Surrealism

views updated

SURREALISM.

ORIGINS
ANDRÉ BRETON, "POPE OF SURREALISM"
MANIFESTOS AND REVIEWS
THE MOVEMENT'S EXPANSION
AND DECLINE
BIBLIOGRAPHY

In 1924 the French writer André Breton published his Manifesto of Surrealism, in which he defined the new movement:

surrealism, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. (translated from the French)

It was Breton's definition—as much as his authority—that in the 1920s brought together Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Giorgio De Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, René Magritte, André Masson, Roberto Matta, Joan Miró, Francis Picabia, and Yves Tanguy, to mention only the best-known of the surrealists, thereby recognizing that surrealism was definitively not an aesthetic school, as is evident from the diversity of the artists' work, any more than it was a plastic formula with a given set of combinable and interchangeable elements.

Surrealism was a new path of artistic exploration that questioned the meaning of the real, beyond its materiality. The real thus became that of the innermost depths of being, a reality within. Although this principle was recurrent, its formal expressions, because they were those of the unconscious in a state of dream, anxiety, or hallucination, were at least as numerous as the artists themselves. And while the use of dreams as a source of inspiration had its origins in Romantic and, in particular, symbolist practices, the surrealists, in the light of psychoanalysis, were able to go beyond oneirism, a fantasized form of dream, and allow the unconscious to express itself freely.

Still, it was necessary to somehow liberate the unconscious, and it is precisely at this step of production that the different surrealist typologies were established. First is painting, in which the illusionist realism of the representation contrasts with, and thereby underscores, a surreality expressed by the improbable nature of the scene owing to the lack of normally logical congruence among the elements. Then there are the practices linked to automatism. Automatic drawings and other "exquisite corpses" are characterized by a practice of immediacy and decontextualization (in the case of the "exquisite corpse," a collection of words or images assembled by a group, the participants know neither what precedes nor what follows their contribution). At the limits of the unconscious and chance, such works escape any form of structuring and consequently any cultural referent. Finally there are mechanical processes such as Max Ernst's grattages (paint scrapings) and collages, or Man Ray's photograms (or "rayographs," as he called them), which excite the imagination and imply that which is beyond the mere appearance of things.

It should be noted that with the exception of Jacques-André Boiffard (described as an "absolute surrealist" in Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism), and apart from some known contacts, not a single photographer, even counting Man Ray, Dora Maar, Raoul Ubac, and Claude Cahun, was truly part of the surrealist group.

ORIGINS

Beyond a variety of approaches and forms, one characteristic remains fundamentally, immutably surrealist: the rejection of all constraints. Social and political constraints, in particular, were targeted, their rejection embodied in an extremely acerbic denunciation of work, prisons, asylums, the army, and the church. This stance engendered an art that was denounced for its cynicism, its anarchist aims, or its disillusioned individualism—a disillusionment that is entirely relative if one considers the paramount importance given to love, the only alternative to an imposed system, as subject matter in surrealist creations.

By liberating gesture and by incorporating multiple techniques, surrealism escaped from the historicity of art and thus from yet another constraint: it also questioned the very notion of the work of art. The means required to gain access to the surreal, linked to the practice of automatism, repudiated the qualities of artistic praxis. Certain characteristics that had traditionally been indissociable from a production such as art had already been challenged by Dada.

Many of those who joined the surrealist movement in 1923, or at least collaborated, did in fact come out of Dada. Some of the technical processes, notably collage and the photogram, and creative behaviors based on the refusal of constraints, whether political, social, or cultural, also came out of dadaism before being integrated into surrealism. Thus the first automatic text written by André Breton and Philippe Soupault, Les champs magnétiques (The magnetic fields), considered to be a surrealist work, was in fact written in 1920 in the spirit of dadaist spontaneity.

ANDRÉ BRETON, "POPE OF SURREALISM"

Breton participated in Dada sessions until 1921, when a rupture took place that would allow the surrealist group, already in gestation, to emerge and take shape. The open and dispersed format of Dada was succeeded by the elaboration of a unique and compact group under the leadership of the man who quickly came to be known as the "pope of surrealism."

Breton was charismatic and the true theoretician of surrealism. He was demanding, and he expected from members an unwavering adherence to the movement's ideals—its artistic ideals, but also, since they were inseparable, its moral and political ideals. Any offenders received a sentence with no concessions: expulsion. Fiercely protective of the purity of surrealist aims, Breton systematically proceeded to throw out, with varying degrees of courtesy, elements deemed to be parasitical. Thus, Antonin Artaud, André Masson, Philippe Soupault, and Roger Vitrac were violently expelled. Robert Desnos, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia were expelled with more circumspection.

MANIFESTOS AND REVIEWS

Breton nonetheless remained the federator of the surrealist group, if only because he was the author of the Manifesto of Surrealism and, along with Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Joan Miró, André Masson, and Yves Tanguy (from 1925), of La révolution surréaliste. This review was considered to be "the most scandalous in the world," notably because it published, on the cover of the first issue, a photo of Germaine Berton, who assassinated Marius Plateau, a member of the extreme-right party Action Française, surrounded by portraits of a number of the surrealists, including André Breton, and because it proclaimed, in the second issue, "Open the prisons! Fire the army!" About a dozen issues were published, ending in 1929.

The orientation of La révolution surréaliste was thus resolutely political, deliberately provocative, and intellectually violent. This, however, does not imply any amorality, as witness this question the review put to its readers: "Is suicide a solution?"—a question that most of the surrealists were to answer in the most absolute negative. Black humor and provocation should not conceal the way this review served as a tool for ethical and poetic reflection and as an aid to experimentation (issue 9–10, for example, was devoted to automatic writing).

Effective modes of dissemination, manifestos and periodicals, were an important part of surrealist activity. They also allowed for theoretical aims to be refined progressively over time. La révolution surréaliste enabled Breton, for example, between 1924 and 1928 to write a series of articles that would appear together in Le surréalisme et la peinture (1928; Surrealism and painting).

Succeeding La révolution surréaliste, six issues of Le surréalisme au service de la révolution were published between July 1930 and May 1933. Publication took place in a context of high tensions within the surrealist group. Indeed, 1929 had seen the release of Breton's new surrealist opus, the Second Manifesto (Second Manifeste du surréalisme), and with it the drastic operation of the dismissal of some members of the group. The ranks of the surrealists were partially decimated, even taking into account Dalí's arrival and Tristan Tzara's reintegration the same year; the excluded artists came together to produce an anti-Breton diatribe, Un cadavre.

La révolution surréaliste and Le surréalisme au service de la révolution are good illustrations of surrealism's politico-artistic approach. That approach proved to be problematic, because it was based on a paradox, that is, the articulation of a fundamentally free and individualistic poetics together with a fundamentally collective revolutionary political engagement.

The difficulties did not curtail the movement's spread. Indeed, the 1930s saw the formation of a number of surrealist groups abroad. At the same time, the group's publishing activity ceased. Strictly speaking, since the folding of Le surréalisme au service de la révolution, and for the first time since 1924, no surrealist review was being published. However, in June 1933 the artists started collaborating on the first issue of Minotaure. Some ten issues later, Minotaure was completely in their control.

THE MOVEMENT'S EXPANSION
AND DECLINE

Between 1933 and 1938, increasing numbers of surrealist exhibitions took place around the world. The first group show took place in 1925, and from 1926 to 1928 a surrealist gallery hosted regular events, ensuring the cohesion of a group that had been seriously destabilized by a crisis in 1926.

The year 1936 attested to the movement's outward expansion: the first major international surrealist exhibition was held in London. However, the 1938 exhibition, held in Paris, marked the start of an irreversible decline of a group whose apparent mobilization could not conceal the ruptures that had taken place or those that were imminent (Éluard and Ernst took their places in the surrealist cortege for the last time). The exhibition also marked the decline of surrealist ideology by renouncing its long-held obscurantism and giving way to facilitating explanation to the public.

The misunderstanding of surrealist ideas in the context of the exhibitions often provoked public reactions of irony or anger. The show of 1938 was not completely exempt from this rule: Dalí's Taxi pluvieux (Rainy taxi) featured a blond mannequin in a car, caught in a downpour of real vegetables and real snails; a "Surrealist Street" was peopled with wax mannequins signed by Dalí, Duchamp, Ernst, Masson, and J. Miró. But this was not the whole story. In this case, a tempering of visitors' reactions was facilitated by the publication of a sort of user's manual, a Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (Abridged dictionary of surrealism) compiled by Breton and Éluard. This overture to the public was a renunciation of the occult character of surrealism. The dictionary itself was proof that the movement had turned back upon itself, evidence of an introspective gaze whose aims were undoubtedly historicizing.

The Second World War then hit like a bomb-shell. Many surrealists, including Breton, Dalí, Matta, and Tanguy, left France for the United States. Their exile, while others such as Éluard, Pablo Picasso, Bellmer, Desnos, and Artaud, remained in France, led to the breakup of the movement. Destinies were split; the experience of those who had stayed behind was too distant from that of the dreamers across the ocean. During the global conflict some of the most representative personalities of the group came together, mainly in New York, where they continued their surrealist oeuvre, produced the periodicals Views and VVV, and organized exhibitions such as First Papers of Surrealism (New York, 1942). When they returned, they brought with them a desire to revitalize the movement and to prescribe a more occult system for surrealist creations, in direct contrast to the change in direction begun in 1938, whereas the surrealists who had remained in occupied Europe sought to establish contacts with revolutionary political movements.

Despite ongoing surrealist activity in painting, as evidenced in the 1947 exhibit at the Galerie Maeght in Paris, surrealism virtually disappeared after 1945. But its presence continued in particular because its incursions into the realm of the unconscious and its theoretical investments with regard to the work of art as object had lasting effects on twentieth-century art as a whole.