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Louis Scutenaire | |
|---|---|
 Scutenaire, 1985 | |
| Born | Jean Émile Louis Scutenaire (1905-06-29)29 June 1905 Ollignies,Belgium |
| Died | 15 August 1987(1987-08-15) (aged 82) Brussels, Belgium |
| Occupations | anarchist, civil servant, poet, surrealist |
Louis Scutenaire (29 June 1905 – 15 August 1987) was a Belgian French-languagepoet,anarchist,surrealist andcivil servant. BornJean Émile Louis Scutenaire in Ollignies, he died inBrussels.
Louis Scutenaire is chiefly remembered as a central figure in theBelgianSurrealist movement, along withRené Magritte,Paul Nougé,Marcel Lecomte and his own wifeIrène Hamoir. He studied law at theFree University of Brussels (now split into theUniversité libre de Bruxelles and theVrije Universiteit Brussel) and was a criminal lawyer from 1931 to 1944. In 1926 he discoveredsurrealism and was a primary contributor to theRevue surréaliste. He was sympathetic tocommunism during the 1930s and 1940s but as the truth aboutJoseph Stalin's regime became more apparent, he grew disenchanted with it and became ananarchist. After theSecond World War he became a civil servant in the Belgian Ministry of the Interior, a job he kept for the rest of his life.
Scutenaire grew disillusioned with the increasingcommercialisation of Surrealism after theSecond World War, but this did not apparently impair his close friendship with the most famous Belgian surrealistRené Magritte. Scutenaire and his wife would visit the Magritte home on Sundays, where Scutenaire would be invited to give titles to Magritte's recent paintings; 170 of the paintings still bear the titles that Scutenaire suggested. (He is also the model for the figure in Magritte's canvasUniversal Gravitation.)
Scutenaire's published works include a series of books entitledMes Inscriptions, collections of gnomic and mischievousaphorisms, as well as one of the earliest and most entertainingmonographs on Magritte. He was awarded in 1985 the Grand Prix spécial de l'Humour noir in recognition of his achievements as a writer with a lifelong distrust of authority and institution.
He died twenty years to the hour after his friend Magritte, just after watching a television programme on the painter.
