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Book illustrated in frontispiece with a portrait of the author and 4 drawings by Pablo Picasso, including one representing the companion of Eluard, Nusch.
"The year 1936, which saw the appearance of Fertile Eyes, was a milestone year in Eluard's life. In a certain sense, we can consider it as the starting point of a new phase of his inspiration and his thought, which will find its culmination, its blossoming with the war and the resistance. Without renouncing the surrealist aesthetic, its research, its watchwords, the poet's speech will often become clearer, more direct, while the external universe takes on a poetic importance in his eyes. bigger. (…)
That same year, Eluard returned to Spain to give a series of lectures there. The pretext is a Picasso retrospective, organized by the new popular government which intends to honor in the person of the great painter, the militant of freedom. Was it not during this trip that Eluard wrote the beautiful poem dedicated to his friend in Fertile Eyes? We like at least to evoke, in the background of this text, a meeting between the two men under the Spanish sky, bright and pure, with its morning freshness quickly dissipated. »
(Luc Decaunes, ex-son-in-law of Eluard, in the biography dedicated to him, about the year 1936, context of publication of the collection Les Yeux fertiles) 67509501
