESCO.