A poet, photographer and creator of objects, Heisler joined the Czech surrealist group in 1938 and published his "realized poems," in a volume titled From the Stronghold of Sleep, where he tried to create a new association between word and image. Heisler spent the war hidden in the artist Toyen's bathroom, in Prague, without once going out, to avoid arrest by the Nazis. It was here that he executed his cycle of "photo-graphics," De la même farine (1944), by putting glycerin or soap foam on the frosted glass of his camera. In 1947 he came to Paris with Toyen for the exhibition, Surrealism in 1947, at Galerie Maeght and was invited to build an altar dedicated to Alfred Jarry's Dragonne. In 1948 he founded the review Néon, creating an original layout for it with exquisite innovations. He also assembled three object-books (1950-1) and a surrealist alphabet composed of collages. When he died at the age of thirty-nine, André Breton declared: "From 1948 to 1950 he was the life and soul of Néon, and, until his last breath, the greatest begetter of projects which, inspired by his genius, he carried out as if by magic. His loss, in this sense, is boundless."  

Jindrich Heisler

Born 1914 in Chrast (Czech Republic); died 1953 in Paris.  

Untitled, Photography and Collage, 1943