Alexandra David-Neel and Georges Bataille

November 3, 2007 9:03 AM

Did Alexandra David-Neel ever meet Georges Bataille?

I'm researching connections between Tibetan Buddhism and Surrealism. If you can give me evidence that Alexandra David-Neel and Georges Bataille met one another, I will be forever grateful. If you can lead me to actual evidence, transcripts, whatever, I will explode with gratitude. Also interested in contact between David-Neel and any other Parisian avant-gardists, especially Surrealists.
Thanks!

posted by arcadia to Society & Culture (2 answers total)

My Google-fu hasn't helped me locate a reference of the two ever having anything to do with each other. Her name is also absent from various biographical and secondary sources of Bataille's life that mention lots of people that he had been in contact with. That isn't to definitively say that that they've neither met nor influenced each other, but you may have better luck digging up an encounter between her and some other "surrealist."
posted by gregb1007 at 1:38 PM on November 3, 2007

You might consider contacting Barbara M. Foster, an Associate Professor in the Library Department at CUNY. She is a world traveler in the tradition of the heroic women she writes about. She has acted as a referee for the Royal Geographical Society (London). She is co-author of the biography The Secret Lives of Alexandra David-Neel. More.

Her website, her forum. She's probably the world's leading expert about Alexandra David-Neel.

She teaches at Hunter College in NYC, is married to Michael Foster, co-author and their manuscript notes in the New York Public Library.

It's quite possible Alexandra David-Neel did meet surrealist artists as on her return from Tibet she camped in a tent outside the Musée Guimet in Paris.

You might contact her center at Samteng Dzong and ask them as well (better if you speak fluent French).

Her pre-Tibet life was surreal in itself.
posted by nickyskye at 8:51 PM on November 3, 2007