The daughter of André Breton and Jacqueline Lamba—Breton called her Écusette de Noireuil (switching the syllables of noisette d'écureuil, squirrel's hazelnut) in a letter written to her when she was eight months old—Aube Elléouët displayed her poetic sensibility and loyalty to her father's message from the time she was an adolescent. In childhood, she was subjected to the tribulations of her parents, who were refugees during the war. When she was six, they lived at the Villa Bel-Air in varseille; they sailed to Martinique on the freighter, Capitathe Paul Lemerle, in the company of André Masson, Wifredo Lam and other notables; and in New York they lived in the Bleecker Street apartment reserved for the family and attended gatherings of the exiled surrealists. When Jacqueline Lamba left Breton in 1943 to live with the painter and sculptor David Hare, she took Aube to live with her on Long Island and then in Connecticut. Breton confessed in Arcane 17 how unhappy he was to be separated from his daughter. He also expressed in a poem his joy upon seeing her again on the occasion of the exhibition Surrealism in 1947 at Galerie Maeght. Aube looked a great deal like her father and stayed more or less attached to the postwar surrealist group. In 1956 she married the poet Yves Elléouët, author of a journal intemporel, called La Proue de la table (1967). They went to live at Saché in Touraine, France, near Alexander Calder, and in 1971 adopted a Korean child, Oona. Yves Elléouët died in 1975, shortly after publishing his excellent Livre des rois de Bretagne. Aube, who had begun to make collages in 1970, devoted more and more time to them, and had her first exhibition at the Galerie Le Triskéle in Paris, in 1977. In 1980 she had exhibitions in Brest, Bordeaux, Villeneuve-Loubet, Tokyo, Azay-le-Rideau and Concarneau, and participated in many group shows, including the FIAC in 1991. Aube always did her collages in the surrealist spirit, pure and sweeping, and her father would have been delighted to see how far she followed in the footsteps of Max Ernst, and other surrealist predecessors.  

Aube Elléouët

Born 1935 in Paris.  

La Nautile, Collage, 1996