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5 THINGS YOU MISSED IN LOS FOMOS -
Drop your personal song of the week below (help Leffi complete the weekly song selection) 🌶️
with contributions from:
@eduardmsmr the weekly surrealist
@speakup's Diesel fashion week updates
@janicka best mon vs wed vs fri me
@dfern.eth's selected drink of the week (& best cocktail name ever)
@bethanymarz bar of the week: The Ivory Peacock in NYC
ps. follow losfomosfm on Insta!
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@pauline-unik
Earlier today: quick chili (sin carne) brunch at a friend’s house. They are obsessed with spicy sauces - we had 20 to pick from
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@tako-unik
My impression of a chilli impersonating a lobster
https://x.com/tako_unik/status/2017898366248669265?s=46
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@eduardmsmr
Happy Surrealist Saturday!!
I often say how important and powerful perspective is, and today I wanted to look at Surrealism from a different one. Not the French perspective we’re most used to, but the Belgian one
Even though at their core they shared the same impulses, the way they embodied them was very different. Today’s exploration led me to one of the key figures of Belgian Surrealism, a person who intrigued me deeply through the way he lived his life
His name is Marcel Mariën
Marcel was born in 1920 in Antwerp, Belgium, into a poor family. His mother wanted him out of school as fast as possible so he could bring money home. At fifteen, he became a photographer's apprentice, doing the most menial jobs imaginable
But while doing this, in his room, he was reading, writing poetry, and making collages, escaping into a world that felt more real than the one demanding he earn a wage
Then, in 1935 at a local art exhibition, he saw two paintings by René Magritte (the Belgian Surrealist known for works like The Son of Man and The Treachery of Images). Everything was about to change that day
Marcel described this encounter as a revelation. He devoured André Breton's (founder of the Surrealist movement) Manifeste du Surréalisme. And in 1937, at just seventeen years old, he contacted Magritte and traveled to Brussels to meet him
He was welcomed immediately. Soon he was sitting alongside Paul Nougé (the intellectual leader of Belgian Surrealism), Louis Scutenaire (poet and Magritte's closest friend), Irène Hamoir (poet and Scutenaire's wife), and Paul Colinet (Surrealist poet). He was the youngest in the room by two decades, but he was already belonging
That same year, Marcel made his first surrealist object (and it's still one of the most iconic of the entire movement). It's called L'Introuvable (The Untraceable): a pair of glasses with only one lens, made from his own broken spectacles
It’s a simple object, yet so disorienting, and at the same time it was an object that announced that Marcel is someone who took the everyday and made it impossible to look at the same way again.
Marcel couldn't paint or draw, so instead of trying to fit into what Surrealism was “supposed” to look like, he invented his own approaches. He moved through every medium (collage, photography, objects, film, and publishing) with what one source called "anarchistic" energy
He even pioneered a technique called étrécissements, a reductive method of collage, the opposite of building something up
His relationship with Magritte was the defining partnership of his early life. Magritte was twenty years older, and Marcel became something like a surrogate son to him
In 1943, Marcel wrote the very first monograph ever published on Magritte. He helped name Magritte's paintings. They even forged art together during the lean postwar years (fake Picassos, Braques, de Chiricos) just to survive. In 1953, they took their pranks public, distributing fake banknotes that Magritte had printed along the Belgian coast
But in 1962, Marcel went too far
During a major Magritte retrospective, Marcel created a satirical pamphlet called La Grande Baisse (The Big Discount), pretending to be from Magritte himself, advertising massive price reductions on his paintings
Even André Breton didn't realize it was a joke and he praised Magritte for the gesture. But Magritte was furious. And just like that, their 25 friendship was over
But provocation was his nature. He simply couldn’t help himself. In 1955, he established the International Prize for Human Stupidity, and the first recipient was King Baudouin of Belgium
Even as late as 1983, his autobiography Le Radeau de la MĂ©moire caused a scandal with its "outrageously libellous" content
But Marcel was also one of the most important archivists and publishers Surrealism ever had
In 1954, while working as a typist at a refinery, he founded a magazine called Les Lèvres Nues (The Naked Lips), partly as a way to look busy at work and use stolen office supplies
Through this magazine and his publishing house, he rescued the writings of Paul Nougé, Scutenaire, and others from obscurity. He published hundreds of titles. And in 1979, he completed L'Activité Surréaliste en Belgique (1924-1950), the definitive chronicle of the Belgian Surrealist movement
Les Lèvres Nues published some of the earliest theoretical texts by Guy Debord (founder of the Situationist International, author of The Society of the Spectacle). Debord's foundational essay on détournement (the practice of appropriating and subverting existing cultural material) first appeared in Marcel's magazine. In other words, Marcel birth what came next for Surrealism
In 1959, Marcel directed a film called L'Imitation du CinĂ©ma, funded through an elaborate workplace contest scam. It's one of the only Belgian films considered part of the surrealist cinema canon, alongside Buñuel and DalĂ's Un Chien Andalou and L'Ă‚ge d'Or
The Catholic censorship board called it “a sacrilegious parody of Christianity mixed with obscenity that beggars imagination.” It was banned in France. Even with support from the Kinsey Institute, it couldn't be shown in America. David Lynch reportedly drew inspiration from it for Wild at Heart
Marcel's life reads like a surrealist novel in itself. During World War II, he was captured by the Germans while caring for wounded soldiers, and he refused to leave behind two bags of books, even while being evacuated to Dunkirk. He spent nine months as a prisoner of war
In 1951, he signed on as a sailor aboard a Danish cargo ship. In the 1960s, he lived in New York, then moved to Communist China to work as a translator on a propaganda magazine, until his disillusionment with Maoism drove him back to Brussels
His most famous photograph, De Sade à Lénine (1943), shows a woman cutting a slice of bread, the loaf pressed against her naked torso, the knife pointing at her breast. Marcel said: “The knife passes from de Sade to Lenin.” If one wants to understand who Marcel was they can only look at this image as I feel it contains everything about him
Today, his works are in MoMA, Tate Modern, the Getty, the Centre Pompidou. The Fondation Marcel Mariën, established in 2017, continues to promote his legacy. His auction prices range widely, with his record being around €26,000, not the astronomical figures of Magritte, but steadily growing as people rediscover him
One of the lessons I learned from this exploration is that Surrealism is about constant provocation and questioning, even of itself, your closest friends, and even when it costs you everything
It also taught me that documenting a movement (publishing its forgotten texts, chronicling its manifestos, preserving its ephemera) is itself a revolutionary act. Without Marcel, so much of Belgian Surrealism would have simply disappeared
And he taught me that a restless spirit never settles. Sailor, prisoner of war, publisher, prankster, filmmaker, forger, photographer, exile in Maoist China. He was living surrealism
He lived like someone who understood that the world is stranger than we pretend it is, and that our job is to keep proving it
He died in 1993 in Brussels and was buried in the Schaerbeek cemetery, near Magritte himself, the friend he lost but never stopped being tangled with
Marcel Mariën may have started as Magritte's surrogate son, but along the way he became the bad boy of Surrealism, the one who kept the movement honest by refusing to let it take itself too seriously
Thank you for reading!🌹
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@pauline-unik
Someone needs to take me to the portrait bar in nyc asap. I’d have a great time memeifying the art on the walls while sipping on my elmhurst
Anyone here tried it? https://www.instagram.com/p/DUJHf5KCqGc/?igsh=MTd2eHRwdnFhaDBtcw==
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@pauline-unik
I discovered Obvio a few years ago because a friend DJs there regularly. Highly recommend for the vibes!
Follow LF on Instagram if you don’t already 💅
https://www.instagram.com/p/DUJHf5KCqGc/?img_index=3&igsh=MTd2eHRwdnFhaDBtcw==
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