Background
Adrien Dax was born in 1913 in Toulouse, Haute-Garonne, France, the only child in a poor family. His father died after the First World War.
Adrien Dax was born in 1913 in Toulouse, Haute-Garonne, France, the only child in a poor family. His father died after the First World War.
Adrien attended evening classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse.
Adrien discovered surrealist painting firstly with reproductions of the magazine "Minotaure." At the beginning of the 1930s, after a stint at the "Jeunesses socialistes", Adrien Dax joined the " Jeunesses communistes." He became a Regional Secretary but was expelled shortly thereafter. After the defeat of 1940, Adrien Dax was imprisoned in a Pomeranian stalag. He was released two years later.
In 1947, Adrien went to Paris to attend a training course in order to become Engineer of rural works and, on this occasion, he made contact with the surrealists. In 1950, in his half-century Surrealist Almanac, André Breton published the text of "Dax, Automatic Perspective." In November 1951, Le Libertaire, the organ of the Anarchist Federation, published his first article "Art subject engaged art" where he stressed the absence of difference between academic and bourgeois art and "socialist Stalinist realism."
As a visual artist, Adrien Dax developed a technique derived from automatism. Close to lithography, the impression of relief was obtained by objects of chance that the artist introduced between the stone and the paper at the time of drawing the lithography. He signed the Manifesto of 121, titled "Declaration on the right to insubordination in the Algerian war" on September 5, 1960.
Three years after the death of a French poet André Breton, fearing that surrealism could escape the bashfulness, sterile pose, and parody, Adrien Dax became a part of the group that proclaimed its self-dissolution. The artist died on August 29, 1979.
Adrien Dax adhered to Communist Youth, a youth political organization, close to the French Communist Party.
Adrien Dax adhered to the artistic traditions of Surrealism.
Adrien was a passionate collector of Oceanic Art.