Patrick Waldberg

Patrick Waldberg (4 April 1913, Santa-Monica - 1 October 1985, Paris) was a Franco-American art critic known for his profiles of Surrealist artists.

Born in Santa Monica, California, Waldberg moved to Paris as a child with his family. In 1932, and while still a student (age 19), he joined Boris Souvarine’s Democratic Communist Circle. There he met Georges Bataille and his friends Michel Leiris and André Masson, and was initiated by them into a wild night life. Waldberg would chronicle those years in his novel La Clé de cendre (The key made of ashes), published posthumously in 1999. The book is set in Paris circa 1933, and chronicles various small groups of revolutionaries and truth-seekers as they form and dissolve. The narrator chronicles his wanderings and nocturnal excursions, where the figures of Souvarine and Bataille are recognizable through the characters of Ghégov and Saint-Nom.

In 1935 Waldberg moved to Sweden, where he lived until 1937, working as a welder's apprentice.

1937 saw him back in California to take care of "family matters". However, a letter from Georges Bataille reached him there, urging him to return to Paris in order to take part in a Nietzschean secret society Bataille was then forming, called Acéphale ("headless"). Waldberg heeded the call in September 1938, and he says this permanently changed his life. From 1938 to 1940 Waldberg would serve as the secretary of Bataille's "official" group, the College of Sacred Sociology.

Also in 1938, and related to his activities with Acéphale, Waldberg met and fell in love with Isabelle Farner, a Swiss artist two years his elder who was working on a masters' thesis about Nietzsche.

In the winter of 1939, Waldberg was invited by Georges Bataille to move in with him to his house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a suburb of Paris.

In the fall of that year he joined the French army to help repel the German invasion. In March 1940, Isabelle Farner gave birth to his son Michel_Waldberg (). After the French defeat Patrick and Isabelle fled to the USA where they took up residence in New York. In 1941 Patrick became a founder of the "Voice of America” radio broadcasts. It seems it was he who then attracted André Breton to also become an announcer on Voice of America.In 1942 Waldberg quit Voice of America to join the US army intelligence service, taking part in the African campaign and then the Normandy invasion. During this time Isabelle stayed in New York.

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