Nougé, Paul (1895-1967)

A trained scientist (he was a biochemist and spent all of his career in a medical laboratory), Paul Nougé was a Belgian poet, considered as the theorist of surrealism in Belgium, a movement he joined on its being founded in 1924. In the same year he founded the ‘review-pamphlet’ Correspondance. He subsequently continually took up official positions on art in all of its forms, wrote poems (for example ‘detourning’ a grammar textbook or the catalogue of a fur trader), took photographs and put his pen to work in the service of his friend René Magritte. But he always rejected the aestheticising form of poetry in particular, and of art in general. For him a poet must recreate reality and poetry is also a form of action. That is why he distrusted pure political action, preferring subversion through art.