Background

Luca was born in Bucharest, Romania, on July 23, 1913. He was the son of a tailor, Berl Locker, who died when Ghérasim was one-year-old.

Career

Luca started his literary career by publishing the first work in the dissident avant-garde journals Alge and Unu. In 1931, the journal group, including Ghérasim Luca, spent a brief period behind bars for insulting the prime minister Nicolae Iorga.

Ghérasim Luca travelled frequently to Paris in the latter part of the 1930s; there he was introduced to the French Surrealists. The Second World War and the official antisemitism in Romania made him leave the country. During the short pre-Communist period of Romanian independence, the painter founded a Surrealist artists group, together with Paul Păun, Gellu Naum, Virgil Teodorescu and Dolfi Trost.

His first publications, including poems in French, followed. Luca invented cubomania, a method of making collages in which a picture or image is cut into squares and the squares are then reassembled without regard for the image. Together with Dolfi Trost, he became a co-author of the statement "Dialectic of Dialectic" in 1945.

Initially, Luca wrote most of his poetic works in his native language, Romanian. Two collections of his works, Inventatorul Iubirii and Un lup văzut printr-o lupă, were published in Bucharest in 1945. They were translated into English (The Inventor of Love and Other Works) by Julian and Laura Semilian and published by Black Widow Press in 2009.

Persecuted in Romania and caught while trying to flee the country, Ghérasim Luca eventually left Romania in 1952 and migrated to Paris via Israel. He accumulated a wide audience in France for both his books and his performances.

In Paris, Luca worked among others with Jean Arp, Paul Celan, François Di Dio and Max Ernst, creating numerous collages, objects, drawings, and text-installations. From 1967, he visited a number of places during his reading sessions like Oslo, Geneva, Stockholm, New York City, and San Francisco. From 1971 till 1972 at the invitation of composer Sten Hanson, Ghérasim Luca recorded a pair of electronically-treated sound works in Stockholm.

In 1988 he participated in the shooting of Comment s'en sortir sans sortir, in which Gherasim Luca recites eight of his poems in a very sober setting. It was directed by Raoul Sangla.

In 1994, Ghérasim Luca was expelled from his apartment in Montmartre. Having spent forty years in France without papers, Luca could not cope with it and committed suicide by jumping into the Seine.

Achievements

• 

  Ghérasim Luca was an outstanding artist and poet of his time, who made a significant contribution to the world of art. Among his best-known artworks are the following: Cubomanie 24, Indochina, Tijuca la Floresta, Tijuca, hôtel Moreau, Lavage du café.
  
  Gherasim Luca's works have been offered at auction multiple times, with realized prices ranging from $375 USD to $9,357 USD. In 2010 the record price for this artist at auction became $9,357 USD for Indochina, that was sold at Calusari Auctions in 2010.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Inventor of Love & Other Writings

    (One of the most extraordinary texts of any of the Surreal...)

    1945
  • The Passive Vampire

    (The Passive Vampire is a mixture of a theoretical treatis...)

    1941

• collage

  • Costume des chefs indiens Appiacaz (Amazone)

  • Lavage de diamants (à Minas)

  • Transpercer la transparence (8)

  • Transpercer la transparence (13)

  • Sommet du Corcovado

  • La récolte du café

  • Cubomanie IV

  • Cubomanie 24

  • Le Corvocado do largo dos Leõe

  • Transpercer la transparence (10)

  • Collage

  • Tijuca la Floresta

  • Transpercer la transparence (5)

  • Transpercer la transparence (12)

  • Transpercer la transparence (11)

  • Transpercer la transparence (1)

  • Transpercer la transparence (2)

  • Les arcs de

  • Collage

  • Indochina

  • La poste Rua 1° de Març

  • Négresse de Bahia - Indienne botocudo

  • Transpercer la transparence (3)

  • Un sous-bois au Brésil

  • Indeterminisme d'un amour

  • Tijuca, hôtel Moreau

  • Jardin botanique, allée de manguiers

  • Jardin botanique, allée des palmiers

  • Transpercer la transparence (9)

  • Pont sylvestre (Rampe 25%)

  • Lavage du café

  • Transpercer la transparence (4)

  • Indiens de Matto Grosso

  • The Passive Vampire

  • Transpercer la transparence (6)

  • Transpercer la transparence (7)

• illustration

  • Illustration for "Le vampire passif"

• sculpture

  • The Letter L (OOO)

Views

Influenced and inspired by Gilles Deleuze, Luca developed a stuttering kind of poetry that he called "ontophonie"; as according to Luca, "[i]n... language that serves to designate objects, the word has only one or two meanings and it keeps sonority imprisoned. But let one break the form in which it has become bogged down and new relationships appear... Liberate the breath and every word becomes a signal."

Quotations: "Only a hallucinated cup or a watermelon would be deluded enough to think that there are common traits between myself and humans, since what humans call love is the encounter of two imbecile hearts."

Personality

Luca spoke four languages, including Yiddish, Romanian, German, and French.

The artist regarded himself as an apatride, or stateless.

Quotes from others about the person

• Dick Higgins: "There was a very fine surrealist poet, not well known in this country, by the name of Gherasim Luca, who said some of the most beautiful things we had ever heard about some pieces - mine, La Monte’s and Maxfield’s seemed to appeal to him... we were deeply moved by the old man’s enthusiasm."
  
  Andrei Codrescu: "Gherasim Luca was a bull, a toro."
  
  John Olson: "Luca writes with the ferocity of Rilke’s panther, blood and sinew turning in a circle."

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Gilles Deleuze

Connections

Luca was married.

Father:

Berl Locker

References

• Gherasim Luca l'intempestif French edition.
  1998