Description

FIRST EDITION.

Autograph signed letter to the poet and writer Max-Pol Fouchet :

"To Max-Pol Fouchet
Yours sincerely
Bazaine

The painter Jean Bazaine shared with Max-Pol Fouchet a commitment to the "Intellectual Resistance" against the Vichy regime. In charge of organising the Plastic Arts section of the cultural movement Jeune France, which was dissolved in 1942 because it was infiltrated by several of Pétain's opponents, Bazaine, together with the publisher André Lejard, organised the exhibition "Vingt jeunes peintres de tradition française" ("Twenty young painters in the French tradition"). Beneath this double-entendre title lay a mockery of the Nazi ideology of "degenerate art": inaugurated in April 1941, it was in fact the first exhibition devoted to avant-garde painting organised under the Occupation.

Television made its appearance in homes in the early 50s, and with it the image of Max-Pol Fouchet, who established himself as a defender of culture on the small screen. He hosted the programme "Lectures pour tous", which ran for 15 years.
Known to the general public through his television persona, Max-Pol Fouchet had already, during the Occupation, built up a large network of artists around the magazine Fontaine, which he had taken over in 1939. Based in Algiers, he published texts by poets opposed to the Vichy regime, in an act of "Resistance in the Light". Louis Aragon, André Frénaud, Jules Supervielle, Henri Michaux and René Char were among the contributors to the magazine, which published 63 issues and is considered one of the major publications of the "Intellectual Resistance". Liberté" first appeared in the pages of Fontaine.