The Accidental Avant-Gardist

The Album (detail), by Édouard Vuillard, 1895.
"The last time I was in Paris I went to pay a call on a writer I admire. Like Balzac, Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, and dozens of other luminaries, Raymond Roussel keeps a permanent address at 8, Boulevard de Ménilmontant, in the Cemitière du Père Lachaise, one of art’s most famous final resting places. But you won’t find flocks of tourists reverently camped out at his grave. No one lights candles for him or leaves him flowers, messages, metro tickets, smooth stones, or any other tokens of gratitude for the strange poems and even stranger novels he left to posterity. Not for Roussel’s tomb, as for Wilde’s, a recently installed glass case to protect the marble from the red lipstick of his fans. The day I visited him, it was gray and rainy and cold. There were few people in the normally well-frequented cemetery. ..."
Laphams Quarterly
Raymond Roussel – Impressions d’Afrique, 1910 Impressions of Africa
Raymond Roussel’s “Impressions of Africa”
Raymond Roussel approached the commercial illustrator Henri Zo
[PDF] Project MUSE
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Raymond Roussel approached the commercial illustrator Henri Zo