Farewell party for Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, New York, 1946. Left to right: Roberto Matta, Arlette Seligmann, Max Ernst, Nina Lebel, Elena Calas, unidentified man, Frederick Kiesler, unidentified woman, Teeny Matisse, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, and Kurt Seligmann.
As the circle of Surrealist refugees was augmented by the arrivals of Breton, Masson, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and others, group activities such as exhibitions and publications proliferated. Ten artists contributed etchings or original works on paper to a portfolio which was sold to help finance a new journal VVV, edited by Breton and Ernst. 9 The etchings were printed on the press in Seligmann’s barn/ studio; according to Meyer Schapiro, the plates produced by the artists who had gathered there were buried in the debris when a cyclone leveled the barn a few years later. Among the artist visitors to the Sugar Loaf farm was Duchamp who fired five shots at the stone foundation wall of an adjacent barn, then photographed it and had it printed with the five bullet holes punched out for the cover of the catalogue accompanying the notorious First Papers of Surrealism exhibition staged by the émigrés in October, 1942. For the first issue of VVV (Spring 1942) Seligmann wrote “The Evil Eye,” in
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