Charles Henri Ford

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Charles Henri Ford (born February 10, 1913 in Brookhaven , Mississippi , † September 27, 2002 in New York City , New York ) was an American poet, visual artist and filmmaker . He is known as the "most prominent surrealist in America".

Life

After leaving high school prematurely in 1929 (and in the same year founded his first magazine Blues ), he went to Paris in 1931, where he joined the American artists' colony around Man Ray , Peggy Guggenheim and Djuna Barnes , who lived there. His novel The Young and Evil , co-authored with Parker Tyler and published in 1933, was perceived as scandalous and could only appear in Europe. In 1932 he went to Morocco with Djuna Barnes for a few months . After his return to Paris he met the Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957), with whom he returned to the USA in 1934 and lived together until his death.

William Carlos Williams wrote a foreword to the poetry collection The Garden of Disorder (1938) .

1940 Ford was on the 1939 immigrant surrealist artist Kurt Seligmann attentive (1900-1962) and gave him an opportunity in the yearbook of the literary journal New Directions in Pose & Poetry to publish his essay "Terrestrial Sun", which deals with the anthropocentric concept of Hermeticism deals and thus touches on occult issues.

From 1940 to 1947 Ford published the art and literary magazine View , in which he mixed illustrations by Marcel Duchamp , Max Ernst , Salvador Dalí and René Magritte with texts by Albert Camus , Henry Miller , Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles . André Breton gave him the only interview ever published in an American magazine. He was friends with Gertrude Stein , whom he visited in Paris, Edith Sitwell , who wrote an introduction to his poetry collection Sleep In a Nest of Flames , Jean Cocteau , André Masson and René Crevel .

In 1952 Ford and Tchelitchew moved to Italy and lived there until Tchelitchew's death in 1957. In 1955 the Institute of Contemporary Art in London showed his photographs, as a painter Ford had his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1956. The preface to the catalog comes from Cocteau. Returning to New York in 1962, Ford joined the burgeoning Pop Art movement and the group of experimental filmmakers that was emerging around Jonas Mekas .

His outstanding role in the establishment of the European “counterculture”, namely surrealism, in the United States is undisputed, and he also played a number of important roles within American artistic circles. It was he who introduced Andy Warhol to the avant-garde filmmaker and poet Marie Menken in the early 1960s and recommended the young poet Gerard Malanga as his assistant.

Fonts

  • (with Parker Tyler): The Young And The Evil . The Obelisk Press, Paris 1933
  • Wicked Youth / Charles Henri Ford & Parker Tyler; from American English and with an introduction by Joachim Bartholomae , Hamburg: Männerschwarm Verlag, 2017, ISBN 978-3-86300-235-0
  • Sonnet for a Day at Nerja . Westchester Arts and Crafts Guild, White Plains, NY, 1935. 40 pp.
  • A Pamphlet of Sonnets Caravel Press, Majorca 1936
  • The Garden of Disorder New Directions, Norfolk, Conn., 1937.
  • ABC's . Press of JA Decker, Prairie City, Ill., 1940.
  • The Overturned Lake . Little Man Press, Cincinnati 1941.
  • The Human Microscope . Hemispheres , No. 1, Summer 1943. Brooklyn. 26 pp.
  • Charles Henri Ford (Ed.): A Night with Jupiter: And Other Fantastic Stories . View Editions, Vanguard Press, New York 1945. 128 pp.
  • Poems for Painters . View Editions, New York 1945
  • The Half-Thoughts: The Distances of Pain . Prospero Pamphlets , No. 1, QVS Press, New York 1947. 10 pp.
  • Sleep in a Nest of Flames . New Directions, Norfolk, Conn., 1949. 64 pp.
  • Plaint: The Desire to Be in Two Places at Once . T. Baum, New York 1964. 34 pp.
  • Marquette for Spare Parts . Vassily Papachrysanthou, A New View Book , Athens 1966.
  • Silver Flower Coo . Kulchur Press, New York 1968
  • Edward B. Germain (Eds.), Charles Henri Ford: Flag of Ecstasy: Selected Poems . Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles 1972
  • 7 [Seven] Poems . Bardo Matrix, Kathmandu (Napal) 1974. 20 pp.
  • Special effects . Cherry Valley Editions, Cherry Valley, NY, 1979
  • Om Krishna , Vol. I-III. Cherry Valley Editions, Cherry Valley, NY, 1979; 1981; 1982
  • (with Reepak Shakya, Indra Tamang): Handshakes from Heaven . Handshake Press. Paris 1986. 164 pp.
  • Out of the Labyyrinth: Selected Poems . City Lights, San Francisco 1991
  • Water from a Bucket: A Diary 1948-1957 . Turtle Point Press, New York 2001
  • (with Indra Tamang): Operation Minotaur: Haikus and Collages . Shivastan Publ., Kathmandu, Nepal, 2006

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Ford, Charles Henri
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet, visual artist, and filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Brookhaven , Mississippi, United States
DATE OF DEATH September 27, 2002
Place of death New York City , New York, United States