When André Breton publicly discussed his conflicted rapport with Freud and psychoanalysis in Communicating Vessels, he began with an epigraph quoting the last lines of Jensen’s Gradiva: “And lightly picking up her dress with her left hand, Gradiva Rediviva Zoé Bertgang, wrapped in the dreamy gaze of Hanold, with her step supple and tranquil, in the bright sunlight striking upon the pavement, passed on the other side of the street.” Left hand, right foot: there is always a body part that remains invisible. Indeed, the game of sunlight and buried darkness played so well by Gradiva had seduced Breton, to the point that he used her name to baptize the art gallery that he opened in Paris in 1937, at 31 rue de Seine. In his presentation, Breton had written about her magical name. He capitalizes it, “SHE WHO ADVANCES,” and adds: “What can she be, ‘she who advances,’ if not the beauty of tomorrow, still masked to the crowd, who reveals herself once in a while next to an object, a painting, a book?” Breton was always keen on being on the vanguard; he had to enlist this fictional creature to pursue his lyrical utopia of a more radiant future in which dream and reality would blend, released by the power of desire. By contrast, Freud never tried to be “in advance,” and even if he knew that he was on the side of “progress,” his view tended to a scientific enlightenment. These two models were bound to clash.

At entrance to Breton’s tiny Gradiva gallery was a double door designed by Marcel Duchamp. It represented the dark silhouette of a man and woman embracing, a hulking double shadow directly cut out of glass panel. The slightly forbidding figure was modeled on the couple Norbert Hanold sees in Pompeii. We may remember that he had first taken them for a brother and a sister, only to realize later that they were a married couple on their honeymoon. This vision of happy sexual exchanges, relaying what he had heard at night in the adjacent room, led to the elaboration of a jealous fantasy. Indeed, soon after, Norbert imagines Gradiva in the arms of another man and is immediately ready to challenge him to a duel.