THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO SURREALISM 9780367689230, 9780367689285, 9781003139652

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO SURREALISM

This book provides a conceptual and global overview of the field of Surrealist studies. ­Methodologically, the companion considers Surrealism’s many achievements, but also its ­historical shortcomings, to illuminate its connections to the historical and cultural moment(s) from which it originated and to assess both the ways in which it still shapes our world in ­inspiring ways and the ways in which it might appear problematic as we look back at it from a t­wenty-first-century vantage point. Contributions from experienced scholars will enable p­ rofessors to teach the ­subject more broadly, by opening their eyes to aspects of the field that are on the margins of their expertise, and it will enable scholars to identify new areas of study in their own work, by indicating lines of research at a tangent to their own. The companion will reflect the interdisciplinarity of Surrealism by incorporating discussions pertaining to the visual arts, as well as literature, film, and political and intellectual history. Kirsten Strom is Professor of Art History at Grand Valley State University.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO SURREALISM

Edited by Kirsten Strom

Cover image: Penelope Rosemont, What a Man!, collage, 2012. Reproduced by kind permission of Penelope Rosemont. First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Kirsten Strom; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kirsten Strom to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-0-367-68923-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-68928-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13965-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of Contributors List of Figures

x xiii

Introduction1 Kirsten Strom PART I

Concepts and Practices

9

Exploratory Themes   1 Dreams and Humour Natalya Lusty

11

  2 Play, Games, and Chance Susan Laxton

20

  3 The Marvelous and the Uncanny Andrea Gremels and Kirsten Strom

28

  4 Convulsive Beauty and Mad Love Gavin Parkinson

37

  5 The Occult, Magic, and Alchemy Rachael Grew

46

v

Contents

  6 Toward a Total Animism: Surrealism and Nature Kristoffer Noheden

53

Protestations   7 Capitalism and Colonialism Michael Richardson

63

  8 Limits Not Frontiers: Surrealist Resistance to Nationalism, Patriotism, and Militarism Krzysztof Fijalkowski   9 Catholicism and Family Values Miguel Escribano

71 79

Creative Applications 10 Verbal Techniques Madeleine Chalmers

90

11 Visual Methods Elliott H. King

98

12 Buñuel and Dalí, Un Chien andalou109 Elza Adamowicz PART II

Lessons from Paris

117

Tensions and Dissensions 13 “Anarchy” . . . or Anarchism?: Dada in Paris and the Shifting Politics of Irreverence Theresa Papanikolas

119

14 Georges Bataille, André Breton, and the Culture of Surrealism Raymond Spiteri

127

15 Surrealism and the French Communist Party Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

136

vi

Contents

Public Interfaces 16 Surrealism’s Publics Rachel Silveri

146

17 Surrealism on Display: American Reception and Expansion Sandra Zalman

155

PART III

Situated Contexts: Adaptations and Translations

163

18 Surrealism in the Arab World Riad Kherdeen

165

19 Surrealism and Australia Gavin Yates

175

20 Surrealism in Belgium: A Never-Ending Story Pierre Taminiaux

183

21 Surrealism in the Caribbean in the 1940s: Transnational Encounters Paulina Caro Troncoso

191

22 Surrealism in Chicago Penelope Rosemont

199

23 Surrealism in China Lauren Walden

208

24 Surrealism in the Czech Lands Malynne Sternstein

217

25 Surrealism in England Christina Heflin

226

26 Surrealism in Greece Victoria Ferentinou

234

27 Surealis Yogya and Other Surrealist Moments in Indonesia in the Twentieth Century Tessel M. Bauduin

vii

243

Contents

28 Surrealism in Japan Chinghsin Wu

252

29 Surrealism in Mexico Melanie Nicholson

261

30 Romanian Surrealism Cosana Eram

271

31 Scandinavian Surrealism Kerry Greaves

279

32 Surrealist Dialogues in South America María Clara Bernal

288

33 Surrealism and Spain Maite Barragán

297

34 Surrealism and Postwar West Germany Patricia Allmer

306

PART IV

Critical Dialogues

317

The Politics of Collecting 35 L’élan surréaliste: Surrealist Aspirations and the Power and Primacy of Oceanic Art Maia Nuku

319

36 The Surrealist Experience of Indigenous North America: A Second “Discovery” of the Americas Marco Polo Juarez Cruz

329

Gender and Sexuality 37 Feminist Encounters with Surrealism: Revisiting the Formative Critiques339 Anna Watz 38 Surrealist Visions of Androgyny Abigail Susik

348

viii

Contents

39 Radical Muses Catriona McAra and Jonathan P. Eburne

358

40 Dismembered Muses and Mirrors That Bite: A Trans Perspective on Gender Variance in Surrealist Art Jordan Reznick PART V

367

Further Reaches

377

41 The Intellectual Resonances of Surrealism Bruce Baugh

379

42 Surrealist Resonances in Contemporary Art Craig Adcock

387

43 The Hybrid and Surreal Memoirs of Tameca Cole, Raymond Towler, Shay Youngblood, and Steve Cormany Rochelle Spencer 44 Inquiry on Surrealism in 2024 Jonathan P. Eburne, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Andrea Gremels, Melanie Nicholson, Michael Richardson, Penelope Rosemont, Rachel Silveri, Rochelle Spencer, Abigail Susik and Pierre Taminiaux

394 397

Index403

ix

CONTRIBUTORS

Kirsten Strom, Editor Grand Valley State University Elza Adamowicz Queen Mary University of London Craig Adcock University of Iowa Patricia Allmer University of Edinburgh Maite Barragán Albright College Tessel Bauduin University of Amsterdam Bruce Baugh Thompson Rivers University María Clara Bernal University of the Andes Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen University of Copenhagen Paulina Caro Troncoso University of Edinburgh Madeleine Chalmers Durham University Jonathan P. Eburne Penn State University

x

Contributors

Cosana Eram University of the Pacific Miguel Escribano Independent Scholar Victoria Ferentinou University of Ioannina Krzysztof Fijalkowski Norwich University of the Arts Kerry Greaves, University of Copenhagen Andrea Gremels Goethe-Universität Rachael Grew Loughborough University Christina Heflin Royal Holloway University of London Marco Polo Juarez Cruz University of Maryland Riad Kherdeen University of California, Berkeley Elliott King Washington and Lee University Susan Laxton University of California, Riverside Natalya Lusty University of Melbourne Catriona McAra University of St. Andrews Melanie Nicholson Bard College Kristoffer Noheden Stockholm University Maia Nuku Metropolitan Museum of Art Theresa Papanikolas Seattle Art Museum Gavin Parkinson Courtauld Institute of Art

xi

Contributors

Jordan Reznick Bennington College Michael Richardson Goldsmiths, University of London Penelope Rosemont Surrealist Group in Chicago Rachel Silveri University of Florida Rochelle Spencer Independent Scholar Raymond Spiteri Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington Malynne Sternstein University of Chicago Abigail Susik Willamette University Pierre Taminiaux Georgetown University Lauren Walden Birmingham City University Anna Watz Linköping University Chinghsin Wu Rutgers University, Camden Gavin Yates Independent Scholar Sandra Zalman University of Houston

xii

FIGURES

7.1 Unknown photographer, “The Truth About the Colonies” installation view, c. 1931. 9.1 “Our collaborator Benjamin Péret insulting a priest.” Photograph by Marcel Duhamel, published in The Surrealist Revolution, no. 8 (December 1926). 11.1 Darren Thomas, The Sun (Becoming), 2021. Contribution to the analogical tarot game with the London Surrealist Group. 11.2 Salvador Dalí presents “bulletism” on an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, New York, New York, January 29, 1961. 12.1 Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien andalou film still, 1929. 14.1 Jacques-André Boiffard, Big Toe, Female Subject, 24 Years Old, illustration in Georges Bataille, “Le Gros orteil,” Documents, November 1929, p. 301. 16.1 Sam Durant, Poetry Must Be Made By All, Not By One, 2014. 17.1 Joseph Cornell, cover of Julien Levy’s book Surrealism, 1936. 18.1 Fateh al-Moudarres, Dancer of the Age, 1947. 22.1 Franklin and Penelope Rosemont at an anti-apartheid protest with Dennis Brutus and Ted Joans, 1986. 23.1 Zhao Shou, Taking Morning Tea (Yin zao cha), 1969. 26.1 Nikos Engonopoulos, Niko hora ruit (Nico Passes Time), 1939. 27.1 Lucia Hartini, The Eye, 1990. 30.1 Gherasim Luca, Andrea Mantegna Cubomania, undated. 31.1 Rita Kernn Larsen, Festen (The Party), 1935. 32.1 María Martins, Iacy, 1943, bronze. 33.1 Maruja Mallo, Antro de fósiles (Den of Fossils), oil on canvas, 1930. 36.1 Tlingit artist, House Partition with Shakes Family Crest, about 1840, Wood, paint, and human hair. 38.1 Toyen. La Carte absolue, 1965. Photomontage with drawing. 40.1 Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, I.O.U., 1930, photomontage introducing Chapter 9, in Claude Cahun, Aveux non avenus, Paris, 1930.

xiii

67 81 101 106 110 130 151 158 170 204 211 237 248 275 285 294 301 330 351 373

INTRODUCTION Kirsten Strom

I am sitting down to write at the end of 2021. It is an interesting time to be thinking about Surrealism. The centennial of André Breton’s first Manifesto of 1924 is now in the foreseeable future, and the recent past has already been characterized by a tangible surge of interest in Surrealism. This has been manifested, among other ways, by the founding of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, which has newly announced the publication of a forthcoming journal while also looking to host its fourth annual conference in 2022. The recent opening of the major Metropolitan/Tate Modern exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders also supports the notion that Surrealism is (already) having a rather significant moment, and these are but two examples (d’Alessandro and Gale). The timing of this volume’s production, however, also coincides with the ongoing global pandemic, soon to be endemic for two full years. As a consequence, its contributors have produced their entries in various stages of lockdown, often while navigating sudden demands for new online work modalities and managing equally sudden and demanding challenges in their personal lives, including homeschooling and the care of unwell loved ones, all with the looming anxiety of potential further complications and variants. Almost miraculously, the volume suffers very little as a result of these stressful conditions, which are nevertheless foremost in my mind as I extend my deeply felt and very nearly incredulous gratitude to all who contributed. In the context of the United States, the crises of the recent past have pointedly also included numerous patently unacceptable, and indeed literally lethal, instances of police racism and brutality, culminating in major protests affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement. Calls for the reimagining of societies characterized by structural racism have echoed well beyond demands for police reform, however. Indeed, renewed calls for equity and accountability have reverberated within the walls of institutions which have historically resisted rethinking the role that they may have played in being part of the problem. This, too, necessarily informs thinking about Surrealism in the twenties of this century. Surrealist protestations against colonialism and its racist underpinnings, as described here by Michael Richardson, reveal a genuine commitment to anti-racist thinking with many sharply pointed criticisms made many decades ago that remain relevant today. However, the fact that the Surrealists of the Parisian group in the 1920s embodied perspectives that were predominantly White, male, cis, heterosexual, and able-bodied is no longer an observation that can go without comment. DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-1

1

Kirsten Strom

In fact, it hasn’t been for some time. First- and second-wave feminist critiques of Surrealism, as summarized here by Anna Watz, have been highly influential in rethinking the hero-worshipping models of modernist art historical discourse. That these critiques, too, have not been without bias, that is, that they were primarily, if not exclusively, focused on cis and heterosexual (as well as White and able-bodied) women, is an important point emerging from Jordan Reznick’s discussion of trans perspectives (and their marginalization) within Surrealism. Insistent characterizations of Surrealism as problematically White and male, however, have themselves inadvertently functioned to perpetuate the exclusion of Surrealists who were (or are) women and/or people of Color. Penelope Rosemont’s Surrealist Women: An International Anthology and Robin Kelly and Franklin Rosemont’s Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora have made important strides in representing a more inclusive conception of Surrealism throughout the last hundred years. Implicit, if not explicit, within their positions is that Surrealism looks most White, and most male, when scholars look only at the European Surrealists of the decades between the two world wars. This has meant that while the question “What is Surrealism?” has seemed the most obvious one to pose, the questions “When is Surrealism?” and “Where is Surrealism?” are also relevant and not nearly as self-evident as has largely been assumed. What is becoming increasingly clear, in fact, is that the latter two are intertwined in the degree to which the imposition of a European sell-by date has precluded consideration of a variety of international iterations of Surrealism that did not make the 1945 cutoff for any number of valid reasons.1 Few would dispute the point that as a fully elaborated movement, Surrealism emerged in Paris in the 1920s with Breton as its figurehead. However, a near-exclusive focus on Bretonian Surrealism has had the consequence of reinforcing the narrative that Surrealism died on the vine after World War II, collapsing in some accounts with the death of Breton in 1966 or in others with the emergence of abstract expressionism, existentialism, or the Situationist International. In such narratives, the events of Paris in May of 1968 represent a brief posthumous revival, like a shooting star across the horizon. Assumptions within these narratives, however, cannot be taken to be neutral or self-evident. The idea that one ism, in this instance Surrealism, must invariably be overtaken by another ism is especially prevalent in art historical narratives, which infer that Surrealism was doomed to irrelevance the moment Jackson Pollock’s first drip landed upon canvas. In Paris, both Sartre and Debord actively disparaged Surrealism, doing so implicitly to advance their own claims to be heading the next wave of French intellectual discourse. This is perhaps particularly ironic in the instance of the Situationists, practitioners of dérive, détournement, and psychogeography, whose deep debt to Surrealism has been reflected upon here by authors including Pierre Taminiaux and Bruce Baugh. Further assumptions ripe for interrogation are also addressed by Tessel Bauduin, who has suggested that the privileging of origins is itself unnecessary and potentially detrimental. Rather than dispute the idea that Surrealism was first developed as a sustained and organized movement in Paris in the 1920s, Bauduin suggests that this point might not be of the kind of critical importance generally ascribed to it, and particularly that it does not justify the exclusion of other Surrealists on the grounds that they came to Surrealism “late,” or worse still, “too late.” There are, in my own view, still reasons to potentially regard Breton’s Parisian circle as a special case, for lack of a better term. Particularly, though not exclusively between the wars, the group was compellingly international (if not widely diverse in other ways), attracting to the French capital an unwieldy number of interested parties from varied parts of the world; throughout the interwar years, it was also consistently in the international public eye in a way that has perhaps not been entirely duplicated later or elsewhere. It was able to function as such 2

Introduction

as the principle node that connected Surrealist groups elsewhere, so while there may or may not have been connections between Surrealists in Madrid and Surrealists in Stockholm, or Surrealists in Fort-de-France and Surrealists in Tokyo or Athens, nearly all the various groups involved were connected to one another at least indirectly through contact with or knowledge of the group around Breton. (Rosemont’s discussion of the Chicago group, however, suggests very active efforts among various groups to connect with one another at least from the 1960s on.) My own position, then, is that while it is unacceptable to regard the interwar Parisian group as the only one that matters, there are plausible reasons for acknowledging it as having functioned historically as a kind of mother ship, though I will have more to say on this in a moment, and it is certainly also possible to imagine that my thinking on this subject will continue to evolve as the field itself continues to internationalize the conversation. The state of the discourse at the moment is such that I can easily imagine some readers regarding this position as uncontentious to the point of being obvious, with others receiving it as frustratingly academic and discouragingly conventional, another concession to the false dichotomy of centers and peripheries, in a world in which no one is peripheral to themselves. One perhaps more sympathetic reason that historians have been slow to look beyond Paris between the world wars is that there were a number of ways in which Breton’s Surrealism was deeply rooted in the French history, politics, literature, language, and culture of the time, arguably in spite of itself. Their contempt for the Catholic Church, for example, as discussed by Miguel Escribano, certainly does not resonate as profoundly in a country whose religious life has not been dominated by Catholicism for many centuries. Surrealism’s formation in the wake of World War I is also arguably essential to a historical understanding of the concept. Indeed, one of the more compelling aspects of the founding Surrealist project is that it established a method of being that insisted upon deep engagement with the urgencies of one’s time and place, however imperfect and biased their perception of such may now at times seem. That Surrealism nevertheless had and has great potential to be adapted to the urgencies of multiple contexts, however, is also among its strengths. We see this very movingly demonstrated in Rochelle Spencer’s discussion of contemporary artists adopting the politics and poetics of AfroSurrealism, wherein it is indeed possible to see a shared set of core values at work, one in which proximity to Breton is absolutely not essential, and Surrealism functions as a language of protest and desire that does not require permission to be spoken. The conditions that enabled Paris to function as a privileged “capital” of Surrealism were themselves products of a colonial history and an iniquitous redistribution of wealth to the predominantly White nations of the world. These conditions have not been eradicated—far from it—but the idea that global Surrealism may have ceased to have a defined geographical capital well past 1945 is indeed not necessarily a point to be mourned. Recent movements, such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, have also specifically sought not to have a defined figurehead but to operate on a model of power diffusion, which can be much more easily facilitated by the agility and spontaneity of social media than by the more conventional forms of publishing available to the Surrealists of the 1920s, however creatively they worked within those conventions (and however problematic social media platforms may otherwise be). These, then, have been among the considerations that have informed the content and the structure of this volume. Any attempt to streamline the messy complexities of history will necessarily be imperfect, and tensions will remain unresolved. I have made a decision to embrace a certain measure of tension by choosing to edit the contributions with a relatively light hand. In this way, it is my hope that the volume will read as a collaboration among scholars representing a variety of perhaps sometimes inconsistent viewpoints, rather than as the product of an auteuristic editorial vision. That said, my own perspectives and biases, both self-aware and 3

Kirsten Strom

un-self-aware, are inevitably present in the choice of topics and contributors as well as in the structure of the volume, for which I must bear the responsibility for both inclusions which may seem arbitrary and omissions, of which there are many. I will speak first to the inclusions and specifically to their organization. Clearly, part of the ongoing appeal of Surrealism as an object of scholarly inquiry and as a manner of being are both the depth and the breadth of its conceptual explorations. I have attempted to represent both by dedicating a significant portion of the volume to Surrealism’s key ideas and core principles. However, in the interests of retaining space for other considerations, I have paired most of what I see as related aesthetic, experiential, and psychological concepts (games and chance, magic and alchemy, etc.). Natalya Lusty, Susan Laxton, Andrea Gremels, Gavin Parkinson, Rachael Grew, and Kristoffer Noheden have all risen to the challenge of representing their respective topics admirably. That there are numerous intersections among these discussions is a testament to Surrealism’s complex and yet highly integrated nature. Part I also includes a subheading on major subjects of political protest: capitalism and colonialism; nationalism, militarism, and patriotism; Catholicism and family values. As with the previous section, these pairings may seem arbitrary, but Richardson, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, and Miguel Escribano have all offered insightful and nuanced observations on the ways in which they interrelate, and here, too, the end result is strikingly, if not unexpectedly, cohesive. Concluding this section on Surrealist concepts and practices are discussions of generative creative processes, one dedicated to verbal techniques and the other to visual methods. While Madeleine Chalmers’s and Elliot King’s very useful discussions are, by design, broad in scope, I have selected the indisputably iconic film Un Chien andalou to stand in for both Surrealism’s cinematic methods and for scholarly approaches to a more in-depth analysis, as is expertly embodied by Elza Adamowicz’s discussion. Part II, “Lessons from Paris,” betrays my own sympathy for the idea of interwar Paris as an important testing ground of ideas, or at a minimum, arguably still the most thoroughly documented testing ground of ideas in the present moment. The first subsection, “Tensions and Dissensions,” focuses on aspects of Parisian Surrealism honed in relation to a series of notorious conflicts: between André Breton and Tristan Tzara, Breton and Georges Bataille, and the Parisian Surrealists and the French Communist Party. Theresa Papanikolas, Raymond Spiteri, and Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen have very deftly unraveled the various tensions present in these conflicts. The second set of “lessons” pertains to Parisian Surrealism’s complex and often uncertain relationship to the public at large. Rachel Silveri’s piece on the Bureau of Surrealist Research pairs very effectively with Sandra Zalman’s text on the reception of Parisian Surrealism in New York. The former looks at the relationship between Surrealism and the public from the perspective of the Parisian Surrealists, attempting the difficult task of retaining ownership of their movement while opening its doors and broadening its base. Zalman’s text, by contrast, looks at the relationship on the receiving end from the perspective of the American institutions attempting to mediate Surrealism’s relationship to the public on their own distinct terms. Part III, “Situated Contexts: Translations and Adaptations,” looks at some, but certainly not all, of the varied ways Surrealism has established itself within a broad range of global contexts. There may perhaps come a time when nations, or even geography, more broadly, will cease to seem a legitimate method for organizing discussions of Surrealism, particularly in the sense of a Paris-and-the-rest model, which I have obviously not managed to subvert completely. In the present, however, I do find some value in thinking about the ways in which the ideas of Surrealism have been adapted and translated to suit the particular needs of local communities in 4

Introduction

historically situated contexts. In this way, both the patterns that emerge and the unique exceptions to them may be instructive. There are indeed a number of characteristics which have been identified by several authors. The first is some level of discomfort regarding the adoption of principles perceived as from without. We see this, for example, in Gavin Yates’s discussion of Surrealism and Australia, rather than Surrealism in Australia. Similar contextually specific hesitation is seen in Norway and, to a lesser extent, Denmark and Sweden, as Kerry Greaves has demonstrated. Tensions are especially pointed in contexts of lived colonial histories in which artists and intellectuals felt, with very good reason, oppressed by European ideals frustratingly insistent upon their own alleged advancement and superiority. That Surrealism seemed to emerge as a critique of European ideals from within Europe, however, made it alternately suspicious and intriguing, as Paulina Caro Troncoso’s discussion of Caribbean Surrealism indicates. Even within the context of Europe, however, a long history of cultural power dynamics favoring the products of Western European capitals has played a significant role in the initial resistance to Surrealism in countries such as Romania and Czechoslovakia, as described by Cosana Eram and Malynne Sternstein. What is clear, however, is that the creative strategies involved in adapting French Surrealism’s declared aims to the needs of these and other local contexts are an essential part of the history of Surrealism. This leads to a second recurring theme within these entries, which is that in many sites, interested parties identified Surrealist tendencies as already inherent within their own culture, well predating the emergence of the Parisian journals and Breton’s manifestos. Mexican “magical realism,” English romanticism, Daoism, and Sufism, for example, have been described by Melanie Nicholson, Christina Heflin, Lauren Walden, and Riad Kherdeen respectively as having traits perceived as pre- or proto-Surreal, further contesting the idea that Surrealism was itself a modern French invention (though it would certainly be going too far to suggest that any of the aforementioned could be entirely contained by an understanding of them as Surreal). A third pattern emerging from these texts is the replication of tensions between Surrealists and official Communist movements. This is evident, for example, in Chinghsin Wu’s discussion of Surrealism in Japan and the conflicts experienced with the proletarian art movement, and also in María Clara Bernal’s descriptions of heated debates in Peruvian journals, with accusations of Surrealism being decadent and bourgeois having a dishearteningly familiar ring. However, in the interwar period in particular, debates on the respective (and/or alleged) merits of Stalin and Trotsky played themselves out in ways in which local groups did not necessarily choose to fall in step with Breton, as Kherdeen, Taminiaux, and Heflin have indicated of the Cairo, Brussels, and London groups respectively. This suggests that perceiving themselves as at least potentially autonomous from Paris was important to the identities of some, if not all, of the groups outside of France. Easily the most discouraging of the recurrent themes, however, is that many Surrealist groups were made to endure authoritarian regimes in which Surrealism was forced underground. Discussions of groups in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Japan, and China, for example, all tell of painful decisions and oppressive consequences, as well as the political and psychological value of Surrealism as a set of strategies for fostering resistance and solidarity. There are, of course, also many compelling instances of unique cultural circumstances inflecting the reception and propagation of Surrealism. While Germany experienced one of the most brutal dictatorships of human history, Patricia Allmer describes a subsequent postwar fascination with Surrealism in West Germany, stemming at least in part from the Nazis’ merciless suppression. Other conditions, such as the trauma of the Spanish Civil War and the Parisian Surrealists’ indifference (if not hostility) toward the privileging of the Greek classical tradition, represent 5

Kirsten Strom

geographically specific circumstances that have resulted in unique variants or inflections of Surrealism, discussed here by Maite Barragán and Victoria Ferentinou respectively. Part IV is dedicated to “critical dialogues” and the sometimes-complex discourses surrounding them. Discussions of issues pertaining to gender and sexuality have been particularly prevalent in the literature, and they indeed provide a compelling opportunity to assess the nuances of Surrealism as a project that offered radical potential that it has not always historically lived up to. Abigail Susik’s discussion of androgyny outlines aspects of that very potential, while Watz’s and Reznick’s texts address issues and discourses stemming from male and cis Surrealist misogyny and transphobia. Whether such biases are necessarily integral or disappointingly but shortsightedly incidental to Surrealism’s identity is an open question. The affiliation of the Surrealist group in Chicago with the New Left certainly provides one model for Surrealism evolving in such a way that it becomes possible to imagine a contemporary Surrealism that would emphatically align itself with progressive ideals, including LGBTQ+ inclusion and advocacy. This in itself, however, does not excuse or erase the transgressions of the past. Hence, we are left with tensions that may well be unresolvable. Similar tensions remain in the seemingly inexplicable scorn for feminism as a platform displayed by many women who are all but feminist icons within Surrealism, one of many points discussed in a dialogue between Catriona McAra and Jonathan P. Eburne that seeks to pry into the numerous tensions surrounding charged and gendered constructions of the “muse” in Surrealism. Arguably, unresolvable tensions are equally present in the European Surrealists’ enthusiasm for anti-racist rhetoric that nevertheless did not manage to see past problems of primitivizing, essentializing, exoticizing, and appropriating from the “other,” as insightfully discussed by Maia Nuku and Marco Polo Juarez Cruz in their respective discussions of Oceanic and North American works in Surrealist collections. Here, too, there may be an element of anachronism in taking Surrealists of the past to task for not measuring up to ideas articulated in the language of more recent times, but the actual life-and-death urgency of contemporary discourses on racism provides a compelling case for not making excuses for past failings any longer. In that neither position directly refutes the other, these are conflicting but simultaneously valid positions. The final section of the volume, Part V, “Further Reaches,” explores the repercussions of Surrealism as a movement that has had a profound effect on contemporary art, history, and culture. The language of repercussions and reaches, rather than that of legacy or posthistory, is intended to reflect the idea that regardless of whether one regards Surrealism as over, its influence has and continues to be profound and pervasive, often in the work of many who have never self-identified as Surrealist. Discussions by Baugh and Craig Adcock specifically speak to some of the many ongoing ways in which Surrealism changed the languages of intellectual history and theory and contemporary art. Furthering this discussion, Spencer’s discussion of the work of four recent artists also takes its place here, though it has important ties with themes from other sections as well. The concluding element of this section is collaborative: a Surrealist-style questionnaire addressed to the contributors of this volume, posing the question, “Looking to the centennial of Breton’s Manifesto, what sort of hope do you place in Surrealism in 2024?” Many will recognize this as a reference to a Parisian Surrealist inquiry of 1929, in which the group posed the question, “What sort of hope do you place in love?” (The Surrealist Revolution no. 12). I am deeply grateful to those contributors who chose to share their ideas and to contribute thoughtfully to this inquiry. Following this brief summary of the topics included in this volume, I  would also like to acknowledge some of its omissions, many being decidedly unfortunate. In an effort to at least partially redress these omissions, I will refer readers to a sampling of relevant existing works. 6

Introduction

Firstly, I have certainly not exhausted the list of global Surrealist groups. The Beyond Borders catalog is an important reference for work on cities, countries, and regions that have not been included here (Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines, etc.). Interesting work on a number of “peripheries” within the Euro-North American “center,” including, for example, Wales and Alabama, is also recently published or forthcoming by Jean Bonnin and Stephen Harris, respectively. Cities, states, and countries, including Montreal, Rio de la Plata, Portugal, Leeds, Turkey, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and St. Louis, are all included in a list of contemporary Surrealist centers with links on surrealismgr.blogspot.com, the webpage of the contemporary Athens Surrealist Group page, while the introduction to Black, Brown, and Beige cites additional centers in Amsterdam, Portland, New York, Baltimore, Detroit, Harrisburg, Vancouver, Belgrade, and Tunis, which are otherwise unmentioned within this volume (5). Expanded discussions of Surrealism through the lens of queer studies would certainly also have been desirable, which I fear is something of an understatement. Relevant works for further inquiry may include C. F. B. Miller’s “Surrealism’s Homophobia,” Karla Huebner’s “Fire Smoulders in the Veins: Toyen’s Queer Desire and Its Roots in Prague Surrealism,” and Peter Dubé’s Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism. I must also take responsibility for neglecting until the very late stages of the process to fully realize that disability studies is another important scholarly lens that should be fully integrated into Surrealist discourses, particularly with regard to the Surrealists’ alternately liberatory and problematic attitudes toward mental illness, as manifested perhaps most blatantly in Breton’s Nadja and in Breton and Aragon’s celebration of the fiftieth “anniversary” of hysteria. This attitude is widely acknowledged by scholars of Surrealism, who, however, do not necessarily come from a background in the methodologies of disability studies. Critiques of the atypical representation of bodies in Surrealist art implicitly privileging a normative body may also be ripe for interrogation, with Amanda Cachia’s Disabling Surrealism: Reconstituting Surrealist Tropes in Contemporary Art providing useful critical perspectives. Finally, the discussions of Surrealism’s ongoing repercussions could easily have included many more topics. Essays on the influence of Surrealism in cinema, popular culture, fashion, counterculture, so-called “pop Surrealism,” etc. might all have been explored had the manuscript’s word count and due date been without limit. There is doubtless interesting work on these topics still to be done, but sources that might be consulted at present include Michael Richardson’s Surrealism and Cinema, Richard Martin’s Fashion and Surrealism, Marija Kertakova “The Influence of Ideas of Surrealism in Fashion Design,” and Kirsten Anderson’s Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art. Among the negative consequences of Surrealism’s broad-ranging influence, however, has been the widespread commodification of its aesthetic and the watering down of its premises into a style of innocuous strangeness. The latter has been recently addressed by the contemporary Surrealist Group of Paris, whose declaration of January 16, 2022, condemns the appropriation of [Surrealism’s] techniques by the dabblers of contemporary art . . . leading to the manufacture of a Surrealism without soil, where so many artists, who produce vaguely oneiric imagery, quite unabashedly proclaim themselves “Surrealists,” without grasping what this denomination implies, as if they claimed membership in a vulgar aesthetic school.2 This concern provides an opportunity to address an overarching editorial decision that I have made to consistently capitalize the term Surrealism (except in quotations in which it was uncapitalized in the original). This is not a universal practice within the field, and it may seem a 7

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technical point, but there is a meaningful reason for this decision, namely, that it is a method of distinguishing Surrealism as an intentional set of practices and convictions from the broader use of the term surreal in popular parlance. In the US, if not also elsewhere, it is commonplace to hear experiences such as appearing on a reality television show or winning a medal at the Olympics described as surreal. I have also recently heard Vladimir Putin’s current invasion of Ukraine described as surreal. I cannot even bring myself to comment further on this point. Recent discussions of the repatriation of African objects in European and American museums, such as Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy’s state-sponsored “Report on the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage” and Mwazulu Diyabanza’s very much unsponsored staging of the “theft” of African objects from European museums, are among the important reminders that historically colonized, marginalized, and oppressed groups must be given equitable opportunities to represent themselves. I am particularly thankful to those contributors who have enabled the volume to represent such perspectives. I would also like to extend a special thanks to the many contributors who wrote their texts in English as a second language. Finally, I will conclude my introduction with an acknowledgment that it was composed on the land of the Council of the Three Fires: the Odawa, the Ojibwa, and the Potawatomie.

Notes 1. The question “Who is Surrealism?” also deserves to be asked, even if it promptly raises more questions, including but not limited to: Is self-description required, or is it acceptable to allow the work to speak for the creator? Is group participation a necessity (a position typically left unstated but apparently taken for granted)? What are the risks of “appointing” people Surrealists, and what are the consequences of omitting them on the grounds of needlessly stringent criteria? (Nunes, Kelly, and Moten). Looking to the Bretonian circles for precedent does little to clarify, as ejected group members, notably Robert Desnos, refused to be stripped of the title, while many others, such as Frida Kahlo and Leonor Fini, refused to accept it or, at a minimum, to allow it to define them. 2. I am grateful to Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson for bringing this declaration to my attention.

Works Cited Anderson, Kirsten. Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art. Last Gasp, 2004. Bonnin, Jean. Surrealism in Wales. Black Egg, 2022. Cachia, Amanda. Disabling Surrealism: Reconstituting Surrealist Tropes in Contemporary Art. Routledge, 2016. D’Alessandro, Stephanie, and Matthew Gale, editors. Surrealism Beyond Borders. Yale University Press, 2021. Dubé, Peter. Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism. Rebel Satori Press, 2008. Huebner, Karla. “Fire Smoulders in the Veins: Toyen’s Queer Desire and Its Roots in Prague Surrealism.” Wright State University, Art and Art History Faculty Publications, Spring 2010. Kelly, Robin G., and Franklin Rosemont. Black, Brown, Beige. University of Texas Press, 2009. Kertakova, Marija. “The Influence of Ideas of Surrealism in Fashion Design.” Tekstilna Industrija, January 2019. Martin, Richard. Fashion and Surrealism. Rizzoli, 1987. Miller, C.F.B. “Surrealism’s Homophobia.” October, vol. 173, Summer 2020, pp. 207–229. Nunes, Zita Cristina, Robin G. Kelley, and Fred Moten. “On Black, Brown, and Beige.” Metropolitan Museum of Art, Surrealism Beyond Borders Virtual Symposium, 20 January 2022. Richardson, Michael. Surrealism and Cinema. Bloomsbury, 2006. Rosemont, Penelope. Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. University of Texas Press, 1998. Sarr, Felwine, and Bénédicte Savoy. “Report on the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage.” Seuil, 2018. Surrealist Group of Paris. “Au pied aile de la letter: Surrealism at 100.” 16 January 2022.

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PART I

Concepts and Practices

Exploratory Themes

1 DREAMS AND HUMOUR Natalya Lusty

Introduction The turn to psychoanalysis in Surrealism was predicated on the discovery of new forms of unalienated desire that would be harnessed to aesthetic and political transformation. Breton envisioned Surrealism as a revolution of the mind, with dreams to play an important role in shifting the contours of both everyday perception and aesthetic practice. In the inaugural Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), Breton argued for a new kind of Surrealist consciousness, indeed, a new kind of avant-garde movement, which would combine the seemingly contradictory states of dream and reality: “Surrealism is based on the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought” (26). While the early experiments with automatic writing bore the blueprint of Freud’s theory of the unconscious, increasingly Freud’s ideas (on dreams, humour, the uncanny, and sexuality) manifested themselves diffusely across a wide range of Surrealist activities and writings, in what Adorno referred to as “the luxuriant diversity of surrealism” (32). There is almost no Surrealist activity that does not reference dreams, from Dalí’s painted dreamscapes (which he suggested resembled hand-painted dream photographs) and Buñuel and Dali’s oneiric cacophony, Un Chien andalou (1929), to the extensive recording of dreams that took place at the Bureau of Surrealist Research in the early days of the movement. If dreams were associated from the very beginning of the movement with an emphasis on the free play of the imagination, humour, in its various absurdist manifestations, a legacy of Dada, and in its new macabre form as “black humour” would be given extended theorization and a historical lineage in Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour. While the Anthology was slow to be given appropriate recognition as an important contribution to the critical work carried out under the auspices of Surrealism (Polizzotti), there is no doubt that it shaped the distinctiveness of black humour as an enduring, if not elastic, category, soon to be evident in a great deal of popular visual culture that followed. From Monty Python’s absurdist and subversive comedy to the domestically macabre humour of David Lynch, black humour has entered the common lexicon via the catchphrase “surreal humour.” More recently, black humour has been resurrected by Glenda Carpio in the context of post–civil rights depictions of slavery, where it is given extensive coverage through contemporary humourists such as Richard Pryor and Dave Chapelle, who use “dark satire” to DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-3

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highlight racial injustice, or visual artists such Kara Walker and Robert Colescott, who lampoon the iconography of slavery as an antidote to academic earnestness and genteel pretentions. As Carpio shows, this type of Black American humour is “a source of creativity and pleasure and an energetic mode of social and political critique” (22) that has much in common with what Robin D. G. Kelley has identified as the “freedom dreams” tied to both a radical imagination and an equally radical politics.

Dream Experiments Man Ray’s iconic photograph Waking Dream Sequence (1924), published on the cover of the first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste, captures the important role of dreams in driving Surrealism’s early experimental ethos. The photo, taken inside the Bureau of Surrealist Research, depicts an attentive group of male Surrealists gathered around a typewriter, with a seated Simone Breton poised to record one of Robert Desnos’s waking dream performances, or “sleeping fits.” The photograph evokes Surrealism’s early fascination with unconscious activity in the service of automatic writing, with the contents of the waking dream transcribed for posterity and published in the same issue as Man Ray’s photograph, along with a collection of transcribed dream reports, including children’s dreams. Before Surrealism became a full-fledged movement, Breton and other members of the group had been exploring dream states and altered psychic phenomena. Much of this activity was recorded in Breton’s essay “The Mediums Enter” (1922), which outlines various experiments with hypnotic slumbers and trance experiences in what was referred to as the “period of sleeps” that lasted from 1922 to 1923. Breton’s essay provides one of the earliest accounts of the significance of the dream state for various collaborative Surrealist activities, if not an early definition of “Surrealism” avant la lettre: To a certain degree it is generally known what my friends and I mean by Surrealism. We use the word, which we did not coin . . . in a precise sense . . . to designate a certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the dream state, a state that is currently very hard to limit. (90) The group’s activities at this point drew on ideas that predated Freud’s work on dreams, principally Pierre Janet’s pioneering book on dissociative disorders, L’Automatisme Psychologique (1989), where he had first coined the term subconscious to understand automatic phenomena that went beyond conscious awareness. Sympathetic to spiritualism but wanting to find a psychological explanation for automatic phenomena such as somnambulism, automatic writing, and hallucination, Janet’s early work focused on a consciousness that lay below or outside normal awareness. As such, Janet linked the medium’s or mesmerist’s powers to the hysteric’s traumainduced disassociation manifested as somatic or affective states, both eliciting evidence of psychic fragmentation or what he referred to as multiple or split personalities.1 While Janet’s work evidently inspired proto-Surrealist experiments with hypnotic slumbers and automatic writing, eventually Breton grew increasingly anxious about the contamination of these activities with the popular and widespread fascination with spiritualism in the postwar period. By the time we get to the first manifesto a few years later, Freud would replace Janet and come to play a prominent role in shaping Breton’s interest in dreams and other psychic phenomenon, and indeed in giving the movement’s interest in unconscious phenomena a more modern scientific template. 12

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Man Ray’s photograph nevertheless provides a striking visual record of the collective experimental culture that permeated the Bureau of Surrealist Research. Colloquially referred to as Centrale Surréaliste, the Bureau was a brief experiment (operating from October 1924 to April 1925) that served as the Surrealist’s headquarters and initially opened to interested members of the public before serving as the editorial office for La Revolution Surréaliste. Louis Aragon’s prose poem essay “A Wave of Dreams” (1924) provides a discursive account of “the era of collective hallucinations,” conveying the importance of dream life for Surrealism’s emancipatory ethos: At its starting point Surrealism rediscovers the dream . . . for the first time since the world began, when André Breton writes down his dreams they retain the characteristics of dreaming in the telling.  .  .  . And Robert Desnos learns to dream without sleeping. He contrives to speak his dreams at will. Dreams, dreams, dreams, with each step the domain of dreams expands. (6) “A Wave of Dreams” also pays homage to the Bureau as a communal dream house, where the public shares their “weighty secrets” in what Aragon describes as “romantic lodgings for unclassifiable ideas and revolutions in progress” (10). Although the Surrealist Bureau was short-lived, it was a unique experiment that combined psychic research, lay ethnography, and early forms of Surrealist display culture centred on themed environments and public performances. But its brevity revealed the difficulty in opening up the experimental ambitions of an avant-garde coterie to the broader public sphere. And yet its attempts to understand the significance of dream life for everyday experience would prove to be inspirational for the Mass-Observation movement’s own creation of a dream archive. Established in 1937 and driven by the application of the general concepts of French Surrealism to English art and culture alongside the tools of anthropology, sociology, and psychology, Mass-Observation developed what we might call an expanded Surrealist ethnography to understand the everyday life of ordinary citizens in midcentury Britain. Attempting to capture a snapshot of the habits, sentiments, beliefs, and rituals of the masses, Mass-Observation gathered attitudes to a range of topics, from the arcane to the prosaic, including anti-Semitism, bathroom behaviour, female taboos about eating, funerals and  undertakers, flu epidemics, telephone etiquette, and so on. The collection of dream diaries and dream reports that formed the extensive dream archive topic collection borrows in ­profound ways from Surrealism’s early ethnographic investigations into dream life at the Bureau of Surrealist Research.2

Breton, Freud, and Dreams Two Surrealist publications significantly preoccupied with dreams in ways that assisted in shaping a new kind of aesthetic idiom for Surrealism were the inaugural Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) and Communicating Vessels (1932). Together, these works trace Breton’s shifting understanding of Freud’s work on dreams and its importance for the movement’s developing preoccupations. Manifesto of Surrealism unequivocally flags Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as seminal to a fuller appreciation of the nonrational vicissitudes governing everyday experience. If, for Freud, dreams represented the royal road to the unconscious, one that stressed an interpretive model of the mysteries of unconscious life, even if he gave it a decidedly poetic quality, Breton accentuated the imaginative impetus of the dream, seeing it as a harbinger of both the creative process and a way to unleash emancipatory forms of individual and collective desire. Indeed, at this point, Breton gave the role of dreams an elevated sense of importance, describing 13

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them as a “superior reality,” asking emphatically, “Can’t the dream be used in solving all the fundamental problems of life?” (12). When Breton penned Manifesto of Surrealism, he had only encountered Freud’s work through his reading of Emmanuel Régus and Angelo Hesnard’s La psychoanalyse des névroses et des psychoses (1914), the first book in France to provide an overview of Freud’s theory of dreams in the context of clinical work with abnormal psychological states, which Breton had encountered as a medical intern during the war. It was only after he had penned Manifesto that Breton encountered Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), as it was not translated into French until 1925. Communicating Vessels, the second instalment of Breton’s Parisian trilogy, which like Nadja and Mad Love, the first and last in the trilogy, provides an extensive examination of “objective chance” in the context of Breton’s urban wandering and intimate life. It also offers a first-hand engagement with The Interpretation of Dreams. In striking ways, Communicating Vessels follows the structure of Freud’s dream book, albeit in condensed form, by working its way through both popular and philosophical theories of dreaming, going on to record and analyse his dreams, as indeed Freud does in his own dream book. But here, the two works depart quite significantly. While Freud was interested in the potentially therapeutic outcome of dream interpretation, Breton endeavours to show how the desires informing nonrational dream life correspond to the everyday manifestations of “objective chance” as it shapes the subjective disorientation of everyday urban life. In this way, Breton’s aim is not to abandon ordinary life, by elevating dream life, something which he came close to doing in the Manifesto, but to show how the logic of the dream also governs the logic of our experiential life. Breton writes, “The splitting of human life into action and dream . . . is purely a formal division, a fiction” (115). Communicating Vessels sets out to reveal what Breton defined as the “capillary tissue” (139) that connects the psychic life of the mind with the exterior world of experience and desire, aligning the maze-like journey of Breton’s urban wandering with the dream’s own complex psychic cartography, outlined by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. In much the same way that Freud created a science out of his own self-analysis, Breton uses his dreams to furnish evidence of the necessity of overcoming the split between action and dream or, indeed, politics and poetry, which preoccupied Breton throughout the 1930s.

Dreams and Film As Laura Marcus contends, “the visual medium or ‘apparatus’ with which dreaming has the most striking affinities is film” (1999: 34), arguing that it is no coincidence that psychoanalysis and cinema emerged simultaneously at the end of the nineteenth century. Breton, in his “Lightning Rod” introduction to the Anthology of Black Humour, similarly notes how cinema as a form had to encounter humour from the very start, given the extreme situations it is often forced to represent, as a way to attract the viewer. Identifying certain films of Chaplin and the comedies of Mack Sennett as well as the anarchic humour of Million Dollar Legs (1932) and the Marx Brothers’ film Animal Crackers (1930) as exemplary of cinema’s successful turn to humour, it is Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’or (1930) that are symptomatic of what Breton defines as “the bottom of the mental grotto” (24). Here Breton hints at the murky depths of psychic life conveyed by both black humour and the dreaming mind. Indeed, Un Chien Andalou is striking for the way it captures the dark, and at times violent, humour of the dream’s images rather than an exegetical distillation of its content. In so doing, it becomes the first such film to cinematically enact the dream state in visual terms, which for Breton made it “the first true Surrealist film” (“Radio Interview with André Parinaud” 123).

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While Buñuel claimed that the film “amalgamated the aesthetics of Surrealism with Freudian discoveries” (56), the philosopher and psychoanalyst J. B. Pontalis has suggested that the Surrealists’ approach to dreams was fundamentally different to Freud’s. According to Pontalis, “[t]here has not been enough emphasis on the primary nature of the visible in the dream: the dream makes visible, and gives its visible place to the déjà vu, which has become visible.” Pontalis thus likens the dream to “a picture made up of pieces, a collage” (128). If, as Pontalis argues, Freud tended to neglect the visual form of the dream at the expense of its interpretation, the Surrealists were captivated by not merely the interpretation of the dream but the visual dislocation afforded by dream images as well as the profound correspondences between dreams and everyday life. Rather than try to interpret the meaning of dreams, Un Chien Andalou presents the dream sequence as a visual spectacle, using montage to draw out the spatiotemporal repetitions (or déjà vu in Pontalis’s reading) and discontinuities that inform actual dream scenarios. Through its highly skilled timing of editing cuts, the film creates what Gilles Deleuze calls the “dreamimage” in cinema, a series of concrete objects that are transposed throughout the film. Beginning with the iconic opening scene of a cloud sliced by the moon dissolving into an eyeball being sliced by a razor, the film proceeds to depict the causality principle of the dream as a series of visual homologies (ants crawling in the palm of a hand become underarm hair and then a sea urchin; breasts become buttocks; the crown of hair on the head dissolves into a circular crowd shot from above). In this way, the film does not interpret dream images but rather performs the vivid dislocations of the unconscious dreaming mind, providing what P. Adams Sitney later defined as “a theoretical application of cinema to the experience of the dream” (13).

Surrealist Humour If Freud had been an important early influence on the role that dreams would occupy in the Surrealist movement, Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) also occupies a significant place in Breton’s endeavour to define the concept of black humour in his Anthology of Black Humour. Breton began work on Anthology as early as the mid-1930s, but it would not be released into the world until four years after it had been printed, having failed to acquire approval from the Vichy censors. Curiously, the idea for the anthology did not come from Breton but from Léon Pierre-Quint, the editorial director of Editions du Sagittaire, who suggested the project, along with his editorial assistant, when Breton found himself in need of funds to support the impending birth of his child with Jacqueline Lamba (Polizotti 112). But as if to thwart Breton’s rare foray into publication for direct financial gain, Editions du Sagittaire was about to become bankrupt, and the book was subsequently passed from publisher to publisher before encountering the Vichy censors, where it languished without distribution for a further five years. It is thus with some irony that one of the few Surrealist publications to be censored would be a book on black humour and that in the end, far from bringing Breton financial security, it remained unavailable to the public until 1945. By then, many of the Surrealists, including Breton, had decamped to the United States, and Anthology was initially met with hostile indifference. Despite the protracted publication history, Anthology would eventually assume a kind of cult status as a key to Surrealism’s various aesthetic categories, even if the concept of black humour has remained elusive. Breton’s “Lightning Rod” introduction to Anthology attempts to provide a coherent definition of black humour. In much the same way that Breton takes us through the extant writing on dreams in Communicating Vessels only to find them wanting, Breton begins by underscoring his dissatisfaction with Paul Valéry’s reticence in pinning down the definition of humour as well

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as Aragon’s extensive, and somewhat earnest, account of humour’s many surreal expressions. While dismissing these accounts as overly vague and too particular, respectively, Breton nevertheless concedes the difficulty of pinning down an adequate definition rather than merely pointing to extant manifestations. Breton, however, finally settles on a quote by his initial publisher, Pierre-Quint, that avows humour as “the absolute revolt of adolescence and the internal revolt of adulthood,” quickly adding in emphasis, “a superior revolt of the mind” (22), one of the most iconic lines from Manifesto of Surrealism. Breton thus pays homage to Pierre-Quint as one of the instigators of the project whilst simultaneously resurrecting the first manifesto, at once signalling Anthology as a collective endeavour and black humour as a Surrealist concept deeply tied to its originary ethos of revolt. It is Freud, however, that is given fulsome elaboration throughout the “Lightning Rod” essay and in the various introductions to the individual writers represented in Anthology. Quoting from Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Breton is drawn to Freud’s observation that humour is essentially rebellious: Like wit and the comic, humour has in it a liberating element. But it also has something fine and elevating. . . . Obviously what is fine about it is the triumph of narcissism, the ego’s victorious assertion of its own invulnerability. It refuses to be hurt by the arrows of reality or to be compelled to suffer. It insists that it is impervious to wounds dealt by the outside world, in fact, that these are merely occasions for affording it pleasure. (Freud quoted in “Lightning Rod” 24) As Breton reads Freud, the power of humour rests in being able to convert pain into pleasure by virtue of displacing the ego’s reality principle with the superego’s paternalistic protection of psychic overinvestment and in the process produces “a peculiarly liberating and elevating effect” (25). Breton goes on to report Freud’s own illustration of “gallows humour,” whereby a prisoner being led to the gallows on a Monday quips, “ ‘What a way to start the week!’ ” (24). But as black humour cannot be merely reduced to gallows humour, or indeed an egoistic economizing of psychic energy, Breton enlists Hegel’s concept of “objective humour” as an aesthetic category that gives an outward, socially objective cast to humour’s more Freudian, ego-dependent guise. Breton alludes to his earlier discussion of these themes in his essay “Surrealist Situation of the Object” (1935), where he describes the coming together of “the black sphinx of objective humour” and “the white sphinx of objective chance” (23). In combining Freud and Hegel in this way, Breton had endeavoured to defend Surrealism from charges of mysticism, arguing instead for a dialectical encounter of interior and exterior life, of perception and representation, so that “objective chance” works as a social and aesthetic category to disrupt mere surface appearances. By the end of his essay, however, Breton is still at a loss to pin down a precise definition, preferring to tell us what black humour is not, namely, “the mortal enemy of sentimentality” which “vainly persists in inflicting its outmoded artifices on the mind” (25). But as Susan Rubin Suleiman observes, “[i]t is in his choice of authors and texts as much as in any explicit statement that Breton clarifies what he means by black humour” (2). Beginning with Jonathan Swift, who Breton defines as “the true initiator” (29) of black humour, the anthology provides a historical sweep of authors already enamoured in the Surrealist canon, including de Sade, Charles Fourier, Thomas de Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Isadore Ducasse (Comte de Lautréamont), and Arthur Rimbaud, before ending with the Surrealist humourists and their close conspirators. Arthur Craven is represented as much for his Dada antics as he is for his passionate championing of boxing over literature in his imagined dialogue with André Gide; Franz Kafka

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is lauded for asking “the capital questions of all time: where are we going, what are we subject to, what is the law?” in an atmosphere of humour and despair (311); Marcel Duchamp is represented as “a genius,” offering us a series of aphorisms informed by the “ ‘realm of coincidence,’ ” akin to his ready-made objects (331); Hans Arp gives us “Bestiary with No First Name,” which “seems inclined to sensitize us to the partly aerial, largely subterranean world that the mind, like the plant, explores by means of feelers” (336); Jacques Vaché, the inventor of Umour, is celebrated for his refusal tout court (348); Salvador Dali, the inventor of the paranoid-critical method, is described as the paragon of pleasure rebelling against reality (380); and Leonora Carrington is the apotheosis of the “modern ‘marvelous’ ” with her “smooth mocking gaze” and “throaty voice” giving us, in Michelet’s words, “the illuminism of lucid madness” (393–394). In other words, Breton’s disparate transhistorical selection covers the spectrum of humour’s forms, from the absurd and the ironic to the macabre and nihilistic. But as Doug Haynes argues, despite this eclecticism, black humour, as it is given shape via the various excerpts and introductions in Anthology, “sets out to expose the ‘bad conscience’ of a dominant discourse” (39). As a collective voice, albeit reflecting Breton’s partiality in what he calls “the black tournament of humour” (25), Anthology speaks to Surrealism’s investment in ridiculing the conventions of literature and conventional social values.

Feminist Black Humour and the Domestic Surreal In her essay “Surrealist Black Humour: Masculine/Feminine,” Suleiman asks the salient question, “Is black humour a man’s business?” (2) or more specifically, “[H]ow does taking account of women’s black humour inflect our understanding of Surrealist black humour or Surrealism generally?” (10).3 Given only two women are represented in Anthology, Leonora Carrington and Gisèle Prassinos, critics have tended to either point to their presence for Breton as either an afterthought (Carrington was added with the second edition) or as exemplary of an innate connection to the macabre sources of black humour (as black humour’s muse). And while much has been written on Carrington’s subversive humour and her exemplary place in Anthology, less on Prassinos, I want to conclude by examining black humour in the realm of the domestic surreal, where for artists such as Carrington and her close friend, Remedios Varo, black humour is exhibited in decidedly feminist ways across a range of art forms and practices. Two examples illustrate this kind of subgenre of what I define (with as much partiality as Breton) feminist black humour, Leonora Carrington’s children’s book The Milk of Dreams (2013) and Remedios Varo’s “A Recipe: How to Produce Erotic Dreams” from her book De Homo Rodens (1970). The domestic surreal in these works exhibit black humour in the context of women’s everyday life, including looking after and entertaining children and cooking, all the while creating a life as a working artist. In these works, everyday rituals such as cooking and storytelling are cast with a macabre, even violent, sensibility. Carrington’s collection of tales, The Milk of Dreams, redefines the nursery tale by offering us absurd and macabre stories devoid of moral instruction but which match the absurd and fanciful world of children’s make-believe. Remedios Varo’s “A Recipe: How to Produce Erotic Dreams” drolly hints at the axiomatic place of dreams and eroticism in the Surrealist canon so that from the outset the evident black humour resides in the reduction of the erotic dream, so prized in the Surrealist canon, to the level of the procedural recipe, albeit one consisting of both prosaic and alchemical elements: “One kilo black radishes; three white hens; one head of garlic; four kilos honey; one mirror; two calf ’s livers; one brick; two clothes pins; one whalebone corset; two false moustaches; two hats of your choice” (280). The instructions that follow draw out the elaborate and time-consuming nature of domestic

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life, ironically flagging the onerous nature of women’s labours, in the kitchen and in the bedroom. We are given instructions on sourcing the right kind of fowl feathers to avoid “prolonged nymphomania” and helpful hints to “relax your nerves” with “moustaches and hats” once the whalebone corset is tightly laced. Varo’s recipe caters to a variety of sexual tastes, with instructions for placing “the warm livers in place of a pillow (in cases of masochism) or on both sides of the bed, within reach (for cases of sadism)” (282). Lampooning domestic advice books for women, an early form of the self-help genre, Varo’s “simple recipe” is exacting of a certain Surrealist orthodoxy even as it exemplifies a distinct Surrealist black humour in its repudiation of an ordinary domestic life. That measure of complicity and resistance is a mark of feminist black humour under the orbit of Surrealism or what Suleiman describes as “a position . . . between appreciation and critique, between repetition and renewal” (10). As it turns out, black humour is a timeless and enduring category, nevertheless shaped in distinctive ways by Surrealism as an arch weapon against conformism. And like our dreams, it archly refuses a self-evident and utilitarian apprehension of the world.

Notes 1. See Gibson for a discussion of Janet and Surrealism. 2. See Groth and Lusty for a discussion of Surrealism and the Mass-Observation dream archive; see Miller for a discussion of the relationship between Surrealism and Mass-Observation. 3. This question was first raised by Mireille Rosello in her book devoted to Anthology, although Suleiman extends the question along the lines of masculine and feminine forms of humour.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. “Surrealism Reconsidered.” The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk, edited by Susan H. Gillespie, University of Minnesota Press, 2015, pp. 31–35. Aragon, Louis. “A  Wave of Dreams” (1924). Translated by Susan de Muth, Papers of Surrealism, no. 1, Winter 2003, pp. 1–12. Breton, André. Anthology of Black Humour (1940). Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Telegram, 2009. ———. Communicating Vessels (1932). Translated by Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris, University of Nebraska Press, 1990. ———. Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, University of Michigan Press, 1969. ———. “The Mediums Enter” (1922). The Lost Steps. University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Carpio, Glenda. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humour in the Fictions of Slavery. Oxford University Press, 2008. Carrington, Leonora. The Milk of Dreams. New York Review of Books, 2013. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by Joyce Crick, Oxford University Press, 1999. Gibson, Jennifer. “Surrealism Before Freud: Dynamic Psychiatry’s ‘Simple Recording Instrument’.” Art Journal, vol. 46, no. 1, 1987, pp. 56–60. Groth, Helen and Natalya Lusty. “The Dream Archive: Mass-Observation and Everyday Life.” Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History, Routledge, 2013, pp. 148–177. Haynes, Doug. “The Persistence of Irony: Interfering with Surrealist Black Humour.” Textual Practice, vol. 20, no. 1, 2006, pp. 25–47. Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon Press, 2018. Marcus, Laura. “Introduction: Histories, Representations, Autobiographies in Laura Marcus, ed., The Interpretation of Dreams.” Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. 1–65. Miller, Tyrus. “Surrealism and Mass Observation.” Surrealism: Cambridge Critical Concepts, edited by Natalya Lusty, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 310–324. Polizzotti, Mark. “Introduction: Laughter in the Dark.” Anthology of Black Humour, edited by André Breton, Telegram, 2009, pp. 9–15.

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Dreams and Humour Pontalis, J-B. “Dream Object.” International Review of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 1, no. 25, 1974, pp. 125–133. Rosello, Mireille. L’Humour Noir selon André Breton. Librarie José Corti, 1987. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “Surrealist Black Humour: Masculine/Feminine.” Papers of Surrealism, vol. 1, Winter 2003, pp. 1–11. Varo, Remedios. “A Recipe: How to Produce Erotic Dreams.” Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, edited by Penelope Rosemont, University of Texas Press, 1998, pp. 279–282.

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2 PLAY, GAMES, AND CHANCE Susan Laxton

If there is, in Surrealism, one form of activity whose persistence has stirred the ­hostility of idiots, it is the activity of play, which can be traced across the majority of our publications of the last thirty-five years. —André Breton, “L’un dans l’autre” (50)

Looking back on Surrealism from the 1950s, André Breton regarded play as a kind of through line, gnarled but unbroken, linking the disparate array of Surrealist practices across shifts in politics, estrangements, and fealties, indeed, across the vast historical and artistic changes of the first half of the twentieth century. Play was present in the nascent movement well before the Surrealists drafted their manifesto, when, in the period we now call the époque floue, Breton pursued the sexual potential of linguistic form through the ludic undermining of meaning, conflating play with desire: “[L]et it be quite understood,” he wrote, “that when we say ‘word play,’ it is our surest reasons for living that are being put into play. Words, furthermore, have finished playing games. Words are making love” (Breton, “Words” 102). From that moment, the ludic in its various forms so permeated the Surrealist movement that, as one historian has put it, play became “more than an activity; it was also an attitude and a value, a way of living and a mode of being” (Garrigues 9). Yet the very ubiquity of the ludic in Surrealism makes this already-slippery term almost impossible to define, even within this limited context. Surrealist play can be as open-ended as wandering and as regulated as games, as collaborative as the exquisite corpse game and as solitary as the practice of objective chance, as random as automatic writing and as motivated as a parapraxis, as forgiving as the technique of grattage and as cruel as the truth game. But this arch indeterminacy is fundamental to the ludic concept itself; if there is any generalization at all that can be made about play, it is that, paradoxically, it is grounded in indeterminacy: play performs exactly what it describes. As such, for the Surrealists, it became at once an ideal embodiment of the irrational structure of the unconscious and a technique for automatically eliciting it. Given the pervasiveness of play in Surrealism (and the consistency of its inconsistencies), the Surrealist movement itself can be understood as fundamentally ludic, always chasing the tensions of incompossible language, objects, and ­experiences in order to loosen the grip of rationality on the human imagination. Ultimately,

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-4

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what the Surrealist ludic activated was the encounter between spheres formerly thought of firmly divided: between subjects and others, of course, but, most importantly, through its deployment of chance and displacement of volition, play appeared to manifest the flow between the unconscious and consciously lived realms. That the Surrealists played for so long, so wittily, and so well ensured that their ludic legacy would persist as a model for future practices in and out of the visual and literary arts. Because play took a number of forms in the movement, the edges between experimental techniques, questionnaires and inquiries, contests, and open-ended creative activity often blurred. In his most direct statement on the Surrealist ludic, “L’un dans L’autre” (The One in the Other), an essay focused on the eponymous game, Breton himself listed not only invented and appropriated games (scholarly notation, analogy, definitions, conditionals, exquisite corpse, irrational intervention, the embellishment of a city, the expansion of a film, on visitors) but also certain plastic “processes and recipes” that could be executed by anyone, regardless of talent of skill (collage, frottage [rubbing], fumage [smoking], coulage [casting], spontaneous decalcomania, candle drawing) (51). While in “Beyond Painting” Max Ernst rooted all these techniques in automatism, grasping them as methods through which the Surrealist subject is meant to “pick out and project that which sees itself in him” (Ernst 8), Breton, fresh from a reading of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938), a humanist tract on the broad cultural significance of play, emphasized the sense of community achieved with the Surrealist games: a means of “strengthening the ties that united us, promoting awareness of desires held in common” (Breton, “L’Un” 50). Subsequent critics and historians of the games, for example, Emmanuel Garrigues (16–19), Mary Ann Caws (223–239), Robert Lebel (18, 22), and Dawn Ades (21), have foregrounded this aspect, pointing out that Breton, at least, believed that the games illuminated metaphysical correspondences in thought among the members of the group. “In Surrealist texts obtained simultaneously by several people . . . we think we have brought out into the open a strange possibility of thought, which is pooling,” Breton wrote in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism. “The fact remains that,” he continued, “striking relationships are established in this manner, and that remarkable analogies appear” (Breton, Second 178–179). Yet even as Breton would go on to further strengthen the importance of the links forged through play, he would just as often emphasize the games’ capacity for producing disjuncture and disorientation—a kind of experiential composite that gave form to the abiding Surrealist desire to “put an end to the old antinomies of action and dream, past and future, reason and madness, high and low . . . serious and non-serious . . . work and leisure, ‘wisdom’ and ‘foolishness’ ” (Breton, “L’Un” 50). As always in Surrealism, Breton lay emphasis on the games’ reliability for eliciting encounter and juxtaposition, two defining formal motifs of the movement. Casting Surrealist play in these terms situates the imagery produced through their ludic activities within the compass of the psychoanalytically informed representations of reality that motivated Surrealist art and thought, rather than functioning merely as a means to stabilize the constantly shifting allegiances of the group, and it is important, when reviewing the Surrealist games, to keep in mind that wherever the unconscious is evoked, there is always only the semblance of cohesion. In fact, Surrealist games performed as avatars of dysfunction more often than not; ultimately, the images, texts, and experiences that emerged from the frisson of the ludic chance encounter stood in defiance of closure in both form and definition, and thus in resistance to the stable tenets of identity. It is easiest, perhaps, to understand this fluidity of meaning through the movement’s penchant for wordplay, first accessed through the emphasis on poesis that first motivated the group. With its origins in automatic writing, conceived by the Surrealists as the registration

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of the freewheeling, associative language of “pure thought,” the two terms, poesis and play, were virtually interchangeable—again, providing both form and access to the liminal states of the unconscious: dreams and half-sleep, the ephemeral; the unforeseeable; the restless figuring of the subject-in-formation. From Surrealism’s first moments, it had aligned play strategies with the nonconformist poetics of the unconscious, layering wordplay, chance, authorial effacement, and a disdain for instrumental communication into a series of ludic gestures that sought, in the words of Walter Benjamin, to “liberate things from the drudgery of being useful” (Benjamin 39). Marcel Duchamp’s ironic “work ethic,” committed to the paradoxical obscuring of meaning through punning overproduction, first provided a model, not the least because many of his ludic aphorisms pulsed with the rhythms of erotic desire: “Je crois qu’elle sent du bout des seins/Tais-toi, tu sens du bout des seins/pourquoi sens-tu du bout des seins?/Je veux sentir du bout des seins” (Litany of the Saints: I think she feels the breasts/Shut up and feel the breasts/Why do you feel the breasts?/I want to feel the breasts) (Duchamp 7). Animated by the prospect of a psychoanalytically informed poesis, Breton seized on the language-based research of Sigmund Freud as his primary guide for a ludic refashioning of the literary and visual arts. For Freud, puns and other forms of wit were complicated manifestations of the unconscious in the social field that took on a specifically pictorial form, a characterization that was also welcomed by Breton and his cohort: as described in his texts on jokes and parapraxes, Freud determined that these psycholinguistic disturbances found their way into everyday life through “a composite structure” (Freud, Psychopathology 135; Jokes 41–42) or, in Surrealist terms, the juxtaposition of apparently “distant realities” (Breton, Manifesto 20). Within the Surrealists’ first official journal, The Surrealist Revolution, for example, one reads linguistic slippage in Michel Leiris’s pun-packed “Glossaire, j’y serre mes gloses,” a ludic dictionary that advised ignoring “accepted meanings” in order to discover “hidden qualities” and “secret ramifications . . . channeled by associations of sounds, forms, and ideas” (Leiris 6), and in the journal that followed, Surrealism in the Service of Revolution (Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution/LSASDLR), the visual equivalent to ludic ambivalence emerged in the form of ­Salvador Dalí’s ambiguous “paranoid-critical” images (Dalí, “Objets”). In these visual illusions, Dalí argued, unconscious desires—often shared by ordinary viewers—surfaced in the form of an alternative image abiding just below the surface of ordinary perception, poised, that is, to emerge symptomatically from an essentially pictorial unconscious. The classic example, ­published alongside his initial theorization of this phenomenon, was Paranoiac Face (1931), a postcard of an African landscape which, when rotated 90 degrees, could be perceived as a “cubist” face. The bistable images that emerged from Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical method” testified to the profound instability of ordinary visual experience, initiating the flickering optical illusions and visual puns that would become embedded in the popular imagination as nearly synonymous with Surrealism. In fact, it was a pun made visual that led Breton to an extended investigation of the ludic potential of found objects, a quest that began with a dream, resumed in the course of a game, and then continued, first in the pages of LSASDLR (Breton, “L’Objet” 20), and later in Breton’s 1934 book Communicating Vessels, the volume that codified the Surrealist terms of the phenomenon “objective chance” (Breton, Communicating). The “phantom object” in question was a drawing of a sealed envelope bracketed by a handle on one side and a set of schematic eyelashes on the other, the three conflicting signs causing the image to flicker between drinking vessel, secret epistolary message, and inscrutable feminine object. Silence, Breton called it, named for the eyelashes (cils) and handle (anse): “a rather poor pun which

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had nevertheless permitted the constitution of the object” (Breton, Communicating 52). The object, Breton claimed, had floated in his memory until it was transcribed as a drawing during a session of one of the Surrealist games, “exquisite corpse,” and was subsequently isolated from that context to stand as a model for the possibility of discovering or constructing ambiguous objects charged with mysterious meanings. Recognizing these objects depended on the operation Breton called “objective chance,” a heightened apprehension of coincidence in which “phenomena that the human mind perceives only as belonging to separate causal series come so close together that they actually merge into one another” (Breton, Conversations 107). Like the paranoiac-critical method, through which receptive subjects perceived their innermost anxieties projected onto an ordinary image, the phenomenon of objective chance defamiliarized objects and experiences by eliciting the paradoxical sensation of familiarity and inscrutability: “facts,” as Breton had already suggested in Nadja, “which on occasion present all the appearance of a signal, without our being able to say precisely which signal, and of what” (19). Indeed, in his next book, the quasi-autobiographical novel Mad Love (1937), Breton described a number of instances in which, having put himself “in a state of grace with chance” (Breton, Conversations 106), he happened upon a number of inexplicably compelling objects that, with concerted retrospective analysis, were seen to have been conjured into his hands by sheer psychic force to resolve an abiding absence of some sort: a spoon that was also a slipper gave form to a poetic nonsense phrase that had preoccupied Breton at that time, “cendrier cendrillon” (Cinderella ashtray); a strange mask whose louvered eye slits paradoxically blinded the wearer provided a head for an unfinished sculpture of Alberto Giacometti’s (Breton, Mad Love 25–34). The operations of objective chance were understood as recoveries of objects or images lost to consciousness and thus confounding rational temporal categories, reappearing in the guise of a riddle or visual pun whose meaning had its origins in the past but would only be resolved at some future point. Significantly, wordplay, juxtaposition of opposites, or the flickering identity of visual puns signaled such an event, linking ludic oscillation to the materializations of unconscious desire and placing both at the center of Surrealist practices. Chance was crucial to preserve in these events, for like the Surrealist practice of automatism, it produced encounters that were experienced as unprecedented, even when they emerged from the mind or hand of the subject, amounting to an extreme displacement of volition that spoke directly to the critical capacity of the aleatory within a functionalist culture—chance provided, that is, a mode of opting out of means-ends rationality. To be clear, these operations were not conceived as completely unmediated gestures in which chance alone made the image (as they had been in Dada practices, for example) but as unforeseeable results that, having been motivated by unconscious desire, retained their air of purposefulness in spite of their inscrutability. Given the necessity of remanding conscious volition to encourage unconscious expression, it is unsurprising that the Surrealists almost immediately developed machinelike systems calculated to produce unpredictable outcome: the Surrealist games. Over the course of the movement, a great number and variety of existing chance-based games were appropriated and adapted by the group, ranging in novelty from the inventive “The One in the Other” (1952), a guessing game that allowed composite imagery to slowly take shape in the collective imagination, to the fairly conventional Jeu d’oie (Goose Game), a well-known French board game, here embellished with Surrealist events and outcomes, to the iconographically Surrealist Jeu de Marseilles (Marseilles Game) playing cards, designed by a group of ­Surrealists waiting for visas to escape the Nazi overrun of France. All these regulated games

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shared two goals: to systematically disrupt the expectations of the players and to make that sensation of disruption and juxtaposition available to the widest possible range of people. The games were simple and deskilled, and they produced imagery tensed between disseverance and synthesis, meeting Surrealism’s highest standards for art practice. The most famous of these—the longest-lasting and most widely practiced—was the game of exquisite corpse, appropriated in 1925 from the parlor game petits papiers and renamed in honor of the first written example, produced by Jacques Prévert: “the exquisite corpse will drink the red wine” (Collinet 30). Over the course of the game, players pass sheets of pleated paper that are marked successively by participants, beginning at the top, with each player drawing a “head” of some sort (the figure was most often, but not always, structured as a human body), shielding the work from the eyes of the others. The marked sections are then folded back and hidden before passing the papers along to another player, and all contributors then draw in the next blank section, and so on, until the papers are filled. When everyone has put down their pencils, the sheets are unfolded and “one judges the viability of the monster thus produced” (Audoin 484). The idea here is that no single authority controls the image; rather, the figure, “born of the unwilling, unconscious and unexpected amalgam of three or four heterogeneous minds,” becomes a ludic object in terms of origin and formal coherence (Collinet 30). The successive contributions to the composite hold together only enough to suggest a body—the main impression is a succession of unruly deviations that send the viewer off in multiple directions. Even when the individual contributions seemed preconceived (even the least-practiced players were aware of the Surrealist codes of unconventionality), the regulated and collective nature of the game guaranteed an unforeseeable outcome once the images were exposed at the end of the round. In a sense, the exquisite corpse pictorializes the fundamental Surrealist idea that the subject is split into consciousness and unconsciousness, suggesting at the same time that the selves we imagine that we control and direct are always already determined by the “other.” Thus, it is not merely an attack on the conventions of visual representation that we encounter in the shock reveal of the exquisite corpse but the much more disturbing refutation of the idea that we, as human subjects, are transparent to ourselves—comprehensive entities identifiable through rational self-consciousness. The Surrealist games, in exposing the fiction that human beings have recourse to free will (and the corollary truism that art affords privileged access to this freedom), can be understood to have performed critically to reveal the otherwise-sublimated conditions of modern reality. Looking back on their ludic practices, the Surrealists tended to recall the pleasures of play, especially with regard to the games. Eluard wrote in the 1930s: It was a matter of who could find more charm, more unity, more audacity in this collectively created poetry. No more worry, no more memories of misery, of boredom, of routine. We played with images and there were no losers. Everyone wanted everyone to win and to win always more, in order to pass the take on to their neighbor. (Eluard 75) Yet other Surrealists’ recollections trailed off into equivocation or bluntly described the discomfort of “being played” by a game in which chance was the magistrate: the games were “a means of exaltation and stimulation, a mine of numerous inventions . . . a drug perhaps,” wrote Simone Collinet. “The wastebasket played its part. One tends to forget” (Collinet 30). “The results always touched poetic expression or humor (rather black!),” recalled André Masson (Masson

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28). Breton acknowledged “the nervous play of extreme discordances” elicited by the process (Breton, cadavre 5), but Salvador Dalí went further, scornfully dramatizing a tortured scenario in which “bodies [were] bound to their chairs . . . so they could only move a hand in a certain way.” The players, he recounted, had become “highly developed automatic puppets . . . holding their breath and biting their lower lips in concentrated attention” (Dalí, “The Object” 87–88). The agonistic quality of the games was not lost on Roger Caillois, who stopped participating almost immediately: It was not the collection of significant responses that agitated me visibly in the sessions, but an outbidding, a competition of delirious and ornate definitions, where the brilliant was the best—and where one waited for none other than the dazzling to come to pass. (Caillois, “Divergences” 690) By the 1950s, even Breton would admit that some of the games took “a dissociating turn” (­Breton, “L’Un” 50)—an effect that André Thirion claims was actively cultivated by Breton, who “set up tests and combats to distinguish the better from the worse” (Thirion 91). As if to counter any shadows cast on Surrealist play by alienated members of the group, Breton sought to control the discourse with his Anthology of Black Humor (1940), drawing on Hegelian premises to compare the “black sphinx of objective humor” to the “white sphinx of objective chance” and imagining a future in which “all subsequent human creation would become the fruit of their embrace” (Breton, Anthology xvi). Compiled in the mid-1930s under the influence of Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (but only distributed after the war, in 1945), the anthology’s buoyancy was tempered in the art production of the Surrealist circle of the time by the rise of formal deliquescence edging on violence. Hans Bellmer’s grisly dolls, for example, materialized the implicit violence of the exquisite corpse’s giddy dysmorphia, tearing apart that entity we most want to imagine as unified and inviolate: the human body. André Masson and Joan Miró, two figures associated with George Bataille’s theorization of “formless” operations, made quasi-aleatory sand paintings and systematic, pun-based works, respectively, in support of a defiant “unworking” of presence, originality, and authorship (Laxton). Yet the book-length pendant to Breton’s sublimation of violence in Anthology of Black Humor would not appear until 1958, in the form of Roger Caillois’s Man, Play and Games, a volume whose taxonomy of play operations characterized the ludic as an avatar of chaos from which daily life had to be protected—a clear disparagement of the Surrealist embrace of chance as the paradoxical understanding of heteronomy as a form of freedom (Bürger 6). By this time, Surrealism’s suprarational strategies had already been communicated to a ­postwar generation seeking their own shifts in everyday experience, drawn, perhaps, by Surrealism’s ludic oppositional unconscious, a life philosophy in which play had been fashioned as the “other” to rational modernity, an alternative to convention latent in even the most conservative subjects and processes. In the hands of the neo-avant-garde, chance became an incendiary device to blast apart preconceived notions of truth, meaning, and presence, reshaping postwar subjectivity through forms that emphasized the aporias of knowledge to an unprecedented degree. Ultimately, this is the ludic yardstick by which all Surrealist practice will be measured: the extent to which any practice welcomes the embrace of never fully knowing, articulated through techniques and activities inviting unpredictability and ascertaining nothing more than uncertainty. The Surrealist attitude, open and available to the chance encounter, rejects agency

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and control in favor of risking, as much and as often as possible,  meaning nothing, if that means gaining access to experiences refracted by the other within the self. That life philosophy demands not only a ludic poetics in literature and the visual arts but also an existence dedicated to eliding borders, one with limits set only by the vagaries of chance. It describes, that is, a life lived in and as play.

Works Cited Ades, Dawn. Surrealist Art: The Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. Art Institute of Chicago, 1997. Audoin, Philippe. “Surréalistes.” Le Dictionnaire des jeux, edited by René Alleau. Tchou, 1966, p. 468. Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–1938, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 32–49. Breton, André. Anthology of Black Humor. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. City Lights, 1997. ———. Communicating Vessels. Translated by Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris. University of Nebraska Press, 1990. ———. Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Paragon House, 1993. ———. “Le cadavre exquis, son exaltation.” Le Cadavre exquis, son exaltation, edited by Arturo Schwarz, Galleria Schwarz, 1975, pp. 5–16. ———. “L’Objet fantôme.” Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution, no. 3, December, 1931, pp. 20–23. ———. “L’Un dans l’autre.” Perspective cavalière, edited by Marguerite Bonnet, Éditions Gallimard, 1970, pp. 50–53. ———. Mad Love. Translated by Mary Ann Caws. University of Nebraska Press, 1987. ———. Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen Lane. University of Michigan Press, 1972, pp. 2–47. ———. Nadja. Translated by Richard Howard. Grove Press, 1960. ———. “Second Manifesto of Surrealism.” Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen Lane. University of Michigan Press, 1972, pp. 117–187. ———. “Words without Wrinkles.” The Lost Steps, translated by Mark Polizzotti, University of Nebraska Press, 1996, pp. 100–102. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Caillois, Roger. “Divergences et complicités.” André Breton et le movement surréaliste. La Nouvelle revue française, no. 172, April 1967, pp. 692–693. ———. Man, Play and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash. Free Press of Glencoe, 1961. Caws, Mary Ann. The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter. MIT Press, 1997. Collinet, Simone. “Les Cadavre Exquises.” Le Cadavre exquis, son exaltation, edited by Arturo Schwarz. Galleria Schwarz, 1975, p. 30. Dalí, Salvador. “The Object Revealed in Surrealist Experiment.” Translated by David Gascoyne. Surrealists on Art, edited by Lucy Lippard, Prentice-Hall, 1970, pp. 87–88. ———. “Objets a foncionnement symbolique.” Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 3, 1931. Duchamp, Marcel. Littérature nouvelle série, no. 5, 1922, p. 7. Eluard, Paul. “Prémieres vues anciennes.” Donner à voir, Éditions Gallimard (1935), cited in Jean-Jacques Lebel, Juegos surréalistas: 100 cadaveros exquisitos, Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, 1996. Ernst, Max. “Beyond Painting.” Beyond Painting and Other Writings by the Artist and His Friends, edited by Robert Motherwell. Wittenborn, Schultz, 1948, pp. 3–19. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by James Strachey. Penguin Books, 1991. ———. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Translated by James Strachey. Hogarth Press, 1960. Garrigues, Emmanuel. Les Jeux surréalistes: Mars 1921—Septembre 1962. Archives du surréalisme, Vol. 5, Gallimard, 1995. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Gallimard, 1951. Laxton, Susan. Surrealism at Play. Duke University Press, 2019.

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Play, Games, and Chance Lebel, Robert. “La erupción de la vida.” Juegos Surrealistas: 100 Cadáveres Exquisitos. Fundación Coliección Thyssen-Bornemisza, 1996, pp. 17–41. Leiris, Michel. “Glossaire, j’y serre mes gloses.” La Révolution surréaliste, no. 3, 1925, pp. 6–7. Masson, André. “D’ou viens-tu, cadavre exquis?” Le cadavre exquis, son exaltation, edited by Arturo Schwarz, Galleria Schwarz, 1975, p. 28. Thirion, André. Revolutionaries without a Revolution. Translated by J. Neugroschel. Macmillan, 1975.

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3 THE MARVELOUS AND THE UNCANNY Andrea Gremels and Kirsten Strom

Central to the basic premise of Surrealism is the idea that anyone can be a Surrealist. Toward that end, Surrealists have invented and advocated numerous creative techniques enabling anyone with, for example, a magazine, a pair of scissors, and a bit of glue to make a Surrealist image. Certified art supplies and advanced study at a prestigious art academy are absolutely not required. However, Surrealist praxis is furthermore broadly inclusive of experiential and experimental methods of being such that one does not necessarily need to produce objects, images, or texts in any form to be Surrealist. Indeed, perception itself ranks highly among the most significant functions of Surrealist experience. The treatment of perception as an act of creative interpretation is well exemplified by the paranoiac-critical method made famous in the paintings of Salvador Dalí, wherein two (or more) disparate forms appear to impossibly occupy the same physical space, a cliff face that is also a dog, the reflection of a swan that is also an elephant, etc. The paintings become an index of this experience of perceiving, in this case being open to seeing double images that one knows objectively are not really there. Two of the most important categories of Surrealist experience and perception, either or perhaps both of which might encompasses the paranoiac-critical method, are the marvelous and the uncanny. Openness to the experience of these categories of perception has been the starting point for a great many, arguably even a great majority of Surrealist images and texts, which might in turn be described as giving form to these experiences, or alternately as offering opportunities to provoke them in the viewer and to inspire them to see that they are phenomena of everyday life.

The Marvelous In the context of Manifesto of Surrealism, the marvelous is praised by André Breton as a phenomenon that goes beyond literature and the arts. The manifesto’s reference to the marvelous echoes Charles Baudelaire’s comment on the 1855 Universal Exposition of Paris, stating that “the beautiful is always bizarre.” Breton muses, “the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful” (14). Read as an answer to Baudelaire’s reflection on beauty, the marvelous is celebrated as beautiful because beauty, in Surrealism, is always related to experience and experience is always driven by the desire of estrangement. The manifesto gives another cue of how to conceive the marvelous, namely, as a “sort of general revelation” (14). As such, the marvelous is closely linked to the Surrealist perception of everyday 28

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-5

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life, which, according to Walter Benjamin, is characterized by an experience of “profane illumination” (179). As a revelatory category that acknowledges “Surrealities” in everyday experience, the marvelous pervades the poetics of many Surrealist authors, above all Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, in which he transforms the cityscape of France’s capital into a wonderland of the marvelous. The city is marked by real signposts and populated by patrons of bathhouses, hair salons, and brothels who unwittingly become the fantastic characters of a “modern mythology” unfolding in real time (5). It is an adventure of exploration unhampered by the fact that the city of Paris is already intimately familiar. Following his highly unconventional tours of the Passage de l’Opéra and the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, Aragon muses on the nature of the marvelous, that it is “the eruption of contradiction within the real” (204). The poetry of Robert Desnos is also demonstrative of what Katherine Conley calls “the marvelous in everyday life.” In his best-known works, it is desire that functions as the conduit to the marvelous, experienced as a state of dreamlike quasi-transcendence that is nevertheless fully grounded in the real world. In “Sleep’s Spaces” (1926), thoughts of his idealized loved one fuel a vision in which all the wonders of the world converge around her: “In the night there are stars and the shadowy motion of the sea, of rivers, forests, towns, grass and the lungs of millions and millions of beings. . . . In the night there is you” (15). The poem’s insistence upon nocturnality, as well as its title, suggests that this may be a world of dreams, but the imagery is described as an extension of the physical world, and indeed the universe, which is itself full of actual marvels. This is not to say, of course, that dreams are not themselves marvelous within a Surrealist understanding. Though they are typically experienced as distinct from reality, Breton famously disavowed a categorical distinction in declaring, “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality” (Manifestoes 14). While acknowledging that the complete dissolution of this barrier represents an unattainable goal, his description suggests that dream life and waking life represent complimentary experiences of reality. It is also true that as a part of everyday life, dreams are indeed part of the real experience of one’s own mind. Their power to transform the subject’s relationship to external reality was expressed in the 1924 Bureau of Surrealist Research calling card imploring parents to “tell [their] children [their] dreams!” That the act of dreaming itself is a source of mystery and wonder has been described by Luis Buñuel in terms reminiscent of Desnos’s imagery: “[T]he mind is bombarded by a veritable barrage of dreams that seem to burst upon it like waves. Billions of images surge up each night, then dissolve almost immediately, enveloping the earth in a blanket of lost dreams” (92). The paintings of Remedios Varo represent an exemplary reverence for the marvelous while also bridging the gap between the realm of the imaginary and that of the physical world. Her images of beings studiously at work by night as if scientists of the marvelous display numerous references to magic, alchemy, and witchcraft, and yet there is nothing more magical in these images than the glowing moons and stars or the fabulous cats and songbirds, as in Celestial Pablum (1958), Creation of the Birds (1957), and Sympathy (The Cat’s Madness) (1955). The paintings’ fantastical elements appear as if representations of heightened experience of perceiving the marvelous within these real-world elements. Leonora Carrington, a close friend and artistic companion of Varo within the Surrealist circles of Mexico City in the 1940s, also belongs to that “scientific community” that approached the marvelous through alchemy, esotericism, and magic. In her text Down Below, which was first published in the New York Surrealist periodical VVV in 1944, Carrington fuses autobiographical writing with psychotic delusions and a phantasmagoric imagery. In her account, the marvelous becomes a strategy to process the trauma of her internment in a psychiatric hospital in Spain, where she was referred in August 1940 29

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due to a nervous breakdown, which she suffered as a result of Max Ernst’s internment in a concentration camp. Within the account of her experience, she creates the fictional cosmos “Down Below” as an imaginative and mythical otherworld that contrasts the realistic setting of the sanatorium. Kristoffer Noheden calls attention to the fact that Carrington’s “initiation” into the marvelous in Down Below is channeled by her reading of Pierre Mabille’s Mirror of the Marvelous, which helped her to “transform her experiences of dissolution and disorientation into insights” (37). Pierre Mabille, who published Mirror of the Marvelous in 1940 during the ravaging years of World War II, has curiously remained a blind spot in the history of Surrealism (ChénieuxGendron 1). In this volume he theorizes the marvelous not only as a literary quality or a genre category of the fantastic but also far beyond that as a global and unifying necessity that, from a Surrealist viewpoint, could be able to resist the hegemony of totalitarianism and fascism. By means of a Surrealist collage, Mabille assembles in Mirror of the Marvelous epics, folk and fairy tales, as well as fables, excerpts from Gothic novels and fantastic short stories, mythologies, and legends from different epochs and cultures reaching from the third millennium BCE to the twentieth century under the sign of the miraculous embracing all continents. Mabille, who was intellectually influenced by contemporary occultist, esoteric, and psychoanalytical thought, considers his text collection a “treatise of initiation” (37) by which he wants to introduce his readers to the existence of a collective unconscious that unites all cultures and individuals in their reliance on and creation of forms, expressions, experiences, and key images of the marvelous. His utopian approach leads him to claim the principle that “the marvelous is everywhere. [It] contains the seeds of innumerable possibilities that the future will bring about” (32, original emphasis). For Mabille, the marvelous has a “democratizing” function. He stresses the fact that many famous sagas and legends, such as the Middle High German Song of the Nibelungen or the Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia, were orally transmitted before being transcribed and canonized. Within the hierarchy of world literature, he does not consider anonymous tales from Africa, India, and Mongolia less worthy than the canonized texts of written culture. He is especially interested in exploring where the marvelous originates and how it works in the popular imagination across world cultures. Mabilles’s concept of the “merveilleux populaire” (40) had had an impact on the Francophone Caribbean writers Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, as well as René Ménil, who were involved in the publication of the little magazine Tropiques (1941–1945) on the Antillean island Martinique. The “folkloric” issue of this tropical periodical (No. 4, 1942) includes an excerpt from Mirror of the Marvelous that is introduced by Aimé Césaire and René Ménil as an “exceptional journey” leading them to (re)discover themselves (39). Mabille stimulates these AfroCaribbean writers to reappropriate their popular literary tradition inherited from West African cultures and “creolized” on the Antillean in the course of the history of slavery. In the anonymous Creole folk tales, described by Suzanne Césaire as “African survivals” (56) in the Caribbean, both the oppressions of slavery as well as the slaves’ strategies of resistance are reflected through the marvelous. In the Afro-Caribbean myths and traditions, the marvelous thus reveals a potential of liberation against colonial oppression. In his 1949 novel The Kingdom of this World, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier conceptualized this idea of the marvelous as resistance with his concept of the “marvelous real” (lo real maravilloso). In this novel, he argues that the Haitian slaves’ belief in vodoun became the decisive motor of the Haitian Revolution, in which they liberated themselves from colonial rule in 1804. For Carpentier, the real maravilloso is best expressed in the Afro-Haitian legend around the rebellious slave Mackandal, who returned from the otherworld after his execution so that 30

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the slaves turn him into a leading figure in the course of their upheaval against colonial rule. In Latin America, the marvelous has thus resulted in historical changes. In the foreword of The Kingdom of this World, his discussions of a “natural” existence of “the marvelous real” in Latin American culture, which he regards as opposed to the “artificial” literary and artistic productions of the marvelous in Europe, reveal an ambiguous and ambivalent relationship to Surrealism. Recent scholars of international Surrealism, however, such as Jonathan Eburne and Melanie Nicholson, have recognized Carpentier’s concept as an important contribution to Latin American Surrealism. In a later essay claiming to illuminate the “difference . . . between Surrealism and the marvelous real,” Carpentier suggests that “the word ‘marvelous’ has . . . lost its true meaning” (“Baroque” 101) and that “we should establish a definition of the marvelous that does not depend on the notion that the marvelous is admirable because it is beautiful” (102). In this he declares that “[e]verything strange, everything amazing, everything that eludes established norms is marvelous,” and he cites both “the Gorgon with her snaky locks” and the “Venus arising from the waves” (101). Though Breton seemed to insist upon equating the beautiful and the marvelous, the broader context of Manifesto indicates that he was very much calling for an expanded conception of the beautiful. Carpentier acknowledges this in stating that: [W]hen Breton spoke of the marvelous . . . he did not consider that the marvelous was admirable because it was beautiful but because it was strange. When he cites the classics in his First Manifesto, or those that end up as Surrealist classics, he begins with the totally macabre book, Young’s Nights, followed by Swift . . . Edgar Allen Poe . . . Baudelaire . . . and many others. (103) In fact, these authors are represented as “Surreal” rather than “marvelous,” though it is telling that Carpentier treats the two terms as interchangeable. In his efforts to distinguish between the marvelous real and a marvelous Surreal, however, he concludes that “if Surrealism pursued the marvelous, one would have to say that it very rarely looked for it in reality” (103). Carpentier sees his own conception of the “marvelous real” as a remedy to this shortcoming, and one that is specifically “encountered in its raw state, latent and omnipresent, in all that is Latin American” (104). His examples include the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, as well as historical events and figures, such as Juana de Azurduy, the prodigious Bolivian guerilla, precursor of the wars of independence, who “[took] a city in order to rescue the head of the man she loved, which was displayed on a pike in the Main Plaza, and to whom she had borne two sons in a cave in the Andes” (105). He suggests that such examples stand in direct contrast to the “manufactured mystery” of a Dalí painting (104). As we have seen, however, Dalí’s paranoic-critical imagery was rooted in a way of seeing the real world. The difference, then, between the marvelous real and the marvelous Surreal seems to be that one is a state of being, and the other an act of perceiving. The example of Paris Peasant may again prove instructive here, as Aragon shares the city with a host of Parisian strangers who do not particularly appear to share in his experience of “profane illumination.” Paris is not inherently marvelous, then, as Carpentier suggests that Tenochtitlán was. It is Paris seen through the illuminating eyes of Aragon that is a marvel. It is worth noting, however, that while Carpentier has often been reproached of his essentialist vision of a Latin American marvelous reality, his essay also states that the basic condition both for the revelation and experience of the marvelous is the belief in it. Here he agrees with Mabille in that the recognition of the marvelous requires a particularly perceptive state of mind (30). 31

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Anke Birkenmaier has stressed that Carpentier’s anthropological idea of the marvelous as rooted in popular belief was closely related to the “Sacred Surrealism”—a term used by Vivienne Brough-Evans—of the group around George Bataille that, from 1936 onward, constituted itself as the College of Sociology. Michael Richardson highlights not only Michel Leiris’s position in his 1938 essay “The Sacred of Everyday Life” that links the college’s idea of the sacred as a liminal experience of exaltation and excess to the Surrealist idea of the marvelous but also the outstanding role Colette Peignot, alias Laure (or Claude Araxe, another pseudonym she used in her writings), has played for re-envisioning the marvelous as a sphere of the sacred that also creates human community (176). Beyond “Sacred Surrealism,” Latin American Surrealism was haunted by the idea of the marvelous in everyday life, as Aldo Pellegrini’s 1948 contribution “The Conquest of the Marvelous” in the first issue of the Argentinian Surrealist periodical Ciclo (Cycle) demonstrates. The widespread use of photography within Surrealism may also attest to Mabille’s assertion that “surrealism has shown that the marvellous was not foreign to life but could and should be incorporated into it” (“Paradise” 247). The broad range of experimental techniques, including collage, solarization, and rayography, tested the limits of the medium’s truth claims but typically did so in a manner that retained some tangible element of the real world. There was furthermore no shortage of unmanipulated photography within this spectrum, yielding such marvelous images as Lee Miller’s celebrated Portrait of Space (1937). While implicit in such images, the role of open-ended perception in the Surrealist pursuit of the marvelous was made explicit in Mabille’s remark that “[Surrealism] teaches us that . . . we did not know how to see” (247).

The Uncanny The Surrealists developed a particular take on the marvelous but retained the term’s generally positive connotations. Indeed, the marvelous suggests a category of experience that can be understood as broadly, if not universally, desirable. The uncanny, by contrast, does not. Indeed, Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” of 1919 describes it as a haunting experience of cognitive dissonance, one that is furthermore characteristic of the disorientation of neurosis, though it can easily be experienced by subjects who have not been identified as pathologically neurotic, a point of great import for the Surrealists. Freud’s essay was diagnostic rather than prescriptive. He certainly hadn’t meant for the Surrealists—or anyone—to treat his essay as a manual, but ample evidence suggests that they did so, albeit decidedly on their own terms. The ensuing embrace of discomfort and ambiguity would become one of the most strikingly distinctive aspects of Surrealist practice. Freud’s text opens with a discussion of a prior essay by Ernst Jentsch, whom Freud identifies as one of a very limited number of scholars who have described the uncanny as an aesthetic experience. Jentsch’s interpretation is largely built around the gothic tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann “The Sandman,” which narrates the demise of a protagonist who unwittingly falls in love with an automaton. Jentsch concludes from this that confusion regarding whether something is living or not is among the most potent forms of uncanny experience, leading him to privilege the role of dolls, mannequins, and automatons as uncanny exemplars. Uncertainty regarding whether a form is animate or inanimate is but one specific type of intellectual uncertainty, however, with Freud defining the uncanny more broadly as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (220). In this formulation, the uncanny is terrifying, but not all that is terrifying is necessarily uncanny. An important distinction lies in the idea that the experience of the uncanny comes from within. It is not based on an actual threat from without, as is, for example, a stalker or a violent storm 32

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at sea. By contrast, the experience of threat in the uncanny is precisely that of self-induced disorientation. It is the experience of a breakdown in the promise of reason to make rational sense of the outside world and the subject’s relationship to it. Freud suggests that this may occur as the strangeness of feeling that one is experiencing something paradoxically both familiar and strange, something that is confoundingly both known and unknown. Indeed, Freud stresses the connotations of the German word unheimlich, literally unhomelike, as suggesting that one feels alienated, or not at home, within one’s own home. This sense is echoed in his 1917 text “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” in which the difficulty is precisely that the exploration of the unconscious poses a threat to “human narcissism” (141) by suggesting that “the ego is not master in its own house” (143). Freud’s reading of “The Sandman” suggests, in fact, that the automaton plotline is not even the most uncanny aspect of the story. Rather, he proposes that it is the character Nathanial’s childhood conflation of the family lawyer with the terrifying mythological Sandman and Nathanial’s subsequent inability to overcome the fear that this inspired in him as a child. Specifically, the Sandman was a figure of menace used to frighten children into going to sleep by suggesting that he would enter their rooms and throw sand into their unsleeping eyes, or alternately, that he would violently steal their eyes from their sockets. Freud writes that there is “no doubt that the feeling of something uncanny is directly attached . . . to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes.” His predictably on-brand explanation is that “[a] study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that a morbid anxiety connected with the eyes and with going blind is often enough a substitute for dread of castration” (231). Though we may seem to have traveled far afield of the original discussion of the uncanniness of dolls and automatons, the retention of childhood belief (i.e., “the persistence of memory”) is a continuous thread. More specifically, it is the lingering memory of having once held beliefs that one now understands to be foolish that generates the disquieting uncertainty of the uncanny (he suggests that the resurfacing of entirely repressed memories may also have this effect). With regard to dolls, Freud indicates that children are typically not terrified of the idea of a doll coming to life, and in fact, they “may even desire it” (233). It is therefore the dread of regression rather than the doll itself that causes discomfort in adults as one is confronted with the realization that they have not so successfully overcome the irrational beliefs of childhood as they might have wished.1 Other examples Freud discusses include (but are not limited to) irrational fears regarding the idea of the doppelgänger, the evil eye, ghosts, unlikely repetitions, and the so-called “omnipotence of thought,” a kind of magical thinking in which one fears having caused misfortune simply by anticipating or imagining it (240). These he relates not only to childhood belief but also to a kind of ancestral memory of the animistic beliefs of ancient peoples, also representing a way of thinking that a post-Enlightenment subject would like to believe they have surpassed. Occurrences of related themes within Surrealism are so numerous—and so obvious—that a flood of prominent examples stands ready to illustrate the influence of the text and the centrality of the theme of the uncanny to Surrealism. These works may also be complex and layered in other ways, but for our purposes here, their relationship to the essay’s themes will be prioritized. Hans Bellmer, for example, developed a sustained body of work prompted by his viewing of the Offenbach opera The Tales of Hoffman, one of the tales dramatized being “The Sandman.” His Poupée series of dolls and photographs depict the overly sexualized anatomy of seemingly pubescent dolls that are obviously constructed objects, and yet the photographs in particular are staged very specifically to suggest that the dolls are animate, emotional, and biological (if not also intellectual) beings. The frequent use of mannequins, famously in the photography of Eugène Atget and in the avenue of mannequins in the International Exhibition in Paris in 33

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1938, provides additional examples to support claims of a Surrealist fascination with inanimate objects deceptively occupying human form, the frequent sexualization of which may also suggest a commentary on the irrationality of desire. Buñuel and Dalí’s L’Age d’or (1930), a flagrant celebration of the irrationality of desire, furthermore includes a scene in which one of the protagonists sucks on the toe of a classical statue as if aroused by it. (The effect here is at least in part humorous, however, as a close-up shot of the statue’s unaffected face proves decidedly absurd). Willful confusion of the animate and the inanimate is also prominently represented in the work of René Magritte. Several versions of the painting Memory, for example, depict the head of a marble statue appearing to bleed its own actual blood. In “The Sandman,” Nathanial becomes fixated on the substitution of eyeglasses for eyes, and a parallel conflation is given concrete form in Magritte’s Philosophy of the Bedroom (1947), in which a pair of shoes terminates in actual human toes and a nightgown on a hanger appears to have actual human breasts. (With regard to the shoes, and also to the example of L’Age d’or, Freud’s 1914 essay “A Case of FootFetishism” similarly associates foot fetishism with repressed castration anxiety.) Threats to the eye are themselves (in)famously represented in iconic Surrealist works, including Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien andalou (1929), which offers an eyeball-slashing as an opening confrontation. Other examples include Victor Brauner’s Self-Portrait with Enucleated Eye (1931) and Georges Bataille’s novel The Story of the Eye (1928), in which a violently disembodied human eye becomes a haunting sexual prop. Less well-known but equally worthy of inclusion is Valentine Hugo’s drawing Dream of December 21, 1929, in which the primate known as an aye-aye (pronounced eye-eye in English) digs its curling claws into the artist’s own face and her left eye. More generally, the widespread use of found objects functions as a means of generating uncanny effects by willfully rendering the familiar strange. Comprised of a teacup, saucer, and spoon lined with fur, Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936) has historically been the most celebrated example, having been a standout in an exhibition entirely dedicated to Surrealist objets trouvés. In this instance, it is specifically a domestic object, one associated with the comforts of home, that remains recognizably familiar even as its conventional use value has been subverted in such a manner that it might literally induce a gag reflex. Another broad category of Surrealist production, magical realist painting might be understood to illustrate Freud’s claim that “an uncanny effect is often and easily produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and reality” (244). Freud is careful to stress that works of fiction, including fairy tales, do not necessarily generate uncanny effects even when the events described would surely do so if they were experienced in reality. The same could be said of painting as well, but the paintings of Toyen, de Chirico, and many other Surrealists are purposefully disquieting, as if indeed courting uncanny effects. With regard to what Freud calls “involuntary repetition,” however, it is Breton’s Nadja and Mad Love that represent the closest parallels to Freud’s text (237). In the essay, Freud offers the example of a person being struck by several random recurrences of the same number in such a way that they cease to perceive them as random. He locates the uncanniness of this unintentional repetition precisely in that it “forces upon us the idea of something fateful and unescapable where otherwise we should have spoken of ‘chance’ only” (237). For Freud, this exemplified neurotic, childlike, or “primitive” thinking; however, for Breton, this exemplified Surrealist thinking. Nadja is indeed riddled with descriptions of freak chance encounters that seem “fateful” or “unescapable,” such as the meeting of Breton and Paul Éluard, at which they realized that they had actually met once before when Éluard mistook Breton for a friend who had died in the war (Nadja 27). The greater part of Breton’s attraction to Nadja herself seems to lie in her ability to function as a lightning rod for such coincidences. Mad Love, too, celebrates 34

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descriptions of chance encounters with two randomly encountered objects at a flea market that come to be perceived as powerfully destined for their recipients, in this case Breton and Alberto Giacometti (Mad Love 28–34). Resolutely unconvinced by the idea of a higher power, Breton does not speak sincerely of “fate” but embraces the appearance of such as “objective chance.” For Breton, such experiences were to be savored in such a way that Freud’s uncanny becomes Breton’s marvelous. These texts, then, represent both the influence of Freud and the Surrealists’ commitment to reading Freud as open and available to Surrealist interpretation, while in their relatively unembellished descriptions of actual events, they simultaneously demonstrate the significance of acts of interpretive perception as Surrealist events, thereby exemplifying the spontaneous experience of Surrealism in daily life. The active pursuit of the marvelous and the uncanny requires and promotes the traits commonly described in recent psychological discourse as openness to experience and a high tolerance for ambiguity. While they have been discussed here primarily as aesthetic concepts, the marvelous and the uncanny may as such have broader implications that link to the politics of the Surrealist worldview and its insistence upon the imperative of revolution. Being open to seeing the world and one’s self in it differently and more deeply is, within Surrealism, the first step to imagining transformation, even if the critique of political realities might require one to be at least at times wide awake to reality.

Note 1. See “The Darwinian Uncanny” in Kirsten Strom, The Animal Surreal: The Role of Darwin, Animals and Evolution in Surrealism, for a discussion of nonhuman animals as uncanny corollaries to dolls and mannequins.

Works Cited Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Exact Change, 1994. Bataille, Georges. The Story of the Eye. City Lights, 2001. Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism.” Reflections. Shocken Books, 1976, pp. 177–192. Birkenmaier, Anke. Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina [Alejo Carpentier and the Culture of Surrealism in Latin America]. Iberoamericana, 2006. Breton, André. Mad Love. University of Nebraska Press, 1987. ———. Manifestoes of Surrealism. University of Michigan Press, 1969. ———. Nadja. Grove Press, 1960. Brough-Evans, Vivienne. Sacred Surrealism, Dissidence and International Avant-Garde Prose. Routledge, 2016. Carpentier, Alejo. “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Duke University Press, 1975, pp. 89–108. ———. The Kingdom of this World. Translated by Pablo Medina. Farrar Strauss & Giroux Classics, 2017. Carrington, Leonora. “Down Below.” VVV, vol. 4, 1944, pp. 70–86. Césaire, Aimé, Suzanne Césaire, and René Ménil, editors. Tropiques. 1941–1945. Collection complète, vol. 4. Edited by Jacqueline Leinier. Jean-Michel Place, 1978. Chénieux-Gendron, Jacqueline. “Pierre Mabille.” The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, vol. 3, edited by Michael Richardson, Dawn Ades, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Georges Sebbag, and Steven Harris, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 1–9. Conley, Katherine. Robert Desnos and the Poetry of Everyday Life. University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Desnos, Robert. The Selected Poems of Robert Desnos. Translated by Carolyn Forché and William Kulik. Ecco Press, 1991. Eburne, Jonathan. “Decolonial Surrealism.” Surrealism, edited by Natalya Lusty, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 342–362. Freud, Sigmund. “A Case of Foot-Fetishism” (1914). The Complete Psychological Works, vol. XIII, Hogarth Press, 1975.

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Andrea Gremels and Kirsten Strom ———. “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis” (1917). The Complete Psychological Works, vol. XVII, Hogarth Press, 1975. ———. “The Uncanny” (1919). The Complete Psychological Works, vol. XVII, Hogarth Press, 1975. Leiris, Michel. “The Sacred in Everyday Life.” The College of Sociology (1937–39), edited by Denis Hollier, translated by Betsy Wing, University of Minnesota Press, 1988, pp. 24–31. Mabille, Pierre. The Mirror of the Marvelous. The Surrealist Reimagining of Myth. Inner Traditions, 1998. ———. “Paradise.” The Surrealism Reader, edited by Dawn Ades et al., University of Chicago Press, 2015, pp. 240–247. Nicholson, Melanie. “Aldo Pellegrini.” The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, vol. 3, edited by Michael Richardson, Dawn Ades, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Georges Sebbag, und Steven Harris, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 178–180. ———. Surrealism in Latin American Literature: Searching for Breton’s Ghost. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Noheden, Kristoffer. “Leonora Carrington, Surrealism, and Initiation. Symbolic Death and Rebirth in Little Francis and Down Below.” Correspondences, vol. 2, no. 1, 2014, pp. 35–65. Peignot, Colette. Laure: The Collected Writings. City Lights Publishers, 1995. Richardson, Michael. “Colette Peignot, (Laure).” The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, vol. 3, edited by Michael Richardson et al., Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 175–177. Strom, Kirsten. The Animal Surreal: The Role of Darwin, Animals, and Evolution in Surrealism. Taylor and Francis, 2017.

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4 CONVULSIVE BEAUTY AND MAD LOVE Gavin Parkinson

The concept of “convulsive beauty” (“la beauté convulsive”) and the related one of “mad love” (“l’amour fou”) were developed in the early 1930s by André Breton. They had originated not merely through aesthetic reflection in museums but in lived experience, chiefly through a specifically emotional assimilation and interpretation, from Breton’s youth, of the poetry, art, and medicine of late-nineteenth-century France. It is a testament to Breton’s curiosity, sensitivity, and remarkable powers of synthesis that he was able, in his teens and early twenties, to absorb, both critically and sympathetically, Charles Baudelaire’s eulogies to beauty in Flowers of Evil (1857) alongside the quite dissimilar, unrestrained, and even volatile passages on beauty tendered by the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse) in Les Chants de Maldoror (1869), while bringing these into dialogue with the paintings he admired, such as those of the relatively academic Gustave Moreau and the pioneering avant-garde artist Georges Seurat, all inflected by a fascination with psychoanalysis sparked by an early, brief flirtation with a career in medicine. Breton’s first writings on Surrealism would be informed by such enthusiasms, solidifying into the full postulations of convulsive beauty and mad love in his middle years, which are still evident in his much later writings, so they are of importance to the understanding of Surrealism even if they were not taken on by all Surrealists. Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) already gives full voice to the centrality of beauty in Surrealism in a phrase that has been quoted often: “Let’s get to the point: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful” (14, translation modified). For Breton, the marvelous changed throughout history, and in the Manifesto he credited Matthew Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796) as its paradigm “[i]n the realm of literature” (14). However, the extravagant similes dotted throughout Lautréamont’s Maldoror, quoted in the Manifesto, delivered the most extreme examples of the Surrealist marvelous, culminating in a suite of images devoted to the English youth Mervyn (a fact generally glossed over by the Surrealists and their first audiences), which simultaneously served to define the new idea of beauty for generations of Surrealists: He is as beautiful as [Il est beau comme] the retractility of the claws in birds of prey; or, again, as the unpredictability of muscular movement in sores in the soft part of the posterior cervical region; or, rather, as the perpetual motion rat-trap which is always DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-6

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reset by the trapped animal and which can go on catching rodents indefinitely and works even when it is hidden under straw; and, above all, as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table! (216–217, translation modified) Still peculiarly hard to classify in its unliterary, prolonged, detailed collaging of the languages of natural history, human (probably) biology, or anatomical textbook, an (imaginary) technical manual and, apparently, ordinary (or non-“poetic”) observation, the string of images insists upon associating the beauty of a young man with frankly macabre signifiers of death or illness. These tilt from the abstract to the physically concrete: the dexterous functionality of birds’ talons (not the appendages themselves or even their capacity to catch and wound their prey); the spontaneity of muscle movement (not the movement itself or the muscle or lesions, let alone the parts of the neck); an improbable device for killing rodents; and most notoriously, the apparently random encounter between a household object and gadget on a device usually situated in a medical environment. Breton insisted on the “arbitrary” nature of the Surrealist image in the Manifesto, brought about by contradiction, part concealment of a property, bathos, bizarre juxtaposition, a hallucinatory character, negation of a property or humor, classificatory terms that roundly implicate Lautréamont’s similes for Mervyn’s beauty, some of them reaching across all the examples in the quotation prior (38). Two years after the Manifesto, Louis Aragon defined the marvelous in his book Paris Peasant (1926) as “the eruption of contradiction within the real” (217). In these opening years of Surrealism, then, the marvelous was identified with a kind of poetic imagery that originated largely in Lautréamont’s notion of beauty and the terms Breton used to classify it, “contradiction” being among the most pertinent, ripe for adaptation to painting, collage, and the three-dimensional object and already leaning toward a classificatory terminology that Breton would soon refine and collect under the term “convulsive.” This adjective saw its earliest use at the close of the inscrutable, much-debated conclusion to Breton’s theoretico-autobiographical tome Nadja (1928). In the latter part of these ruminations on subjectivity and collectivity inspired by dreams, walks, friendships, poetry, art, and at greatest length, his encounter with the young, inspiring, mentally ill Léona Delcourt, who called herself Nadja, Breton inserted a section below an ellipsis addressed to an unnamed woman (his then-lover Suzanne Muzard, who was actually on the point of leaving Breton)—“You, indeed,” he writes, “ideally beautiful”—who had a “genius” for love and who had replaced Nadja in his life (157). Beauty and passionate love are considered together, unevenly and uncertainly here, cued by a quotation by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as Breton intuitively strove to parse the relationship between the two. Another strong ellipsis intervenes in Nadja before Breton’s text presses on to relate the genius of love to an aesthetic of beauty: A certain attitude necessarily follows with regard to beauty, which has obviously never been envisaged here save for emotional purposes. In no way static, that is, enclosed in Baudelaire’s “dream of stone,” lost for man in the shadow of those odalisques, in the depth of those tragedies which claim to girdle only a single day, scarcely less dynamic—that is, subject to that wild gallop which can lead only to another wild gallop—that is, more frenzied than a snowflake in a blizzard—that is, resolved, for fear of being fettered, never to be embraced at all: neither dynamic nor static, I see beauty as I have seen you. (159, translation slightly modified) 38

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Breton’s quotation here from Baudelaire’s allegorical “Beauty” in Flowers of Evil, beginning, “I am as beautiful, O mortals! as a dream of stone,” performs several functions (37). Baudelaire’s Salon odalisques, muses, and nudes in marble and oils, “[a]s eternal and mute as matter,” and their descendants in the art of Henri Matisse and others are rejected by Breton as exemplars of beauty whether dreamt or not (37). The same goes for all the other iconic and narrative genres of early modernist art and even art itself, considered by Breton to be as incomplete and outof-date in their illusions of either stillness or movement as Baudelaire’s declaration in the same poem, “I hate all movement which displaces lines” (37), or in “An Invitation to Voyage,” the better-known “There, all is order and beauty/Luxe, calme et volupté” (57–58). In their stead is proposed a beauty based in contradiction, “neither dynamic nor static,” surrendered in an image not of the museum but of modern urban and industrial life that is as profuse and irrational as those of Lautréamont: Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts, many of which do not have importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Jolt, which does. (Nadja 159–160) The debt to Lautréamont is confirmed immediately after in a simile consistent with this erotic “jolt” and its metaphorical association with modern technology: “Beauty, neither static nor dynamic. The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph” (160). The larger, still-underdeveloped theoretical prop of Breton’s nascent aesthetic, of a beauty that exists in contradiction, resides in Hegel’s dialectic, which is hinted at bluntly through the single word “Hegel,” placed as a footnote to the quotation that precedes the reflections in this final section of Nadja as though it were a signpost.1 Like Nadja herself, the structure of Nadja shreds expectation of tidy behavioral patterns. That inclination continues up to the final words of this demanding and obscure final section in line with its emerging theme of a lived, post-Baudelairean beauty that is contradictory, fractional, oblique, unwritable. It tapers to a close with a French newspaper report of December 26, 1927, presented slightly edited by Breton and without comment, detailing a “fragment of a message” sent by an unknown, lost “aeroplane,” which was received by a radio operator on the unpopulated Île du Sable, or Sable Island, some distance southeast off the coast of Halifax, Nova Scotia: “There is something which is not working” (160). The transcription of this clipping in Nadja is followed not by an analysis but by the final sentence of Breton’s book: “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all” (160). Again, both radio and flight are emblematic of a particularly modern sensibility. However, the ostensible poetic content is borne not in any specific facts surrounding the reported event, which turns out to be the final message received from the lost “aeroplane” named Dawn attempting a cross-channel flight from Long Island, New York, but rather, it lies for readers of Nadja in the suggestive fragment of the message, its transmission on Christmas Day (a Sunday in 1927), the mystery of the lost aircraft and that of the fantastic-sounding Île du Sable (“Island of Sand”), which Breton named in italics without its specific geographical locale. Although its pessimistic, disembodied half message sent from above on the Holy Day to a world demanding certainty has a darkly humorous shading, meaning seems close at hand but is forever suspended, incomplete yet charged with potential, like the many-sided metaphor of sand, comparable with the blocked communication and the fate of the anonymous communiqué, travelling in the space of a dream. It is notable that Breton’s attempt to convey without orthodox definition what he meant by “convulsive beauty” was carried out in Nadja from the standpoint of a passionate experience 39

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of love. His concern with beauty had not emerged initially from an aesthetic experience: as he maintained, it had “never been envisaged here save for emotional purposes” and, addressing Muzard (not Beauty herself in the forms of her monuments like Baudelaire), he stated, “I see beauty as I have seen you.” This carries in a veiled manner even for certain details of the key example of beauty that he gave of the train always leaving the station. Over the following years, Breton’s experiences would lead him toward a theorization of erotic love alongside a refined understanding of convulsive beauty. Beyond its erotic implication, the medical context is evident in the term “convulsive,” partly defined through consultation with the Littré by the editors of Breton’s Oeuvres complètes as “an involuntary muscular contraction and jerking [saccadée] of muscles.”2 The closeness to Lautréamont’s idiosyncratic comparison of Mervyn’s beauty with the “unpredictability of muscular movement” is striking, but it is the convulsive movements of hysteria patients that are most germane. From his initial vocation in medicine, Breton had long been aware of the behavior and imagery of patients suffering from the condition. Accordingly, in La Révolution surréaliste in 1928, he celebrated “The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria” with Aragon by reviving for poetry what had become contested symptoms for medicine. As “the greatest poetic discovery of the later nineteenth century,” hysteria remained an “irreducible mental condition” for the Surrealists, “a supreme means of expression” characterized by the overturning of the pact previously made by the subject with a moral code (320–321). Exemplary for Aragon and Breton were the black-and-white photographs accompanying their text captioned “LES ATTITUDES PASSIONNELLES EN 1878.” They were taken for medical purposes and first reproduced in Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (1878), documenting the behavior of the well-known hysteric Louise Augustine Gleizes, who gazes joyfully, alluringly, or disturbingly, hallucinating upward, into the camera or inward, utterly disordered by abrasive contrast with Baudelaire’s serene, composed Beauty, who says, “I never weep and I never laugh” (37). Lying down or sitting upright on the messy, creased sheets of hospital beds, she performs a variety of distinctive angular poses that mock Beauty’s “great poses/ Which [she] seem[s] to borrow from the proudest monuments (37).” As viewed in La Révolution surréaliste swathed in a medical gown, Gleizes rudely challenges and parodies previous canons of poetic and artistic beauty in the name of Surrealism, not just the draped statuary of the classical period, but also the odalisques and nudes of the Salon and early modernism from the likes of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814) through Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) to Matisse’s contemporary efforts. Traces of Breton’s developing theory of convulsive beauty as disorderly, spontaneous, and beyond the control of the will—as an expression that imposes itself on its author (stumbled on, like the newspaper clipping) as opposed to being consciously created by him or her—and its relation to erotic love can be discovered in his poetry of the late 1920s and early 1930s in the collection Le Revolver à cheveux blancs (1932). In “Postman Cheval,” the train in Nadja that perpetually leaves the station is transformed into a heightened, explicitly erotic, and environmental metaphor of a “locomotive preyed upon by immense barometric roots/That cries out dolefully in the virgin forest with all of its mauled boilers/Its stacks puffing hyacinths and propelled by blue serpents” (Poems 67), while in “Deadly Rescue,” which contemplates a prostrate statue of Lautréamont, Breton declares, “I have close access to him as a convulsionary” (89). His reflections culminated in a full theory of beauty in the book Mad Love (1937), where the terms convulsive and fou flag unambiguously the decentering of the individual in this aesthetic. The first part of Mad Love is most relevant to this, tying together beauty and love in a piece of writing that had first appeared in 1934 in the review Minotaure, which the Surrealists largely controlled, under a title that pointed back to the final section and sentence of Nadja: 40

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“La beauté sera convulsive” or “Beauty Will Be Convulsive” (9). Breton’s initial dream image of a row of seven or so seated anonymous males, “the lovers [he] shall have been,” gives way to another of seven or nine “seated women in pale clothes,” where he “will discover at the same time in all these women’s faces one face only: the last face loved” (Mad Love 6, 7). It is in the coupling of two people that Breton goes on to seek a new idea of beauty, “a beauty ‘envisaged exclusively to produce passion,’ ” arguing for the responsiveness to nature and art as akin to the sensation of erotic pleasure (8). Three sets of phenomena follow, through which the conditions of beauty can be recognized. Obviously indebted to Sigmund Freud’s notion of sublimation, Breton turns first to rare cases in mainly nineteenth-century poetry and art that produced in him this “shiver,” giving a special significance to the Surrealists’ discovery of Lautréamont, whose “ ‘beautiful as . . .’ constitutes the very manifesto of convulsive poetry” and who “reigns without question over the immense country source of most of these irresistible appeals” (9, translation modified). In such poetic images and in the eyes of the women in Moreau’s paintings and those of “certain contemporary wax effigies,” Breton perceived a certain “veiled-erotic” quality, illustrated rather literally, when the text appeared in Minotaure by Man Ray’s full-page, half-body photograph of Meret Oppenheim naked with an inked arm and hand, her breasts only partly concealed by the flywheel of a printing press (9, 19). Secondly, this beauty was to be conceived not in motion but “at the exact expiration of this motion” (10). As an example, Breton gives a “photograph of a speeding locomotive abandoned for years to the delirium of a virgin forest,” which he presumably saw and seems to have inspired the imagery of “Postman Cheval,” but which he laments being unable to reproduce with his text either in Minotaure or Mad Love (it was located soon after and served as an illustration and inspiration for a poetic text on the primacy of nature by Benjamin Péret published in Minotaure) (10). The synthesis of the machine and nature in the image is important. Subsequently, in Mad Love, all of Breton’s examples of the dialectical twinning of stasis and movement are drawn from the natural world; more specifically, they are concerned with geology: the formation and appearance of minerals, quartz crystals, and coral in grottoes he had visited in Vaucluse and Montpelier and in the spectacle of the Great Barrier Reef, seedbeds of the animate and the inanimate, in Breton’s eyes, formation and destruction (11, 13). He gives particular attention to quartz crystal in an influential eulogy inspired by Hegel that draws an analogy with “creation, spontaneous action, insofar as the crystal, nonperfectible by definition, is the perfect example of it” (11). These passages in Mad Love are accompanied by Brassaï’s photograph of Halite crystals cut into cubes, strewn across a glittering mineral ground (reproduced much more impressively as a banner photograph over “La beauté sera convulsive”) above a passionate caption drawn from Breton’s text, “[T]he house I live in, my life, what I write,” and a little later in the text there is a full-page photograph by Man Ray of what appears to be a flamenco dancer in full flight, captioned to illustrate this category of convulsive beauty, “[F]ixed-explosive” (again, this was impressively reproduced full page at the beginning of “La beauté sera convulsive,” and the text also carried a composition formed from six photographs of coral, quartz, and mineral not used in Mad Love, where a not-very-illustrative photograph of the Great Barrier Reef filled in instead) (12, 14, 20, translation modified). Finally, in Mad Love, Breton turned to his final category in which beauty is the outcome of “the integral certainty produced by the emergence of a solution, which, by its very nature, could not come to us along ordinary logical paths . . . a solution certainly rigorously fitting and yet somehow in excess of the need,” normally seen in resemblance, analogy, or coincidence (13). This barely understood desire is met unexpectedly through automatic writing and the discovery of objects that beckon the subject in an echo of what was unknowingly because unconsciously 41

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sought. The convulsive beauty that it registers can equally emerge by way of certain manufactured procedures and uncanny experiences. In both Mad Love and Minotaure, Breton’s text is illustrated by Man Ray’s meticulously lit and posed photographs of an arrangement of playing cards with a rubber statue that, Breton asserts, “wrongly or rightly, [he] [has] decided to consider as a spell-casting object” and a mandrake root “looking to [him] like Aeneas carrying his father,” while Minotaure also carries Brassaï’s photograph of what appears to be a shriveled potato sprouting roots so that it resembles a heart with its web of veins and arteries (916, 18). The main purpose of the delineation of this category of convulsive beauty that he calls “magiccircumstantial”—in which things, phenomena, and events collaborate with barely recognized human desire as though experience were the outcome of still-unknown, magical, natural forces rather than tested, logical, scientific laws—is to anticipate the two sections that follow in Mad Love, which speculate on the meanings of significant encounters and narrate logically the illogical circumstances surrounding Breton’s own encounter with Jacqueline Lamba, who he had met and married in the interim between the publication of the very text in Minotaure and Mad Love that he felt had predicted it. Breton concluded, “Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be” (19). Breton’s surrender at the approach of convulsive beauty and his activation of its categories and terminology in his writings after Mad Love are rarely discussed but can be demonstrated here. In the course of his analysis of Seurat’s work in the third lecture he gave on his pedagogical visit to Port-au-Prince in Haiti in 1945–1946, Breton read the artist’s Chahut (1889–1890) dialectically as a “synthetic conception” in the sense that it arrested the gestures of the featured dancers who dominate the tableau at their very extremity (“Conférences 242). This was in keeping with the third condition of convulsive beauty, “fixed-explosive,” where movement expires at its limit, conveniently illustrated in Mad Love by the photograph by Man Ray that immobilizes a dancer (10–13). Recently, in his Anthology of Black Humor (1945), Breton had addressed an art in which “humor can be sensed but at best remains hypothetical—such as in the quasi-totality of Seurat’s painted opus” (“Lightning Rod” xvii). He then examined the humor of Chahut in the 1946 lecture as follows: [T]his painting seems to me to shelter a good many other intentions, which have not yet been aired and make it one of the works whose impact is still in large part to come. Not enough has been made in La Chahut [sic] of its contribution to an icy humor that is entirely modern, which, freezing here impossibly the scene which insists upon the most boisterous treatment, engenders a feeling of extreme vanity and absurdity, corroborated by the inane or blissfully satisfied expressions of one and all. (243) The “fixed-explosive” humor identified here was extended toward the “magic-circumstantial” through the isolation by Breton of the brightly lit bow on the shoe of the foremost dancer, which for him was the key component in the composition. He perceived in this bow the “entirely poetic heroine” of Chahut as a core form insofar as it binds the painting analogically (243). Its “wings” compliment and even reinforce the movement of the dancer’s raised leg; they match the shapes of the upturned corners of the mouths and mustaches of the figures in the painting, as well as the leaves of the tulip-shaped gas jet at center left, and its coloration harmonizes with the wall lighting. It is as though it were a “will-o’-the wisp,” in Breton’s words, which “communicates to the canvas its exorbitant life,” and it is “these elements of great humor and the magic of certain lighting bringing about the strange distribution of organic elements” that establish synthesis in Seurat’s later work (243). 42

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Surprisingly, given his long-standing fascination for the dissimilar Moreau, Breton alluded only briefly to that artist in the Haiti lectures, even though he had already venerated the eyes “of several of Gustave Moreau’s faces” alongside the “heavenly eyes” of Matilda in Lewis’s The Monk in the inventory given by Mad Love of mainly poetic and artistic prototypes that were convulsively beautiful in the sense of being “veiled-erotic” (Mad Love 9; Lewis 81). Quite late in life in 1960, he devoted a short piece of writing to Moreau which stated clearly enough both his enduring devotion to the artist and his firm commitment to the aesthetic of convulsive beauty. Drawn from an informal, unpublished appreciation of 1950, Breton’s text opens with a telling recollection of the compelling impression made on him by his exposure to Moreau’s art around 1912: My discovery, at the age of sixteen, of the Musée Gustave Moreau influenced forever my idea of love. Beauty and love were first revealed to me there through the medium of a few faces, the poses of a few women. The particular ‘type’ of these women plunged me into a state of complete enchantment and probably prevented me from recognizing any other type. . . . This woman who, almost without changing her expression, becomes successively Salome, Helen of Troy, Delilah, the Chimera, Semele, compels recognition as their composite incarnation. (“Gustave Moreau” 363) The multiplicity in singularity perceived by Breton across Moreau’s canvases is already dialectical, and given its formative status in his emotional life, it is not surprising that it recalls the dreamlike opening scene in Mad Love of his encounter with seated women who have, nevertheless, “one face only: the last face loved” (Mad Love 7). The dialectic is continued in his characterization of the museum, which had opened only nine years before Breton’s first visit and was a few streets from his long-term home at 42 rue Fontaine, as “both the ideal image of what a temple should be . . . and the other image of the ‘place of ill repute’ which it might also become” (“Gustave Moreau” 363). Breton extols the faces and attitudes of the female cast of Moreau’s paintings with reference to Baudelaire’s poem “Beauty”—presumably the “[G]reat poses” and “[E]yes, my large eyes with their eternal light!” (37)—and the same poet’s “Hymn to Beauty,” which possesses its own dialectical imagery: “Your eyes, infernal and divine” and “You contain in your eyes the sunset and dawn” (41). If Moreau’s women resemble more closely the Salon figures that lie behind Baudelaire’s “Beauty” than, say, the agitated faces and bodies of the hysteria patients in La Révolution surréaliste, Breton’s further extension of the dialectic through convulsive beauty is meant to rationalize his aesthetic arrest. This takes place through a rejection and interpretation, respectively, of Moreau’s two stated guiding principles for his art: “beautiful [belle] inertia” and “necessary richness [richesse]” (in “Gustave Moreau” 365–366). The first of these would have been unacceptable to Breton, of course, and he says so: “The word ‘inertia’ is far too passive to be admissible, since the liturgical atmosphere which pervades his work is almost hieratic in its power,” by which terms Breton introduces a ritualistic authority to fuse their static poses with a dynamic character and therefore the quality of being “fixedexplosive” (366). Of the second, Breton regarded “richness” as worse than “inertia,” yet he let it pass, arguing that: [I]n fact the word is being used in the same sense that Baudelaire used the word “luxe,” to indicate not only luxury but luxuriance. The accent in Moreau’s work is, indeed, centered on mineral luxuriance: an impossible amalgam, with the flesh, of 43

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those precious stones which Baudelaire, in “The Litanies of Satan,” accused “the jealous God” of having hidden. (366, translation slightly modified) Breton goes on to credit the second stanza of Baudelaire’s “Jewels” with calling up the “the mystery of the fascination exercised by precious stones” (366). In these ways, across the Baudelairean coupling of flesh and mineral, soft and hard, animate and inanimate, nudity and its concealment, Moreau’s “luxuriant” painting is associated with the paragraphs of Mad Love that present minerals and, above all, crystal as exemplary of the condition of convulsive beauty called “fixedexplosive.” It might equally be argued that those passages stating the conditions that give rise to convulsive beauty have their distant origin in Breton’s youthful infatuation with Moreau’s art. Readers of Breton will be familiar with the remarkable consistency of his taste from his teens into middle age and up to the end of his life. Yet it was only in the years from the Manifesto of Surrealism to the middle 1930s that he was able to comprehend fully the erotic content of aesthetic beauty. A final token of this contemporary preoccupation with the writing of Mad Love can be found in Breton’s important Minotaure essay of 1936 responding to the fiftieth anniversary of Symbolism, “Marvelous versus Mystery.” Baudelaire is regarded there as almost entirely a poet of mystery in the control he demands over language, while Lautréamont, “the sublime wanderer, the great locksmith of modern life,” leads those poets of the marvelous who initially yield to language (“Marvelous” 4). As disclosed by the words “convulsive” and “mad,” a subject is reduced to a puzzled observer of an object, image, condition, or phenomenon beyond conscious control that is imposed upon the socialized, civilized self from the unconscious, namely, the sexual instinct, writes Breton, referring to the process of “sublimation” (3). That is why he could insist that “behavior in matters of language will tend more and more to be modelled on amorous behavior” and the “poet and the lover must aim, in the presence of the form haunting them, at being infinitely less mystifying than mystified” (6). Beauty and love in the Surrealist sense, then, truly exceed the control of the mind and are more matters of chance than design.

Notes 1. Breton had been reading Hegel since about 1919; his editors tracked this source not directly to Hegel but to the French translation of Benedetto Croce, Ce qui est vivant et ce qui est mort de la philosophie de Hegel, Paris: Girard et Brière, 1910, 51–52; Breton, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 1561 n. 5. 2. ‘une contraction musculaire involontaire et saccadée des muscles,’ Breton, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 1564 n. 8.

Works Cited Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant [1926]. Translated by Simon Watson Taylor. Picador, 1987. Aragon, Louis, and André Breton. “The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria” [1928]. André Breton, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, edited by Franklin Rosemont, London: Pluto, 1978, pp. 320–321. ———. “Le Cinquantenaire de l’hysterie (1878–1928).” La Révolution surréaliste, no. 11, 15 March 1928, pp. 20–22. Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil [1859]. Translate by Wallace Fowlie. Dover Publications, Inc., 1963. Breton, André. “Conférences d’Haïti, III” [1946]. André Breton, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, Gallimard, 1999, pp. 233–251. ———. “Gustave Moreau” [1960]. Surrealism and Painting [1965]. Translated by Simon Watson Taylor. Harper & Row, 1972. ———. “La beauté sera convulsive.” Minotaure, no. 5, February 1934, pp. 9–16. ———. “Lightning Rod.” Anthology of Black Humor [1945/1966]. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. City Lights, 1997, pp. xiii–xix, xvii.

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Convulsive Beauty and Mad Love ———. Mad Love [1937]. Translated by Mary Ann Caws. University of Nebraska Press, 1987, pp. 6, 7. ———. Manifesto of Surrealism [1924], Manifestoes of Surrealism. University of Michigan Press, 1969, pp. 1–47. ———. “Marvellous versus Mystery” [1936], Free Rein [1953]. Translated by Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise. University of Nebraska Press, 1995, pp. 1–6, 4. ———. Nadja [1928]. Translated by Richard Howard. Grove Weidenfeld, 1960, p. 157. ———. Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1. Translated by Marguerite Bonnet. Gallimard, 1988. ———. Poems of André Breton: A  Bilingual Anthology. Edited and translated by Jean-Pierre Cauvin and Mary Ann Caws. University of Texas Press, 1982. Lautréamont, Comte de. Maldoror and Poems [1869 and 1870]. Translated by Paul Knight. Penguin, 1988. Lewis, Matthew. The Monk [1796]. Oxford University Press, 1988. Péret, Benjamin. “La nature dévore le progrès et le dépasse.” Minotaure, no. 10, Winter 1937.

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5 THE OCCULT, MAGIC, AND ALCHEMY Rachael Grew

The Occult and Its Seers Though the word “occult” may popularly conjure images of sinister figures drawing on dark forces for nefarious purposes, its meaning is much broader. “Occult” refers to that which is hidden, and so occult disciplines and practices—which include magic and alchemy—seek and explore worlds, knowledge, and ideas outside or beyond or hidden within our everyday world. The occult’s secret nature also positions it against religious, scientific, medical, political, and cultural institutions. By suggesting that there is something else beyond the dogmas and ideologies that take the lead in shaping society, occultism rebels against, and even rejects, these dominant rationales (Baudin et al. 37). This challenge to everyday rationalism immediately suggests a connection to Surrealist thought. Embracing the occult meant rejecting the Enlightenment-driven, bourgeois emphasis on reality, logic, and the sensorial world, opening another avenue to the irrational and the imaginary (Rabinovitch 66–67; Baudin et al. 4). Equally, by drawing on the hidden, secret world to understand and change the physical world, the occult also operates in parallel to the core Surrealist aim of uniting the dream and the real. The occult was also used, by Breton in particular, as a way of positioning Surrealism within a canon of art that challenged the typical, formalist basis of modernism. Occultism, magic, and alchemy were associated with “transformational, metaphorical, or transmutational” properties in art, using these disciplines to produce an antiestablishment version of the modern canon (Parkinson 290–293). These tropes of the irrational, the hidden, and the rebellion against the norm recur time and again in the different facets of Surrealist engagement with the occult. In his 1925 Letter to Seers, André Breton highlights and liaises the anti-institutional nature of magic and the occult. He bemoans the way society clings to economic success and scientific study, praising instead the “infinitely vast framework” of the seer’s “immense” clairvoyant powers (199–201). He imagines the seer as a passive young woman beset by the attention of doctors and academics. However, in realising her true potential, the seer’s awakening is likened to “the next eruption of Vesuvius,” and Breton envisages her with “unbound hair” and as a harbinger of love (203). In this sense, Breton allies this manifestation of occult power—and the seer—with mad love, the sensual yet innocent young woman, echoing key tropes within his conception of Surrealism. 46

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-7

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This is also echoed in Breton’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism from 1930, which contains his infamous call for “the profound, the veritable occultation of Surrealism” (178). In the footnote to this statement, Breton highlights various Surrealist games, such as the exquisite corpse, as methods of exploring the occult, adding a call to “submit ourselves to the mediums.” He follows this with the pronouncement: “Praise be to hysteria, Aragon and I have said, and to its train of young, naked women sliding along the roofs” (179–180); then, he brings the footnote back to love, again tying together the occult with the irrational feminine and Eros. I will return to this connection later in relation to the witch, but for now I want to ask, What is the attraction of the seer for Breton? Arguably, it is because of what they can reveal through their intangible methods, their ability to confuse and blur the dream and the real, and thus to facilitate the marvellous (Breton 201).

Tarot This kind of marvellous revelation through occult means is also central to tarot, an area of the occult that interested a variety of Surrealists. Though its origins are somewhat obscure, tarot ultimately derives from card games and is used as a form of divination to answer questions and to look into the past and the future. Tarot decks are split into two sets of cards: The Major Arcana (22 picture cards conveying archetypal tropes and themes) and the Minor Arcana (56 cards akin to a standard card deck with four suits, each with cards numbered Ace to 10, plus four court, or royal, cards). While a group of Surrealists were stuck in Marseilles in the winter of 1940–1941, awaiting travel papers allowing them to flee war-torn Europe, they created a card game: the Jeu de Marseilles. Though it contained no Major Arcana and thus looked like a typical deck of cards, the name and the colour scheme of blue, red, and yellow directly recalled the Tarot de Marseilles, which Breton might have known at least through Eliphas Lévi’s writings. The tarot suits of wands, swords, coins (or pentacles), and cups are replaced in the Jeu de Marseilles by the suits of flame, dream, revolution, and knowledge. Similarly, the traditional court cards of Jack, Queen, and King are replaced by Magus, Siren, and Genius, removing hierarchical class distinctions (Sawin 132). Each of the figures depicted on the Surrealist court cards referred to a person that represented transgression and the permit of the marvellous. For example, the genius of flame was Baudelaire, while the Magus of dream was Freud, both cards drawn by Oscar Dominguez. Similarly, Wifredo Lam drew Alice of Wonderland as the Siren of dream, while Jacques Herold drew the Marquis de Sade as the Genius of flame. Max Ernst, Victor Brauner, Jacqueline Lamba, and André Mason also contributed designs to the deck. Though some of the cards reference tarot meanings or iconography, overall, they use tropes from Surrealist interest and ideology, retrofitting tarot to convey Surrealist revelations. However, other artists felt deeply enough into the meaning and significance of tarot to produce their own decks. Roberto Matta produced a deck that shared the same colour scheme as the tarot and Jeu de Marseilles, but the imagery recalls that of another famous and more recent deck, the Rider-Waite Tarot, produced in 1910 and illustrated by Pamela Coleman-Smith. This latter tarot was also possibly a key source for Leonora Carrington’s 1955 tarot deck (Aberth and Arq 69). Her cards certainly use layouts similar to those of the Rider-Waite deck, though they are peopled by figures akin to those found in her painting of this period. By looking back to these older European sources for their tarot, these artists may perhaps echo Breton’s wartime call for a new mythology, looking across mythic and folkloric contents to build a new unity following the horrific fragmentation caused by the Second World War. This ethos is strongly reflected in the Surrealism in 1947 exhibition, installed in Galerie Haight, Paris, in July-August of that year. It was conceived by Breton to represent initiation, 47

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transformation, and rebirth, and the viewer entered the exhibit via a staircase symbolising 21 cards of the tarot Major Arcana, eventually finding themselves in the egg-shaped “hall of superstitions” before arriving in the final room, dedicated to the new mythologies of Surrealism (Mahon 118). The hall of superstitions was created by Frederick Kiesler in concert with various artists, including Ernst, Miro, Matta, Tanguy, Etienne Martin, and David Hare. In the text Kiesler wrote to accompany the exhibition, “The Magic Architecture of the Hall of Superstition,” he explicitly states the contemporary need for a new unity and brings this unity to life through the shared collaboration between different artists and the space. For Kiesler, the “magical” nature of his architecture rests on collaborative creativity and the grounding of the space in the human being (152–153). The painting that Victor Brauner included as part of his altar in the hall of superstitions, entitled The Lovers, draws directly on the iconography of the Rider-Waite Tarot, depicting the Hierophant and the Magician, also known as the Juggler. The latter figure inspired another of Brauner paintings from 1947, The Surrealist. As in the tarot card, the central figure in the painting stands at a table laden with representations of the four tarot suits, an infinity sign hovering above their head. However, the presence of fire and water also speaks to alchemical lore and the combination of opposing materials to produce the Philosopher’s Stone. Whether read through the lens of tarot or alchemy, Brauner portrays the Surrealist as an occult adept, one who has been initiated into occult mysteries.

Sources of Knowledge But how did the Surrealists come to know about and become interested in these occult disciplines in the first place? How did they learn more about them? At the turn of the twentieth century, the occult was far from an underground subculture. There was a widespread general interest in occultism, as seen in the enormous popularity of movements like Theosophy. There were also texts on the subject written for a broad audience, such as Fraser’s The Golden Bough. When Surrealist artist Kurt Seligmann published his 1948 book Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion (also known as The Mirror of Magic), the sources he mentions in his introduction attest to the continuing popular interest in the occult. For example, as well as Frazer, he cites G. L. Kittredge as a key scholarly source (xxiii). Kittredge’s 1907 book on witchcraft was republished again in 1929. Likewise, in Seligmann’s bibliography, he lists texts published in 1927 by Oswald Wirth and Montague Summers, both specialists in occult literature. It is clear that occultism continued to be a mainstream cultural interest in the developmental, early years of the Surrealist movement. Writers favoured by the Surrealists, such as Apollinaire and Alfred Jarry, also used themes of the supernatural and the occult. Ironically, new discoveries around radium and other phenomena caused alchemy to resurface as a legitimate science at this time, as alchemical concepts were discussed in relation to the work of scientists such as William Crookes, William Ramsey, and Norman Lockyer (Grew, Evolution 27–28). Critics have also posited a number of sources directly read by the Surrealists. Anna Balakian has suggested that Breton was heavily influenced by occultist Eliphas Lévi (35), while Linda Dalrymple Henderson has argued that both Lévi and the turn-of-the-century alchemist and publisher of alchemical journals Jolivet Castelot were key for Duchamp (26; 231–232). More broadly, other key sources include Jules Michelet’s The Sorceress (1862) and Gillot de Giry’s Witchcraft, Magic, and Alchemy (1929). The latter is heavily illustrated and provided visual source material as well as information. These sources in particular attest to the Surrealists’ interest in the occult strands of magic and alchemy. 48

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Magic, Witches, and Witchcraft Magic is a key example of this rebellious form of exploration. It seeks to explore, understand, and change the natural condition of matter, but not through officially sanctioned methods. While Breton may have conceptualised the magical as being akin to the transformative power of poetic metaphor (Parkinson 29), other Surrealists took a more literal interest in the subject, especially witches and witchcraft. In some cases, Surrealist references to magical figures reiterate gendered stereotypes. Circe and Melusine, for instance, who both feature in the diagram detailing the magical, mythical origins of Surrealism for the 1961 exhibition Surrealist Intrusion into the Enchanter’s Domain, are typical femmes fatales (Baudin et al. 1). Both of them are beautiful but dangerous seducers of men. Equally, Max Ernst’s painting The Witch (1941) is one of a series thought to refer to Leonora Carrington, the ex-lover he was separated from due to the outbreak of war. Carrington was already viewed as a femme enfant/muse figure by some of her male peers in the group, and her mental breakdown following Ernst’s forced imprisonment endeared her to Breton further as a hysteric. We have already seen the connection Breton made between women, hysteria, mad love, and occult power, but Carrington and others did not share his perspective. A number of female Surrealists and female artists associated with the group drew on the image of the witch and the notion of witchcraft and the witches’ Sabbat in their work. In Carrington’s painting, the most overt example of witchy activity appears in The House Opposite (1945), where three human-hybrid figures stand around a cauldron full of bubbling green potion. She viewed cooking as a rite of magical, transformative activity, as seen in Grandmother Moorhead’s Aromatic Kitchen (1975), where the strange figures prepare ingredients around a large magic circle chalked on the floor. Carrington and her close friend and fellow Surrealist artist, Remedios Varo, also concocted recipes for spells and potions, strengthening the idea of the kitchen as a site of witchcraft (Kaplan 95–96). There is also an alchemical dimension to this activity, the combination of different “ingredients” over a fire or heat source to produce something greater than the sum of its parts. I will return to alchemy in more detail later, but it is worth noting here Varo’s Witch Going to the Sabbat (1957) as a different example of the connection between these two occult disciplines. Though both Varo and Carrington lived the remainder of their lives in Mexico following their wartime exodus from France, neither used Mexican myth or folklore very often in their works. Witch Going to the Sabbath is an exception. The witch’s flaring, ankle-length red hair, white attire, and the egg-shaped black hole in her chest correspond to indigenous Mexican belief of types of magic: red, white, and black (Grew, “Wizard” 27–28). These three colours also correspond to the phases of the alchemical Great Work, as the matter in the crucible changes from black to white, and finally to red. The fact that Varo’s witch pulls a bird from the central black space is highly significant. As Madrid argues, the way that the bird rises from or sinks into this hole suggests “magical metamorphosis,” that the bird is the witch’s alter ego and represents her transformed self, ready to fly away to the Sabbat (202). The fact that the bird and the witch in Varo’s painting both share some of the artist’s own facial features highlights that this is a form of self-creation and transformation. Unlike Breton’s idealised seers, who place themselves at the service of male artists, Varo’s witch creates for and by herself. Madrid further connects this work with other paintings by women Surrealists that depict “a powerful witch accompanied by totemic animals or familiars,” such as Dorothea Tanning’s Birthday (1942) or Carrington’s Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937–1938) (202). Leonor Fini’s depictions of witches likewise depict them as embodiments of transformation and metamorphic identity. Unlike Varo and others, however, she does not express this 49

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transformative power through totemic animals but through the body and its adornment. In her witch paintings of the mid-1930s, the women’s clothes peel off their bodies in shreds, while some even pull at their own skin! They figuratively and literally shed their skin so that flesh and costume are the same matter: a substance to be transformed and creating multiple iterations of self (Grew, “One Day” 107). The depiction of the witch as a key representation of magical practice encapsulates magic’s antiauthoritarian position in bringing about change. However, for Carrington, Varo, Fini, and others, the authority that the witch challenges is a patriarchal authority both within social norms and Surrealist ideology that would see them as passive catalysts for inspiration rather than actively creating themselves. This use of the occult to rebel against patriarchal, institutional norms within and beyond the Surrealist group is also visible in artists’ approaches to alchemy, as we will see.

Alchemy The transformative and transgressive nature of both magic and alchemy undoubtedly appealed to the Surrealists. However, while the significance of magic gained more momentum in the post-WWII period (for André Breton in at least), the Surrealists’ interest in alchemy was present right at the start, and even prior to the first Manifesto of 1924. Alchemical imagery appears, for example, in Breton’s text Soluble Fish (1924), while the October 1923 issue of Littérature included the names of three notable alchemists—Hermes Trismegistus, Nicolas Flamel, and Raman Lull or Lully—in the group’s list of favourite writers or philosophers (Grew, Evolution 72). The occult position on alchemy is a little more complicated than that of magic, which made no bones about its otherness. Originating in Ancient Egypt and making its way to Europe via Greece and Persia, alchemy examined the fundamentals of matter: what materials were composed of and how to change their nature. However, the ultimate goal of the alchemist was to produce the philosopher’s stone, a material capable of turning any metal into gold. This quest was sometimes equated with a spiritual journey, whereby the soul of the alchemist would be purified in the same way they purified the material in their crucible in the hope of turning it into the philosopher’s stone. Alchemy thus combined legitimate scientific experimentation with more mystical and spiritual goals, which separated it from the rationalist emphasis of scientific institutions from the seventeenth century onward. Moreover, alchemists hid their knowledge in cryptic texts and allegorical images. Decoding these sources was an alchemist’s first step in proving that they were worthy to engage in the Great Work, as it was called. The highly symbolic and dreamlike nature of these images was another factor in the Surrealists’ interest. One artist clearly influenced by alchemy is Max Ernst. M. E. Warlick has produced a detailed assessment of Ernst’s application of alchemical concepts and imagery in his work, particularly in his collage novel A Week of Kindness (1934), which, for Warlick, functions as an allegory for the alchemical process as well as an engagement with the Surrealist themes of violence, sexuality, and individual freedom (Warlick 120, 125). The “Wednesday” and “Thursday” sections of the novel are full of birds. Not only do they function as avatars of Ernst’s bird alter ego, Loplop, but they also refer to alchemical symbolism. In alchemy, birds generally refer to the refining process—the repeated distillations and condensations that strip away the cruder layers of the material in the crucible (or the alchemist), until the perfected stone is revealed. The “Wednesday” section is full of bird-headed human figures that reference this metamorphosis, whether through combining gendered elements or other animal components or seeking to escape from an enclosed environment (Warlick 124–125). 50

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Equally, the “Thursday” section features roosters; a symbol of the alchemist and indeed one of the collages, plate 2, in this section depicts a rooster in an alchemical laboratory (Warlick 125). Through his connection with Loplop, Ernst is then figured as the alchemist undertaking a creative process while being himself transformed. Though the alchemical Great Work describes the combination and transformation of matter in terms of a binary male-female union that produces an androgyne, by associating himself with that matter, Ernst emphasises a male creative process. This is echoed by the frequently masculine presentation of the birds in the section that stand for him. Moreover, in plate 2, the rooster-alchemist approaches a woman’s abdomen with a scalpel, which is highly significant given that alchemical texts use pregnancy as a metaphor for the development of the philosopher’s stone in the crucible and even feature images of male pregnancy to refer to the alchemist’s generation of the stone. Is the rooster-alchemist/LoplopErnst appropriating “female” powers of procreativity further enhancing the idea of a strongly masculine creative process (Grew, Evolution 226)? It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that a number of women artists use alchemical imagery to emphasise a female or androgynous creative process. For example, in Varo’s Solar Music (1955), an androgynous figure causes rays of sunlight to break the crystalline cages of white birds, turning them red and enabling them to fly away. The colour change echoes that of the Great Work, but the use of the sunlight and the fact that the figure wears a cloak which has grown out of the forest floor suggest a direct connection to “female” nature. Similarly, the British Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun, who had a deep interest in the occult in general, emphasised a female creative process in her painting The Visitation (1944). At first glance, it is an abstract rendering of the union of mercury and sulphur to form the philosopher’s stone, using “cold” blues and “warm” pinks to symbolise the gendering of the different elements. However, on closer examination, the shape of these biomorphic, abstract forms distinctly recalls the shape of ovaries, gendering the entire operation female (Grew, Evolution 241). It is likely that Leonora Carrington was interested in alchemy before meeting Max Ernst, and her paintings abound with alchemical symbolism, especially the motif of the egg, a reference not only to the alchemist’s crucible but also to the womb (Aberth 82). Alchemical imagery intermixes with a plethora of other esoteric and mystical symbols in Carrington’s writing too. In both Down Below (1944) and The Hearing Trumpet (1974), Carrington describes herself and/ or alter ego characters in relation to alchemical imagery and concepts (Aberth 49). For example, at the climax of The Hearing Trumpet, the protagonist, Marion, says, “Holding the mirror at arm’s length I seemed to see a three-faced female. . . . One of the faces was black, one red, one white” (Carrington 138), matching the stages of the Great Work. Marion/Carrington/ the woman is thus not simply an ingredient in the transformative process but the work in its entirety: the container, the material, and the alchemist. Transformative creativity is thus at the heart of Surrealism’s engagement with the occult, magic, and alchemy. Whether it is the Bretonian quest to transform the mundane through the experience of the marvellous or a more far-reaching exploration of creative potential and empowerment through metamorphosis and multiplicity, these disciplines that sit on the edges of accepted rational ideologies and practice offer a rebellious route to forms of self-knowledge which powerfully challenge convention.

Works Cited Aberth, Susan. Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy, and Art. Lund Humphries, 2005. Aberth, Susan, and Tere Arcq. “As in a Mirror with Multiple Facets: Leonora Carrington and the Tarot.” The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, edited by Susan Abert and Tere Arcq, Fulgar Press, 2020, pp. 63–116.

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Rachael Grew Balakian, Anna. André Breton: Magus of Surrealism. Oxford University Press, 1971. Baudin, Tessel M., Victoria Ferentinou, and Daniel Zamani. “Introduction: In search of the Marvellous.” Surrealism, Occultism, and Politics: In Search of the Marvellous, edited by T. M. Baudin, Victoria Ferentinou, and Daniel Zamani, Routledge, 2018, pp. 1–19. Breton, André. “Letter to Seers.” 1925. Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor, 1972, pp. 195–203. ———. Second Manifesto of Surrealism. 1930. Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, University of Michigan Press, 1972, pp. 119–187. Carrington, Leonora. The Hearing Trumpet. 1974. Penguin Classics, 2005. Grew, Rachael. The Evolution of the Alchemical Androgyne in Symbolist and Surrealist Art. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2010. ———. “From One Day to Another: A Ballet Scenario by Leonor Fini.” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History, vol. 90, no. 2, 2021, pp. 101–114. ———. “A Wizard/Witch’s Duel: Gender Power Struggles and the Occult in Surrealism.” The Apothecary’s Chest: Magic, Art, and Medication, edited by Fabienne Collignon, Konstantina Georganta, and AnneMarie Millim, Routledge, 2010, pp. 23–39. Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in The Large Glass and Related Works. Princeton University Press, 1998. Kaplan, Janet. Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys. Abbeville Press Inc., 1988. Kiesler, Frederick. “The Magic Architecture of the Hall of Superstition.” 1947. Surrealists on Art, edited by Lucy Lippard, Spectrum Books, 1970, pp. 151–153. Madrid, María José González. “ ‘On the True Exercise of Witchcraft’ in the Work of Remedios Varo.” Surrealism, Occultism, andPpolitics: In Search of the Marvellous, edited by T. M. Baudin, Victoria Ferentinou, and Daniel Zamani, Routledge, 2018, pp. 194–209. Mahon, Alyce. Surrealism and the Politics of Eros 1938–1968. Thames and Hudson, 2005. Parkinson, Gavin. Enchanted Ground: André Breton, Modernism, and the Surrealist Appraisal of Fin-de-Siècle Painting. Bloomsbury, 2018. Rabinovitch, Celia. Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art. Westview, 2004. Sawin, Marticia. Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. MIT Press, 1995. Seligmann, Kurt. Magic, Supernaturalism, and Religion. 1948. Penguin edition, 1971. Warlick, M. E. Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of a Myth. University of Texas, 2001.

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6 TOWARD A TOTAL ANIMISM Surrealism and Nature Kristoffer Noheden

In no. 10, 1937, of the journal Minotaure, a photograph of a steam locomotive overgrown with vegetation accompanies Benjamin Péret’s essay “La Nature devoré le progrès et le dépasse” (Nature Devours Progress and Exceeds It), in which the poet tells of a forest being attacked by humans wielding axes and dynamite in order to clear a path for a railroad. Eventually, the train gets stuck on the tracks and the vegetation returns, slithering around the locomotive and locking it in place (Péret 20–21). Having first been exploited by humans under the guise of progress, nature reclaims its space with a vengeance. Péret’s gleeful siding with nature against human incursion bears reminiscences of William Blake’s Romantic outcry during the Industrial Revolution a century earlier against the English landscape being overtaken by “these dark Satanic mills” (xix). It also anticipates the later Surrealist attraction to the radical environmental movement of the last decades of the twentieth century, which spurned fantasies about wilderness invading highways, malls, and cities (Rosemont). Images of verdant nature being replaced by malignant machines act, in Blake as much as in Péret, as a rallying cry for awareness of what is lost with technological progress, and the counterimage of nature striking back at technology has served to mobilize resistance among environmentally minded Surrealists. Péret’s conjuration of nature devouring progress, then, aligns interwar Surrealism with Romantic forebears and bears the seed of an environmental consciousness. In Péret’s essay, however, nature is also fraught with more unexpected forces and characteristics; nature does not just oppose but interplays with culture in the guise of technology. Nature, here, is no mere blind force. In Péret’s narrative, the train is first halted when the vegetation seduces the mechanic and makes him neglect his duties; then, the train itself engages in sexual congress with the forest. The train, an emblem of modernist progress, is not just stopped in its tracks by vengeful nature. Instead, nature and technology enter into a new union under the sign of Eros. Nature is an active, erotically minded, and even seductive agent, not just stalling, but surpassing progress.

Flora and Fauna Nature has been important to a wide range of Surrealists for a large number of reasons throughout the movement’s long history. As suggested by Péret’s essay, Surrealism has frequently derided the destruction and exploitation of nature in the name of progress and modernity but also turned to nature for its position as the unknown other in relation to DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-8

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civilization. In its otherness, nature is at once a counterforce to industrial modernity and charged with poetic potential. The first French Surrealists are generally, and justly, thought of as urbanites. Still, in the first Surrealist manifesto, Breton speaks of “the inadmissible” “flora and fauna of Surrealism” (Manifestoes 40), and plants, forests, and animals are prevalent even in the earliest Surrealist poems and artworks. Just consider the black-and-white photographs of birds pasted in Max Ernst proto-Surrealist mixed-media work Flamingoes (1920), the splendorous cocks-on-a-rock passing through crystals in Breton’s poem “No Paradise Is Lost” (1923) (Poems 63), or the ants pouring out of a hole in a man’s hand in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s pioneering film Un Chien andalou (1929). Moreover, the movement’s opposition to colonialism, capitalism, and Christianity means that Surrealism questioned their views of nature as an emblem of backwardness, a resource to be exploited, and a realm for humans to lord over. During the 1930s, there was a marked increase in Surrealist interest in biology and philosophy of nature, as evidenced by the photographs of and speculations about owls, leaf insects, and iguanas in Minotaure (1933–1939) and the centrality of crystals and coral reefs for Breton’s Mad Love (1937). Nature has taken on a multifaceted role in Surrealist art and thought. Surrealists have lauded numerous animals, plants, and stones as evidence that there is a rich poetry immanent in reality, modeled Surrealist poetics on natural processes of growth and change, and likened the unconscious with a dense vegetation teeming with animalistic instincts; some Surrealists have been amateur or professional biologists, including Roger Caillois, Christopher K. Starr, and Mattias Forshage. Jean Arp claimed that art should not seek to emulate the appearance of nature, but rather its spontaneous growth (50–51). Leonora Carrington felt a strong kinship with horses, which for her became totemic symbols of resistance against patriarchal domination. The exhibitions Exposition surréaliste d’objets at Galerie Charles Ratton in Paris in 1936 and Surrealist Objects and Poems at the London Gallery in 1937 featured found natural objects alongside a host of other Surrealist objects. Rikki Ducornet describes herself as a “frustrated natural historian” (interview). Jan Švankmajer has constructed his own version of the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities, premodern displays of the marvels of nature, complete with a wide range of natural specimens (Solařík). The Surrealist attraction to nature thus encompasses revolt against exploitation, a revival of premodern fascination with nature, totemistic identification with animals, and naturalistic attentiveness to the appearance and behavior of animals, plants, and minerals, including their interaction. Such passions and preoccupations are reflected in the prevalent presence of nature in the Surrealist outlook overall. It is significant that Surrealism emerged in the wake of the twin “Copernican revolutions” of evolutionary biology and psychoanalysis, both of which struck blows to an earlier anthropocentric worldview. Charles Darwin demonstrated that humans descended from animals, that humans are animals, the difference between humans and other life-forms being one of degree and not kind. Sigmund Freud’s “discovery” of the unconscious showed that humans were not rational beings with a coherent self but fractured and riven with repressed, irrational desires, less masters of themselves than prey to intolerable drives. The Surrealists realized that if human reason is constantly challenged by irrational undercurrents, then the modern edifice of rationality and logic masks “the actual functioning of thought” (Breton, Manifestoes 26). Considering the large number of animals and other natural elements that crop up in automatic writings and drawings, this actual functioning of thought is one in which the human mind is crisscrossed with remnants of animal and plant life. Indeed, in the early years of Surrealism, Louis Aragon described Breton as “a fantastic hunter who exhibits his prey, ‘a reinvented zoology, a reinvented botany’ ” (Ubl 78). 54

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Animism and Mechanism For Freud, the unconscious, teeming with animalistic urges intolerable to modern civilization, also harbors a repressed animism, according to which there is no clear distinction between the inanimate and the animate, mind and matter (147). Latching onto the anthropological jargon of his time, Freud considered such animist tendencies to be remnants of a primitive, less-evolved understanding of the world. In contrast, Surrealists have always been drawn to what Claude Lévi-Strauss calls the wild thought of indigenous people, and through their methods of probing the unconscious, they have persistently engaged with an animist view of the world. In Max Ernst’s paintings, the vegetation is riddled with mysterious forces. In Leonora Carrington’s painting The Ancestor (1968), albino lemurs take part in a magical ritual. In a vast number of paintings, including L’Acte en or (1968) and La Parure (1992), Jorge Camacho creates elaborate totem-like constructions of bones, muscles, claws, and inorganic matter undergoing creative processes of growth and transformation. Alan Glass arranges his intricate assemblages, often featuring natural objects intermingling with human-made artefacts, as attentive acts of listening to the inner lives of things, as can be seen in La Mémoire (1994). Freud’s disdain for animism is part of a more general post-Enlightenment conviction that any notion that there exists mind, interiority, or even proper agency anywhere else than in humans is but a remnant of a superstitious past. René Descartes, one of the most influential initiators of what became known as the mechanical worldview, proclaimed, “There exist no occult forces in stones or plants, etc.” (Plumwood 104). Mind and will were purged from the world, which was now merely extension, mute and brute; the one tantalizing exception was the human mind, whose immaterial existence was hard to refute, thoughts inevitably haunting even the most mechanically inclined minds. The resulting mind-matter dualism conceived of the entirety of the nonhuman world as void of inner life and hence emptied of inherent meaning. Rid of value in this way, the natural world was now fit to be used, even to the point of being used up, by humans, who no longer considered themselves to be part of nature. Environmental philosopher Val Plumwood has an apt word for this dualistic split between human and nature: hyperseparation (49–52). If evolutionary biology and psychoanalysis uncovered the repressed truth that humans are animals, it ought no longer be possible to conceive of human culture and nonhuman nature as being separate but enmeshed. However, the Surrealists were cognizant of the fact that these discoveries were insufficient to counter the hyperseparation of human and nature. In his 1944 essay Arcanum 17, Breton critiques humanity’s self-imposed superiority and the willful ignorance upon which it rests: Man prides himself on being the chosen one of creation. Everything that evolution has been able to reveal to him about his origins and general biological necessities, which even assign a limit to the duration of his species, remains in effect a dead letter. He persists in seeing and acting as though these revelations, so crushing to his pride, never occurred. (58–59) In contrast, Surrealism has persistently sought to counter hyperseparation and to restore humanity to its place in nature, through artistic practice as much as through philosophical inquiries. Péret’s story of an erotic encounter between train and vegetation is part of such broader Surrealist tendencies to envision the nonhuman world as riddled with its own forces, wants, and 55

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creative encounters. The copulation between machine and plants on wrecked railroad tracks is not just a forceful Surrealist image. The coupling overcomes, in a philosophically sophisticated way, the dualisms of nature and culture, mind and matter. Descartes’s purging of the interior dimension of the nonhuman world also meant that “there are no amazing or marvellous sympathies or antipathies, in fact there exists nothing in the whole of nature which cannot be explained in terms of purely corporeal causes totally devoid of mind and thought” (Plumwood 104). From the outset, Surrealism opposed the Cartesianism and its attendant rigid logic that dominated French intellectual life. Over the years, Surrealists have increasingly sought out sources that present alternatives to the Cartesian eradication of interiority in nature. Notable examples include German Romantic writers and philosophers, alchemy, and occultism, all of which engage the interrelation between nature and the unconscious. In a 1933 essay on the German Romantic writer Achim von Arnim, Breton places Arnim in the context of Romantic nature philosophy. He dubs the physicist, theosophist, and poet Johann Wilhelm Ritter a Surrealist “before the fact,” based on his interest in animal magnetism and hypnotism. Ritter believed that in somnambulism “man falls back into the universal organism,” entering a “region where the organic body behaves anew like an inorganic being, and thus it reveals to us the secrets of both worlds at the same time” (Breton, Break of Day 92–92, italics removed). According to Ritter and like-minded Romantics, the unconscious does not merely consist of repressed material and dangerous animalistic urges. Rather, the unconscious is the human being’s “point of connection with the great processes of nature” (Béguin 76). The Surrealists’ explorations of the unconscious were then also investigations of humanity’s hidden intimacy with nature, in which the corporeal and the mental intersect. In 1945, the Martiniquan Surrealist Aimé Césaire similarly wrote that “the unconscious, to which all true poetry appeals, contains within it the original relationships that unite us with nature. . . . The animal, the vegetable and the mineral are within us. Man is not only man. He is universe” (139). Probing the unconscious with Surrealist methods does more than unleash imagery of nature. It ostensibly provides humans access to a deeper dimension of nature and unlocks new kinds of knowledge. In that way, poetry, broadly conceived, presents an alternative to the reigning dualisms and to the enumerations and measurements of science, which leave humans malnourished. Poetry, for Césaire, is an act of healing, bringing human and nature closer together, since in poetry “two of the most agonizing antinomies possible are resolved: the antinomy of self and other and that of the Ego and the World” (140).

Living Nature and Communicating Stones The Surrealist belief that poetry can function as a bridge between humans and nature took on a particular urgency during and following World War II, when both humans and the very planet were the victims of an increasingly brutal assault. In exile in the US, and despairing over the ongoing destruction, Breton pinpointed a lingering and pernicious anthropocentrism as a central cause of the state of the world and mused on the prospect of trying “to convince man that he is not necessarily the king of creation that he prides himself on being” (Manifestoes 291). Since an excessive belief in rationalism underpinned the technological destruction effected during the war, many Surrealists sought out alternative means of relating to the world. Breton, for one, turned to myth, poetry, and a host of esoteric thinkers, including the German Romantic Novalis, the occultist Eliphas Lévi, and the early utopian socialist Charles Fourier. Fourier’s visionary politics included the prospect of a more harmonious human relation with nature, exemplified 56

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by “his attempt to furnish a hieroglyphic interpretation of the world, founded on the analogy between human passions and the products of the three natural realms,” and appeared as a way of mending the fracture between human and nature (Breton, Conversations 207). Such analogies between human and world are an example of the esoteric notion “as above, so below,” meaning that there are intricate correspondences connecting the microcosm and the macrocosm, nature and universe, and this doctrine can be found in various guises in Novalis, Fourier, and Lévi alike. Their Romantic, occult, alchemical, and utopian systems of knowledge are replete with precisely those “marvellous sympathies” that Descartes had sought to purge from the world. While attentive to invisible forces and the workings of spirit, they place such preoccupations inside nature, which is thus radiantly animated. In contrast to the mechanical worldview, they espouse a “living nature,” structured by dynamic correspondences, “seen, known, and experienced as essentially alive in all its parts,” and reverberating with hieroglyphic messages that indicate that nature needs to be read like a book (Faivre 11). Breton drew on these modes of knowledge to reformulate Surrealist poetics in terms of analogies and correspondences. They also informed his view of painting. In a 1944 essay, Breton pronounced that the Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta’s paintings evoke a “total animism,” with roots in Romanticism, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont (Surrealism and Painting 184). Passing through modern poetry and art, this animism lends Surrealism “the conviction that nothing is in vain, that everything that can be contemplated speaks a meaningful language which can be understood when human emotion acts as interpreter” (Breton, Surrealism and Painting 186). Exploring and communing with the world through his paintings, Matta has “plunged into the agate” (Breton, Surrealism and Painting 184). The intimate knowledge of the world that Breton makes out in Matta’s painting transgresses Kant’s prohibition against the possibility of acquiring knowledge of “the thing-in-itself,” or the world beyond phenomenal appearances (see Bachelard 7–9). It is again founded on a belief that nature is more than silent matter; instead, nature, here, holds vast interior secrets, caverns throbbing with Eros and whispering ontological secrets to those attentive enough to listen to the murmur of nature. Inside the agate, Matta finds what Breton, drawing on Lévi, calls the “exalted water” or the “soul of the water,” an alchemical universal solvent that dissolves conventional appearances and so makes possible Matta’s non-Euclidean imagery of a vertiginous material world unfolding (Breton, Surrealism and Painting 184). Intimate relations with nature, Breton appears to argue, can only be established by destroying habitual perceptions. Under the surface of things glimmers “nature’s imagination,” an occult force like a pulsating unconscious permeating all things (Breton, Surrealism and Painting 184). Nature, then, is creative and enminded, and agate stones, with their often seemingly throbbing layers of many-colored minerals, are potent pictures of its poetic life, a rowdy chorus breaking the silence imposed on nature by Descartes and his ilk. Taking the plunge into the agate with Matta and Breton, it may seem that we are far removed from nature as experienced in everyday life and, in particular, from the sort of nature writing that revels in phenomenal appearances of animals and environments. But Surrealism has always tended to combine its tendency to search for that which lies beyond immediate appearance with a sense of keen observation of the richness of the surrounding world, whether urban or natural. In Surrealism during and following World War II, occult, nature-philosophical speculations were coupled with an intensified interest in natural observation. Consider Breton and André Masson’s short stay in Martinique on their way to the US in 1941. Taken with the island’s tropical vegetation, they recorded a dialogue in the jungle. Breton exclaimed to Masson, “One really doesn’t need to add anything to this place to make it perfect. Of course, I am not seeking to rehabilitate the art of representation, but it seems to me it would be less offensive here than 57

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in other places” (Martinique 44). Surrounded by the abundant vegetation, the Surrealist refugees found in nature a poetic force that prompted them to turn the tables on human notions of hierarchies in the natural world: Let us symbolically raise up the canna blossom flowing with blood from the lowest to the highest life forms. . . . May the canna be emblematic of the reconciliation we are seeking between the obtainable and the wild beyond, between life and dream. (Breton, Martinique 52) Tropical nature reinforced the Surrealist view that poetry surrounds us and that we only need to break habitual patterns of perception to detect it. Freed from the mechanical worldview, nature is poetry in itself, and human poetry can reveal this primordial truth. During his remaining years in exile, Breton continued to explore his natural surroundings. He was smitten in particular with agate stones, which were not merely potent symbols for Matta’s radical interventions in art but delectable things in themselves. Collecting agates and other stones on a trip to Quebec instilled in Breton a habit of hunting for unusual stones. In 1953, Breton wrote “Souvenir du paradis terrestre,” “memory of an earthly paradise,” on a found pink-and-terracotta-colored stone, and dedicated the object “pour Elisa,” his third wife. Stones, evidently, are not merely curious objects. Charged with nature’s imagination, they bear witness of the world’s immanent poetry and so may be keys to a verdant human connection with nature, a restored paradise on earth. A few years later, in 1957, Breton wrote an essay on the language of stones. Taking recourse to occultists once again, in it he suggests that the signatures of elemental forces are responsible for inscribing stones with their intricate patterns, exemplifying what Novalis thought of as a grammar in nature. “Between them and us, as if by osmosis, a series of mysterious exchanges will take shape on the road of analogy,” Breton writes of agates (Perspective cavalière 159). The total animism that Breton locates in Matta’s painting now manifests in stones themselves as a lithic semiosis that works through esoteric analogies. Nature sprouts messages; humans need to learn, or recall, how to decipher them. Thus may hyperseparation be undone.

Classification and Its Discontents As part of their opposition to human exceptionalism and dualism, Surrealists frequently critique taxonomy. In Surrealism and Painting in 1928, Breton derides Linnean classification: The very idea of “three kingdoms”—animal, vegetable and mineral—is the height of absurdity. If a phyllium alights on a branch, who can be sure that it is not a leaf from the tree that flies away a little later, leaving the leaf insect in its place? (44–46) Then, in 1941, having just arrived in New York, Breton stated in an interview, “I’ve begun my initiation into the mystery of American butterflies” (Conversations 183). Breton traveled outside the city to explore the flora and fauna of his surroundings. The area along the Hudson River was charged for him with “something secret and menacing” that he recognized from certain childhood readings. The pinnacle of such menacing secrets was “the uniquely spectral light that hit the grass at five in the afternoon, and that bathes . . . certain of Poe’s poems” (Conversations 183). He then adds in a footnote that this spectral light appears to be caused in part by the Samia cecropia caterpillar. So poetry and naturalistic observation are interwoven, mutually enriching 58

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each other. But while Breton’s naturalistic interests are evident enough, he once again takes exception to biology’s penchant for taxonomy: Should the description of a plant be allowed to ignore that of the caterpillar, or of the larva that lives on it more or less by choice? Isn’t the affinity it shows with such an animal organism just as significant as its type of flowering, for example? But the mania for classification tends to win out over every true means of knowledge. I fear that the philosophy of Nature hasn’t taken a single step forward since Hegel. (Conversations 183) In his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel describes the workings of nature in terms of a dialectical operation, in which the development of individual specimens occur in relation with their surroundings. While Breton developed an aversion to the natural sciences after World War II, his interest in observing and collecting insects, plants, and stones indicates that his resistance to classification was more sophisticated than knee-jerk antiscientism. Rather, it can be understood as a reaction against the kind of compartmentalization of knowledge that underpins hyperseparation and risks blinding humans to interrelations between different beings in the world and between them and their environment. It is not a stretch to call Breton’s emphasis on interrelations and interconnections, whether in terms of the biological interdependence of flower and caterpillar or occult correspondences between human and nature, implicitly ecological. Surrealist art, films, and writings also suggest that traversing the Linnean kingdoms and wreaking havoc with naturalistic classification is a potent tonic for the imagination. The young polymath Roger Caillois proposed in a 1935 Minotaure article that leaf insects mimicking leaves share significant characteristics with legendary psychasthenia in humans, both conditions being based on a desire for self-annihilation (91–103). Suzanne Césaire writes about the poetic and mythical value of the Ethiopian conception of plant-humans (84–86). In his paintings and etchings, Max Walter Svanberg depicts women with arms turning into plants, breasts turning into the heads of birds, and leaves or fish sprouting from their collars, so depicting a world in which classification gives way to erotic metamorphosis. Jan Švankmajer subverts natural history as he animates museum specimens into riotous revolts against classification in his film Historia Naturae, Suita (1967). Rikki Ducornet delights in imaginative cross-fertilizations, using her sharp penchant for naturalistic observation in drawings and paintings of plants that sprout elements of stones, claws, and genitalia. For Caillois and Ducornet in particular, a deep commitment to scientific exploration pairs with an at-once ludic and ontologically driven inquiry into the hidden interrelations between life-forms, propelled by the creative imagination. In that region, the ban on animism and on perceiving nature conceived as a creative agent in its own right is not in effect.

Ecology and Activism Just as for Plumwood and other environmental philosophers, the Surrealist resistance to dualism, human domination, and hyperseparation forms part of an ecological outlook. By the 1960s, the implicit ecological awareness in Surrealism turned into an explicit ecological engagement in tune with the rise of the environmental movement. In Prague, Švankmajer created the assemblage Ecological Catastrophe (1968), and for many decades he has consistently attacked anthropocentrism and the human domination of nature and other animals. His films, including Lunacy (Šileni, 2005), feature muscles, tongues, brains, skulls, and bones that are afforded new life through animation and are so awarded the capacity for revolt against reification. In 1990, 59

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Švankmajer wrote the essay “To Renounce the Leading Role,” in which he states that it is time for humans to return to nature and denounce their self-imposed position as rulers of the earth; this acidic critique of a biocidal civilization looks back to the harmonious utopia dreamed of by Fourier and revived by Breton (2). The Surrealist Group of Chicago has likely made the most consistent attempts to pair Surrealism with environmental activism. In the 1971 leaflet “The Anteater’s Umbrella: A Contribution to the Critique of the Ideology of Zoos,” the group protests the captivity of animals in zoos, described as a “penitentiary of the instincts” (Surrealist Group of Chicago 374). Over the next decade, the group elaborated on what they called “a specifically Surrealist ecology,” founded on a critique of anthropocentrism and exploitation of nature (Garon et al. xxx). In the 1980s, the group joined forces with radical environmentalists Earth First! and launched campaigns for the protection of animals and wilderness, including “Let There Be Wolves!” and “No Jails for Whales.” In 1989, no. 4 of the group’s journal, Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, featured a review of a guide to ecological sabotage, an essay by Penelope Rosemont on animals in fairy tales, animal art by Gina Litherland, and a transcribed radio interview with Breton in which, alluding to Taoism and alchemy, he called on the need to “follow nature” (“Whither Surrealism Now?”). Ever since the 1920s, then, nature has been a central concern for Surrealism. Surrealists have countered Cartesian hyperseparation with a combination of naturalistic knowledge, occult nature philosophy, poetry, and creative speculation about the secret workings of nature. Taken together, these methods have unsettled anthropocentrism as well as persistent notions about nature being mute and brute. As Caillois puts it: “Henceforth, man knows that he is neither alone, nor a monarch” (357).

Works Cited Arp, Jean. On My Way: Poetry and Essays 1912–1947. Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1948. Bachelard, Gaston. Earth and Reveries of Repose: An Essay on Images of Interiority. Translated by Mary McAllester Jones, Dallas Institute, 2011. Béguin, Albert. L’Ame romantique et le rêve: Essai sur le romantisme allemand et la poésie française, nouvelle édition, Libraire José Corti, 1946. Blake, William. The Prophetic Books of William Blake: Milton. Edited by Eric Robert Dalrymple Maclagan and Archibald George Blomfield Russell, A. H Bullen, 1907. Breton, André. Arcanum 17: With Apertures Grafted to the End. Translated by Zack Rogow, Green Integer, 2004. ———. Break of Day. Translated by Mary Ann Caws and Mark Polizzotti, University of Nebraska Press, 1999. ———. Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism. Translated by Mark Polizzotti, Paragon House, 1993. ———. Mad Love. Translated by Mary Ann Caws, University of Nebraska Press, 1987. ———. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, University of Michigan Press, 1972. ———. Perspective cavalière. Edited by Marguerite Bonnet, Gallimard, 1970. ———. Poems of André Breton: A Bilingual Anthology. Translated and edited by Jean-Pierre Cauvin and Mary Ann Caws, Black Widow Press, 2006. ———. Surrealism and Painting. Translated by Simon Watson Taylor, MFA Publications, 2002. ———. “Whither Surrealism Now? A  Message Read over Radio-Canada.” Translated by Mary Low, Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, no. 4, 1989, pp. 13–14. Breton, André, with André Masson. Martinique: Snake Charmer. Translated by David W. Seaman, University of Texas Press, 2008. Caillois, Roger. The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader. Edited by Claudine Frank. Translated by Claudine Frank and Camille Naish, Duke University Press, 2003.

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Toward a Total Animism Césaire, Aimé. “Poetry and Knowledge.” Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. Edited by Michael Richardson. Translated by Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Verso, 1996, pp. 134–146. Césaire, Suzanne. “Leo Frobenius and the Problem of Civilizations.” Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. Edited by Michael Richardson. Translated by Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Verso, 1996, pp. 82–87. Ducornet, Rikki. Personal interview. 26 January 2020. Faivre, Antoine. Access to Western Esotericism, SUNY Press, 1994. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock, Penguin, 2003. Garon, Paul, Franklin Rosemont, and Penelope Rosemont. “Introduction: Surrealism, the Chicago Idea.” The Forecast Is Hot!: Tracts & Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States 1966–1976, edited by Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont, and Paul Garon, Black Swan Press, 1997, pp. ix–xlii. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind, University of Chicago Press, 1966. Péret, Benjamin. “La Nature devoré le progrès et le dépasse.” Minotaure, no. 10, 1937, pp. 20–21. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 1993. Rosemont, Penelope. “A Revolution in the Way We Think & Feel: Conversations with Leonora Carrington.” Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States, edited by Ron Sakolsky, Autonomedia, 2002, pp. 184–190. Solařík, Bruno, editor. Jan Švankmajer. CPress, 2018. Surrealist Group of Chicago. “The Anteater’s Umbrella: A Contribution to the Critique of the Ideology of Zoos.” Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States, edited by Ron Sakolsky, Autonomedia, 2002, pp. 374–375. Švankmajer, Jan. “To Renounce the Leading Role.” Manticore/Surrealist Communication, no. 2, 1997, p. 2. Ubl, Ralph. Prehistoric Future: Max Ernst and the Return of Painting Between the Wars. Translated by Elizabeth Tucker, University of Chicago Press, 2013.

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7 CAPITALISM AND COLONIALISM Michael Richardson1

“Capitalism” is not a word that will often be found within the annals of Surrealist writing. Lack of interest, no doubt even distaste, for anything to do with economics partly explains this absence,2 although opposition to capitalism both as an ideal and a practice can also be said to be so ingrained in the Surrealist sensibility as not to need to be mentioned. Implacable hostility to the principles of work and family, those bulwarks of a capitalist economy, and rejection of the indelible stains of capitalist ideology (individualism, private property, capital accumulation and expansion, the revolutionising of the means of production through technological and scientific advances) are Surrealist fundamentals, but in these respects there is little that explicitly distinguishes Surrealist attitudes towards capitalism from other forms of anti-capitalist agitation, especially those arising from Romanticism. Like the Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the barbarism of modern capitalism and its attachment to principles of exchange value, utilitarianism, and the exploitation of nature has disgusted Surrealists. They also tend to share the Romantic nostalgia for pre-capitalist modes of production and the communitarian values of earlier societies. Ultimately, though, the Surrealists regarded capitalism as one emanation of a greater evil, which was Christian civilisation as a whole, which Pierre Mabille characterised as an “egregore,” about which more later. Anti-capitalist sentiment becomes explicit largely in relation to two subjects: war and colonialism. As is well-known, the experience of the First World War was determining for what would later become Surrealism. Most of the first-generation Surrealists had been unwilling participants in the war, and they came out of it with a feeling of moral repugnance at what they had witnessed. This imbued them with a categorical sense of revolt against the society and the capitalist competitive values that had resulted in the war. Their opposition at the beginning was marked, however, in largely poetic terms, as a revolt of the mind (or the spirit) determined to show “the fragility of [people’s] thoughts and on what shifting foundations . . . they have affixed their shifting foundations” (“Declaration of 25 January 1925,” in Fijalkowski and Richardson, eds. 24). It took another war, that occurring in Morocco in the early 1920s, to concretise this sense of revolt and move it in a more political direction after the French government intervened to help restore Spanish government control in Morocco. In 1921 the Spanish colonial army in Morocco had been defeated by the guerrilla forces of the Berber peoples in the Rif mountains. Sporadic fighting had occurred over the next few

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-9

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years, but only when the French army was mobilised to intercede on the side of the Spanish were the Rif defeated and Spanish colonial control over the territory was re-established. By August 1925, the Surrealists had asserted their commitment to political revolution with their declaration “The Revolution First and Always” drawn up in collaboration of the two other groups of revolutionary intellectuals (those of the Philosophies group, which included the sociologist Henri Lefebvre, and the Marxist grouping Clarté) and in which it was stated that “we do not accept the laws of economy or exchange, we do not accept the slavery of work,” and specifically rejecting “the form of slavery inflected on populations by international high finance” (in Fijalkowski and Richardson, eds. 95). The war in the Rif concretised these assertions. Opposition to the war was organised primarily by the French Communist Party, and when in October  1925 the party drew up an incendiary declaration against it, calling upon French soldiers to desert and fraternise with the Rifians, the Surrealists were among those who enthusiastically countersigned it. The declaration asserted that the troops were “being sent to die in Morocco to allow the bankers to get their hands on the natural resources of the Riff Republic to line the pockets of a few capitalists” (in Fijalkowski and Richardson, eds 181).3 This association between colonialism and capitalism would become more acute as the Surrealists engaged in a complex set of relations with communist intellectuals, but this should also be read in conjunction with the fact the Surrealists were also increasingly interested in the arts and cultures of non-Western societies and the ways in which they were being compromised and even destroyed through the effects of colonisation. Over these years, individual Surrealists made several visits to the Pacific and to East Asian countries, enabling them to witness these effects first-hand, and they were in every case appalled by what they saw. One day in March 1924, the poet Paul Éluard suddenly and mysteriously vanished. It transpired that he had set sail for the South Seas and would eventually reach Saigon. Here he would remain and later be joined by his wife, Gala, and Max Ernst. They stayed for some months, appreciating the local arts and visiting the Khmer temples, but also alert to the colonial oppression of the natives that affected them deeply, especially Éluard. This journey has been meticulously and beautifully recounted by Robert McNab, who reveals the effect it had on subsequent Surrealist understandings of the impact of colonialism. Éluard and Ernst were not the only Surrealists to travel across Oceania during this period. As McNab notes, over the next few years, Jacques Viot, Émile Savitry, Georges Malkine, JacquesAndré Boiffard, Éli Lotar, and Roger Parry would follow in their footsteps. In addition, the film-maker Henri Storck accompanied anthropologists Alfred Métraux and Henry Lavachery on a scientific mission to the area, making the film L’Île de Pâques (1935), an acerbic commentary on the impact of colonialism on Easter Island. Another future Surrealist, the Czech poet Konstantin Biebl, had also spent considerable time in Sumatra and Java during 1926 and 1927, where the attitudes of the Europeans and colonial practices so incensed him that he took an active role encouraging indigenous communist and nationalist movements and became an object of police investigation. These first-hand experiences inspired all these Surrealists with a hatred of colonialism that was remarkably consistent and came to permeate Surrealism as a whole. The most important of these Surrealist travellers for the history of Surrealism was undoubtedly Jacques Viot. Viot (who, for a time, was Ernst’s agent) first visited the Pacific, first in 1927, when he worked in Tahiti, and then as an agent for the collector Pierre Loeb in New Guinea in 1929. On his return to Paris, he wrote and offered scathing critiques of colonialism in two books, Déposition de blanc (1932), an excerpt of which was published in the first issue of Surrealism in the Service of Revolution (1930), and Malaventure (1933). The first of these was the more 64

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significant, the play on words of the title giving a clear hint as to its direction: this deposition by a White man was actually giving an account of a void, a blankness that was the result of the devastating impact of the colonisation of these islands. Denying the supposed “civilising mission” of the West, Viot argued that the only possible consequence of Western penetration of other cultures was their destruction. Viot’s two books represent early accounts of what the anthropologist Robert Jaulin (1970) would later define as “ethnocide”: the systematic annihilation of culture from within by means of the religious and political methods of indoctrination the White man inevitably brought with him. Viot’s arguments undoubtedly informed and gave substance to the Surrealists’ attitudes towards colonialism, giving them ammunition they would utilise in opposing the enormous colonial exhibition organised by the French government in 1931. International exhibitions in general had become a key aspect of international rivalry and competition, particularly since the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, designed to show off the glories of the nation and strengthen its bonds while boosting trade and innovation. Specifically, colonial exhibitions began to emerge at the time of the Scramble for Africa from 1871 that led to the wholesale colonisation of the continent while inflaming European rivalries. Germany, Belgium, Holland, Portugal, even Japan, staged colonial exhibitions, but the most spectacular were those of the two major colonial powers, Britain and France. They mainly took place in the home countries but were sometimes organised in the colonies themselves and were additionally designed to justify the colonisation enterprise and its civilising mission in an international context as it offered the home audience a sense of pride in the achievement of the empire. The French Colonial Exhibition in 1931 was the most spectacular of all these shows, occurring at the moment of one of the greatest crises of international capitalism (the Wall Street crash and economic and political crisis in France, the dual threats of communism and fascism). It followed in the wake of the British Empire exhibition of 1924–1925 held at Wembley, which it sought to outdo in every respect as it attempted to unify the nation around the French colonial idea. Spread over 500 acres and drawing roughly 35 million visitors over a period of six months, it presented the empire, as the publicity made clear, “with its masses closely allied for defence and prosperity [as] a magnificent continuation of our French humanity” (cited in Lebovics 24). An aquarium, a museum, and a zoo were built. Palm trees were planted, indigenous peoples were brought over to populate the village as exhibits, the metro was extended and a special railway was constructed around the village itself, models of the architectural styles of the colonial peoples were represented in each part of the village, often on a quite grandiose scale: the Angkor Wat temple was 150 feet high. Local crafts were sold, accompanied by advertising campaigns stating that offices were not complete without a Berber rug or an Annamite bronze. The benefits of colonisation for the colonised were emphasised: “For us, the surest means of penetration there could be; for them, an equally certain one of understanding us and each day liking us more” (quoted in Lebovics 24). Thus, there was a quite-conscious ideological aim to this: to sell the idea of the empire both to the French people and to the world. But the publicity also suggests that there was an element of primitive or sympathetic magic: the belief that by creating a simulacrum of the empire in Paris, its perpetuity in actuality might be assured. In its immediate aims, the exhibition was an undoubted success. Visitors spoke of being overwhelmed by the sublimity of the spectacle.4 And it does appear to have contributed to uniting the French public behind the colonial idea, imbuing the French sensibility with a colonialist tinge with long-lasting consequences it has struggled to outgrow. But it didn’t convince everyone, and opposition to it was again led by the Communist Party, which had long taken an anti-imperialist stance. It also appalled the Surrealists, who saw it as 65

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a deliberate attempt to justify colonial pillage and legitimate the destruction of the cultures subject to it. Prior to the opening of the show, the Surrealists drew up a tract urging people to boycott it, condemning the “colonial piracy” and exploitation of the native labour on which it was founded. They were still more acerbic in June, when the Dutch pavilion containing “the most valuable manifestations of the intellectual life of Malaysia and Melanesia” was burned down, something they condemned as an “act of negligence” for which capitalism itself must “take the blame.” Therefore, when Alfred Kurella, a representative of the Comintern and a founder of the Anti-Imperialist League, proposed that the Surrealists should organise a counter-exhibition, they were keen to take up the baton. According to André Thirion, Kurella was disappointed by the lack of interest the French Communist Party had shown in opposing the exhibition, opining that: The Surrealists are practically the only ones who have demonstrated an intelligent hostility [to the Colonial Exhibition]. Why don’t you do something bigger under the aegis of the Anti Imperialist League? . . . You can represent the League, and you and your friends can handle it yourselves. (Thirion 289) The exhibition “The Truth About the Colonies” opened in September 1931 and appears to have run to February  1932,5 drawing around 5,000 visitors. For a long time, little was known about the show aside from two not-very-clear photographs published in Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution issue 4 (December 1931) and a couple of others that have emerged subsequently. Apart from Thirion, no other Surrealists appear to have said anything about it; there was no catalogue, and it doesn’t seem to have attracted any contemporary reviews. All we know is that a quotation from Marx, “A people that oppresses others could not be free,” was displayed prominently, and there were sections devoted to “ornaments and toys preparing for war” and “European fetishes” (which included a Black child with a begging bowl). The exhibits from non-Western societies were largely drawn from the personal collections of Breton, Éluard, and Tzara. As far as one can gather, the organization of the exhibition was left principally to Thirion, Georges Sadoul, and Aragon, with Aragon largely taking charge of it, to Thirion’s annoyance, judging from his slightly bitter comments (289–290). Breton himself, beset with personal problems through 1931,6 seems to have had little personal involvement with it, other than providing artifacts. Valuable research conducted by Jody Blake in the 1990s has allowed us to have more precision about its context, but she wasn’t able to discover very much more about the exhibition itself. According to Blake, the three major sections of the exhibition “were devoted to the military conquest of the colonies, the economic exploitation of indigenous peoples, and the activities of nationalist and revolutionary movements” (45), but the only new concrete evidence she seems to have uncovered is from a report by a government spy who infiltrated the planning meetings that “[e]verything will be done to imitate the colonialist Exposition at Vincennes, but in a contrary sense” (41). She does, however, reveal that opposition to the Colonial Exhibition was more widespread than Thirion indicates; indeed, the Communist Party was far from indifferent to it, attacking it in the pages of its newspaper, L’Humanité, through April and May of 1931 and publishing an oppositional, anti-colonialist Veritable Guide de l’Exposition Coloniale through the Secours Rouge International (SRI), the Communist counterpart of the Red Cross. But other antiimperialist and indigenous groups, such as the League for the Defence of the Negro Race and 66

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Figure 7.1  Unknown photographer, “The Truth About the Colonies” installation view, c 1931.

the Vietnamese Committee of Struggle, also spearheaded protests against it, as did the magazine Monde, edited by the pacifist Henri Barbusse, a bitter rival of the Surrealists. Blake ends her article by attacking the Truth about the Colonies exhibition, claiming that “it reiterated many of the dynamics of the government fair at Vincennes [and] can be viewed as yet another instance of appropriation” (58). To make such claims based on so little evidence and assert such equivalence for what was, of necessity, a rather ad hoc exhibition put together in a matter of months with few resources and none of the institutional connections of Colonial Exhibition itself, which was several years in the planning, is surely excessive in the extreme.7 As ephemeral as it apparently was, the Truth about the Colonies exhibition still represented a significant gesture of opposition in an environment that was overwhelmingly hostile to any such dissent. Over the coming years, the Surrealists would consistently express heartfelt opposition to imperialism in all its forms. In 1934, they contributed a powerfully argued tract 67

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(“Murderous Humanitarianism”) to the very important anthology Negro, published in New York by Nancy Cunard. In 1947, they exposed the fact that the French were involved in a war in Vietnam, a fact largely suppressed by the media, and in 1960 they initiated the “Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War,” initially signed by 121 leading French intellectuals and attacking the conduct and aims of the war in what was then colonial Algeria (see Fijalkowski and Richardson, eds. 180–197, for the texts of all these declarations). As noted earlier, capitalism was seen by Surrealism less as an isolated phenomenon and more as an emanation of a much broader political and ideological construction determined above all by the historical dominance of Christianity. This was explored most explicitly in Égrégores, ou la vie des Civilisations, a book published by Pierre Mabille in 1937, in which he uses the concept of an egregore to show how Christian civilisation had evolved and was then coming to an end. Egregore means the “spirit of a group.” More precisely, it is the energy force by which a collective body assumes an identity separate from that of the individuals constituting it. It explains, for instance, the process by which a crowd can be turned into a baying mob by a manipulative demagogue, or how cults form around a charismatic leader. In occult circles, for instance, the concept was used to explain how Hitler was able to forge the Nazi Party and have such a hold over the German people. Mabille took this concept to analyse the largest form of egregore, that of civilisations, arguing that they should be seen as living bodies having a regulated life span of around 2,000 years and that this can be examined as a process. On this basis, he argued that Christian civilisation was coming to the end of its life span and was even then in its death throes. An egregore cannot be defeated; it collapses when the energy feeding it no longer has any power or when a counter-egregore emerges to displace it. Writing in the early part of 1936, Mabille completed the book just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, which he considered to be one of the major occurrences presaging the coming crisis. Expecting the defeat of the fascist insurgency, he thought this would institute the conditions for the emergence of a new egregore with the capacity to imbue the world with fresh values and sweep away those decadent ones still in place and thus see the passing of the Christian era. Mabille’s prophecy didn’t come to pass, at least not in the immediate term. The threat posed by fascism was eventually overcome not by an energy surge constituting a new egregore but by the very capitalist forces he considered to represent the closing stages of the Christian egregore, which was subsequently able to reconstitute itself following a second world war. Nevertheless, Mabille’s analysis is crucial if we are to appreciate the import of the “revolution” Surrealism sought to provoke, which was not so much one “of the mind” or “of society” (as desirable as those aims might be) as of the sensibility as a whole. In bringing together Rimbaud’s call to “change life” with Marx’s to “transform the world” and seeing them as one and the same task, as Breton put it, Surrealism was renouncing the role of human agency in the transformation of society, recognising that a facile will for change was insufficient, even when it was supported by powerful organisational structures. No amount of human effort could effect qualitative change; the means could never justify the ends, since the ends followed inevitably from the means. The necessity, rather, is to work towards creating a moral space that will make it possible for life and the world to be transformed in and of themselves. To an extent, this was a bitter lesson learned from their experience of working with the French Communist Party and the degeneration they witnessed in the Stalinist takeover of the Russian Revolution. However, it was something that was always implicit in the philosophical

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pessimism that had been an aspect of Surrealism from its very beginnings, which Michael Löwy has said means: Being prepared to fight against the current with no certainty of winning . . . motivated not by a teleological belief in a swift and certain triumph, but by the deeply held conviction that it is impossible to live as a human being worthy of that name without fighting fiercely and with unshakable will against the established order. (9) As Georges Bataille noted, the singularity of Surrealism is to recognise thus: If I do not seek to dominate it, liberty will exist: it is poetry; words, no longer striving to serve some useful purpose, set themselves free and so unleash the image of free existence, which is never bestowed except in the instant. (Absence 66) In many ways, this accords with the contentions of the philosopher François Julien, whose notion of what he calls “silent transformations” show a remarkable coincidence with Mabille’s idea of egregores. Drawing on Chinese philosophy, notably that of the I Ching or Book of Changes, Jullien argues that real change occurs in imperceptible ways rather than through momentous upheavals. Silent transformations, he says, “deflect step by step—without warning, without announcement—to the point of causing everything to topple over into its opposite without anyone having noticed” (65–66). This is precisely the sort of transformation Mabille envisages in Égrégores, and this idea is not confined to Chinese thinking but has other echoes in Western thought: it ties in with the image Hegel and Marx, even as denizens of progress, had evoked of the Old Mole, working away unseen at the foundations of society until they collapse of their own contradictions. Surrealism must certainly be placed among those who place their faith in the work of the Old Mole, even if Bataille, in a well-known essay written at the time of the movement’s closest association with the Communist Party, attacked it for what he called its “Icarian” pretensions, that is, that its “revolutionary idealism tends to make of the revolution an eagle above eagles, a supereagle striking down authoritarian imperialism” (“Old Mole” 34). The whole history of Surrealism belies this criticism, however, as Bataille himself would later recognise. The revolution Surrealism seeks, whose priorities may change in relation to different political realities, is one that will never be satisfied by any sort of political upheaval but works with constant vigilance against the conditions and ideas within society that make capitalism and colonialism appear not only as emanations of the human condition but even as possible solutions to it. For the Surrealists, they should, on the contrary, be seen as betrayals of the human spirit in each and every case. The last word can be left to the Martiniquan Surrealist René Ménil promoting “the ideological defeatism” preceding fresh beginnings: It is a matter of demoralising this society, discrediting it, ridiculing it, and making it feel ashamed of itself. In the final analysis we must cause it to lose consciousness of its rights, among which is its right to exist, and make it dance hypnotically like a bear to the sound of its own tune. (Ménil 174)

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Notes 1. “Thanks to Steven Harris for discussion of some of the issues raised in this essay.” I said I would ask, but didn’t promise it. 2. The exception is Georges Bataille, notably his study The Accursed Share and his well-known earlier study “The Notion of Expenditure.” 3. Defeat in the Rif War and the perceived national humiliation that followed would be directly responsible for the military coup that occurred in Spain in 1923 and set the seeds of fascism in Spain, heralding the military uprising that would begin in Morocco in 1936 and lead to the Spanish Civil War— Francisco Franco had been one of the military chiefs during the Rif War. 4. Among them was the future British anthropologist Adrian Mayer, who was taken to the exhibition as a teenager, an experience that no doubt inspired his choice of a career (personal communication, 1987). 5. There is a dispute about this—some sources say it closed in December 1931. 6. He lost half of his art collection as a result of the divorce settlement with his former wife, Simone, and his financial situation was such that he was forced to auction off some of what remained of his collection of Oceanic art to pay the bill after his electricity supply was cut off (see Polizzotti 361). He was also preoccupied with the organisation of the Paris-Tokyo League of Emerging Art exhibition of 1932, for which he was responsible with André Salmon for the French work, his first major curatorial experience. 7. Her comments also represent in their way a kind of “colonialism of the past” by taking it out of its historical context and expecting it to conform with the values and curatorial practices of a later period (she even seems to have expected the organisers to have been aware of critics writing sixty years after the event!).

Works Cited Bataille, Georges. The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. Translated by Michael Richardson. Verso, 1994. ———. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume 1: Consumption [1949]. Zone Books, 1991. ———. “The Notion of Expenditure.” Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, translated by Allan Stoekl. University of Minnesota Press, 1985. ———. “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist.” Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, translated by Allan Stoekl. University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Blake, Jody. “The Truth about the Colonies, 1931: Art Indigène in Service of the Revolution.” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 25, no. 1, 2002, pp. 35–58. Fijalkowski, Krzysztof, and Michael Richardson, editors. Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations. Pluto, 2001. Jaulin, Robert. La Paix blanche, Introduction à l’ethnocide. Éditions du Seuil, 1970. Julien, François. The Silent Transformations. Seagull, 2011. Lebovics, Herman. “Donner à voir l’Empire colonial. L’exposition colonial internationale de Paris en 1931.” Gradhiva, no. 7, Winter 1989–90. Löwy, Michael. Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia. University of Texas Press, 2009. Mabille, Pierre. Égrégores ou la vie des civilisations. Sagittaire, 1977. McNab, Robert. Ghost Ships: a Surrealist love triangle. Yale University Press, 2004. Ménil, René. “Humour: Introduction to 1945.” Refusal of the Shadow, Surrealism and the Caribbean. Verso, 1996. Polizzotti, Marc. Revolution of the Mind: the Life of André Breton. Bloomsbury, 1995. Thirion, André. Revolutionaries without Revolution. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. Cassell & Company, 1975.

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8 LIMITS NOT FRONTIERS Surrealist Resistance to Nationalism, Patriotism, and Militarism Krzysztof  Fijalkowski

At first sight, considering the Surrealist movement in the context of the interlinked challenges of nationalism, patriotism, and militarism seems like a perfectly straightforward task: it detested all three, taking every opportunity to reject assumptions they held to be intrinsic to the injustice and ethical bankruptcy of contemporary society. While this picture remains broadly accurate, closer inspection can begin to give our understanding of this stance some depth, locate nuances and particularities, and set them within the frameworks of Surrealist history, practice, and theory. It might be objected, of course, that resistance to the forces of nationhood and military aggression characterizes the majority of groups and individuals within progressive and avant-garde circles of the time and is thus not particular to Surrealism. All the same, there are strong arguments for seeing Surrealism’s perspective here as qualitatively as well as quantitatively distinct, not only for the fervor with which Surrealist groups felt compelled to act on these concerns, but also for the sense that this is a central, nonnegotiable pillar of the movement’s identity. Among the evidence here is the fact that many of the most explicit Surrealist statements in this area are found in collaborative contexts, especially collectively signed tracts, underlining the communal nature and public arena of the movement’s views, linked to an explicit aim for revolutionary social and intellectual transformation. Notwithstanding the century-long history and international spread of Surrealism, the format of this chapter imposes a narrower scope, focused mainly on Surrealism in France—though it must immediately be acknowledged that, in response to the specific conditions of their time and place, many other groups developed distinctive responses in this domain. Bordering on significant debates around politics, anticolonialism, and identity dealt with elsewhere in this volume, Surrealism’s responses to questions of nation and conflict are nuanced, informed, and intimately enmeshed in the experiences and conditions of its members’ day-to-day lives.

The World in the Time of the Surrealists: Patriotism, Nation, and the International From its inception in Paris in the early 1920s, Surrealism was an international affair: networked to overseas circles and individuals, and welcoming non-French participants. This first group made a point of championing foreign thinkers and texts, particularly in German, at a moment just after the First World War, when popular anti-German sentiment was rife. In its avowedly international DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-10

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constitution, then, Surrealists in France made clear their anti-nationalist convictions— both toward French traditions and the French state, with its “miserable nationalism” leading only to violence (Breton, What Is Surrealism? 159), and more generally toward Europe as a whole, the Europe of which poet Ted Joans (62) would later write: “There is something about everything/ every where in Europe/of being dead/of fast dying.” It is surely for this reason that Surrealist groups have very often identified themselves by their location in a city, not a country. Two outward-facing perspectives ratified in collective statements by the early group in France indicate the directions toward which this international stance might face. On the one hand, open letters to the Dalai Lama and the Buddha schools in The Surrealist Revolution (April 1925) confirmed the attraction of Asian culture and philosophy for a movement seeking ideas beyond moribund European conventions and expressing a passionate longing for an elsewhere (Pierre, Tracts surréalistes 1922/1939 37–38). On the other, an “Appeal to the Intellectual Workers,” cosigned with the Clarté and Philosophies groups, published in the Communist daily L’Humanité, saw the Surrealists take a public stand against the Rif War in Morocco, at that point in its fourth year and recently joined by the French Army (Pierre, Tracts surréalistes 1922/1939 51–53). A turning point for the group’s growing consciousness of domestic and foreign political arenas, this statement—and the willingness to take public action it demonstrated—was an important stage in both its growing anti-colonial convictions and in its search for common ground with party Communism. This was an era, we might note, in which the principle of a socialist “international” resonated a hope for global class solidarity in the face of capitalist states, even if surrealists would soon be wary of this appeal (Rentzou 308), while in contrast claims for nation characterized Far Right movements and leagues, such as Action Française, not to mention National Socialism. Surrealism’s proactive attitude would continue throughout the late 1920s and the 1930s, notably with the group’s contributions to FIARI (International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art) and Trotsky’s Fourth International. In the late 1940s, Paris-based Surrealists would briefly endorse the World Citizens movement and its figurehead, Garry Davis, an Air Force pilot who had renounced his own US citizenship to seek an end to global conflict. They also participated in the socialist coalition Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire, with a firmly internationalist agenda (Breton, Mettre au ban 40–58), confirming anti-nationalist attitudes that would continue in subsequent decades. Meanwhile, the worldwide restitution of rights to those excluded from contemporary nationhood was also a growing concern, as for example among the Chicago Surrealists, who from the 1960s onward supported the causes of Native Americans and other marginalized groups in the United States and beyond (Rosemont et al. xxvi, xxx and 1–8). These two geographic approaches—the imaginative and the political—and the clear implication that to favor the international meant to denigrate the national come together in the single best-known collective Surrealist statement of global perspectives, the redrawn world map Le Monde au Temps des Surréalistes (The World in the Time of the Surrealists), published in the Belgian journal Variétés in June 1929. With its seismic disruptions of countries and continents, a chart teeming with swollen Pacific islands and in which Russia, China, and Alaska dwarf a Europe now comprised mainly of Germany, leaving Paris as a last outpost at the edge of the world, the map sets Surrealism’s view at a cross-current between the imaginative morphology of space and an ethical-political geography. Undermining the Eurocentric mapping so firmly etched in the Western imagination (Roediger 175), the Surrealists’ bastard cartography projects the movement’s cultural and political preferences onto the conventional atlas, squeezing and erasing here, expanding and restructuring there. Charting temporal as well as spatial frameworks, the map’s references to Austro-Hungary, Constantinople, and Russia play between the tumult of an old order swept away by the First World War and the October 72

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Revolution and the geopolitical realities and Surrealist interests of the 1920s. Commentators of The World in the Time of the Surrealists have noted how it establishes a mythical space rooted in Romantic literary traditions (Adamowicz 198): few of the highlighted locations figure places where Surrealist groups emerged or to which they traveled. But they have also rightly emphasized the geopolitics at the heart of its “countermappings” (Roediger 170–171), placing it in the context of the group’s desire to affirm radical positions despite tense relations with the French Communist Party. The question of the international would increasingly characterize Surrealist activity during the 1930s, a decade that saw the emergence of new groups around the world, each with its own distinct set of priorities added to shared core values; the inauguration of International Surrealist Exhibitions, whose catalogs nevertheless often made a point of listing participants’ nationalities; a triple-page spread in Minotaure entitled “Surrealism around the World” documenting publications from eighteen countries including USSR, Egypt, Japan, and Peru (D’Alessandro and Gale 23); and the inauguration of a set of four bilingual International Surrealist Bulletins (1935–36), each issued in a different country and in which the proliferation of Surrealist activity was a recurring motif (Sebbag). These examples witness a marked dialectic tension: that even while celebrating the geographic specificity of each of its territories or the rainbow of nationalities among its participants, Surrealism also explicitly aimed to establish an understanding beyond the conservative insularity of national identities and local dialogues. This proclamation of a realm beyond borders and boundaries, one that represents a mental as much as material freedom, is typified by André Breton’s claim for the “Limits not Frontiers of Surrealism,” a speech first given in London in June 1936 asserting Surrealism’s international nature and ambitions. It affirmed that Surrealism “tends to unify the aspirations of the .  .  . writers and artists of all countries. . . . This unification, far from being simply a unification of style, corresponds to a new consciousness of life common to all” (What Is Surrealism? 152). Breton’s essay “Surrealism Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” in This Quarter (September 1932) similarly prioritized a determination to surmount barriers to universal revolutionary thought and knowledge in the face of national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries (What Is Surrealism? 84). This challenge, connecting the political, the ethical, and the personal, is expressed again in the anonymous opening statement of the first issue of the International Bulletin of Surrealism, published in Prague in April 1935: Once Surrealism located, in the dialectical idea of the unity of the external world and the internal world, the means to even out in a permanent way the balance that is man in the face of the real world and of himself; once he has ceased to believe in the existence of a barrier between waking and sleep, between conscious and unconscious, between objectivity and subjectivity, how can he account for the frontiers that still separate nations and languages, how could he not enter in a practical sense into the sphere of international activity towards which he had forever oriented himself through his enquiries at the same time as through his negation of artificial antinomies? The human psyche is international, just as the conditions of a perfect consciousness of the destiny and changes of the human individual are international. (Sebbag 13) Breton’s watchword of “limits not frontiers” is significant, and it is as a world-facing and networked movement that engages concepts rather than styles or conventions, confronting these 73

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across regional circumstances, restless border crossings, and transnational debates that Surrealism may best be viewed (D’Alessandro and Gale 21–31; Adamowicz). In this regard, interwar Surrealism’s explicitly anti-national and international perspectives may strike us as both distinct from most other cultural or intellectual movements of the era and notably prescient of the formations of more recent global networks in the realms of art, literature, and film, for which a transnational dimension is generally taken as understood. Given the Surrealist movement’s resolute hostility to nationalism, it is of course no surprise that this position entailed an equally blunt rejection of all shades of patriotism. “We, as Surrealists, do not love our country,” Breton would proclaim in a statement written for the Communist-sponsored International Writers’ Congress for the Defense of Culture of 1935 (Position politique 74). Breton’s lecture on art and politics delivered in Prague that spring had already pinpointed “the mechanism of oppression based upon family, religion and fatherland” (Position politique 16), a sentiment repeated in his book Mad Love (117), which extolled the cause of Spanish Republicanism determined “at any price to finish with the old ‘order’ founded on the cult of that abject trinity: family, country and religion.” If these categorical statements of the 1930s were made against the background of tensions and ruptures in the group’s political alliances, including divisions within the group itself, they nevertheless expressed convictions already present early in its political awakening. The collective tract “The Revolution First and Always,” a frank denunciation of European values written with the Clarté group, pulled no punches: Even more than patriotism, a hysteria like any other but one that is more empty and fatal than others, we find the idea of the fatherland repellent, truly the most bestial, least philosophical concept to which we are expected to submit. Identifying as “Barbarians, since a certain form of civilisation disgusts us,” the authors pour scorn on the principle of military service “given that for us France does not exist” (Richardson and Fijalkowski 95–96). Nothing would diminish the group’s sentiments—or indeed the courage to express them publicly at significant personal risk—over the coming decades, as evidenced in the similarly forthright diatribe “Down with France!” of May 1968, skewering the vested interests, colonial ambitions, and bankrupt claims of French nationalism, and published anonymously in the journal L’Archibras: Down with our inheritance; above all, down with national heritage! Down with patriotic and patronal patrimony! . . . The French flag is henceforth good only to serve as a shroud for the bourgeoisie which has known how to use it for its profit alone. (Richardson and Fijalkowski 134) That this was a position shared by most, if not all, Surrealists might be gauged by writings published in Paris just a few years later, this time by the contributors to the Arab-language journal Le Désir libertaire, whose avowed resolve was that “our Surrealism means destroying the Arab fatherland,” one their manifesto of 1975 vowed to spit on “since the affirmation of a fatherland is an insult to the universality of humanity” (El Janabi 9–10 and 45).

Hide Yourself, War!: Battles against Militarism Hand in hand with its passionate stance against nationalism and patriotism comes Surrealism’s vigorous opposition to militarism. In this arena, however, complications begin to arise, 74

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particularly in the broader contexts of its attitudes toward violence and war. Speaking in December 1942 to students at Yale University, Breton specifically considered Surrealism in this light: I must insist on the fact that Surrealism can be understood historically only in relation to the war; I mean—from 1919 to 1939—in relation at the same time to the war from which it issues and the war to which it extends. (What Is Surrealism? 243) The address posed a fundamental question: “[W]hat, I ask, is that narrow ‘reason’ which has been taught us if that reason must, from life to life, yield place to the unreason of wars?” (What Is Surrealism? 237). Wars, Breton had already argued elsewhere, embodied symptomatic upheavals in thought, forming the matrix of new directions represented by Arthur Rimbaud and Isidore Ducasse around 1870 (the Franco-German war) or Picasso and Giorgio de Chirico around 1914 (What Is Surrealism? 153). For many years historians of the movement (particularly art historians), equating Surrealism solely with the group in Paris, relied upon this model as a framing device, viewing its birth as an outcome of the First World War, via Dada, which had been born in direct reaction to it, and its alleged demise as a function of the Second. Certainly, many critiques of Surrealism immediately after 1945 presented it as not merely obsolete once these historical conditions had played out but one whose representations of the psyche’s nightmares now looked problematic in the light of the catastrophes and devastation of World War II, while in France the movement’s opponents made much of the fact that the Occupation had forced many Surrealists to emigrate and thus miss contributing to resistance efforts. This view of Surrealism as belonging to a golden age of peacetime intellectual ferment between the wars, free to express its rebellious fantasies without constraint in a purely cultural arena, is convenient but flawed: while the Paris group’s activism against colonial conflict had continued unabated, it had also taken strong positions in response to the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe. During World War II, while émigrés from France continued their work in the United States, Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean, significant, if inevitably limited, Surrealist activity persisted in Paris under the umbrella of the Main à plume group, members of which participated and perished in the Resistance. Just as importantly, many other groups and networks endured or emerged in this period, notably in Bucharest, Cairo, Mexico City, and Martinique. The ethical ferment and activist character of the international Surrealist movement has continued to the present day, with their opposition to conflicts (among them those in Indochina, Vietnam, the Gulf, and Iraq) often remaining a priority. One way, then, in which we might understand Surrealism is to see it as perpetually on a war footing, and in this light the often-repeated motif of Surrealist creations as encapsulating a “crisis” might span a range not only from personal emotional collapses to ethical or intellectual breaking points but also to moments of geopolitical emergency. While it would be misleading to view all Surrealist activity from this perspective, certainly it is possible to track threads in which intimations of threat, violence, and hostilities connect individual psychic tensions and actual struggles in the world at large. Several retrospective museum exhibitions have focused on Surrealist representations of war, violence, and conflict, linked, for example, to the predominance of myths, monstrous forms, and representations of aggression in Surrealist painting (Stich; Shell and Tostmann). While consideration of these topics lies beyond the scope of this chapter, it is significant that themes of implicit or explicit violence—particularly in relation to gender, sexuality, and the body—are among the most distinctive and sometimes most contested aspects of Surrealist practice, whether represented through ravaged and distorted human forms in Surrealist painting and collage, investigated in the context of violent crime with figures such as 75

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Germaine Berton or the Papin sisters (Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime 74–95), theorized by writers like Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris and prominent in the works of forebears such as de Sade and Ducasse, or found, for instance, in the radical pessimism of Bucharest Surrealism during the 1940s, whose collective and individual writings repeatedly attempt a dialectical confrontation with mortality and annihilation. The broader context for these, of course, is often the theater of actual or threatened violence during conflict: Breton’s experience of caring for traumatized soldiers in the First World War; the threat of pogroms, militias, and forced labor for the Bucharest Surrealists in the Second; hiding from the authorities, as many Surrealists in Europe were obliged to do between 1940 and 1944; near-death experiences for those who had known the battlefronts of 1914–1918, such as André Masson, whose traumas would be sublimated and avenged in drawings and paintings of massacres and assaults in the human and natural realms alike (Monahan 707–724). Given these conditions, what might seem surprising is how few Surrealist works make explicit reference to such historical events. In hindsight, the reasons for this seem clear enough. Victor Brauner’s 1934 portrait of Hitler as a wounded zombie automaton now looks circumstantial compared to his Strange Case of Mr. K of the previous year, a painting in which the multiple images of its protagonist indict every aspect of the monstrous violence of political and economic power. Joan Miró’s Still Life with Old Shoe (1937) seems a far more poignant and distressing evocation of the Spanish Civil War than his widely known propaganda poster Help Spain (Aidez L’Espagne) of the same year, while his visionary suite of gouaches Constellations, painted in France and Majorca between 1940 and 1941 and among his most powerful works, is made as a deliberate affirmation of destiny over despair—in Breton’s words, “the very distant promise of an order of things over which the calamities of the world could finally never prevail any longer” (Surrealism and Painting 260). Among the few exceptions here are Lee Miller’s hallucinatory photographs of bombed buildings in Grim Glory (1941), capturing the London Blitz from a fully Surrealist perspective (while her later photojournalism during the Liberation is a distinctive but far “straighter” body of work). Exemplary of these attitudes is Czech Surrealist artist Toyen’s set of meticulous large-scale ink drawings of 1944 Hide Yourself War!, one of several drawing cycles made under Nazi occupation, capturing all the menace and desolation of war without directly depicting any of its emblems: instead, fleeing animals, or their skeletal remains, inhabit a wasteland of abandoned structures, ruined objects, and barren vistas. To elude the circumstantial and self-evident and reveal instead what is hidden or emergent but profoundly meaningful, even in times of greatest crisis, is the privileged mode of Surrealist thought: this is the central tenet of Benjamin Péret’s wartime polemical essays “A Word from Péret” (“La Parole est à Péret,” 1943) and “The Dishonour of the Poets” (“Le Déshonneur des poètes,” 1945). While the first of these affirms the fundamental duty of poets to annul all expediency, to “show by their total non-conformity their opposition to the world in which they live” (Péret 199), the latter heaps scorn on those—notably former Surrealist poets now in thrall to Stalinism—who seek to instrumentalize poetry, above all in the context of a war representing “a conjunction of all forces of regression” (Péret 202) in which the fatal triumvirate of political leaders, religious belief, and fatherland reduces the authentic idea of freedom to its most debased expressions. Inevitably, the exigencies of war bring turmoil and compromise, against which Surrealists struggled to assert their own liberty. “Who can still talk of writing poems, and all the rest?” Breton had written to his wife, Simone, in July 1925 (Lettres à Simone Kahn 258), in despair over the Rif War. “[N]o written protest can prevail on such terms, so what’s to be done!” While founding members of the original Surrealist group in Paris had served during 1914–1918, their younger male colleagues had to endure peacetime conscription, fostering an enduring hatred 76

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of everything to do with the military and the Army; “Open the Prisons, Disband the Army!” demanded a collective tract of 1925, claiming “there is no freedom for the enemies of freedom,” while a brief scandal ensued in 1929 when Georges Sadoul and Jean Caupenne sent an insulting letter to a recruit from the Saint-Cyr Military Academy (Richardson and Fijalkowski 142–143; Pierre Tracts surréalistes 1922/1939 129–130). But it was Louis Aragon who honed this disgust to its bluntest perfection, at the culmination of Treatise on Style (117–118), vowing never again to wear uniform or pay deference to an officer: “I have the honor, in my home, in this book, here and now, very consciously to say that I shit on the entire French army.” Surrealists in France continued to protest and intervene in the face of national and colonial conflicts through the course of the group’s long history, notably during the mid to late 1930s, as Europe’s stability grew increasingly precarious in the face of rising fascist militarism: visible above all in collective declarations, their titles alone already give a flavor of attitudes that were often markedly distinct from those of their contemporaries: “Mobilization Against War is not Peace” (1933), “Neither your War nor your Peace” (1937). “If you want peace, prepare for civil war,” the first of these had announced (Richardson and Fijalkowski 103), making clear that the Surrealist stance against nationalism and militarism did not, for all that, imply a straightforward pacifism (Raynaud Paligot 317), most particularly when the forces of capitalism might be as fatally aggressive as fascism. But for some Surrealists at least, a few moments in history did justify armed intervention. This attitude comes across vividly in the movement’s support for the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, engaged by the French, Belgian, and English groups at the level of intellectual and activist contributions but more explicitly demonstrated by a number of current or future members who joined the combat in Spain, among them Péret, Eugenio Granell, Wifredo Lam, Juan Bréa, Mary Low, Achille Chavée, and Toni del Renzio. Significantly, however, Péret’s view would be that the failure of the vision of a Spanish revolution came precisely because “the soldiers have ruined everything” (Breton and Péret 47). After World War II, Surrealists in France continued to take positions against global conflicts, particularly colonial wars. If their enthusiastic participation in the urban insurrections of May ’68 was a tantalizing opportunity to see what freedoms civil war might promise, one highly significant intervention came in the so-called “Manifesto of the 121”—the Declaration on the right of insubordination in the Algerian War (September 1960), cosigned by a broad front of French intellectuals but drawn up by three authors within or close to the Surrealist group: Jean Schuster, Dionys Mascolo, and Maurice Blanchot. Calling upon all French soldiers in Algeria to desert from a blatantly illegal and ideological conflict, the Surrealist context for this highprofile intervention, ruffling the government and subjected to strong censure, has often tended to remain unacknowledged (Pierre, Tracts surréalistes 1940–1969 205–208; Paligot 278–283). Thus, while the Surrealist movement’s attitudes to nationalism remained complex but stable throughout its history—protective of the distinctive qualities of local cultural identities while firmly opposing contemptible appeals to nation and fatherland, and promoting the internationalization of knowledge and communication—its stance on militarism is more intricate. Denouncing both war and the ongoing condition of legalized terrorism ratified by totalitarian and capitalist states alike, hating military institutions, it nevertheless sought to expose and understand the deep-seated origins of aggression, while acknowledging moments where the recourse to defensive violence might be needed, above all in reclaiming personal or anti-colonial freedom. In December  2001, the French writer and curator Jean Clair published a polemic holding Surrealism responsible for a state of mind behind acts of terrorism, such as the attacks of 9/11. Extraordinary as this claim might seem, as Jonathan Eburne has shown (“Antihumanism and Terror”), it can also be connected back to the hostile postwar debates into which the movement in France was drawn, particularly on publication of Albert Camus’s L’Homme révolté (The 77

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Rebel, 1951), which similarly presented Surrealism within the wider argument that revolutionary thought always slides into repressive orthodoxy. Yet in the face of these critiques, Surrealism’s priority has always been to demand and proclaim freedom in ways that remain complex, unfolding, and emergent, a continued and always renewed quest in which poetic, utopian, or mythical thinking infiltrates the grain of everyday experience and political realities, as mindful of social and material life’s bitter constraints as of all its promises.

Works Cited Adamowicz, Elza. “Off the Map: Surrealism’s Uncharted Territories.” Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers, edited by Elsa Adamowicz, Peter Lang, 2006, pp. 197–216. Aragon, Louis. Treatise on Style. Translated by Alyson Waters. University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Breton, André. Lettres à Simone Kahn 1920–1960. Gallimard, 2016. ———. Position Politique du surréalisme. Bélibaste, 1970. ———. Mettre au ban les partis politiques. L’Herne, 2007. ———. Surrealism and Painting. Translated by Simon Watson Taylor. Harper & Row, 1972. ———. What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Edited by Franklin Rosemont. Pluto, 1978. Breton, André, and Benjamin Péret. Correspondance 1920–1959. Gallimard, 2017. D’Alessandro, Stephanie, and Matthew Gale. Surrealism Beyond Borders. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001. Eburne, Jonathan P. “Antihumanism and Terror: Surrealism, Theory, and the Postwar Left.” Yale French Studies, no. 109, 2006, pp. 39–51. ———. Surrealism and Art of Crime. Cornell University Press, 2008. El Janabi, Abdul Kader, editor. Le Désir libertaire: Le surréalisme arabe à Paris 1973–75. L’Asymétrie, 2018. Joans, Ted. Afrodisia. Marion Boyars, 1976. Monahan, Laurie. “Violence in Paradise: André Masson’s Massacres.” Art History, vol. 24, no. 5, November 2001, pp. 707–724. Péret, Benjamin. Death to the Pigs: Selected Writings. Edited and translated by Rachel Stella. Atlas, 1988. Pierre, José, editor. Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, 1922/1939. Eric Losfeld, 1980. ———. Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, 1940–1969. Eric Losfeld, 1982. Raynaud Paligot, Carole. Parcours politique des surréalistes 1919–1969. CNRS Éditions, 2010. Rentzou, Effie. “Internationalism and Universalism.” Surrealism Beyond Borders, edited by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001, pp. 308–309. Richardson, Michael, and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, editors. Surrealism against the Current: Tracts and declarations. Translated by Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski. Pluto, 2001. Roediger, David. Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past. University of California Press, 2003. Rosemont, Franklin, Penelope Rosemont, and Paul Garon, editors. The Forecast is Hot! Tracts and Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States 1966–1976. Black Swan Press, 1997. Sebbag, Georges, editor. Bulletin International du Surréalisme, avril 1935—September 1936. L’Âge d’homme, 2009. Shell, Oliver, and Oliver Tostmann, editors. Monsters and Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s. Rizzoli, 2018. Stich, Sidra. Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art. Abbeville, 1990.

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9 CATHOLICISM AND FAMILY VALUES Miguel Escribano

Anticlericalism, in Theory Surrealism took shape with an aspiration to productively channel Dada provocation within a polarized social and political atmosphere in both the arts and society. Its revolutionary intent was clear in the manifestos and pamphlets its members distributed, but its earliest magazine, Littérature, edited by Philippe Soupault, André Breton, and Louis Aragon, had a more detached and intellectual character. Attempts to invoke the Dada spirit in Paris tested the limits of Surrealism’s affinity with the aims and methods of Tzara and Picabia, but one thing common to both movements was their contempt for the constraints imposed on human liberty by institutions such as the Church and the family. In 1934, Breton called this essential impulse of Surrealism “refusal,” which they directed “against the whole series of intellectual, moral and social obligations that continually and from all sides weigh down on man and crush him” (“What is Surrealism?” 113). The Surrealists were adamant that some kind of social revolution was called for, which at times led them to adopt combative positions. Breton looked back on two such moments in the development of Surrealism, when they “were seized by a desire for widespread subversion,” in 1924–1925 and 1930–1931. At those times, Breton said, they were motivated by hatred for “every concept that by convention had been granted a sacred value, first and foremost those of ‘family,’ ‘country,’ and ‘religion’ ” (Conversations 71). These periods were among the most fruitful for Surrealist creativity. Surrealism made few attacks on specific aspects of religion, more often directed at social structures in general, with the Church just one more bourgeois institution. The clergy was generally dismissed with varying degrees of scorn, from jocular to vicious, but when Surrealists did take aim at it, they achieved some of their most spectacular results, especially in the arts. Breton’s confidence in a viably Surrealist art, without aesthetic control, had a long gestation, but visual art did eventually become a valuable weapon in the battle against institutionalized moral restrictions. Dada had shown one way: subversive iconoclasm. In 1920, Picabia reproduced an ink splash in his magazine, 391, which he titled The Blessed Virgin. Surrealists often reverted to similarly direct, Dadaist gestures in their anticlerical attacks, but the predominant tone of Breton’s serious engagement with religious and other institutions was one of informed critique. Generally, he DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-11

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sought a revolutionary liberation of the mind through materialist dialectics, with a smattering of Freudian interpretation. He returned to the same reference points: Freud in psychoanalysis; Sade, Lautréamont, and Rimbaud in literature; Hegel, Marx, and Trotsky in philosophy— thinkers who had developed their ideas within and against the Judeo-Christian tradition of monotheism, with its moral codes of remote and peculiar origins. The original, Eurocentric Surrealists were raised and educated in the same tradition and shared those writers’ perspectives, however many trips to the Trocadéro they made, and however much they speculated on the universal condition of man. Within these limitations, Freud, Lautréamont, and Marx were welcome allies of Breton and his fellows in their assault on dogma and received moral constraints. This social revolution would be a positive one, of constant renewal and liberation of the mind, but dialectics and psychoanalysis, as well as personal experiences, made it clear to the Surrealists that the human condition they were considering was irremediably hampered by inherent flaws and irreconcilable dualities that should best be accepted as the essence of humanity, as healthy uncertainty full of marvelous possibilities. The idea of man having been created by God in his own image was simply laughable; Surrealism was a quest for a new reality, not a new ideality. The “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924) contrasts the freedom and innocence of childhood with the rational, moral, and practical concerns of the flawed man one has become. Breton believed that automatism was the best bet for giving free expression to the authentically personal, disengaged from what he later amended to be “conscious aesthetic or moral preoccupations.” The Church is implicated in this shackling of man’s freedom by way of omission: now, it is man who both “proposes and disposes” (14, 18; “What is Surrealism?” 116).

Anticlericalism, in Action The anti-Catholic fun really starts with Artaud’s edition of the third issue of The Surrealist Revolution in 1925, which announced the “end of the Christian era” on its cover and included Artaud’s “Address to the Pope,” blaming Christianity for all evil: “We don’t give a damn for your canons, index, sin, confessional, clergy, we are thinking of another war—war on you, Pope, dog” (58). This is a fine example of the vituperative blasphemy that occasionally erupted among the Surrealists—destructive revolt rather than the constructive revolution that Breton extolled in a more serious tone when he took back control for issue 4, which included the first of his speculations on Surrealism and painting. The arrival in Paris of Max Ernst was important in this respect, as the version of Dada that he brought from Cologne was more measured than Tzara’s absurdism, and more amenable to dialectical discussion. Ernst was well-grounded in Freud, Hegel, and Marx, and this opened his collage series, La Femme 100 têtes, to interpretation, on terms familiar to Breton, of its haunting memories of childhood and sinister threats lurking in bourgeois homes. Ernst even placed Breton in a position of complicity in a similarly sinister scene, in The Virgin spanking the Christ child before three witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the painter (1926), where Breton is one of three male observers of a spectacle of family intrigue, of Christian and maternal associations, raising questions of fear, desire, transgression, identity, and more; a Madonna and Child that has ruptured the boundary between the ideal and the real. In Ernst’s painting, the subversive Virgin, who Katharine Conley has pointed out can be “an icon of disruption within patriarchal society” (28), is separated from the men by a window—alluding to Breton’s conception of painting. This insurmountable separation between male and female was a constant theme of Surrealists’ representations of women as saints, goddesses, mannequins, or machines. Tempting as it is to interpret this as misogyny, it is fairer to see such representations as exposure of that misogyny, 80

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with motivation closer to wonder and awe than contempt—aspects of religious sentiment, in other words, but in a different sphere to the Church’s pontifical despotism. Ernst’s painting was reproduced in issue 8 of The Surrealist Revolution, in December 1926, carrying this implicit attack on the Church and its moral authoritarianism. Éluard made a harsher judgment of Christian family values in the same issue, in “D.A.F. de Sade, Writer of Fantasy and Revolutionary,” enlisting Sade for an attack on the Catholic tenet that sexual relations are only permissible within marriage, and for the sole purpose of procreation, according to a celibate male clergy. “Sade validated those men who had singular ideas in the realm of love, and stood up to those who saw love only as an indispensable means to perpetuate their filthy race,” wrote Éluard. The full extent of the Surrealists’ contempt for the clergy is explicit in the famous photograph of Benjamin Péret “insulting a priest,” which also appeared in the same issue 8 of The Surrealist Revolution. The Surrealists’ anticlerical vitriol met an unexpected adversary in the Catholic editor of the cultural section of the French Communist Party’s mouthpiece, L’Humanité, Henri Barbusse, who lamented the immorality of the poets Lautréamont, Rimbaud, and Éluard. Éluard responded, accusing the newspaper of “procedures revived from the Holy Catholic and Roman Church,” and so the bell rang for a slanging match. In the next round, Breton published “Legitimate Defense,” attacking L’Humanité’s tolerance of patriotism, Catholicism, and “arrant counterrevolutionaries,” demonstrating the distance between Marxist Surrealism and Stalinist Communism and positioning Surrealism as the authentic opposition to the bourgeoisie (Durozoi 126–147).

Figure 9.1 “Our collaborator Benjamin Péret insulting a priest.” Photograph by Marcel Duhamel, published in The Surrealist Revolution, no. 8 (December 1926).

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Breton dug his heels in the following year, with a focused and prolonged attack on institutionalized moral constraint in “Hands off Love,” which defended Charlie Chaplin, who was being sued for divorce on the grounds of “immorality.” The tract reveals that opposition to the Church’s conception of marriage took precedence over the adoption of any worthwhile feminist position. Among the apparent proofs of Chaplin’s sins was that he had defended an unmarried couple with children, suggested a threesome to his wife, and defended his right to have a relationship outside his marriage. Chaplin did all this as a “defender of love,” according to an indignant Breton, who thought it “monstrous” that married women are not bound to a professional code of secrecy, for this reason: The state of the married woman is a profession like any other from the day she claims her right to support, her domestic and sexual pittance. Man, bound by law to live with one woman only, has no alternative but to make her share all his ways, thereby placing himself at her mercy. In the spirit of Sade, Breton deemed it “an absurdity that personal habits should be a matter for legislation,” and he wagered that a “free and truthful discussion of sexual habits” would show that fellatio is perfectly normal and healthy between a loving couple (150–155). Breton tested this wager, convening the first of twelve sessions of such “free and truthful discussion of sexual habits” in January 1928. Far from the exposure of healthy love, liberty, and tolerance that Breton had envisaged, these “Recherches sur la sexualité” tended toward adolescent rutting, blasphemic boasting, and semantic pedantry—most of the forty participants were men—and Breton showed himself to be the strictest legislator of personal habits in the room. The focus on sexual relationships had, at least, signposted Breton’s quest for an ideal, revolutionary love that might mean that “happiness, the exaltation that gives a measure of value to life, can be found beyond the traditional frame of family, work, and community effort” (Gershman 4). The journey began inauspiciously, with him exposing his limitations and prejudices in the “recherches.” Soon afterward, the Surrealists celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the clinical definition of hysteria, and Breton latched onto the basic idea that the hysterical woman might provide a fitting model for the love object. So began his search for a myth of woman suited to Surrealism, and a theory of “mad love.” This theory is as elusive as the mythical protagonist of Nadja that Breton published that year, but its essence is that “mad love” is a vital impulse, akin to religious faith, but secular and authentic. “Mad love” overrides all rational, moral, and social considerations. The insurmountable gap between man and woman is a Surreal space where divisions between real and ideal, moral and immoral, are dissolved, elevating love to a divine level; it is in this “mad love” that woman is transfigured and deified according to Surrealist values. According to Ferdinand Alquié, Breton meant that “the problem of finding human happiness in this life, and by the sole modification of our attitude toward life, is a problem the whole Christian era has neglected, Christianity judging happiness possible only in the supernatural order” (13, 15), but Breton later modified that conclusion: it wasn’t happiness he sought in love, but love (Conversations 176). “Mad love” was firmly established as a guiding principle of Surrealism by the final issue of The Surrealist Revolution, published in December 1929, which contained 53 responses to a survey on love, and also the “Second Surrealist Manifesto.” This called for every possible effort “to lay waste to the ideas of family, country, religion” (128). Psychiatrists and priests are charged with having misunderstood love and are attacked as representatives of bourgeois institutions: the Church, and the equally despicable psychiatric profession, which Breton accuses of acting arbitrarily and morally. As alternatives, Breton champions “Marxist doctrine” in the realm of 82

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social problems, and “Freudian doctrine” for the evaluation of ideas (159–160). The measured speculation of the previous few years was becoming more frenetic, the revolutionary dial turning from theory to calls to action, with a glimpse of the “new morality” Breton had mooted in the first “Manifesto.” The “simplest Surrealist act” is now defined as “dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd”—a statement Breton later said he made “in a moment of ‘giddiness’ ” (Conversations 223). The Church was one legitimate target for this “new morality,” and the revolutionary giddiness was not confined to Breton. Jean Caupenne contributed his own incitement to revolutionary love in the same issue of The Surrealist Revolution, with his “How to Accommodate a Priest” echoing the 1926 issue’s photograph of Péret insulting a priest, and Éluard’s invocation of Sade “validating those men who had singular ideas in the realm of love.” Caupenne demanded that should anyone meet a “servant of the Bearded Whore of Nazareth in the street, you must insult him in a tone that leaves no doubt as to the quality of your disgust.” Anybody unwilling to do so would “find their faces covered with our spittle.” We have no record of Caupenne attacking any “servant of the Bearded Whore of Nazareth,” but it seems he did commit two others of the three sacrileges that he advocated, “defiling holy places” and “stealing sacred objects.” André Thirion recalled doing just that, with Caupenne, at a church in Gers in 1928: It was deserted, so we conscientiously pissed into the holy-water basins, filled the collection box with pebbles, and filched all the ornaments on the altar, including the crucifix. Opening the tabernacle, we removed the ciborium, which was filled with consecrated wafers . . . we mailed the whole batch to Monsieur Louis Aragon. (Imrie 177) Aragon duly attached the looted crucifix to a flush chain at Thirion’s home. This was the second wave that Breton referred to, in which they “were seized by a desire for widespread subversion,” and Dalí and Buñuel rode in on its crest. The giddy spirit and venomous humor of their film Un Chien andalou was perfectly in tune with the moment: “mad love” battles against bourgeois obstacles—priests, police, pianos. Buñuel may have had more responsibility for the film’s anticlericalism, as Dalí later said, but Dalí was happy to participate, painting both Profanation of the Host and Sometimes I spit for pleasure on the portrait of my mother in 1929, the latter a hasty addition to an exhibition at the Goemans Gallery. The words in the title were scrawled in ink around an outline of Christ with a flaming, sacred heart that likely referred to a cover for Littérature drawn by Picabia in 1922. Breton bought Sometimes . . . and was delighted with Dalí’s “overwhelming” impact on Surrealism, for his contributions to its theory, and for his representations of profanity and Oedipal intrigue. Less so Dalí’s family, which only increased his focus on the unconscious processes at play in a Freudian scheme. Ironically, Dalí would later compare Breton’s efforts to regulate the content of his paintings with moral control: Sadism, umbrellas, and sewing machines could all be found in dream imagery, but all references to religion or mysticism, except sacrilegious ones, were taboo. If you innocently dreamed of a Madonna by Raphael, without manifestly blasphemous intentions, you were forbidden to mention it. (Gershman 25) Others who had been closer to Breton for longer were already tiring of his attempt to regulate Surrealism and made anticlerical attacks as the ultimate insult. They depicted Breton as Christ on the cover of a pamphlet, “Un Cadavre,” in January 1930, and referred to him sarcastically 83

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as a pope and a prophet. Robert Desnos, who had been one of Breton’s closest companions, wrote his own “Third Manifesto of Surrealism,” in which he accused Breton of religiosity: “Surrealism, as formulated by Breton, is . . . the best auxiliary for a renaissance of Catholicism and clericalism” (Durozoi 192–193). As accusations of religiosity flew around, some Surrealists veered deliberately toward the diabolical, reviving familiar themes of symbolist poetry and art. This could be innocently amusing, as in Man Ray’s photograph of a bottom, with an inverted crucifix framing the junction of its buttocks, and titled Monument à D.A.F. de Sade (1933), or more problematic; discussion of the diabolical can imply a tacit acknowledgment of the existence of God. Aragon walked the line by claiming a place for the diabolical in the development of Surrealism in “La Peinture au défi,” the preface to the catalog for an exhibition of collages in 1930. Rimbaud and Lautréamont, he wrote, had shown the way to reclaim the marvelous from Christianity for the diabolical, making available “the images offered by dreams, madness, and poetry” for Freudian interpretation. Aragon’s equation of the marvelous with the diabolical was rattling the handle of a door behind which lay trouble; Buñuel and Dalí’s second film, L’Âge d’or, kicked down that door. The film mercilessly mocks Christianity, its values, symbols, and representatives, and the effect was dramatic. Even the first private screening had repercussions, with the mother of the film’s sponsor, Charles de Noailles, apparently having to intercede to avoid her son’s excommunication. When it was first shown publicly, right-wing protestors ransacked the cinema and had the film banned. The Surrealists issued a questionnaire wondering, among other things, if the outlawing of the film meant they were entitled to ransack events which could be construed as propaganda for religious sentiments (Durozoi 213). Surrealism’s anticlerical invective had reached its zenith. But from the Surrealist perspective, this was a film about love. A “Manifesto on ‘L’Âge d’or” was published to assert its message of passionate love and its antibourgeois, anti-Catholic, and revolutionary impact (327–328). In 1937, Breton looked back on the film as “the only enterprise of exaltation of total love such as I envisage it” (Mad Love 78), and in 1951, he still remembered it as the ultimate expression of love, free from both the “literary” world and “civilized” conformism. Protestors had reacted to the film’s lack of respect for Catholic values, and Breton would not disagree. However, he asked, “What does this film respect, if not, as always, love in its most carnal aspects, freedom pushed to the point of delirium?” (Conversations 121). One more important expression of contempt for the clergy swept in on this wave of anticlericalism—the tract Fire!, which welcomed ongoing violence against the Catholic Church in Spain in 1931. This, it said, was revenge for the pyres of the Inquisition. There were “countless vermin of Christianity . . . which must be exterminated,” and signatories hoped that flames would soon consume “every monastery and all the cathedrals of the world.” Breton, for all the diplomacy that he occasionally applied in steering the course of Surrealism, was firm in his belief that religion was an obstacle to the freedom of mankind: To destroy religion by every means available, to obliterate every vestige of these monuments of darkness to which men have prostrated themselves, to erase the symbols that artistic pretext vainly seeks to save from the great popular furore, to disperse the priesthood and attack it in its final hiding places. (322–324)

Family Values Men dominated Parisian Surrealism in the 1920s. They were educated by men, they addressed men, and their literary reference points were overwhelmingly men. Within their limitations, 84

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in the restrictive and misogynistic atmosphere of 1930s France, they meant to address what they called the “problem” of woman, tacitly admitting that the problem was really theirs, not women’s. The Surrealists’ attempts to deal with this problem were often clumsy and fell back on stereotypes or poetic tropes, rarely striking an ironic tone when referring to women as maternal or hysterical, apparatuses or goddesses, but this did at least till fertile ground for discussions of moral constraint. Any meaningful engagement with the broader category of the family is bound to be inadequate from this strictly male perspective, and what the problem of the family or marriage is remains hazy. Despite being married, Breton criticized the institution of marriage as restrictive—to men—and the family was often classed alongside the Church as another institution to be opposed. Attempts to conceive of the family as an institution, reconciling Freud’s Oedipus theory of the family as a viper’s nest of fear, desire, and transgression and Marxist economic theories of the family, lack coherence. With Sade further undermining any objectivity, we might consider how the family could be reimagined at a personal level, but it is hard to see how it might be eradicated as a repressive institution. These inconsistencies in apportionment of moral responsibility, within and outside the family, were obvious when the Surrealists took up the cause of Violette Nozière in 1933. Nozière had poisoned and gassed both her parents, although her mother survived. Her defense that her father had repeatedly raped her met counteraccusations by her mother of promiscuity and prostitution. Although it seems hard to understand now, Nozière was also deemed guilty of breaking the cultural taboo against revealing incest. The court case did not take place until the following year, and then Nozière was found guilty, but the Surrealists had read enough to reach their own conclusions and to rally behind her as a talismanic victim of patriarchal, social constraint within the family, and to publish a collection of illustrated poems in her support. They were quick to blame the patriarchal family, but their views on woman and family relations were never likely to approach feminism, within the narrow perspective to which they were restricted. Yet deliberately or not, Surrealism did disturb the foundations of the institutions they attacked and prepared the way for women who joined the Surrealists later to better address the roles of mother and wife that they were expected to play in Catholic France.

New Myths for a New World The second half of the 1930s was a turbulent period for Surrealism, reflecting the political events cascading over Europe. The rise of Hitler and Stalin, the Spanish Civil War, the polarization of political positions, expulsions, and defections meant that Hegel and Marx moved back to the top of the agenda, at the expense of Freud. As Surrealism maneuvered its political position, internally and externally, René Crevel stepped forward as an eloquent spokesman, fluent in the language of Marxist dialectics, but petty squabbling between the Surrealists and an intransigent Communist Party so eroded his hopes for a new world order driven by love that he was nudged to suicide (Durozoi 235–236). Breton reminded his readers that Socialism had originally been a worthwhile cause; “the whole question of bettering the lot of mankind was at stake” (“Political Position” 207). Still, the bickering raged on, and as cracks appeared in the Surrealist group, Breton could only lament that certain former Surrealists had “abandoned all critical sense” to toe the official communist party line (“On the Time” 243–253). The traditional Christian message of love was out of the question; despite events, Breton still had more faith in dialectics than apologetics. The Surrealists’ criticism was aimed at the Church’s hypocrisy and lack of critical integrity, and it was no surprise to them that the clergy did little to resist Franco, Mussolini, or the Vichy government. In this fractious atmosphere, 85

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Breton compiled Mad Love, revisiting themes explored in Nadja, buoyed by his new love for Jacqueline Lamba and the birth of their daughter, Aube. Among the book’s ruminations, Breton hopes for the future happiness of the children of the Spanish militia that he had met in 1936, whose fathers’ lives were being sacrificed to eradicate “the old ‘order’ founded on the cult of that abject trinity: family, country, and religion” (117). Breton turned to familiar, heretical crusaders against that old order, as much to remind lapsed Surrealists and communists as to persuade new converts. Sade, Lautréamont, Marx, Engels, and Freud are all referred to in the book. After the war began, the focal point of Surrealism shifted to the USA, where Breton and others spent time in exile. Family, country, and religion earned some reprieve from Surrealist attack. Despite the nominal pervasiveness of Christian values in America, the Church as an institution did not occupy the position it did in Europe, and Catholic dogma was not as intrusive on people’s freedoms. Neither were circumstances propitious for dalliances with Communism, and social revolution was hardly a realistic proposition for these guests in a foreign land. However, when the Surrealists reconvened in Europe after liberation, many felt heightened revulsion for the Church; postwar anticlericalism was personal and visceral rather than theoretical. When Magritte organized the first group exhibition of Surrealists after the war, a catechism book floated in a rotting stew, and among the slogans painted on the walls, Dominguez had written, “I want the death of 30,000 priests every 3 minutes” (Durozoi 452). Nonetheless, Breton retained his optimism for a new world of peace and freedom built on the rubble of the old institutions, although he had refined his conceptualization of the love that would inspire that social renaissance. Although he had lost none of his contempt for the Church, he had lost faith in shouting matches and exchanges of pamphlets as a method of combat. As Alquié put it, Breton had added Kant’s transcendental dialectic to his intellectual armory, the idea that “the illusion inherent in religions should rather be comprehended than refuted” (38). Breton returned in 1946, having published Arcane 17 in New York, which called for the establishment of “the child-woman myth,” and in a new edition of the “Second Manifesto,” Breton added a footnote to his call for “THE PROFOUND, THE VERITABLE OCCULTATION OF SURREALISM,” confirming that this was the area in which he now placed most faith. He proposed astrology, metaphysics, and telepathic collaboration as tools for the task. Love, now, was “the site of ideal occultation of all thought” (178–182). This new taste for the esoteric was shared by other Surrealists too; at the exhibition Surrealism in 1947, curated by Breton and Duchamp, more than 100 artists from 24 countries created tarot cards, totems, and shrines devoted to invented or appropriated myths (Durozoi 466). This courting of esoterism inevitably brought a reaction from Surrealists that insisted on a return to the more politically revolutionary aims of earlier years, oblivious to the possibility that as many lives had been lost in the name of Communism as Christianity during the war. It also brought a reaction from Christians, worried that this interest in the occult, coupled with citations of Sade, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Marx, and Freud, could only mean that Surrealists sought to impose an alternative system, of immorality. Breton fielded such accusations in interviews, explaining that while it was true that “Hegelianism and Marxism have toppled traditional morality,” Surrealism was opposed to the imposition of any moral system (Conversations 212). When reminded of Artaud’s proclamation of the death of Christianity on the cover of The Surrealist Revolution in 1925, Breton outlined the extent to which he was prepared to allow religion any consideration: “I reject the entire masochistic dogma based on the insane concept of ‘original sin,’ no less than the idea of salvation in an ‘other world,’ with the sordid scheming it entails in this one.” He further qualified his modicum of “interest in Christian mythology and the speculations it has inspired, just as [he was] interested in Egyptian, Greek, Aztec, and other 86

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mythologies.” However, he could not resist explaining that as far as Christianity was concerned, his “preference goes straight to the heretics” (Conversations 219). This only opened the door to further accusations: asked if he wanted to replace Christian morality with a “morality of passion” instigated by Sade, Freud, and Fourier, Breton referred the interviewer to the imminent publication of a tract, “A la niche les glapisseurs de Dieu!” (To your kennels, yapping curs of God!), intended to establish Surrealism’s anticlerical credentials once and for all, in response to a flurry of texts claiming the compatibility of Surrealism and Christianity (Conversations 222). Alquié has tried to clarify the nuances at play in the ensuing recriminations, which continued for a couple of years. The insult is aimed at the glapisseurs, not God— “Surrealist blasphemy insults, not God, but believers,” a point the “yapping curs” seem to have missed. Misfired accusations were instigated by those who had confused the “romantic satanism” that the Surrealists enjoyed in Rimbaud or Lautréamont, for example, with the “theoretical negation” of their philosophical atheism (43–44). Allusion to Sade was always likely to cause confusion; Surrealist Sadism is a starting point for dialectic thought, not an end in itself. Surrealists considered that Sade exposed the universal evil in man, not that he, or they, were responsible for it. The intention was to invoke, “without believing in God, the vertigo of facing evil” (52). Any meaningful hope of a détente in the increasing agitation collapsed in 1951 with the “Carrouges affair,” in which Breton and Péret were cast in the unlikely roles of defenders of Michel Carrouges against anticlerical hardliners (Gershman 162). The openly Catholic Carrouges had been on the margins of Surrealism for a few years, and his book André Breton et les données fondamentales du Surréalisme was well received in 1950, even by Breton. But when Pastoreau heard that Carrouges was to give a lecture, “How Is Surrealism Doing?” in, of all places, a church in 1951, he determined to disrupt the lecture and read an excerpt from “Á la niche” to affirm the distance that separated Carrouges from Surrealism’s “basic anticlericalism.” Pastoureau was disappointed to find that his intervention was met with little enthusiasm from Breton and others, and distributed an Aide-mémoire accusing Breton of weakness and demanding a return to a revolutionary position. Breton and Péret responded, the whole affair was debated at the general assembly of the Surrealist group, and Pastoureau and Waldberg were excluded, as well as Carrouges. A text was signed reiterating Surrealism’s revolutionary position, but even so, the affair rumbled on (Durozoi 515–516). Was this really the state of Surrealism after thirty years, condemned to perpetually draft protocols on the semantics of its revolutionary position regarding the Catholic system of morality that it had set out to dismantle? It was time to set these questions aside. Society was moving inexorably toward secularization, and Surrealism had played its part in that. It was time to look forward to new challenges.

Works Cited Alquié, Ferdinand. The Philosophy of Surrealism. 1955. Translated by Bernard Waldrop. Ann Arbor, 1969. Artaud, Antonin. “Adress to the Pope.” 1925. Waldberg, Patrick. Surrealism. Thames and Hudson, 1965, pp. 58–59. Breton, André. Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism. Originally published as Entretiens, 1952, revised 1969. Translated by Mark Polizzotti, Marlowe & Company, 1993. ———. “Hands off Love.” 1927. The Autobiography of Surrealism, edited by Marcel Jean, Viking Press, 1980, pp. 150–155. ———. Mad Love. Originally published as L’Amour fou, 1937. University of Nebraska, 1987. ———. “Manifesto of Surrealism.” 1924. Manifestoes, pp. 1–47. ———. Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor, 1972. ———. “Political Position of Surrealism.” 1935. Manifestoes, pp. 205–211.

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Miguel Escribano ———. “Second Manifesto of Surrealism.” 1930. Manifestoes, pp. 111–194. ———. “What Is Surrealism?”1934. Rosemont, pp. 112–141. Breton, André et al. “Fire!” Rosemont, pp. 322–324. ———. “Manifesto on ‘L’Âge d’or.” 1931. Rosemont, pp. 327–328. ———. “On the Time When the Surrealists Were Right.” 1935. Manifestoes, pp. 243–253. Conley, Katharine. Automatic Woman. University of Nebraska, 1996. Durozoi, Gérard. History of the Surrealist Movement. Translated by Alison Anderson. University of Chicago, 2002. Gershman, Herbert S. The Surrealist Revolution in France. Ann Arbor, 1974. Imrie, Malcolm “Notes on Participants.” Investigating Sex, edited by José Pierre, translated by Malcolm Imrie with an afterword by Dawn Adès, Verso, 1992, pp. 173–183. Rosemont, Franklin, editor. What Is Surrealism? Book Two: Selected Writings of André Breton. Pathfinder, 1978.

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10 VERBAL TECHNIQUES Madeleine Chalmers

Future Surrealist techniques do not interest me. André Breton, “Manifeste du surréalisme” 344

My epigraph may seem a strange one for a chapter on Surrealism’s verbal techniques. After all, Surrealism, as it evolved in France during the 1920s and 1930s, is known for its plethora of linguistic innovations and experiments, from automatic writing to exquisite corpses. In this chapter, however, I aim to show precisely why Breton’s apparent dismissal of techniques should be the cornerstone of our approach to the way that the Surrealists manipulated language. By showing how Surrealism emerged from an existing intellectual and artistic milieu and then exploring how Breton sought to systematize and resystematize it throughout his career, I invite us to see it not as a set of practices but as an aspiration, and its verbal techniques—from collage to automatic writing through to poem-objects—as a set of heuristic tools. I begin with the word itself.

Surrealism: The Story of a Neologism We can see the word surrealism as an example of a particular kind of verbal technique: the coinage of a neologism. In the preface to Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias, 1903), the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) suggests that his gender-bending play is the first example of a new form of art. He writes, “I have forged the adjective surrealist, which bears no relation to the symbolic” (Apollinaire 11).1 His surrealism is embedded in reality, replicating its functioning without its accustomed appearance or the kind of analogy that we might associate with symbolism. Apollinaire puts it like this: “[W]hen man wanted to imitate walking, he created the wheel, which looks nothing like a leg. He thereby did surrealism without realizing” (12). In the Manifeste, Breton explains that “surrealism” was adopted in tribute to the late Apollinaire but suggests that the nineteenth-century poet Gérard de Nerval’s “supernaturalism” describes more closely surrealism’s work (327). Nerval’s “supernaturalism” is, in fact, not a defined school or movement, as Breton’s admiration of it suggests; rather, it is an almostthrowaway designation for a particular metaphysical turn in German Romantic writing, tucked away at the end of a dedication (Nerval xix). 90

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-12

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These small details point us towards two important considerations. Firstly, surrealism predates “Surrealism.” What Breton considered himself and his peers to be doing in 1920s Paris was bringing into the foreground something that had always been there: the marginal notes of mystics and saints, the mentally ill and spiritualists, clowns and eccentrics, through the centuries. He claims a name for it but gives it a much longer prehistory. Secondly, we can see that Surrealism should more properly be thought of as a number of surrealism(s). Bretonian Surrealism (which I focus on and capitalize in this piece) was always caught between the desire to understand, define, and categorize the impulses and insights it provoked, and the very messiness of those impulses and insights as they emerged in the maelstrom of world politics and events. This contributed to its repeated schisms and to Breton’s notorious characterization as the doctrinaire “pope of surrealism” (Goll 371). Retrospectively encompassing earlier authors and artists, broadening scope from the individual psyche to the sociopolitical collective, Bretonian Surrealism expanded both backwards and forwards in time. Just as he does with the word “surrealism,” Breton would constantly seek to define and redefine old terms, probing and moulding words and ideas in his quest for a view of the world in which he could believe. That synthetic Bretonian ambition is the leitmotif of my reading of surrealist verbal techniques.

Cutting and Sticking with Raymond Roussel and Dada If Apollinaire provided the Surrealists with the noun and the adjectives they would use to describe their activities, other writers opened the way towards potential techniques. In this section, I home in on two major influences, highlighting the ways in which they subvert our ambitions to define and order language. The first is Raymond Roussel (1877–1933). This eccentric writer’s two major novels, Impressions d’Afrique (Impressions of Africa, 1910) and Locus Solus (1914), comprise detailed descriptions of a range of irrational and yet immaculately designed, useless, and yet perfectly functioning machines and strange objects. “Raymond Roussel describes; and there is nothing beyond what he describes,” declared Alain Robbe-Grillet, lauding his “opacity without mystery” (70–71). Though he was denied the mainstream success he sought in his lifetime, Roussel has since been lauded by structuralists, poststructuralists, and the New York poets for the “purity” of his writing, which creates its own self-regulating world, seemingly resistant to all our conventional frames for reading. Roussel expressed his admiration for Joan Miró, visited André Masson and viewed his automatic drawings in 1924, and made the Surrealists who attended and defended his plays his literary executors (Leiris 279, 297). Indeed, his nephew was the Surrealist ethnographer Michel Leiris (1901–1990), and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) drew inspiration from his writings throughout his career. In the posthumously published Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Some of My Books, 1936), Roussel describes his method of composition. This exists in two forms: the simple and the complex. The first is described by Roussel as “creation based on the coupling of two words taken in two different directions” (20). He illustrates the process with an example of the source text for Impressions d’Afrique. This method is based on selecting two near-homophones (“billard” and “pillard”) and building two phrases around them. Each phrase uses the same words but operates with different meanings or definitions of them. One sentence becomes the first sentence of the story, the other the last: the writer’s job is then to weave “a tale” between the two, connecting up the two meanings of the words (Roussel 11–12). The same sounds and words unfurl in a plethora of ways, pushed apart and pulled back together again to produce a textual entity. Roussel also details the “evolved procedure” (23), in which he uses the words of nursery rhymes instead of individual words. Here, “I was driven to take any old phrase, and 91

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to draw images from it by dislocating it” (Roussel 20). By “dislocating” it, taking words and phrases on homophonic journeys but then bringing them back together, Roussel manages to create and weave surprising sense from sonic associations to show us the order in chaos, the reason for the rhyme. On the surface, Roussel’s tightly controlled, almost-algorithmic writing method would seem to have little in common with Dada, which began in 1916, in Zürich, as an international group of renegades at the Cabaret Voltaire came together to produce hybrid performances whose chaotic energy reflected the nihilistic drive of the First World War unfolding in Europe. Dada was Breton’s first home, as it was for many other French Surrealists. In 1916, the German poet Hugo Ball (1886–1927) described Dada as “a question of connections, and of loosening them up.” For him, Dada’s new approach to language was about showing “how articulated language comes into being,” reinventing language from the ground up (Ball). As he put it, “I  let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat miaows. . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words” (Ball). A new language is born, plastic, endlessly morphing, and playful. Ball draws our attention to sounds and the phenomenology of language. We can hear (and feel) it, even in the dental bite of “Dada.” In his 1920 Dada manifeste de l’amour faible et de l’amour amer (Dada Manifesto of Feeble and Bitter Love), the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) declares that “thought is produced in the mouth” (57). The sound, taste, texture of language are brought to the fore; language is something organic and living. Its consonants can clash in rapid-fire speech, its vowels can be stretched to their limits in slow motion, and together they can be combined in any and all arrangements. Thus Tzara’s instructions for making a Dadaist poem advocate, in numbered steps, that the reader cut up and arrange random phrases from a newspaper (“Pour faire un poème dadaïste” 18). This collage represents a fragmentation, but it also coheres, not into something meaningful in the conventional sense, but into something that exists—that lives—on its own terms. William S. Burroughs would continue this work in his “cut-ups,” but I  want to put the emphasis on collage: the act of sticking back together. Leiris remarked of his uncle, “[O]ne day, he told me with a chuckle: ‘They say I’m a Dadaist; I don’t even know what Dadaism is!’ ” (205). Perhaps it is in collage that we can see the Dada in Roussel, and the Roussel in Dada: that shared freedom to decompose and recompose, to disarticulate and rearticulate. Why, then, did the Surrealists break from Dada? For Breton, Dadaism’s “pure and simple iconoclasm” prevented it from attaining the “total remelding of the human spirit” (Art magique 275), which was Surrealism’s aim. In other words, these precursors offer conscious methods, but not the ontological ambition which should accompany them. For the Surrealists, language breaks down in order to break through: not just to put things back together, but to reinvent them.

From Breakdown to Breakthrough The Manifeste (1924) might seem an intuitive place to start thinking about the modalities of this breakthrough and reinvention, but it is not the first statement on Surrealism and its verbal techniques. In “Entrée des médiums” (“Entry of the Mediums,” 1922), Breton recorded his first encounters with Surrealist phrases in the hinterland of a “psychic automatism fairly similar to the dream state, a state . . . which is difficult to delineate” (274). In this account, Breton is inhabited by phrases that come to him as complete entities, as faits accomplis, emerging from the deep substrate of Breton’s own reality when the activity of his conscious mind is suspended. Surrealism here does not refer to a movement but to a perceptual experience. Its raw material is “the more or less partial phrases which . . . become perceptible to the spirit without it being possible to discover any form of prior determination” (“Entrée” 274): phrases which we 92

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do not consciously think into being. At first, Breton tries simply to remember these phrases, which occur to him on the brink of sleep, in order to deploy them as “poetic elements of the first order” (“Entrée” 274). Later, he and Philippe Soupault induce automatic states within themselves to produce the poems of Les Champs magnétiques through an “abstraction of the external world” (“Entrée” 274), but writing necessarily reimplants the subject into the world and materiality: the hand must put pen to paper and thereby invite a return of the conscious subject and conscious will. Even “objective” accounts of dreams require a conscious effort of unreliable memory (“Entrée” 275). Drawing on the nineteenth-century traditions of the séance and hypnotism to which René Crevel introduced them, Robert Desnos and other susceptible individuals would circumvent the pen by speaking and moving while in automatic states, to the extent that—as Louis Aragon (1897–1982) remarked—“sometimes we have to pull the knives from their hands” (22–23). Automatic experiences took some to the very brink of physical danger, and automatic writing appears almost as an unsatisfactory and pragmatic compromise that put health and safety first. And yet in the Manifeste, Breton establishes automatism as the very identity of Surrealism: “Surrealism: . . . Pure psychic automatism by which we porpose to express . . . the real functioning of thought” (328). I have argued that the Manifeste can be read as a rewriting—and righting—of the aporias of “Entrée des médiums,” one which “reframes experiment as theory, in a form of legitimizing foundation myth which rehabilitates the paradox of automatic writing” (Chalmers 370). For instance, its opening paragraphs introduce elements absent from “Entrée des médiums”: the work of Freud and an ambition which stretches beyond the poetic. Breton suggests that Freud’s work on dreams and the unconscious indicates a path out of our adherence to a deceptive rationalism which makes us suppress and “correct” the experiences we have which exceed the framework of supposed reality (Manifeste 316). Breton wishes to exploit this: “[I]f the depths of our spirit harbour strange forces . . . it is in our interest to capture them . . . in order to then submit them, if required, to the control of our reason” (Manifeste 316). Surrealism seeks to do something with its discovery of subjectivity. Breton goes on to resituate Surrealism in an intellectual and historical context which makes automatic writing a starting point rather than the unsatisfactory intermediary experiment of “Entrée des médiums.” The two frameworks through which Surrealist automatism is usually read were identified by Jean Starobinski in “Freud, Breton, Myers” (1970) as Freudian psychoanalysis and spiritualism (in its esoteric rather than philosophical sense). These have dominated the critical agenda ever since, with scholars debating their relative influence on Breton’s ideas. However, it is important to note that Starobinski does not play “Freud” and “Myers” off one another in a battle of the influencers. He argues that Breton borrows the lexicon and gestures of Freudian analysis or mediumship in order to clothe his own nascent metaphysical proposition, a “magical materialism” (Starobinski 338). We should read the Manifeste as a heuristic document rather than a prescriptive programme, a creation myth that seeks to explain and bring structure to intimations and instincts. This is perhaps why Breton now ascribes his interest in automatism to Freud and to his treatment of shell-shocked soldiers as a medical officer during the First World War: “I resolved to obtain from myself what we sought to obtain from them, that is, a monologue . . . which is as close as possible to spoken thought” (Manifeste 326). Here, Breton bridges the gap between speaking and writing since a third party transcribes the subject’s “spoken thought.” The technological mediation of writing remains, but the objectivity of this form of recording avoids the contamination of consciousness evoked in “Entrée des médiums.” As Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau has noted (260), Breton’s understanding of automatism stems from dynamic psychiatry, notably the work of Pierre Janet, and from Babinski, with whom he worked during the war. Breton’s sleight 93

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of hand can be seen in the fact that the process which he describes here is a Freudian practice, since “in French dynamic psychiatry, the patient personally transcribed .  .  . interior speech” (Schiff 172). In other words, Breton claims for Freud the practice which best fits his ideal of minimal mediation. This form of strategic amendment is a practice to which Breton returns again and again throughout his career in an attempt to buff out the sharp edges of Surrealism’s paradoxes and contradictions. In order to have the freedom to bend language, sometimes we have to bend our ideas. It is important to note that while automatic writing privileges freedom and the abstraction of self, the Surrealists under Breton experimented with more constrained exercises. Even the Manifeste features a section on the “Secrets of the Surrealist Magic Art” (331). Here, details of environmental conditions conducive to automatic writing are followed by humorous instructions on “how to be noticed by a woman in the street” (Manifeste 333–334). Should the wouldbe automatist feel their conscious self intruding, they are instructed—perhaps paradoxically—to “write any old letter, the letter l for example, always the lettre l, and to reintroduce randomness by making this the first letter of the next word” (Manifeste 331–332). In L’Immaculée conception (The Immaculate Conception, 1930), Breton and Paul Éluard offer a hybrid collection of short texts. In their introduction to the section entitled “Les Possessions,” the two poets argue that poetry can reproduce the verbal manifestations of the mentally ill, thus demonstrating that mental illness is not an aberration but a connection to a deeper realm of connections and relationships. We read their “simulations” of various conditions—“mental debility,” “acute mania,” “general paralysis,” “interpretative delirium,” and “dementia praecox”—in texts which mimic the verbal tics and flights of ideas associated with these (now outdated) medical diagnoses. These exercises may shock twenty-first-century readers, but they are in line with Surrealism’s long-established scepticism regarding psychiatry, visible in texts such as Nadja (1928). Breton and Aragon celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of hysteria by affirming that “hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and can, in every respect, be considered as a supreme means of expression” (“Cinquantenaire” 950). While Breton championed outsider artists throughout his career, he was rather less invested in the care of those he knew personally (notably René Crevel, Antonin Artaud, and Nadja herself). Breton and Éluard argue that simulating mental illness is as effective a method of accessing absolute reality as automatic writing or associative practices found in the same volume. All are forms of writing, supposedly conceived without the sin of conscious thought or control, and yet the paradox of this secular immaculate conception is clear. Even the title “Les Possessions” is contradictory. We have already seen that Surrealism’s earliest experiments imitated the mediumistic setting. While Breton rejected the premise of their activities—that they were in some way possessed by ghosts or astral beings—he saw the products of their experiences as automatic in nature. The key difference, perhaps, is one of directionality. Whereas spiritualism seeks a passive state in which the medium becomes receptive to external forces, Breton’s automatism looks inwards and is active as it brings together elements of subjectivity that have been separated. Mediumship seeks to “dissociate the psychological personality of the medium,” whereas “surrealism proposes nothing less than the unification of that personality” (“Message automatique” 386). Reunification is the watchword of his practice of automatism, and even of the texts in L’Immaculée conception, which are deemed to reconnect Breton and Éluard with the deepest reaches of their psyches. Ultimately, this reunification goes to the heart of a fundamental distinction in Western culture and thought—between the real and the represented, between what is perceived and what is created. For Breton, this distinction is the result of the “dissociation of a single faculty” (“Message” 391), a faculty that is recovered in automatism. Breton thereby definitively rehabilitates 94

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automatic writing by collapsing any distinction between writing and thought. He enacts this in the Manifeste when he gives Surrealism a specific starting point, a trigger image which is never mentioned in any of his earlier writings: One evening, then, before falling asleep, I perceived—so clearly articulated that it was impossible to change one word of it, but nevertheless separate from the sound of any voice—a fairly bizarre phrase. He describes the sensation by saying that the image “knocked at the window” and (though he claims not to remember it) says that “it was something like, ‘There is a man cut in two by the window’ ” (Manifeste 324–325). By bringing the mirror into the phrase and the experience of its perception, Breton folds together two worlds: that of the image (the “representation”) and the material world of his bodily experience (the “real”). The image of the bisected man captures the meeting of those two worlds—and it is captured in words, written and printed. For Dada, thought happened in the mouth and manifestos were delivered aloud; for Surrealism, it happens in the written trace.2

From the Page to the Poem-Object The first manifesto focuses on a personal quest, a deep and individual psychic liberation. In the Second manifeste (Second Manifesto, 1930), Breton presents Surrealism as a sociopolitical movement which seeks to harness automatism’s uncovering of subjectivity in the service of the revolution as the foundation for a new society. This manifesto captures the urgent welter of a historical moment in which society and politics were up for grabs, amid rising extremism at both ends of the political spectrum within France. In 1929, Breton argues that Surrealism must think bigger: “the problem of social action . . . is but one of the forms of a more general problem which Surrealism has made it its duty to resolve and which is the problem of human expression in all its forms” (Second manifeste 802). Indeed, Breton apologizes for his mistake in “briefly underestimating the social misunderstanding” (Second manifeste 186). This is not incompatible with Surrealism’s roots in personal experiment; it is its logical conclusion, and it is outwardfacing. Imagining an “everyman” discovering Surrealism, Breton writes that he now surrounds himself with the products . . . which . . . surrealism offers him in the form of books, paintings, and films, . . . and—more or less timidly—relies on them to overturn his way of feeling. (Amour fou 802) The everyman hands over agency to the Surrealist words and objects, asks them to act upon him, and in so doing, begins to change his world. Opening oneself to objective chance, the “necessity which escapes man though he experiences it vitally as a necessity” (Amour fou 485), we discover a correspondence between a subject’s inner life and the universe, animated by mutual desire. Coincidences are no longer coincidences; they were meant to be. From the joint automatic writing of Les Champs magnétiques (Magnetic Fields, 1920) with Philippe Soupault, through to these joint efforts, Surrealism always saw its discoveries as acts of collaborative creation, uncovering a “shared heritage” to which human beings have “total equality” of access (“Message” 387). Games, questionnaires, rankings of their favourite authors, tarot were all used to facilitate access to those hitherto-unknown realms of reality and to tap into objective chance. Among their best-known techniques is the “exquisite corpse,” in which 95

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players would take it in turns, adding to a starting phrase to create an ever-unfurling concatenation of verbal creativity. This, for Breton, was the way to renovate not only to “remeld the human spirit” but also to remake the world. An automatic poem, he believed, “could suddenly become charged with meaning following a later event, prefigured by the poem” (“Pont suspendu” 918). Words could make the future—and the past. In his 1941 poem-object “Portrait de l’acteur A. B.,” Breton turns the strokes of the pen which make up the initials of his name into the date which they resemble, 1713 (“Peinture” 693–695). Discussing himself in the third person, he writes, “[H]e . . . was curious enough to pick out key events which this date could mark (perhaps at least one of these events prompted his unconscious fixation on this historic time, or even his identification with it)” (“Peinture” 693). The box itself is indissociable from the commentary which accompanies it, in which Breton draws together key figures and events from 1713: the marriage of the blind mathematician Nicholas Saunderson, the birth of the Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot (whose 1749 Letter on the Blind has Saunderson at its core), the Peace of Utrecht, and the papal bull Unigenitus Dei Filius issued by Clement XI. Intuitively and associatively, an object coalesces around the text and interpretation. It allows Breton to explore his identity and the myriad unsuspected coincidences and resonances which bind us together as human beings across time and space: “actors disappear, but their message reaches us” (“Peinture” 693). The box contains cogs, wheels, a glass suitcase—tools and receptacles to carry out repairs and new constructions. In the earliest days of Surrealist enquiry, Aragon described how we would see . . . a written image which would first present itself as the product of chance, something random, reach our senses and shed its verbal aspect, to then clothe itself in the phenomenal modalities which we had always considered impossible to provoke. (18) Beyond the immaculate conception, this “poem-object” is the Surrealist verbal technique made flesh, made object, entering into and changing the world. In its manifestos, automatic writing, exquisite corpses, simulations, associations, and poemobjects, Surrealism gives us a catalogue of verbal techniques whose finished products are precisely not finished products. They are not literature or art, to be understood as ends in themselves. Rather, they are field reports from the frontier. When Breton claims disinterest in Surrealist techniques, this is disinterest in techniques as such—because what matters is what they allow us to do, to see, to experience. Perhaps Aragon put it best when he described Surrealism as “a notion which recedes like the horizon ahead of the walker, for like the horizon it is a relationship between the spirit and what it will never reach” (Aragon 19). Words are just one set of well-worn boots which carry us down that never-ending road.

Notes 1. All translations from French are my own. 2. For insight into the relationship between the verbal and the visual in Surrealist practice, see Grant.

Works Cited Apollinaire, Guillaume. Les Mamelles de Tirésias. SIC, 1918. Aragon, Louis. Une Vague de rêves. Hachette, 1964.

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Verbal Techniques Bacopoulos-Viau, Alexandra. “Automatism, Surrealism and the Making of French Psychopathology: The Case of Pierre Janet.” History of Psychiatry, vol. 23, no. 3, 2012, pp. 259–276. Ball, Hugo. “Dada Manifesto (14th July  1916).” UbuWeb. www.ubu.com/papers/ball_dada-manifesto. html. Breton, André. “Entrée des médiums.” Œuvres complètes, edited by Marguerite Bonnet, Philippe Bernier, Étienne-Alain Hubert, and José Pierre, vol. 1, Gallimard-Pléiade, 1988, pp. 273–279. ———. L’Amour fou. Œuvres completes. Edited by Marguerite Bonnet, Étienne-Alain Hubert, and José Pierre, vol. 2. Gallimard-Pléiade, 1992, pp. 673–786. ———. L’Art magique. Œuvres complètes: écrits sur l’art et autres textes. Edited by Marguerite Bonnet, Étienne-Alain Hubert, Philippe Bernier, and Marie-Claire Dumas, vol. 4. Gallimard-Pléiade, 2008, pp. 49–292. ———. “Le Cinquantenaire de l’hystérie 1878–1928.” Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, 948–950. ———. “Le Message automatique.” Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, pp. 375–394. ———. “Le Pont suspendu.” Œuvres complètes, vol. 4, pp. 918–920. ———. “Le Second manifeste.” Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, pp. 775–837. ———. “Le Surréalisme et la peinture.” Œuvres complètes, vol. 4, pp. 347–848. ———. “L’Immaculée conception.” Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, pp. 841–886. ———. “Manifeste du surréalisme.” Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, pp. 309–406. Chalmers, Madeleine. “Living as We Dream: Automatism and Automation from Surrealism to Stiegler.” Nottingham French Studies, vol. 59, no. 3, December 2020, pp. 368–383. Desnos, Robert. Corps et biens. Gallimard, 2005. Goll, Ivan. “Réponse à ‘Encore le surréalisme’.” Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, Tome 1, 1922– 1939, edited by José Pierre, Terrain Vague, 1982, pp. 370–371 Grant, Kim. Surrealism and the Visual Arts: Theory and Reception. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Leiris, Michel. Raymond Roussel & Co. Edited by Jean Jamin and Annie Le Brun. Fayard, 1998. Nerval, Gérard de. Les Filles du feu. Michel Lévy frères, 1856. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. “Énigmes et transparence chez Raymond Roussel.” Pour un nouveau roman, Minuit, 1963, pp. 70–77. Roussel, Raymond. Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres. Gallimard, 1995. Schiff, Christopher. “Banging on the Windowpane: Sound in Early Surrealism.” Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, MIT Press, 1992, pp. 139–189. Starobinski, Jean. “Freud, Breton, Myers.” L’Œil vivant II: la relation critique, Gallimard, 1970, pp. 320–341. Tzara, Tristan. “Dada manifeste sur l’amour faible et l’amour amer.” Lampisteries, précédées des sept manifestes Dada, Pauvert, 1963, pp. 53–76. ———. “Pour faire un poème dadaïste.” Littérature, no. 15, July–August 1920, p. 18.

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11 VISUAL METHODS Elliott H. King

“Everyone now knows that there is no surrealist painting. Neither the strokes of the pencil given over to chance gestures, nor the image retracing the figures of a dream, nor imaginative fantasies can, of course, be so described” (Naville 328). The Surrealist poet Pierre Naville published this rebuke of Surrealist painting in April 1925, evincing that even by this early date—six months after the release of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto—visual approaches to Surrealism were a subject of vigorous debate within the Paris group. As a collective initially comprised almost entirely of writers, the burgeoning Surrealists struggled to reconcile their enthusiasm for poetic freedom with the premeditative processes of painting and drawing. Others were more favorable to the association: indeed, just seven months after Naville’s publication, the first Exhibition of Surrealist Painting opened at Paris’s Galerie Pierre with nineteen works from Man Ray, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Picasso, and others. The display made no attempt to define “Surrealist painting” so much as unite artists whose work shared an affinity with Surrealist ideas—serving as an early signal that, in a certain sense, Naville was right: there was “no such thing as surrealist painting” because “surrealist” was not, nor has it ever been, a codified aesthetic style. “Surrealist painting” is perhaps more rightly “painting by Surrealists,” and the visual techniques Surrealists have employed—whether “the marks of the pencil abandoned to chance gestures” or “the image retracing the figures of a dream”—consistently serve as a means of expressing and ultimately liberating, in the language of the Surrealist Manifesto, “the true functioning of thought.” What follows is a brief overview of some of the innovative visual techniques invented or popularized by Surrealists. Though disparate in their methods and manifestations, Surrealist visuals consistently strive to emancipate thought and expression from accepted, rational order. In fact, these aims are indicated in Breton’s very definition of Surrealism from 1924: 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 thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concerns. Encyclopedia. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested

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play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life (Manifestoes 26). Studies of Surrealism tend to prioritize the first, “dictionary” definition and its orientation toward automatism—actions and ideas outside conscious control. While the public commonly associates Surrealist imagery with bizarre, figurative “dream paintings,” the majority of Surrealist visual techniques are based in aspects of automatism. However, this already sets up a well-worn and potentially misleading dichotomy between automatic methods and figurative modes of representation—a debate the Surrealists knew well through their recurring conversations over intentionality and the role of memory in depicting subconscious imagery (Morise 325). An account of these discussions is well beyond my scope here, and instead I would like to emphasize what is revealed, or at least implied, by Breton’s “encyclopedia” definition: Surrealist techniques varied tremendously across time and geography, but their common aim remains to manifest unforeseen poetic images that prioritize “previously neglected associations.” Said another way, Surrealists employed these methods because they bore the most astounding, “marvelous” results. Although some of these techniques are now over a century old, what is perhaps most exciting about them is their continued relevance and accessibility. Invoking Lautréamont’s pronouncement that “poetry should be made by all,” many of these methods can be easily replicated, offering Surrealist insights and revelations to seasoned practitioners and dilettantes alike.

Collage In 1952, Breton reflected that “dada and surrealism—even if the latter was still latent—can only be considered correlatively, like two waves that cover each other by turns” (Conversations 43–47). The remark was atypically gracious, as Breton generally sought to distinguish more clearly Surrealism’s ambitions from Dada. In terms of visual production, however, there were clear overlaps between the Dadaists who exhibited in Paris in the early 1920s and those who would soon align themselves with Surrealism. Indeed, Dada’s discordant juxtapositions and celebration of chance proved an invaluable model for Surrealist techniques following Breton’s break from Dada and the formation of Surrealism. By at least 1913, synthetic cubism had established papier collé as an avant-garde practice that challenged high/low distinctions, heightening the naturalism of key compositional elements, and formally fractured the consistency of the traditionally painted picture-plane. Dada, founded in Zurich in 1916, accentuated collage’s faculty for disturbance. Jean Arp, one of the founders of Zurich Dada who was subsequently active with Surrealism, had abandoned traditional oil painting in 1915, turning instead to biomorphic “constructed paintings” and paper collages to protest the Western world’s valorization of reason. In some of these early collage works, created in partnership with his soon-to-be wife, the artist Sophie Taeuber, Arp allegedly cut or ripped paper into small squares and let the pieces fall freely onto a preglued canvas—a radical approach to collage most readily comparable not to cubist techniques but to the “anti-retinal” experiments Duchamp had independently pioneered with Three Standard Stoppages (1913–14). Other Dada collagists employed photographs—among art’s earliest examples of photomontage, a term invented by the Berlin Dadaists—to produce unsettling cyborgs with political gravitas (Ades 16). Works such as Raoul Hausmann’s Self-Portrait of the Dadasoph (1920), with its mechanization of the dissected, decapitated subject, are particularly prescient of Surrealism’s ensuing manipulations of the human body and attraction to the Freudian Unheimlich.

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Following service in the German Army, Max Ernst, one of the founders of the Cologne Dada Group in 1919, created his own brand of collages—at once fanciful and subversive— by combining images from catalogs of classroom posters, fashion brochures, and nineteenthcentury engravings. Some of the collages he exhibited in Paris in May 1921—in an exhibition organized by Breton, Louis Aragon, Simone Kahn, Benjamin Péret, and other Paris Dadaists— incorporated only small elements of collage surrounded by drawn and painted figures, making it difficult to discern the hand-done from the printed. In combination with de Chirico’s “metaphysical” paintings that were already known to Breton and that Ernst would discover in 1919, these Dada experiments with chance and collage would introduce the aesthetic of surprising incongruity that would mark a great deal of Surrealist artworks. But where Dada sought an insurgency against traditional modes of representation as its own end, the Surrealists hailed collage as a poetic activity, rife with potential to uncover stimulating visual combinations—as Aragon described collage, “a machine to destabilize the mind” (Adamowicz 176). In bringing to light “previously neglected associations,” Surrealist collage disorients, disrupts, and reconfigures everyday experience. Collage, with its many variants and artistic legacies—photo collage, photomontage, assemblage, bricolage, cut-ups, combines, détournement, etc.—is so familiar that it can be difficult to appreciate its perturbing quality, though the medium has proven one of the most internationally widespread and enduring forms of Surrealist visual expression, from Miró’s pasted papers to Pierre Molinier’s orgiastic photomontages and Magritte’s “collages entirely painted by hand” (Adamowicz 177). Specific collage techniques Surrealists have developed include cubomania, the brainchild of the Romanian Surrealist Gherasim Luca, which involved slicing preprinted materials into regular squares (usually 4 × 6 cm) and reassembling them into new disjointed images (Fijalkowski 5), and landscapade, invented by Penelope Rosemont, in which pieces of landscape images are cut and reassembled to form new landscapes. Others devised further variations of the process: in the 1950s, the Belgian Marcel Mariën cut away sections of an existing image with scissors or a razor to reveal a new composition in a technique he called étrécissements. René Passeron employed a similar method in the 1980s, calling the results inimages, a word chosen because the prefix “in” connotes both negation and content (Conte and Lancri). Closely linked to the Surrealists’ pursuit of the surprising image was an exaltation of chance— again, an interest that developed directly from Dada, though both Duchamp and Picabia, as well as other international artists and writers, were already weaponizing spontaneity as a modernist strategy. Dada’s investigation of chance emerged from within a rich web of contemporary social and historical conditions—cubism, modernist attitudes toward primitivism, absurdity, positivism, and appropriation among them (Susik 245). The Surrealists were attracted to chance for its ability to destabilize a rationalist sense of order and encourage subconscious revelation (Kadri et al. 144). It was in part for this that they turned to what would become their preferred channel to subconscious revelation, automatism.

Automatism Automatism was not only the very “definition” of Surrealism in 1924 but also became its central visual practice. Concerning the origins of this attention to automatism, Breton acknowledged a debt to early psychiatry—specifically the research of Jean-Martin Charcot, William James, and Sigmund Freud (Breton, “Automatic” 17). Pierre Janet went unmentioned in Breton’s 1933 essay “The Automatic Message,” though it is likely that in 1919, when Breton and Philippe Soupault were experimenting with the writing exercises that soon would be published as The Magnetic Fields (1920), both young writers were acquainted with Janet’s 1889 study 100

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Figure 11.1  Darren Thomas, The Sun (Becoming), 2021. Contribution to the analogical tarot game with the London Surrealist Group. Collage. Private Collection. Source: © Darren Thomas, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

L’automatisme psychologique (Psychological Automatism), which detailed Janet’s research into his “hysteric” patients’ ability to maintain both a “primary consciousness” and respond in writing to whispered questions in a practice Janet dubbed “automatic writing” (Strom 168). Where psychoanalysis viewed this dual attention as a pathological symptom of disassociation, however, Breton, Soupault, and others in their stead found in automatism a pathway toward fruitfully extracting novel poetic inspiration from the subconscious. 101

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Automatism’s appeal to a “voice” beyond one’s conscious control also invoked séance practices central to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century spiritualism—again, a reference Breton acknowledged, albeit with the sincerest reservations. During séances, mediums in contact with spirits would enter a trance state, claim to speak the spirit’s voice, write, or draw to communicate with the living. While Breton castigated mediums’ claims to interacting with the deceased as a “pathetic joke,” their techniques of “automatic writing” and “automatic drawing” generated with an unknowing (“as if anaesthetized”) hand during the trance state appealed to him as evidence of a subconscious “voice” (“Automatic” 24). Mediums, he offered, were under a delusion that they were in contact with persons outside themselves; these were not cases of following outside voices but inner ones. The early Surrealists’ enthusiasm for automatism foregrounded the written and spoken word. Like a verbal collage, automatism encouraged the joining of disparate realities, heeding the poet Pierre Reverdy’s 1918 instructions that the more distant two realities are from one another, the more poetic and emotionally powerful their union. During the époque des sommeils (period of sleeps), the poet Robert Desnos displayed a particular aptitude for writing, speaking, and drawing in a state of quasi-slumber. I underscore drawing here, as the loose-line drawings Desnos produced during this time—similar in character to certain spiritualist sketches Breton heralded by the Swiss medium Hélène Smith—portended the group’s later attention to the emotive power of automatic drawing as a complement to automatic writing. In effect, the practices of automatic writing and automatic drawing are not dissimilar, with both finding roots in spiritualist practices: “Mediums,” Breton wrote in 1933, “or at least those with outstanding gifts, operate by setting down letters or lines in an entirely mechanical fashion; they have absolutely no idea what they are writing or drawing” (“Automatic” 20). Desnos was a case in point, all the more so because he was untrained as an artist—as was Breton when he conceived one night of the phrase and image of a “man cut in two by a window”: “With a pencil and white sheet of paper to hand, I could easily trace their outlines” (Manifestoes 21). The first professional artist within the Paris group to make a determined attempt at automatic drawing was André Masson, who had begun experimenting with automatism in late 1923. Masson would begin his pen-and-ink compositions without a subject in mind, giving his work over to speed and intuition. He later delineated his practice: “(a) the first condition was to make a clean slate. The mind freed from all apparent ties. Entry into a state bordering on trance. (b) Surrender to the interior tumult. (c) Speed of writing” (Rubin and Lancher 107). As Masson’s instructions indicate, automatic drawing is essentially an intensified form of rapid doodling, albeit with the express aim of unyoking oneself from conscious control. It can be achieved in an altered state of consciousness, such as a hypnotic trance, or more simply by distracting oneself so that attention is divided (as in Janet’s studies). It requires no formal training in art or writing; the technique is “tempting and easy, within reach of everyone” (Breton, “Automatic” 27). It is perhaps due to this accessibility that automatism became a truly international artistic style, influencing American abstract expressionism, lyrical abstraction, Canadian automatisme, CoBrA, and other artistic groups and movements with both acknowledged and undervalued ties to Surrealism. Among the most popular examples of the Surrealists’ enthusiasm for automatism and chance is the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), a game that began as a writing exercise that soon translated to drawing and, in some cases, collage. Exquisite corpse is usually played by three or four players. A piece of paper is folded as many times as there are participants, and in the writing variant, which preceded its visual equivalent, each participant writes a part of a sentence (the game’s name derives from Jacques Prévert’s contribution, “The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine”). According to Simone Kahn, when the game was first played, “André [Breton] 102

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shouted with joy. . . . Even more so than with automatic writing, we were sure of getting an astonishing amalgam” (Kahn 18). A drawing game followed, by which a piece of paper again is folded, and each player draws a part of a figure and covers it up for the next player so that the final composition can be revealed at the end. The result is a fantastical conglomeration generated by multiple voices. Exquisite corpse drawings are usually finished when the paper is unfolded, though there are known instances of artists transforming the resulting figures or transplanting them into unusual settings. Similarly, some Surrealists consider automatic drawings finished in their initial phase of creation, in need of no further refinement, while others view automatism as a source of inspiration or as a starting point for consciously emphasizing recognizable elements—figures, animals, architecture, and so forth. In this way, modes of automatic painting and drawing differ from automatic writing, at least in principle, as Breton insisted that automatic writing should not be re-read or edited. By contrast, the Surrealists were amenable to fleshing out images derived from automatic processes.

Frottage One of Surrealism’s most important visual techniques, frottage, was pioneered by Ernst in the mid-1920s and is typically completed in two steps: the initial automatic discovery (made by chance) and its elaboration. Like collage, it is a familiar technique to many, though it is more likely to be associated with grade-school art projects than avant-garde exhibitions. Named for the French term for “rubbing,” it consists of laying a piece of paper down onto a textured surface and making a scrubbing over it with a pencil, crayon, or charcoal. Both Breton (“Automatic” 14) and Ernst (Ernst 120) acknowledged a precedent for frottage in Leonardo’s Trattato della pittura (1632), in which Leonardo advised his students to stare fixedly at spots on the wall to reveal figures and landscapes. It is likely that Ernst also was acquainted with Tinten-Klecks, interpretive inkblots that illustrated nineteenth-century German books of poetry, and perhaps inkblots’ subsequent use in psychological research (most famously in the later work of Hermann Rorschach, who began publishing on inkblots in 1921). For his part, Ernst pinpointed his discovery of frottage to August 10, 1925, when he found himself enthralled by a worn wooden floorboard in a coastal inn in western France. The floorboard recalled for him a false mahogany panel from his childhood bedroom in which he vividly remembered being able to discern phantasmal images in the faux-wood grain. Inspired, Ernst began rubbing the wooden floorboard and was struck by the hallucinatory figures that emerged. As he continued his frottage experiments, the shapes he uncovered began to coalesce; Ernst moved his paper, reshaping the artwork more consciously. This technique developed into a series of frottage works incorporating leaves, bark, and other materials that would constitute the portfolio Histoire naturelle (1926). Ernst heralded frottage as “the true equivalent of . . . automatic writing. The author is present at the birth of his work as an indifferent or passionate spectator and observes the phases of its development” (Ernst 121–122). Unlike even the most complex automatic drawings, however, as frottage compositions develop, they adopt an increasingly tight composition that more closely resembles collage than uncontrolled automatism. The congruity between collage and frottage was not lost on Ernst, who wrote that “the similarity of the two [frottage and collage] is such that I can, without changing many words, use the terms employed earlier for the one, to relate how I made the discovery of the other” (Ernst 128). The dual process of frottage—creation and elaboration—provides a useful model for several of the creative means Surrealists employed for generating automatic images. While a number 103

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of sources, both popular and academic, offer overviews of Surrealist techniques, I am especially indebted here to Alastair Brotchie and Mel Gooding’s A Book of Surrealist Games (1995), which describes several visual as well as verbal games that generate the intense, unpredictable results the Surrealists avidly sought. This list does not claim to be exhaustive but provides a sense of automatism’s prevalence and proliferation, as well as the ingenuity of its Surrealist practitioners: Coulage, based on the French “couler” (to flow), can refer to either 1) a technique invented in 1939 by Gordon Onslow Ford, in which the artist poured enamel paint directly onto his canvas and moved it around to create strange forms, or 2) a form of automatic sculpture made by pouring molten material (e.g., lead, wax, chocolate) into cold water. As the material cools, it adopts various biomorphic forms. Decalcomania. The term “decalcomania” originated with transfer printing techniques in the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century. In Surrealism, it refers to spreading thick paint or ink onto a paper or canvas and then pressing a sheet of paper or glass against it, which is then lifted to reveal bubbles and designs. Alternatively, and just as effectively, a paper or canvas can be pressed against the ink and the design transferred to that surface. As with other automatic methods, this can be considered a finished artwork itself or fleshed out to reveal forms that arise spontaneously with the creation of the image. Decalcomania was introduced to Surrealism by the painter Óscar Domínguez and first published in Minotaure (1936), where the images were compared to a window “onto the most beautiful landscapes in the world and elsewhere” (Breton, “Concerning decalcomania” 129). The technique was quickly taken up by many others, including Ernst, Takiguchi Shūzō, Remedios Varo, and the Dutch poet Gertrude Pape. Éclaboussure. Literally, in French, a “splash” or “splatter,” in this process, a solvent is freely sprayed across the surface of a painted work, generating an automatic image when it is lifted up. Écrémage is a form of “marbling” associated with English Surrealist Conroy Maddox. It begins by drawing an image into an oily liquid with a water-based medium (or vice versa). A sheet of paper is then placed upon or across this surface, and the image is “creamed off” the top. The method is somewhat similar to another technique, parsemage (see below). Entopic graphomania. In this automatic method developed by Romanian Surrealists, the artist begins by drawing a random collection of dots on a blank page. Lines are drawn connecting these dots. The lines may be curved or straight, though in most examples, such as those illustrating Dolfi Trost’s Vision dans le Cristal, Oniromancie obsessionelle (Et neuf graphomanies entoptiques (1945), they are curved. Froissage. A straightforward and easy technique, in froissage a sheet of paper is crumpled up, then smoothed out again. When the paper is soaked in colored ink, the creases take up the ink and create an effect resembling veins. Fumage was introduced to Surrealism in 1936 by the Austrian artist Wolfgang Paalen. In fumage, automatic designs are made onto a paper or canvas using the smoke of a candle or oil lamp. Paalen’s fumage works influenced American abstract expressionists, including Robert Motherwell, and can be compared fruitfully to Yves Klein’s 1961 series of “fire paintings” produced with the aid of a flamethrower. Grattage. Ernst discovered a new application of the frottage technique in 1927, which he dubbed grattage (“scraping”). He set his canvas over textured materials, as in frottage, the difference being that the canvas was already painted, left to dry, and then thickly repainted. While the top layers were still wet, Ernst scraped the canvas with a flat instrument, such as a palette knife or spatula, to reveal the textures and color beneath. In his 104

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grattage painting Forest and Dove (1927), for example, Ernst’s scraping over the backbone of a fish inspired a dark forest closing in on caged bird. Later in the 1930s, Esteban Francés employed a somewhat-similar method by which he applied paints to a wooden board and then scraped at it with a razor. Heatage. Named by the American artist David Hare in the 1930s, “heatage” involves heating an unfixed photographic negative from below, causing the emulsion to ripple and distort. It is only when the image is developed that the extent of the damage becomes wholly apparent. The procedure was also practiced in the 1930s by Raoul Ubac, who created around seventeen such works under the name brûlage (burning) between 1939 and 1940 (Bouqueret 275). Oscillation. Ernst developed the “oscillation technique” around 1942 while in exile in the United States. A forerunner of abstract expressionist styles, “oscillation” consisted of attaching a long cord to an empty tin can, drilling a small hold in the can, and filling it with diluted paint. Ernst then swung the can over a flat-lying canvas to create a rhythmic design. Parsemage. Invented by British Occult artist Ithell Colquhoun, in this charcoal dust or chalk dust is lightly sprinkled on the surface of water so it floats. Then a piece of stiff paper (preferably watercolor paper) or cardboard is submerged in the water, and the charcoal, which adheres to both sides of the paper, is “skimmed” off. Sand painting. Developed by André Masson following his experiments with automatic drawing, “sand painting” consists of hastily pouring glue on a flat, unprimed canvas, followed by handfuls of sand. Different-colored sands create various visual effects. The sand can be left to dry where it lands or manipulated to generate shapes and figures. Sifflage (or soufflage). Named by Max Ernst’s son, Jimmy, this is the technique of blowing thin liquid paint or ink with a straw to reveal an image. According to Breton, Óscar Domínguez also blew on his decalcomania works to achieve his desired effects (Breton, “The Most Recent Tendencies” 146). Some of the most unusual automatic methods were practiced by Salvador Dalí in the 1950s, mostly for public attention. Ever theatrical, Dalí’s experiments included outfitting a live sea urchin with a finely inked brush so that, when he injected it with adrenaline, its movements produced “automatic” drawings (Descharnes 94). Around the same time, he debuted another unique method, bulletism, which consisted of shooting a blank support with a gun loaded with nails or paint-filled capsules and using the resulting marks to generate imagery. Dalí created a number of his 1950s and 1960s graphic projects in this manner, including his illustrations of Don Quichotte (1957), for which he employed a fifteenth-century French arquebus loaded with lithographic paint. These stunts rarely failed to attract the public’s imagination and the Surrealists’ ire. While these examples nod to automatic methods, Dalí claimed early in the 1930s to have provided Surrealism with an alternative technique that, he said, trumped automatism, one that Breton himself praised as “capable of being applied equally to painting, poetry, the cinema, the construction of typical surrealist objects, fashion, sculpture, the history of art, and even, if necessary, all manner of exegesis” (“What Is surrealism?”): the paranoiac-critical method.

Critical Paranoia Paranoia is widely understood today as an irrational feeling of persecution and perceived threats, though historically the word, derived from the Greek meaning “other mind,” denoted 105

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Figure 11.2 Salvador Dalí presents “bulletism” on an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, New York, New York, January 29, 1961. Source: Photo by CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images.

any mental illness that prominently featured delusions. Building upon psychological research into paranoia by Paul Sérieux and Jospeh Capras, Dalí extensively theorized paranoia’s value to Surrealism, beginning in 1930, when he published his essay “L’Âne pourri” (The Rotten Donkey). According to Dalí, paranoia’s prevailing feature, distinguishing it from hallucinatory experiences, was its focus on interpretation and systemization: where hallucinations occur when one sees or hear things others do not, the paranoiac experiences what others share but interprets them differently, engendering a self-perpetuating system of “irrational knowledge.” Through paranoiac “vision,” one can look at an object and “see” an entirely different configuration without altering the initial image; the result was a multiple image—one that anyone could see once it was pointed out by the paranoiac observer. This double-image, Dalí mused, 106

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could just as readily be a triple- or quadruple-image, depending on the individual’s “paranoiac function” (Dalí, “The Rotting Donkey” 224). One of Dalí’s most elaborate multiple-image paintings, The Endless Enigma (1939), contains six different subjects hidden in one seamless configuration. When Dalí introduced paranoia to the arsenal of Surrealist techniques, he presented it as a complement to automatism (“The Rotting Donkey” 223). By 1935, however, the artist had relegated “passive” automatism to Surrealism’s “first period,” the methods of which were now “in liquidation” (Dalí, “Conquest” 266). The Surrealists responded that critical paranoia was too predetermined, that guiding the viewer through specific visions stunted further interpretation. The coup de grâce came with Breton’s May 1939 essay, “Des tendances les plus récentes de la peintre surréaliste” (The Most Recent Tendencies in Surrealist Painting), in which Breton sought to reorient Surrealist visuals back to automatist practices and bar Dalí from further group activity. Dismissing Dalí’s latest double-images as mere “entertainments on the level of crossword puzzles,” Breton foregrounded artists grounded in explicitly automatic practices, including Paalen, Domínguez, Francés, and new recruits such as Matta and Gordon Onslow Ford (Breton, “The Most Recent” 147). Both Dalí and Breton underscored a chasm between critical paranoia and automatism, but this framing is too simple: critical paranoia’s interpretative element does not differ significantly from automatism’s second phase of “elaboration”—something both Breton and Ernst acknowledged (“Concerning Decalcomania” 129; Ernst 122). Others have carefully detailed the relationship between automatism and paranoia (and the highly fraught rapport between Dalí and Paris group in the 1930s) (Stubbs 17). In the context of surveying Surrealist techniques, I would add only that focusing on these differences, while real, may cloud what these methods shared in terms of generating astonishing visuals. Indeed, given the automatist slant of “The Most Recent Tendencies in Surrealist Painting,” it is perhaps telling that Breton’s attack on Dalí was immediately followed with praise for another figurative painter, Yves Tanguy. Tanguy had entered the Surrealist orbit in 1924 with paintings inspired by de Chirico, and when Breton described Tanguy’s merits in 1939, he compared his paintings directly to de Chirico’s “arcades, towers, chimney-stacks, mannequins and biscuits” (“The Most Recent” 147). Like de Chirico’s painting, there is little overt mark of automatism in Tanguy’s canvases, yet when Gordon Onslow Ford was invited to write for Tanguy’s retrospective at the Pompidou Center in 1982, he described Tanguy’s paintings as “closer to the spirt of automatism than any that had appeared before” (Onslow Ford 4). What was at stake, for Breton and later Onslow Ford, was again the surprising element of Tanguy’s images: “Tanguy never drew on the canvas before starting to paint except for the short period of les coulees and in some of his last paintings. He painted directly on the canvas. In this way, everything that appeared was a surprise” (Onslow Ford 15). Dalí’s Surrealist paintings were often sketched and meticulously crafted, but their end point was still, according to the artist, a feeling of unforeseen perturbation: “The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand the meaning of my paintings does not indicate that these paintings have no meaning. . . . The images of concrete irrationality thus are authentically unknown images” (Dalí, “Conquest” 263). It may seem reductive to group such an extensive array of artistic practices under the straightforward (Maldororean?) umbrella of surprise, yet from cameraless photographic rayographs to found objects, it is difficult to locate an example in Surrealism’s vast visual production that does not ultimately celebrate the unforeseen, “convulsive” image, arguably even beyond the work’s claims to subconscious authenticity (Suzuki 314). This is not to say that materializing the “never seen” (Breton, Manifestoes 21) is, in any sense, the sole objective of the Surrealist movement as a whole, but equally, art has never been the emphasis in Surrealism (Maddox 11). What I have 107

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outlined here are but a few of the visual techniques that support the movement’s far-reaching exaltation of the imagination, its reimagining of life.

Works Cited Adamowicz, Elza. “Collage.” Surrealism, edited by Natalya Lusty. Cambridge University Press, 2021. Ades, Dawn. Photomontage. Thames and Hudson, 2021. Bouqueret, Christian. Raoul Ubac. Photographie. Éditions Le Scheer, 2000. Breton, André. “The Automatic Message” (1933). Translated by Antony Melville. Atlas Press, 1997. ———. “Concerning Decalcomania without Preconceived Object (Decalcomania of Desire)” (1936). Surrealism and Painting. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2002, pp. 128–129. ———. Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Paragon House, 1993. ———. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. University of Michigan Press, 2010. ———. “The Most Recent Tendencies in Surrealist Painting” (1939). Surrealism and Painting. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2002, pp. 145–150. ———. “What Is Surrealism?” (1934). Lecture delivered in Brussels, Belgium, 1 June 1934. Brotchie, Alastair, and Mel Gooding. A Book of Surrealist Games. Shambhala Redstone Editions, 1995. Conte, Richard, and Jean Lancri. René Passeron: Inimages. Klicksieck Éditions, 2008. Dalí, Salvador. “Conquest of the Irrational” (1935). The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí. Edited by Haim Finkelstein, 1998, pp. 262–272. ———. ‘The Rotting Donkey’ (1930). The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí. Edited by Haim Finkelstein, 1998, pp. 223–226. Descharnes, Robert, and Nicolas Descharnes. Dalí: The Hard and the Soft, Sculptures and Objects. Eccart, 2004. Ernst, Max. “Beyond Painting” (1936). Surrealists on Art. Edited by Lucy R. Lippard. Prentice-Hall, 1970. Fijalkowski, Krzysztof. “Cubomania: Gherasim Luca and Non-Oedipal Collage.” Dada/Surrealism, no. 20, 2015. Finkelstein, Haim. “Dalí’s Paranoia-Criticism or The Exercise of Freedom.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 21. February 1975, pp. 59–71. Kadri, Raihan, Michael Richardson, and Krzysztof Fijalkowski. “Objective Chance.” Surrealism: Key Concepts, edited by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson. Routledge, 2016. Kahn, Simone. “The Exquisite Corpse.” Translated by Franklin Rosemont. Surrealist Women, edited by Penelope Rosemont, University of Texas Press, 1998. Maddox, Conroy. “Only Chaos Within One Gives Birth to a Dancing Star.” Surrealism, edited by Silvano Levy, New York University Press, 1997. Naville, Pierre. “Beaux-Arts.” La Révolution Surréaliste, vol. 3, April 1925. Onslow Ford, Gordon. Yves Tanguy and Automatism. Bishop Pine Press, 1983. Rubin, William, and Carolyn Lanchner. André Masson. The Museum of Modern Art, 1976. Strom, Kirsten. “Automatism.” The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, vol. I, edited by Dawn Ades, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Steven Harris, Michael Richardson, and Georges Sebbag, Bloomsbury, 2019. Stubbs, Jeremy. “The Dalí-Breton Honeymoon: Hallucination, Interpretation, High and Low Ecstasies.” Persistence & Memory: New Critical Perspectives on Dalí at the Centennial. Edited by Hank Hine, William Jeffett, and Kelly Reynolds, Bompiani, 2004. Susik, Abigail. “Chance and Automatism: Genealogies of the Dissociative in Dada and Surrealism.” A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, edited by David Hopkins, Wiley Blackwell, 2016. Suzuki, Masao. “The Unconscious.” The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, vol. I, edited by Dawn Ades, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Steven Harris, Michael Richardson, and Georges Sebbag, Bloomsbury, 2019.

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12 BUÑUEL AND DALÍ, UN CHIEN ANDALOU Elza Adamowicz

Producing the Film “Un Chien andalou was born of the encounter between my dreams and Dalí’s” (Buñuel 92). At the anecdotal—and largely mythical—origin of the filmscript were two dream images: Luis Buñuel’s image of a cloud passing across the moon like a razor slicing through an eye and Salvador Dalí’s dream of ants swarming out of a hole in a hand. The script was written in six days in early 1929 in Dalí’s home in Figueras. Adopting the Surrealist “recipe” for writing an automatic text, they ruled that “[n]o idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why” (Buñuel 104).1 Buñuel’s mother provided the funding for its production, allowing Buñuel to hire professional actors Pierre Batcheff and Simone Mareuil for the main roles. He himself appeared as the man with the razor in the opening sequence, while Dalí featured as one of the Marist priests in the donkeysand-piano episode; extras were rounded up from a local café. The cameraman was Albert Duverger. The film was shot in two weeks at the Paris Billancourt film studios, and in Le Havre for the last sequence. There is some confusion about the actual contribution of each of the filmmakers to the film’s production: Buñuel was probably responsible for most of the shooting and the meticulous montage, while Dalí’s principal contribution appears to have been preparing the donkeys-and-pianos sequence, emphasizing its gory putrefaction (Secret Life 213). The film, just over 16 minutes long, was composed of 300 shots (an average of three seconds a shot), with few special effects. The film was first shown at a private screening on 6 June 1929 at the left-bank Studio des Ursulines. Buñuel was behind the screen with a gramophone (alternating tangos and Wagner), his pockets full of stones in the event of a hostile reception. It had several screenings in July in the Vicomte de Noailles’s private cinema, attended by Paris intellectuals and aristocrats, and a successful public run from September at Studio 28, where it was shown in a double bill with a Donald Crisp thriller, then with Harold Lloyd and Mack Sennett comedies.

Initial Reception “I don’t want the film to please you but to offend you. I would be sorry if you enjoyed it.” These were the words of Buñuel in his introduction to the first Madrid screening of Un Chien andalou DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-14

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Figure 12.1  Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien andalou film still, 1929.

(An Andalusian Dog) in 1929 (Aranda 64). According to its two filmmakers, the aim of the film was to shock and provoke its audience, but was it the succès de scandale Dalí claimed it was (“L’Ane” 212)? Contemporary accounts suggest that, following its initial screenings, reactions ranged from the enthusiastic to the hostile. Critics noted the violence of the imagery: for Spanish writer Eugenio Montes, the film’s “[b]arbarous, elementary beauty, the moon and the earth of the desert,” was seen as a reflection of Spanish culture, while for André Delons: “We have the impression we are witnessing . . . truth being skinned alive” (Delons 22). Raymond Aron, on the other hand, dismissed it as “witticism and harmless onanism” (Aron 1929), while Carl Jung saw it as “a fine example of dementia praecox” (Buñuel 229). For Cyril Connelly, writing in 1934, the film produced “a tremendous feeling of excitement and liberation.” He describes how the audience reacted with boos and threw projectiles at the screen, while a woman shouted, “Salopes, salopes, salopes (bitches)” (Baxter 93). He appears to be confusing the screening of Un Chien andalou with Buñuel and Dalí’s second collaboration, L’Age d’or (The Golden Age), however. In fact, the notoriety of Un Chien andalou as a scandalous film was somewhat increased in the wake of the stormy reception at the first showing of L’Age d’or the following year. The Surrealists loved scandal, hence immediately supported the film, seeing in the silent cinema a new revolutionary language capable of provoking social revolt and sexual liberation. For Surrealist Jacques Brunius, for example, the logic of the narrative matched the structure of dreams, and the free association of images was the pure product of automatism. He interpreted the opening sequence as an attack on bourgeois aesthetics: “In the first minute of the film with a slash of his razor Buñuel rams back into their sockets the shining eyes of seekers of pretty shots, aesthetes, those easily offended by what they see” (Brunius 230–231). Following the film’s screening, Dalí and Buñuel were immediately integrated into the Surrealist group. The filmscript was published in the 1929 issue of The Surrealist Revolution with a short preface by 110

Buñuel and Dalí, Un Chien andalou

Buñuel expressing his unconditional allegiance to Surrealism, identifying with the movement by attacking those who found the film “poetic” and “beautiful.” When describing the film on the contrary as “a desperate, passionate call to murder” (Buñuel 34), he was echoing Breton’s claim that the simplest Surrealist act is to go down into the street and shoot at random in the crowd. The same issue included a photomontage by René Magritte featuring photobooth portraits of the Surrealist group, which now included Dalí and Buñuel. Two paintings by Dalí were reproduced (The Accommodations of Desire and Illuminated Pleasures, both from 1929) in the issue, from his exhibition at the Goemans Gallery.2 In 1931 Max Ernst’s At the Gathering of Friends, a photomontage of the Surrealist group, features Buñuel standing in front of a display of knives, while a giant eye is featured on the right. The collaboration lasted only until 1932, when Buñuel left the Surrealist movement while continuing to explore Surrealist principles of dreams and the unconscious in his films. Dalí, for his part, was excluded in 1936 for his support of Franco in the Spanish Civil War against the Republican cause defended by the Surrealists and for his overeager commercialisation of his art, which earned him the nickname Avida Dollars.

A Surrealist Film? “Un Chien andalou would not exist if Surrealism did not exist,” Buñuel declared in his preface to the film. Given that the aim of Surrealism was not to create a new literary or artistic movement but to disrupt the social order, they greeted Un Chien andalou as a revolutionary film, an attack on oppressive bourgeois institutions—politics, marriage, religion, art, morality. It was a transgressive film, hence liberatory, in keeping with Surrealism’s radical aim, to “transform the world” (with Marx) and “change life” (with Rimbaud). Its alleged automatism, the free association of images and narrative incoherence, its violent actions and dreamlike elements, its radical montage techniques—these features cast the film in an overtly Surrealist mould. This was a deliberate strategy on the part of Dalí and Buñuel, however, since the film was designed to open the door of Surrealism. By 1929 there was no single model for Surrealist film, just as there was no single pictorial style, yet the film was appropriated as a model of, and for, Surrealism. The self-conscious mechanistic application of Surrealist automatic techniques combined with the playful pastiche of 1920s films suggest that the film was actually conceived in a Dada spirit of parody and playfulness as much as a Surrealist exploration of the unconscious, in a mix of spontaneity and lucidity materialising Dalí’s “paranoia-critical method.”

Romantic Melodrama So what is the film “about”? Its elements are familiar to spectators of silent cinema’s romantic drama: a moonlit night, male seduction, female resistance, murder, separation, and death. Indeed, for Dalí the poetic nature of film lies precisely in these familiar images of popular melodrama. The melodramatic is further characterised by a rhetoric of excess (the violence of the initial crime, the hero’s herculean burden of pianos, donkeys, melons, corks, and priests, the theatricality of the seduction scene), exaggerated gestures (the script refers to the main protagonist “looking like a villain in a melodrama”), and heightened emotions (terror, lust). However, whereas classic melodrama unfolds in a coherent fashion, from the suspense of enigma to the closure of solution, this is not the case for Un Chien andalou, where fragments and non sequiturs obstruct development. The narrative is constantly undermined. It has two beginnings (the eye-slitting scene and the hero cyclist in frills and apron), several (unexplained) digressions deflecting narrative momentum, and three (inconclusive) endings. The initial crime is not solved, the female victim survives her 111

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violent disfigurement, both eyes appearing miraculously intact in the next sequence, while the male protagonist or his double dies and resurrects. The film can be read as composed of short independent sequences (a gory crime, the androgyne’s suicide, the murder of the double) in the manner of a montage of sensationalist news items. Consequently, it is unsurprising that the film should have become widely known as a succession of gags or shock shots, an anthology of Surrealist clips: razor-and-eye, ants-in-hand, rotting-donkeys-on-pianos, books-into-guns—a reading triggered by Buñuel’s and Dalí’s own accounts of the mythical origin of the film in two striking dream images. These narrative disruptions are complemented by temporal inconsistencies introduced by the intertitles. The first title (“Once upon a time”) situates the story in the timelessness of fairy tales, yet it is followed by a precise temporal indication (“Eight years later”), which is contradicted by the action: the young woman who lost an eye in the opening sequence now has two undamaged eyes. Later, in an apparent flashback (“Sixteen years earlier”), the action is continued from the previous sequence, while the last intertitle (“In the spring”) introduces images of disintegration and death instead of the renewal promised by the spring cliché of the title. As for the soundtrack, alternating between the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and two Argentinian tangos, it both matches and contradicts the narrative. The Liebestod accompanies the death of the woman in the street and that of the double, while the light-hearted tango accompanies and contradicts the violence of the eye-slitting scene and the last scene of the couple half-buried in the sand.

Reading the Film How do we “make sense” of the film? Over the near-century of its screening, the film has been the object of a vast critical literature that attempts to unravel its apparent inconsistencies. The opening sequence, for instance, has been variously read as rape, sexual intercourse, castration, an allegory of childbirth, the staging of the dissolution of the self, a metaphor of inner vision, a mise en abyme of the cinematic act. However, such attempts at rationalising the film often threaten to reduce it to “crude sub-Freudian and sub-Marxist socio-erotic allegory” (Drummond 78). Critical discourse has nevertheless constantly rewritten—and therefore transformed—the film in the shifting cultural and ideological contexts within which it has been viewed and reviewed. With the backing of the filmmakers’ own position, the film has been read in terms of Surrealism in an exploration of its themes of desire, revolt, violence, dream (Matthews 1971), or via a subjective poetics of effect that mimics the film’s automatism (Desnos 1929) or collage (Péret). Several critics have interpreted the film in the light of psychoanalysis, an approach encouraged by Buñuel himself but scathingly rejected by Dalí. This usually takes the form of an analysis of the psychosexual development of the hero, a tale of the passage from infancy to maturity, of frustrated desire, or as a young man’s struggles with his homosexual desires (Piazza); or of a study of the structural similarities between the film and dream (Williams, see below). Elsewhere, structuralist and semiotic analysis, informed by the work of film theorist Christian Metz and Lacanian theory, focuses on detailed analysis of particular sequences (Oswald). With the development of gender studies, Un Chien andalou has been read as a study in the crisis in masculinity (Evans; Powrie). Yet the film resists any single totalizing reading and remains elusive, the instability of its images both inviting and resisting interpretation.

Film and Dream In his “Notes on the Making of Un Chien andalou,” Buñuel states that the film “does not attempt to recount a dream, although it profits by a mechanism analogous to that of dreams” 112

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(Mellen 151). The visual shocks and non sequiturs, the absence of rational coherence, the free associations do more than destabilise conventional storytelling codes; they point to an alternative distinctive temporality—immediate, elliptical—recalling the structure of dreams. As Bunuel himself declared: It doesn’t make sense to refer to a lack of logical links in Un Chien andalou. . . . It’s simply a Surrealist film in which images, sequences, follow on from each other according to a logical order, whose expression depends on the unconscious, which has naturally got its own order. (Aub 52) Such a perspective clearly deals less with psychological processes or dream content than with the structures of the unconscious or the dream work, with its processes of condensation and displacement, and this approach is in keeping with contemporary critical film discourse linking film techniques and dream mechanisms. The dreamlike is suggested in close-ups (the giant moth), dissolves (breasts to buttocks), nondiegetic crosscuts (the male protagonist double’s fall from bedroom to park, Mareuil stepping from apartment to seashore). Indeed, Buñuel once even suggested that psychoanalysis might offer the only possible method of interpretation. The most detailed psychoanalytical analysis of the opening scene is that of Linda Williams (1981) developed by Paul Sandro (1987), drawing on the work of Freud (the return of the repressed), Jakobson (metaphor and metonymy), and Lacan (the analogy between rhetorical figures and process of condensation and displacement). In this approach, the first sequence is interpreted as a traumatic event, suggesting birth, rape, castration, dismemberment. Through the process of the dream work, the traumatic event of the eye-slitting scene is repressed (“Eight years later,” the woman has recovered two undamaged eyes) but is referred to indirectly. According to Freudian analysis, the unconscious expresses itself in dreams but tries to cover this expression through the work of censorship, hence the indirect allusions to the initial traumatic memory through processes of displacement and condensation, which include images of the dismembered body (the donkeys’ heads, the severed hand), dissolution of the body (ants emerging from the hand, the erasure of the mouth), sexual in/differentiation (the cyclist in frills, the phallic tongue). Similarly, formal allusions include round shapes recalling the female protagonist’s eye (iris opening and closing shots, the sea urchin, the street crowd surrounding the severed hand), diagonals recalling the torturer’s tie (the box, the cyclist’s fall). Unlike the allegorical readings mentioned earlier, a psychoanalytical interpretation takes into account the inconsistencies or breaks in the narrative, as well as the ambivalence of the images. However, there is a danger of applying a psychoanalytical framework to the film uncritically, since Buñuel and Dalí were au fait with psychoanalytical processes and could be seen to be indulging in a playful juggling with common Freudian symbols, such as the severed hand, the hole on the hand, the slit eye, body fragments. The film can thus also be read as parodic of the psychoanalytical situation.

The Film’s Materiality The aforementioned discussion suggests that the film both invites and resists symbolic interpretations. Indeed, its very materiality resists symbolisation or sublimation. Dalí was the first to refer to the film’s materiality in his account of the preparation of the putrefying donkeys (Life 68). Viscerality is at the core of dissident Surrealist Georges Bataille’s commentary on the film, published in an article titled “Oeil” (Eye) in the journal Documents (1929–30). Developing the 113

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concept of “base materialism,” Bataille challenges the primacy of vision, the Cartesian tradition of ocularcentrism, in a desublimatory movement in favour of the body as informe or formless, lacking fixed boundaries, as exemplified in the mutilation of the eye, a recurrent theme in Bataille’s texts, notably in L’Histoire de l’oeil (The Story of the Eye). In 1931, Dalí took up the idea of putrefaction in his article “L’Ane pourri” (Putrefying Donkey), published in Surrealism in the Service of Revolution, arguing that the rotting donkey is a real image, “truly and horribly rotting and covered with thousands of flies and ants.”3

Automatism or Intertextuality? Buñuel and Dalí claimed that they wrote the script following the Surrealist model of automatism—Surrealism’s own myth of the blank sheet of paper or canvas as a starting point for the work—rejecting all conscious associations, as if the script were produced in a vacuum, unmediated through cultural references. Yet by the end of the 1920s, the Surrealists acknowledged that so-called “pure” automatism was indeed a myth and that texts and images were produced within a dense network of cultural allusions, memories, and fantasies. In other words, automatism itself was intertextual. The focus is therefore less on the alleged immediacy of the filmscript than on the conscious or semiconscious adoption of subjective associations, collective Surrealist images, filmic quotations, pastiches, and parodies. Several of the most striking images in the film had already featured in earlier works by Buñuel, Dalí, or the Surrealists. For example, the putrefying donkey was a recurrent image in Dalí’s paintings, including Senecitas (1926) and Blood Is Sweeter than Honey (1927). The image of the violated eye was present in Buñuel’s poems and in Dalí’s own texts before 1929, as well as in a number of Surrealist works. Among these, Max Ernst’s cover collage for Repetitions (1922), representing an eye with a piece of string threaded through it held by a disembodied hand, recalls the hand and eye in the opening sequence of the film. Spanish culture is referenced in the link between sexuality and death when the hero caresses Mareuil’s breasts, his face turning into a death mask (Buñuel 15).

Intertexts Filmic intertexts abound in the film, above all, largely no doubt because both filmmakers had previous experience in film production, Dalí in film criticism, and Buñuel as assistant to film directors, including Jean Epstein. Firstly, the film can be linked to popular entertainment of the prewar years, in particular as a pastiche of the early cinema of attractions, developed from vaudeville theatre and fairground spectacle, especially in the films of Georges Méliès, magician turned film director (see Ezra). Buñuel’s cameo role in the first sequence as the man wielding a razor echoes Méliès’s role as magician in his own films. Further links include the theatrical effect of frontal framing, the build-up of suspense (knife-sharpening, moon-slicing, eye-slitting), the apparent compliance of the female victim-accomplice. Sawn in half, dismembered, or conjured away, the woman always reappears whole in the last tableau. Substitution tricks, such as breasts to buttocks, armpit hair to sea urchin, or insect to monster, also characterise fairground entertainment and the cinema of attractions. Further fairground references include the play on gender (see in the following) and waxwork displays with their often-gory displays of diseases and operations: the waxwork of a cataract operation where two disembodied hands hold open the eye of a seemingly compliant woman which the surgeon’s scalpel is about to pierce may well have been an influence, given also the two filmmakers’ frequent visits to the fairground (see Adamowicz 79). Beyond the cinema of attractions, the film can also be read as a pastiche of the melodramatic film genre, with its similarity with dream structures, its scattered elements of the gothic tale 114

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(moonlit night, gory crime, severed hand, monstrous insect, buried alive) or romantic drama (seduction, chase, resistance). The actor Pierre Batcheff, “the French James Dean of the 1920s” (Drummond 78), plays a parody of his role in The Siren of the Tropics (Buñuel had worked on the production of the earlier film). A further intertext is the 1920s popular American cinema, in particular the films of Buster Keaton. The donkeys-and-piano sequence quotes from One Week (1920), where a piano at the end of a long rope has to be dragged into Keaton’s house. In The Paleface (1922), a shot of Keaton kissing a girl is followed by the intertitle “Two years later,” then the same Keaton kissing the same girl, a sequence parodied in Un Chien andalou, where the intertitle “Sixteen years earlier” is followed by the same actors and action. Such intertextual references reflect the filmmakers’ preference for popular American comedy over European avant-garde cinema, reflecting Dalí’s claim that the film “ruined in a single evening ten years of pseudo-intellectual, post-war avant-gardism” (Dalí, Life 212). Our last intertextual link is French film director Louis Feuillade’s popular crime series Fantðmas (1913–14), based on the best-selling feuilletons or serial novels written by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. Fantômas was greatly admired by the Surrealists as “emperor of crime” and a model of revolt, embodying the triumph of anarchy over social order: his crimes, unmotivated, go unpunished, indeed, as in Un Chien andalou, there is very little concern with solving the mystery of a crime. Moreover, as the “man of a thousand faces,” he precedes the shifting identities of the male protagonist of Un Chien andalou.

Play on Gender Roles The play on gender roles in funfair’s optical tricks, such as the bearded lady or the intersex person, is echoed in the film, reflecting less a nostalgic or playful turn to the past than an engagement in contemporary debates on sexuality and gender. Through the writings of psychologists and jurists such as Otto Weininger, Sigmund Freud, or Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the 1920s were a period in which traditional notions of a stable and unified ego and related fixed definitions of femininity and masculinity were directly challenged. The Surrealists themselves rejected the concept of an essentialist identity in favour of the self as mobile, continually refashioned by desire and anxiety. Such instability is displayed in the male protagonists’ multiple identities (as magician, cyclist, seducer, or double), his frustrated sexual advances (hindered by the burden of pianos, melons, priests, and donkeys) and bodily disintegration (ants emerging from a hole in his hand, his mouth erased), the shifts between passive and desperate, child and adult, male and female. The play on gender is further extended in the death-head moth sequence. “This hilarious sequence compresses an extraordinary range of sexual signifiers into a dance between genders,” writers Dawn Ades (78). Body parts disappear or migrate (Batcheff acquires Mareuil’s armpit hair). In reaction, Mareuil defiantly applies lipstick, asserting her femininity, while sporting a phallic tongue. She abandons her companion—defaced and feminised—to join another man on the beach. While the scene, played out in a comic mode, refers to fairground entertainment—with the soundtrack of a tango to accompany a choreography of shots and reverse shots which structure the sequence—it is also deeply disturbing, undermining notions of fixed identity.

Un Chien andalou Today In an early review of Un Chien andalou, filmmaker Jean Vigo warned: “Cave canem. Beware of the dog, it bites.” The film continues to attract and alienate, to provoke and shock audiences. As an icon of film history, it has influenced numerous filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, 115

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David Lynch, Jan Švankmajer, Nelly Kaplan, Alejandro Jodorovsky, or John Cassavetes; intertextual references to the film abound, including Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), or David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). It has echoes in advertising, punk culture, gore films, or American independent movies. But does this suggest that the film has lost its bite? When Breton admitted to Buñuel in 1955, “It’s sad, mon cher Luis . . . but it’s no longer possible to scandalíze anybody!” (Buñuel 114), he was referring to culture’s capacity to absorb into the mainstream what initially appears irretrievable. Hence, the outstanding question, Is it a home movie with amateur gags and disjunctions, Federico Garcia Lorca’s “tiny little shit of a film”? Or is it still the “desperate, passionate call to murder” that Buñuel claimed for it, Henry Miller’s “gob of spit in the face of art”? In short, one of the few art films (with L’Age d’or) that has changed the way we see and think about cinema?

Notes 1. The script was first published in La Revue du cinema, vol. 1, no. 5, 1929, pp. 3–16, and La Révolution surréaliste, no. 12, December 1929, pp. 34–37. 2. The catalogue preface was written by Breton, who evoked the paintings’ hallucinatory qualities and their link to the unconscious, thereby appropriating them for Surrealism. 3. In his own Bataillean reading of the film, Martin Jay emphasizes the literal dimension of the film, focusing on the visceral, material dimension of the eye-slitting sequence (Jay 259–260).

Works Cited Adamowicz, Elza. Un Chien andalou. I.B. Tauris, 2010. Aranda, Juan Francisco. Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography. Da Capo Press, 1975. Aron, Robert. “Films de révolte.” La Revue du cinéma, vol. 1, no. 5, 1929, pp. 41–45. Aub, Max. Luis Buñuel: Entretiens avec Max Aub. Belfond, 1991. Bataille, Georges. “L’Oeil.” Documents, vol. 1, no. 4, 1929. Baxter, John. Luis Buñuel: A Biography. Fourth Estate, 1994. Brunius, Jacques. “Un Chien andalou. Film par Louis (sic) Buñuel.” Cahiers d’art, vol. 4, no. 5, 1929, pp. 230–231. Buñuel, Luis. My Last Breath [1982]. Fontana Paperbacks, 1985. Dalí, Salvador. “L’Ane pourri.” Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 1, 1930, pp. 9–12. ———. The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí [1942]. Vision, 1968. Delons, André. “Un Chien andalou. Film de Buñuel.” Variétés, 15 July 1929. Desnos, Robert. “Un Chien andalou.” Le Merle, vol. 11, 28 June 1929. Drummond, Philip. “Textual Space in Un Chien andalou.” Screen, vol. 18, no. 3, 1977, pp. 55–119. Evans, Peter W. The Films of Luis Buñuel. Subjectivity and Desire. Clarendon Press, 1995. Ezra, Elizabeth. Georges Méliès. Manchester University Press, 2000 de. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. University of California Press, 1993. Mellen, Joan, editor. The World of Luis Buñuel: Essays in Criticism. Oxford University Press. Montes, Eugenio. “Un Chien andalou.” La Gaceta literaria, 15 June 1929. Oswald, Laura. “Figure/Discourse: Configurations of Desire in Un Chien andalou.” Semiotica, vol. 33, nos. 1–2, 1981, pp. 105–122. Péret, Benjamin. “L’œuvre cruelle et révolté de Luis Buñuel.” Arts, no. 374, 1952. Piazza, François. “Considérations psychanalytiques sur Le (sic) Chien andalou de Luis Buñuel et Salvador Dalí.” Psyche, nos. 27–28, 1949, pp. 147–156. Powrie, Phil. “Masculinity in the Shadow of the Slashed Eye. Surrealist Film Criticism at the Crossroads.” Screen, vol. 39, no. 2, 1998, pp. 153–163. Sandro, Paul. Diversions of Pleasure. Luis Buñuel and the Crises of Desire. Ohio State University Press, 1987. Vigo, Jean. “Un Chien andalou hurle.” Ciné-Club, no. 5, 1929. Williams, Linda. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. University of Illinois Press, 1981.

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PART II

Lessons from Paris

Tensions and Dissensions

13 “ANARCHY” . . . OR ANARCHISM? Dada in Paris and the Shifting Politics of Irreverence Theresa Papanikolas Early in 1919, the Zurich Dada review Dada 3 made its way to Paris and into the hands of André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault, poets and editors of the literary magazine Littérature, who were seeking novel pathways to creative freedom. On its pages was Tristan Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto 1918,” a fiery polemic that announced the aims—and expanded the reach—of the international Dada movement. Dada itself had originated in Zurich two years earlier, in February 1916, when a group of artists and writers—including the Romanians Tzara and Marcel Janco; the Germans Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Richter; the Alsatian Jean (Hans) Arp; and the Swiss Sophie Tauber-Arp—gathered in exile from the First World War and its mandatory conscription and joined forces to launch the nightclub/gallery Cabaret Voltaire. Almost nightly, this dedicated and international cohort of regulars created an open forum for unchecked artistic expression and an escape from the logic and rationalism that, in their view, drove the power structures responsible for the war. Ball summarized their goals when he wrote that the “sole purpose” of the Cabaret was “to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalities, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals” (n.p.). Tzara’s manifesto elevated this cosmopolitanism to wholesale antinationalism and propelled its jubilant iconoclasm into an angry call for revolution: Let each man proclaim: there is a great, negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the individual after the state of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of bandits, who rend one another and destroy the centuries. (81) Breton, Aragon, and Soupault were as appalled as Tzara was at society’s “madness” and therefore inspired by his revolutionary plea. All had been involuntarily mobilized in wartime and faced with strict censorship since the armistice, and while only vaguely aware of Dada’s artistic and social critique, they had been exploring parallel ideas in their literary gatherings and on the pages of Littérature. The three were seeking to absorb and transcend the poetic iconoclasm of their symbolist and neosymbolist antecedents: Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire; Tzara’s manifesto exemplified, for them, the use of literature to attack the DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-16

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very fabric of society. Not long after they read it, Tzara himself arrived in Paris to align himself with his French counterparts—Breton, Éluard, Soupualt, the painter Francis Picabia, and the writers Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Louis Aragon, and Paul Éluard—laying the groundwork for the Paris branch of the Dada movement. Through their poetry and prose, art, and well-placed gestures of rebellion, the Paris Dadaists sought to deconstruct the conformist mentality that celebrated the war and upheld bellicose nationalism, and they espoused complete individualism—artistic and otherwise. While their “anarchic” antics have become cliché in the scholarly discourse, their activities had actual anarchist underpinnings; specifically, they rode the wave of anarcho-individualism that had become a sustaining political mode in French cultural milieus during and immediately following the war. An extreme form of anarchism based on the theories of Max Stirner, anarchoindividualism went beyond the mere rejection of statist structures to advance a repudiation of all collective alliances (a mainstay of communist forms of anarchism) in favor of the complete sovereignty of the individual. Its staunchest adherents advocated a “union of Egoists,” loosely associated out of mutual respect for each other’s “ownness” (Stirner 94–105), and deemed even the most equitable of milieus a threat to this egoist self. In wartime and postwar France, this Sternerian anarcho-individualism was transformed under the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of ideological institutions in the name of individual will to power and articulated and elaborated on the pages of such politicized artistic and literary journals as Action: Cahiers individualists de philosophie et d’art and La Mêlée. There, a radical transformation of human consciousness at the level of the individual intellect—a cerebral revolt—was put forth in place of organized insurrection, and creative autonomy was thereby marshaled as an agent of social change. This anarchist intellectual politics drove broader postwar debates about the social responsibility of the individual artist and was echoed, notably, in the artistic antiauthoritarianism of Paris Dada. Dadaist anarcho-individualism finds its first and clearest expression in Tzara’s very public, definitively “Dadaist” manifestation of cerebral revolt. “Our antidogmatism is as exclusivist as a bureaucrat that we are not free yet shout freedom,” he had announced in 1916 at the First Dada Evening, and he consistently called for the liberation of humanity from the collective authority that enslaved it. (75) “I am against systems,” he proclaimed,” the most acceptable system is on principle to have none.” (78) He realized that such an individualist existence could only ensue after the revolutionary destruction of the cultural status quo, believing “every act [to be] a cerebral revolver shot”—a revolution unfolding not in the streets but on the intellectual plane (83)—and praising “new painters” for protesting dogma by rejecting the authority of aesthetic conventions and natural forms: The new painter creates a world, the elements of which are also its implements, a sober, definite work without argument. The new artist protests, he no longer paints (symbolic and illusionist reproduction) but creates—directly in stone, wood, iron, tin, boulders—locomotive organisms capable of being turned in all directions by the limpid wind of momentary sensation. All pictorial or plastic work is useless: let it then be a monstrosity that frightens servile minds. (Motherwell 78) Indeed, Dadaism merged with revolution in the complicated syntax, ruptured grammar, and explosive rhetoric of Tzara’s writings, and his example helped position Paris Dada’s anarcho-individualism.

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“Anarchy” . . . or Anarchism?

Tzara’s committed antiauthoritarianism resonates with Breton’s principled subversion. The French poet’s own artistic and political views had begun to take shape shortly before the war when, as a student faced with the dual realities of the coming cataclysm and his own impending military obligation, he participated in the protests against the three-year draft at Près-SaintGervais near Paris in August  1913 (Bonnet, Naissance 50). As he remonstrated the war, he was honing his knowledge of all forms of anarchist theory, for he read such newspapers as the revolutionary anarchist Le Libertaire and the anarcho-individualist L’Anarchie, and he had in his possession the first issue of L’Action d’Art (February 15, 1913). There, he discovered the Nietzschean critic Gérard Lacaze-Duthiers’s principle of l’artistocratie, which proclaimed art equal to revolutionary action (Lacaze-Duthiers n.p.), and he drew on such theories of politicized creativity as he developed a literary philosophy that located the individualist challenge to collective nationalism in the poetic liberation of human perceptions. As he solidified his youthful study of anarcho-individualist theory into an anarcho-individualist intellectual position, he became convinced of the need for “total liberation, not only from ways of thinking, but also from pre-established means of expression” (Lost Steps 25). In this, he turned to the Dadaist theories of Tzara, which called for a similar, though more destructive, transformation of consciousness through art. In 1919, Breton, Tzara, and their colleagues, now aligned behind the Dada idea, began to plan an “action (d’art ou d’anti-art)” that would lay the anarcho-individualist foundation for their project. Ribermont-Dessaignes describes their antiauthoritarianism in distinctly anarchoindividualist terms: Just as Picabia expressed his contempt for what was sensory and “pictorial” in painting, so they succeeded in destroying the usual effect of language. . . . Yet all this had already gone beyond literature. To liberate man seemed to them far more desirable than to know how one ought to write. . . . It was not enough to kill art, which is always like itself. . . . Perpetual freedom from attachments and the destruction of their own idols . . . were principles dear to all these men. (“History” 104–105) The following January, their anti-idolatry reached vast public dimensions when Breton and Tzara, along with Aragon, Éluard, Soupault, and Ribemont-Dessaignes, secured the Palais des Fêtes for the “First Friday of Littérature” and officially launched Paris Dada. Included in this performance/ demonstration were recitations of the newest poetry with little regard to authorship, musical performances that seemed randomly “composed,” modernist painting and sculpture juxtaposed with Dadaist “anti-art,” and Tzara’s rendition—inaudible over the din of an electric bell—of the right-wing deputy Léon Daudet’s latest speech before the chamber. Reflecting Tzara’s model of destruction as a liberating force, the Paris Dadaists designed their debut to provoke a revolutionary response in their audience, and as they had hoped, the “First Littérature Friday” ended in chaos. Subsequent performances found the Paris Dadaists bombarding their angry audiences with manifestos, where they made it clear that their deliberate disregard for literary propriety and negation of artistic convention formed part of a broader plan to topple authority in any form. At the second Dada matinee (February 5, 1920), for example, Aragon recited the “Manifesto of the Dada Movement,” in which the rapid-fire rejection of cultural and political labels denounced the institutions to which they referred: No more painters, no more men of letters, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no

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more anarchists, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more armies, no more police, no more countries, enough then of these imbecilities, no more nothing, no more nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. (“Mouvement Dada” 1) That same afternoon, the writer Paul Dermée—founder of L’Esprit Nouveau and an early adherent to Dada—echoed Aragon’s antiauthoritarianism when he announced that “[t]he oldest and most formidable enemy of Dada is named GOD” and designated Dada a “God-Killer” (Dermée 13). In rejecting artistic traditions, literary conventions, and even political philosophies, the Paris Dadaists sought to depose authority and, in the process, empower the individual (Ribemont-Dessaignes, “History” 110). As the “Manifesto of the Dada Movement” proclaimed, the destruction of authoritarian institutions would bring about a “Dadaist” coalition of equally liberated “presidents” and thus was a vehicle for positive social change: In this way we hope that newness which will be the very thing we no longer want will assert itself as less rotten, less egotistic, less mercantile, less obtuse, less immensely grotesque. Long live the concubines and the concubinists. All the members of the DADA movement are presidents. (1) The blunt antiauthoritarianism of the manifestos was only one tactic by which the Dadaists enacted revolution; more subtly dissident were the revolutionary strategies deployed in their poetry, essays, and other publications, which went beyond proclaiming the necessary break with “sacred idols” to demonstrate this break by destroying conventional linguistic and typographical structures. To offer just one example, the review Proverbe (1920–21) regularly unfurled apparently haphazard arrangements of unconnected aphorisms and random phrases which liberated words from the responsibility of collective meaning and allowed them to function according to the creative needs of the individual. As Jean Paulhan explained: Words are used to serve, and when they have succeeded once they no longer give much of themselves. . . . Equality of soul, presence of mind retain nothing of their first marvelous meaning. More quickly still these too-ingenious terms get tiring, [become] movements more than objects, or the records of this masonry: like, even though . . . are .  .  . exhausted common places; the sort whose sole suppression, [when] too expected, can contradict a new meaning. (n.p.) Such literary schemes were the vehicle through which much of Paris Dada enacted its anarchism; however, some of its members—notably Picabia—envisioned anarcho-individualist assault in the realm of the visual arts. An enthusiast of Stirner and Nietzsche, Picabia had become drawn to anarchism during encounters with Marcel Duchamp—himself a student of Stirner—in New York in 1913 (Antliff 49ff). Following Duchamp’s lead, he abandoned his Cubist practice for the free personal expressiveness of pure abstraction and, as a Dadaist, continued to articulate his anarcho-individualist views in frequent contributions to the anarchist periodical Les Humbles and in his column, “Carnet d’un sédentaire,” for the anarcho-individualist review La Forge, where he launched an assault on all moral structures. In his manifesto JesusChriste Rastaquoère, he exclaimed that “ALL BELIEFS ARE CHAUVINISTIC IDEAS” (241) 122

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and, in his article “L’Art,” condemned art and beauty as ideological systems that were as oppressive as organized religion: The principle of the word BEAUTY is only an automatic and visual convention. Life has nothing to do with what these grammarians call Beauty. Virtue like patriotism only exists for average intellects [who dedicate] their whole lives to sarcophagi. It is necessary to dry up this sources of men and women who look at art as a dogma whose God is accepted convention. We do not believe in God, no more than we believe in Art, nor its priests, bishops, and cardinals. (227) Ribemont-Dessaignes warned outright of the dangers of aligning art directly with the state, a move that would throttle individual expression by reducing it to an ideological tool in the service of perpetuating the “fatherland’s” standards of beauty and truth, and he went on to equate ideologically sanctioned art with organized religion: There is a religion of Art, like there is a religion of God. One can only speak of God in certain chosen terms, otherwise fire cleanses the guilty. . . . It is not yet permitted to say what you want about Art and Beauty. Art is a public edifice. All public edifices exist to glorify death. They are all propped up on the past by the same essence. (“Ce qu’il” 25) “The odor of carrion reigns,” he continued, over art and other public edifices. Elsewhere, he wrote that such institutions commemorated the “massacre of certain ruin” perpetuated by oppressive, controlling governments—“Bolshevik . . . and capitalist alike” (“Dadaisme” 239). Ribemont-Dessaignes denounced governments and political systems for consistently leading to militaristic bloodshed, but far from encouraging an intellectual retreat from this contemporary reality, he called for the wholesale destruction of culture as it existed and urged sympathetic artists and intellectuals “to push the masses to destructive fanaticism, to savageness, to the incomprehension of all that is elevated” (“Non-seul plaisir” 196). With this revolution, “God,” the “Artist,” and all other ideological “leaders” would be totally eradicated, and the oppressive systems they perpetuated would thus be abolished: Let the mass be reassured. [The Dadaist] does not mean material harm. Heat, nourishment and tangible love make life agreeable. We are only against God. Vinci is not god, nor Cézanne, nor Wilhelm II, nor Picasso, nor I, nor you, nor him. We are ready to abandon the magnificent acquisitions of thought that have carried human idiocy to its highest point. . . . We have renounced teaching you something. (“History” 103) Indeed, Ribemont-Dessaignes proclaimed, “The Dadaists are enemies of society” (“History” 131), and thus he summarized their cerebral revolt: The activity of Dada was a permanent revolt of the individual against art, against morality, against society. The means were manifestoes, poems, writings of various kinds, paintings, sculptures, exhibitions, and a few public demonstrations of a purely subversive character. 123

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However, the implications of the movement went beyond literature and art. It aimed at the liberation of the individual on the plane of the spiritual; it may even be said that the movement liberated the individual from the mind itself, placing the genius in the same rank as the idiot. (“History” 102) On December 17, 1920, the Paris Dadaists assembled at the Povolosky Gallery to view a selection of works by Francis Picabia and hear a lecture by Ribemont-Dessiagnes on “what is not permitted to be said about art” (“Ce qui” 25). “Destroy what you construct,” Ribemont-Dessaignes proclaimed, “[but] if you [do] need to construct . . . Dada will destroy Dada. You construct nothing that is not rotten” (“Ce qui” 29). His manifesto went straight to the heart of Dada’s anarcho-individualism, for it suggested that stale systems could be “destroyed” through continuous ideological renewal and set this practice of destruction against its polar opposite, “construction.” In purposefully opposing “destruction” and “construction,” Ribemont-Dessaignes solidified Dadaism’s ideological position in the postwar French avant-garde, and his grim reminder that civilization would inevitably be dismantled by its builders issued a direct challenge to more constructive models for social change being developed simultaneously in contemporary French cultural milieus. Indeed, while revolutionary destruction was an end in itself for writers such as Tzara and Ribemont-Dessaignes, many of their contemporaries—especially those associated with the journals Ça Irà!, La Revue de L’Epoque, and L’Esprit Nouveau—envisioned a new spirit focused on rebuilding culture once its linguistic and artistic foundations were dismantled. Breton, Aragon, and Soupault were, in theory, sympathetic to this, for they wished to establish a clearer connection between Dada’s anarchism and the more constructive solutions favored by many of their peers. In fact, Breton had never been entirely comfortable with the idea of wholesale destruction for its own sake, and while he did convince Tzara to transfer Dada to Paris, he expressed fear over “becoming disqualified” by Tzara’s unyielding “passion to destroy” (Short 86). Tiring of Tzara’s perpetual satisfaction with Dada’s spectacular unpredictability, he questioned whether the cultivation of chaos limited Dada to the provocation of scandal for its own sake, and increasingly mindful that poetic liberation must evolve into new and original creation, he began to seek ways of channeling Tzara’s revolutionary pursuit of spontaneity into something less destructive, less repetitive, and less bound by instant gratification. In his view, “[t]he anarchic nature of [Dada’s] protest, its love of scandal for scandal’s sake, in short, its whole offensive thrust,” could never “free us . . . from that hideous cage in which we struggled,” and Tzara, though he “walked for a time with defiance in his eye,” ultimately remained unable to “stage a veritable coup d’état” (The Lost Steps 122–123). Thus, he concluded, Dada had become so enslaved by its own pursuit of notoriety that it had compromised the intellectual liberty necessary for true creation. Instead, he began to explore alternative forms of provocation while still operating nominally under the Dada banner. These were the “visits,” “trials,” and “commemorations” known as “The Great Dada Season” of 1921, and through them Breton developed a version of individual liberation that would address the problem of the “stereotyped character” of Tzara’s Dadaism, by acknowledging and exploring the responsibility implied in the rejection of social constructs (Sanouillet 251). The season began on April 14 with a visit to the Church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, planned as the first of several visits to “chosen places, in particular to those which really have no reason to exist” (Sanouillet 255–256). The Dadaists claimed to have chosen this church because its spacious courtyard was an ideal setting for the delivery of manifestos, and also because it offered an alternative venue to the stuffy concert halls on whose stages Dada had operated in the past. 124

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Encoded in this practical explanation was veiled social commentary, for the Dadaists’ denial of the anticlericalism implied in the nonreligious use of a consecrated spot drew attention to that spot’s own secular—and even touristy—contemporary function as a stop on the Friends of Paris Society’s tours to various monuments around the city. By designing their “visit” as a parody of these tours, the Dadaists highlighted Saint-Julien’s evolution from pilgrimage site to leisure destination and, in doing so, exposed the religious codes for which it served as constructed beliefs ultimately rendered meaningless by the obsolete “sacred” monuments that commemorated them. The exposure of belief systems as meaningless institutional paradigms was only the first step in true human progress, however, for to reject them outright, as Tzara had, would be to deny their apparent necessity in society and, inevitably, run the risk of constructing a new set of institutions to replace them. This, for Breton, had been the downfall of the writer and politician Maurice Barrès, whom the Dadists placed on mock “trial” on May 13, 1921 (Sanouillet 255). While a follower of anarcho-individualism in his early career, Barrès had more recently devolved into a bellicose defender of blood and soil, and this would seem reason enough for this accusation at the hands of the anti-nationalist Dadaists. But what was at the core of their challenge was the moral implication of such a dramatic shift in beliefs, for Barrès had revised his youthful Stirnerian individualism to accommodate an elitist philosophy based on nationality, religion, and race, suggesting the potential for a similar decline into despotism of unmanaged individualism in all its forms (Sanouillet 255ff). From Barrès’s opportunism, it was an easy leap to Tzara’s haphazard negativism and, more broadly, the conclusion that Dada’s incitement and endorsement of purposeless revolutionary acts would launch it on a similar trajectory to absolutism (Bonnet, L’Affaire 19). Tzara retaliated against the insult of the Barrès trial with an onslaught of “classical” Dada, including the blockbuster spoof “Salon Dada: Exposition Internationale” and the burlesque The Gas Heart (both June  1921). Still, Breton held firm, and by the following year, he had broken definitively with Dada to align himself, at least nominally, with representatives from other French modernist groups to plan the “International Congress for the Determination of the Directives of the Modern Spirit.” This “Congress of Paris” was to be overseen by a diverse organizational board that included Breton; the painters Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, and Amédée Ozenfant; the writer Jean Paulhan; and the composer Georges Auric. Its purpose was to establish a unifying discourse for the post-WWI avant-garde; its planning process, however, only exposed the fragmentary and adversarial nature of its numerous factions. Eventually, everything fell apart, forcing Breton once and for all to abandon Dada’s destructive exploits and strike out on his own path toward a viable theory of the revolutionary intellect and a sustainable model for social change, in response rather than in opposition to the broader postwar cultural dialogue. For Breton, “literary activity” could be a source of empowerment; after all, he explained, “ink and paper alone know how to keep the imagination awake” (Breton, Les Pas Perdus 110). No longer a Dadaist casualty of revolution, literature, for Breton, became a revolutionary terrain capable of liberating the individual from the constraints of the logical, material world and unleashing the “higher” reality contained in the “irrepressible personal imagination” (Motherwell 199). From his definitive break with Dada until the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Breton, together with Aragon, Éluard, Soupault, Benjamin Péret, and Robert Desnos, conjured and recorded the seemingly irrational mental images revealed both in automatic writing and during periods of semiconsciousness, exploring intuition as a conduit for spontaneous expression, and approaching it as an arena for revolution and a site for the formulation of new modes of thought. Breton and his cohorts’ desire to modify Dada’s revolutionary destruction 125

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had thus evolved into their study of the liberating potential of the individual subconscious; Tzara’s revolutionary example had found equilibrium in Surrealism. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. This chapter is based on my book, Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada: Art and Criticism, 1914–1924. Ashgate, 2010.

Works Cited Antliff, Allan. Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007. Ball. “Announcement.” Cabaret Voltaire, 15 May 1916. Bonnet, Marguerite. André Breton: Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste. José Corti, 1975 and 1998. ———, editor. L’Affaire Barrès. José Corti, 1987. Breton, André. Les Pas Perdus. Gallimard, 1924 and 1969. ———. The Lost Steps. Edited and translated by Mark Polizzotti. Nebraska, 1996. Dermée, Paul. “Dada tue-Dieu.” Littérature, vol. 13, 1920, p. 13. Lacaze-Duthiers, Gérard. “L’Individualisme esthétique et l’artistocratie.” L’Action d’Art, no. 13, 1913. “Manifeste du mouvement Dada.” Littérature, vol. 13, 1920, p. 1. Paulhan, Jean. “Syntaxe.” Proverbe, vol. 1, 1920, n.p. Picabia, Francis. Ecrits, 1913–1920. Edited by Olivier Revault d’Allonnes. Pierre Belfond, 1975. Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges. “Ce qu’il ne faut pas dire sur l’art.” 1920, reprinted in DADA: Manifestes, poèmes, nouvelles, articles, projets, théâtres, cinéma, chroniques, rev. ed., edited by Jean-Pierre Begot, Editions Ivréa, pp. 25–30. ———. “Dadaisme.” 1922, reprinted in DADA: Manifestes, poèmes, nouvelles, articles, projets, théâtres, cinéma, chroniques, rev. ed., edited by Jean-Pierre Begot, Editions Ivréa, pp. 239–242. ———. “History of Dada.” 1931, translated by Ralph Manheim, reprinted in Motherwell, Robert, editor, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. 2nd ed., Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 101–120. ———. “Non—seul Plaisir.” 1920, reprinted in DADA: Manifestes, poèmes, nouvelles, articles, projets, théâtres, cinéma, chroniques, rev. ed., edited by Jean-Pierre Begot, Editions Ivréa, pp. 194–196. Short, Robert. “Paris Dada and Surrealism.” Journal of European Studies, vol. 9, March–June 1979, pp. 75–98. Stirner, Max, The Ego and His Own. Translated by Stephen T. Byington. Boni and Liveright, 1918. Tzara, Tristan. “Seven Dada Manifestoes.” 1916–20, translated by Ralph Manheim, reprinted in Motherwell, Robert, editor, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 75–98.

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14 GEORGES BATAILLE, ANDRÉ BRETON, AND THE CULTURE OF SURREALISM Raymond Spiteri

The names André Breton and Georges Bataille are often taken to exemplify a distinction between orthodox and dissident Surrealism. This distinction has gained currency in recent scholarship on Surrealism, but its validity is rarely examined. This chapter examines the relation between Breton and Bataille and what it reveals about Surrealism. Their relationship was initially characterized by misunderstanding and enmity, but over time a friendship of sorts developed around a shared relation to Surrealism. In part, their differences were attitudes to life: Breton the charismatic leader who devoted his life to the maintenance of a shared experience of Surrealism among a small exclusive group, versus the more solitary Bataille, a profound thinker of the unthought. Yet at the heart of Bataille’s thought was the pursuit of limit experience—what Maurice Blanchot has called a “movement of contestation” (204)—that was also characteristic of Surrealism. Where Bataille’s focus was on the impossible effort to convey this experience, Breton would maintain a more circuitous route, orbiting the dark star that Bataille dared approach. Although only eighteen months separate the birth of Breton from Bataille—February 1896 and September  1897, respectively—their entry into adulthood would follow different paths. Breton would enroll in the faculty of medicine in October 1914, three months after the start of the First World War; he was mobilized in February 1915, eventually serving as a medical orderly treating shell-shocked soldiers. Bataille completed his baccalaureate in June 1914; he was mobilized in January 1916, only to be discharged after a year for health reasons. Breton was a committed atheist from an early age, whereas Bataille underwent religious conversion in August  1914 and spent a year in a seminary after his military service before enrolling in the École des Chartes in 1919. Indeed, Bataille’s first publication was Notre-Dame de Rheims, a pamphlet on the spiritual significance of the current war. Bataille graduated from the École des Chartes in 1922, winning a bursary to study in Madrid before commencing a career as a rare book librarian at the Bibliothèque nationale (Polizzotti 38–82; Surya 16–44). Bataille’s initial link to Surrealism was through his friendships with Michel Leiris, André Masson, and Georges Limbour. Bataille’s single contribution to La Révolution surréaliste was “Fatrasies,” a translation of a series of thirteenth-century nonsense poems. An introduction to Breton did occur, but the latter dismissed Bataille as an “obsessive” (Bataille, Absence of Myth 39–41). If Bataille remained outside the inner sanctum, he nonetheless was close to the rue Blomet circle, whose members grew estranged from Breton at the decade’s end. These DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-17

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friendships gave Bataille inside knowledge of the personal dynamic of the Surrealist group, notably the November 1926 expulsion of Antonin Artaud, who refused to accept the attempt to align Surrealism with Communism (139–145). If Breton laid siege to the avant-garde, Bataille pursued a more scholarly path. He began contributing essays to the art and archeology journal Aréthuse, edited by Jean Babelon and Pierre d’Espézel, a connection that led to Documents, founded in 1929 by the art dealer and publisher Georges Wildenstein. Yet Bataille’s professional success was eroded by a pervasive sense of personal malaise. A course of psychoanalysis with Adrien Borel would lead to the writing of the erotic narrative Histoire de l’œil, published under the pseudonym Lord Auch in 1928 (Bataille Story of the Eye). The narrative described the erotic exploits of its two teenage protagonists, which culminate with Simone, the female protagonist, masturbating with the enunciated eye of a murdered priest in a Spanish church. Breton responded favorably to the book, describing it to his wife, Simone, as “absolutely marvelous” and the “the intellectual event of the year”: “Not only is it the most beautiful erotic book that I know, but it is also one of the seven most beautiful books that I have read” (Breton, Lettres à Simone Kahn 328). This comment—admittedly made in private to an estranged intimate partner who shared her name with the protagonist—sounds an odd note given the enmity that would emerge the following year. A key event to understand the emergence of the Breton-Bataille polemic was the Bar du Château meeting that occurred in March 1929. The prelude to this meeting was a letter sent to 76 intellectuals sympathetic to Surrealism exploring the possibility of collective action. After the responses were collated, the Surrealists convened a meeting at the Bar du Château on the pretext of discussing Trotsky’s recent expulsion from Soviet territory: the meeting opened with a review of the responses to the initial letter, but the meeting ended acrimoniously after Breton took the floor to interrogate the “moral qualification” of the writers associated with Le Grand jeu (Nadeau 154–158). The underlying motivation for the Bar du Château meeting was the tension between the political and cultural dimensions of Surrealism. This had been a recurring issue since the launch of the movement, leading to an effort to align Surrealism with the Parti communiste français (PCF). This effort reached an impasse in 1927 when the PCF regarded Breton’s membership with ongoing suspicion. Surrealism’s cultural status had been growing over this time; in 1928, a number of important publications appeared, including Breton’s Nadja and Le Surréalisme et la peinture, as well as exhibitions by Joan Miró and Max Ernst. Surrealism was on the point of becoming another vanguard cultural movement. The Bar du Château meeting was engineered to short-circuit this process, forcing intellectuals close to Surrealism to declare their position on the issue of collective political action, an effect exacerbated in June 1929 when Aragon and Breton published a transcript of the meeting as a supplement to Le Surréalisme en 1929 (“À suivre” in Pierre 1:96–129). Bataille received the initial letter, but he was not invited to attend the March meeting, being classed among the four recipients opposed to collective action (along with Leiris and Masson), having responded “Beaucoup trop de emmerdeurs idéalistes” (too many idealistic shit stirrers) (“À suivre” 104). At that time Bataille was involved in the launch of Documents, whose editorial board included a cross section of scholars from art history, anthropology, and the museum world. Bataille was appointed the managing editor (secrétaire général), a role that allowed him to shape the review’s layout and provided him a platform to develop his critique of the idealism that underpinned European civilization. Unlike La Révolution surréaliste, which had appeared intermittently since 1926, Documents appeared regularly from April 1929, publishing 15 issues over the next two years, and it opened its pages to former Surrealists—a key factor that made Bataille a target of Breton’s ire. 128

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Initially, Documents did not advance an explicit critique of Surrealism. Bataille’s early contributions drew on his background as a medievalist. A more distinctive position emerges in the June 1929 issue with the publication of “The Language of Flowers” (Bataille Visions of Excess 10–14). This article introduced many of the themes central to Bataille’s thought: a critique of idealism performed through the way material facts escape symbolic language. Bataille employed photography as an integral part of this strategy: the article was illustrated with Karl Blossfeldt’s close-up photographs of flowers, which rendered an “inexpressible real presence” irreducible to symbolic interpretation (10). Bataille questioned the conventional association of flowers with beauty: rather than being exemplars of ideal beauty, “even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centers by hairy sexual organs,” and denuded of its petals, all that remains of a rose’s beauty is “a rather sordid tuft” (12). Bataille’s strategy here is to take an object associated with ideal beauty and demonstrate how, on a material level, it leads to the failure of “human ideas” (12). Bataille developed this analysis in his entry to Document’s “Critical Dictionary” on “Materialism.” In contrast to philosophical materialism’s “obsession with the ideal form of matter,” Bataille proposed a materialism “immediately based on psychological or social facts,” such as unconscious impulses: “When the word materialism is used, it is time to designate the direct interpretation, excluding all idealism, of raw phenomenon” (Visions of Excess 15–16). It is important to note that Bataille’s target here was not specifically Surrealism. Indeed, his comments exemplified a current in Surrealism that embraced the disruptive, unruly affective force of the unconscious within the remit of materialism. The dividing issue for Breton, however, would be that Bataille’s materialism appeared incommensurable with dialectical materialism. Another key early essay is “The Big Toe,” which used the affective dimension of seduction to challenge the view that human life is an elevation (Visions of Excess 20–23). The big toe was, for Bataille, “the most human part of the human body,” since it was the digit most differentiated from the corresponding part of the anthropoid ape, but given its base status, it also questioned the conceptual oppositions between high and low, elevated and base, human and animal (20). Bataille focused on the erotic investment in the toe to distinguish between “two radically opposed kinds of seductiveness”; its affective value lay not in “elegant and correct forms” but “the ugliness and infection represented by the baseness of the foot” (22–23). Bataille concluded the article with a position statement that indicated the gulf emerging between himself and Breton: The meaning of this article lies in its insistence on a direct and explicit questioning of seductiveness, without taking into account poetic concoctions that are, ultimately, nothing but a diversion (most human beings are naturally feeble and can only abandon themselves to their instincts when in a poetic haze). A return to reality does not imply any new acceptances, but means that one is seduced in a base manner, without transpositions and to the point of screaming, opening his eyes wide: opening them wide, then, before a big toe. (23) To underline this point, Bataille included three full-page photographs of big toes by JacquesAndré Boiffard (who earlier provided photographs for Breton’s Nadja). Here Bataille extended his critique of idealism to question a key tenet of Breton’s Surrealism: the value of the poetic (Surrealist) image. He also introduced a key distinction between Surrealism and base materialism by questioning the role of transposition in sublimating instinct. The catalyst for the emergence of the Breton-Bataille polemic was Salvador Dalí, who had recently made the film Un Chien andalou with Luis Buñuel. Bataille had recognized distinct 129

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Figure 14.1 Jacques-André Boiffard, Big Toe, Female Subject, 24 Years Old, illustration in Georges Bataille, “Le Gros orteil,” Documents, November 1929, p. 301.

parallels between his concerns and those of Dalí, discussing Un Chien andalou in his critical dictionary entry on the “Eye” and reproducing three of Dalí’s paintings in the September 1929 issue of Documents (Visions of Excess 17–19). By the time Dalí held his first Paris exhibition in November, he had joined the Surrealist group allied with Breton, and he refused Bataille permission to reproduce The Lugubrious Game to accompany an article in the December 1929 issue of Documents. Bataille responded to the snub with overt criticism of Breton, who had contributed a short essay to Dalí’s exhibition catalog (which itself contained several allusions to Bataille and Documents) (Breton, “First Dalí Exhibition”). Bataille’s opening line sets the tone: “Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence” (“The ‘Lugubrious Game’ ” Visions of Excess 24). Bataille asked if painting was capable of this violence: could “the dislocation of forms lead to that of thought” and thus overturn the prison house of the idea, or was it little more than a distraction (24)? Several passages stand out as being directed at Breton: Little by little the contradictory signs of servitude and revolt are revealed in all things. The great constructions of the intellect are, finally, prisons: that is why they are obstinately overturned. Dreams and illusory Cimmerii remain within reach of the zealously irresolute, whose unconscious calculations are not so clumsy since they innocently shelter revolt from laws. Besides, how could one not admire the loss of will, the blind manner, the drifting uncertainty ranging from willful distraction to attentiveness? It is true that I am speaking here of what already sinks into oblivion when Dali’s razors 130

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carve into our faces the grimaces of horror that probably risk making us vomit like drunkards this servile nobility, this idiotic idealism that leaves us under the spell of a few comical prison bosses. (27–28) The phrase “Dreams and illusory Cimmerii” was a direct reference to Breton’s Dalí essay; similarly, Bataille cited Breton’s description of a “marvelous land of treasures” to state, “[I]t is impossible to retreat and hide in the ‘land of treasures’ of Poetry without being publicly condemned as a coward” (29, translation modified). Bataille’s criticism was more direct in the essay’s endnotes. He described the essay as “a portion of an unpublished essay on the inferiority complex,” and Dalí’s The Lugubrious Game as “nothing other than the complex in question . . . in which the genesis of emasculation and the contradictory reactions it carries with it are translated with an extraordinary wealth of detail and power of expression” (29). Although Dalí withheld permission to reproduce The Lugubrious Game, Bataille included a line drawing of the picture and a perceptive analysis of its underlying structure. Bataille used the picture to position himself against Breton: by focusing on the scatological foreground figure with feces-stained underwear, he contrasted the “dreams of virility of a puerile and burlesque temerity” that issue from the midground figure to “a new and real virility is rediscovered by this person in ignominy and horror themselves” (29). Here Bataille touched on the tension between scatology and symbolization in Surrealism, particularly how unconscious forces either motivate or interrupt the process of symbolization. Where Breton downplayed the importance of scatological element in Surrealism, Bataille foregrounded the disruptive character of a materialism that turned on asocial, primeval impulses. Hence the question he implicitly posed to Breton: This permits one to inquire seriously about the orientation of those who see here for the first time the mental windows opening wide, who place an emasculated poetic complacency where there appears only the screaming necessity of a recourse to ignominy. (29–30) Underlying Bataille’s rejection of the evasions of poetry was also a skepticism toward Surrealism’s political position—a stance already evident in his response to the Bar du Château meeting. In “The ‘Lugubrious Game,’ ” he advocated violence as a political response, citing the example of the Marquis de Sade on the eve of the 1789 French Revolution screaming into his waste pipe to inflame the crowd outside the Bastille prison (28). Where Breton still sought rapprochement with the PCF and attempted to align Surrealism with dialectical materialism, Bataille understood revolution as a violent rupture with existing society, one that drew its energy from base sources. The December 1929 issue of Document also included Bataille’s critical dictionary entry on “Formless.” This short entry distilled a key element of Bataille’s thought: formless is not a concept but “a term that serves to bring things down in the world,” one that affirms “the universe resembles nothing” (Visions of Excess 31). As Yve-Alain Bois has noted, formless is not a concept, theme, or substance but an operation that “participates in the general movement of Bataille’s thought” (Bois 15). Indeed, there is no equivalent operation in Breton’s thought (Krauss 34–36). Breton published the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” in December  1929, which included several pages attacking Bataille and Documents (Breton, Manifestoes 180–186). It is unlikely that Bataille had read the “Second Manifesto” before publication, although he may 131

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have been aware of its tenor; “The ‘Lugubrious Game’ ” responded to Breton’s earlier Dalí essay. Whereas the bulk of the “Second Manifesto” was addressed to “ex-Surrealists” who had failed to fulfill Breton’s expectations, Bataille’s inclusion was notable because he had never been a member of Breton’s group. However, Documents represented a grave threat to Breton since it had published “ex-Surrealists” Robert Desnos, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, André Masson, and Roger Vitrac, and he feared Bataille could constitute the core of a rival Surrealist group (182–183). The next issue was Bataille’s materialism. In the “Second Manifesto,” Breton attempted to resolve the political impasse Surrealism reached with the PCF through dialectical materialism, invoking Hegel to negotiate between Surrealism and Marxist materialism. Bataille’s critique of materialism explicitly called this strategy into question, thus heightening its risk to Breton: “what we are witnessing is an obnoxious return to old anti-dialectical materialism, which this time is trying to force its way gratuitously through Freud” (183). Although Breton adopted a patronising and dismissive attitude to Bataille, he did identify one of his limitations: that despite his aversion to idealism, Bataille nonetheless did reason: M. Bataille’s misfortune is to reason: admittedly, he reasons like someone who “has a fly on his nose,” . . . but he does reason. He is trying, with the help of the tiny mechanism in him which is not completely out of order, to share his obsessions: this very fact proves that he cannot claim, no matter what he may say, to be opposed to any system, like an unthinking brute. What is paradoxical and embarrassing about M. Bataille’s case is that his phobia about “the idea,” as soon as he attempts to communicate it, can only take an ideological turn. (184) In fact, this was the Nietzschean kernel of Bataille’s thought, and to a degree Breton was correct, at least from the perspective of reason. However, it also missed the point of Bataille’s critique, which was not to win an argument but to demonstrate the limit of conceptual thought and any intellectual system. Indeed, what Bataille accomplished in Documents was a practical demonstration of a “deconstructive” logic, performed in the interplay between text and visual images— the disturbing close-up photographs of flowers, big toes, abattoirs, etc.—an inheritance taken up by “French Theory” since the 1960s, at least on a conceptual level (Patron; Forest). One of the repercussions of the “Second Manifesto” was the tract Un Cadavre, which published responses by twelve Surrealists attacked by Breton (“Un Cadvre” in Pierre 1:132–148).1 Bataille contributed “The Castrated Lion,” which described Breton as “the old aesthete and false revolutionary with the head of Christ” who has “obstructed the pavement for so long with his degrading idiocies” (Absence of Myth 28). Apart from personal insults, Bataille also described Surrealism as a “newly consecrated religion devoted . . . to hollow success,” and he also noted the political impasse of Surrealism’s revolutionary ambitions, its frustrated attempt “to insinuate itself . . . into the baggage of Communism,” leading Breton to conceal “his religious enterprise under a feeble revolutionary phraseology” (28–29). Bataille would later describe Un Cadavre as a mistake, only serving to enhance Breton’s reputation (“Notes of the Publication of ‘Un Cadavre’ ” in Absence of Myth 32). Documents continued publication in 1930, but overt references to Breton or Surrealism were largely absent. Bataille indirectly continued his dialogue with Surrealism in “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” where he notes that the Gnostics contributed to the metaphysical conception from which Hegelian idealism emerged (Visions on Excess 45–52). For Bataille, the significance of Gnosticism was its conception of matter as an active principle: in 132

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contrast to the Hellenistic spirit, which regarded matter and evil as “degradations of superior principles,” to the Gnostics darkness was not “simply the absence of light, but the monstrous archontes revealed by this absence,” while evil was not “the absence of good, but a creative action” (47). Bataille’s other responses to Breton would remain unpublished during his life (“Dossier de la polémique avec André Breton”). His most direct response was the essay “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist,” which was written as a review of the “Second Manifesto” and destined for Bifur (which ceased publication before Bataille’s essay appeared) (Visons of Excess 32–44). Bataille described Surrealism as a “childhood disease” of base materialism. Although Surrealism acknowledged the “low values” of the unconscious, sexuality, and obscene language, these values are associated with the “most immaterial values” that disguised “all claims from below . . . as claims from above” (39). When Surrealism does acknowledge the significance of base elements, “these unhealthy forms are limited to the poetic”; and Breton’s preference for celestial imagery and spiritual elevation over the base material conditions of existence was characteristic of bourgeois revolutionary idealism (41). This essay reprised the need for violent action to overthrow bourgeois rule, a violence allied to the vulgar and base values associated with the proletariat (43). Documents ceased publication at the end of 1930, and Surrealism soon moved on to other battles.2 Bataille became involved Boris Souvarine’s Cercle communiste démocratique and its review La Critique sociale, where he published “The Notion of Expenditure” and “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (Visions of Excess 116–129, 137–160). Although these essays did not address Surrealism, Bataille did write several critical reviews of Surrealist publications by André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, and René Crevel (Bataille, Œuvres complètes 1:3243–327, 337–338). The Surrealists still regarded Bataille with suspicion: when Albert Skira approached Bataille to collaborate on Minotaure (which was partly modelled on Documents), his participation was vetoed by the Surrealists (Éluard 157–172). By 1935, the acrimony between Bataille and the Surrealists had diminished sufficiently for them to undertake the collective initiative of Contre-Attaque. This group was formed after the Surrealists’ final break with the PCF and Stalinism in June  1935 and the publication in August of “On the Time When the Surrealists Were Right” (Breton, Manifestoes 243–253). The Surrealists’ relationship with the PCF had been precarious after the Aragon Affair in 1932, and it soon became irredeemable after the adoption of socialist realism and the emergence of the Front Populaire coalition in 1934. The growing threat of fascism dissolved the past enmity between Breton and Bataille, and for several months, they were able to collaborate on a common project, Contre-Attaque (Reynaud Paligot 107–121; Falasca-Zamponi 132–143). This “Union of Revolutionary Intellectuals” brought together members of the Surrealist movement with Souverine’s Cercle communiste démocratique around shared opposition to the political compromise of the Front Populaire. Bataille played a key role in the group, with his critique of fascism furnishing vital ideas, but this would also contribute to its dissolution, after Breton and the Surrealists became uncomfortable with the proximity of some of Bataille’s ideas to a tacit support of fascism. The collaboration collapsed in March 1936 when the Surrealists issued the tract accusing Bataille of flirting with “surfascism” (“La Rupture avec ‘Contre-Attaque’ ” in Pierre 1:301). Breton and Bataille’s paths would diverge after Contre-Attaque. Breton continued to shepherd the Surrealist movement, establishing the Fédération Internationale de l’Art Révolutionnaire Indépendant and organizing a series of major Surrealist exhibitions. Bataille established the Collège de Sociologie and the secret group Acéphale, which continued to explore aspects of his political thought (Holier; Bataille, Sacred Conspiracy; Falasca-Zamponi). The outbreak of 133

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the Second World War would place more distance between them. While Breton was in wartime exile in the United States, Bataille published L’Expérience intérieure in 1943, his first book under his own name, which provoked responses from key intellectual figures (Sartre; Monnerot; “Nom de Dieu” in Pierre 2:9–10; Waldberg et al.). After the war, Bataille played a central role in the establishment of the review Critique, which he edited until his death in 1962 (Patron). This final part of his career was marked by a détente with Breton: while neither ceded ground, a mutual respect nonetheless developed. Bataille would contribute short texts to Le Surréalisme en 1947 and the 1959 EROS exhibition, and his response to the questionnaire on “art magique” was included in Breton’s L’Art magique (“Enquête” 265). Bataille’s greatest contribution during this final period was to write a number of essays that defended aspects of Surrealism, particularly in relation to the rise of existentialism. Bataille’s postwar assessments of Surrealism were remarkably clear-sighted and absent the rancor of the interwar period—indeed, they were enriched by his friendship with Maurice Blanchot, who exhibited a similar critical yet sympathetic attitude to Surrealism (Bident 135–144; Surya 311–317). In January 1946, while Breton was still in exile, Bataille described himself as Surrealism’s “old enemy from within” (“On the Subject of Slumber” Absence of Myth 49). He noted his past opposition to Surrealism but now sought “to affirm it from within as the demand to which [he had] submitted and as the dissatisfaction [he] exemplif[ied]” (49). Bataille’s proximity to Surrealism was exacerbated by his distance from existentialism, which emerged as the leading intellectual movement in the post-WWII period. Whereas existentialism imbued the act of decision with the power to confer meaning on existence, Surrealism was “a decision to decide no longer”; in this context, Surrealist poetry unleashes the “image of free existence, which is never bestowed except in the instant” (“Surrealism and How It Differs from Existentialism” Absence of Myth 66). A recurring theme in Bataille’s post-WWII writings on Surrealism is the key role Breton played in preserving Surrealism as a collective experience, an experience that often assumed the outward form of art or literature but was irreducible to it. The antagonism that characterized the 1929–1930 polemic faded with time, and Bataille remained in accord with an experience to which Surrealism bore witness; indeed, while critical of aspects of Surrealism, his position was complementary to that of Breton (Richardson 6). As Surrealism’s “old enemy from within,” Bataille illuminated aspects of Surrealism that Breton could not articulate, grasping the broader philosophical dimension of Surrealism with a lucidity that too often escaped Breton. Indeed, looking back at their earlier polemic, Bataille conceded that Breton’s actions were largely justified: Today I am inclined to believe that Breton’s demands . . . were fundamentally justified; there was in Breton a desire for common consecration to a single sovereign truth, a hatred of all forms of concession regarding this truth, of which he wanted his friends to be the expression, otherwise they would cease to be his friends—something with which I still agree. (Notes of the Publication of ‘Un Cadavre’ Absence of Myth 31) Where Breton fell short was “to be too rigidly attached to the outward forms of this fidelity,” a stance that gave rise to “a sort of hypnotic prestige” and authority but which he used without sufficient care or discretion (31). Where many former Surrealists would rarely see beyond Breton’s summary judgments, Bataille could still acknowledge the validity of Surrealism beyond Breton’s personal shortcomings.

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Notes 1. The contributors were Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Jacques Prévert, Raymond Queneau, Roger Vitrac, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Jacques-André Boiffard, Robert Desnos, Max Morise, Georges Bataille, Jaques Baron, and Alejo Carpentier. 2. Although dated 1930, the final issue of Documents appeared in March 1931.

Works Cited Artaud, Antonin. “In Total Darkness, or the Surrealists Bluff.” Selected Writings, edited by Susan Sontag, University of California Press, 1988, pp. 139–145. Bataille, Georges. The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. Edited and translated by Michael Richardson, Verso, 1994. ———. “Dossier de la polémique avec André Breton.” Œuvres complètes: Écrits posthumes, 1922–1940, Gallimard, 1970, vol. 2, pp. 49–109. ———. Œuvres complètes: Premiers écrits 1922–1940, vol. 1. Gallimard, 1970. ———. The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology. Edited by Marina Galletti and Alastair Brotchie. Atlas Press, 2017. ———. The Story of the Eye. Translated by Joachim Neugroschal. Penguin, 1982. ———. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Edited by Allan Stoekl, translated by Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Bident, Christophe. Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography. Translated by John McKeane. Fordham University Press, 2018. Blanchot, Maurice. “The Limit Experience.” The Infinite Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson, University of Minnesota Press, 1993, pp. 202–229. Bois, Yve-Alain. “The Use Value of the Formless.” Formless: A User’s Guide, Zone Books, 1997, pp. 13–40. Breton, André. “The First Dalí Exhibition.” Break of Day, translated by Mark Polizzotti and Mary Ann Caws, University of Nebraska Press, 1999, pp. 51–53. ———. L’Art magique. Biro, 1991. ———. Lettres à Simone Khan: 1920–1960. Edited by Jean-Michel Goutier. Gallimard, 2016. ———. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seavey and Helen R. Lane. University of Michigan Press, 1969. Éluard, Paul. Letters to Gala. Edited by Pierre Dreyfus, translated by Jesse Browner. Paragon House, 1989. Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta. Rethinking the Political: The Sacred, Aesthetic Politics, and the Collège de Sociologie. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. “Fatrasies.” La Révolution surréaliste, no. 6, March 1926, pp. 2–3. Forest, Philippe. Histoire de Tel Quel, 1960–1982, Seuil, 1995. Krauss, Rosalind. “Corpus Delicti.” October, no. 33, Summer 1985, pp. 31–72. Monnerot, Jules. “La Fièvre de Georges Bataille.” Inquisitions, Corti, 1974, pp. 197–217. Nadeau, Maurice. The History of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Howard. Harvard University Press, 1989. Patron, Sylvie. Critique, 1946–1996: une encyclopédie de l’esprit moderne. IMEC, 2000. Pierre, José, editor. Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives (1922/1969). 2 vols. Eric Losfeld, 1980. Polizzotti, Mark. Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton. Bloomsbury, 1995. Reynaud Paligot, Carole. Parcours politiques des surréalistes, 1919–1969. CNRS Éditions, 1995. Richardson, Michael. “Introduction.” Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, edited and translated by Michael Richardson, Verso, 1994, pp. 1–27. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Un nouveau mystique.” Situations I, Gallimard, 1947, pp. 143–188. Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography. Translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson, Verso, 2002. Waldberg, Patrick, Robert Lebel, and Georges Duthuit. “Vers un nouveau mythe? Prémonitions et défiances.” VVV, no. 4, February 1944, pp. 41–49.

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15 SURREALISM AND THE FRENCH COMMUNIST PARTY Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realises that the role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him. This fact alone, in so far as he is conscious of it, makes the artist the natural ally of revolution. (Breton and Trotsky 50) This quote by André Breton and Leon Trotsky appears in the text “For an Independent Revolutionary Art,” cowritten in 1938 to launch the new International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art. Breton wrote a first draft, which Trotsky subsequently edited and rewrote (Schwarz 195). Breton and the Mexican painter Diego Riviera signed the manifesto, but Trotsky did not. His refusal to sign was not because he disagreed with the content and tone of the text but because he did not want to give the impression that he was dictating a program to artists. The point was precisely—as the title of the manifesto makes clear—that revolutionary artists were totally free. Modern art, exemplified by Breton’s Surrealism, was inherently revolutionary— and, as such, a natural ally of the Communist revolution. The text is an extraordinary document which not only reveals art’s vital role in the revolutionary tradition but also testifies to the integral importance of the Communist revolution in Surrealism. Several interwar avant-garde movements, not the least Surrealism, developed an aesthetic critique of capitalism that prioritized the importance of creative expression, no longer to be confined to the institution of art and reserved for the select few who were granted the status of artists. Surrealism and other avant-garde movements, such as Dada and Constructivism, sought to challenge the separation of art from lived experience by bringing art into everyday life and unleashing its creative powers (Bürger; Tafuri). It was this that endowed modern art with its revolutionary perspective and made it an ally for the Communist movement. The Surrealists sought, from the very beginning, to establish common ground between their group and other revolutionary vanguards, movements and parties, including the French Communist Party and, later, Trotsky’s Fourth International. This was not easy. The trajectory of Trotsky made that clear. Alongside Lenin, Trotsky had been the most important figure in the October Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government and took power in Russia. He had been Commissar for Foreign Affairs, responsible for negotiating a Soviet exit from the First World War, and commanded the Red Army during the Russian Civil 136

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-18

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War. Publicly, Trotsky was the number two in the new revolutionary project, but when Lenin fell ill, Stalin sidelined Trotsky and excluded him from the Politburo’s decision-making process. By the time Lenin died in 1924, Trotsky had already lost out to Stalin (Wistrich 121). The Bolshevik Party’s authoritarianism, which had been present from the very beginning and resulted in the repression of competing socialist and anarchist tendencies in 1917 and 1918, as well as the brutal crackdown on the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921, intensified significantly (Rosenberg 193–218). Trotsky was expelled from the Central Committee in 1927 and forced into exile in 1929. He initially went to Turkey, then lived in France, watched closely by French police, then moved to Norway, and eventually to Mexico in 1937. During his exile, Trotsky remained committed to the revolutionary struggle. He was a fierce critic of the “nationalization” of the revolutionary process inherent in Stalin’s “socialism-in-one-country” and continued to write texts and set up networks capable of challenging the political direction in which the Soviet Union was moving. At first, Trotsky was reluctant to build an international Communist organization to rival the Comintern, as he was afraid that it would splinter the Communist movement. However, confronted with the spread of fascism, he changed his mind and founded the Fourth International as an alternative to the Stalinist Comintern. This was the historical backdrop with which the Surrealists had to contend throughout the 1920s and 1930s—a fast-moving political and ideological horizon in which the prospect of a Communist revolution was bound up with events in the new Soviet state.

From an Irrational Revolution to a Communist One In Manifesto of Surrealism, published in October  1924, Breton outlined the Surrealist program: “A new morality must be substituted for the prevailing morality, the source of all our trials and tribulations” (Manifestoes 44). This was an ambitious program, aimed at nothing less than solving the problems of modern existence. Initially, the Surrealists’ preferred route to emancipation was poetry. They saw it as an art form that expressed the transgression of existing reality toward the marvelous, and therefore a means by which to channel and affirm the irrational aspects of human existence: Man . . . alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy. Poetry teaches him to. It bears within itself the perfect compensation for the miseries we endure. (18) Surrealism was the attempt to generalize Rimbaud’s “derangement of all the senses,” through which the poet transformed into a seer (Rimbaud 307). Obviously, the notion of the seer contained a revolutionary critique of existing society, but it was primarily formulated as a rejection of bourgeois morality. Breton’s manifesto did not contain any references to Marx, Communism, or the Russian Revolution. At first, the Surrealists did not see any connection between the contemporary revolutionary proletarian movement and Surrealism. In October 1924, Aragon tellingly dismissed the Russian Revolution in “Have You Ever Slapped a Corpse,” his contribution to the pamphlet Un cadavre, which ridiculed the recently deceased author Anatole France, an avid supporter of the Russian Revolution (Pierre 19–26). In an ensuing debate with Jean Bernier from the para-Communist journal Clarté, Aragon characterized the Russian Revolution as being “on the scale of ideas, not more than a vague ministerial crisis” (Pierre 377). Aragon stated that he had little regard for “politics” and its accompanying “pragmatism” but valued “the spirit of revolt” over all else (377). 137

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However, in the spring of 1925, the Surrealists started to relate their notion of a Surrealist revolution and the search for the marvelous to the idea of Communism, as encapsulated in the writings of Marx, the Russian Revolution, and the French Communist Party (founded in 1920). This was a difficult enterprise, as the Surrealists had no wish to give up or limit their idea of the marvelous, but at the same time, they wanted to exit the confines of the cultural institution. In an attempt to clarify matters and stress their revolutionary intentions, on January 27, 1925, the Surrealists issued a declaration in which they sought to emphasize their distance from the literary establishment and the cultural sector: “We have nothing to do with literature” (Pierre 34). Surrealism was not a literary movement, they said, but the Surrealists would use any means necessary, including literary ones, to “make a revolution” (34). “Declaration of 27 January 1925” was a perfect expression of the paradoxical avant-­gardist critique of art: art has subversive potential, but only insofar as art is realized in everyday life (Bolt Rasmussen, After 27–52). The Surrealists were revolutionary, but their activity was not directly anti-capitalist, except by analogy. Circumscribed by the domain of culture, they ­repeatedly sought to castigate the literary institution, constantly distancing themselves from contemporary artistic and literary groups and styles. However, it was obviously difficult to overcome the separation of art from life. Following the exchange between Aragon and Bernier, in which Bernier praised the Surrealists for publishing the anti-France pamphlet but critiqued Aragon for missing the significance of the October Revolution, the Clarté group and the Surrealists began to meet and discuss matters of common concern. In summer 1925, the two groups joined forces in opposing the French intervention in the Rif War on the side of the Spanish occupying forces (Drake 179–184). The Surrealists even agreed to sign a declaration written by the influential Communist author Henri Barbusse published in L’Humanité, the Communist Party’s paper, under the headline: “The intellectual workers on the side of the proletariat and against the war in Morocco” (Pierre 393). The Prix Goncourt winner Barbusse was a favorite target of the Surrealists, but the dramatic situation momentarily suspended their intracultural animosity and made them sign Barbusse’s declaration against European colonial warfare. The Surrealists then jointly issued several declarations with the Clarté group opposing the war. These declarations articulated a much more ruthless critique than Barbusse’s. The most important, “Révolution d’abord et toujours” (Revolution First and Always), cowritten by Aragon and Crastre from Clarté (Crastre 73), argued that workers in France should rally behind Abd el-Krim and the Rif rebels. As Clarté explained in an open letter preceding the declaration (Pierre 394), victory for the Moroccan people was a victory for the French proletariat, as both were fighting the capitalist class led by Paribas, the French investment bank that controlled 50% of investments in Morocco. With “Revolution First and Always,” the Surrealists not only made their antipatriotic stance clear—“for us France doesn’t exist” (Pierre 55)—but also took a step in a clear materialist direction, stressing the need for a social revolution. “We are the revolt of the spirit; we consider a bloody Revolution to be the inescapable revenge of the spirit humiliated by your works. We are not utopians; we conceive this Revolution only in its social form” (56). The text voiced a radical Marxist critique of Western commodity society, arguing that it reduced everyone—workers and colonized alike— to their exchange value. “We do not accept the laws of the Economy or Exchange; we do not accept the slavery of work” (55). The only solution was a total revolution in the sense outlined by Marx as a total break with civilization: “We are undoubtedly barbarians because a certain form of civilization disgusts us. . . . We want to proclaim our total detachment . . . from the ideas that are the foundation of European civilization” (54). The text constituted a significant shift toward practical collaboration with groups and journals that were either Communist or affiliated to the PCF in other ways. The text was published 138

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both as a pamphlet and in the fifth issue of the Surrealists’ journal The Surrealist Revolution, alongside Breton’s review of the French translation of Trotsky’s biography of Lenin. Breton was very enthusiastic, asserting that the Russian Revolution was of utmost importance and far from over: “The Russian Revolution finished, I don’t think so” (“Lénine” 29). He wrote that the events in Russia were an inspiration for revolutionaries in France, where the French Revolution had become part of the national mythology. Trotsky’s biography presented an opportunity to reaffirm the recent shift in the Surrealist position. Breton ended his short review, which was more a comment on the ongoing discussions in the group and the cultural political milieu rather than an actual review of Trotsky’s book, with an enthusiastic “Long live Lenin!” (“Lénine” 29). Lenin was considered a revolutionary seer, an ally in the grand-scale social and mental transformation of society. However, the shift toward the idea that the Surrealist revolution had to be or was also a Communist revolution was in no way straightforward. Along the way, the group was mired in conflict and discussion regarding how the Surrealist revolution of the mind could be combined with the idea of a Communist revolution of capitalist society. Some members of the group were very reluctant to pursue this. Antonin Artaud regarded the rapprochement as a betrayal of the revolutionary character of the Surrealist endeavor. To him, the Surrealist revolution was first and foremost a metaphysical transformation. To ally oneself to a political party or an ideology, be it Communism, Marxism, or otherwise, was to limit the spiritual metamorphosis Surrealism sought to embody. Artaud refused to follow Breton, Aragon, and the others, saying, “I aspire to another life” (Artaud 143). While Artaud was dismissive of the attempt to “Marxify” the Surrealist position and employ the terminology of Marxism—class struggle, exploitation, exchange value, etc.—other members, such as Pierre Naville, were becoming impatient and found Breton’s “politicization” unconvincing. After joining Clarté in June 1926, Naville argued that the Surrealists had to concentrate on the concrete needs of the revolution and dedicate themselves to a Marxist analysis of the contradictions of capitalism and the proletariat’s abolition of bourgeois class power (Naville 324–330). He asserted that this was a question of choosing revolution over revolt and sought to convince Breton and the other Surrealists to focus on the material destruction of capitalism rather than the liberation of the mind. The attempt to collaborate with Clarté quickly fell apart, and the mooted idea of a joint journal never materialized. In his reply to Naville, “Legitime Defense,” Breton made one final attempt to occupy a position from which he could both uphold the autonomy of the Surrealist project and still claim to be a revolutionary Communist. He did not hold back, violently critiquing Barbusse and L’Humanité, calling the party paper “unreadable” and “puerile” (Breton, “Légitime défense” 34). He insisted that there was no contradiction between the Surrealist attempt to revolutionize “inner life” and the Communist aim of ending capitalism. However, this text did not resolve the dispute. In 1927, following lengthy discussions in the Surrealist group, Breton, Aragon, Eluard, and Pierre Unik finally decided to apply individually for membership of the French Communist Party (Nadeau 103–106). Paradoxically, at that moment, Naville, who had been pressuring the other Surrealists to join the party, was himself on the verge of leaving to join the Trotskyist opposition following a trip to the Soviet Union, where he had met Victor Serge (a contributor to Clarté) and Trotsky (Löwy 50–51). The Surrealists’ problems only worsened once five of them joined the PCF. They had to engage in “a fragile balancing act,” as they attempted to continue the Surrealist project as members of the PCF (Fauvet 115). The leadership of the Communist Party was not only puzzled by the arrival of the new members, who had previously mocked the party and the Russian Revolution, but also seemed intent on shunning the Surrealists. Although the PCF had no clear cultural program in the late 1920s, the party considered the Surrealists’ 139

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artistic practice bourgeois at best but more often attacked it for being juvenile and anarchist (Durozoi 137–147). The early years of the party’s existence had been characterized by different factions and ongoing discussion regarding the development of the Russian Revolution (Fauvet 46–48). By 1927, this situation was changing—  the party was quickly becoming Stalinist. Even as new members enrolled, many original members left, disillusioned both by the party and by ongoing political developments (Wohl 398). The idea of a global revolution had suffered a heavy blow, in the form of the defeat of the German Revolution in 1923, which followed the failed November Revolution of 1919. In the same year that the Surrealists joined the party, the dream of revolution was further shattered with the massacre of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. The sense that a revolution was imminent slowly evaporated (Adamczak 11–14), and the Communist Party began to behave like a “normal” political organization, with a leadership and a base. Worse, it began to uncritically defend whatever the Comintern and Stalin decided, including the adoption of the theory of “socialism-in-one-country.” Soon the party would be characterized by a sterile and dogmatic economism, coupled with a triumphalist understanding of history (Lichtheim 39–40). The Surrealist dream of combining a revolution of the mind with a program of socio-material transformation, including an end to the money economy, was no longer on the table. In 1929, Breton published Second Manifesto of Surrealism, in which he sought to justify his decision to join the PCF, affirming “completely, without any reservations, [the Surrealists’] allegiance to the principle of historical materialism” (Manifestoes 142). He insisted that “Surrealism considers itself ineluctably linked . . . to the movement of Marxist thought and to that movement alone” (149). In doing so, Breton was both settling scores with former members of the Surrealist group (Naville, Artaud, Robert Desnos, André Masson, etc.) who were in different ways skeptical regarding the rapprochement to the PCF and trying to show that Marxism was in fact a natural complement to Surrealism’s existential project of a mental and moral revolution. The stakes were high, and it was difficult to convince an evermore dogmatic “economist” Communist Party of the relevance of Surrealism. When he first joined the party, Breton was asked to make a statistical report on the state of the Italian gas industry (143) and found himself constantly having to explain and justify Surrealist activities to commissions composed of anonymous party functionaries (Breton, Entretiens 130–131). In 1930, the Surrealist journal was renamed Surrealism in the Service of Revolution to signal the commitment to a Communist revolution. The first issue opened with a statement of unconditional support for the Comintern and its political line, in the form of a telegram sent to Moscow stating that, in the case of an imperialist war against the Soviet Union, the Surrealists would join the ranks of the latter (Pierre 153–154). The new pledge of allegiance was followed by the active participation of several younger Surrealists in party activities, including André Thirion (Thirion 108–122), as well as a series of Surrealist projects somewhat reluctantly supported by the PCF. Thirion mounted a counter-exhibition to the 1931 Exposition Coloniale, called “The Truth about the Colonies,” in the Palais des Soviets, a former exhibition hall used as headquarter for workers’ syndicates (Thirion 319–320). The critique of colonialism was one issue on which the Surrealists were able to find common ground with the Comintern-supporting PCF, as both groups agreed that fighting colonialism was integral to overthrowing capitalism.

The Break The Surrealists found it difficult to pursue their attempt to articulate a total revolutionary stance combining a material rejection of the ills of capitalism with a realization of the deep desires of 140

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subjects within the framework of the PCF. They would continuously spark conflict with other Communist or para-Communist groups and journals, such as Monde, Naville’s Class Struggle, and Marxist Review, critiquing them for being insufficiently radical in their behavior and writings. However, the idea that the revolution should be in the service of the marvelous was given little credence. In 1930, during a trip to Kharkov in the USSR, where he attended the International Conference of Revolutionary Writers, Aragon was asked to sign a statement distancing himself from idealism and the Trotskyist tendencies in Surrealism (Pierre 185). Upon his return to Paris, Aragon retracted his statement and reaffirmed the importance of the Surrealists’ experiments. New members of the Surrealist group, not the least Salvador Dalí, were nonetheless discontent with Aragon’s behavior and insisted on the importance of a totally open and experimental attitude, even if that meant displeasing the PCF (Breton, Entretiens 168). In January 1932, Aragon was again in trouble. During his trip to the USSR, he had written the poem “Red Front,” which contained the lines “Kill the cops” and “Fire on Léon Blum.” The poem was published in July 1931, and a few months later, the French authorities charged Aragon with incitement to murder (Durozoi 232–233). Breton came to Aragon’s defense in a pamphlet titled The Poverty of Poetry, in which he insisted on Aragon’s right to artistic freedom, arguing that the poem was written in specific circumstances during the trip to the USSR and that the poem could not be understood on the basis of specific lines taken out of context but had to be read in its entirety (Pierre 208–222). While Breton was busy trying to defend and rally support for his comrade in the Parisian cultural public sphere, Aragon was brought in front of an internal PCF committee to explain the recently published fourth issue of Surrealism in the Service of Revolution. The situation was becoming increasingly pressurized. When Breton’s pamphlet came out, Aragon distanced himself from the Surrealist group and quickly took on a significant role in the cultural apparatus of the PCF, as a writer in L’Humanité and editor of Commune, a journal launched by the party in March 1932 as an outlet for the newly created Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, the local branch of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (Lewis 99–100). Aragon was out, and the PCF was busy promoting the Comintern’s new cultural line—a broad cultural front against fascism—but the Surrealists nonetheless still sought to continue their uneasy alliance with the party. The sixth issue of Surrealism in the Service of Revolution, published in 1932, included a translation of Lenin’s notes on Hegel, alongside Breton’s Communicating Vessels and Réné Crevel’s Diderot’s Harpsichord. The latter two pieces attempted to show the necessity of fusing dialectical materialism with the Surrealist critique of logical perception—in other words, political action and Surrealist activity went hand in hand. However, political events continued to accelerate and would soon shatter the alliance between the Surrealists and the PCF. In the early 1930s, in the wake of the Great Depression, France underwent an economic crisis, leading to an unstable political situation in which local fascist parties and organizations gained ground. In Germany, Hitler came to power in 1933. The revolutionaries were facing a double defeat. Not only had the Russian Revolution disintegrated and turned into a state capitalist dictatorship, but a counterrevolutionary wave was also sweeping across Europe, from Italy to Germany, in the form of fascist movements that brutally crushed any remaining revolutionary aspirations. The parliamentary situation in France was characterized by chaos and the inability to form viable governments following the 1932 elections. In February 1934, paramilitary ultraroyalist and fascist groups rioted in Paris, raising the specter of a fascist takeover in France. The center-left Daladier government was forced to resign, and a government comprising several far-right parties came to power. The Surrealists reacted quickly, writing and distributing two pamphlets calling for a response to the fascist riots. 141

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They interpreted the events as a coup attempt and called for a general strike (Pierre 262–263, 265–267). Confronted with the rise of fascism, the Comintern revised its policies, abandoning its opposition to parliamentarism, while the PCF joined forces with the social democrats and middle-class republicans (Agnew and McDermott 120–121). The turn in the politics of the Communist movement was confirmed in May 1935, when the USSR signed a Treaty of Mutual Assistance with France. The Surrealists viewed the pact as an instance of nationalism and a complete abandonment of the internationalism that had previously characterized the revolutionary Communist perspective. In June that year, the Surrealists tried to participate in the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, set up by the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, but found that they were unwelcome. The conference’s emphasis was on defending French culture—a stance the Surrealists could not accept. Nonetheless, Crevel had managed to secure a spot in the program. However, on the eve of the conference, Breton encountered the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, a distinguished member of the Soviet delegation, and assaulted him for writing a pamphlet in which he characterized the Surrealists as pederasts. Eluard was allowed to read the presentation Breton had prepared, but the conference signaled the end of the alliance between the PCF and the Surrealists. Two months later, the Surrealists published a pamphlet, When the Surrealists were Right, that critiqued the PCF’s recent nationalist turn and questioned the revolutionary nature of the party and the Comintern. The time had finally come to bid farewell to the French Communist Party: “We can do no more than to formally notify this regime, this chief, of our mistrust” (Pierre 281). From then on, the Surrealist group distanced itself from the PCF. Soon afterward, in October 1935, the Surrealists joined forces with Georges Bataille and other former Surrealists in the short-lived Counter-Attack group. Their objective was to oppose not only the fascist offensive but also the Stalinist PCF, as well as the increasingly weakened democratic system. CounterAttack, Union of the Struggle of Revolutionary Intellectuals, was an attempt to meet the challenge of fascism head-on by emphasizing the collective strength and affective dimension of class struggle. While the new Popular Front approach appealed to the nation, it was deemed too passive and thus not capable of responding to the radical challenge of the fascists who were mobilizing the disillusioned masses (Bataille 124–125). Bataille, who had written several analyses of fascism, described fascism as radically other, dynamic and heterogeneous, which distinguished it from the homogeneous democratic politics that seemed preoccupied with productivity (Pierre 283). In November 1935, Breton published Political Position of Surrealism, a collection of political articles, culminating in the announcement of the new project. However, Counter-Attack was short-lived. In March 1936, the Surrealists issued a short statement announcing their break with Bataille, whom they accused of being unable to differentiate between critically using fascism in order to defeat it and just using fascism (Pierre 301). The mid-1930s were an extremely difficult time for the Surrealists and for most other avantgarde groups (Held 17–52). Developments in the USSR were challenging the entire narrative of the Russian Revolution as the beginning of something new, and the rise of fascism threatened to derail the revolutionary push once and for all. After the final break with the PCF in 1935, the Surrealists began working with factions closer to Trotsky’s Left Opposition. Given the situation in the USSR—forced collectivization, the Moscow Show Trials, and the crushing of the Spanish Revolution by Stalinist forces attacking the left-centrist POUM—it was natural that they should turn to Trotsky. The new alliance was confirmed during Breton’s trip to Mexico in 1938, via the previously mentioned cowritten manifesto For an Independent Revolutionary Art, in which Breton and Trotsky not only attacked the three competing ideologies of the time— fascism, Bolshevism, and Popular Front democracy—but also defended the revolutionary nature 142

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of modern art: “We believe that the supreme task of art in our epoch is to take part actively and consciously in the preparation of the revolution” (Breton and Trotsky 52). However, these revolutionary aspirations took another heavy beating during World War II, in which tens of millions of workers were killed. Trotsky himself was killed one year into the war, when a Spanish-born Soviet agent attacked him with an icepick. The war buried the dream of a revolutionary upheaval. As Jacques Camatte summarized it in the early 1970s, by 1945 the old workers’ movement had effectively died (Camatte 240). The proletariat had been integrated and abandoned its revolutionary mission. After the war, the Surrealists attempted to revamp their activities. Breton and several other members had been in the United States during the occupation of France, but the group kept their distance from the PCF. Although the Surrealist group remained an important part of the cultural revolutionary milieu in Paris, new groups emerged that claimed to be the true continuation of the Surrealist project, including the Revolutionary Surrealism Group CoBrA, the Lettrists, and the Situationist International (Bolt Rasmussen, “The Situationist International”). Throughout the postwar period, the PCF and its huge cultural apparatus loomed over the cultural political horizon, attempting to intimidate revolutionaries into submission. Following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, many Communists left the PCF (Caute 227–234). The unrest on the streets of Paris and Lyon and other cities across France in May–June 1968 was a radical critique of postwar consumer society, but also a rejection of the PCF and its defense of electoral politics (Baudrillard 13). The PCF’s response to the events—dismissing the students as bourgeois and trying to keep the students and the striking workers apart—confirmed that the party was part of the political system. Contrary to its revolutionary rhetoric, the PCF helped to defuse the largest general strike in Western Europe in the postwar era. Some members of the Surrealists had regrouped after Breton’s death in 1965, and many Situationists came out onto the streets during the events of May–June 1968, participating in occupations and writing pamphlets. During the tumultuous events of ’68, the walls of Paris were covered in “surreal-expressive poetic content” (Baudrillard et al. 16), showing that, for many participants, the Surrealist dream of a realization of poetry was alive and well (Duwa 173–184).

Conclusion: Art and Revolution The question of the relation between Surrealism and Communism was never resolved. In retrospect, it might seem strange that the Surrealists went to such great lengths to maintain their relation to the PCF at a time when the party was becoming a centralized, ideologically homogeneous party led from abroad—indeed, the most slavishly loyal of all Western European Communist parties. However, we must remember that the party presented itself as the primary representative of Communism and the Russian Revolution, which was an extremely inspiring event for any contemporary revolutionary. The Bretonian Surrealists were part of the “generation of revolutionaries [who were] committed to the vision of world revolution under the flag raised in October” (Hobsbawm 71). The prospect of building a new world, one far removed from the world that had sent millions of men to their death in World War I, was intoxicating. The idea promised an end to capitalist exploitation and the misery of the uneven development of capitalism. In a certain sense, the Surrealists were unlucky to have collided with one specific incarnation of Communism, namely, the PCF. Even if the party had originally been characterized by openness, the window was closing by the time the Surrealists joined. The Surrealists wrestled with and tried to hold on to the illusion of a Communist Soviet Union but ultimately had to let go in order to salvage poetry and the idea of a Communist revolution (to come). 143

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Works Cited Adamczak, Bini. Beziehungsweise Revolution. 1917, 1968, und kommende. Suhrkamp, 2017. Agnew, Jeremy, and Kevin McDermott. The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin. Palgrave, 1996. Artaud, Antonin. “In Total Darkness, or The Surrealist Bluff” [1927]. Selected Writings, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. Bataille, Georges. L’Apprenti Sorcier. Textes, lettres et documents (1932–1939). Éditions de la Différence, 1999. Baudrillard, Jean. Le P.C. ou les paradis artificiels du politique. Cahiers d’Utopie, 1979. Baudrillard, Jean, Bernard Conein, Laurent Cornaz, François Gautheret, René Lorau, Jean-François Lyotard, and Hélène Uhry. “La transgression est-elle un mode d’action politique?” [1968]. Jean Baudrillard. Entretien, PUF, 2019, pp. 15–51. Bolt Rasmussen, Mikkel. After the Great Refusal. Zero Books, 2018. ———. “The Situationist International, Surrealism and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics.” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 27, no. 3, 2004, pp. 365–387. Breton, André. Entretiens (1913–1952). Gallimard, 1969. ———. “Légitime défense.” La Révolution Surréaliste, no. 8, 1926, pp. 30–36. ———. “Léon Trotsky: Lénine.” La Révolution Surréaliste, no. 5, 1925, p. 29. ———. Manifestoes of Surrealism. University of Michigan Press, 1971. Breton, André, and Leon Trotsky. “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art.” Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 1, 1939, pp. 49–53. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Camatte, Jacques. Capital et Gemeinwesen. Spartacus, 1976. Caute, David. Communism and The French Intellectuals. Andre Deutsch, 1964. Crastre, Victor. Le drame du surréalisme. Éditions du Temps, 1963. Drake, David. “The PCF, the Surrealists, Clarté and the Rif War.” French Cultural Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, 2006, pp. 173–188. Durozoi, Gérard. A History of the Surrealist Movement. University of Chicago Press, 2002. Duwa, Jérôme. 1968. Année surréaliste: Cuba, Prague, Paris. Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, 2008. Fauvet, Jacques. Histoire du Parti Communiste Français, 1920–1976. Fayard, 1977. Held, Jutta. Avantgarde und Politik in Frankreich. Revolution, Krieg und Faschismus im Blickfeld der Künste. Reimer, 2005. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. Abacus, 1995. Lewis, Helena. The Politics of Surrealism. Paragon House, 1988. Lichtheim, George. Marxism in Modern France. Columbia University Press, 1966. Löwy, Michael. Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia. University of Texas Press, 2009. Nadeau, Maurice. Histoire du surréalisme. Seuil, 1991. Naville, Pierre. Le Temps du surréal: L’espérance mathématique. Galilée, 1977. Pierre, José, editor. Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, 1922–1939. Eric Losfeld, 1980. Rimbaud, Arthur. Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition. The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Rosenberg, Arthur. A History of Bolshevism: From Marx to the First Five-Year Plan. Oxford University Press, 1934. Schwarz, Arturo. Breton/Trotsky. 10/18 (Union générale d’éditions), 1977. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. MIT Press, 1976. Thirion, André. Révolutionnaires sans Révolution. Robert Laffont, 1972. Trotsky, Leon. “Art and Revolution.” Partisan Review, vol. 5, no. 3, 1939, pp. 3–10. Wistrich, Robert. Trotsky: The Fate of a Revolutionary. Robson Books, 1979.

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16 SURREALISM’S PUBLICS Rachel Silveri

“One publishes to seek out men, and nothing more,” André Breton declares within the first pages of Les Pas perdus (The Lost Steps, 1924 (Œuvres complètes 194)).1 Writing these lines nearly a century later, I feel a similar impulse accompany my own voice: we write to seek the company of others. We publish in hopes of finding a community of readers—some like-minded; others who bring disagreement and nuance, a change in perspective; those we might teach and who might teach us in turn; and still others unknown, whose encounter with our words might spark something entirely new. This chapter responds to the prompt by The Routledge Companion of Surrealism to reflect on Surrealism’s public interfaces. How did the Surrealists, at the start of their movement in Paris in the 1920s, seek out others? In what ways did they court and attract an audience, viewer, or reader? How, in short, did Surrealism create its publics? These questions are broad, and their answers could fill many books. Of the many pursuits of the Surrealists, this chapter will privilege one, that of the Bureau de recherches surréalistes (Surrealist Research Bureau) and the complexity of its more contemporary afterlives. For what this chapter contends is that what constitutes a Surrealist public is not necessarily so straightforward, particularly for a movement that upended public/private distinctions and which eschewed any simple understanding of the present in favor of a dense, multiwoven temporality of uncovered pasts and possible futures to come. While the Bureau may not have initially succeeded in finding an audience, its publics eventually arrived, creatively adapting and transforming the office into other endeavors. To begin, then, to answer the question of Surrealism’s public interfaces, one must state unequivocally from the start that this movement ruptured the traditional distinctions of a public/private binary. Working in the path cleared by “the discoveries of Freud” (Breton, Œuvres complètes 316), the Surrealists asserted that no aspect of private life should remain unexamined. Dreams held during slumber would, upon waking, be remembered, recorded, analyzed, and published. The first page of the very first issue of The Surrealist Revolution (December 1924) begins with dreams recounted by Breton and Giorgio de Chirico. The unconscious—that unintelligible opacity of memory, fantasy, and thought which grounds the self but remains unspoken, obscure, glimpsed through “slips” of the tongue and “mistakes” of the mind (Breton, Œuvres complètes 318)—this unconscious was to be made manifest, captured through the techniques of

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automatism, published in various forms, offered up for public scrutiny. These practices were visible from the earliest days of the movement, from the automatic writing of Breton and Philippe Soupault’s Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields, 1922) to André Masson’s automatic drawings that appeared throughout the run of The Surrealist Revolution (1924–29). Likewise, the experiences of desire, love, and sex—these were not confined to the bedroom but broadcasted, celebrated, examined, and discussed. Breton’s chance encounter with Léona Delacourt on Rue Lafayette and the passion that ensued filled the pages of Nadja (1928), his love of Jacqueline Lamba praised and proffered as necessary and absolute in L’Amour fou (Mad Love, 1937), and more than a dozen of the Surrealists publicly debated various facets of sex—a woman’s orgasm, masturbation, an array of sexual positions—in the Recherches sur la sexualité (Research on Sexuality, 1928). These are but a few examples. In short, as the writer Henri Pastoureau stated, “In Surrealism, private life and public life do not differ very much” (349). Or at a broader level, as Sarane Alexandrian maintained, what Surrealism ultimately promised was “the overthrowing of the institutions of public life by the inspirations of private life” (124). Where, then, does that leave us with the question of Surrealism’s public interfaces? That, perhaps, any Surrealist activity has a public-facing component to it. (Indeed, it’s a question which begs another, which is that of what might constitute a properly private Surrealist pursuit, if such exists.) Even the personal manuscripts penned by the Surrealists and their intimate correspondence have now found a public, whether through posthumous publication or the preservation of archives. Something of a genuinely private practice must be one that has eluded the archives altogether—say, Simone Breton’s correspondence with André (Colvile 16–17). As such, the best definition of a Surrealist interface might be its broadest: that the promise of Surrealism lay in how it reworked the boundaries between private and public, the conscious and unconscious, reality and dream, past and present, present and future, individual desire and the workings of the world. Among the many ventures of the Surrealists at the start of their movement, one of the most innovative was the Bureau de recherches surréalistes, what the artists intimately called La Centrale (The Office). Situated in the Hôtel de Bérulle, at that time owned by Pierre Naville’s family, the Bureau was located at 15 rue de Grenelle in the seventh arrondissement of Paris. A bilevel space, the ground level was used for office work, while the second floor was purposed for more intimate gatherings among the Surrealists themselves. They furnished the Bureau with furniture and equipment—a table, chairs, typewriter, and a large black cahier used as a logbook. The Surrealists ordered official business stamps and printed several letterheads. They decorated the space with various works: De Chirico’s Le Rêve de Tobie (The Dream of Tobias, 1917) hung on the walls alongside a painting by Max Morise, a watercolor by Robert Desnos, several posters, and “a volume of Fantômas, fixed to the wall with forks” (Aragon 26–27). A statue of a wild boar was placed in the stairway, a deformed mirror was brought in, and as Aragon declared, they “hung a woman from the ceiling”—a nude statuette contorted in a pose of hysteria (Bureau 27–29; Aragon 26). Most importantly for our purposes here, the Surrealists decided the Bureau would have a public function: open every day, Monday to Saturday, from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., and staffed by two different Surrealists, the office’s goal was to receive and welcome visitors. In a meeting in September or early October of 1924, the Surrealists envisioned the types of audience they would attract: 1) “All those who desire to gather information about Surrealism”—anyone, in short, who wanted to consult the Bureau’s library of Surrealist publications; 2) “All those who desire to abandon themselves to dream and surrender themselves to experiences (of automatic writing)”; and 3) “All those who, interested in Surrealism, would like to bring ideas related to

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a new means of expression”—anyone, that is, who had innovative ideas for the Bureau, for the journal The Surrealist Revolution, or for the Surrealist movement at large (“Bureau” 94).2 To help publicize their new office, the Surrealists sent announcements to various newspapers and journals. Paris-Soir, for example, in its edition of October 7, 1924, reported: The promoters of the Surrealist movement, eager to make the greatest use of the unknown and to engage Surrealism in the most independent of ways, have now organized an Office where all those who are interested in manifestations of thought freed from artistic preoccupations will be received. (2) The Surrealists also created their own publicity. A  full-page advertisement for the Bureau appeared on the verso of the cover in the first issue of The Surrealist Revolution. At the top of the page was the journal’s masthead and a brief introduction to the goals of the movement, extolling the promises of Surrealist inquiry (“we must expect everything from the future”). The advertisement’s center featured a drawing of a fish with “SURRÉALISME” boldly printed along its body, positioned next to accompanying text which interpellated the viewer: “We are on the eve of a REVOLUTION. . . You can take part.” The bottom of the page directed readers to the address and opening hours of the Bureau. Alongside the publicity that appeared in the journal, the Surrealists created a series of papillons, a set of sixteen small multicolored papers that promoted the Bureau and Surrealism at large. Borrowing from the Dadaist strategy of using petite brightly colored flyers to advertise the Dada movement and its illogic and humor, the Surrealists experimented with different forms of language, both appropriated and new, aimed at arousing curiosity and luring any potential reader to visit the space of the Centrale. In one—“PARENTS! Recount your dreams to your children”—they offer directive, a suggested action. In another—“SURREALISM is literature denied”—they espoused a central claim of their movement. Several cards offered phrases from George Berkeley, G. W. F. Hegel, or lifted unattributed quotes from Gaston Leroux’s pulp novel Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1908), where the removal of the quote’s frame of reference has led one historian to describe the papillons as producing a break in communication, offering the multiplication of “difference and uncertainty” (Eburne 45). Other cards directly promoted the movement, publicizing its name: “If you love LOVE, you will love SURREALISM.” “Surrealism is the door to every unconscious.” “Surrealism is looking for you. You are looking for Surrealism.” No matter the phrase or its source, each of the sixteen cards listed the address “15, rue de Grenelle,” with some adding the arrondissement “Paris-7e,” others adding the title “Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes,” and still others providing the opening hours “4 h. ½ à 6 h. ½.” A primary purpose of these papillons was thus geared toward raising interest and intrigue; they alerted readers that an official locale for Surrealism existed, a place where one could visit and learn more. Pasted on the walls of Paris or inserted into publications and distributed throughout a network of bookstores and cafés, these small advertisements became their own type of interface, working to cultivate a public for the Bureau (Alexandre 105). Presented with this array of publicity endeavors, one might imagine that the Surrealists successfully welcomed an abundance of visitors to the Centrale’s quarters. During the year of the office’s opening, Aragon wrote, “[E]very day, worried men arrive, carrying heavy secrets” (26). Breton later maintained that the office was “besieged” by “nosy and annoying” individuals (Entretiens 112). Others, such as Maurice Nadeau, romanticized the office as a place that

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beckoned “all those carrying secrets: the inventors, the insane, the revolutionaries, the inadaptable, the dreamers” (61). In reality, however, during the early existence of the Bureau, from October 10, 1924, to January 30, 1925 (the date when the Centrale closed to the public), the office received only sixty-six visitors—roughly four guests per week.3 Most of them were fellow Surrealists (Man Ray, Max Ernst, Théodore Fraenkel, René Crevel, Philippe Soupault), soon-to-be love interests (Nancy Cunard, Lise Meyer), or other avant-garde friends (Pierre de Massot, Vicente Huidobro). If not directly affiliated with Surrealism, many guests were writers or literary figures (Paul Valéry, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Raymond Queneau, Joseph Delteil, Pierre Reverdy). Quite often, visitors were editors, critics, or journalists who were already planning on writing articles about Surrealism. Only several guests fit the category of a nonartistic, nonliterary individual interested in learning more about the movement—a student, a businessman, an “unknown” stranger, and a series of intrigued women (named Mademoiselles Dallot, Luminet, and Terpsé). And in only one or two instances did the public existence of the Bureau create a new convert to Surrealism— such as Georges Bessière, who learned about the movement and very quickly became more involved, even assuming replacement shifts at the office in January 1925.4 Given this veritable infrequency of visitors to the Bureau and the fact that the office fully closed on April  20, 1925 (six months after its creation), some historians have subsequently deemed the Centrale’s relationship to the public “ambiguous” at best, a “failure” at worst (Kelly 89; Spieker, “La bureaucratie” 41). But while the Bureau was initially unsuccessful in engaging a community of others, it has nevertheless achieved a robust legacy, influencing artistic practices across generations, from the midcentury to the contemporary moment. Consider: in July 1943, amid the German occupation of France, members of the Surrealist collective Quatre Vingt et un (Eighty-one) published a series of four multicolored “playing cards.”5 One, borrowing directly from the Bureau’s own papillon, declared, “If you love LOVE, you will love SURREALISM.” Another stated, “If you are not a PRIEST, GENERAL, OR BEAST, you will be Surrealist.” A third proclaimed, “—On the question of form, they say EVERYTHING that is known HAS BEEN SAID. —That’s good. It’s time to say WHAT WE DON’T KNOW.” And yet another issued the directive “Unbutton your BRAIN as often as your FLY.” On the verso of each card were short poems published, respectively, by Marc Patin, Noël Arnaud, André Stil, and Boris Rybak, each in some way affiliated with Quatre Vingt et un and the affiliate group La Main à Plume (The Hand with Quill). Underneath each of the card’s slogans rested the name CENTRES D’ACTION SURRÉALISTE, listing three locations: Le Quesnoy, representing the occupied zone of the North; the urban center of Paris; and Villeurbanne, near Lyon, representing the unoccupied zone of the South. What are these Centres d’action surréaliste, this clear invocation of the original Bureau de recherches surréalistes, and its diffusion of publicity-seeking papillons? As scholars such as Michel Fauré and Gérard Durozoi have demonstrated, the goal of La Main à Plume and Quatre Vingt et un was to “keep Surrealism alive under social and political conditions that were most unfavorable to it” (Durozoi, “Les Audaces” 5). While leaders of the movement such as Breton sought exile in the Americas, the members of these loose collectives stayed in France, working under the oppressive conditions of the Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime. They sought to “save Surrealism from history,” to “protect” the movement’s name and “publicly maintain” its “poetic” thought (Arnaud et al. 277, 283). “To prove our existence,” they wrote, “it was necessary to ensure a more or less accessible publication” (Arnaud et  al. 277). And so they published—journals, magazines, essays, poems, anthologies—seeking out others while attesting to their own presence.

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In this context, the “Centres d’action surréaliste” acted as a performative force: less referring to three distinct public centers, the name at once suggested the diffusion of Surrealism and its unity, multiplied in cities across France, transcending the very boundaries of the occupation. The cards, often freely distributed, alerted readers to the Vingt et un collective and provided them with the means with which they could learn more. Still, these cards carried a risk. The addresses listed in Paris, Le Quesnoy, and Villeurbanne were the personal addresses of Arnaud, Stil, and Pierre Minne, making the authors easy to find and target. And the risks for La Main à Plume were real: Arnaud, Jacques Bureau, and Jean-François Chabrun were arrested by the Abwehr in July 1943; Patin passed away after being forced to enlist in the Service du travail obligatoire; Jean-Claude Diamant-Berger died in the Resistance; Jean-Pierre Mulotte, Jean Simonpoli, Marco Ménegoz, and Robert Rius were executed by the Nazis; Hans Schoenhoff and Tita (née Edita Hirschová) died in concentration camps (Fauré 284–298; Vernay and Walter 21, 324–338). Here, then, we see one of the public afterlives of the original Surrealist Research Bureau, a site whose historical memory later inspired a handful of artists living under fascism to assume the courage to continue publishing. In 2005, another evocation of the Centrale took place at the Manchester Museum. There, visitors encountered the Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and Its Legacy, created by Mark Dion. A gallery enclosed with a wooden door and glass paneling, the installation featured a fireplace and two plush armchairs on one end of the room, a worktable and overstuffed desk on the other. Throughout, Dion filled the space with objects culled from the university museum’s storage, privileging items that were unusual, outmoded, defying classification (Lomas 6–7). In the artist’s words, he sought “curiosities and arcane artifacts,” objects damaged and fragmented, “fantastic things,” and items that might produce a “smile (and) laugh” or “shock and condemnation” (Dion, Bureau 126; Dion et al. 3, 7; Endt 6). Peeking through the windows, viewers could find a stuffed six-legged guinea pig and other taxidermied animals, photographs of pyramids, images of a so-called Neanderthal man, mineral and fossil specimens, forged Egyptian statuaries, and wax models of plants, all situated around bookshelves, display cases, filing cabinets, and a Rorschach-inspired wallpaper. Outside the office’s door, viewers were invited to take papillons from a cabinet, some featuring direct replicas of the original Bureau’s own phrasing, others newly invented by Dion, such as the query “Are you a fox or a hedgehog?” (Endt 11). While Dion claimed that he learned about the original Bureau only after he had begun work on the installation (Dion et al. 5), it is nevertheless important to emphasize the differences between these two projects. As both I and others have argued elsewhere, the 1924 Centrale was a site directed less toward parody and critique and instead mired in forms of interwar bureaucracy, a sober attempt at legitimizing the newly formed avant-garde movement, a genuine effort in using organizational systems, and a tangle of power relations which saw Breton rising to the position of office manager and Surrealist leader (Silveri; Hayden; Spieker, Big Archive 85–103). By contrast, Dion’s work is geared toward the critique of dominant knowledge systems and their everyday practices, from museological to bureaucratic and scientific. In the words of one scholar, his Bureau hovers “ambiguously between parody and endorsement,” using such a position for “ambushing forms of cultural authority” (Lomas 9). Further still, the artist stated that his office was “a way of motivating people around the idea of the marvelous” (Dion et al. 5). Rather than fully embrace the original Bureau and its trappings, effectively, what Dion accomplishes is to tap into a spirit of Surrealism—embracing the marvelous, the uncanny, the unknown—in a manner that at once carries such energies into the twenty-first century while inviting us to reimagine how the historical precedent could have been otherwise. While the Surrealist Research Bureau has continued to inspire other contemporary artists, such as Her de Vries, Craig Willms, and the Dreams Collectors project, I will end this chapter with 150

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a final example: that of Sam Durant.6 In 2014, his show Invisible Surrealists opened at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. An installation with works on paper and mixed-media sculptural objects, many of the works consisted of graphite drawings in which Durant appropriated canonical images, altering them to give voice to alterative histories. In one, The Séance, When History Wakes Up (Frantz Fanon) (2014), Durant reproduced a cropped image of Man Ray’s 1924 photograph of the Bureau, in which various Surrealists appear huddled around Simone Breton, seated at a table with a typewriter. Amid the crowded gathering, meticulously reproduced in graphite with the addition of red enamel, Durant has added the portrait of Frantz Fanon, who gazes outward and confronts the viewer. In another, Poetry Must Be Made By All, Not By One (2014), Durant appropriated Man Ray’s other famous photograph of the Bureau, originally featuring fourteen Surrealists lined up against the office’s interior, presenting themselves as a serious and formidable group. To this assembly, Durant inserted portraits of Wifredo Lam, Joyce Mansour, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Jules Monnerot, René Ménil, Claude McKay, and Baya Mahieddine (Figure 16.1). As stated in the exhibition’s press release, Durant’s purpose was to recuperate the “revolutionary” spirit of Surrealism and draw attention to “lesser-known members of the movement from the Francophone colonies,” working against historical “amnesia and repression.” While Durant admitted being inspired by the seminal work of Robin D. G. Kelley, it should be noted that artists, scholars, and curators of Surrealism have been arriving at this critique for quite some time (Kelley 157–194; Rosemont and Kelley). Consider, for example, Franklin Rosemont, a member of the Chicago Surrealist Group, who corresponded with Naville throughout 1989. Writing letter after letter asking the elderly Surrealist for more information about the origins of the movement, Rosemont was particularly interested in uncovering the

Figure 16.1 Sam Durant, Poetry Must Be Made By All, Not By One, 2014. Graphite on paper, 26 × 40 in. (66 × 101.6 cm), frame: 28 × 41 1/2 × 1 1/2 in. (71.1 × 105.4 × 3.8 cm). Photo: Steven Probert © Sam Durant. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

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possible dialogues between the White European Surrealists and artists of Color: in one letter dated March 24, 1989, he pointedly asked Naville if any Black or Asian Surrealists participated in the Bureau of Surrealist Research. (Naville, of course, admitted no but suggested the work of Césaire). Likewise, in the wake of Rosemont and Kelley’s work, many scholars and curators have published important research examining the global dimensions of the Surrealist movement. A  recent example includes the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition, organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern, which positions the original Bureau as a site of exchange for artists of a multinational avant-garde (O’Hanlan). Perhaps, then, Durant’s drawings point to where the field of Surrealism studies has now arrived: to no longer privilege a movement’s origins over its subsequent developments, to stop the hagiography of a singular leader in favor of attending to a plural multitude, to cast aside the language of center and periphery, treating Surrealism as an ever-generative creative practice, adopted, adapted, and transformed by many around the world. But as the field continues to develop along these lines, we must do so ethically and responsibly, avoiding what Kaira Cabañas has deemed the “monolingualism of the global” (145–168) and what Brent Hayes Edwards has diagnosed as “bias,” of reducing the complex work of international artists to the singular influence of “Breton’s surrealism” (127–128). This is to say that we may arrive at Fanon or Césaire through Surrealism, but that our understanding should not stop there; rather, we must be willing to acknowledge the dialogues with Surrealism but also the departures, as both the formation and critical stakes of Black radical thought and self-determination extend well beyond the contours of this movement. Despite Durant’s labeling, neither Fanon nor Césaire could be considered overlooked figures in 2014, and while we should welcome further knowledge about their contributions to Surrealism, we should also question to what extent the label of “Invisible Surrealist” imposes its own form of violence upon the work of these thinkers. The ambition of Breton—“to seek out men”—in the early ventures of Surrealism thus developed in a manner far past what the original members of this movement may have envisioned. While not many walked through the doors of 16 rue de Grenelle, that does not mean that the Bureau never found its public. Past its closure, past its “failure,” it continues to find audiences—some who embrace it, others who find nuance, and still others who take it as inspiration to produce something entirely new.

Notes 1. Breton adapted the phrase from Tristan Tzara (Sanouillet 415). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2. Given that this document constitutes an agreement on the opening of the Bureau, I suggest a dating of September–October 1924. 3. This is according to Bureau 17–81, which presumably accounts for all visitors. Before its final closure on April 20, 1925, the Bureau received two additional guests, bringing the count to 68 visitors. 4. The other instance might be Dédé Sunbeam. Nadeau and Durozoi claim that Sunbeam became associated with Surrealism through the Bureau, but this does not seem to be supported by archival evidence or by statements in the Cahier (Nadeau 62; Durozoi, History 714). 5. André Stil had the idea for the cards, which he published in two sets on July 9 and July 23, 1943 (Fauré 381–383). 6. Her de Vries founded the Bureau de recherches surréalistes en Hollande (BRSH), which lasted from 1959 to 1978. The Dreams Collectors project (Megan Marsh-McGlone, Andrew Salyer, Katie Schaag) held a residency at Madison Public Library’s Bubbler Room (March 6–30, 2015), collaborating with the public and the Oakhill Prison Humanities Project. Craig Willms’s exhibition Office of Surrealist Investigations was held at the Arnica Artist-Run Centre in Kamloops, British Columbia (June 5—July 11, 2015).

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Works Cited Alexandre, Maxime. Mémoires d’un surréaliste. La Jeune Parque, 1968. Alexandrian, Sarane. André Breton par lui-même. Seuil, 1971. Aragon, Louis. Une Vague de rêves. Seghers, 1990. Arnaud, Noël, Jacques Bureau, Jean-François Chabrun, and Marc Patin. “Lettre à André Breton, 13 juillet 1943.” Histoire du surréalisme sous l’Occupation, edited by Michel Fauré, La Table Ronde, 2003, pp. 275–283. “À Tous Échos.” Paris-Soir, 7 October 1924, p. 2. Breton, André. Entretiens. Gallimard, 1969. ———. Œuvres complètes, Tome I. Edited by Marguerite Bonnet. Gallimard, 1988. Bureau de recherches surréalistes: Cahier de la permanence: octobre 1924—avril 1925. Edited by Paule Thévenin. Gallimard, 1988. Vol. 1 of Archives du surréalisme. 5 vols. Gallimard, 1988–95. “Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes: Manuscrits autographes et textes ronéotypés, réunion du 2 avril 1925.” André Breton: 42, rue Fontaine: Tome III: Manuscrits. CalmelsCohen, 2003, p. 94. Cabañas, Kaira M. Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art. University of Chicago Press, 2018. Colvile, Georgiana. “Introduction.” Lettres à Denise Lévy, 1919–1929 by Simone Breton, edited by Georgiana Colvile. Joëlle Losfeld, 2005, pp. 13–27. Dion, Mark. Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy. Book Works, 2005. Dion, Mark, Anna Dezeuze, Julia Kelly, and David Lomas. “Mark Dion in Conversation with Anna Dezeuze, Julia Kelly and David Lomas.” Papers of Surrealism, vol. 4, Winter 2005, pp. 1–14. Durozoi, Gérard. History of the Surrealist Movement. Translated by Alison Anderson. University of Chicago Press, 2002. ———. “Les Audaces de la Main à plume.” La Main à plume: Anthologie du surréalisme sous l’Occupation, edited by Anne Vernay and Richard Walter. Syllepse, 2008, pp. 5–15. Eburne, Jonathan P. Surrealism and the Art of Crime. Cornell University Press, 2008. Edwards, Brent Hayes. “The Ethnics of Surrealism.” Transition, vol. 78, 1998, pp. 84–135. Endt, Marion. “Beyond Institutional Critique: Mark Dion’s Surrealist Wunderkammer at the Manchester Museum.” Museum and Society, vol. 5, no. 1, March 2007, pp. 1–15. Fauré, Michel. Histoire du surréalisme sous l’Occupation. La Table Ronde, 2003. Hayden, Sarah. “The Surrealist: Revolutionary, Explorer, or Researcher?” Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood. University of New Mexico Press, 2018, pp. 117–128. Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon Press, 2002. Kelly, Julia. “The Bureau of Surrealist Research.” Twilight Visions: Surrealism and Paris, edited by Therese Lichtenstein. Frist Center for the Visual Arts, 2009, pp. 79–101. Lomas, David. “Mark Dion’s Surrealist Legacy.” Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy, edited by Mark Dion. Book Works, 2005, pp. 6–10. Nadeau, Maurice. Histoire du Surréalisme. Seuil, 1964. Naville, Pierre. Letter to Franklin Rosemont. 23 May 1989. “Dossiers non classés.” Archives Pierre Naville, CEDIAS Musée sociale bibliothèque, Paris. O’Hanlan, Sean. “Bureau de recherches surréalistes, Paris.” Surrealism Beyond Borders, edited by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021, pp. 60–63. “(Papillons surréalistes).” Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, edited by José Pierre. Vol. 1. Le Terrain Vague, 1981, pp. 32–33. Pastoureau, Henri. Ma vie surréaliste. Maurice Nadeau, 1992. “Recherches sur la sexualité.” La Révolution surréaliste, vol. 11, 15 March 1928, pp. 32–40. Recherches sur la sexualité (janvier 1928—août 1932). Edited by José Pierre. Gallimard, 1990. Vol. 4 of Archives du surréalisme. 5 vols. Gallimard, 1988–95. Rosemont, Franklin. Letter to Pierre Naville. 24 March  1989. “Dossiers non classés.” Archives Pierre Naville, CEDIAS Musée sociale bibliothèque, Paris. Rosemont, Franklin, and Robin D. G. Kelley, editors. Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. University of Texas Press, 2009. “Sam Durant: Invisible Surrealists (12 September—18 October  2014).” Press Release. New York: Paula Cooper Gallery. Sanouillet, Michel. Dada à Paris. CNRS Éditions, 2005.

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17 SURREALISM ON DISPLAY American Reception and Expansion Sandra Zalman

Seven years after the Surrealist Manifesto officially conjured Surrealism into being in 1924, the first exhibition of Surrealism in the United States opened in Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford was an insurance town with a well-regarded museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and although Hartford’s audience was rather conservative, the Atheneum’s adventurous director, Chick Austin, insisted on introducing his patrons to modern art as it was actively underway. In 1931, Surrealism was still so new that Austin felt compelled to frame his exhibition by comparing Surrealism to other forms of trendy entertainment: Fashion in art is very much like fashion in dress. Most of our clothes are bought with the idea of ultimately discarding them. . . . Yet we do not hesitate to dress in fashion because we fear that next year the mode will alter. We know it will, but we can take pleasure in what we have on today and take pride in knowing that we are in style. . . . These pictures which you are going to see are chic. They are entertaining. They are of the moment. . . . Surrealism is “sensational, yes, but after all, the painting of our [present] day must compete with the movie thriller and the scandal sheet.” (Austin, 1931) Well-heeled art patrons apparently accepted this rhetorical move, for the exhibition was something of a success. Prior to Austin’s exhibition at the Wadsworth, a few scattered reviews of Surrealist artists had appeared in the New York press, but Newer Super Realism presented 50 paintings as part of a consolidated movement. Among those paintings was Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dalí’s diminutive depiction of melting clocks on the Catalan coast, which made its American premiere. Painted earlier that year, Persistence of Memory encapsulated the novelty that Austin alluded to, underscoring how the traditional techniques of academic painting could be marshalled to reveal the dissolution of rationality. The dawning horror of the work is its hyperreal illustration of the undoing of time, decaying in the heat like Camembert cheese, as Dalí liked to say, or “like a wet dishrag,” as the Hartford Courant newspaper described it. Julien Levy, who would become Dalí’s dealer in the US, had imported the painting earlier that year after buying it in Paris for $250. Austin wanted to purchase Persistence of Memory for the Wadsworth’s collection but couldn’t afford the markup Levy was asking—to $350. Austin instead settled on another Dalí painting, Solitude (1931) for $120, and it became the first Dalí to enter any DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-20

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museum collection (Zafran 78). Eventually, Alfred Barr was able to acquire Persistence of Memory for MoMA’s collection in 1934, thanks to an anonymous donor. Surrealism’s first exhibition in the US was quickly followed by one hosted by Levy at his New York gallery in January 1932. Levy had worked with Austin and collector James Thrall Soby to select the paintings for the Wadsworth exhibition, and when it came time for him to present Surrealism in his own space, he opted to demonstrate that Surrealism extended beyond what was then accepted as fine art—exhibiting photography and collages alongside painting and drawing, as well as Joseph Cornell’s assemblages. Edward Alden Jewell, critic for the New York Times, called the array a “potpourri” that included “paintings, drawings and specialties, difficult to classify.” And whereas Austin had named his exhibition Newer Super Realism—a translation of the French surréalisme that added “newer” to acknowledge Dalí’s addition to Surrealism—Levy insisted that surréalisme was untranslatable and used the French word instead. The press did not mind the switch, and surréalisme was readily touted as the “newest ‘ism’ in art.” The New York Herald Tribune made explicit reference to the title of the exhibition in New York: “The question of labels comes up again at the Julien Levy gallery, where the exhibition is composed of small paintings and photographs, lumped under the heading of ‘surrealisme.’ ” While Austin may have hoped to ease patrons into the Surrealist worldview by presenting a selective group of exclusively European paintings, Levy made the kaleidoscopic range of Surrealism his hallmark. Surrealism was no longer framed as a merely visual entertainment (though that, too, was widely acknowledged in the reviews) but increasingly also considered a thoughtprovoking pursuit: The exhibition, whether the man in the street be strictly prepared for it or not, has been most intelligently thought out and put together. It is not to be dismissed as mere cleverness, and patience is recommended, however long it may take some of us to catch up with a dimension so far along as the twenty-seventh. (Jewel 1931) Still, it seems Levy couldn’t resist a bit of curatorial license—according to Ingrid Schaffner, he made material Austin’s comparison between Surrealism and the scandal sheet by exhibiting front pages from the tabloids New York Evening Graphic and Daily Mirror (Shaffner, “Alchemy of the Gallery” 56). Five years later, Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, expanded the purview of Surrealism even further into contemporary culture with the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Barr had spearheaded an ambitious agenda for the young modern museum, and he mounted an exhibition of Surrealism as part of a series of important movements in modern art. (The first in this series was Cubism and Abstract Art, also of 1936.) Not only did Barr follow Levy’s commitment to Surrealism’s many mediums, unlike previous exhibitions, he also positioned Surrealism within an art historical genealogy, tracing its antecedents back to a Fantastic strain of art, beginning with the Renaissance. Spanning 500 years, Barr’s exhibition included works by Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, Dürer, and Leonardo da Vinci, as well as artists from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, before landing on contemporary Dada and Surrealist works. Barr took particular care to frame Surrealism art historically because as a contemporary movement that was still unfolding, its history had barely begun to be written. Also timed to coincide with Barr’s exhibition at MoMA was the publication of the book Surrealism, by Julien Levy, who, like Barr, now opted to anglicize the word Surrealism. Unlike Barr’s more contextual approach, Levy positioned himself as a key interlocuter of Surrealism, publishing a book written in the style of a Surrealist manifesto (Heimlich). On the opening page of the 156

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book, Surrealism’s multidisciplinarity is again highlighted: “Surrealism is a point of view, and as such applies to Painting, Literature, PLAY, BEHAVIOUR, POLITICS, ARCHITECTURE, PHOTOGRAPHY and CINEMA” (Levy, Surrealism 3). Levy purposely positioned Surrealism at the intersection of an array of disciplines and modes of cultural production—and against the “snob monopoly of abstract painting” (Levy, Surrealism 9). Like Levy, Barr had also stressed that Surrealism was “diametrically opposed in both spirit and esthetic principles” to his earlier exhibition on Cubism and Abstract Art (1936). Already in 1936, abstraction was considered elitist, with Surrealism set to disrupt the conventions of modern art. Levy’s book was among the first to comprehensively showcase Surrealism and, in addition to illustrations of artworks, included a series of entries on pink, yellow, white, and green pages devoted to various Surrealist terms (for example, “mystery” represented solely by a purple rectangle, and tongue-in-cheek etiquette advice offered under the heading “behaviour”). The cover of Levy’s Surrealism book nicely encapsulates how the movement moved between art and life, expanding the understanding of art beyond traditional borders (Figure  17.1). Designed by Joseph Cornell—and reprising the gallery brochure from Levy’s 1932 exhibition— the cover illustrated a young boy proclaiming the movement by blowing through a piping bag to emit the word Surrealism. The letters snake across the blank space, floating and falling, their distinct and mismatched typefaces eerily recalling a ransom note, but also a certain playful chance dislocation. In contrast to the boy and the ten letters issuing forth from his instrument, the cover seems to be charred, fraying, peeled back. The tromp l’oeil effect becomes a surreal move in its own right—Surrealism was still quite new in 1936, especially for the American public to whom the book was aimed, and yet the cover’s decay presented the book as an ancient text. The cover embodies Surrealism’s many contradictions—both old and new, fantasy and reality, representational and abstract, text and image, art and, as Levy proclaimed, “a point of view.” Levy’s perspective was echoed by MoMA’s exhibition catalog, in which Barr stressed that Surrealism was “more than an art movement: it is a philosophy, a way of life” (Barr, MoMA catalog, 1936). At the same time, Barr understood Surrealism as the most pioneering art exhibition MoMA had ever mounted, and so he also sought to contextualize Surrealism in contemporary culture. For him, that meant situating Surrealist practice amid other living artists, like Georgia O’Keeffe, who were unaffiliated with the official movement, while also illustrating Surrealism’s connections to everyday life by including commercial work (advertisements and Disney film stills), drawings by patients at mental health facilities, children’s watercolors, and folk art assemblages. Barr’s expansive idea of the contemporary meant that Surrealism was contextualized within avant-garde artistic practice and via more vernacular visual production. But it is worth noting that despite the breadth of the 700 works on display, evidence of Surrealism’s engagement with Marxism and the group’s anti-colonial, anti-imperialist politics was still missing. It was not until the second edition of the MoMA catalog appeared that the American public could read an extended essay on Surrealism, written by the artist George Hugnet. Barr had to fight to frame Surrealism as a heterogenous mix of art and visual culture. For these unconventional choices, Barr risked alienating the Surrealists—particularly the movement’s founder, André Breton, and the poet Paul Éluard—who then refused to lend key objects and encouraged other important collectors to follow suit. Barr also met with protest internally from the museum’s administration. President A. Conger Goodyear urged Barr to remove what he called “the most ridiculous objects” from the traveling show, embarrassed by headlines such as “Farewell to Art’s Greatness” and “Modern Museum a Psychopathic Ward” (from The New York Sun and The New York Post respectively). The most famous of the works in question, Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936), was reproduced extensively in newspaper reviews and even made its own headlines, as the object was seen in the US for the first time. In covering a teacup, saucer, 157

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Figure 17.1 Joseph Cornell, cover of Julien Levy’s book Surrealism, 1936. Source: © 2021 The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

and spoon with fur, Oppenheim conflated a tactile pleasure with an oral one, playing on our attraction to fur and the curves of the cup and spoon but repulsing the viewer with the insinuation of getting fur in one’s mouth. Barr convinced the museum president to let the objects remain, arguing that the root of the misunderstanding came from the museum’s pioneering effort to exhibit the anti-rational strain in modern art rather than the generally accepted aesthetic of form. Thus, Barr recognized that the Fantastic Art exhibition challenged and expanded the category not only of Surrealism but also of the avant-garde more broadly, pushing MoMA and its public in new directions. With MoMA’s endorsement, and untethered from its official manifestos and political declarations, Surrealism spread from the museum to the marketplace, traversing the increasingly 158

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fraught territory between the avant-garde and the commercial. One of the more dynamic ways this connection was forged was on Fifth Avenue, where eight window displays at Bonwit Teller department store featured gowns for New Year’s Eve in Surrealist-inspired settings (see Zalman). Salvador Dalí designed one of the windows, while the other seven more spare windows showcased MoMA’s Surrealism catalog in their corner, explicitly associating the department store’s goods with the museum’s imprimatur. As Chick Austin’s analogy between Surrealism and fashion had anticipated, advertisers welcomed Surrealism. At the Advertising and Marketing Forum in New York in January 1937, the art director of Condé Nast publications declared that Surrealism “deals primarily in the basic appeals so dear to the advertiser’s heart.”1 By February, Elizabeth Arden was using Surrealist visual strategies to sell Valentine’s perfume, and a profusion of ads followed, promoting room decor, furs, and V8 Fords. Barr collected such ads, explaining in a letter to an advertising agency that the museum would simply like a copy for its files of “any material that might indicate the influence it has had upon the American commercial design.” Barr’s exhibition—which itself had included advertisements—became a primer for the application of Surrealist strategies in other realms of visual production, which eventually included an amusement at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, orchestrated by Julien Levy. For the most part, 1930s critics set aside the question of Surrealism’s artistry and focused on its social implications. Barr’s far-reaching presentation of Surrealism set the tone for the exhibition’s critical response. While reviewers were generally accommodating, the notion that Surrealism was worthwhile artistically was very much contested. The art reviewers found the array to be a hodgepodge. Art Digest wrote, “If you’ve misplaced anything around the house, trot into the Modern; chances are you’ll find it there.” Critic Emily Genauer declared that “the real value of this show . . . rests on the good pictures in it. And there are probably only a few dozen . . . out of the 700 items.” But Life magazine asked its readers to identify with Surrealism: “Surrealism is no stranger than a normal person’s dream. . . . When you scribble idly on a telephone pad you are setting down your irrational subconscious.” Other reviews found Surrealism to be a reflection of society. In the New Yorker, critic Lewis Mumford concluded that “it would be absurd to dismiss Surrealism as crazy. Maybe it is our civilization that is crazy. Has it not used all the powers of rational intellect . . . to turn whole states into Fascist madhouses?” (Mumford 79). The New York Times expressed a similar opinion: A view of what’s going on under the name of surrealism in the Museum of Modern Art suggests . . . that the artists of the lunatic fringe, however they rank in their own field, are better than the political commentators at describing what’s going on in other spheres. Outside the galleries .  .  . the contemporary eye must rest on objects and images much more grotesque.2 For these critics, the rise of fascism lent Surrealism’s anti-rational images a particular cultural valence that other avant-grade movements did not have. As Surrealism circulated in American visual culture during the later 1930s, US audiences were already familiar (at least subconsciously) with its basic premises prior to France’s fall to Germany in 1940, which forced many of the Surrealist artists to emigrate to New York. More traditional art historical narratives have framed the Surrealists’ arrival as a revelation to the New York art world, but American artists were well aware of Surrealism in both its avant-garde and commercial variations. Nonetheless, the influx of the artists in exile facilitated increased Surrealist activity. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, arrived in New York in July 1941. In October 1942, he organized First Papers of Surrealism, an exhibition to raise funds for the French war relief effort at the Whitlaw Reid Mansion in New York. Marcel Duchamp, who had 159

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emigrated that June, installed the exhibition by purposefully obfuscating the artworks behind a tangled “mile of string” that crisscrossed the room, subverting the very idea of exhibition by forcing would-be viewers into an antagonistic relationship with the work ostensibly on view. The frustration of being refused access may have been an embodiment of the exhibition’s title, which referred to the challenging bureaucracy facing Surrealist artists needing to emigrate and the urgency of possessing passable papers. At the same time, as James Housefield has argued, Duchamp’s installation is also evocative of nighttime air strikes that lit up the sky and would have been familiar to anxious wartime audiences. The exhibition brochure’s cover featured a yellow-tinted photograph of a pockmarked surface, recalling a desolate lunar landscape (and perhaps the Surrealists’ alien status in the US) but is actually a close-up image of cheese. Despite the overt political engagement of the exhibition, it was Surrealism’s other qualities that were especially influential for American artists during the 1940s. Collector Peggy Guggenheim famously supported the burgeoning New York School at her gallery Art of This Century while also keeping Surrealism on display in a room tailor-made to invite an encounter with the works. Painters such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko all experimented with Surrealist ideas, including automatism, biomorphic forms, and a renewed interest in myth and the supernatural. Art historian Lewis Kachur has recently advanced the idea that in addition to these more abstract tendencies in Surrealism, Pollock was also deeply engaged with Dalí’s multi-image work of the late 1930s, which he would have seen at Julien Levy’s gallery or on the pages of Life magazine. Other American artists like Peter Blume were clearly influenced by Dalí’s precise rendering of supernatural elements. But despite American artists’ obvious interest in Surrealism, influential critic Clement Greenberg disavowed the movement as too literary, too political, too content-driven, and too commercial. Immediately following the war, the staggering revelations of the horrors of atomic warfare and the atrocities of the Holocaust seemed to confirm that reality was completely surreal, rendering Surrealism strangely redundant. For almost a generation, abstract painting held primacy of place in American art criticism. But just as the Surrealists had “revolted against the snob monopoly of abstract painting,” in the 1920s and 1930s, a new generation of artists in the 1960s reacted to the hegemony of midcentury abstraction by forging a renewed kinship with Surrealism. Smaller exhibitions, like Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain, held at D’Arcy Gallery in 1960 and curated by Breton and Duchamp, would have demonstrated again the cross-pollination between Surrealist artists and their younger American counterparts. As Susan Power has written, “the Surrealists were attuned to presenting Surrealism with an American slant,” mixing artists affiliated with Surrealism, dissident practitioners, and Americans like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg (Power, “Surrealism Intrusion and Disenchantment” 435). Breton also worked up an Enchanters’ Diagram, emphasizing Surrealism’s attention to occult precursors (including Merlin and Maldoror) while mimicking the manner in which Barr had diagrammed the history of abstraction 25 years earlier (Power 438). Breton charted an alternative history for Surrealism’s predecessors far beyond the realm of fine arts, and even the visual. Indeed, by the time curator William Rubin assembled Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, his landmark show of 1968 at the Museum of Modern Art, he was already convinced that outside of pure abstraction, nearly everything being produced by contemporary artists was in some way related to Surrealism. Rubin also used this reasoning to avoid having to justify the show’s exclusions, essentially arguing for the somewhat-arbitrary nature of the “Heritage” section of the exhibition, though several of the contemporary works, including Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) and Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts (1955), had recently been seen alongside Surrealist works in Surrealist Intrusion. Giving a lecture in conjunction with Rubin’s exhibition, Surrealist artist Marcel Jean recognized Surrealism’s 160

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influence on “show windows, posters, typography, interior decoration, theater décor, fashion and cinema. Everything except architecture perhaps mingles Surrealism and Dada themes inextricably into the pattern of everyday life.” This was partly why Rubin’s exhibition was met with protest by contemporary artists and critics who objected to Dada and Surrealism being encased in a museum when they were clearly still living movements. Rubin’s exhibition did not include examples of Surrealism’s influence on, or participation in, mass culture. Instead, he wanted to assimilate Dada and Surrealism into a formalist tradition of art making, demonstrating how Dada and Surrealism had influenced later art. For Rubin, it was especially important to foreground the work of Joan Miró as having had a major influence on abstract expressionism. But the exhibition had the opposite effect—it exposed the limitations of a strictly formalist methodology and was broadly criticized for not considering social concerns. Surrealism presented a unique critical challenge for scholars because it thwarted the accepted criteria for aesthetic evaluation. In Surrealism, American artists recognized a successful precedent for art practice that was intertwined with the concerns of life—be they psychological, political, or commercial—just as the ongoing sociopolitical tensions of the 1960s, including the civil rights movement, student protests, antiwar sentiment, and the burgeoning psychedelic culture, exposed how circumscribed prevailing models for visual practice were. Even today, Surrealism offers a model for disrupting conventional understandings of art, becoming a strategy for contemporary artists and those involved in all realms of cultural production. Rather than retreat into history, Surrealism not only endures but also continues to expand. Ninety years ago, Cornell’s boy trumpeter (whose instrument was actually a piping bag) announced the new movement with swirling letters floating like notes released to the air. It is clear in our contemporary culture that Surrealism’s reverberations continue to be felt.

Notes 1. Dr. M. F. Agha, quoted in “Links Surrealism and Ads,” New York Times (January 23, 1937). M. F. Agha wrote that “[t]he Surrealist school (or rather, Dalí, because he is the Surrealist school of today) has such immense capacity for propaganda . . . that its influence is felt everywhere. . . . What is snobbish art scandal to-day, is an accepted style to-morrow, and a merchandizing style the next day” (M. F. Agha, “Surrealism or the Purple Cow,” Vogue, 1936). 2. The author mentions the war in Spain and the Chinese government as examples of “surrealism translated into politics” (Ibid.).

Works Cited Art Digest, vol. XI, no. 6, December 15, 1936, p. 6. Barr, Alfred. Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Simon & Schuster, 1936. ———. Letter to Henry Sell Advertising Agency (19 February 1937), Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition files, MoMA archives. Genauer, Emily. “Drawings by Lunatic Asylum Inmates as Good as Most of the 700 Items in Museum’s Fantastic Exhibit.” New York Herald Tribune, 1936. Housefield, James. “Marcel Duchamp’s Guernica? ‘His Twine,’ the First Papers of Surrealism (1942), and Aerial Warfare in Europe.” The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914–1945, vol. 14, 2018. Jean, Marcel. 27 March 1968, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage exhibition files, MoMA Archives, NY. Jewell, Edward Alden. “Art.” New York Times, 13 January 1931. Levy, Julian. Surrealism (1936). Da Capo Press, 1995. Mumford, Lewis. “Surrealism and Civilization.” The New Yorker, vol. XII, no. 44, 19 December 1936. Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Power, Susan. “Surrealist Intrusion and Disenchantment on Madison Avenue, 1960.” Networking Surrealism in the USA: Agents, Artists and the Market, edited by Julia Drost, Fabrice Flahutez, Anne Helmreich, and Martin Schieder, The German Center for Art History in Paris, 2019, pp. 428–447.

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Sandra Zalman Rubin, William. Memo to Anne d’Harnoncourt, 24 January  1968, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage Exhibition files, MoMA Archives, NY. Schaffner, Ingrid. “Alchemy of the Gallery.” Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery, edited by Ingrid Schaffner and Lisa Jacobs, MIT Press, 1998, pp. 20–59. “Surrealism.” New York Times, January 2, 1937. “Surrealism on Parade.” Life, vol. 14, December 1936, p. 24. “There’s Method in the Madness of French Super-Realists Whose Odd Works are Now on View Here.” Hartford Courant, November 22, 1931. Zafran, Eric. “Springtime in the Museum: Modern Art Comes to Hartford.” Surrealism and Modernism from the Collection of the Wadsworth Athaneum. Yale University Press, 2003. Zalman, Sandra. “The Art of Window Display: Cross-Promotion at Bonwit Teller and MoMA.” Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail, edited by Patricia Lara-Betancourt, Anca Lasc and Margaret Petty, Routledge, 2017, pp. 64–76.

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PART III

Situated Contexts Adaptations and Translations

18 SURREALISM IN THE ARAB WORLD Riad Kherdeen

While the Surrealist movement initially emerged in Paris in the aftermath of World War I, it must not be ignored that the French Empire engaged in various colonial wars outside of metropolitan France and continental Europe during the so-called “interwar” years, especially in parts of the Arab Mediterranean world.1 One war in particular, fought in the Rif mountains in the north of Morocco between 1921 and 1926, had a significant impact on the trajectory of Surrealism. The Rif War began when the political and intellectual Riffian figure Abd el-Krim united a coalition of Amazigh tribes of the Rif, declared independence from Spanish colonial rule, and established the independent Republic of the Rif. This drew the attention of the Surrealists in Paris after the French entered into the war in 1924 on the side of the Spanish. Not able to defeat Abd el-Krim’s smaller army and the new type of guerilla warfare he pioneered, the Spanish resorted to the use of chemical weapons and committed numerous atrocities against the people of the Rif with the support of the French military. Working with the Action Committee Against the War in Morocco, the French Communist Party (PCF) sided with the people of the Rif and backed their anti-colonial stance, marking one of the first critiques of French imperialism to take root within metropolitan France. The following year, as the PCF found support in labor unions, immigrants, pacifists, anarchists, and intellectuals in opposing the Rif War, nineteen Surrealists showed their solidarity by signing an open letter by Henri Barbusse addressed to “intellectual workers” condemning the war (Leclercq 176–177). That same evening, July 2, 1925, the Surrealists crashed a banquet in honor of the French symbolist poet Saint-Pol Roux; they distributed an inflammatory letter addressed to the French ambassador to Japan, Paul Claudel, and yelled out loud, “Long live Germany! Long live China! Long live the Riffians! Down with France!” (Leclercq 177). Several months later, the Surrealists were among the signatories of a text supporting the Action Committee Against the War in Morocco, which proclaimed, “Despite the promises that were made in 1918, war has begun again in Morocco, one that is even more horrible than the one that ravaged the world for over four years” (in Richardson and Fijalkowski 181). It was during this time that the Surrealists, in conjunction with other leading leftist intellectual groups, namely, Clarté, Correspondances, and Philosophies, published their first political tract, titled “The Revolution Now and Always.” With this text, which was profoundly shaped by the appropriation of the (anti)colonial war in Morocco, the Surrealists entered into a new phase of their trajectory.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-22

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While the Surrealists in Paris did not understand the nuances of the people of the Rif and the complexity of what Abd el-Krim tried to achieve—representing yet another instance of the reductivism of the colonial gaze and the power differential of orientalism (see Westbrook)—the war in Morocco ultimately helped push the first generation of Paris Surrealists to expand their pursuit of liberation beyond the aesthetic and into the political. Surrealism thus came to be a model for liberation from colonial, class, racial, gender, sexual, religious, epistemological, and ontological oppression. It is for this reason, I argue, that Surrealism has appealed to visual and literary cultural producers from the so-called Arab World since then and well into the current day. For the purposes of this chapter, the term “Arab World” refers to a geographic area conventionally made up of the 22 member countries of the Arab League, spanning a region that includes much of North Africa and West Asia, as well as parts of East and West Africa, where Arabic is a predominant language. While this term has its roots in the secular Pan-Arabist movement that first emerged in the late nineteenth century to counter Ottoman, and later European, imperialism, it must be noted that this region that spans two continents is considerably linguistically, culturally, socially, ethnically, and religiously heterogenous. As such, the Surrealist artists and literary figures featured in this article from this part of the world communicated in a variety of languages, not just Arabic, and many of them traveled and lived abroad, constituting an important diasporic dimension of the Arab World and its Surrealisms. In addition to sharing Arabic as the lingua franca of the region, colonization by European empires is also shared in common, as nearly the entire Arab World was colonized, mainly by the French and the British, but also by the Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese. While Iran and Turkey have a long shared, interconnected history with the Arab World, they are generally not part of the modern geopolitical construct of the Arab World and thus lie beyond the scope of this chapter; that is not to discount, however, the Surrealist contributions of artists like Yüksel Arslan (Zybok) and Ali Akbar Sadeghi (Faroutan), for example. To date, there is a dearth of scholarship on histories of Surrealism from a larger regional and comparative perspective covering the Arab World. Scholars have tended to instead focus on specific groups, figures, and nation-states. Studies of Surrealism in the Arab World have largely been focused on the Art and Liberty group based in Cairo during the Second World War (Bardaouil; Dika Seggerman; El Janabi, Nile; etc.); over the past decade, the significance of this group has become more widely recognized in Euro-American institutions, culminating in 2017 with the first major exhibition of the group at the Pompidou Center in Paris (Bardaouil and Fellrath) and the first anglophone monographic study of the group (Bardaouil). Beyond Art and Liberty, which featured both literary and visual Surrealist production, Surrealism in other parts of the Arab World was not as balanced and tended to favor primarily literary variations of Surrealism; the corresponding scholarship, albeit far from thorough, reflects this trend (AbdelJaouad; Krainick; Kelley and Rosemont; Muyassar). Art historians working on modernisms in the Arab World have more recently begun to shed further light on histories of Surrealist entanglements in places like Aleppo (Lenssen), Khartoum (Hassan), and Baghdad (Shabout). This is in keeping with the broader field of global modernist studies and is reflected by the major 2021 exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders co-organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tate Modern (D’Alessandro and Gale). This chapter features several groups and individuals from the Arab World and its diaspora who engaged with Surrealism to various extents. All of them can be said to have at least intersected with Surrealism in a multiplicity of ways, even if they ultimately did not proclaim any avowed allegiance or affinity to Surrealism. And rather than presenting them along the problematic lines of nationalities or countries of origin, I have organized this chapter chronologically 166

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in a way that highlights major historical occurrences, such as wars and political events. Due to the constraints on this chapter, artists like Jamil Hamoudi and Ibrahim el-Salahi, among others, could not be included.

1930s–1940s: World War II Art and Liberty Openly Surrealist activity in Paris and much of Europe came to a halt under Nazi occupation, which outlawed Surrealism as a form of “degenerate art,” but by then Surrealism had already begun to take root all across the world. One such place was Cairo, and during the Second World War, it played host to the earliest and most significant Surrealist formation in the Arab World to date. A motley assortment of poets, artists, intellectuals, and political figures based in Cairo joined together in 1938 as Jamā’at al-Fann wa-l-Ḥurriyya, also known as Art and Liberty or Art et liberté. One of the founders and key figures of the group was Georges Henein. Born in Cairo, he spent parts of his childhood in Paris, Rome, and Madrid due to his father’s career as a diplomat. After attending high school in Paris, he remained there to study at the Sorbonne. While living in Paris, Henein learned about Surrealism and met André Breton, with whom he would remain in correspondence after he returned to Cairo. After grappling with the revolutionary possibilities of Surrealism, Henein sought to establish a Surrealist group in Cairo beginning in 1936. It was not until 1938, however, that Surrealism would gain more traction in Egypt. That spring, Cairo-based francophone literary and cultural club Les essayistes/al-Muḥāwilūn (“The Attempters”) invited the Egyptian-born leader of the Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti to a salon dedicated to his poetry. At the gala dinner in honor of Marinetti, Henein, a former member of Les essayistes, staged a protest of Marinetti and the futurists—vaguely recalling the subversive actions taken by the Paris Surrealists in 1925 at the banquet in honor of Saint-Pol Roux on July  2, 1925. Henein and his allies, like Jean Moscatelli, crashed the gala, critiquing Marinetti and the fascist, imperialist Mussolini regime the futurists colluded with; they particularly denounced the gruesome colonial wars Italy had just waged in Libya and Ethiopia. Before the end of 1938, the Surrealists in Cairo published their manifesto (alongside a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica), titled “Long Live Degenerate Art”—originally written in Arabic as “Yaḥyā al-Fann al-Munḥaṭṭ” and in French as “Vive l’art dégénéré.” Several weeks later, in early January of next year, the Art and Liberty group was officially founded. Among the manifesto’s more than three dozen signatories were artists, writers, journalists, and lawyers; in addition, many others, including political activists, would be affiliated in various ways with Art and Liberty until it disbanded in 1948. The core of the group, however, included Henein, Ikbal El-Alaily, Kamel el-Telmisany, Ramses Younan, Amy Nimr, the brothers Fouad and Anwar Kamel, Inji Efflatoun, Ida Kar, Angelo de Riz, Jean Moscatelli, Albert Cossery, and Laurent Marcel Salinas. Art and Liberty held five “counter-exhibitions” in Cairo between 1940 and 1945, a key component of their Surrealist activities. They also launched the Arabophone journal al-Taṭawwur (Evolution)—the successor to the journal al-Majalla al-Jadīda (The New Journal)— representing one of the first Surrealist, feminist, Marxist publications in the Arab World; the journal launched as a monthly publication in January 1940, but the final issue was published in July 1940 before being shut down by the government. Georges Henein, Iqbal El Alaily, Ramses Younan, and Edmond Jabès founded the francophone Surrealist publishing house and journal La part du sable in 1939. 167

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What brought this group together was a set of shared values and commitments. Fundamentally, Art and Liberty was dedicated to artistic freedom and the emancipation of the individual from political, economic, social, and cultural constraints that reached an apogee during the 1930s and 1940s. Their firm anti-fascist stance is clearly articulated in their manifesto: “We believe that the fanatical racialist, religious, and nationalistic path that certain individuals wish modern art to follow is simply contemptible and ridiculous” (in Rosemont and Kelley 148). Echoing these anti-nationalist sentiments, Kamel el-Telmisany wrote in an article titled “al-Insāniyya wa-l-Fann al-Ḥadīth” (“Humanity and Modern Art”), “For is there in the world of art a crime bigger than for an artist to limit his art within a specific piece of land!” (in Bardaouil 136). Rather than preoccupying themselves with notions of Egyptianness and trying to define what is Egyptian art or Egyptian Surrealism—which would subsume their politico-aesthetic project under a national banner—Art and Liberty members positioned themselves as interlocutors and equal participants in a global network of Surrealist activity, albeit from the vantagepoint of Cairo. That is to say that while they were deeply engaged with Surrealism, Art and Liberty were not beholden to Surrealism and did not allow Surrealism to subsume their larger political and aesthetic project. As el-Telmisany put it: “But we must remember that Surrealism is, at heart, a call for a moral, social revolution before it is an artistic school” (in Lenssen et al. 93). Bardaouil has also argued that they did not view themselves as a cell within the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art, which was established and organized by André Breton and Trotsky while in exile in Mexico City. This is due to the group’s lack of allegiance to Trotskyism, instead being open to all forms of Communism so as to bring together the largest coalition of revolutionary figures in Cairo. Bardaouil makes it clear that while Art and Liberty took into account international politics, they just as importantly responded to local political conditions taking place in Egypt, such as British colonialism, martial law due to the Second World War, and political and artistic repression.

Aleppo Following Syrian independence from France in 1946, a Surrealist formation took root in Aleppo. Rather than following or building on the developments of Art and Liberty, however, the poets and artists in Aleppo went their own way; they may have even been somewhat, if not entirely, unfamiliar with Art and Liberty because of differing colonial and linguistic histories and networks that separated them. The Istanbul-born poet and intellectual Urkhan Muyassar, along with Ali al-Nasir, published a short Arabic volume of poetry and critical texts in 1947 titled Surīyāl (Surreal). Not only are Surrealist techniques like automatism and the incongruous juxtaposition of unrelated concepts on full display, but in the title essay and the notes written by Muyassar, he also shows a deep understanding of Surrealism while also trying to theorize it in his own way that is informed by local contexts. Muyassar offers, here, one of the first translations of the word “Surrealism” into Arabic—as opposed to just transliterating it: “mā warā’ al-wāqi’iyya,” literally “that which is behind reality” (Muyassar 37), choosing significantly to use the word “warā’” (behind) instead of “fawq” (above/beyond). The project of the Aleppo Surrealists, which included artists Fateh al-Moudarres and Adnan Muyassar (Urkhan’s brother), was to reach for that which lays behind reality so as to bring it forth into reality. Urkhan Muyassar became the intellectual leader of the group, even hosting a regular salon at his home that came to be the base for Surrealist activity and exploration in Aleppo. Like the first generation of Parisian Surrealists, their counterparts in Aleppo were interested in psychoanalytic theory, and thus the idea of the unconscious and repressed thoughts that lay behind the ego was of great interest (Muyassar 36, 41). But the Aleppo Surrealists had a 168

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more capacious approach to that which lays behind reality, including spirits, monsters, and even history itself, which has literally been buried in the Syrian desert over millennia. The idea to mine and excavate layers of ancient history in Mesopotamia as a source for a locally specific modernism in Aleppo was echoed by the Baghdad Group for Modern Art several years later (al-Bahloly). By reclaiming and rewriting the work done by colonial anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, philologists, and other scholars, the Aleppo Surrealists could claim a unique lineage of Surrealism and modernism, one that was locally rooted rather than ones that were simply imported and adopted tout court. This strategy—which has been commonly employed by modernist cultural figures in formerly colonized lands—was not just utilized to rebuff critiques of belatedness or derivativeness, but more significantly, it was a part of a politics of decolonization that reversed this critique to say that what the Europeans called “modern” is actually derivative of the arts of ancient and premodern Mesopotamia (or Africa, Oceania, and the Americas). Not only did the Aleppo Surrealist circle emerge in the wake of France’s withdrawal from the Levant, but it also did so in the aftermath of the Second World War. As France fell to Germany during the war, Germany sought to use the areas of Syria and Lebanon under Vichy French control to establish bases with which they could attack Egypt and Europe from the east. The British launched the Syria-Lebanon campaign known as Operation Exporter to oust the Vichy French and Germans from the Levant and gain control of the area. Following the official withdrawal of the French and the British from the region in 1946, Syria would go on to fight a war with Israel shortly thereafter and experience military and political upheaval well through the late 1960s. The lingering effects of colonialism and the Second World War left a strong mark on various parts of the Arab World, including Syria, and it is partially against this historical, social, and political backdrop that the Surrealists in Aleppo emerged. The visual artist Fateh al-Moudarres largely entered into the world of Surrealism in the late 1940s at the Aleppo salons and by way of his association with the Muyasser brothers, as well through avant-garde cultural journals like the Latakia-based al-Qīthāra (The Lyre) and the Beirut-based Shi’r (cofounded by Adonis and Yusuf al-Khal). Having attended the Aleppo American College, al-Moudarres had an anglophone, rather than francophone, education, thereby aligning himself along anglophone Surrealist networks. This, in part, may explain why the francophone Art and Liberty group, for example, was not a key touchstone for the Aleppo Surrealists, despite Art and Liberty’s significance as one of the very first Surrealist groups in the Arab World. These colonial and linguistic networks of circulation cut through and divided the purportedly homogenous Arab World and sometimes ended up limiting opportunities for collaboration or continuity across the broader region. Some of al-Moudarress’s most iconic works from the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he was most engaged with Surrealism, were automatist, multimedia works on paper. In one such example from 1953, a symmetrical amorphous blot of ink (the product of a bilateral fold) is supported on either end by two postlike elements. Below are orthogonal lines that recede into the background at a vanishing point, creating a sense of three-dimensional, illusionistic depth. The alien landscape is dotted with a motley assortment of objects and figures, including what may be a skull, a flower in a pot, trees or mountains, a bone, and a human with a walking stick. As Anneka Lenssen explains, “Having outlined so many detailed supplements around the inkblot, the artist may be understood as himself engaging in ritualized behavior meant to make it possible to coexist with hallucinations” (171). In an earlier painting from 1947 titled Dancer of the Age, a bony structure extends upward from the bottom of the canvas end ends in a rounded form reminiscent of a clenched fist. As Lenssen describes it, “[t]he painting gives grisly form to an archaeological idea of reanimation, 169

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Figure 18.1  Fateh al-Moudarres, Dancer of the Age, 1947. Source: Reproduced by kind permission of Rania Moudarres.

producing its titular ‘dancer’ from fossil-like bones arranged in a coil on what appears to be a shallow bed of sand,” while furthermore, “as a dream image, Dancer of the Age chimes with the mobile sense organs that feature in the Aleppo Surrealists’ poetry” (171). After studying in Rome, al-Moudarres chose to work in Damascus rather than Aleppo because of the incipient art scene taking root in Damascus. As his career evolved, for his imagery and content, he often drew on that which is local to historical Syria, including family life, folktales, religion (Christianity and Islam), the desert, ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, urbanization and modernization, rural/country life, and the poor. He often played between binaries (such as male/female, east/west, sun/moon, Arabic/French, modern/traditional, religious/secular, holy/profane, mystical/everyday, word/image, death/rebirth, true/false) to destabilize them and generate new connections. He rendered his imagery through dense applications of paint, at times scratched 170

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and stippled; on occasion, he added sand to his paint mixture, which may be regarded as an ecological concern of his locality.

1950s–1960s: Algerian War, Cold War, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism, Third Worldism Farid Belkahia The end of World War II marked the beginning of the fall of European empires, resulting in numerous wars fought across the globe. One of the most gruesome and deadly occurred in Algeria, which fought a long war of independence against France from 1954 to 1962. This war came to represent a lightning rod for the decolonization of Africa, and it coincided with the Bandung, or Afro-Asian, Conference, which resulted in the Non-Aligned Movement of 1961. Though these wars and decolonization movements took place beyond the European metropoles, their impacts were strongly felt in Europe, as seen by the collapse of the French Fourth Republic and the ratonnades massacres of Algerians in Paris during the war. Living in Prague at that time, the artist Farid Belkahia drew attention to the state-sponsored torture of Algerians by the French military in a series of paintings from 1961 titled Tortures. One depicts a nude Algerian, presumably, suspended upside down by the foot with their eyes blacked out. The color palette is somber and primarily features darkened azurite and ocher earth tones. It is difficult to clearly discern whether the figure is merely placing their thumb over their mouth or if they are possibly trying to eat it due to starvation. The poet and critic Rajae Benchemsi, Belkahia’s widow, has written about the loss of humanity that Belkahia captured with this Tortures series. She writes: The bodies deform themselves in order to embrace the line of anguish and dread. Above and beyond death, it is the impossibility of dying that is expressed by these personages who seem to be doomed to wait without purpose and without beginning, as if the concept of death, deprived of the dimension of becoming, dispossess them of their humanity. (Benchemsi 17) Belkahia is better known for his postminimalist abstract copper sculptural reliefs and shapedhide paintings, and so these earlier works have rarely been discussed in terms of Surrealism (Gauthier); instead, they are more often discussed in terms of an “expressionist” period (Benchemsi). Belkahia traveled considerably throughout his life, and in 1958, while studying in Paris, he journeyed to West Asia and visited Cairo, Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Damascus; he met the aforementioned Surrealist Fateh al-Moudarres while in Damascus. This encounter must have been significant, for shortly thereafter, Belkahia began to create paintings, prints, and drawings that are full of biomorphic forms and ambiguous figures that blur the lines between figuration and abstraction. His Cuba Yes of 1961 depicts a distorted, geometric, protean human figure with a square torso, an unproportionally large circular head, and long curvilinear arms clenched together fist in fist above and to the left of the figure’s head. The figure’s wide open circular mouth, which echoes the round head, eyes, and pupils, as well as the badge worn on the chest, seems to be proudly exclaiming, “Si!” (yes!). Belkahia made this painting in response to the contemporaneous “Bay of Pigs” invasion by the US, in which it attempted, but ultimately failed, to invade Cuba in order to overthrow Fidel Castro and put an end to the Cuban Revolution. Like the Parisian Surrealists in the 1920s, Belkahia took a strongly 171

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anti-imperialist, anti-colonial stance, and this came to be the foundation for his aesthetic, political, and even pedagogical project upon returning to Morocco. Unlike the Parisian Surrealists, however, Belkahia was once a colonial subject and lived and worked in a place that had once been colonized; while the Parisian Surrealists may have been earnest in their anti-colonial politics, they would never know what it would be like to be colonized, and most of them benefited immensely from privileges afforded to them by their gender, race, and class within the capital of the French Empire. As such, Belkahia, who traveled far more extensively than most of the Parisian Surrealists, turned away from the Euro-American and Soviet worlds (having experienced both for a few years in Paris and Prague) and instead embraced Third Worldist affiliations and solidarity, particularly by way of Pan-Arabism and Pan-Africanism. Though his most overtly Surrealist period may have been short-lived, the biomorphic forms and ambiguous figures he first brought forth in these early Surrealist works would be reconfigured and transformed and reincorporated throughout the rest of his career. It must also be pointed out that he collaborated with a group of literary figures on a radical Third Worldist cultural and literary journal called Souffles (Breaths); the poet and founder of the journal, Abdellatif Laabi, as well as the poet and Souffles group member Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine were invested in Surrealism.

1970s–1980s: Rise of the Dictators Abdel Kader El Janabi Despite the numerous coups, mass protests, and regime changes across nearly every part of the Arab World during the 1950s and 1960s, revolutionary energies for social, political, and economic liberation had been exhausted, and autocratic rulers, largely backed by the US, gained full control of their respective nation-states by the late 1970s. (Some of these leaders have remained in power until the past decade or two, such as Saddam Hussein, Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, and Ali Abdullah Saleh.) The poet and visual artist Abdel Kader El Janabi (sometimes known as AKEJ) left Baghdad for London in 1970, and from there he passed through Vienna before arriving in Paris in 1972, where he has resided ever since then and still is an active Surrealist today. It was in London where he encountered Surrealism for the first time, and he aligned himself with the Trotskyist movement and the International Marxist group led by Tariq Ali. In Paris, he learned about Georges Henein and Art and Liberty. AKEJ found Arabic translations of texts by Breton and Antonin Artaud in the modernist literary journals Shi’r and Ḥiwār (Dialogue), and he went on to translate parts of La révolution surréaliste and many other foundational Surrealist texts into Arabic. Fully aware of the significance of journals to the history of Surrealism and modernism, he founded several Arabophone journals and presses, including al-Raghba al-Ibāḥiyya (Libertarian Desire) and Faradis (Paradise). He was deeply critical of Islam and religion, the corruption and power of Arab political leaders, and the chokehold on everyday life of consumerism and late capitalism. Tracing his lineage from Breton through the Frankfurt School and the Situationist Internationalists, AKEJ developed his own idiosyncratic understanding of Surrealism that triangulated all three of these points of reference. In 1976, he and several other Paris-based Arab Surrealists, Maroin Dib, Faroq El Juridy, Fadil Abas Hadi, Farid Lariby, and Ghazi Younes, participated in the world Surrealist exhibition Marvelous Freedom Vigilance of Desire in Chicago by invitation of Penelope and Franklin Rosemont (Krainick; El Janabi, Désir). This group, known as the Arab Surrealists in Exile and led by El Janabi, published Arabic Surrealist poetry and visual art and translated historical Surrealist literature into Arabic. While AKEJ had great admiration for Henein and Art and Liberty, he did not consider them to be an 172

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“Arab” Surrealist group, because they never made that their cause, nor did they take an interest in “Arabness” as part of their larger political and aesthetic project. That is not to say that AKEJ and his group were staunch Arab nationalists—quite the contrary, as one of AKEJ’s most important artworks is called Visa Without a Planet, a play on Trotsky’s text “The Planet Without a Visa,” in which he destroyed his Iraqi passport by inviting a different Surrealist to produce a Surrealist intervention on each page of his passport. The Arab Surrealists in Exile, who were in exile from the Arab World because they could not return there for fear of arrest, or worse, wanted to directly reach the Arab population. If the Arab World were to ever achieve any sense of liberation and revolution, then Surrealism would be particularly well suited for such an oppressed people. They also innovated upon Surrealism by playing Surrealist word games in Arabic in ways that could only be done in an Afro-Semitic language based on a triliteral root system. Rather than setting out to forge a doctrinaire Arab Surrealism, the Arab Surrealists in Exile explored what would happen if Surrealism were given an Arab inflection, bringing to bear their backgrounds, life experiences, reference points, and differences on some of the foundational tenants of Surrealism to push it forward and complicate Surrealism even further. AKEJ was primarily a poet, but he also made Surrealist collages, sketches, automatic drawings, corps exquis, and “gommages” (erasings) as forms of visual production that he saw as continuous with his poetry. The gommages works are some of his most celebrated works, as he pioneered this medium/technique of creating images by erasing or rubbing out parts of a found picture to create new images. He particularly liked to use reproductions of Hollywood stars and would often erase their faces and other parts of their bodies or key details of the image to draw attention to the contrived nature and absurdity of their stardom and the photoshoots (Jaguer and Joubert).

Habib Tengour In his Surrealist manifesto “Magrebian Surrealism,” the sociologist, writer, and poet Habib Tengour makes the argument that Surrealism is a new word and concept for practices and ways of life that have long been in existence in the Maghreb (and also across the Arab and Muslim worlds). This attempt to find local antecedents and references for a Surrealism avant la lettre is not unique, as Art and Liberty, the Aleppo Group, Adonis, and the Arab Surrealists in Exile, among others, have all stressed the affinities of Surrealism with Sufism in terms of their embrace of automatism, the occult, madness, altered states of consciousness, and dreams. The Art and Liberty group, for example, even utilized Sufi customs, like whirling and chanting, as an alternative to the seances of the French Surrealists to transcend the self and enter into an altered state of mind. Tangour also cites an alternative genealogy for the origins of Surrealism, one that includes medieval scholars from the Maghreb, like Ibn Khaldun and Ibn ‘Arabi, together with Tengour’s contemporaries, like Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, and Mohammed KhaïrEddine. He believes that Surrealism is part of a universal cultural language, lying dormant and ready to be awoken anywhere given the right conditions. He draws on Edward Said’s concept of “rewriting” (from The World, the Text, and the Critic) to argue that “through the practice of rewriting, [the Maghrebi] is going to filter the Surrealist revolution through his own historical and ontological experience” (7).2 Rewriting is also a way for people of the Maghreb to counter the narratives written about them, their histories, and their cultures by the French, by rewriting their own histories. This opens up an agential space for the Maghrebi writer to draw on Surrealism but adapt it to their needs and in accordance with their own experiences, including those having to do with being colonized and living in a colony. Abdel-Jaouad is quick to point out, however, that rewriting was also what the first generation of Parisian Surrealists did. They 173

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rewrote what it meant to experience modern Paris and how to counter the legacies of Enlightenment, rationalist, and capitalist modes of experiencing the world.

Notes 1. As Hannah Feldman suggests, the Eurocentric term “postwar” ignores decades of wars of independence that took place against European and American imperialism after World War II. 2. Author’s translation.

Works Cited Al-Bahloly, Saleem. “History Regained: A  Modern Artist in Baghdad Encounters a Lost Tradition of Painting.” Muqarnas Online, vol. 35, no. 1, October 2018, pp. 229–272. Bardaouil, Sam. Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group. I.B. Tauris, 2017. Bardaouil, Sam, and Till Fellrath, editors. Art et liberté: rupture, guerre et surréalisme en Égypte (1938–1948). Skira, 2016. Benchemsi, Rajae. Farid Belkahia. Skira, 2013. Dika Seggerman, Alexandra. “Al-Tatawwur (Evolution): An Enhanced Timeline of Egyptian Surrealism.” Dada/Surrealism, vol. 19, October 2013, pp. 1–26. El Janabi, Abdel Kader. “Le désir libertaire”: le surréalisme arabe à Paris 1973–1975. l’Asymétrie, 2018. ———. The Nile of Surrealism: Surrealist Activities in Egypt, 1936–1952. Arabie-sur-Seine, 1991. Feldman, Hannah. From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962. Duke University Press, 2014. Gauthier, Michel, editor. Farid Belkahia: pour une autre modernité. Centre Pompidou, 2021. Hassan, Salah. Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist. Museum for African Art, 2012. Jaguer, Édouard, and Alain Joubert. Vamps évaporées: les gommages d’AKEJ. Edited by Samuel Tastet, 1985. Krainick, Sibylla. Arabischer Surrealismus im Exil: Der irakische Dichter und Publizist ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Ğanābī. Reichert, 2001. Leclercq, Sophie. La rançon du colonialisme : les surréalistes face aux mythes de la France coloniale (1919–1962). Presses du réel, 2010. Lenssen, Anneka. Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria. University of California Press, 2020. Muyassar, Urkhan. Surīyāl Wa-Qaşāʾid Ukhrā (Suryāl and Other Poems). Ittihād . al-Kuttāb al-’Arab (Union of Arab Writers), 1979. Richardson, Michael, and Krzysztof Fijalkowski. Surrealism against the Current. Pluto Press, 2001. Rosemont, Franklin, and Robin D. G. Kelley, editors. Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. University of Texas Press, 2009. Shabout, Nada M. Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics. University Press of Florida, 2007. Westbrook, John. “Reorienting Surrealism.” The French Review, vol. 81, no. 4, March 2008, pp. 707–718. Zybok, Oliver, editor. Yüksel Arslan: Artures. Hatje Cantz, 2012.

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19 SURREALISM AND AUSTRALIA Gavin Yates

For a brief period, Surrealism was one of the most influential modern movements to emerge in Australian cultural and intellectual life. But the path to navigate this juncture is not entirely clear. For the better part, scholars have tended to explore the ways in which Australian artists in particular had received and reimagined Surrealism, opening it up to different avenues within the Australian context. Most notable are the following landmark exhibitions: Surrealism: Revolution By Night (1993); Australian Surrealism: Agapitos/Wilson Collection (2003); and the more recent Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes (2015). Within this catalogue, there is consensus that the 1930s and 1940s mark the operative period for “Australian Surrealism,” whereas succeeding decades mostly refer to the various traces, “echoes,” and divergences whereby Surrealist influences had been integrated into Australian culture at large. Despite ongoing use of the nomenclature of “Australian Surrealism,” the term is here treated cautiously for reasons that will hopefully surface throughout this entry. As Christopher Chapman rightly observes: “The paths that meander throughout Australian Surrealism are many; they weave across, above and below each other” (216). The interweaving and, more often than not, differentiated layers of “Australian Surrealism” supposes an overall diffusional and disunited response, also compounded by the fact that in Australia, there was never an official or cohesive group or movement that worked self-consciously as Surrealists and in line with the aims and aspirations of originary iterations. Instead, Surrealism can be traced through the multiple and distinct channels of individual artists and writers: the fragments, references, glimpses, and shadows of their antecedents are recognizable enough, but a crucial shift in Surrealism’s character is highly apparent. Bruce James observes that while Surrealism’s spirit always remained overseas, its presence in Australia can be described as a “mobile ghastliness” (28). Painter Albert Tucker, having adopted Surrealist practices in exploration of the moral and social decay of modern times, once described the Melbourne art and literary salon Heide as a place where “the devil walked” (qtd. in James 28); this also leads one to consider the indeterminate and haunting presence Surrealism may have had on those who came within its proximity. The ghost-poet “Ern Malley” is perhaps a suitable emblem for the inherent paradox of Surrealism, as discussed further along in this entry. And it is also the case that Surrealism’s ghostly and elusive character had continued to obscure its overall reception in Australia, generally speaking. As Richard Haese remarked in his seminal book Rebels and Precursors (1981), “The attraction of Surrealism was so pervasive . . . that few [Australian] modernists could resist it. Even fewer could grasp the substance behind the shadow” DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-23

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(91). In tracing Surrealism’s passage out of Paris to the monumental 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition, we can observe its expansion into new linguistic and cultural territories, where Michel Remy cites “the essential intransigence, the anonymous, drifting quality of Surrealism in general” (qtd. in Cassels 3). Recognizing this can lead us closer to the matter at hand. This entry about Australia’s reception of Surrealism traces the earliest points of contact and transmission to the absorption of Surrealist idea and technique into local practice, instances of imitation and parody, stoppages, misunderstanding, and tangential approaches. It will focus on the ferment of Australian modernism in the 1930s and 1940s in exploration of the origins and development of Surrealism in Australia. Over the years, the mode of visual arts and sculpture has continued to dominate the intellectual space: this entry will also survey the relevant literary iterations. Due to restrictions in length, this account cannot claim to be complete; instead, it will track the key events and practitioners in hope of bringing us closer to understanding the nature of Surrealism’s influence in Australia.1 Despite art critic Basil Burdett’s 1938 statement that in Australia, “Surrealism is practically non-existent” (12), the earliest references to that movement can in fact be traced to Melbourne in the early 1930s. Italian émigré Gino Nibbi, who was an acquaintance of Giorgio de Chirico’s, opened Leonardo Art Shop in 1928, where he was responsible for importing major texts and art reproductions of European modernism, including the Surrealist periodicals Minotaure and Transition, and poetry collections by Benjamin Péret and Louis Aragon (Kershaw 2–3). Through his Little Collins Street salon, Nibbi had assisted the cultivation of a modernist milieu involving the likes of George Bell, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Adrian Lawlor, and Alister Kershaw. Not long after Nibbi’s arrival did Australians begin to reflect Surrealist influences in their work: the short-lived periodical Stream (1931), edited by Cyril Pearl, and assisted by repatriated poet Bertram Higgins, reflects an early literary interest in modernist expression, publishing “Surrealism: A Pre-Novel” by Arizon (pseudonymous for Spanish novelist José Martínez Ruiz) and a short story by Dadaist Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. Early experimentation with Surrealist-inspired modes in painting can be located in Sam Atyeo’s Surrealist Head (1932) and Eric Thake’s High and Dry (1934), with Thake going on to adopt the trompe l’oeil “illusionist” styling of Rene Magritte and Edward Wadsworth. As Surrealism was the subject of growing interest in Melbourne, around the same time in Sydney, the spellbinding quality of Surrealist pictures was assisting Max Dupain’s “transition from pictorialism to modernism in photography” (Ennis 105). This occurred on account of an invitation to review James Thrall Soby’s monograph Man Ray Photographs 1920–1934 (1934) for the modern lifestyle magazine The Home, where Dupain subsequently developed a deep affinity for the American Surrealist, writing of him, “The importance of Man Ray in photography is analogous to that of Cezanne in painting, and it does not seem imprudent to prophesy his enjoyment of an equivalent greatness” (Dupain 38). As noted by Helen Ennis, “from 1935 to 1938, Max [Dupain] energetically and systematically worked his way through Man Ray’s techniques in both his commercial and art photography, experimenting with photomontage, multiple exposures, solarisations and photograms, replicating their effects” (106). However, the erotic symbolism of The Bride (1936), the psychosexual (Doll’s Head & Goat Skull) (c. 1937), and the photomontage (Surreal Face of a Woman) (1938), for instance, are not just excursions into the dream and erotic motifs of his models but instead display a “characteristic Australian robustness of form” (James 45), having “progressed beyond any sedulous imitation of European Surrealism” (James 56).2 Part of any description of Australia’s earliest encounters with Surrealism also requires mention of the explosive 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition at London’s New Burlington Galleries, an event that signified Surrealism’s shift into the English language, thus allowing for unhindered 176

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expansion into other anglophone territories. Notable Australian artists living in London at that time included Peter Purves Smith, whose New York (1936) and Surrealist Landscape (1938) indicate his reworking of landscape through Surrealist-inspired imagery, and James Cant, who was directly involved with the British Surrealist group, exhibiting the uncanny sculptures Surrealist Hand (c. 1936) and Welcome to Empire Day (1938) at the London Gallery (Taylor 20). Cant is also regularly cited, along with Australian artist Geoffrey Graham, Roland Penrose, and several others, for taking part in a medical study on the effects of mescaline on vision at the Maudsley Hospital in South London. It is noted that both Australians produced drawings while under the influence, in keeping with Surrealism’s practical aims of emancipating unconscious thoughts and images. Chapman describes Graham’s mescaline-aided sketches in the following terms: Graham’s extraordinary drawings and etchings present the body in a state of psychological and physical torment. His attenuated figures focus on the violence implied in possessing a physical body. Here is a violence that finds its existence in the very movement of the body’s bones and muscles, and the mechanisms of processing the intellect that guides it. (299) Surrealism’s entrance into England not only formed the prevailing model for Australians at that time but also marks an important evolution in the movement’s history. Since its official inception in 1924, Breton had forcefully defended his position as the movement’s chief theoretician. However, as Donaldson and Butler point out, “[d]espite its leader’s attempts to contain it institutionally . . . the movement ultimately went beyond Breton” (3). And while the London Exhibition was indeed a joint enterprise involving the French organizing committee of Breton himself, Paul Eluard, Georges Hugnet, and Man Ray, “the show was in fact driven by the Englishmen Roland Penrose and Herbert Read” (3). Peter Nicholls, in reference to the exhibition’s companion publication, Surrealism (1936), observes an important shift in the anglophone expression: while the French Surrealists describe “dream and automatism . . . as the means of looking to the future, of releasing a ferocious imaginative energy against the dead weight of both past and present” (404), “[f]or the English contributors Herbert Read and Hugh Sykes Davies, however, Surrealism was less a dynamic state of mind than it was an exciting style” (404). As Nicholls continues to single out Read and Davies for deriving “Surrealism from the work of Coleridge and the English Romantics” (405), an English lineage is consequently foregrounded “so as to obscure the avant-garde character of Surrealism and to make it instead something thoroughly domesticated and familiar” (405). In Australia, Coleridge and Wordsworth, for instance, were already woven into a major part of the literary tradition given Australia’s historical and cultural connection to England. The other key pillar of Surrealism appeared in Sigmund Freud, and it would appear that in the twenties and thirties, considerable cultural awareness of Freud had already prepared the conditions for Surrealism, whereby the movement was generally viewed to be synonymous with Freud’s theories (see McQueen 78–79). Interestingly, as early as 1922, New Zealand artist Len Lye, who would later participate in the 1936 London Exhibition, was hand-copying Freud’s Totem and Taboo at the Mitchell Library in Sydney, and in 1923 psychologist Henry Tasman Lovell writes about “Psycho-Analysis and Art” in the major periodical Art in Australia. For the key figures of the Angry Penguins movement, who were responsible for the eponymous (and provocative) periodical from 1940 to 1946, Read’s earlier book Art Now (1933), which emphasizes Freud as “the real founder” (120) of Surrealism, is said to have been something of a “bible” (Harding and Morgan 61). 177

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It is therefore understandable that for many Australians Surrealism as a concept was often regarded to be synonymous with Freudianism and English Romanticism, while its visual representation was predominantly perceived in the imagery of Salvador Dalí. It is also possible that varying and often-misguided interpretations, whether it was interpreted as a purely unconscious matter, and therefore self-negatory, or if it required a dual process of inspiration, then fastidiously and purposefully put together as representation, may have further inhibited Surrealism from taking hold in deeper and more profound ways. Where prominent commentators were not being critical of Surrealism, they were being reductive: Margaret Preston, in her 1938 lectures published in Art in Australia, makes the claim “Dali, the Catalonian, is the head” of the movement, and that Surrealism reflects the “Freudian philosophy of no control” (52). The social realist painter Harry de Hartog, in 1935, denigrated “Super-realism” for “reject[ing] reason altogether” (5). But despite the uncertain and dismissive perspectives of some, there were other Australians whose involvement with Surrealism was far more serious and sustained. Nowhere is that more evident than in the works of Sydney artist James Gleeson. In 1937, Gleeson, a student at the Sydney Teachers’ College, was imbibing the history and basic principles of Surrealism quite directly, through André Breton’s What Is Surrealism? (1934), David Gascoyne’s A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935), and Dalí’s The Conquest of the Irrational (1935). These texts would confirm what the artist had already intuited: “the logical mind, with its prescribed formulas of thought, is incapable of expressing the entire range of human experience and aspiration” (Gleeson, “What Is” 27). Thereafter, Gleeson’s 1937–1945 experiments vigorously explored biomorphic figures and apocalyptic dreamscapes with at times clear references to Dalí and de Chirico. Some of Gleeson’s most notable early paintings include The attitude of lightning toward a lady-mountain (1939), We inhabit the corrosive littoral of habit (1940), and The sower (1944), as well as a suite of tenebrous poem-paintings scrawled with “schizophrenic” language. Gleeson is also noteworthy for writing Australia’s first formal attempt to define Surrealism, “What Is Surrealism?” (1940), identifying the urgent need to synthesize contrary domains of reason and imagination in order to combat “the primordial fear of darkness” (28). An unwavering faith in the aims and methods of Surrealism is further expressed in a 1941 article: “Do not commit suicide, for Surrealism has been born” (“Necessity” 96). Not only did Gleeson, like many other Australian artists and writers of his generation, draw on Surrealism in reaction to the atrocities of the Great War and the realization that the world was on the verge of entering into another; he is also one of the only Australian modernists to have “maintained an unwavering commitment to Surrealist practices” (Maidment and Taylor 4). This devotion is also what brought Gleeson to Paris in the late 1940s, along with his friend the Australian creator of Surrealist sculptures Robert Klippel, in what turned out to be a rather-lackluster meeting with Breton. Yet Gleeson’s Surrealism was never specifically a social or collaborative endeavor, and it was also not even overtly political; instead, through the adoption of what Paul Eluard refers to as a “state of mind” (174) and the practical aims of automatism, Gleeson expressed a personal and intellectual inquiry into automatic and unconscious domains. It is usually the case that from this period most Australians were quick to abandon Surrealism: even the Adelaide artist Ivor Francis, often regarded as a key exponent and practitioner of Surrealism, in Angry Penguins September 1943, expressed his misgivings about Surrealism’s “false promises.” Gleeson, however, as Bruce James puts it, “was a born Surrealist” (62, see also Klepac and Smith). In result of the shock waves from the London Exhibition as well as the growing circulation of Surrealist texts and reproductions, by the end of the 1930s, many Australians were beginning to experiment with Surrealist modes and techniques. The year 1939 is considered to be a high point for Surrealism in Australian culture, starting with the Herald Exhibition of French and 178

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British Contemporary Art, an event that brought to Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide the blockbuster productions of modern artists associated with international Surrealism, including works by Picasso, Ernst, de Chirico, and Dalí. Revelatory for modernist sympathizers, the exhibition was not without controversy. Dalí’s Memory of the Woman-Child prompted prominent cultural arbiter J. S. MacDonald to remark that the exhibited paintings were the products of degenerates and perverts. This was also the time when Australia was grappling with modernization against a climate of escalating international tensions, where exponents of cultural norms and traditions remained defensive and resistant to external influence. In consideration of Australia’s cultural landscape preceding the late 1930s, the following lineaments can be observed: in the 1920s, there was an “overall predominance of conservative taste in painting” (Haese 39), and in literature, the Vision group associated with Norman and Jack Lindsay was equally dismissive of T. S. Eliot, Sitwell, e. e. cummings, and James Joyce (Ulysses was banned in Australia from 1929 to 1937). The staunch traditionalist poet A. D. Hope was always explicit about his aversion to “the mindless sludge of Surrealist verse” (77). In consequence, for traditionalist circles the modernism of Cézanne and van Gogh presided over Picasso and Dalí, and “modern poetry meant Browning, Bridges and Masefield” (McQueen 8). Yet for all obvious cultural resistance, by the end of the 1930s Australia was indeed changing, and with the foundation of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) in 1938, an oppositional force to traditional art institutions was attracting new artistic talent and interest. Establishing branches in Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide, the CAS held its inaugural exhibition in 1939 at the National Gallery of Victoria, defining a new course for Australian art—one that would be stimulated by radical politics, artistic experimentation, and indeed, Surrealism. Featured works included the following: Eric Thake’s Happy Landing, James Gleeson’s The attitude of lightning towards a lady-mountain, Albert Tucker’s The Philosopher, and Sidney Nolan’s Rimbaud. Some of the key figures associated with the CAS included George Bell, Gino Nibbi, Albert Tucker, and the art benefactor John Reed. In fact, John Reed and his wife, Sunday, are both particularly notable for their centrality to the cultivation of Melbourne’s progressive subculture. After purchasing a semirural property in 1934, the Reeds opened the modern salon Heide to many writers and artists, witnessing the formation of the Angry Penguins group. Among the Heide/Angry Penguins movement, Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester, Albert Tucker, the Reeds, and Max Harris are most notable. Out of this cohort, however, it was Tucker who dealt with Surrealism most directly. For Tucker, Surrealism was drawn from the same source as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (the key influence on both Kenneth Slessor’s poetry, including the seminal “Five Bells” [1939], and Gleeson’s late-thirties collage poetry). Tucker revealed the processes behind The futile city (1940) to be undoubtedly characteristic of Surrealist automatism: Relaxation of conscious focused thought. . . . Under these conditions a brief image flashed involuntarily into my mind—an image of a glaring white space, with a large key throwing a thin blue shadow across the bottom and, simultaneously the word “futile.” (qtd. in Gleeson, “What Is” 29) Tucker’s view of Surrealism, however, hinges on the paradox that it can only exist when judgment and reason are exercised, where evidently, Surrealism will “cease to exist” (qtd. in Uhl 15–16). In turn, many of Tucker’s paintings from this period—for example, the famous Images of Modern Evil series—show how Surrealist practices and aesthetics remain at the artist’s disposal 179

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in his revisioning of dark urban spaces, depraved scenes of wartime Melbourne, grotesque and unnatural human forms, and the recurring symbolism of a red glowing smile. For legendary painter Sidney Nolan, Surrealism is most recognizable through technical application, particularly of his late-thirties and early-forties collage series in the manner of Max Ernst. Beyond this, however, Nolan was to draw impetus not necessarily from the Surrealists themselves but from the proto-Surrealist poet Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud appeared to Nolan, as John Reed once remarked, “almost as a revelation and as the epitome of all his own powerful urgings and rebellious nature” (qtd. in Harding and Morgan 92). The influence of the French enfant terrible is displayed in the abstract Head of Rimbaud (1939), Untitled (Rimbaud) (1939), Royalty (1943), and as well as in Nolan’s naive poems. Surrealism for Nolan, however, functioned as part of his greater artistic vision informing his conception of the modern Australian myth in his famous Ned Kelly series, and in his vision of Australia’s unrelenting landscape in painting (Central Australia [1950]) and photography (Carcass [1952]). In fact, reimaging the Australian landscape through a Surrealist lens was common practice among modernists. The blending of interior and exterior spaces is a signature of Surrealist expression, and history has recorded no shortage of art practitioners who have mapped their own unique psychogeographies in a similar fashion. In terms of landscape, Chapman makes the following suggestion: “What makes a landscape image convey a feeling of Surreality is essentially a sense of ‘disquietude’ ” (232). This depiction of the natural vastness and unknown expanse can be detected in the following works from the period: Herbert McClintock’s Approximate portrait in a drawing room (1938), Gleeson’s We inhabit the corrosive littoral of habit (1940), Bernard Smith’s Drought (1940), Thake’s Meteorological Balloon, Alice Springs (1945), Joy Hester’s Fun Fair (1946), Russell Drysdale’s The Rabbiters (1947), and Ivor Francis’s Venus Reborn (1947). It is indeed the case that a significant number of “Surrealist” paintings and poems from the period explored themes of violence and torment expected from an atmosphere of a modern world at war. For many Australians working within the Surrealist idiom, references to apocalyptic themes and imagery, obscurantism, and tenebrous shades of existence are widely available. In 1939, poet and self-proclaimed anarchist Max Harris had become a vocal proponent of this approach; he is also the first Australian poet to author “Surrealist poems” (Bohemia 9). Harris’s 1940 extended poem “The Pelvic Rose” is among the most regularly cited, if not for its abstruse imagery, but for its dedication to Salvador Dalí. However, Harris’s understanding of Surrealism remains somewhat unclear; his turgid writings reflect his reading of Herbert Read and Hugh Sykes Davies, the Canadian anarchist George Woodcock, Kafka, Dylan Thomas, and the New Apocalyptics—which in turn form the broader literary stimulus for the “noisy and aggressive” modernist periodical Angry Penguins (1940–1946) (Harris, “Angry” 6). Under Harris’s editorship, Angry Penguins initially appeared as a small undergraduate magazine, launched as an “act of defiance” (Harris, “Note” 7): it would therefore come as no surprise that in 1942, when John and Sunday Reed made contact with the young Adelaide radical, a partnership was established leading to the journal’s growth in sophistication and scope, the creation of the publishing firm Reed & Harris and the formation of the Angry Penguins movement. The productive years of Angry Penguins were, however, short-lived due to the infamous 1944 “Ern Malley” hoax, where the editors had received and enthusiastically published The Darkening Ecliptic by “Ern Malley,” a manuscript of ersatz “Surrealist” poetry that was actually composed by James McAuley and Harold Stewart in order to debunk Angry Penguins and associated movements such as Dada, Surrealism, and the New Apocalyptics. As a result, the overwhelming public success of the hoax had catalyzed the disbandment of the group and cessation of the Angry Penguins journal. Even so, the literary merit of “Ern Malley” did not go unrecognized, and the fact remains that via the articulated Dada and Surrealist literary techniques, “Ern Malley’s” 180

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poetry, as defended by Herbert Read, attained an “unusual level of achievement” (5). Indeed, “Malley’s” poetry marks some of Australia’s most intriguing poetry from the period characterized by disjunctive association and unpredictable poetic expression perhaps edging closer to the haphazard and chance collisions of the original French Surrealists. The narrative of Surrealism and the Angry Penguins entails the collapse of that specific group but also the broader ruin of literary Surrealism’s reputation for the generation. It just so happened that for the 1940s and 1950s, “Ern Malley” paradoxically vanquished the momentum of radical poetics in Australia with “his” own unique and experimental style. However, in the visual arts, Surrealism persisted not only with undertones and reminiscences available, for example, in the later works of Nolan or Arthur Boyd but also more directly through new and exciting channels. In closing this entry about Surrealism in Australia, the arrival of Czechoslovakian artist and filmmaker Dušan Marek and his artist brother Voitre on Australian shores represented a new and vital path for Surrealism in postwar Australia. Dušan, who studied under Frantisek Tichy in Prague, known to be a “Surrealist proselytiser” (James 83), had also identified himself to be a Surrealist from the age of thirteen (Bunbury 161). During their voyage to Australia, the Mareks utilized the available materials to produce some of Australia’s most important Surrealist works. In particular, Dušan’s Equator (1948), which includes the text “Break the Mirror to See What I Am,” and Gravitation—The Return of Christ (1949), which has embedded in the upper area a convex mirror, both exemplify juxtapositional assemblages as the metaphorical quality of the sea and the artist’s psychoterrain coalesce. While a lot more can be said of the Mareks, and indeed, for each figure and group identified here, this brief entry charting the presence of Surrealism in Australia highlights, foremost, its equivocal and multitudinous strands. Perhaps the peak of Surrealism’s influence in Australia can be attributed to the year 1941, when Art in Australia, edited by Sydney Ure Smith, published André Breton’s article “Originality and Liberty.” The following issue, containing the article “Life and Liberty” by André Masson, which also includes several art reproductions including “The Sun,” additionally indicates how Surrealism was well and truly permeating through Australian art culture at that time. As for the adoption of Surrealist modes and practices by Australian artists and writers, there is undoubtedly a characteristic reimagining of the original European avant-garde, where Surrealism—amorphous, contradictory, and evasive—proliferated beyond its original European boundaries in unique and unexpected ways.

Notes 1. It should be noted that of this generation very few women artists took to Surrealism with sustained interest, despite exceptional achievements in art by many modern Australian women, such as Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith, and Lina Bryans. Even if in some of the works of Joy Hester, Jacqueline Hick, and perhaps Olive Cotton, Surrealist elements are somewhat detectable, when Chapman interviewed prominent Surrealist artist James Gleeson about the glaring shortage of women who took to Surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s in Australia, the artist was left unable to offer any explanation (309). 2. Olive Cotton, who was briefly married to Dupain, is a preeminent Australian photographer in her own right but was not at all drawn to Surrealism with the same enthusiasm. Yet even if Cotton’s employment of Surrealist aesthetics was “cursory at best” (Ennis 108), certain photographs, such as Sky submerged (c. 1937) and Design for a mural (1942), are nevertheless imbued with an oneiric ambience—the latter having featured in the 2015 Lurid Beauty exhibition.

Works Cited Bunbury, Alisa. “The unbroken line. Marek and Marek.” Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes, edited by Simon Maidment and Elena Taylor. National Gallery of Victoria, 2015, pp. 158–165.

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Gavin Yates Burdett, Basil. “Modern Art in Melbourne.” Art in Australia, no. 73, 1938, pp. 12–23. Butler, Rex,  and  A. D. S. Donaldson. “Surrealism and Australia: Towards a World History of Surrealism.” Journal of Art Historiography, vol. 9, 2013, pp. 1–15. Cassels, Imogen. “ ‘Surrealism Found Me’: British Surrealism and Encounter.” The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/bfab001. Chapman, Christopher. “Surrealism in Australia.” Surrealism: Revolution by Night, edited by Michael Lloyd, Ted Gott, and Christopher Chapman. National Gallery of Australia, 1993, pp. 216–301. de Hartog, Harry. “Super-Realism.” Manuscripts, no. 12, 1935, p. 5. Eluard, Paul. “Poetic Evidence.” Surrealism, edited by Herbert Read, Faber and Faber, 1971, pp. 171–183. Ennis, Helen. Olive Cotton: A Life in Photography. Fourth Estate, 2019. Francis, Ivor V. “Reintegration and the Apocalypse.” Angry Penguins, September 1943. Gleeson, James. “The Necessity for Surrealism.” A Comment, no. 5, 1941. ———. “What Is Surrealism?” Art in Australia, no. 81, 1940, pp. 27–30. Haese, Richard. Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art. Penguin, 1981. Harding, Lesley, and Kendrah Morgan. Modern Love: The Lives of John and Sunday Reed. Miegunyah Press, 2015. Harris, Max. “Angry Penguins and after.” Quadrant, vol. 7, no. 1, Summer 1962 1963, pp. 5–10. ———. “Note.” Angry Penguins, no. 1, 1941, pp. 7–8. ———. “Surrealism in Harold Herbert.” Bohemia, no. 5, August 1939, p. 9. Hope, A. D. The New Cratylus. Oxford University Press, 1979. James, Bruce. Australian Surrealism: The Agapitos/Wilson Collection. The Beagle Press, 2003. ———. “James Gleeson: Notes in and around the period 1958–1970.” James Gleeson: Beyond the Screen of Sight, edited by Lou Klepac and Geoffrey Smith. The Beagle Press, 2004, pp. 62–67. Kershaw, Alister. Heydays: Memories and Glimpses of Melbourne’s Bohemia 1937–1947. Angus & Robertson, 1991. Maidment, Simon, and Elena Taylor. “Lurid Beauty: An Introduction.” Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes, edited by Simon Maidment and Elena Taylor. National Gallery of Victoria, 2015, pp. 2–7. McQueen, Humphrey. The Black Swan of Trespass: The Emergence of Modernist Painting in Australia to 1944. Alternative Publishing, 1979. Preston, Margaret. “Five Lectures Given At the National Art Gallery of N.S.W.” Art in Australia, no. 72, 1938, pp. 48–52. Read, Herbert. Art Now. Faber and Faber, 1933. ———. “A Cable and Letter.” Angry Penguins, December 1944, p. 5. Taylor, Elena. “Surrealism and Australian Artists in France and Britain: 1930s.” Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes, edited by Simon Maidment and Elena Taylor. National Gallery of Victoria, 2015, pp. 18–27. Uhl, Christopher. Albert Tucker. Lansdowne, 1969.

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20 SURREALISM IN BELGIUM A Never-Ending Story Pierre Taminiaux

The history of Surrealism in Belgium is a particularly rich one. This movement defined in many ways the artistic identity of the country throughout the twentieth century. If we were to look for another example of such a dominant cultural influence, we would have to think most likely of comics and of their Belgian master, Hergé. First, it is necessary to stress the importance of the visual arts in Belgian culture. I wish to refer here in particular to the painter Leon Spilliaert, an artist who developed a unique form of ghostly aesthetics and who can be seen as the main precursor of Surrealism. He was born in Ostend and settled in Brussels later in life. He is well-known for his nightly landscapes of the Belgian coast, which are characterized by their uncanny nature. Although not an avantgarde artist strictly speaking, Spilliaert departed from traditional realism and expressed a definite attraction for abstract and desolate spaces. In other words, Surrealism started in Belgium before its actual birth in the 1920s. One should also, in this regard, emphasize the ongoing presence of the baroque both in art and in architecture, as demonstrated by the work of James Ensor. This is to say that Belgian artists often attempted to move beyond the strict domain of realism and created various hallucinatory and dreamlike forms of representation. It also implied a taste for excess that was deeply rooted in classical Flemish culture. Surrealism prolonged and expanded therefore a Belgian aesthetic tradition. The main difference is that it turned this tradition into an avant-garde and unequivocally modernist project. There were historically several Surrealist groups in Belgium, in particular the group based in La Louvière, an industrial and rather-grim city located in a region of Wallonia called Le Centre. It was led by Achille Chavée and published a journal called Correspondances, to which several foreign avant-garde artists contributed, in particular the Dada artist and poet Kurt Schwitters. This is what allowed Breton to state that La Louvière was the second homeland of Surrealism after Paris. But the most famous group was undoubtedly the one formed around the personality of René Magritte. I  will focus in this chapter on the poets and writers that helped this group thrive, since they are less well-known in the United States than the illustrious painter. We have to say first that this group largely existed outside of the influence of the Paris group led by André Breton. In fact, Magritte himself spent some time in Paris at the end of the 1920s. But

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-24

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his stay proved to be disappointing: his personal and artistic relations with Breton and his friends remained actually distant and were often characterized by mutual misunderstandings. This constitutes a bit of a paradox, since Magritte and Breton spoke the same language, that is, French, and lived in neighboring countries. Nevertheless, it proved that Surrealism was not a unified movement and that it could easily be fragmented according to aesthetic values and sociopolitical views. I would go even further and say that these poets and writers tried to avoid the word “Surrealism” when describing their own literary endeavors and those of the artists of the movement in Belgium. On the occasion of a show on Surrealism organized in 1945 by its Belgian members in Brussels, Nougé even asked to cross out the term “Surrealism” from the title and the program of the event. It had already been misused too many times and distorted in its original meaning for purely commercial and opportunistic purposes. In the case of Belgian Surrealism, what separated first and foremost the two sides was the fact that the Belgian poets and writers did not abide by the dogma of automatic writing. This is particularly true in the case of both Paul Nougé and Marcel Mariën. They did not oppose the idea of a spontaneous and free-flow type of writing, but they could not support the strong bind between poetry and psychoanalysis that Breton’s theory inevitably entailed. Indeed, Nougé and Mariën were not interested in Freudian thought at all. They emphasized instead the radically experimental and independent nature of Surrealism. They refused therefore to tie the movement to any preestablished system of ideas, no matter how modern and innovative this system could be. In other words, there was no such thing for them as a literature of the unconscious: it was thus not the main purpose of Surrealism to unveil the hidden desires of humanity. For the Belgian Surrealists, the key word was “experiment.” It largely defined the spirit of their common project. This term could be related to the world of hard sciences, since Nougé worked as a chemical technician in a lab. But it meant more precisely that writing was defined by its quite-hypothetical and random nature. The Surrealist poet did not impose predetermined truths: to the contrary, he created open forms that were shaped by chance and led to various interpretations by the reader. In other words, Belgian Surrealism was highly speculative in its main philosophical and aesthetic orientations. This dimension was also quite relevant for the art of Magritte. Indeed, one of his main works, The Treason of Images, known for its text reading, “This is not a pipe,” emphasized the need to question constantly the meaning of pictorial representation and its socalled objective quality. The use of language in several of his paintings, in particular The Key to Dreams, also served to express the imaginary identity of objects and the ability of words to suggest this original identity. In many ways, Belgian Surrealism was as close to the chess-obsessed Marcel Duchamp as it was to André Breton. It underlined the conceptual perspective of the twentieth-century avantgarde beyond the strict realm of Surrealism. This artistic kinship was particularly striking in the case of Paul Nougé, who wrote a short treaty, Notes on Chess, that was published a few years after his death. From Duchamp, Nougé and Mariën borrowed also the principle that the idea of art was more important than the actual production of numerous works. Nougé, for instance, only published his major book of poetry, L’Expérience continue, at the age of seventy-one, one year prior to his death. Though he was also a Surrealist photographer, until then, he had been better known for his articles of literary and art criticism, as well as for his Conférence de Charleroi, which was the text of a speech devoted to the issue of music. Mariën was also better known as a critic and as the editor of the journal Les Lèvres nues (Bare Lips) than as a poet or as the creator of Surrealist objects. In many ways, these writers questioned the very notion of a work of literature and art according to a mindset that was 184

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quite similar to that of Duchamp. The main purpose of their activities was to define a certain image of the avant-garde, regardless of any imperative of production. In their perspective, critical thinking played a key-role in the construction of this image. In other words, Surrealism could not exist without such thinking. It allowed for a radical project that was both aesthetic and political. This peculiar situation also showed that they were not really interested in fame or even recognition by their peers. Instead, they focused for the most part their attention on alternative modes of literary expression. These modes existed largely outside of any mainstream publishing networks. In this regard, the publishing house that they founded in Brussels, Les Lèvres nues, was a rather-marginal one that did not fit the norms of the Belgian literary establishment. The main person in charge of this publishing house was Jane Graverol, a painter of French extraction who played a significant role in the history of the movement in Belgium. Another important figure of Belgian Surrealism was Louis Scutenaire. He published in 1945 the first volume of Mes Inscriptions (My Inscriptions), an autobiographical work that escaped the traditional rules of the genre. It was not a narrative, indeed, but rather a set of casual thoughts and aphorisms on art, literature, politics, and life in general. This book underlined the taste of Belgian poets for fragmented and nonlinear forms of writing. The two volumes of Mes Inscriptions were also characterized by a strong sense of derision and self-irony. This attitude constituted a recurrent feature of Belgian Surrealism. One can think in this regard of the aforementioned Treason of Images by Magritte. A key moment in the history of Belgian Surrealism was the publication of The Manifesto of Revolutionary Surrealism in 1947. This manifesto was signed by virtually all the members of the movement, including young writers and artists, such as Christian Dotremont and Marcel Broodthaers. It enlightened once more the philosophical conflicts that opposed the Belgian Surrealists to André Breton. Its focus was primarily political since it asserted the unequivocal support of Communist ideology by these artists and writers. Such a position clearly stood in opposition to Breton, who, the same year, published his Ode à Charles Fourier. In publishing this work, Breton stressed his irreversible break with Marxism and expressed instead his admiration for the Utopian Socialism of the nineteenth-century French thinker. The Manifesto of Revolutionary Surrealism included a direct reference to the Soviet Revolution of 1917, which had earlier inspired French Surrealism, as demonstrated by the creation of the journal Surrealism in the Service of Revolution. Therefore, the Belgian Surrealists strived through this document to return to the Communist ties of Surrealism, whereas Breton was increasingly distancing himself from them. Their Manifesto entailed, therefore, an implicit statement: “We are the true Surrealists.” The shared embrace of Communism actually put all these artists and writers in a rather-marginal position, since the Belgian Communist Party did not enjoy strong popular support, as opposed to its French counterpart, right after World War II. The Manifesto of Revolutionary Surrealism was thus like a throw of the dice, from a purely political point of view. It was a quite-risky undertaking that pleased neither Belgian society at large nor the Parisian leader of the movement. It definitely constituted an act of faith, though, and as such, it should still be seen today as a collective document of utmost historical significance. Manifestoes stress the importance of community ties for the artistic and literary development of the avant-garde. They contradict therefore the fundamental individualism of bourgeois society. Their perspective is profoundly ethical, to the extent that they express a common set of values and principles that have to be respected by all the members of a particular movement. The history of the avant-garde, indeed, relies heavily on manifestoes. This was also true for Dada and Futurism. These texts are not just of an ideological nature; they also underline the 185

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need for radical aesthetic change. In this regard, The Manifesto of Revolutionary Surrealism paved the way for the creation of the CoBrA movement, which was founded one year later. The essential role played by the Soviet Union in the ultimate military defeat of Nazi Germany had a direct influence on the political views of the Belgian Surrealists right after the end of World War II. Very little was actually known at that time in Belgium about the large-scale campaign of repression launched by Stalin as early as the 1930s through numerous trials and systematic deportation of political dissidents in labor camps. What prevailed therefore was an idealized vision of Communism and of its concrete application in Eastern Europe. The period that immediately followed the end of the second world conflict was also characterized by a renewed optimism and a strong belief in a bright future. Totalitarianism had been vanquished, indeed, throughout the West, and the younger generations were now eager to fully enjoy life. They had just lived under foreign occupation for several years and had been therefore deprived of their most fundamental rights, namely, freedom of speech and artistic expression. The Manifesto of Revolutionary Surrealism reflected in this sense a form of idealism that was widespread at that time. It implied the quest for a new world in which avant-garde art and poetry would play a preeminent role. The term “revolution” had not yet been spoiled by the reality of the Gulag. It implied a sort of purity that could only attract the Belgian Surrealists and their spiritual heirs. That is the reason it would be unfair to judge this common enthusiasm for the political model of the Soviet Union from a contemporary perspective. In other words, The Manifesto of Revolutionary Surrealism has to be put in a very particular historical context that can explain its actual significance. The kind of skepticism (and even of sheer cynicism) that dominates today the political sphere was quite rare back then, especially among the most liberal elements of the population, who were convinced for the most part that capitalism could be overthrown and replaced by a more egalitarian socioeconomic system. As Magritte stated, “Surrealism is not an aesthetics: It is an attitude of revolt.” The Manifesto of Revolutionary Surrealism echoed this way of thinking with a particular vigor. Journals also constituted an essential venue for the ongoing expression of the movement in Belgian culture. There were many of them, since their average life span was usually short. Among the most striking examples, one finds L’Invention collective and La Carte d’après nature (The Card from Nature), which were both published in the nineteen fifties. The latter was particularly original in its format, as it was actually made of a set of postcards. They were marginal publications with a limited number of subscribers. They emphasized therefore the fundamental otherness of Surrealism, in spite of its growing reputation and stature. In one of the issues of La Carte d’après nature, one could read an article by Paul Nougé that was written in 1941. It was entitled “Récapitulation” and attempted to stress the main goals of Surrealism in front of its detractors. For Nougé, Surrealism was primarily a movement that granted equal value to all forms of human and artistic expression. It questioned, therefore, the academic supremacy of painting and valued original and often overlooked aesthetic forms, such as imaginary objects, collages, and photographs. This kind of artistic relativism constituted an essential dimension of the avant-garde in general since Dada. Nevertheless, for the poet Nougé, poetry was still located at the forefront of the Surrealist project, to the extent that it included for him an important visual component. In this sense, poetry was not separated from art but synthesized instead the literary and the artistic side of Surrealism. The publication of an article like “Récapitulation” demonstrated that the fight for a full recognition of Surrealism as a major artistic movement was still going on inside the bourgeois and rather traditional Belgian culture of the 1950s. It was a fight that was common to all avantgarde groups. In the twenty-first century, things are obviously quite different. Surrealism has 186

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now infiltrated mainstream Belgian culture, as shown by the opening of the Magritte Museum in downtown Brussels. Les Lèvres nues was another important publication. It was directed by Marcel Mariën and included articles on art, literature, and politics. Its role in the history of Belgian Surrealism should not be underestimated. This journal allowed for the close collaboration between Surrealist poets and members of the Situationist International. The latter was only founded officially in 1957, but its main intellectual orientations were already developed and expressed in some of the earlier issues of Les Lèvres nues. I think in particular of détournements, a symbolic appropriation of messages coming from the world of advertising and the media that enabled this avant-garde group to assert his radical critique of modern capitalist society and of its mainstream culture defined by the Spectacle. Guy Debord authored several articles for this journal. He was then a young man in his twenties who was still a rather-unknown figure, even in avant-garde circles. Les Lèvres nues allowed him to present his main original concepts to readers outside of France. Belgian Surrealism, in this sense, established a thorough dialogue with other avant-garde groups. This particular situation questioned the sectarian nature of the Surrealism defined by André Breton: it was, in many ways, inclusive in its identity. This journal exposed therefore the intellectual flexibility and openness of the Belgian Surrealists. Mariën asserted in the journal his will for what he called an Immediate Revolution. This idea stemmed from the observation that true Socialism had yet to be implemented, including in the Soviet Union. He conceived, therefore, a radical political model that was different from Communism. His inspiration was more anarchist in nature. In this sense, Mariën anticipated in his revolutionary discourse the spirit of May ’68. Surrealism had to stir social change without relying upon traditional institutions, such as political parties and trade unions. His focus on the instantaneous dimension of revolutionary action also implied the idea that radical politics had to be rooted in the present and in everyday life rather than in history. This idea was shared by Debord and his colleagues. Everyday life, indeed, constituted a privileged sphere of alienation within capitalist and postindustrial societies. The Situationists also introduced in this journal the concept of dérive. In order to transform everyday life, one had to drift from usual routine and work habits. This concept was tied to the notion of wandering. It contradicted the strictly utilitarian perspective on human activities that stemmed from modern capitalism. Dérive was therefore another word for personal freedom: it meant that one could escape the demands of sheer productivity imposed by the almighty economic system. Wandering included the possibility of both dreaming and playing within the realm of everyday life. It questioned first and foremost the supremacy of labor in the organization of the social order. These notions had already been developed by Breton in his novel Nadja more than two decades before. Breton, indeed, criticized in his book the enslavement of man by work and stressed the need for a less hectic and pressured way of life. He also celebrated the wandering soul of his main female character. In many ways, thus, Situationism echoed the spirit of early Surrealism. The main difference between the two movements, though, is that Situationism was, from its inception, directly concerned with social and political issues. The Western society of the 1950s confronted the avant-garde with entirely new challenges. It engendered in particular an unbridled form of consumerism stemming from the post–World War II economic boom. This situation reflected the widespread materialism of the era. The middle classes, which were the first to benefit from this growth, became more and more concerned with the private ownership of goods and objects. Moreover, the 1950s (and ’60s) saw the birth of television and the development of a new cultural order based on the almighty power of information and mass communication. 187

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Mariën and the Situationists witnessed this radical evolution and undertook a critique of its most negative effects. In this regard, classical Marxism was no longer relevant, to the extent that the law of the Spectacle derived from the sovereignty of the media and of the world of entertainment. The class warfare of the past that opposed industrialists or factory owners and the workers had suddenly been replaced by a symbolic warfare that deceived the common man through false representations of reality. This critique culminated with the publication of La Société du Spectacle by Debord in 1967. The issue of representation, and of its ethical meaning for the community, was paramount for Surrealism. After all, this movement was nothing else than a fundamental questioning of realist representation in Western art and literature. Therefore, Les Lèvres nues expressed some of the most important ideas of Surrealism in the context of post–World War II Belgium. In particular, it stressed the need for a definite truth of representation, which could be reached neither through a so-called objective mimesis nor through the constant cultural dissemination of ephemeral signs and images. Belgian Surrealism evolved thus according to the profound changes in the symbolic order of modern societies. In this sense, the avant-garde is never a static phenomenon: it must always adjust to new situations and maintain its critical perspective toward them. The creative encounter between Belgian Surrealism and French Situationism led therefore to the expression of an in-depth cultural discourse that exceeded the strict domain of aesthetics. The foundation of the CoBrA movement in 1948, that is, one year exactly after the publication of The Manifesto of Revolutionary Surrealism, constituted another major episode in the history of Surrealism in Belgium. Its main leader was Christian Dotremont, a young poet and artist who had already played a key role in the writing of the manifesto. Like Surrealism, CoBrA was an international movement that brought together artists from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium, such as Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, and Corneille. Its geographical identity was clearly located in Northern Europe and, more precisely, in small countries that, until then, had been rather marginalized in the history of the avant-garde. The members of CoBrA shared a strong desire to break away from Surrealism. They thought in many ways that Surrealism had lost most of its original qualities over the years. In particular, they wanted to return to a more spontaneous form of artistic expression. This spontaneity had been important for the creation of automatic writing by Breton and Soupault back in 1919. Somehow, though, it had faded in their eyes after almost three decades of existence. CoBrA, in this sense, celebrated the childhood of art. Breton himself, in his manifestoes, had done the same thing, but the initial playful spirit of Surrealism had become now less predominant. This playfulness was obvious in the poetry of Dotremont himself, which was characterized by numerous puns and word games. Such perspective implied a strong attraction for primitivism both in art and in poetry. Again, this attraction already constituted a striking feature of Breton’s critical discourse on art. It was also reflected by the collection of artworks that he gathered in his Parisian apartment located in Rue Fontaine. Therein lay the paradox of CoBrA. On one hand, indeed, it pretended to relinquish the legacy of Surrealism. On the other hand, though, its main purpose was to go back to the roots of the movement. This is the reason that we can say that CoBrA was still an heir of Surrealism, but a rebellious one, in many ways. The issue of the community was also essential for CoBrA, as had been the case for Breton’s Surrealism, at least originally. The movement organized in particular in 1949 an international conference in which all its members participated. Moreover, various artists of the group created works in collaboration with other fellow members.

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CoBrA must be seen as the most influential avant-garde movement of post–Word War II Belgium. It can be defined both as post-Surrealist and as neo-Surrealist, as I explained before. Its fundamental contradictions demonstrate that the shadow of Surrealism could never be fully erased in twentieth-century Belgian culture. Even artists and poets who apparently rose in opposition to it were still, eventually, influenced by it. In this sense, the idea of a history of Belgian Surrealism is not really valid, to the extent that history always belongs to the past. It corresponds also to a finite period of time. One should talk instead of a never-ending story. Surrealism started indeed a century ago, but it never truly died or disappeared in Belgian culture, in spite of the emergence of new styles of both art and poetry. Its presence can still be felt, for instance, in contemporary art. In conclusion, I will ask the following question: what can be the cultural and artistic significance of Surrealism for twenty-first-century Belgium? It is quite obvious that contemporary Belgian society is different from the one in which the likes of Nougé and Mariën lived. Before World War II, or even right after, indeed, Belgium was a much more homogeneous society than it is now. In particular, the country was still a colonial power, since the process of decolonization only started in 1960, after the independence of Congo. By comparison, Belgium today is a very multicultural society, both ethnically and culturally diverse. The Belgian Surrealists did not live in this kind of social environment. In this regard, their works were mostly deprived of references to non-Western cultures. Moreover, the overwhelming power of new technologies, of the internet, of iPhones, and of social media have literally transformed the everyday experience of the average Belgian citizen. This is, in many ways, a cultural revolution that has profoundly altered and even distorted our common representation of reality. Surrealism stressed both the aesthetic and the existential meaning of dreams for mankind. Dreams allowed in this perspective for a temporary suspension of reality. But they also led to the deep perception of a hidden world. They emphasized therefore the need for an ongoing relation with our own imaginary space. In other words, they defined for Surrealism the introspective nature of human beings and their ability to reshape reality according to their own desires and visions. We have to wonder, though, whether a world ruled by technology still allows us to explore the vast realm of dreams that Surrealism unveiled. The law of global and instant connection tends instead to tie us to a social reality that becomes, in many ways, unescapable. The 24-7 deluge of information that it entails too often prevents us from feeling within ourselves the transcending power of the supernatural. This predicament makes thus a true Surrealist experience more and more elusive, since it relies upon a large-scale process of rationalization of both social interaction and individual expression.

Works Cited Breton, André. Manifestes du surréalisme. Gallimard, 2003. ———. Nadja. Gallimard, 1990. ———. Ode à Charles Fourier. Edited and Introduced by Jean Gaulmier. Méridiens-Klincksieck, 1961. Debord, Guy. La Société du Spectacle. Buchet-Chastel, 1967. Lambert, Jean-Clarence, editor. CoBrA Poésie. Orphée/La Différence, 1992. Mariën, Marcel. Apologies de Magritte. Didier Devillez, 1994. Nougé, Paul. La Conférence de Charleroi. Allia, 2020. ———. L’Expérience continue. Les Lèvres nues, 1966. ———. Notes sur les échecs. Les Lèvres nues, 1969. Scutenaire, Louis. Mes Inscriptions (1943–1944). Allia, 2007.

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Pierre Taminiaux ———. Mes Inscriptions (1945–1973). Allia, 2013. Taminiaux, Pierre. Du Surréalisme à la Photographie Contemporaine: au Croisement des Arts et de la Littérature. Honoré Champion, Poétique/Esthétique XXe/XXIe siècles, 2016. ———. Esthétiques radicales. Actualité des avant-gardes. Hermann, 2021. ———. Révolte et Transcendance: surréalisme, situationnisme et arts contemporains. L’Harmattan, Beaux-Arts, 2018. ———. Surmodernités: entre Rêve et Technique. L’Harmattan, Ouverture Philosophique, 2003.

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21 SURREALISM IN THE CARIBBEAN IN THE 1940s Transnational Encounters Paulina Caro Troncoso

The history of Surrealism in the Caribbean unfolds around the artistic encounters that took place in Paris in the 1930s and on the islands in the 1940s. The publication of the journals Légitime défense (1932) and L’Étudiant noir (1934), edited by Caribbean students in Paris, and Tropiques (1941–1945) in Martinique, Wifredo Lam’s return to Cuba in 1941, and André Breton’s visit to Haiti in 1945 are some examples of the transatlantic interactions that shape this important chapter in the history of the movement. The new approaches towards Surrealism as a poetic and critical tool taken by Caribbean poets and artists, as well as the more critical voices that questioned the possibility of Surrealist activity in the Americas, contributed to broader narratives that expand our understanding of Surrealism beyond Paris. But these Surrealist encounters and new perspectives that emerged from them certainly present methodological challenges for art historians today that cannot be ignored. How do we examine Surrealism in the Caribbean without overlooking the impact that the historical, political, and cultural particularities of each context may have had in artistic practices? How do we negotiate the centre-periphery tensions that arise when examining art in the Americas in light of a European avant-garde? Though it is not the purpose of this chapter to analyse the theoretical issues that these questions present, it is important to acknowledge them in order to continue a conversation around Surrealism in light of current debates in postcolonial studies. Over the past decades, scholars have argued that the study of Surrealism in the Caribbean, as well as in the rest of the Americas, is as complex as the political and social histories of the region (Ades, Brough-Evans, Richardson). Indeed, not only does the cultural diversity of the region make problematic the articulation of a single narrative, but so, too, does the heterogenous reception that Surrealism has had in the Americas, for example, in the works of Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, who, despite being in contact with the Paris Surrealist circle in the 1920s, reconsidered his approach to Surrealism the following decade when he returned to Cuba (Brough-Evans). This chapter focuses on the encounters and interactions between Caribbean and European writers and artists who considered themselves Surrealists or whose work was informed by the movement’s ideals about the revolutionary potential of art and poetry and the influence that their work in Haiti, Martinique, and Cuba had for expanding the scope of Surrealist activity and its engagement with anti-colonial and revolutionary struggles in the 1940s.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-25

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Encounters in Paris: Légitime défense (1932) and L’Étudiant noir (1934) The anti-colonial attitude that Surrealists firmly manifested constitutes an important aspect of the political position of Surrealism. Their protestations against French colonialism include the statement in solidarity with the Riffian struggle for independence published after the 1925 French intervention in the Spanish occupation of the Rif in Morocco (1921–1926) and the declarations that accompanied the 1931 counter-exhibition The Truth about the Colonies, organised by Louis Aragon, André Thirion, and the French Communist Party in response to the Colonial Exhibition held that year in Paris in an effort to promote French colonial power. During this period, two important journals associated with Surrealism were also distributed: Légitime défense, edited in June 1932 by a group of Martinican students from La Sorbonne that included Etienne Léro, René Ménil, Jules-Marcel Monnerot, and Pierre Yoyotte, and L’Étudiant noir, issued in 1934 and edited by the Guyanese Léon Damas, the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor, and the Martinican Aimé Césaire, who at that time were students at the École Normale Supérieure. While only a single issue of Légitime défense was printed, the limited documentation available regarding L’Étudiant noir suggests that five to six issues of this journal were published, although, to this day, only one is available (Rosemont and Kelley 29). What is clear is that both journals were important platforms for the circulation of texts addressing anti-colonial concerns from a perspective informed by Surrealism and Marxist thought (Richardson 5). In the opening declaration of Légitime défense, the students acknowledged the influence of Surrealism in their work: “[W]e refer our readers to André Breton’s two manifestos and to all the works of Aragon, André Breton, Réne Crevel, Salvador Dalí, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret and Tristan Tzara.” They then added, “[I]n Sade, Hegel, Lautrémont and Rimbaud . .  . we seek everything surrealism has taught us to find” (quoted in Richardson and Fijałkowski 188). For them, Surrealism was “instrumental in providing . . . a point of departure for their critique of colonial society for . . . it offered them a sort of Trojan Horse in which to enter the previously impregnable white citadel” (Richardson 5). The editors were clear that the content of the first—and only—issue of Légitime défense was addressed to French Caribbean youth, “people whose capacity for revolt we certainly do not underestimate” (quoted in Richardson and Fijałkowski 189). The content covered in the journal included poetry and a harsh critique on the political and cultural landscape in the Antilles, which probably explains why the journal was censored in Martinique (Rosemont and Kelley 21). But the impact that the publication had on Surrealism was notable, as it “reinforced and expanded surrealism’s revolutionary project and drove home the crucial point that surrealism . . . was in truth a movement concerned above all with freedom, equality, and revolutionary transformation” (Rosemont and Kelley 22). Two years later, in 1936, Damas, Sédar Senghor, and Césaire published L’Étudiant noir, considered one of the foundational initiatives of the Négritude movement as it was here that the term coined by Césaire was first included in a publication (Rosemont and Kelley 28). Through a focus on race issues, L’Étudiant noir intended to bring together Caribbean and African students and the Black community in Paris, creating a new space for debate and expression (Rosemont and Kelley 28). Similar to the editors of Légitime défense, Damas, Sédar Senghor, and Césaire were also interested in Surrealist ideas and activities. Moreover, for the publication of L’Étudiant noir, the students received the support of the French Surrealists André Breton, Robert Desnos, and Michael Leiris (Rosemont and Kelley 28). That the admiration between Breton and Aimé Césaire was mutual is expressed through interviews and texts. In 1939, Césaire published in the Parisian journal Volontés his celebrated poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), a searing critique of the lingering material and psychological 192

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effects of slavery. Breton’s 1943 text “A Great Black Poet: Aimé Césaire” was included as the introduction of an English and French edition of the poem later published in New York. Therein Breton described the poem as “nothing less than the greatest lyric monument of our time” (Breton quoted in Richardson 194). Similarly, the work of Martinican poet Suzanne Césaire, a philosophy student at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris in the 1930s who married Aimé Césaire in 1937, was an important point of convergence between Surrealism and Caribbean thought, a collaboration framed by the friendship that the writer had with Breton in the 1940s, as seen in the poems the poets dedicated to each other in 1941: “André Breton, poet,” written by Suzanne Césaire, and “For Madame Suzanne Césaire,” by Breton.

Surrealism in Martinique: Tropiques (1941–1945) After studying in Paris, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire returned to their homeland in 1941, and in the 1940s, their work made significant contributions to Black Caribbean thought and Surrealism in the Caribbean. They became teachers at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, “offering students a bridge to the African values they had always previously been taught to despise” (Richardson 7). The lack of a local cultural production the poets identified in Martinique inspired not only their teaching approach but also their editorial work along with Martinican poet Réne Ménil, former editor of Légitime défense, with whom they created the influential journal Tropiques, published between 1941 and 1945. Tropiques had a key role in the development of new approaches to Martinican literature, operating “as a focus for a developing black consciousness in Martinique; as a cover locus for the anti-Vichy struggle (during the war Martinique was ostensibly administered by Vichy); and as a journal of international surrealism” (Richardson 7). Undoubtedly, the experience of the Césaires and Réne Menil as students in Paris and their contact with the Surrealist group influenced their work in the journal. Although each of them approached Surrealism differently, its revolutionary ideas were an important reference for Tropiques. While Aimé Césaire was drawn to Surrealism for its poetic potential, Ménil and Suzanne Césaire saw Surrealism as a fertile critical approach to examine Martinican culture (Richardson 7). The idea of an international Surrealism was particularly attractive to Suzanne Césaire, who, in her well-known 1943 essay “Surrealism and Us,” stated: “Many believe surrealism was dead. Many wrote so. Childish nonsense: its activity extends today to the entire world and surrealism remains livelier, more audacious than ever . . . Surrealism, tightrope of our hope” (Césaire 34, 38). Tropiques became not only an important locus for the dissemination of poetry and articles on African and Caribbean culture and traditions but also a central point of contact with Surrealism—in other words, a means to new subjectivities and realities. Martinique was a place of Surrealist encounters. In March 1941, an old cargo ship known as Capitaine Paul-Lemerle departed from Marseille with more than 300 refugees on board. Among them were the Surrealists André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, and Wifredo Lam, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Russian poet Victor Serge, and German writer Anna Seghers. A month later, the ship arrived in Fort-de-France, where Breton and Lam were forced to stay before continuing their journey to New York and Havana, respectively. The timing of their arrival was fortuitous as it coincided with the publication of the first issue of Tropiques. One day, while visiting the city, Breton entered a shop where he found a copy of the new journal. Amazed by the references to Surrealism included in the first issue of the periodical, Breton requested an introduction to Ménil and the Césaires, an opportunity that allowed Breton and other Surrealists to collaborate with Tropiques. In Breton’s words, Tropiques “said exactly what needed to be said. . . . Aimé Césaire was the name of the one speaking” (Breton quoted in Ades 185). The encounter between the Surrealists and the editors of Tropiques was a fertile experience 193

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for all of them, and the journal became an important means for the visibility of the Surrealists’ work in Martinique. Breton and Lam published articles and drawings in Tropiques, and the work of the latter was celebrated in texts, such as the article “The Jungle,” written by physician and Surrealist writer Pierre Mabille in January 1945. Inspired by the painting with the same title that Lam painted after he returned to Cuba in 1941, Mabille examined the life and work of the Cuban artist and argued that The Jungle (1943) “marks the decisive turning point in his career” (Mabille in Richardson 208). Another example of the effect that the experience in Martinique had for French Surrealists is Breton’s text Martinique, charmeuse de serpents (Martinique: Snake Charmer), first published in the newspaper Pour la Victoire in 1942 and later, in 1948, as a book in an edition that included drawings by Surrealist artist André Masson, who also arrived in Martinique in 1941. In the 1948 version of the book, Breton described his first impressions of the Caribbean island, highlighting the beauty of its landscapes. Similarly, Masson’s work was inspired by his encounter with nature in Martinique, representing imaginary landscapes that merge elements of the local flora with humanlike bodies in the drawings included in the book. Both appreciations of the Caribbean suggest that, upon their arrival in the Caribbean, Surrealists were captivated by their encounter with untouched nature, a state that they immediately associated with their interest in the “primitive” (Bernal Encantador 43). Prior to the experience in Caribbean soil, Surrealists’ attraction to African, Oceanic, and American cultures and belief systems was informed by the rise of ethnographic research in Europe in the 1920s. For Surrealists, “ancient New World cultures and their current practices reached into everyday life and responded, in part, to the yearned-for fusion between art and life—a central concept for surrealists” (Ades et  al. 4). The Surrealists’ first impressions of the Martinique experience seem to reflect the influence of these imaginaries. Along these lines, it is interesting to examine how the work of Caribbean artists such as Cuban painter Wifredo Lam and Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier responded to these ideas, as well as how the experience of Surrealists in other Caribbean contexts expanded and problematised the Surrealists’ understanding of local cultures and traditions.

Wifredo Lam’s Return to Cuba and Alejo Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso Following the experience in Martinique, Lam returned to Cuba after a long absence from his homeland. The political and social circumstances in the island were complex during Fulgencio Batista’s administration. In Lam’s words: What I saw on my return was like some sort of hell. For me, trafficking in the dignity of a people is just that, hell. . . . I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the Negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the Blacks. (Lam quoted in David 19) In this context, in 1942, Lam started working in La jungla (The Jungle, 1943), a painting that Mabille described as a turning point in Lam’s career in the article the poet published in Tropiques. The painting also had a positive reception in the local artistic scene despite Lam being unfamiliar with avant-garde trends and cultural debates in Cuba. However, the influential work of Cuban anthropologists Lydia Cabrera and Fernando Ortiz facilitated Lam’s to re-encounter

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with Afro-Cuban culture and traditions. Cabrera’s research on the syncretism of Afro-Cuban traditions and Ortiz’s notion of transculturación (transculturation) were inscribed within the development of a new Cuban paradigm against forms of oppression and domination (David 19), ideas that definitely had an impact on Lam’s painting. In the iconography developed by the artist during this period, these concepts powerfully resonate as the artist worked extensively in the creation of new imaginaries by merging a range of elements from African heritage, Cuban traditions, and European modernism. In doing so, Lam’s work could be seen as that of a transculturador, that is to say, as a mediator between the cultures that were familiar to him (Bernal, Mas allá 179). As art historian María Clara Bernal argues, Lam’s work not only opened new paths for the representation of transcultural processes of collective identities but also demonstrated that artists from Latin America could take a new approach towards European influences by acknowledging and highlighting the hybrid character of their culture (Bernal, Mas allá 221). As Breton’s book on Martinique shows, Surrealists’ attraction for the “primitive” resonated in their first impressions of the Caribbean. However, while in Lam’s painting this notion is also echoed, it appears from a more critical perspective as “his eye did not replicate the uneven power dynamic of the anthropological gaze” (Joseph-Gabriel 77). Surrealism in Latin America “has been accused of neo-colonialism, of being too fantastic or not fantastic enough, too irrational or not irrational enough” (Ades 177). In light of these critical approaches, the case of Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier is worth examining as another example of the reception Surrealism had in the Caribbean. Born to a French father and Russian mother, Carpentier was exposed to French and Spanish from an early age, and like many of the Caribbean writers already mentioned, Carpentier lived in Paris in the 1930s, where he started writing in two languages. This allowed him to develop a creative approach that integrated elements from Afro-Cuban and French culture (Birkenmaier 14). The works Carpentier wrote in the 1930s revealed an interest in developing a type of literature that aimed to emphasise a local perspective, an endeavour that would not have been possible without his experience in Paris and his contact with Surrealist circles (Birkenmaier 19). In Paris, Carpentier was part of the intellectual scene, and among his friends were Georges Bataille and Roger Callois, dissident Surrealists who, after leaving Breton’s circle, edited the journal Documents and founded the Collège de Sociologie. Back in Havana, and influenced by new approaches towards the local culture, Carpentier reconsidered Surrealism for being “too Eurocentric” (D’Alessandro and Gale 119). Carpentier’s position towards Surrealism was stated in the prologue to his 1949 novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World), where the author asked, “But what is the story of all of the Americas if not the chronicle of the marvelous and the real?” (Carpentier xx). The distance that Carpentier placed between Surrealism and Latin America was synthetised in his concept of the marvellous real (lo real maravilloso) that the writer developed to propose “that there was an extraordinary dimension to everyday reality in Latin America, an enhanced and sensuous perception of a very strange world, which was ‘real’ by contrast with surrealist fantasy” (Ades 178). Drawing on the theory of magical realism that German critic Franz Roh developed in the 1920s to describe postwar painting, Carpentier intended to articulate a position that would respond to the cultural specificity of Latin America. Although Carpentier’s view of the fantastic and the real in an opposing dynamic might be seen as “a misrepresentation of [Surrealism’s] fundamental belief that the real cannot be limited to everyday experiences and to waking consciousness” (Ades 178), it is important to consider his critique of Surrealism as a fruitful yet complex approach that allowed him to articulate a Latin American aesthetic (Birkenmaier 20). In this way, and similar to the work of Lam and other Cuban artists, Carpentier’s writings contributed to the cultural renewal of 1940s Cuba.

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Towards a Poetics of Freedom: Surrealism in Haiti In 1945, French cultural attaché and Surrealist writer Pierre Mabile invited Lam and Breton, who at that time was living in New York, to visit Haiti in the context of the exhibition of the works of the Cuban artist that opened in January 1946 at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince. Local newspapers announced that Breton was to deliver a series of speeches and lectures. These, he hoped, would facilitate a stimulating dialogue between Surrealism and the Haitian tradition of revolutionary struggles, notably including the successful slave rebellion of 1804. Though political events would prevent him from delivering the complete series of weekly lectures, Breton would regard his experience as a mesmerising encounter with two types of freedom: the political and the spiritual (Bernal Latin America 138). In December 1945, Breton made two important public interventions in which he reflected upon the concept of freedom and the permanent quest for it that Surrealism disseminated. The first was a speech delivered in a welcome dinner organised at the Hotel Savoy in Port-au-Prince, and the second, a speech known as “Surrealism and Haiti,” took place six days later at the REX theatre, where the poet addressed a large audience that included local poets, artists, and Haiti’s president, Louis Élie Lescot. In this occasion, Breton promoted his ideas on freedom and human liberation and encouraged young poets and artists “to make themselves heard, voice their opinions, and impose their audacious solutions on everyday life” through their work (Bernal, Latin America 135). The reception of Breton’s words among the audience was encouraging as the revolutionary tone of the speeches resonated with the local reality. Haitian historian and novelist Roger Gaillard, for example, described Breton “as a force. To hear him, to get near him, was to enter into a fiery zone. It was to undergo the test of the magnetic fields” (quoted in Bernal, Latin America 136). Breton was aware of the political tensions in Haiti and their historical antecedents as the poet stated in a 1946 interview: “I tried, not only for the clarity of my paper but also in deference to the spirit animating their history, to align surrealist aims with the age-old aims of the Haitian peasants” (Breton quoted in Bernal, Latin America 136). The reception of Breton’s visit had an immediate impact on the local scene. The following weeks, on 1 January 1946, La rouche, a radical journal edited by a group of fifteen students that included Haitian poets Réne Depestre, René Belance, and Paul Laraque, published a special issue dedicated to the French poet before the periodical was censored by the local authorities and its editorial members were arrested. The texts included in La rouche were “bold, defiant, and idealistic, driven by a revolutionary zeal and naïve optimism in Marxism” (Smith 2009, 75). It is then not surprising that the editors of the journal soon declared their admiration for Breton and Surrealism, “a movement that is not only an enterprise of liberation of the psychological richness in the human brain but also an antifascist moment that has not stopped believing in the legitimate aspiration of men toward social justice and freedom” (quoted in Bernal, Latin America 133). The tense political atmosphere during the Lescot period that Breton witnessed during his first weeks in Haiti soon heightened. After a student strike that ended up escalating to a general strike, a military coup overthrew Lescot in February, an event that changed the course of the history of Haiti (Smith 2009, 71). Led by a popular movement, the Haitian revolution of 1946 was motivated by the abuses of a ruling class influenced by US interests. The upheaval brought a political reformation in the country with the presidential election of Dumarsais Estimé, a Black politician born to a peasant family. Scholarship on Surrealism in the Caribbean has tended to attribute a central role to Breton in the events that followed his lecture. While Bernal convincingly argues that it would be naive to perceive Breton’s presence in Port-au-Prince as the starting point of the social unrest in Haiti, “it its indisputable that Breton in particular and surrealism in general acted as catalysts for that 196

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political upheaval” (Bernal, Latin America 134). In an interview from 1946, Breton acknowledged this and explained that he “was caught amid a chain of circumstances that could happen only once in a lifetime” (quoted in Bernal, Latin America 136). Bernal’s argument highlights an important aspect of Breton’s visit to Haiti: the poet contributed to the convergence of the Surrealist ideals of freedom and revolt and the particular social and political circumstances in the island (Latin America 135). And although Haitian artists and poets were already familiar with Surrealism thanks to the work of Pierre Mabille, Wifredo Lam, and Aimé Césaire, who visited Haiti in 1944 to give a series of lectures about international solidarity among Caribbean islands, the political events that frame Breton’s visit galvanised the revolutionary potential of Surrealism. While for Haitian artists “surrealism was one of the modernist ideas coming from Europe that gave some legitimation—in its claim for the ‘primitive’ and its assault on rationalism—to Haitian aims of developing a specifically black conscious” (Bernal, Latin America 135), for Breton, the experience in Haiti facilitated the access to new spiritual practices. In Haiti, Breton was introduced to Vodou practice, in which the poet identified a point of contact with Surrealism’s interest in the spiritual liberation of individuals in everyday life. This aspect put into contact Surrealism and the work of Haitian artist Hector Hyppolite, “who was convinced that he painted possessed by the spirits and created his work according to their instructions” (Bernal, Latin America 139). Influenced by his spiritual practice as oungan or Vodou priest, Hyppolite worked as a prolific painter and created a series of paintings inspired by Haitian culture. An example of this is Damballah la flambeau (Damballah the Flame, ca. 1947), a work that represents Damballah, or Sky Father, a serpent-spirit from Vodou belief. In this painting, the Haitian artist depicts Damballah as a serpent with long hair and feminine facial and body features, echoing the description in the title that juxtaposes the feminine article “la” with the masculine noun “flambeau” (Joseph-Gabriel 75). The artist’s images revealed “how the visual archive of Hyppolite’s world moved between masculine and feminine attributes, the quotidian and the supernatural, the real and the marvelous” (Joseph-Gabriel 75), elements that explain the interest of Surrealists in his works, even if they may not have fully understood the religious and cultural contexts in which they were created. The works examined in this chapter aimed to offer an overview of the interactions between Caribbean and European poets and writers in the 1940s, acknowledging the significance that the initiatives that took place in Paris the previous decade had for the development and dissemination of Surrealism in the Americas. Although the examples examined only represent a limited selection of artistic encounters with Surrealism, they allow us to grasp the heterogeneous cultural landscapes that frame the development of Surrealism in the 1940s.

Works Cited Ades, Dawn. “Surrealism in Latin America.” A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, edited by David Hopkins, John Wiley & Sons, 2016. Ades, Dawn, Rita Eder, and Graciela Speranza. Vivísimo Muerto: Debates on Surrealism in Latin America. Getty Research Institute, 2012. Bernal, María Clara. “El encantador de serpientes: sueños de paisajes lejanos.” Revista de estudios sociales, vol. 30, 2008, pp. 38–45. ———. Latin America Beyond Lo real maravilloso: Lam, Surrealism and the Créolité Movement. LAP: LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2012. ———. Más allá de lo real maravilloso: El surrealismo y el Caribe. Universidad de los Andes, 2006. Birkenmaier, Anke. Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina. Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2006. Brough-Evans, Vivienne. Sacred Surrealism, Dissidence and International Avant-Garde Prose. Routledge, 2016. Carpentier, Alejo. The Kingdom of this World. Translated by Pablo Medina. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

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Paulina Caro Troncoso Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Translated by Clayton Eshleman. Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Césaire, Suzanne. “1943: Surrealism and Us.” The Great Camouflage. Writings of Dissident (1941–1945), edited by Daniel Maximin, translated by Keith L. Walker, Wesleyan University Press, 2012. D’Alessandro, Stephanie, and Matthew Gale. “Horizons.” Surrealism Beyond Borders. Exhibition Catalogue, edited by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021. David, Catherine. “El monte y el mundo.” Wifredo Lam: The EY Exhibition, edited by Catherine David, Tate Publishing, 2016. Joseph-Gabriel, Annette. “Haiti, Martinique, Cuba.” Surrealism Beyond Borders. Exhibition Catalogue, edited by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021. Richardson, Michael. Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. Verso, 1996. Richardson, Michael, and Fijałkowski Krzysztof. Surrealism against the Current: Tracts and Declarations, edited and translated by Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijałkowski, Pluto Press, 2001. Rosemont, Franklin, and Robin Kelley. Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. University of Texas Press, 2009. Smith, Matthew J. Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934–1957. University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

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22 SURREALISM IN CHICAGO Penelope Rosemont

Unlikely place, unlikely time: an industrial city undergoing rapid transformation, a generation coming of age, war in Asia, freedom struggles at home. . . . In 1966, a lasting Surrealist group came into being that was militantly Surrealist, strikingly political, and drawn toward activism. Franklin Rosemont (1943–2009) and Penelope Rosemont set the spark after returning from Paris. Robert Green, Bernard Marszalek, Lawrence Decoster, Dotty Decoster, and Tor Faegre, soon joined by Paul Garon and Joseph Jablonski, published their own journal, Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, (1970–1989), organized the international exhibit Marvelous Freedom: World Surrealist Exhibition (1976), and linked itself to André Breton’s Paris group and Surrealists in Prague, Amsterdam, Milan, Lisbon, Tokyo, Mexico, San Francisco, Frankfort, London, New York, etc. Among its major contributions were books and publications in the fields of Surrealism, African Americans, women, blues music, popular culture, radical history, and its intense creative output: found-object sculpture, Surrealist games, experimental drawing, bold paintings, and transformative collage. Earlier, in the twenties, a brave Margaret Anderson, who admired Emma Goldman, published snatches of Dada and Surrealism in her avant-guard Little Review. Then, in the 1940s, a loosely organized group of Surrealist-oriented artists emerged around Gertrude Abercrombe in the Hyde Park area. Here the Compass Players, using Victoria Spolin’s improv methods, evolved into Second City, which later evolved into Saturday Night Live. Chicago was no stranger to improv—a method closely related to Surrealism. Second City founder Mick Nichols was a descendant of anarchist theorist of play Gustav Landauer. In 1951, Slim Brundage opened the club the College of Complexes. This evolved from Bughouse Square meetings where IWWs (Industrial Workers of the World), One-Armed Charlie Wendorf, the Cosmic Kid, and the Surfessor held sway. They discussed everything and anything and had African-American performers, including Big Bill Broonzy, and folk musicians. Here Larry Glasser first performed his “Dr. Freud” song, later made famous by the Irish Rovers. Franklin Rosemont was from Maywood (also home to the Black Panther organizer Fred Hampton, who was murdered by police in 1969). He edited the Proviso High School underground paper The Lantern, started a poetry group called the Rapsodists, and established a friendship with Warren Leming, an actor, playwright, and rock musician. Penelope Rosemont grew up in Lake Villa and came to Chicago influenced by Nelson Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make, wanting to know the wilderness and the wonder of it. At Lake Forest College, she heard DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-26

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Hannah Arendt and also Aldous Huxley speak, joined the Student Peace Union, demonstrated in Washington, marched at SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) demos, and heard Norman Thomas speak at a YPSL (Young People’s Socialist League) meeting. There she encountered Gavin MacFadgyen (1940–2016), a friend of Franklin Rosemont’s who filmed Chicago 68, worked for Granada TV, and later defended Julian Assange. The proto group initially came together at Roosevelt University. Robert Green, Bernard Marszalek, Lawrence DeCoster, John Bracey Jr., Tor Faegre, Scott Spencer, Lionel Bottari, Franklin Rosemont, and Penelope Rosemont formed a Dada-Surrealist grouping, the AntiPoetry Club. When this group was suspended, Nelson Algren and Paul Goodman came to their defense. Ardent students of African-American anthropologist St. Clair Drake, they delighted in the search for new forms of social organization. John Bracey Jr. later became head of the African American Studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Tor Faegre traveled to Afghanistan and wrote on Yurts. Scott Spencer penned a best seller, Endless Love. Bernard established the coop print shop Inkworks in Berkeley. Decosters joined the Peace & Freedom Movement. Green became an inventor. For these anthropologists run amok, C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins and Mariners, Renegades and Castaways were an inspiration, as were the local Haymarket Anarchists. Interestingly, Leonora Carrington was the key to the formation of the Chicago Surrealist group. Franklin Rosemont found Sunstone by Octavio Paz at Kroch’s & Brentanos bookstore. In 1963, he and Lawrence Decoster hitchhiked to Mexico City in the hopes of meeting Paz, but Paz was in India. By chance they found a magazine featuring Carrington’s work and got in touch with her. They were thrilled to meet her and see her work. It was she who told them how to contact Surrealists in New York. Claude Tarnaud, Nicholas Calas, and EF Granell were welcoming and took them to Gotham Book Mart. They found View magazine, VVV, Julian Levy’s Surrealism, and the exhibition catalog Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanter’s Domain. They also obtained Breton’s address, 42 rue Fontaine. Their letter to him was published in La Brèche, and they corresponded with Robert Benayoun, editor of Positif. In 1964, the group published a mimeographed mag, Rebel Worker. A  Surrealist-oriented friend, Jonathan Leake, published Resurgence in New York. They and their bookshop became characters for Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea in Illuminatus (1975). In Spring 1965, the group invented “Make love, Not war!” and it became the sixties slogan, spreading far and wide, beginning with a Mother’s Day Peace March and sales at the Mole Hole on Wells Street. In Paris in 1965–1966, Franklin and Penelope met André Breton, viewed the L’Ecart absolu exhibition, went to the Surrealist New Year’s party, and attended the Paris group’s then-dynamic café meetings, excited by the exhibition and looking forward to a new journal. André Breton, Elisa Breton, Mimi Parent, Jose Pierre, Jean Benoît, Jean-Claude Silbermann, Jehan Mayoux, Toyen, Nicole Espagnol, Alain Joubert, Georges Sebbag, Robert Benayoun, Joyce Mansour, Jean Schuster, Geovanna, Micheline and Vincent Bounoure, Gérard Legrand, Claude Courtot, and others frequented a café on the edge of Les Halles. André Breton himself welcomed the Chicagoans Franklin and Penelope into the group. Visiting Paris in 2012, Penelope joined the Surrealists at their meeting at the home of Michel Zimbacca, filmmaker and one of the few remaining of the 1965 group. In Paris they also met situationists Guy Debord and Mustafa Kayati. Debord commented that he thought Surrealist art had just become part of the spectacle; he added that he admired Breton and gave the Rosemonts SI literature to distribute. In London, the Rosemonts visited Freedom Press and published an issue of Rebel Worker with Charles Radcliffe, who started a Surrealist-oriented journal, Heatwave, before joining the situationists and being forced into hiding, charged unjustly with counterfeiting. 200

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After returning from Paris, Penelope and Franklin Rosemont wrote The Situation of Surrealism in the U.S. (1966), which was published in the Paris Surrealist journal L’Archibras in 1967. The group’s headquarters on Armitage Avenue, Solidarity Bookshop, was affiliated with the IWW and was an experiment in do-it-yourself revolution. They were joined by African Americans Joan Smith, studying social work; Simone Collier, writing plays; and Charlotte Carter, a writer of mysteries. All were attracted to the politics and the social justice project of the bookstore in the then slum of Lincoln Park. The group mimeographed Surrealism & Revolution (1966) and issued the manifesto The Forecast is Hot! At a New York demonstration in 1967, they met novelist Rikki Ducornet and Guy Ducornet. Paul Garon, who was to play a major role, came to the group in 1968. A friend of Radcliffe’s and a founder of Living Blues magazine, Paul was interested in blues, Black history, and psychoanalysis. He was finishing his book Peetie Wheatstraw: The Devil’s Son-in-Law. In 1975, he would publish the first book on Surrealism and blues, Blues and the Poetic Spirit (1975). 1968 was a year of slogans that were Surrealist: “Demand the Impossible” and “All Power to the Imagination!” Surrealists in Prague, Paris, and Chicago participated. In fall 1968, to protest the Art Institute’s showing of William Rubin’s exhibit Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, the Surrealists held their first exhibition at the Bugs Bunny Gallery. Robert Green, Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont, Eric Matheson, Lester Dore, and Schlecter Duvall participated. Later shows at Bugs Bunny were Surrealist Objects & Revolutionary Posters, Franklin Rosemont, and Schlecter Duvall. Penelope Rosemont joined the national staff of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1967, working mainly in the printshop. It was there that The Morning of a Machine Gun and Surrealist Insurrection were printed. August  1968 was a heady time. Through SDS, they met Paul Buhle, who was to be their longtime colleague and friend; Chicago Surrealists beginning in 1968 participated in three issues of Buhle’s SDS journal, Radical America. These concerned Benjamin Péret, E. L. T. Mesens, and “Surrealism in the USA.” Joseph Jablonski arrived from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to join the group. He proved to be a theoretician of myth, a storyteller, and a splendid poet. In 2012, he organized a Surrealist extravaganza in Harrisburg, in celebration of the Mayan millennium. After 1968, the Chicago group was joined by David Schanoes, John Simmons, and Peter Manti. Franklin Rosemont, John Simmons, and David Schanoes spoke at the Telos Conference in 1971. They met friends Max Stanford Jr., John Bracey Jr., and also the Black Revolutionary Workers group. They enjoyed a friendly and significant meeting with Herbert Marcuse, whose Eros & Civilization was a basic text for the group. (Marcuse’s letters written to Rosemont on Surrealism were published in Arsenal 4, 1989.) A leaflet widely reprinted, “The Anteater’s Umbrella: Contribution to the Critique of Zoos,” (1971) analyzed the relationship of humans and animals. After an unusual chain of events, Simmons and Schanoes split, publishing Nightwatch in 1973 and ending the group’s midnight meetings at Mike’s Bar and Mr. Pancake. Visiting Paris and London in 1970, the Rosemonts found Paris shut down by police for the Alain Geismar trial. The Paris group had split. Visiting Mimi Parent and Gérard Legrand, they received publications from Jean Schuster and met with the Vincent Bounoure group. It was to be Bounoure who would keep Surrealism alive in Paris. On that trip, they also met Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, Conroy Maddox, and Irene Plazewska. Later, Maddox sent lavishly illustrated, supportive letters. Ted Joans became a close friend, visiting the Chicago group almost yearly, and C. L. R. gave them permission to publish his work. In the seventies, Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion made its way into the world, and the Chicago group was contacted by members of the Prague group around Analogon, including Vratislav Effenberger and Jan and Eva Ŝvankmajer. Georges Gronier in Brussels, Her De Vries and 201

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Laurens Vancrevel in Amsterdam, Sergio Lima in Brazil, and Philip Lamantia and Nancy Joyce Peters, living in San Francisco, contacted and joined the Chicago group. Lamantia, who as a young poet met Breton, contributed a critique of poetry to Arsenal; Nancy wrote a series of essays on women and Surrealism, a major contribution. Arsenal had created a pole of attraction. Pete Winslow found Arsenal at City Lights. Clarence John Laughlin found Arsenal at Krochs & Brentanos. Laughlin, a contributor to View who was already known as a great photographer, visited Chicago and wrote his thesis on photography for Arsenal. Chicago Surrealists enjoyed a personal tour of New Orleans guided by Laughlin, their driver, and a wisecracking Ellen Gilchrist. Enrico Baj, encountered in Chicago, illustrated Penelope’s poems Beware of the Ice. Abdul Kadar El Janaby and the Arab Surrealists in Paris sent their publications. A group from Columbus, Ohio, Jean-Jacques Dauben, Ronald Papp, Timothy Johnson, Wayne Kral, and Jocelyn Koslofsky, moved to Chicago and issued their own Surrealist manifesto. From Miami came Brooke Rothwell and Janine Rothwell. A  young Thom Burns found the group from Glenview, his house already full of his paintings. Enthusiasm plus the strategy and organization of Robert Green made Chicago’s World Surrealist Exhibition Marvelous Freedom happen in 1976. Due to the fragmentation of the group in Paris, this show would not have been possible without Mimi Parent, who became the defender of Chicago in Paris. Support was forthcoming also from Edouard Jaguer, Mário Cesariny, Anne Ethuin, Elisa Breton, Shuzo Takiguchi, Maddox, and Janaby. The Paris group sent a series of “Parallel Collages,” a game invented for the exhibition. Alice Farley performed Surrealist dances. Douglas Ewart and Hamid Drake created the Sun Song jazz event. Arrabal’s movie Viva La Muerte was shown. Tristan Meinecke displayed his huge shadow boxes. Portuguese Surrealists, including Artur do Cruzeiro Seixas, sent collective works. Joel Williams, collagist, painter, joined the group soon afterward. Cecil Taylor attended the opening, as did E. F. Granell, Amparo Granell, Mário Cesariny, Gracia Lobo, Gerome Kamrowski, Michael Vandelaar, V. Vale, Allen Graubard, and Alice Mayoux. And maybe Frank Sinatra. Kamrowski had known Breton in New York, and it was he who designed the massive two-story centerpiece. V. Vale, now known for RE/Search Publications, filmed the gallery. Beth Garon, a painter, sculptor, and collagist, found the group. She delights in Surrealist games, a mainstay of the group. This very significant exhibition displayed 500 works by 130 participants, making it one of the largest. It served as a rallying point for world Surrealism at a time of crisis. Surrealism would survive as a critical force, an independent movement and endless creative reservoir—survive and flourish. Further shows were organized through John Forwalter for the Hyde Park Art Center and the Gary Art Center. Outsider Henry Darger’s work was shown for the first time ever at the Gary Art Center thanks to photographer Nathan Lerner. Laughlin and Rosemont were among the first to see the newly discovered Darger works found in a small apartment near Roma’s, the restaurant where the Surrealists and the Blue Demons basketball team met. The Ozaukee Art Show of 1977 was a Tribute to the 100th Anniversary of Hysteria. Also, in 1977, with Elisa Breton, Franklin Rosemont edited a collection of Breton’s writings, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, published in New York by Monad/Pathfinder and in London by Pluto Press (1978). A self-styled Nazi group became active in the Chicago area in the 1970s. The Surrealist group issued a leaflet, organized a “Rock Against Racism” concert, and demonstrated against them. It was there they again encountered friends Carole Travis and Noel Ignatiev, anti-racist activists. Ignatiev later became noted for How the Irish Became White (1995). The group made news when its defense of Octavio Paz got out of hand at a Robert Bly poetry reading held at Body Politic, often referred to as the “Bly Pie Incident” (1977). On another occasion, Surrealists got front-page coverage and a lovely piece by Roger Simon when 202

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three Surrealists were arrested at the unveiling of Claes Oldenberg’s Bat Column (1977), also mentioned in the New Yorker and People. The Rosemonts finally got together with Paz in Chicago in 1990, the year he received the Nobel prize. The group continued its publication project with Cultural Correspondence (1979), Paul Buhle’s new journal, editing “Surrealism & Its Popular Accomplices.” Chicago Surrealists felt that American popular culture had an unruly and revolutionary spirit that was beloved, embodied by Bugs Bunny (see Herrada), Pogo, and Little Lulu. Lawrence Ferlinghetti had long been interested in Surrealism, and Chicago Surrealists had long admired his Coney Island of the Mind. The Beats influenced all the group as young people. Thanks to Ferlinghetti, Nancy Joyce Peters, Philip Lamantia, and Paul Buhle, a section of City Lights Anthology (1974) was contributed by Chicago Surrealists, and later came an entire publication, Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination (1982). Edouard Jaguer published the Chicago group in his Phases magazine and displayed their works at exhibitions in Lyon (1981) and Lisbon (1984), and in Bochum, 1985. Heribert Becker in Germany included their poems in Das Surrealistishe Gedicht, an international anthology of Surrealist poetry. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a painting by Penelope Rosemont, was chosen by Arturo Schwarz to be in the 1986 Venice Biennale “Surrealism & Alchemy.” The Surrealist group established Surrealist Editions, Black Swan Press, and the Surrealist Research & Development Monograph Series. Then, Penelope Rosemont, working with the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, became its secretary-treasurer. The board of directors included Virgil Vogel, Fred Thompson, Joseph Giganti, and Carlos Cortez, all respected for their writings or activism; it added Franklin Rosemont, Paul Garon, Beth Garon, and David Roediger. This group got on well and had the support of Len Despres, Studs Terkel, Utah Phillips, and Archie Green. Impressed by Terkel’s Division Street, the Surrealists were committed to uncovering the lost history of those creative groups aspiring to build a radical counterculture. Their first major project, the Haymarket Scrapbook, edited by Roediger and Rosemont, was ready for the 1886 centennial of the Haymarket rally. This began a new period for Surrealism, one rich in writings and publications. Its major figures were Nancy Joyce Peters, David Roediger, Jane Cortez, Michael Löwy, Robin D. G. Kelley, Noel Ignatiev, Ron Sakolsky, Max Cafard, and the continually innovative Paul Buhle. Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont, and Paul Garon developed their ideas and brought them to publication. Lengthy encounters in Chicago with Leonora Carrington, Diane di Prima, and Ted Joans brought new perspectives. Published in 1991, Roediger’s book Wages of Whiteness remains a pathbreaking study of racism. Löwy, a major thinker understanding the potential of Surrealism, would write several books, including Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (2005) and Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia. (2009). Three days That Shook the New World Order, a Surrealist manifesto/analysis of the Los Angeles uprising, was published in the group’s newspaper, What Are You Going to Do About It? (1992). With Kerr Company, Roediger published History Against Misery (2006), a cultural critique analyzing the “Surrealist Map of the World.” With Beth Garon, Paul Garon researched and wrote Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues (1992) and, with Kerr Company, published What’s the Use of Walking If There’s a Freight Train Going Your Way?: Black Hoboes and Their Songs (2006). In the 1980s, Leonora Carrington moved to Chicago, saw the group weekly, and visited with Debra Taub and Gina Litherland. Her humor, paintings, and stories, and soup, put her at the center of the group. Pablo Weisz Carrington joined in when possible. A series of exhibitions was held at Evanston’s Utopia Gallery, run by Platypus Books. Hal Rammel wrote Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias (1990). Nigerian Cheikh 203

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Figure 22.1 Franklin and Penelope Rosemont at an anti-apartheid protest with Dennis Brutus and Ted Joans, 1986. Source: Photo courtesy of Penelope Rosemont.

Tidiane Sylla, African-American Patrick Turner, and Puerto Ricans E. San Juan Jr., Andrew Mendez, and Daniel Del Valle Hernandez found their way to the group near the publication of Arsenal 4. Michael Löwy, Guy Girard, Mary Low, Kenneth Cox, Sarah Metcalf, Ronnie Burk, Katerina Piňosová, Ody Saban, Jill Fenton, Frank Wright, Bruno Jacobs, Mathias Forshage, and Laura Corsiglia visited and participated in the activities of the Chicago group. An International Surrealist Movement declaration on the Columbus Quincentennial (1992) initiated by Sylvia Grénier in Argentina was signed and circulated by the group. Eugenio Castro, Lourdes Martinez, and friends in Spain exchanged publications and correspondence. Chicago Surrealists contributed to the Spanish group’s journal Salamandra. 204

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In the spring of 2000, Diane di Prima, who had long been admired by the group, especially for her Revolutionary Letters, arrived in Chicago, came to Surrealist meetings, worked on her book Recollections of My Life as a Woman (2001), and read her poetry at the studio/storefront of Carlos Cortez to nearly 70 admiring friends. Carlos, who often hosted the group’s gatherings, was well-known for his woodcuts of Joe Hill, Lucy Parsons, and Mother Jones. An old-time Wobbly, retired editor of the Industrial Worker, and then president of Kerr Company, he had earlier hosted Ody Saban, a Paris Surrealist. Ody displayed spectacularly colored giant ink drawings on rice paper. Penelope Rosemont continued to visit with di Prima in San Francisco. In a conversation about poetry and groups, Di Prima told her that she felt closer to the Surrealists than she ever had to the Beats. In 1998, a Surrealist series began at the University of Texas Press, publishing Penelope Rosemont’s Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, which represented years of collecting documents and the help of Myrna Rochester and Edouard Jaguer. It featured women, almost entirely excluded by studies and exhibitions. Don Lacoss, Surrealist and scholar, wrote a monograph, Surrealism in ’68: Paris, Prague, Chicago: Dreams of Arson & the Arson of Dreams (2008), and revived the Surrealist connection with radical Detroit publisher Fifth Estate. Also in this series are Michael Löwy’s Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia (2009) and Robin D. G. Kelley and Franklin Rosemont’s Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (2009). Franklin Rosemont had met Robin D. G. Kelley at the Black Radical Congress of 1998. Kelley already knew Joans and Cortez, and their conversation on Surrealism led to correspondence. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002) linked Surrealism and Black liberation, especially through the Caribbean Surrealists Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Césaire, but mentioned the activity of Chicago Surrealists. Surrealist activist Ron Sakolsky, encountered by chance in 1986 at Haymarket Centennial events, edited a 742-page book on the group Surrealist Subversions, Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the U.S.A. (2002). Celebrating the publication of Surrealist Subversions, African American poets Jayne Cortez and Ted Joans read poems at the Printers Row Book Fair (2002). The Guild Poetry tent crowded to capacity, and outside people crammed themselves close, filling the street. You could hear the joy in Ted’s voice as he read, and the passion in Jayne’s voice that rang out brought tears as she read her “Sacred Trees!” a poem about women. Many said it was the finest poetry reading ever. Surrealist exhibitions at Chicago’s Heartland Café, established by Michael James and Katie Hogan, included Totems Without Taboos; IWW Cartoons; and Bugs Bunny Gallery Revisited. Konrad Klapek, visiting the show, commented, “I wish we had a place like this in Munich!” At Heartland during a Rising Up Angry Reunion, Penelope met Dennis Cunningham, one of the civil rights attorneys who defended Fred Hampton, but just for fun, created found-object Surrealist sculptures. The group in Chicago delighted in Surrealist games, created stacks of them, and invented some of its own: “Time-Travelers Potlatch” and “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” In TimeTravelers Potlatch, players pick people in history and give them Surrealist gifts; In What’s Wrong with this Picture? a commercial image is analyzed using Surrealist tools, such as the “paranoid critical method” for its latent and humorous content. An invention of Carrington while with the group, “Surrealist Survival Kit,” provided much humor. Solidarity Bookshop and the Rosemonts found themselves comic book characters thanks to Paul Buhle and Harvey Pekar in Wobblies, A Graphic History (2005), and also Students for a Democratic Society, A Graphic History. (2005) Through Danny Postel, expert on the Middle East, the group met Max Cafard, and his Surregional Explorations (2012) was published by Kerr Company, bringing a unique insight on the Surrealist/situationist “derivé.” 205

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In 2010 Ramsey Kanaan, publisher of Ak Press, and later PM Press, invited Penelope Rosemont to speak in San Francisco. This revived the connection between Chicago and Bernard Marszalek, Ken Knabb, V. Vale, Dennis Cunningham, Diane di Prima, and Winston Smith. Knabb, an expert on Situationism with his Bureau of Public Secrets, has kept Situationist books in print and created an archive at the Yale Library. In San Francisco, a Surrealist exhibition, Insect Music, was presented featuring Winston Smith, Dennis Cunningham, and Penelope Rosemont at Grant’s Tomb Gallery (2012). Another show at the Emerald Tablet (2013) included Marian Wallace, Surrealist artist and filmmaker. Peter Maravelis at City Lights organized Dada events and later a celebration of Surrealism at which Abigail Susik and Penelope Rosemont spoke. Penelope’s memoir and essays, Inside the Magnetic Fields, was published by City Lights in 2019. With Beth Garon, Penelope Rosemont organized the group’s extensive Surrealist papers, now in the Joseph Labadie collection at the University of Michigan. Alexandria Eregbu, with other young African Americans in Chicago, organized a Marvelous Freedom exhibition in 2012 as a tribute to the Chicago group’s 1976 exhibition, discovering Surrealism through the AfroSurreal Manifesto (2009) of D. Scott Miller. A  participant of this exhibition, Krista Franklin published Under the Knife (2018) and Too Much Midnight (2020) and gave a talk in 2019 with Penelope Rosemont on Japanese Surrealist Tetsuya Ishida at 659 Wrightwood. That same year, Penelope Rosemont and Paul R. Sievert traveled to City Lights for the celebration of Ferlinghetti’s 100th birthday, at which Penelope read a poem. Curated and assembled by Jennifer Rose Cohn, Revolutionary Surrealism: Chicago Surrealism from Object to Activism (2018) brought Michael Richardson, Joanna Pawlik, Kristoffer Noheden, Myrna Rochester, Abigail Susik, Ron Sakolsky, Michael Stone-Richards, V. Vale, and Marian Wallace as participants and showed works at the Studio Gallery. Chicago Dada, organized by Beth Garon at Gallery 760 (2017), included works of Kate Khatib, John Duda, Gale Ahrens, Janina Ciezadlo, and Tom Palazzolo, known for Surrealist films. In 2021, Justin Harwood opened Gallery Sabine, inviting Chicago Surrealists to do the first show. Surrealism Beyond Borders (2021–2022), a major exhibition and catalog at New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, traveling to the Tate, curated by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, prominently displayed Chicago Surrealist literature and works by militant Surrealists and friends: Ted Joans, EF Granell, Joyce Mansour, Toyen and others. The image retains its power.

Works Cited Buhle, Paul. “Cultural Correspondence, 1975–1983.” https://library.brown.edu/cds/cultural_correspond ence/about.html ———. “Radical America, 1967–1999.” https://library.brown.edu/cds/radicalamerica/about.html Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, and Nancy Joyce Peters. Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination. City Lights, 1982. Herrada, Julie. “Surreal Life with Bugs Bunny” (2018). https://apps.lib.umich.edu/blogs/beyond-rea ding-room/surreal-life-bugs-bunny Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams. The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon, 2002. Löwy, Michael. Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia. University of Texas Press, 2009. Richardson, Michael. International Encyclopedia of Surrealism. Bloomsbury, 2019. Rosemont, Franklin, and Charles Radcliffe. Dancin’ in the Streets Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos in the 1960s as Record ed in the Pages of the Rebel Worker & Heatwave. Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2005.

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Surrealism in Chicago Rosemont, Franklin, and Penelope Rosemont. Papers Surrealism. quod.lib.umich.edu/s/sclead/umich-scirosemont Rosemont, Franklin, Penelope Rosemont, and Paul Garon. The Forecast Is Hot! Tracts & Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States 1966–1976. Black Swan Press, 1997. Rosemont, Penelope. Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. University of Texas Press, 1998. Rosemont, Penelope, Don Lacoss, and Michael Löwy. Make Love, Not War: Surrealism in 1968! Kerr Publishing, 2018. Sakolsky, Ron. Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States. Autonomedia, 2002. Schwarz, Arturo. Il Surrealismo: leri e oggi. Skira, 2014. Susik, Abigail. Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work. Manchester University Press, 2021.

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23 SURREALISM IN CHINA Lauren Walden

Introduction Whilst Japanese artists exhibited at the Paris International Surrealist Exhibition of 1938, gaining valuable recognition from André Breton, the contribution of China’s avant-garde to Surrealism was never formally acknowledged by its founder or his entourage. As such, Chinese Surrealism has been ignored in favour of its neighbour Japan with several extant book-length studies on the topic (Clark, Sas, Munro, Stojkovic). Indeed, Bevan laments: “[T]he adoption of the visual world of Surrealism by so many artists in the art world in China has not been widely recognised by art historians and consequently has not found a place in the standard art history books” (237). Admittedly, Japanese artists were pivotal in transmitting French-born Surrealism to mainland China and Taiwan. Chinese art students encountered the movement whilst studying abroad in Tokyo during the early 1930s due to its geographic and linguistic proximity. Surrealism was discovered in Taiwan at the same time under Japanese occupation. Ironically, Japan became the principal destination for Chinese artists’ initiation into Western modernism, although a select coterie of Chinese artists encountered Surrealism in its birthplace of Paris. In Shanghai, Surrealism first emerged in the city’s French concession during the early 1930s as student returnees from Tokyo and Paris disseminated their hybrid creations employing both traditional Chinese and Surrealist iconography via exhibitions and periodicals. Paradoxically, the transmission of Surrealism to China was irrevocably bound to colonisation despite the ardent anti-colonialism of European-based Surrealists. Notwithstanding, Surrealism’s artistic influence in mainland China and Taiwan traverses practically a century of profound political transformation in which both entities cast off the yoke of colonial oppression. As such, I will chart the usage of Surrealism in mainland China from a fledgling democracy with colonial concessions (1930–1937), Japanese occupation (1937–1945), Civil War (1945–1949), socialist revolution (1949–1976), reform and opening up to the present day (1979–). In the case of Taiwan, Surrealism will be examined through the Japanese occupation until 1945, then martial law (1949–1987), culminating in its continued presence on the island’s present-day democracy.

Surrealism in Republican China (1930–1949) During the 1930s, Shanghai’s interwar French concession formed a cosmopolitan hub where Surrealism was infused with Chinese aesthetics until the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War 208

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-27

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in 1937. A dense ecosystem of artistic institutions in Shanghai’s French concession supported Surrealist activities, including the Shanghai Art College, artists’ studios, publication houses, and the French Aurore University (French classes were taught here to prepare students for study in France). Shanghai Art College professors Pang Xunqin (1906–1985), who encountered Surrealism in Paris, and Ni Yide (1901–1970), who discovered Surrealism in Japan, founded the “Storm Society” in 1932, praising the “dreamscapes of Surrealism” in their manifesto (Trans. Andrews and Shen 78). The Storm Society appropriated emblematic examples of Surrealist art, such as Marcel Duchamp’s urinal (Zhu 94) in Pang Xunqin’s Such Is Paris (1932), the GrecoRoman heads of Di Chirico in Yang Taiyang’s Untitled (1933), and Picassoesque instruments in Yang’s Chimney and Mandolin (1933). Zhou Duo adopted the technique of incongruous juxtapositions, extrapolating Surrealism’s iconic fish from a marine environment, placing it against a wall and trees for a front cover of the periodical Xiandai (Les Contemporains) in 1934. However, Storm Society artists equally drew from Chinese imagery. Pang Xunqin’s work Composition (1934) evokes both the dreamscape and the revolutionary politics associated with Surrealism, featuring the disembodied head of a Chinese peasant woman juxtaposed against a robot and three human fingers. Pang interpreted the work in his autobiography, stating: “The robot symbolises the advanced industrialisation of capitalist countries, the peasant woman represents the defunct agricultural movement in China whilst the three fingers represent the three scourges of imperialism, reactionary politics and feudalism” (Zhu 06). The Storm Society held four exhibitions in Shanghai’s French concession between 1932 and 1935; most were only attended by exclusive groupings of art aficionados. However, reproductions of their work were found in popular, high-circulation periodicals of the day, such as Liangyou (The Young Companion), with a circulation of 50,000 in 1935 (Wang 248), and the high-quality Shidai (Modern Miscellany), disseminating their Surrealist-inflected artworks to a wider audience. Another key avant-garde grouping in Republican Shanghai was the Chinese Independent Art Association (CIAA), who had all studied abroad in Japan. Upon their return to China, they held an exhibition in Shanghai’s French concession during 1935. Their artworks from the Shanghai exhibition were also reproduced in Liangyou and Shidai. At the same time, the artist Zhao Shao (1912–2003) translated the Surrealist Manifesto from Japanese to Chinese in a special edition of Guangzhou-based Yifeng (Art Winds) magazine, entitled Chaoxianshizhuyi jieshao (Introduction to Surrealism) with a further eight articles dedicated to the movement. Here, Zhao Shou and another Chinese artist, Zeng Ming, were added to a list of iconic Surrealist painters compiled by Liang Xihong (1912–1982). Zhao commingled the traditional Chinese iconography of a fish as a good luck symbol with Western geometric forms in his work Let’s jump (1935). As ChiaChiu Tsai points out, in the Surrealist special issue of Yifeng, Paul Klee’s 1926 work Around the Fish is reproduced in black and white, bearing striking iconographic similarities to Zhao Shou’s painting, its components likewise consisting of a fish surrounded by geometric shapes (130). In Yifeng magazine, whilst European artists such as Klee are acknowledged, the same cannot be said for their Japanese counterparts. Wu emphasises that despite learning from Japanese Surrealists, Chinese Surrealists attempted to “disintermediate their Japanese mentors” (Wu 05) amidst the empire’s designs to colonise the entirety of China, particularly after their occupation of Manchuria in 1932. The CIAA were eager to highlight the French origins of the moment and pay homage to related artists from Europe, such as Dalí, Picasso, Magritte, and so on. Hence, Chinese Surrealism emerged as a paradoxical entity, harnessing the anti-colonial sentiment of their European counterparts whilst principally operating in a French overseas territory, presumably seen as a lesser evil compared to the vast swathes of land Japan usurped from China. In the photographic realm, Lang Jingshan’s (1892–1995) Surrealist juxtapositions contrasted nude models with Buddhist sculptures. Lang was the first Chinese to photograph a nude model 209

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in 1928, which aroused substantive controversy in a nation where the genre was (and is) scarcely tolerated. His work was inspired by Surrealist photographer Man Ray, who Lang eventually met in Paris after World War II. In Lang’s archives, a photograph of Man Ray accompanied by a dedication from him can be found: “I paint what I cannot photograph, I photograph what I cannot paint” (Ge and Lin 264), referring to Lang’s invention of jijin sheying (composite photography) in 1934, which seamlessly melds the two media in contradistinction to the conspicuous copying and pasting of photomontage. Lang abundantly borrowed from Man Ray’s trope of juxtaposing woman with object. For example, in the piece Nirvanesque (1930s), a nude woman is holding a statue of a Buddha’s head with her legs crossed in a lotus meditative position. The statue is cupped by her breasts, and the lighting creates a cloudlike, floating background. In 1949, just before the instauration of the Communist regime, Lang fled to Taiwan on the same boat as the leader of the defeated Nationalist Party, Chiang Kai-Shek, continuing his aesthetic borrowings from Surrealism on the island. Beyond fine art photography, Surrealist-inflected photomontage was used by manga cartoonists to satirise colonial modernity and alert the public to the Japanese menace. The periodical Shidai Manhua (Modern Sketch) (1934–1937) drew from the Surrealist technique of photographic appropriation, copying and pasting the ubiquitous Shanghai “modern girl” figure into dire situations of war, famine, and prostitution. Cartoons of headless women were also present. The periodical’s use of photomontage also invoked a clash between traditional Chinese and imperialist iconography in pieces such as Shanghai Landscape (1934) and A Standard Chinese Man (1936). After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Shanghai ceased to provide a safe haven of artistic activity. Refugee crises in the foreign concessions, incessant bombing, and censorship prompted the vast majority of artists to enter into exile, many seeking solace in rural areas of China, where there was no Japanese presence. Amidst this diaspora, the artist Hu Kao (1912–1994), who had previously illustrated for Shidai Manhua (Bevan 307), borrowed from Surrealism during the war, drawing on Giorgio di Chirico’s Greco-Roman heads and Picasso’s Guernica in Bombing, which was published in Hong Kong newspaper Huashangbao in 1941. The work of several Chinese Surrealist-inspired artists, such as Pang Xunqin and Ni Yide, would, during the war, be published in another Hong Kong newspaper, Xingdao Ribao, during 1938 (Bevan 310).

Surrealism and Maoist China (1949–1976) From 1942, Mao stipulated Chinese artists must adopt Soviet Socialist Realism in his infamous Yan’an talks. Consequently, once Mao came to power in 1949, works of Chinese Surrealism became taboo until after the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and Mao’s death. Despite this, Communist Party propaganda posters exhibited vestiges of Surrealism; fantastical posters included dragons, phoenixes, and peasants in peanut canoes. These images, synonymous with Daoism, appear as an autochthonous form of Surrealism as opposed to Western borrowings. Girard has demonstrated potent similarities between Surrealist and Daoist philosophies, noting, “[D]aoists and Surrealists share a suspicion of the arbitrary predominance of the waking state over the dream (310).” In the context of Mao’s China, dreamlike elements of iconography from Daoist origins commingled with socialist forms of reality to mirror outlandish agricultural production targets, creating an illusion of abundance during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), which ended in a cataclysmic famine. European Surrealists were markedly torn between traditional Chinese and Maoist culture. André Masson explored Chinese calligraphy as an expression of the soul throughout the 1950s 210

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in pieces such as Acteurs Chinoises (1955), whereas Michel Leiris’s 1955 travelogue, Journal de Chine, praised the socialist regime. Conversely, Belgian Surrealist Marcel Mariën wrote for a Beijing propaganda publication, entitled La Chine en Construction (China Reconstructs), between 1963 and 1965 but became disillusioned with Maoist policies, including the thought reform of intellectuals. Jean Degottex, like Masson, also experimented with traditional Chinese forms of calligraphy. André Breton wrote the foreword to Degottex’s exhibition catalogue L’Épée dans les nuages (The Sword in the Clouds), linking the Chinese concept of chi’jun (the soul of the painter expressed by his brushstroke) to the modality of Surrealist automatic writing. The differing reactions of Surrealists towards an extant Communist regime highlighted the European movement’s ideological schism between individual liberty and collective revolution. Moreover, Zhao Shou, known for translating the Surrealist manifesto into Chinese in 1935, continued to clandestinely produce Surrealist works during the Cultural Revolution, having been sentenced to “reform through labour” in Guangzhou in 1958 (Wang 15). By way of example, his 1969 work Taking Morning Tea (Figure  23.1) configures alienated groupings of people looking away from each other, geometric Picasso-inspired masks distorting their faces, denying their individual subjectivity. Taking tea during the Cultural Revolution was seen as a bourgeois act, so the masks could also be used as signifiers of anonymity and the precarious position of belonging to the intellectual classes. One figure also shields his face with his hand. Some teahouses were even torn down by political extremists during the Cultural Revolution, so this seemingly banal act has highly subversive undertones.

Figure 23.1 Zhao Shou, Taking Morning Tea (Yin zao cha), 1969, oil on canvas, 59 × 70 cm. Source: Guangdong Art Museum.

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Surrealism and Contemporary Chinese Art in Mainland China (1976–Present) After the reform and opening up of 1979 under Deng Xiaoping and the loosening of socioeconomic restrictions, Surrealism enjoyed a resurgence of popularity. The Chinese ’85 new wave employed Surrealism to process the traumatic Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and react to newfound freedoms. Gao Minglu acknowledges the impact of Surrealism on contemporary Chinese art. Notwithstanding, he argues that Chinese avant-garde works cannot be termed Surrealist per se, giving the following explanation: The project of the avant-garde at this moment, was neither dialectic nor a negation, rather it was a representation of a realm transcending reality, a mental realm transcending (not resisting) reality, a mental realm of philosophical enlightenment that involved both the Surrealist and socialist realist style. (171) Certainly, at this juncture, many paintings had recourse to the dreamscape. It does not follow, however, that these works transcended reality; rather, they distorted reality. A case in point would be Zhang Xiaogang’s (1958–) “Ghost” series (1984), reifying nightmarish hallucinations he experienced during a hospital stay induced by alcoholism. A highly sardonic work entitled Ghosts Picking Up Prescriptions merges the tangible reality of the hospital with distorted, encumbered figures lining up to take their medication whilst the grim reaper of death watches earnestly in the background. These sketches highly resemble the style of Surrealist André Masson, who pioneered the genre of automatic drawing. Zhang Xiaogang has informed this author that he considers the “Ghost” series the “most surrealist” of all his works (Zhang). Zhang Xiaogang was inspired by René Magritte, commenting that his “language of painting reorganises situations and objects from real life, placing them in a conjectural space and producing a sense of psychological dislocation and illusion” (Lu 265), deviating from the transcendence of reality Gao Minglu refers to. Indeed, Zhang’s “Bloodlines” series (1993–present) lays bare the indoctrination of youth during the Cultural Revolution through his recurring “red baby” motif, literally coloured by ideology. Conjoining red lines together act as an affirmation of the family unit that Maoist politics attempted to destroy. In an interview with M+ Hong Kong, Zhang notes this trope was inspired by Frida Kahlo and her use of lines as arteries in The Two Fridas (1939). Many famous ’85 new wave artists utilised their newfound freedom to parody Mao’s image, perhaps spurred on by Western counterparts. Salvador Dali’s Mao-Marilyn formed the front cover of Vogue in 1971. This surreal photomontage could be read in many different ways: A commentary on Mao’s famous phrase that women hold up half the sky? A parody of Surrealism’s mix of the erotic with political revolution—Mao, a Communist leader, and Monroe, a sex symbol? Was it symbolic of the paradoxical relationship between the US and China during the Cultural Revolution, or even a plea for them to ally with each other? Zhang Hongtu’s (b. 1943) works, whilst drawing from Surrealist techniques, are far less ambiguous. Zhang lampoons Mao in the same way as Duchamp vis-à-vis Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q, whereby sounding out the letters makes an erotic reference in French. Conversely, Zhang Hongtu uses the five letters H.I.A.C.S. (1989), which stand for “He is a Chinese Stalin” in English. He also draws a moustache on Mao in reference to both Duchamp’s original work and Stalin himself. Comparing Mao’s legacy to Stalin is, of course, 212

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controversial, as Valjakka notes “Mao’s aim was truly to develop the nation, and although many Chinese ended up in unbearable conditions in numerous labour camps, they were not planned to eliminate people in a similar way as in Stalin’s death camps” (103). In the same series, Zhang Hongtu distorts Mao’s face in the style of René Magritte’s The Rape (1945), as well as a Picassoesque rendering of Mao’s face. Hence, Zhang draws from the Surrealist canon of distortion to avenge the ills of Mao’s rule, under which his Muslim family profoundly suffered in an atheist state. At present, Chinese contemporary artists are utilising Surrealism to conceive rapid economic growth at the expense of Chinese cultural values, particularly in urban metropoles, such as Shanghai. Thomas Berghuis’s concept of “New Shanghai Surrealism” contends that “surreality is used to overcome past conditions of socialist realism as well as the present-day vehement conditions of pure capitalism” (6). Indeed, in Hu Jieming’s (b. 1957) 2004 work Somewhere, Shanghai Chicago, the traditional Chinese Yu gardens are enmeshed with Chicago’s signature skyscrapers to parody the onslaught of neoliberalism in Shanghai. Jiang references the artist Jiang Zhi’s (b. 1971) work Rainbow (2005), which replaces this natural phenomenon with “a man-made spectacle formed from fragments of urban highlights” over the founding symbol of Communist rule, Tiananmen Square. Jiang Zhi notes that “the rainbow is constructed as a surrealistic prospect, representing commercial consumptions that take place every day” (Jiang), applying Berghuis’s theory of new Surrealism beyond Shanghai to elsewhere in China. In 2008, Jiang Zhi’s work formed part of an exhibition entitled “Exquisite Corpse: China Surreal,” which was held at the M97 Gallery in Shanghai, bringing together contemporary Chinese fine art photographers whose work resonated with Surrealism. In 2015, a great number of Salvador Dali’s works were shown at the K11 art foundation in Shanghai. To accompany this, the foundation also displayed the work of contemporary Shanghainese artists in a related exhibition called “The Shanghai Gesture: Our Real, Your Surreal.” For example, Wang Xingwei (b. 1969) comments: Some of my works have absorbed some surrealist techniques; for example, the replacing of heads with flowerpots. . . . I borrow the concept to achieve a kind of substitution to take the painting out of a single dimension and to achieve a conflict and interaction that hints at a virtual system rather than being wholly realistic. (Peckham 65) Wang reflects upon Surrealism’s rapport with reality rather than a transcendence of it, displaying how a deep understanding of foundational Surrealist thought can lead to innovative contemporary art practice today. Moreover, the exhibition hints at granting Shanghai the status of an intrinsically Surreal city, invoking the famous “resolution of opposites” Surrealism espouses in the 1929 Second Manifesto (Breton, Manifestoes 123);1 communism versus capitalism, East versus West, traditional versus ultramodern coexist in contemporary Shanghai on a daily basis. In 2021, an exhibition entitled “Chinese Surrealism” took place in Hong Kong at Alisan Fine Arts to coincide with a loan exhibition from the Centre Pompidou entitled “Mythologies: Surrealism and Beyond—Masterpieces,” curated by Didier Ottinger. The exhibition also aimed to utilise Surrealism as a method to convey coexisting contradictions in Hong Kong’s cityscape.

Surrealism in Taiwan In 1930s Taiwan, a poetry society called “Le Moulin” (The Windmill) encountered Surrealism, the movement having spread as an ironic by-product of Japanese colonial rule. This group of 213

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Taiwanese poets (who wrote in Japanese) was the subject of a documentary shot by Huang Yali (2015). Surrealist activity during Taiwan’s colonial era revolved around a social elite of Japanesespeaking Taiwanese artists and Japanese artists who found themselves in Taiwan. Events were documented by the Japanese-controlled Taiwan Daily News (Taiwan ri rixinbao). Interestingly, whilst censorship occurred, Japan had long been influenced by Western art; therefore, the Surrealist movement was broadly tolerated, provided that government critique was not evident. For example, scenes of the world-famous 1938 “International Surrealist Exhibition” in Paris were also published in this very newspaper, featuring André Breton’s Object-chest, bearing a women’s legs appended to a traditional chest of drawers (Yang 39). In postwar Taiwan, Surrealists subverted martial law under the Nationalist Party, who established the island as their new base after being defeated by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949). Only portraiture and documentary photography were tolerated in Taiwan due to fears of a Communist resurgence. Taipei-born artist ChangChao Tang’s (1943–) photography adopted the sanctioned form of portraiture, which was displaced by iconic Surrealist imagery of headlessness during the 1960s to reflect violence and limitations on freedom (Liu, M. 76). Lang Jingshan moved to Taipei in 1949, fleeing Mao’s newly founded Communist regime, further experimenting with Man Ray’s technique of rayography, which inverted light. Surrealist dreamscapes, owing to their melange of reality and fantasy, enabled artists to eschew censorship whilst surreptitiously enacting political commentary. Despite martial law being in operation in Taiwan at that time, the government was keen to distinguish the regime from the repression synonymous with the cultural revolution under Mao in the mainland. The subversive methodology of Surrealism may have been tolerated for political expediency, as Wei Hsiu Tung aptly notes: Taiwanese artists in the 1960s were, after all, the cultural representatives of the Republic of China at a time when the Cultural Revolution of the People’s Republic was trying hard to eradicate any symptom of tradition on the other side of the Straight. (57) Granted that these protests against martial law were figurative, recourse to psychoanalysis formed the best method to circumvent political censorship whilst subtly expressing dissatisfaction with the prevailing regime. In 2008, an exhibition entitled “Surrealists in Taiwan” was held at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, comprising 20 artists and 76 works composed from 1945 to the present, including Li Zhongsheng (1912–1984), Huo Gang (b. 1932), and Lien Chien-Hsing (b. 1962). Liu notes that Li Zhongsheng “uses automatic drawing to accompany his subconscious transformations” (Liu 13), whilst Huo Gang’s “drawings are filled with ambiguous images and deep levels of the subconscious that transform the real world into an interwoven déjà vu” (Liu, Y. M. 14). Indeed, Huo Gang’s 1955 pastel merges a staircase into a human face which protrudes out onto a candlelit desk. Lien adopts Salvador Dali’s signature technique of floating objects, employing this iconography to uproot an entire cityscape in his later 2011 painting Floating Nostalgia, probing Taiwan’s complex cultural memory, concurrently influenced by the Western and Japanese colonisers, the Chinese mainland, and indigenous inhabitants. The artist himself states he is particularly perturbed by “Taiwan’s post-colonial industrial ruins” (Eslite Gallery), critiquing the rampant change intended to stimulate economic growth in the era of globalisation. More recently, Chan Yu-Fan’s (b.1983) “Formation of Space and Time” exhibition was held in 2018 at the Cloud Gallery in Taipei. In his “Island” series, Chan envisages Taiwan as a paradisiacal, isolated island encroached upon by widespread globalisation. In the piece Advancing 214

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to the Future (2011), a train is formed out of body parts, perhaps indicating an unbridled form of modernisation and humanity’s literal embodiment of technology. Modes of transportation abound; trains, airplanes, and boats seem to allude to the copious waves of migration the island has seen and the intrinsically hybrid nature of Taiwanese culture. Chan Yu-Fan presents Taiwan as an entity still grappling with Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese colonial legacies alongside Western cultural hegemony. He concocts the multifarious nature of Taiwanese identity via Surrealist juxtapositions of incongruous objects. Ultimately, the artist states that his “surrealist world attempts to demonstrate a more realistic meaning compared to the real world” (Lee 11).

Conclusion The role of Surrealism in China over the past century has provided a cathartic outlet of incisive social commentary whilst the Chinese lived under the yoke of consecutively oppressive regimes. Equally, Chinese avant-garde artists have experimented with Surrealism to breathe new life into millennia-old traditional Chinese iconography and search for their own distinct voice. In particular, Daoist imagery clearly complements the dreamscapes of Surrealism. Whilst Chinese Surrealists experimented with the latest avant-garde techniques, European Surrealists adopted an inverted temporality through recourse to ancient Chinese calligraphy and its linkages to automatic writing, conveying a malaise with the spiritual basis of Western art history. Surrealism in China has been used as a method to explore the liminal space between indigenous and “imported” aspects of culture, owing to legacies of colonialism and globalisation. Whilst the regimes of mainland China and Taiwan clearly diverge, the psychoanalytic element of Surrealism has enabled artists to process the collective trauma of the Cultural Revolution and martial law respectively. Condemning both the nation-state and Western civilisation, it is likely that Chinese artists did not perceive a contradiction in utilising Surrealism, a movement of Western origin, to engage simultaneously in self-critique alongside that of imperial powers.

Note 1. “Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future. the communicable and the incommunicable. high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.”

References Andrews, Julia F., and Kuiyi Shen. The Art of Modern China. University of California Press, 2012. Berghuis, Thomas. “(Re)Imagining the City: Shanghai Dream Theatre and the New Shanghai Surreal.” Journal of the Asian Art Society of Australia, vol. 16, no. 3, 2007, pp. 4–6. Bevan, Paul. A Modern Miscellany: Shanghai Cartoons Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926–1938. Brill, 2018. Breton, André. “L’Épée dans les nuages.” 1955. www.andrebreton.fr/en/work/56600101000022?back_ rql=DISTINCT%20Any%20M%2CMT%2CD%20ORDERBY%20ST%20WHERE%20X%20 linked_to%20M%2C%20M%20short_description%20D%2C%20NOT%20X%20identity%20 M%2C%20M%20title%20MT%2C%20M%20sorttitle%20ST%2C%20X%20eid%2041096&back_ url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.andrebreton.fr%2Fen%2Fview%3F_fsb%3D1%26rql%3Ddegottex%26sub vid%3Dtsearch ———. Manifestoes of Surrealism. University of Michigan Press, 1969. Chia-Chiu Tsai. “1930 Niandai dongya chaoxianshi huihua de gong xiang yu shengbian—yi taiwan, zhongguohua hui wei zhu de bijiao kaocha” [The Diversification of Surrealistic Paintings in East Asia during the 1930s: A Study of Art Associations in Taiwan and China]. Yishuxue Yanjiu [Art Education Research], vol. 25, 2019, pp. 93–187.

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Lauren Walden Clark, John. Surrealism in Japan. Monash Asia Institute, Japanese Studies Centre, 1997. Eslite Gallery. “Lien Chien Hsing.” n.d. www.eslitegallery.com/en/authors/lien-chien-hsing-連建興/ #1506494608281-5e99763d-1d70 Gao, Minglu. Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art. MIT Press, 2011. Ge, S., and M. Lin. Ming jia. ming liu. ming shi: lang jing shan shi shi nian zhou nian ji nian wen ji. Tai bei shi: Guo li li shi bo wu guan [Taipei City: National History Museum], 2015. Girard, Guy. “Taoism.” The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism: Movements, edited by M. Richardson, D. Ades, K. Fijalkowski, S. Harris, and G. Sebbag, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. http://dx.doi. org/10.5040/9781474208024.04264 Jiang, Jiehong. The “China Dream” Reimagined: Contemporary Photography in China. University of Michigan, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0006.105. Le Moulin. Directed by Huang Yali. Roots Films, 2015. Lee, Yichou Gary, editor. Chan Yu-Fan—Formation of Space and Time: New Classic Parallel Theatre. Cloud Gallery Taipei, 2018. Liu, M. Y. “The Surrealist and the Documentary in Chang Chao-tang’s Photography.” Art in Translation, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 75–96. Liu, Y. Taiwan chao xian shi zhan [Surrealists in Taiwan] Taibei Shi: Taibei shi li mei shu guan, 2008. Lu, Peng. Bloodlines: The Zhang Xiaogang Story. Skira, 2017. M+ “Artist Interview: Zhang Xiaogang.” n.d. https://stories.mplus.org.hk/en/transcript-zhang-xiao gang-interview/ Munro, Majella. Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan, 1923–1970. Enzo, 2012. Peckham, Robin “The Shanghai Gesture: Our Real, Your Surreal.” K11 Art Foundation: Shanghai, 2015. Sas, Miryam. Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism. Stanford University Press, 2001. Stojkovic, Jelena. Surrealism and Photography in 1930s Japan: The Impossible Avant-garde. Routledge, 2020. Tung, Wei Hsiu. Art for Social Change and Cultural Awakening: An Anthropology of Residence in Taiwan. Lexington Books, 2017. Valjakka, Minna. “Parodying Mao’s Image: Caricaturing in Contemporary Chinese Art.”  Asian Studies, vol. 15, 2011. Wang, Chuchu. “Appendix: Distributing Liangyou.” Liangyou, Brill, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1163/978900 4263383_013 Wang, Huang Sheng. Zhao shou · shen mi de kuang qi. Guang zhou, Ling nan mei zhu chu ban she [Lingnan Fine Arts Publishing House], 2008. Wu, Chinghsin. “Reality within and without: Surrealism in Japan and China in the Early 1930s.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society, vol. 26, no. 1, 2014, pp. 189–208. Yang, Wen Yi. Chaoxianshizhuyi zai Taiwan de xingcheng yu zhan [The Formation and Development of Surrealism in Taiwan] MA thesis, National Tainan University of the Arts, 2013. https://hdl.handle. net/11296/a6h8d5 Zhang, Xiaogang. Wechat message to author, 2020. Zhu, X.  Pang Xunqin (1906–1985): A  Chinese avant-garde's metamorphosis, 1925–1946, and questions of “authenticity.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Maryland, 2009.

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24 SURREALISM IN THE CZECH LANDS Malynne Sternstein

Introduction Living in Paris in the mid-1920s, Jindřich Štyrský and Toyen (born Marie Čermínová), who were to become synonymous with the movement of Czech Surrealism, were keenly aware of the goings-on in the French avant-garde art scene. Their older compatriot, painter Josef Šíma, had moved to France in 1920 and was well connected with its major actors. Šíma would make a splash as the most celebrated artist of the Le Grand Jeu, but while his work has been called “Surrealist,” he did not subscribe to the Surrealist group around Breton, and as influential as his art and philosophies of art were to later Czech Surrealists of the 1930s, his path also diverged from theirs. Štyrský and Toyen meanwhile carried on with their own movement, “Artificialism,” which they describe in 1927 as contrary in style and ethos to Cubism, Surrealism, and “Objectless art”: Mirror without reflection. Artificialism is the identification of painter with poet. It negates painting as mere game of forms to amuse the eyes (objectless painting). It negates formally historizicing painting (surrealism). Artificialism has an abstract consciousness of reality. It does not deny the existence of reality, but neither does it operate with it. Its interest is focused on POETRY, which fills the gaps between real forms that radiate from reality. (Bydžovská and Srp 48) The emphasis on poetry correlates with the painters’ affiliation with Devětsil, a collective of Leftist Czech artists, theorists, writers, and performers founded in Prague in 1920. When Štyrský and Toyen returned to Prague in 1928 and 1929 respectively, they had established themselves as successes both abroad and at home. Lines of communication were open between Paris and Prague, but Surrealism would not be accepted as the dominant avant-garde in Czechoslovakia until the mid-1930s. What is called today the Czech Republic, or Czechia, is a state borne out of multiple crises of the twentieth century. When the nation of Czechoslovakia was established in 1918, after 300 years of serving as a provincial state of the Habsburg Empire, the floodgates were open to sociopolitical discourses of all kinds, largely free from the strictures of censorship. As Czech DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-28

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cultural identity has a dappled history, the discussion that follows echoes the many iterations of the tradition and nation that might be determined most stably to be Czech. The contours of various foreign and autochthonous regimes shaped Czech culture, and it is next to impossible to divorce the matter and modes of Czech Surrealism from the wider sociopolitical practices and pressures to which it responded. I have chosen, then, to follow Czech Surrealism through the major political divisions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from its beginnings in the interwar period (1918–1938), to the violent end to Czech independence with the Nazi invasion (1939–1945), to the era stretching from the Communist putsch to the Velvet Revolution (1948– 1989), and finally, to today’s Czech Republic (1989–present day). Surrealism in the Czech lands is marked by the redressing of regnant power, so the sections that follow operate not despite of but because Czech Surrealism is united by an abiding sense of the political urgency of countering regnant discourses and strategies.1

Surrealism in the Czechoslovak Republic (1924–1939) Despite manifold interactions with not only the dominant Paris Surrealist circle around Breton but also those peripheral, and in opposition, to orthodox Surrealism, such as Bataille’s splinter Documents group (see Bydžovská) Czech artists were not eager to cede their own avant-garde pursuits and assemble immediately under the banner of Surrealism. In fact, the Czech avantgarde in the 1920s would have been aware of the term Surrealism as much as a coinage of Apollinaire, thanks to Karel Čapek’s translations of modern French poetry, as they would have Breton’s version of the term. Prior to 1930, Karel Teige, easily the most prolific of all the Czech avant-garde theoreticians, treated Surrealism as inferior in status to the work of the Artificialists. The antipathy toward French Surrealism such as can be found in Teige’s work and the work of Štyrský and Toyen homed in on what were seen as the fantastical obsessions of the French movement and what the Czechs adjudicated as the French group’s political conservatism in gender and sexual politics and in otherwise politically engaged art. (Toyen chose that name precisely because it could not be grammatically declined in Czech.) In addition, suspicion toward key French Surrealist techniques, such as automatism, involuntarism, and the dream résumé, kept Surrealism at bay for the Czechs, dedicated as they were to a “freedom” from “referentiality.” The regnant avant-garde known as Devětsil (nine powers, also the name for the butterbur plant) was made up of all manner of “artists” in various media and disciplines—architects, journalists, a psychologist (Bohuslav Brouk), sculptors, theater performers, filmmakers, photographers, poets, painters, composers (Jaromír Ježek), et al.—in both Prague, Brno, and Pilseň. It prided itself on diversity of expression and unity under a Leftist banner. Many had officially joined the Czech Communist Party (KSČ) and all signed onto the manifesto tenets that art must be accessible, playful, and anti-institutional. So though there were many interactions between the two capitals, e.g., Philippe Soupault and Léon-Pierre Quint gave a series of lectures on “Lautréamont and the Modern French Novel” in Prague and Czech avant-garde journals that published the works of Man Ray, Max Ernst, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, et al. side by side with those of Šíma, Toyen, Štyrský, photographer Jaromír Funke, and poets Vítězslav Nezval and Konstantín Biebl, still the Czechs remained ambivalent at best about the French movement. There are as many speculations as to why Surrealism took so long to find purchase in the Czech lands as there are scholars of Czech culture, but suffice it to say that the reasons are likely to touch on all those that have been heretofore suggested: the politics of national identity, allegiance to Šíma’s brand of art, dissatisfaction with the paucity of Marxist theory and action, a sense that orthodox Surrealism had turned its back on painting, skepticism about psychoanalysis, the opinion that Surrealism was just an outgrowth of bourgeois romanticism, its pessimism 218

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(Petr Král), its drunkenness (Jan Švankmajer). All these anxieties about French Surrealism, and more, contributed ultimately to what shaped Czech Surrealism, even when it appeared to adhere staunchly to its French counterpart. By 1930–1931, because of various internal dynamics and breakdowns within Devětsil— including but not limited to Teige’s vehement and often-polarizing stances, the magnetic attraction many members found with the Soviet experiment, and the varying levels of Left political exuberance—it was more or less abandoned. For example, whilst the poet Vítězslav Nezval grew more attracted to the potential for revolutionary socialism, the poet Jaroslav Seifert, ironically, as the only member of the movement with a true working-class background, saw the political intervention into art to be unfortunate. The way the two responded to changes that came in the early 1930s is emblematic of the sectarianism that would lead to the crystallization of a Surrealist movement in the Czech lands. Coinciding with the publication of the Breton circle’s “Second Surrealist Manifesto,” the Czech avant-garde, once held together by a shared notion, saw its adherents gradually returning to the particularities of their own fields. How the first sparks of a “true faith” in Surrealism were struck among the Czechs has reached the heights of origin myth in the history of the avant-garde. In 1933, Nezval, along with Jindřich Honzl, writer and theorist of avant-garde performance and then director of the Devětsil-affiliated Osvobozené divadlo (Liberated Theatre), were in Paris. Nezval, who had been reading Breton’s Nadja obsessively for translation into Czech, was searching for Breton when he and Honzl chanced upon him and colleagues in a café. As Nezval writes in Invisible Moscow (1935), he made it clear to Breton: “We are made of the same stuff as you” (see also Vichnar).2 Nezval also made overtures to Breton that Devětsil would pledge its allegiance to Surrealism and help to concretize its dream of being an “international” movement. By March of 1934, with other major players in the Czech avant-garde such as Toyen, Štyrský, Honzl, and Teige all eager now to subscribe to Surrealism by a similar logic, i.e., what we are doing is what “you” are doing, Nezval informed the KSČ of the birth of a new Surrealist group. Later that month, the Group of Surrealists was officially founded in Czechoslovakia with eleven subscribers and, importantly, with the blessing of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. It became abundantly clear, especially in Teige’s clarion call, that the Czech Surrealists had established a movement that was marching in time with a socialist revolution and dialectical materialism, and the publication of the dual-language Bulletin international du surréalisme/ Mezinárodní bulletin surrealismu in 1935 guaranteed Surrealism in Czechia. The comparatively late date of the Czech movement’s full acceptance of the nomenclature “Surrealism” allowed, arguably, for Czech Surrealism to consider, digest, and contemplate various political, social, and sexual/erotic anxieties. The period from 1934 to 1939 is one of intense productivity and innovation for the newly minted Czech Surrealist group. Their activity is to be found in every arena and all media. Poets took advantage of automatic modes used in plastic arts, such as decalcomania, and visual artists availed themselves of practices arising from “chance” interfaces, writing poems in response to products of combination and confrontation with “no preconceived object.” For the Czech Surrealists, though, the book was the most produced form, embraced as the object-text par excellence. Czech books of this period are a nexus of different artists working on design, typography, binding, illustration, and all manner of other textual and paratextual aspects of the book. So prolific were the Czech Surrealists at this time that only exemplary milestones can be summarized here. Nezval published several poetry collections, Farewell and a Scarf (1934), Woman in the Plural (1936), The Absolute Gravedigger (1937), and Prague with Fingers of Rain (1937), with each collection exhibiting more and more unmitigated free association with the poet’s environment, memory, and desires, all still in Nezval’s firm poetic control. 219

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The often-overlooked poet Konstantin Biebl (1898–1951) was an early subscriber to Surrealism and an important signatory for its 1934 decree, given his Communist pedigree, though by the 1940s he had receded entirely from the artistic scene. His published work during the 1930s—Heaven Hell Paradise (1930), The Plancius  (1931), his only prose work, and Mirror of the Night (1939)—strike the reader with a sense of the casual and unfetishized exotic. Biebl was the most traveled of the Czech Surrealist Group, having both lived in France and journeyed to the “antipodes,” Sri Lanka, Java, Sumatra. The Plancius is especially engaging for its sense of a hypertrophied lived experience; it has the tone and deftness that affiliates it with the short prose of Kafka. Influenced in part by the erotic writings of Louis Aragon and Georges Bataille, Štyrský founded Edice 69 in 1931 and published six small batch volumes of the journal for a coterie of readers. These, along with the journal Erotické Revue, are marked by multi- and intermedial work; they contain prose, poetry, and illustrations from a number of Czech avant-gardists in conversation (and for the Erotic Revue translations into Czech from Freud, Beardsley, Hoffman, Verlaine, da Vinci, Sacher-Masoch, and others). Štyrský’s daring “Emilia Comes to Me in a Dream” is made up of collage and photomontages that juxtapose images of the sexual with the destructive or moribund (e.g., a phallus emerges from a bubbling mud pool, a burlesque female body lies beside a skeleton). Nezval’s contribution, “Sexual Nocturne,” is a confession of sexual awakening and bristles with themes of Eros and Thanatos (“This woman is my grave”) and a stylistic simultaneity representative of Surrealist jouissance. These explorations of eroticism are graphic, though not pornographic; the collage and photomontage techniques speak frankly about sex and defiantly against bourgeois constraints. At the same time, Brouk critiqued and supplemented Freudian psychoanalysis with his own theorizations of human sexuality and social order in works such as the primer Psychoanalysis (1932), the critical in-depth study Autoeroticism and Psychosexuality (1935), and what may be called the culmination of Brouk’s independent thought, On Death, Love and Jealousy (1936). In this generative moment in the years before World War II, Toyen and Štyrský created a number of paintings and series that are now iconic of their work as a whole. The anamorphic object is the “subject” par excellence for them, and while their work is quite distinct one from the other, both of them seem fervid in their desire to presence the void and put pressure on the viewer to look into the lacunae of forlorn things, the anxiety of rhizomatic growth, and the yonic gapings or phallic intrusions of the ordinarily benign. During this period, too, Štyrský devoted himself to collage and photomontage cycles. The many images that are collected under the title The Peripatetic Cabinet (1934) lunge at the viewer with their sexual and political wit; Štyrský combines excerpts from books of anatomy, industrial and trade catalogs, with sedate and stock bourgeois environments and religious iconography to create an abject field of semantic potentialities. Vincenc Makovský, whose Surrealist legacy today is all but eclipsed by his traditional monumental sculpture, created rounded outcrops with hints, too, of the phallic and yonic. Defying denotative sensibility, the music of Jaromír Ježek combined different styles—ragtime, blues, drinking songs—into singular compositions capable of sounding familiar and uncanny at once. In film, Surrealist elements can be found in formal decisions made in Gustav Machatý’s Extase (1933) and in the screenplay for Machatý’s From Saturday to Sunday (1931), which Nezval worked on. The lyrical short films of Aleksandr Hackenschmied, whose last name was changed to Hammid in the years he worked with Maya Deren, also show the influence of avant-garde forms and Surrealist techniques. As Timothy Owen states, however: Generally speaking, Surrealism, as a form that had been reviled and suppressed during the Stalinist years, had to wait for the cultural liberalization of the Sixties, ushered in 220

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with the reform politics that would culminate in the 1968 “Prague Spring”, before it could make its mark on cinema. (2) Marking the centenary of the death of Czech Romantic poet Karel Hýnek Mácha in 1936, the collection Neither Swan nor Moon was a who’s who of Czech Surrealism. Subtitled “Statement by the Czechoslovak Surrealists on the 100th Anniversary of Karel Hynek Mácha’s Death,” with its bravado and gall, the introductory page does not disappoint: The smoldering revolutionary embers of Mácha’s poetry survived under the ash of a century of conformism to burst into a fantastic flame before the eyes of the revolutionary avant-garde of poetry and thought, whose relationship to contemporary society and its culture is one of hostile confrontation. . . . This ceremonial act we consider an act of vengeance! The jubilee edition also featured affiliated theorists, such as Záviš Kalandra, Communist Party activist, and Jan Mukařovský, leading theorist of the Prague Structuralists. The 1930s were the heyday for Czech Surrealist photography. Štyrský produced several cycles; Frogman of 1934 is reminiscent of Eugène Atget’s work with its “found Surrealism” of window displays and urban streetscapes. Jaromír Funke, Karel Kaspařík, and many others, on the other hand, staged objects (and persons) in skewed position vis-à-vis the apparatus and availed themselves of mirrors and other practical effects to create alarmingly off-centered visions. František Vobecký’s photographs are assemblages of everyday objects or other photographs placed into uneasy propinquity. Teige also played at this time with found photography and collage, “amending” another photographer’s work (e.g., Moholy-Nagy) with his own addition or deletion. A new Surrealist entered the scene at this time, the poet, photographer, and creator of Surrealist objects and realized poems Jindřich Heisler. Heisler was a decade or more younger than this generation of Surrealists, but his enthusiasm and talent quickly found harbor in the group. After their initial awkward meeting in Paris in 1933, close friendships blossomed between the French Surrealists and their Czech counterparts, especially Breton, Soupault, Péret, Éluard, Toyen, Štyrský, Nezval, and even the irascible Teige. Breton’s visit to the Czech lands (Prague and Brno) in the spring of 1935 under the aegis of a lecture series, “What Is Surrealism?” and with an entourage including many of those already mentioned above, was quickly followed by visits to Breton’s atelier in Paris in June of the same year by Nezval and cohort. But as much as the two movements cross-pollinated, Czech Surrealism maintained a lingering trace of Poetism, the poetic spirit and wing of Devětsil, an element Chalupecký relates directly to “a positive attitude towards the revolutionary workers’ movement from its very beginning.” This attitude would prove to be very dangerous soon enough as fascism, virulently opposed to Communist ideology, consolidated its power in neighboring lands.

Surrealism under Nazi Occupation: The “Protectorate” of Bohemia (1939–1945) The invasion and occupation of Czech lands by Nazi forces made all Leftist art and politics, for that matter, all art that did not forward the ideology of the Third Reich, illegal. The decree was published in March of 1939, and the Czech Surrealists, now truly endangered, went underground. They did not stop their activities but worked in secret in private circles, fully aware 221

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of the consequences should they be discovered. Jindřich Heisler, a Czech Jew, was in a doubly precarious situation, but he, solo and in collaboration with Toyen and Štyrský in particular, was arguably more prolific than ever. Some of the most charged of the Czech Surrealists’ works were forged in this crucible and circulated underground in samizdat (self-publication in handmade or typeset limited copies) and also found their way into tamizdat (literally “there” publication, i.e., publication outside of occupied Czechia). Of the most poignant works of this time are Štyrský and Heisler’s On the Needles of These Days (1941), featuring “found” photographs by Štyrský with Heisler’s short poetic “realizations,” and Toyen’s Hide, War! (1944) and The Shooting Gallery (1946), pen-and-ink drawings on paper that cut to the quick with their shattered-eggshell-like faces, barren landscapes strewn with detritus, skeletal fragments, and hollowed-out bodies. There is an eerie, carnivalesque decay to these images that both mock the senselessness of war and memorialize its wounds. Heisler’s From the Stronghold of Sleep (1940–41) is “arguably the most important photobook produced in the twentieth century” (Toman and Witkovsky, front matter). It may be also one of the most moving and tragic creations of the first generation of Czech Surrealism. In this work Heisler is a scenarist of dreams, creating images that carry the sense that disparate things, in their thingliness, have been compelled together by dream forces. His “realized” poems accompany and visually grow from these images. Heisler was the photographer (he created in hiding, much of the time in the inner rooms of Toyen’s apartment, gelatin on glass images transferred to lightsensitive paper); he was a poet, too, and an assemblage artist, a maker of “magical objects” that challenge the very logic of categorization. Heisler’s version of an abecedary bitingly critiques bourgeois institutions and is comparable to the work of John Heartfield.3 These letters are made up of everyday things, lampposts, staircases, train cars, etc., conjoined to living forms: a man’s open-mouthed head punctuates the tip of a razor to make the last curl on a J, an angel’s wings bent downward prop up the facades of buildings to form an M. In occupied Prague, after a life of poor health, Štyrský died of pneumonia. His death notice was signed by Toyen, Heisler, and Teige, who at that point represented the true heart of the Czech Surrealist group. During occupation, though, the group that had formed in the mid1930s was not the only Surrealist grouping to be found. Ironically, the grave strictures on social life under the Nazi regime in many ways made the need to reach out to other artists, especially those of the next generation, more urgent. In 1944, for example, Teige’s relationship with Brno artists helped to form Skupina Ra (Group Ra); he was also instrumental in the founding in 1943 of the Spořilov Surrealists. Ra attracted the talents of poet Zbyněk Havlíček, Rudolf Altschul, František Jůzek, painter Libor Fára, and literary critic Robert Kalivoda. Skupina 42 (Group 42), founded in that year, did not have direct ties to the Surrealists of the first generation, despite the fact that many of its subscribers were working in the Surrealist vein already in the 1930s. Its leader, the theorist Chalupecký, was, from the 1930s, critical of what he saw as the Czechs’ blinding Gallocentrism. Including the poet and translator Kamil Bednář, poet Jiří Orten (born Orenstein), artists Jiří Kolář and Kamil Lhoták, and photographer Miroslav Hák, Group 42 looked to myriad inspirations: the Czech tradition, Weimar, Russian constructivism, and modern American poets like Whitman, Sandburg, and Langston Hughes. The bases of their art lay in an attachment to the working poor of the urban landscape and experimental combinations of word and image. At a time when having a camera in public was itself against the law, Hák trained his lens on the tenacity of life amid the ruins of the city. In sketches and paintings, Lhoták conveyed the everyday of the urban and suburban—pipes, factory chimneys, trains, planes—with a childlike conceit. In the years immediately after the war, many Czech Surrealists took the opportunity to leave the country. Toyen and Heisler relocated to Paris, where connections with the Bretonian group 222

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strengthened. Heisler died unexpectedly in 1958, leaving behind the journal Néon, which he had only recently founded; Toyen lived out their life, continuing to make art of the highest caliber, though dying almost penniless. Their work enjoys a fame today it would be hard for them to imagine, and the monetary value of their works has skyrocketed. Those who remained became more active in experimental art of Surrealist techniques and a socialist way of life. By 1948, however, the Communist putsch in Czech parliament once again spelled a strictly regulated art. Skupina 42, Ra, and all other artistic movements that did not conform to the tenets of socialist realism were banned. Czech Surrealism would remain an underground phenomenon, sometimes, notably in the mid-1960s, unofficially tolerated by the censor, other times, as in the 1970s, closely scrutinized and harshly punished. In the early 1950s through the 1960s, the group which would be the most genuine scion of prewar Czech Surrealism coalesced. Spearheaded by Karel Teige, this group came to be referred to as the Circle of Five Objects and included artists Vratislav Effenberger, Karel Hynek, Zbyněk Havlíček, Mikuláš Medek, Emila Medková, Josef Istler, Václav Tikal, Ludvík Šváb, and Libor Fára.

Czech Surrealism from Communist Czechoslovakia to the Velvet Revolution (1948–1989) Teige’s death in 1951 was rumored by Breton to be a suicide brought on by confrontations with the Communist regime. The truth is not as heroic: Teige died from heart failure. This does not mean, however, that stress brought on by the vicious clampdown on artistic expression did not make its impact. The relationship between Paris and Prague now was strained—some remained loyal to friends (Breton); others turned against them to the point that they condemned them to death (Éluard). The fate of erstwhile-Surrealist Záviš Kalandra, executed after show trial proceedings in 1950, was one that threatened many who subscribed to vanguard Communism rather than to the Stalinist program of socialist realism. Only Vítězslav Nezval used his poetic voice for the state. The 1960s ushered in a new generation of artists, most notably filmmakers, influenced strongly by Czech-born Surrealism. There are indeed intriguing Surrealist artistic-political inflections in Czech new wave cinema. These can be seen in the films of Věra Chytilová, especially those in collaboration with Ester Krumbachová. It was during this time of cultural “thaw” that the underground activity came up for air. Surrealism attracted many new artists, Věra Linhartová, Petr Král, Stanislav Dvorský, and Ivo Medek. These Surrealist activities over the 1960s culminated in two publications in 1969: Surrealistické východisko, 1938–1968 and the first issue of the journal Analogon. The Warsaw Pact Invasion of August  1968 spelled the end of the “Prague Spring” and, for many, their flourishing artistic careers. Surrealism’s Leftist critique of bourgeois society ironically made it dangerous to the values of Soviet Communism. Surrealism once again went underground. There it availed itself again of samizdat and tamizdat, the latter now established in the UK, France, and Canada. Effenberger; filmmaker Jan Švankmajer; jazz musician, actor, and psychiatrist Ludvík Šváb; artist and writer Eva Švankmajerová; poet and essayist František Dryje; photographer Emila Medková; painter and author Martin Stejskal; and many others were determined to keep Surrealism alive in these years Milan Kundera calls the era of “Forgetting.” Members of the group were responsible for a number of samizdat anthologies, academic essays, and catalogs for exhibits that either never took place or did so in secret. Eva Švankmajerová’s novel Baradla Cave (samizdat 1980s) is emblematic of the Surrealist underground with its acerbic critique of both 223

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the Communist state and the burgeoning consumerism wrought in a style that flits from druginduced haze to scientific arcana, from sexual passion to sexual violence. Jan Švankmajer made many stop-motion films in this time, films as innovative as they are faithful to native Surrealism. In the late 1980s, at the close of Soviet-style Communist rule, the Surrealist journal Gambra also enjoyed underground circulation. These works again plumbed the archives of dreams and fantasy, and now the psychical origins and functions of humor also come to the fore.

Contemporary Czech Surrealism (1989–Present Day) The peaceful Velvet Revolution of 1989 eventuated the election of Václav Havel, terrorized during the 1970s and 1980s by the state, to the presidency of Czechoslovakia. A democratic Czechoslovakia—soon to be Czech Republic with the “Velvet Divorce” from Slovakia in 1991—also meant the open practice of art as free speech. But it did not mean the redundancy of Surrealist art and life as critique. The 1990s saw many second “firsts”: the second issue of Analogon was published in 1990 after a hiatus of over twenty years, and it continues its run. Surrealism as an official artistic movement to which individuals may affiliate was founded once again in the early 1990s as “The Group of Czech and Slovak Surrealists.” Though at the time of this writing it has no Slovak members, it attracted many young artists, such as Kateřina Piňosová, into a third and fourth Surrealist generation. The Moravian circle known as AIV also merged with the group. Works once only available in mimeographed or hand-copied versions are now published to a wide Czech and international readership, with a number of translations. Švankmajer in the 2000s and 2010s continued to make unapologetically Surrealist films— Lunacy (2000), Surviving Life (2010), Insect (2018). Václav Švankmajer worked with his father on Insect and is a director and animator in the Surrealist mode in his own right. Kolář worked prodigiously through to his death in 2002, writing poetry and creating 2- and 3D collages that highlight the tension between the written word, image, photograph, and inherited meaning. Kolář splices famous works universally valued, like Botticelli’s Venus, into chiastic disfigurations that not only allow one to see the collaged work anew but to also problematize art’s “auratic” value. David Černý has been called Surrealist for his sardonic and politically oppositional works and kinetic installations, such as The Finger (2013), which was pulled on a barge on the Vltava in full view of Parliament. Czech Surrealism, in its many iterations, including the Group of Czech and Slovak Surrealists, enjoys retrospectives in galleries and museums around the world, and it has come to be regarded as equal in importance to the French movement.

Conclusion From an uneasy relationship with a movement they could not integrate into their own avantgarde, Czech Surrealism through the years found its own footing and, by dint of unique geopolitical circumstances, its own necessarily specific character. Pummeled by occupation, war, and cultural colonialism, Czech Surrealists have been resilient in their conviction that Surrealism is not merely a style but a modus vivendi. With a circumspect and critical eye, Czech Surrealism translates the importance of the oneiric, erotic, and unbidden in a particular Czech context. A dissenting voice can always be heard in Czech Surrealism, given that whatever regime is in power is certain to focus on preserving that power. From its beginnings, Czech Surrealism has held to a firm anti-bourgeois position, one that battles against complacency, kitsch, and purchased ethics and morality. What remains true of Czech Surrealism from its beginnings in the

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1930s to the present day is an abiding sense that art must run against the grain and counter to the current, in perpetual awakening and rebellion.

Notes 1. It is also important to express candidly that this article is interested in Czech and not Slovak Surrealism. While at many points in the history of Surrealism in the Czech lands there have been and continue to be (though in diminishing terms) productive and important collaborations with Slovak Surrealists, Slovak Surrealism proper, as a distinct phenomenon per se, is not discussed here. 2. All translations from the Czech are mine, unless otherwise specified. 3. This fact is especially notable as Nezval, Teige, and dancer Milča Mayerová had created a Poetist work also confronting the bourgeois formality of education with their playful revisioning of the ABCs.

Works Cited Brouk, Bohuslav. Autosexualism and Psychoeroticism. Edice Surealismu, 1935. Bulletin (1935). Bulletin international du surréalisme/Mezinárodní bulletin surrealismu, no. 1. Prague, April 1935. Reprinted in facsimile, Torst 2004. Bydžovská, Lenka, and Karel Srp, editors. Štyrský, Toyen, artificielismus 1926–1931. Středočeská galerie, 1992. Chalupecký, Jindřich. “O dada, surrealism a českém úmění.” 1940. https://monoskop.org/Jind%C5%99ich_ Chalupeck%C3%BD Effenberger, Vratislav. Výtvarné projevy surrealismů. Odeon, 1969. Heisler, Jindřich, Z kasemat spánku. Torst, 1999. Karel, Teige. Surrealistické koláže. 1935–1951/Surrealist Collages. Museum of National Literature in Prague, 1994. Král, Petr. Le Surréalisme en Tchécoslovaquie. Gallimard, 1983. Nezval, Vítězslav. The Absolute Gravedigger. Translated by Stephan Delbos and Tereza Novickvá. 2016. https://pen.org/the-absolute-gravedigger/ ———. Neviditelná Moskva. František Borový, 1935. Surrealistické východisko. Československý spisovatel, 1969. Švankmajer, Jan. Transmutace smyslů/Transmutation of the Senses. Central Europe Gallery and Publishing House, 1994. Teige, Karel. “Abstraktivismus, nadrealismus, artificielismus (Šíma, Štyrský, Toyen).” Kmen, vol. 2, no. 6, 1928, pp. 594–600. Toman, Jindřich, and Matthew Witkovsky. Jindrich Heisler: Surrealism under Pressure, 1938–1953. Art Institute, 2012.

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25 SURREALISM IN ENGLAND Christina Heflin

Introduction As easy as it is to pinpoint Surrealism’s inception in Paris to the publication of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto in October  1924, its counterpart across the channel emerged rather rhizomatically. English Surrealism was born in Paris, but this continental surrogacy would later yield as the English Surrealists forged their own independent movement, anchoring it within a legacy of the English intellectual and Romantic tradition. 1936 has been “seen as the year Surrealism was introduced to Britain,” but this was only in the form of “an organized presence” (Stabakis 17). From Roger Fry’s 1910 Manet and post-Impressionist exhibition to the Vorticist movement, myriad events and avant-garde movements paved the way for a Surrealist group to flourish in England beginning in the interwar years and currently existing in its contemporary form today.

The Emergence of Surrealism in England The road to Surrealism in Albion chronologically overlapped in many areas due to individual pools of activity on both sides of the English Channel. In England, this path began forming within the circles of late-1920s undergraduate Oxbridge students who began to publish avant-garde journals. One such was Experiment, whose first issue appeared in November 1928, featuring a manifesto stating an “emphasis on ‘a clearing up of beliefs’ and the ‘building up of a uniform and contemporary artistic attitude’ ” (Remy Britain 28). Other contributors included Humphrey Jennings, Hugh Sykes Davies—both editorial board members—and Julian Trevelyan, who would all go on continuing in the quest to upset the axioms of art and literature as prominent English Surrealists. On the French side of the Channel, the Transatlantic Review ran from January until December 1924. Scholar Michel Remy claims it was instrumental in the passage of the movement from France to England, despite only one mention of Surrealism, though its importance lies more in the featuring of many future members of the movement (Britain 29). The English French-language magazine was edited by Ford Madox Ford and included contributions from Jean Cocteau, Philippe Soupault, and other Surrealists (Gasiorek 200). The lack of explanation may stem from an assumption that its readers were already aware of the movement and thereby 226

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needed no introduction (Ray 68). Despite its attempts to bridge London, New York, and Paris, the distances proved too great for its survival (Bulson 103). However, it nevertheless points to the very first arrivals of these names and ideas on the shores of Britain. Eugène Jolas’s Transition (1927–1938) soon occupied the void left by the Transatlantic Review. His journal, in its Surrealist-adjacent desire for intellectual subversion, bridged francophone and anglophone avant-gardes. Characterised by a “prevalence of Surrealism,” it avoided Breton’s dogmatic program while also publishing approximately 50 different Surrealist pieces by some of the biggest names from the continent (Setz 18; Brooker 634). In June 1930, it reprinted contributions from the Experiment group, including an article by Trevelyan titled “Dreams,” indicating a burgeoning recognition of English Surrealism. The next publication to link continental Surrealism to Britain was Edward W. Titus’s This Quarter (1925–1932). Its September 1932 issue was devoted to Surrealism, with Breton as guest editor, including many contributions from major names in continental Surrealism. In his essay “Surrealism Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” Breton names English literary greats such as Lewis Carroll and Ann Radcliffe as ancestors of Surrealism. Like many of these little magazines, This Quarter did not last long; Breton’s issue had been the penultimate. All three periodicals were available at gallerist Anton Zwemmer’s bookshop, which already functioned as a lightning rod for avant-garde ideas from the continent, and a mounting swell in the interest of the movement was emerging (Halliday 110). The first Surrealist poem written in English, “And the Seventh Dream Is the Dream of Isis,” was published in October 1933 by seventeen-year-old David Gascoyne and described as being “rife with beautiful and sinister disquiet” (Fraser 96). Two months later, Charles Madge’s “Surrealism for the English” appeared in the same publication, Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse. It was “the first thoroughgoing article on the specificity of English Surrealism. Ruling out mere imitation of Parisian Surrealism, Madge asserted that close analysis was compatible with a British perspective that could be developed from French standpoints” (Remy Britain 32). This locates a nascent indigenous Surrealism in the British Isles. Another facet of the bridge linking English Surrealism to the continent was film. The London Film Society was formed in December  1925, allowing for the bypassing of censorship laws to show films from French Surrealism, including Man Ray’s Etoile de mer and Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman, which had been previously dismissed by the censors as “so cryptic that it is meaningless and even if it had sense, it would have been rejected” (Remy Britain 33). An opportunity presented itself in the economic downturn of the early 1930s when Hollywood lessened its grip on British cinema, resulting in experimentation as well as the establishment of the British Film Institute and the General Post Office Film Unit in 1933 (Remy Britain 33). Jennings worked with the GPO concurrently, embarking on the domestic anthropological documentary project Mass-Observation and remaining active with the Surrealist group, exhibiting in 1936. Another contributor associated with Surrealism and the GPO was Len Lye, whose abstract colour films like A Colour Box (1935) were used for purposes such as post office advertisements (Horrocks 136–137). Continental Surrealism made one of its first appearances in London in an April 1933 exhibition at the Mayor Gallery with works by Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, and Joan Miró alongside future English Surrealists Henry Moore and Paul Nash. At this time Nash had been rallying artists to join Unit One, which included Edward Burra, Ben Nicholson, and Barbara Hepworth, and counted writer Herbert Read amongst its supporters (Causey 214; Harrison 233). Though short-lived, it left a significant mark on the British art scene in its progressive stance (Feaver 36) and marked another paving stone in the path leading to Britain’s own Surrealist autonomous presence. 227

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Coinciding with his publication of the first English-language Surrealist poem, Gascoyne left for Paris in October 1933, where he met Éluard and Breton during his three-month sojourn (Williamson 315). In May 1935, a year “said to mark the turning-point in the career of English Surrealism,” he wrote the First Manifesto of English Surrealism while in London, publishing it in Cahiers d’art in French (Ray 86). This declaration of the English principles of the movement was an overt message to the continental Surrealists of an incoming phenomenon. Following another visit to Paris that year, he happened upon British poet and artist Roland Penrose, and they subsequently decided together to introduce London to Surrealism (Sherwin British 21). Gascoyne’s Short Survey of Surrealism was written in November 1935 and published with a cover designed by Ernst. Gascoyne’s survey functioned as an introductory text for the anglophone public and was “a chronological summary of the main phases of Surrealism in France” and was a precursor to the upcoming exhibition the following summer (Remy Britain 71). The survey also included translations of texts and reproductions of works from all the major actors of the movement over the previous eleven years. Most importantly, it closed with the idea of Surrealism soon thriving in Britain.

The International Surrealist Exhibition Gascoyne’s survey functioned as a precursor to the upcoming International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 at New Burlington Galleries in London, the general public’s first introduction to Surrealism in England. It was headed by Penrose, who was assisted by Read, Sykes Davies, Gascoyne, Jennings, Rupert Lee, Diana Brinton Lee, Moore, Nash, and ELT Mesens and a team of Parisian organisers: Breton, Éluard, Georges Hugnet, and Man Ray. In all, between 11 June and 4 July, there were 23,000 visitors; 68 artists from 14 nationalities represented; 360 collages, drawings, paintings, and sculptures; 30 African and Oceanian objects as well as found objects on display (International Surrealist Bulletin 1). Breton led the opening ceremony, which boasted over 2,000 attendees. Throughout the exhibition’s duration, poetry readings and lectures were given by Breton, Read, and other Surrealists on various topics relating to the movement. The exhibition was successful in introducing Surrealism to a British audience. The bridge was complete. However, it also brought forth a need for the English Surrealists to consider an identity separate from that of the continental version. There still was no formal English or British group, leaving open both the list of potential local exhibitors and the tenets to which it would hold itself. Remy states that on one side, Read and Sykes Davies sought to make Surrealism “acceptable” to the English tradition, and on the other side, Jennings and Madge wanted to avoid “reducing Surrealism to simple formulas,” also stressing its “break from the past” (Britain 96–97). This is seen in their work following the event as it began to establish itself as an independent equal. After its closing, elements of the exhibition continued to resonate beyond the gallery’s walls, including publications. The International Surrealist Bulletin and Read’s edited volume, Surrealism, both appeared in September 1936, with the former partly serving as summarised documentation of the exhibition and also an official declaration of the creation of an English group organizing its own activities. The latter was an assessment of the movement in Britain to come. Surrealism can also be seen as a diplomatic gesture in its blending of continental Surrealism from Breton—who reiterated the English literary contribution to the movement—as well as Éluard and Hugnet. This is placed alongside Read’s own introduction of the English group—its “definitive manifesto” and his “most comprehensive statement on Surrealism”—accompanied by an essay by Sykes Davies (Read 20; Ray 121). The ideas of continental Surrealism, Read’s consideration of Surrealism as it related to the English Romantic and Victorian canon, and Sykes 228

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Davies’s position on “Surrealism at This Time and Place”—likening Magritte’s work to Wordsworth—aimed to provide a coherent first canonical touchpoint for Surrealism in England by linking the continent to British intellectual and cultural history. The inclusion of photographs of Surrealist paintings and objects—most of which were displayed at the exhibition the previous summer—provided visual support of the concepts and ideologies enumerated in the essays. The next major exhibition, Surrealist Objects and Poems, was perhaps a reflection of Breton’s influential hold in England following his essay “Crise de l’objet,” published in Cahiers d’Art in May 1936 (Matheson 154). The show opened at the London Gallery in November 1937 and was accompanied by a catalogue filled with poems and images of the works. Mesens, the gallery’s director, became the editor of the London Bulletin (1938–1940). Prior to the Bulletin, the main publication had been the Roger Roughton led Contemporary Poetry and Prose (spring 1936–fall 1937), which featured both British and French contributions as well as political statements (Remy “Snark’s Looking Glass” 10). Mesens’s journal featured articles, reviews, poems, and notices of exhibitions as well as catalogues, including Surrealist shows at other galleries, such as Mayor, Zwemmer, and Guggenheim Jeune, in addition to its own (Harrison 316; Ray 218). Assistant editors included Jennings and Penrose, who “were among the most faithful members of the London Surrealist group” (Ray 219). The gallery also served as a publishing house, most notably for Roland Penrose’s 1938 photo-poem The Road Is Wider Than Long. Many members of the British Surrealist group were politically engaged. In fact, politics are inextricable from the discussion of the movement, notably in moments when the group acted as a unified front in expressing their political position. In June 1936, the politically Left-leaning Artists International Association organised a debate on the social aspects of Surrealism, which continued to permeate the general discussion of modern art for several years afterward (Harrison 313). Penrose and Gascoyne joined in the cause against fascism in Spain in November 1936, publishing “Declaration on Spain,” which called on the government to abandon its noninterventionist stance, and they marched against Chamberlain on Mayday 1938 (Remy Britain 104; Sherwin “British” 32). Five months later, Mesens and Penrose sponsored an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery of Picasso’s Guernica to benefit women and children in the Spanish Republic; in December, Ernst’s London Gallery show was also a benefit for Jewish refugees from Central Europe (Stabakis 21). Politics also played a part in dissolving the bonds that existed between members of the Surrealist group in England. Following the July 1938 publication of Breton’s (and Trotsky’s) For an Independent Revolutionary Art, which rejected both left-wing and right-wing totalitarian restraints found in Stalin’s USSR and Nazi Germany, the English group received the text as well as a request to organise their own section in support (Ray 226). For many reasons both stemming from desires to keep distance from speaking out for or against the USSR or due to a strong loyalty to Communism, this moment is what London Surrealist Conroy Maddox described as “the collapse of English Surrealism” (Ray 226). However, note that Maddox only joined the movement in 1939 as part of an informal Birmingham collective, which also featured Emmy Bridgwater, who both later migrated to the London group. Like its French counterpart, much of the British Surrealist movement is marked by disputes and rifts between members throughout, though there was no central figure excommunicating members like Breton. Despite these shifts, many exhibitions continued through the interwar years and beyond. The disunity in the group could be ascribed to individualism and a lack of café culture, thereby depriving the group of having a common space upon which to congregate (Ray 148; Stabakis 19; Whitworth 19). Agar once claimed, “English artists are notoriously self-contained as a rule, and do not have either the desire or the opportunity to meet as often as they should” (Whitworth 45). In 1940, Mesens organised a meeting at the Barcelona restaurant in Soho where he drew a line in the sand, requiring that members begin adhering 229

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“to the proletarian revolution,” pledging fealty to the movement, and not exhibiting or publishing outside of officially sanctioned Surrealist outlets (Agar 146; Ray 227). This was perhaps Mesens’s attempt to become the Anglican equivalent of the pope of Surrealism, and it was not well-received. Many left or were expelled, including Read, with others—like Agar—eventually coming back but refusing Mesens’s terms (Ray 227; Remy Britain 211; Whitworth 24).

World War II and Its Aftermath World War II had a profound effect on the Surrealists in England. The London Gallery and its London Bulletin went on hiatus in 1940, with only the gallery opening again in 1946 (Clark 35). Though some life was left to the movement, such as Zwemmer Gallery’s Surrealism Today in June 1940, the following year was so inactive that Breton wrote, imploring the group to keep going (Levy 2). In addition to the wartime efforts and hardships that dramatically halted Surrealist activity, arrivals in London from occupied Paris included filmmaker, poet, and collagist Jacques Brunius, as well as the painters Stanley William Hayter and Gordon Onslow-Ford (Stabakis 21). Another major figure to emerge within the English Surrealists was Toni del Renzio, who arrived in London in 1940. Of Russian aristocratic descent, he spent time in Mussolini’s army, fought in the Spanish Civil War, and then went to London via Paris, where he was introduced to the Surrealists (Stabakis 21). He began to attempt to revive the since-dormant group in London and, in March 1942, published a single issue of the journal Arson with contributions from Agar, Bridgwater, Maddox, and himself, as well as de Chirico and Breton, who evoked a third manifesto (Levy 5–6; Ray 231). Most notably, Mesens had been excluded from the publication. At the end of that year, Del Renzio organised the exhibition Surrealism at the International Arts Centre in London that featured works by Parisian Surrealists as well as Agar, del Renzio, and Ithell Colquhoun, who had left the group following Mesens’s ultimatums at the Barcelona restaurant two years prior and would later marry del Renzio. The Mesens and del Renzio factions within the English group broke off and carried out attacks in the form of published letters in newspapers, journals, and pamphlets in 1943 and 1944 (Wilson 164–165). The excessive animosity motivated Mesens to reignite the group’s activity, having nearly lost his reign in Surreal Britain. By October 1945, Mesens’s group was hosting exhibitions, beginning with Surrealist Diversity, and publishing collections of essays like Free Unions Libres in 1946. These activities were nevertheless insufficient to sufficiently drive the renewal; the group issued the French-language apologetic “Declaration of the Surrealist Group in England” as a contribution for the 1947 Paris International Surrealist Exhibition at Galerie Maeght, which explained the lack of unwavering Surrealist presence in England as being due to the inherent irrational nature tied to English culture, citing Swift and Carrol, a decentralised society, as well as a different moral code from which to rebel, compared to France’s “monolithic Roman Catholic Church” (Ray 257). As Stabakis describes, this show served as Breton’s homecoming after his wartime American exile as well as a reconnection between the English and Parisian Surrealists (23). Within this, the issue of the disputes between members became inherently tied to their relationship, with Éluard’s Stalinist sympathies having made him persona non grata, being at the root of the rift between Mesens and del Renzio, and the former having also been in agreement with Breton on this issue. Penrose chose to remain friends with Éluard, and he was also criticised for having taken a British Council position in Paris in addition to later accepting knighthood (King 259). Stabakis also notes the role of the London Gallery in the continuing promotion of Surrealism (24). While it—and therefore Mesens—also began promoting emerging midcentury trends, such as abstract expressionism, it remained a stalwart of Surrealism, with a solo Edith Rimmington show in 1948 and a joint exhibition of Desmond 230

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Morris—a Birmingham Surrealist and zoologist still active today—and Miró in 1950. The London group did not survive the London Gallery’s closure in 1951, and with the founding of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1947 by Read, Penrose, Mesens, and others, many of the foundational figures began to move to other projects. The newly established Arts Council had provided support for the ICA to focus on exhibitions of avant-garde work as a way of relieving themselves of the responsibility, establishing “an unlikely outpost of Surrealism in a publicly funded organization” (Clark 52; Garlake 20). Surrealism quietly found its way into the English mainstream art world establishment.

Contemporary Surrealism in England Surrealism re-emerged from hibernation in spring 1967 after John Lyle included Mesens, Maddox, and Brunius as part of the program for the Exeter Festival of Modern Arts (Levy and Maddox 125). The exhibition included original members of the group, such as Agar, as well as newcomers, such as the painter and assemblage artist Anthony Earnshaw. Lyle began his own publication, TRANSFORMAcTION (1967–1979), established with Mesens and Maddox (Brunius had died the day of the opening of the Surrealist event in Exeter). From this revival emerged Patrick Hughes, Boyd Webb, Richard Wentworth, Tony Blundwell, and Glen Baxter (Walker, “Contrariwise” 10). Maddox and Lyle clashed to the point that the former left the journal after the second issue, with it lasting for a total of ten numbers (Levy and Maddox 131). The two proceeded to attack each other in the form of written publications, though Maddox remained nevertheless focused also on restarting the group’s activity. In concert with Édouard Jaguer’s “para-Surrealist movement” phases, he opened the show Surrealism Unlimited at the Camden Arts Centre in January 1978 as a way of representing the more recent Surrealist artists who had been excluded from the concurrently running more historical and scholarly Dada and Surrealism Reviewed at the Hayward Gallery (Levy and Maddox 136; Harris 394). There, Maddox featured artists including John Digby, John Welson, and Haifa Zangana (Stabakis 25). English Surrealist activity briefly moved back to Paris in 1979, where Peter Wood and Abdul Kader El-Janaby published The Moment, aimed at a Surrealist audience in England that included a mix of previous and new Surrealist writing from all over the world. The focus on Surrealism in the 1980s related more to its past, with the fiftieth anniversary of the International Surrealist Exhibition receiving great attention in 1986, including the major exhibitions at the Leeds City Art Galleries, Surrealism in Britain in the Thirties and Contrariwise: Surrealism and Britain 1930– 1986 in Swansea. Various events, publications, and media attention featured many of the artists and writers from the first wave of Surrealism in England while also highlighting its continuing existence by featuring postwar Surrealists as well as the new guard and others influenced by Surrealism. This new attention led people, such as Jeffrey Sherwin, to begin amassing important collections of these artists’ works (Sherwin, “What Sort of Bloke” 93). A new Surrealist group was founded in March 1994 in Leeds that was comprised of painters Stephen J Clark and Bill Howe as well as the writers Sarah Metcalf and Kenneth Cox. Despite their arrival seventy years after the initial birth of Surrealism, they made a significant contribution to the movement with their games as well as their internal journal, Black Lamplight (Richardson 138). Active in publishing, organizing film festivals, and exhibitions both in England as well as on the continent in Spain and France, this revitalised group remains active and is the “longest-standing Surrealist collective in England” (Stabakis 25). Its other publications include Phosphor, which is still active today. A London group was founded in 2004 by photographer and writer Stuart Inman, in which even del Renzio participated in the form of a poetry reading shortly before his passing. The Surrealist London Action Group was a break-off faction formed 231

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in early 2006 that centred more on activism and in which new technologies were incorporated into Surrealist practice as a way of circulating work (Stabakis 25). Collaborating with Surrealist groups in Stockholm and Athens, SLAG published works and organised exhibitions in London and abroad before ending exactly ten years after its inception in 2016.

Conclusion As visual as it is literary, Surrealism in England may not have had the most linear inception or trajectory, but it has demonstrated its own distinctive character throughout its existence. Remy has noted, for example, that a unifying aspect within British is a neo-Romantic relationship with nature. This is consistent with Read’s vision of the movement, and others, such as Nash, have shared in this sentiment. Though Jennings sought a Surrealism that challenged Romanticism, (Walker 4), a celebration of the natural world is woven into the literary and artistic works of nearly all members of the group. They “all pay homage to the reciprocal influences of nature” (Remy Britain 337). British Surrealism’s indeterminate birth date is mirrored by its amorphic disunity, which has lent the movement an unserious reputation that does it great disservice, as the feuding distracts from the important contributions made to Surrealism. This sentiment is exemplified in Walker’s description of the movement having been “said to contain a number of small successes within an overall failure” (Walker, “Contrariwise” 9). However, this unfair description demonstrates how difficult it has been for scholars of Surrealism in England to cut the umbilical cord and to allow it to live independently from the French movement. Living in the shadow of Paris has made it difficult to be considered independently, but as more work is done on these artists, its distinct qualities begin to reveal themselves.

Works Cited Agar, Eileen. A Look at My Life. Methuen, 1988. Breton, André. “Surrealism: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.” This Quarter, September 1932. Brooker, Peter. “Cross-currents: America and Europe: Introduction.” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II: North America 1894–1960, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 629–635. Bulson, Eric. Little Magazine, World Form. Columbia University Press, 2017. Causey, Andrew. “Unit One—Towards Surrealism.” British Art in the 20th Century: the Modern Movement, edited by Compton, Susan P., London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1987. Clark, Adrian. British and Irish Art 1945–1951: From War to Festival. Hogarth Arts, 2010. Durozoi, Gérard. Histoire du mouvement surréaliste. Éditions Hazan, 1997. Feaver, William. “Art at the Time.” Thirties, British Art and Design before the War. An Exhibition Organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain in Collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum, edited by Arts council of Great Britain, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Hayward Gallery, The Council, London, 1979. Fraser, Robert. Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne. Oxford University Press, 2012. Garlake, Margaret. New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society. Yale University Press, 1998. Gasiorek, Andrzej. “Editing the ‘Transatlantic Review’: Literary Magazines and the Public Sphere.” International Ford Madox Ford Studies, vol. 9, Brill, 2010, pp. 197–214. Halliday, Nigel Vaux. More than a Bookshop: Zwemmer’s and Art in the 20th Century. Philip Wilson, 1991. Harris, Steven. “The Surrealist Movement since the 1940s.” A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, edited by David Hopkins, John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2016, pp. 385–399. Harrison, Charles. English Art and Modernism, 1900–1939. 2nd ed. Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press, 1994. Horrocks, Roger. Len Lye: A Biography. Auckland University Press, 2001. International Surrealist Bulletin, no. 4, September 1936. King, James. Roland Penrose: the Life of a Surrealist. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

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Surrealism in England Levy, Silvano. “The del Renzio Affair: A Leadership Struggle in Wartime Surrealism.” Papers of Surrealism, no. 3. Manchester University, 2005. Levy, Silvano, and Conroy Maddox. The Scandalous Eye: the Surrealism of Conroy Maddox. Liverpool University Press, 2003. Matheson, Neil. “The Phantom of Surrealism: Photography, Cultural Identity and the Reception of Surrealism in England.” History of Photography, vol. 29, no. 2, 2005, pp. 149–162. Ray, Paul Charles. The Surrealist Movement in England. Cornell University Press, 1971. Read, Herbert, editor. Surrealism. 1936, Faber, 1971. Remy, Michel. “British Surrealist Writing and Painting: Re-marking the Margin.” Surrealism: Crossings/ Frontiers, edited by Elza Adamowicz, Peter Lang, 2006. ———. “The Snark’s Looking Glass.” Les Enfants d’Alice: la peinture surrealiste en angleterre 1930–1960 (exh. cat.), Galerie 1900–2000, Paris, 1982. ———. Surrealism in Britain. Aldershot and Brookfield, 1999. ———. “The Visual Poetics of British Surrealism.” Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality, edited by Silvano Levy, Keele University Press, 1997. Richardson, Michael. “ ‘Other’ Surrealisms: Center and Periphery in International Perspective.” A Companion to Dada and Surrealism. edited by David Hopkins, Hoboken, John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2016, pp. 131–143. Setz, Cathryn. Primordial Modernism. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Sherwin, Jeffrey. British Surrealism Opened Up: from France to England. Northern Artists Gallery Ltd, 2014. ———. “So What Sort of Bloke Would Collect Pictures Like These? Confessions of a Collector.” British Surrealism in Context: a Collector’s Eye (exh. cat.), Leeds Art Gallery, 2009. Stabakis, Nikos. “Britain.” The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, vol. 1, Bloomsbury Press, 2019, pp. 17–26. Stephenson, Andrew. “1933: Moderate Modernism.” The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018, edited by Mark Hallett, Sarah Victoria Turner and Jessica Feather. Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2018. Trevelyan, Julian. “Dreams.” transition, edited by Eugene Jolas, June 1930, pp. 120–123. Walker, Ian. “Contrariwise.” Contrariwise: Surrealism and Britain, 1930–1986: A Glynn Vivian Art Gallery Touring Exhibition, edited by Ian Walker and Glynn Vivian Art Gallery and Museum, Swansea Museums Service, 1986. ———. So Exotic, So Homemade: Surrealism, Englishness and Documentary Photography. Manchester University Press, 2007. Whitworth, Anna. The Angel of Anarchy: A Study of the Work of Eileen Agar up to the Second World War in the Context of English Surrealism. 1985. Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, MA dissertation. Williamson, Marcus. “David Gascoyne.” The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, vol. 2, Bloomsbury Press, 2019, pp. 315–318. Wilson, Sarah. “En Angleterre.” La Planète Affolée: Surréalisme, Dispersion et Influences, 1938–1947, edited by Marseille Direction des musées, Marseille, Flammarion, 1986.

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26 SURREALISM IN GREECE Victoria Ferentinou

In the “Surrealist Map of the World,” published in Variétés in 1929, Greece is meaningfully excluded. This omission is related to André Breton’s long-standing conviction that European culture was hegemonized by Greco-Roman antiquity as it had been reformulated by postEnlightenment epistemologies. This iconoclastic stance toward classical heritage was shared by several Greek intellectuals who were drawn to Surrealism as early as the 1930s, adopting its derisive politics and revisionist attitude toward tradition, myth, and identity (Yatromanolakis 1–25). Although their activities did not lead to the inauguration of a proper organized group, they laid the groundwork for the infiltration of Surrealist ideas and practices in Greece, contributing to the emergence of a vibrant movement that has sought to interrogate the perceptual, creative, and revolutionary possibilities of the poetic endeavour from the mid-1930s onward. This sustained dialogue with Surrealism has not been sufficiently covered in historiography with few recent exceptions (Stabakis; Sigalas; Chryssanthopoulos; Yatromanolakis). Mario Vitti’s argument that Greek Surrealism was apolitical and therefore socially mutilated because its proponents did not commit to the Communist cause (123–127) has impacted several scholars who propagated his idea without properly investigating unpublished material, the networks of individuals involved with the Surrealist enterprise in Greece, and their postwar collective activities. Yet Greek Surrealism is a notable chapter in the history of international Surrealism. This chapter aims at sketching out its history, taking into account new findings and recent scholarship to shed light on the manifestation, reception, and appropriation of Surrealism in Greece to this day.

The Power of the Surrealist Voice: Toward the Formation of Greek Surrealism, or Not Surrealism was one of the first avant-garde movements to be introduced in Greece as early as the early 1930s. At that time, the country sought to consolidate its ethnic identity through an ethnocentric modernism that blended European modernism with ancient, Byzantine, and folk Greek elements in its effort to construct a national artistic and literary canon. The military junta of Metaxas in 1936, the outbreak of the Second World War in 1940, the German Occupation (1940–44), and the ensuing Greek Civil War (1946–49) did not facilitate the infiltration of avant-garde poetics and politics in Greek artistic and literary circles. Within this context, the publication of the first Surrealist collection of automatic poems, Blast Furnace (Υψικάμινος) 234

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-30

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by poet and psychoanalyst Andreas Embeirikos in 1935, was a memorable event that marked the debut of Surrealism in Greece. Often conceived as a form of a Surrealist manifesto, Blast Furnace was explosive and disturbing for conservative critics and readerships (Chryssanthopoulos 117). In January of the same year, Embeirikos had given his public lecture “On Surrealism” (Περί Σουρρεαλισμού) in Athens, showing his allegiance to Breton and the French Surrealists’ adherence to dialectical materialism and Freudian psychoanalysis that attracted more enemies than friends (Sigalas 147–160). Embeirikos had lived in Paris between 1928 and 1931, befriending psychoanalysts René Laforgue and Jean Frois-Wittmann. Before 1933, he met Breton and his circle and joined their daily meetings at Café Cyrano in Place Blanche (Skarpalezou 14). He maintained contacts with his Surrealist colleagues after his departure from Paris, as is evidenced by his archive in which letters, Surrealist books bearing dedications, and Surrealist questionnaires conducted by the review Minotaure have been identified (Sigalas 90–91). Wishing to inaugurate Surrealist activity in Greece, Embeirikos triggered the formation of a group of intellectuals, including poet and critic Nicolas Calas, poet and painter Nikos Engonopoulos, poet Odysseas Elytis, and for a brief period, painter Orestis Kanellis, and critic and editor of Nea Phylla (Νέα Φύλλα), Thalis Retoridis. Embeirikos, Calas, Elytis, and philologist and editor K. Th. Dimaras were planning the publication of a journal “with explicit Freudian and Surrealist tendencies” to be titled Thiasos (Θίασος) or Skopoi (Σκοποί) that did not materialise (Elytis 355–356; Embeirikos 85). As an alternative, in 1937 Retoridis included poems by Embeirikos and Calas and a reproduction of a painting by Yves Tanguy in the last two issues of Nea Phylla that explicitly promoted Surrealism. In 1938, an anthology of translations of Surrealist texts by Breton, René Crevel, Salvador Dalí, Paul Éluard, Georges Hugnet, Benjamin Péret, Gisèle Prasinos, Guy Rosey, and Tristan Tzara, Surrealism 1 (Υπερ(ρ)εαλισμός Α’), was published by Govosti, a Leftist publishing house. Embeirikos, Calas, Engonopoulos, Elytis, Kanellis, Retoridis, and Dimitris Karapanos were all involved in the translations, showing the degree of their involvement as the nucleus of the Greek Surrealist group (Sigalas 131). This publication, which for Calas seems to have functioned as the first issue of a Surrealist-oriented periodical (Sigalas 131), announced the forthcoming Surrealism 2 (Υπερ(ρ)εαλισμός B’) and other important Surrealist publications, such as Engonopoulos’s Do Not Distract the Driver (Μην Ομιλείτε εις τον Οδηγό, 1938) and SO4H2, that would be published as The Clavichords of Silence (Τα Κλειδοκύμβαλα της Σιωπής) in 1939, and Embeirikos’s The Hinterland (Ενδοχώρα, composed between 1934 and 1937, published in 1945). Common themes underpinning the aforementioned publications are the experimentation with automatism and free association, intertextuality and subversive appropriations of myth and history, sardonic humour, utopian revisions of place and time, and the use of a hybrid language predicated on an intersemiotic play between vernacular and puristic language characterised by critics as a form of coup de théâtre (Valaoritis, “On a Theory 2” 84). Emberikos’s, and particularly Engonopoulous’s, poetry provoked a scandal and sarcastic comments, as is documented in the daily press and even theatrical plays that scorned and humiliated the Surrealist proponents to such an extent that it left indelible marks on the reception of their work (Trivizas 27–40, 54–63). Influenced by this atmosphere, Elytis, whose first published collection, Orientations (Προσανατολισμοί, 1939), betrayed the influence of Éluard, gradually adhered to the modernist camp, as exemplified by Nobel laureate poet Georgios Seferis, although he would continue defending Surrealism with his essays, such as “Cards on the Table T.T.T. 1935” (Ανοιχτά Χαρτιά Τ.Τ.Τ. 1935, 1944) in New Letters (Νέα Γράμματα). Another Surrealist sympathiser and participant in the group’s meetings was poet Nikos Gatsos, who was well-read in Surrealism and published his collection of Surrealist automatism, Amorgos (Αμοργός), in 1943. Although Gatsos 235

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distanced himself from literary circles in the postwar era, his work as lyricist evinces the dissemination of Surrealist aesthetics and themes in popular Greek songs. Surrealist art was also promoted, with Embeirikos organising an exhibition of Surrealist painting at his house from 10 to 29 March 1938, titled the First International Surrealist Exhibition of Athens, comprised of works by Victor Brauner, Oscar Dominguez, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Tanguy, photo-collages by Elytis, copies of Breton’s Manifestoes, and other Surrealist publications, including Embeirikos’s Blast Furnace and Éluard’s poems translated by Elytis (Elytis 363–364). Embeirikos was already acquainted with the painter Georgios Gounaropoulos, whose imagery of oneiric landscapes and immaterial creatures shared affinities with Surrealism (Papanikolaou 119–121), and he encouraged Kanellis and Gerasimos Steris, for whom he wrote a recommendation letter to Breton (Sigalas 108–109, 123–127), to paint Surrealistically. Both Kanellis and Steris experimented with Surrealist themes at that time, but it was Engonopoulos who developed an explicit Surrealist iconography from 1936 onward. With the help of Calas and Embeirikos, Engonopoulos’s Surrealist painting was exhibited at the former’s house in 1939 (Perpinioti-Agazir 21–22). Engonopoulos’s images echoed his influence from Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical painting and post-Byzantine art juxtaposing incongruous objects and mannequin-like hybrid figures in urban, natural, or fantastic landscapes of purposefully distorted perspective, such as Nico Passes Time (Niko hora ruit) (Figure 26.1). Drawing from antiquity, comparative mythology, and alternative epistemologies, Engonopoulos’s paintings conversed with his poetry, invoking an enigmatic, densely populated space that questioned a normalised perception of reality and revisualised dominant discursive topoi of history, myth, and tradition. As has been documented, the exhibition was considered a provocative gesture by conservative critics and audiences (Perpinioti-Agazir 21–22). As Engonopoulos reminiscences, there was such a negative reaction that a woman punctured one of his paintings with her umbrella (qtd. in Perpinioti-Agazir 21). Nonetheless, Emgonopoulos’s pictorial work would be more openly espoused and imitated in the postwar era, as is made manifest in the 27th Biennale of Venice dedicated to Surrealist painting in which he represented Greek Surrealism with 72 artworks. In the photographic realm, Embeirikos and his first wife, Surrealist poet Matsi Chatzilazarou, collaborated in a series of photographs taken in the late 1930s with explicit references to Man Ray, Brassai, and Henri Cartier-Bresson (Stathatos 15). Optical plays, dimly lit spaces, bodily transformations and disfigurements, juxtapositions of unrelated objects or objets trouvés offer uncanny images exploring the darkest recesses of the unconscious. In another series, Embeirikos explored the marvellous in everyday life and the shocking effects of chance encounters. His contribution to Surrealist photography, only recently discovered, is unique for Greek standards and sheds light on Embeirikos’s multifaceted conception of creativity in line with Surrealism. In the field of criticism, the most celebrated critic of the coterie was Calas, who was one of the first writers to discuss Surrealism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis in his essays from 1929 onward. It was in 1933 that Calas showed a more consistent interest in the movement via his acquaintance with Embeirikos. In 1935, he travelled to Paris and met Breton and the French Surrealists (Hoff 123–125). In 1938, he published his first book of essays, Foci of Fire (Foyers d’incendie), in Paris and continued his collaboration with his Greek colleagues until 1939. In 1940, he moved to the United States and supported Surrealism with essays in View and New Directions of Prose and Poetry, published Confound the Wise (1940), while he collaborated with Breton on several projects. It is not therefore coincidental that in Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not (Prolégomènes à une troisième manifeste du surréalisme ou non, 1942), Breton included Calas in the list of the “most lucid and daring minds of his era” (Breton 287). His treatises should be reassessed as the 236

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Figure 26.1 Nikos Engonopoulos, Niko hora ruit (Nico Passes Time), oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm, 1939. Source: Private Collection © Errietti Engonopoulou.

intellectual products of the critic’s contributions to international Surrealism, but his primary corpus of ideas was shaped within the Greek political and cultural context. It is commonly accepted that Calas’s departure, the derision by conservative Greek critics and the press (from both right and communist camps), and the turbulent political climate hindered not only the explicit expression of Surrealist sympathies but also the foundation of an organised movement in the model of the Parisian group. Nonetheless, as poet Nanos Valaoritis correctly remarks, the spate of Surrealist publications from 1935 to 1946 as well as the regular meetings of Surrealists and Surrealist sympathisers at coffee houses (Kato Loumidi, Brazilian, Floka’s) show an intense activity that parallels that of Breton’s group (“Toward a Theory 2” 25–26). During the Nazi occupation, it was mainly Embeirikos and Chatzilazarou who fostered collective endeavours by organising weekly meetings at their house, in which Gatsos, Elytis, Engonopoulos, and younger poets, among them Valaoritis, Miltos Sahtouris, Hector Kaknavatos, D. P. Papaditsas, Epameinondas Gonatas, and Georgos Likos, gathered, read poetry, 237

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and exchanged ideas (Elytis 403–405; Valaoritis, “Toward a Theory 2” 35). In these meetings, Embeirikos recited several of his unpublished texts, such as excerpts from The Great Eastern (Ο Μέγας Ανατολικός published 1990–92), characterised as “a Freudian, Surrealist, Dionysian Noah’s Ark” (Valaoritis, “Toward a Theory 2” 14). Amidst devastation, death, and disillusionment, Surrealists and modernists collaborated to publish a new journal, Tetradio (Τετράδιο), in 1944–1948, which served as an avenue for resistance, creativity, and redemption. It is within this context that Engonopoulos published his Bolivar (Μπολιβάρ, 1944), a prose poem that explored the concept of political freedom and self-emancipation, drawing parallels between the Greek and Latin American revolutions, but also landscapes and cultures, prioritising cultural hybridity as a response to a narrowly conceived Greek identity and “primitivism” as an alternative paradigm for the marvellous. His poem is highly meaningful within the context of a tumultuous decade that led Greece to deep polarization, bloodshed, and political persecutions and left Greek Surrealism a project in progress.

Postwar Activity: From Solitary Ventures to the Pali Group In the early postwar years, Greece did not provide a safe haven for several artists and poets who fled the country. A number of younger poets, among them Sahtouris, Kaknavatos, Papaditsas, Gonatas, Manto Aravantinou, and Eleni Vakalo, were drawn to Surrealism, but there was no attempt to form a collective or make connections to the international movement. The exception was Valaoritis, who had moved to Paris and was involved with Breton’s circle from 1954 to 1960 via his future wife, the American Surrealist painter Marie Wilson. Valaoritis took part in the group’s activities and served as the link between Breton and the Greek Surrealists, although the older generation took different trajectories: Calas became an art critic in New York, writing essays on Surrealism and contemporary art; Embeirikos experimented with photography, abandoned psychoanalysis, and wrote extensively, with most of his texts published after his death; Engonopoulos taught freehand drawing at Athens Polytechnic (1956–1973) and produced a prolific visual oeuvre. The 1960s saw the publication of Embeirikos’s Amour-Amour, written in 1939 but published as a prologue to Writings or Personal Mythology (Γραπτά ή Προσωπική Μυθολογία, written 1934–1946, published 1960). This is a manifesto-style text in which Embeirkos configures poetic creativity as “the flowing and falling of waters” in perpetual becoming, defines the concept of the “autonomous poem, or poem-event,” and acknowledges his alignment to “the immense, truly enchanting world” of Surrealism (qtd. in Stabakis 32–35). To corroborate Surrealist theorizing, Valaoritis published a related essay in Criterio (Κριτήριο) in 1965. His essay was addressed to his Greek contemporaries, who misunderstood the movement’s practices and theories, exemplifying its primary ideas and adhering to Breton’s theories and the Surrealist goal of interweaving creative endeavour and social action (“Toward a Theory” 21–49). This was not his sole contribution to the permeation of Surrealism in postwar Greece. According to Valaoritis, Surrealism “deeply inspired” a series of activities and works in the period 1950–1970 (“Toward a Theory 2” 11–12), but it was the journal Pali that sought to endorse “a more radicalized and extremist modernism, that is the avant-garde” in the Greek cultural milieu (“Modernism” 37). The Pali group comprised young intellectuals, among them Tassos Denegris, Panos Koutroumboussis, Eva Mylona, Dimitris Poulikakos, and Nikos Stangos, who were fascinated by Surrealism, Nouveau Roman and the Beatniks, and older writers, such as Aravantinou, Alexandros Skinas, Giorgos Makris, and Kostas Tachtsis. Of pivotal importance was the contribution of Valaoritis, who was encouraged by the Paris Surrealist group to publish a journal in Greece and was planning to edit it along with Embeirikos and Elytis. The collaboration did not 238

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materialise, but the idea came to fruition when Valaoritis was involved with the group. They all decided to publish an alternative journal, called Pali (Πάλι), which means “again” in Greek, the latter an allusion to the Greek avant-garde’s resurgence in the postwar era (Valaoritis, “Modernism” 37–38, 40–44). Pali was internationalist, pluralist, and experimental and weaved together Surrealist trends with subversive politics, occupying an in-between, hybrid space informed by “philosophical Marxist existentialism” (Valaoritis, “Modernism” 44), but also anarchist and neo-Leftist positions. The editors and contributors introduced “new, foreign, nonconventional, futuristic, and erotic elements to Greek literature by accommodating texts written by . . . international Surrealists and absurdists, as well as vanguard jokes and psychedelic writings” (Arseniou 219). As a Surrealist-oriented project, Pali laid the groundwork for the revitalisation of Surrealism in Greece in the 1960s, thus responding to the internationalisation of Surrealist socio-aesthetics and to other artistic and literary developments. To set the tone, Valaoritis declared that the Pali group would oppose the mentality imposed by conventional rationalism and social prejudices . . . hindering the realization of dreams through love and the elementary right to the freedom of expression on all planes. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the future looks bright, full of new strange beings, extracted from the still-unknown areas of the psychic hinterland. It is this search alone that justifies poetry, whichever medium this latter utilizes, whether visual, written, or auditory. (qtd. in Stabakis 273) The editors of Pali believed that their journal would cover an intellectual vacuum current in Greek letters since 1940. The major problem had been the obsessive allegiance to the past and especially Greek tradition, as was constructed by conservative modernism. Pali not only revisited classical tropes but also further highlighted the interface of Greek antiquity with Eastern civilisations, through the recourse to Hellenistic alchemy, Gnosticism, and various alternative epistemologies. Pali’s dissident stance is manifest in the publication of texts drawn from this corpus, but also in the list of authors or works, which the editors aspired to publish in the next issues, ranging from Apollonius of Tyana, Hermes Trismegistus, and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass to the Indian Epics, The Tale of Genji by Murasaki, The Monkey by Wu Ch’Eng-En, to Éliphas Lévi, Jin Ping Mei, and the Zohar (Pali 98). Although these texts were never published because the journal ceased its circulation in 1966, just before the emergence of a military dictatorship (1967–1974) that dispersed the group, the list is programmatic and highlights their initiative for the creation of an avant-gardist alternative to mainstream periodicals. The journal did not accommodate solely Surrealist prose but a selection of artworks by Engonopoulos and Wilson, young Greek artists and poets dialoguing with contemporary currents, such as Alexis Akrithakis, Minos Argyrakis, Giannis Gaitis, Alekos Fasianos, Georgios Derpapas, Dimitris Rikakis, as well as international Surrealists Miró and Jean Benoit and artists Philip Martin, Rotella, Le Marechal, Rodchenko, and Raoul Michaux. The juxtaposition of text and image is grounded on the concept of the Surrealist image as a poetic image that transgresses artistic media and conveys the experience of an alternative view of reality as analogical and magical, resounding Breton’s emphasis on everyday magic in the 1950s. Along these lines, Valaoritis included a few of his collages, sometimes to complement the meaning of a text. Collage would become one of his primary visual techniques in his post-1970s work during his permanent residence in Oakland, California, where he taught creative writing and comparative literature at the San Francisco State University. For example, Hired Hieroglyphs (1971) and 239

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Diplomatic Relations (1972), interwove prose texts with collages, adopting the collage technique as propounded by Ernst in his collage-novels of the 1930s. The interrelation between image and text in the creative production was additionally endorsed by Elytis, who created Surrealist-influenced collages in the late 1960s as a vehicle to unearth images surfacing from the unconscious, and by Embeirikos, who explored the poetical potentialities of photography in parallel with his textual oeuvre. Surrealist and Dadaist visual techniques, such as collage and photomontage, were also utilised in contemporary politically engaged art to counter consumerism, political suppression, and poverty, especially during the junta years (Hamalidi et al. 425–444). Further, Surrealism exerted a certain influence on a number of painters whose work was infused with Surrealist references, puns, or tropes. Among them art historians place Spyros Vassileiou, Georgios Vakalo, Georgios Paralis, and Celeste Polychroniadi (Papanikolaou 124–129). Vakalo, in particular, lived in Paris from 1922 to 1940, familiarising himself with the French avant-garde. In 1940–1960 and after 1970, his work invokes Surrealist themes, such as psychological landscapes, and an oneiric, poetical atmosphere. This lyricism often characterises contemporary Greek art, which experimented with modernist currents in an eclectic way that has often impeded the understanding of Surrealism’s actual impact on the postwar artistic scene.

Long Live Surrealism! 1975 to the Present After the restoration of democracy in 1974, Pali’s legacy as the most influential avant-gardist Greek periodical was acknowledged, laying impact on a younger generation of intellectuals. Especially through its reissue in 1975, it left its traces to the Greek underground scene as Dada and Surrealism were now reappraised as forerunners to May ’68, Beat literature, and alternative countercultural poetry and art (Stabakis 337). There was also a growing interest in the reprinting of texts of the first generation of Greek Surrealists, the publication of unpublished texts by Embeirikos, Calas, and Valaoritis, and the scholarly study of Greek Surrealism by academics, such as Frangiski Ampatzopoulou, who synthesised a collection of Surrealist poetry in 1982, including self-declared Surrealists but also poets influenced by Surrealist poetics. In the 1990s, Valaorits attempted to resume avant-gardist ventures in Greece, founding with Aravantinou and poet Andreas Pagoulatos the literary review Synteleia (Συντέλεια, 1989–1996), which they saw as “a continuation of Pali.” In 1991, Valaorits organised along with Ketty Tsekenis a big exhibition of Greek Surrealists at Centre Pompidou in Paris and edited the accompanying catalogue, Surréalistes Grecs, aiming at presenting Greek Surrealism to a wider, international audience. In the introductory text, Valaoritis noted that Surrealism “gained great success” in Greece because Greek culture embraces the interweaving of the paralogical and the everyday via its folk tradition (“Toward a Theory 2” 9–13). Throughout the 1990s, Valaoritis published essays, reviews, and collections of prose texts echoing Surrealism, the most important being My Afterlife Guaranteed, experimenting with the performative potential of language and the admixture of different genres, media, and styles. In 2004, he returned to Athens with Wilson and was more deeply implicated in the contemporary Greek cultural scene, serving as a mentor to younger poets and briefly collaborating with the Athens Surrealist Group founded in 2004 (Valaoritis Personal Communication). Member of the Athens Surrealist Group and editor of Surrealism in Greece: An Anthology (2008), Nikos Stabakis, laments the missed opportunity of post-junta Greek publishers, poetic, and academic circles to fulfil Pali’s agenda of interweaving “old and new Surrealism” (338). He further pinpoints the unavailability of the work of Greek Surrealists in English, except for Embeirikos’s Amour-Amour (1966) and certain poems included in anthologies, which hinders 240

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their appreciation and proper positioning within the legacy of international Surrealism. However, he enthusiastically greets contemporary periodicals dedicated to current Surrealism: Farfoulas (Φαρφουλάς), edited by Diamantis Karavolas; Perpetalia (Περπετάλια, 2005), edited by the Ioannina Surrealist Group (formed in 2000); and Klidonas (Κλήδονας), edited by the Athens Surrealist Group. The declarations of the two aforementioned groups (2004 and 2005 respectively) emphasise their commitment to collective activity, the fusion of life and poetry, the disengagement from academic circles historicizing Surrealism as a dead movement, and the idea of total revolution and freedom. The Athens Surrealist Group also contributed to volumes 1 and 2 of Hydrolith: Surrealist Research and Investigations (2010 and 2015), coedited by members of various Surrealist groups, and participated in collective enterprises entailing exhibition of Surrealist objects, film screenings, public talks, musical, and poetry events in Athens and abroad as means of political mobilisation and protest. If Surrealism is rightly conceived as a revolutionary, sociopoetic praxis by the Greek Surrealist groups, its influence has been largely disseminated especially from the late 1960s onward to popular culture and individual artists appropriating its techniques, themes, and poeticization of the paradoxical, the fantastic, the monstrous, and the uncanny, without necessarily committing to political action. Surrealism’s impact has been briefly explored in art history textbooks and exhibitions focusing on its Greek manifestations, such as Surrealism—The Greek Dimension (Σουρρεαλισμός—Η ελληνική διάσταση, 1996), curated by Manos Stefanidis at Gallery Titanium; Beyond the Real-Echoes of Surrealism in Greece (Πέρα από το Πραγματικό-Απόηχοι του Σουρρεαλισμού στην Ελλάδα, 2009), curated by Bia Papadopoulou at the Municipal Gallery of Chania; and Approaching Surrealism (Προσεγγίζοντας το Σουρεαλισμό, 2012), organised by the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation at its prestigious Museum of Contemporary Art in Andros. Artists included in this genealogy of Surrealist “successors” are Derpapas, an old collaborator of Pali, and Theodoros Pantaleon, Alexandros Isaris, Alkis Ginis, Dimitris Geros, Sarantis Karavouzis, Alekos Levidis, and others, whose work evinces a visual dialogue with the imagery of Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst, and Paul Delvaux (Kotidis 236–237). Petros (Papavassileiou), who moved to Italy in the 1950s after his studies in Athens, is another painter associated with the legacy of Surrealism paying tribute to de Chirico, Wifredo Lam, and Roberto Matta. Petros developed a form of “Orphic Surrealism,” blending cubism, abstract expressionism, and Surrealist tendencies to visualise the idea of transformation voicing a panpsychist sensibility that sees the self as continuous with nature. Overall, Surrealism has been appropriated by Greek artists to expand on the possibilities of the marvellous, the fantastic, the dreamscape, and the libidinal, either opposing or integrating other contemporary trends.

Conclusion Although Breton refused to visit Athens on several occasions, he was acquainted with Greek Surrealists and encouraged Surrealist activity in the country. As has been evidenced, the reception of Surrealism in Greece was not a belated phenomenon, but the first generation of Greek Surrealists initiated a dialogue with the French group, which remained undocumented or neglected over the years. One of the reasons that Greek Surrealism was not celebrated was the unavailability of the Greek Surrealists’ work in other languages, hindering their visibility in the context of the international movement. Furthermore, scholarship based on Mario Vitti overlooked the dynamic surfacing of the movement in Greece, misconstruing the revolutionary potential of the Surrealist enterprise by situating it in grand narratives propagating theories about the periphery’s intellectual backwardness. Moreover, the failure of Greek scholarship to acknowledge that Surrealism expanded to different media and genres led to a partial study 241

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of Surrealist manifestations in Greece, focusing on poetry and dismissing the visual arts. New research has brought to light evidence of the flourishing of Surrealism and its legacies in the country, showing its lasting effects and diverse appropriations in the Greek context: as a revolutionary medium, as a poetic mode of living, as a textual and visual corroboration of the omnipotence of dream, metamorphosis, and becoming. As Stabakis asserts, “The future is still open-ended” (341).

Works Cited Ampatzopoulou, Frangiski. Δεν άνθησαν ματαίως. Ανθολογία Υπερρεαλισμού (They Did Not Bloom in Vain: Anthology of Surrealism). Nefeli, 1980. Arseniou, Elisabeth. “The Emergence of a Hybrid Avant-Grade: The Response of the Magazine Pali to Greek Modernism.” Greek Modernism and Beyond, edited by Dimitris Tziovas, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1997, pp. 217–228. Breton, André. “Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not’ (1942).” Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, University of Michigan Press, 1969, pp. 281–294. Chryssanthopoulos, Michalis. Εκατό χρόνια πέρασαν και ένα καράβι: Ο Ελληνικός Υπερρεαλισμός και η Κατασκευή της Παράδοσης (Greek Surrealism and the Construction of Tradition), Agra, 2012. Embeirikos, Andreas. Περί Σουρρεαλισμού: Η διάλεξη του 1935 (On Surrealism: The 1935 Lecture). Agra, 2009. Hamalidi, Elena, Maria Nikolopoulou, and Rea Walden. “A Second Avant-Garde without a First: Greek Avant-Garde Artists in the 1960s and 1970s.” Regarding the Popular. Modernism, the Avant-Garde, and High and Low Culture, edited by S. Bru, L. van Nuijs, B. Hjartarson, P. Nicholls, T. Ørum, and H. van den Berg, De Gruyter, 2011, pp. 425–444. Hoff, Lena. Nicolas Calas and the Challenge of Surrealism. Museum Tusculanum Press, 2014. Kotidis, Antonis. Μοντερνισμός και Παράδοση στην Ελληνική Μεταπολεμική και Σύγχρονη Τέχνη. Ζωγραφική-Γλυπτική-Αρχιτεκτονική 1940–2000 (Modernism and Tradition in Greek Post-war and Contemporary art: Painting-Sculpture-Architecture). University Studio Press, 2011. Pali. Volumes 1–6. Athens, SIMA, 1975. Papanikolaou, Miltiadis M. Ιστορία της Τέχνης στην Ελλάδα. Ζωγραφική και Γλυπτική του 20ου αιώνα (History of Art in Greece: Painting and Sculpture of the 20th century). Adam Publications, 1999. Perpinioti-Agazir, Katerina. Νίκος Εγγονόπουλος. Ο Ζωγραφικός του Κόσμος (Nikos Engonopoulos: His Pictorial Work). Benaki Museum, 2007. Sigalas, Nikos. Ο Ανδρέας Εμπειρίκος και η Iστορία του Eλληνικού Yπερρεαλισμού ή μπροστά στην Αμείλικτη Αρχή της Παράδοσης (Andreas Embeirikos and the History of Greek Surrealism, or before the Relentless Reality Principle). Agra, 2012. Skarpalezou, Andromache. “Συνέντευξη με τον Ανδρέα Εμπειρίκο” (Interview with Andreas Embeirikos), Ηριδανός (Eridanos), vol. 4, February–March, 1967, pp. 13–15. Stabakis, Nikos. Surrealism in Greece: An Anthology. University of Texas Press, 2008. Stathatos, Giannis, editor. Φωτοφράκτης. Οι Φωτογραφίες του Ανδρέα Εμπειρίκου (Shutter: The Photographs of Andreas Embeirikos). Agra, 2001. Trivizas, Sotiris. Το Σουρρεαλιστικό Σκάνδαλο. Χρονικό της Yποδοχής του Yπερρεαλιστικού Kινήματος στην Eλλάδα (The Surrealist Scandal: A Chronicle of the Reception of the Surrealist Movement in Greece). Kastanioti, 1996. Valaoritis, Nanos. Μοντερνισμός, Πρωτοπορία και “Πάλι” (Modernism, Avant-garde and “Pali”). Kastaniotis, 1997. ———. Για μια Θεωρία της Γραφής (Toward a Theory of Writing). Eksantas, 1990. ———. Για μια Θεωρία της Γραφής Β’: Κείμενα για τον Υπερρεαλισμό (Toward a Theory of Writing 2: Texts on Surrealism). Electra, 2006. ———. Personal Communication with the author, 2015. Vitti, Mario. Η γενιά του Τριάντα. Ιδεολογία και Μορφή (The Generation of the 1930s: Ideology and Form). Ermis, 1977. Yatromanolakis, Dimitris. Greek Mythologies: Antiquity and Surrealism. Harvard University Press, 2012.

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27 SUREALIS YOGYA AND OTHER SURREALIST MOMENTS IN INDONESIA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Tessel M. Bauduin Introduction In the mid-1980s, a group of young artists active in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, banded together for a small-scale exhibition. They employed the term “Yogya surealis” to refer to themselves and their art. From these tentative beginnings, a “school of surrealism” (Wright, Soul 30) arose, arguably resulting in “three decades of surrealist tendencies” (Saptari) in Indonesian art by the early 2010s. The association with Surrealism was not always so well received in Indonesia, or internationally, yet several artists continued to work in this vein and investigate the potential of a Surrealist visual language. This chapter will explore the phenomenon of Yogya surealis, as well as a select few artists associated with it. It will furthermore briefly touch upon other moments of Surrealist contact in Indonesian history during the twentieth century. To begin with, it will highlight some challenges and questions with regards to place and time.

Some Conceptual Considerations After Surrealism first saw the light in the early 1920s, it quickly spread across the globe to an astonishing number of locations. Surrealism blossomed first in France, Belgium, and Japan and, from the 1930s onward, appeared in Argentina, Brazil, China, Czechoslovakia, the Canary Islands, Chile, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Greece, Haiti, Martinique, the Netherlands, Mexico, Peru, Romania, Turkey, Syria, Sweden, the UK, the US, and Yugoslavia, up to and including, in the 1950s and later, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Spain, and Thailand (Pérez passim). International collaboration and exchange were a key component of the practice of several Surrealist groups, and the emphasis of, for instance, the French Surrealists on transnationalism and a “planet without visa” is well-known. Yet while Surrealism’s worldwide rhizomatic success has been widely acknowledged, Surrealism studies has not always managed to bypass the biases propagated in conservative hegemonic (Global Northern) art history, for instance with regards to place. Being tied to Paris is considered a sine qua non for many avant-garde movements, including Surrealism. One problematic result is that the Surrealism that arose in Paris is considered the original and thus “real” Surrealism, often obscuring Surrealism elsewhere. Moreover, Surrealism in and from Paris, and figures DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-31

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considered pivotal within it, have received an amount of attention that is extreme in comparison to that devoted to Surrealism and Surrealists elsewhere,1 reflecting the conventional treatment of movements and tendencies in the Global South as peripheral or marginal and associating those with reception and imitation while locating originality and authorship in the (Northern or European) centre. Fortunately, recent scholarship and curation, such as 2021’s pathbreaking Surrealism Beyond Borders (D’Alessandro and Gale), are broadening the horizons of Surrealism studies considerably, with regards not only to where but also to when. The obsession of modern art history with periodisation and linear hierarchical temporal models has often proven quite damning for artists from the Global South, who are faced with a hegemonic, absolutist chronology of modern(ist) art (history) that considers them “too late” but also not contemporary enough. This phenomenon has plagued Surrealists and fellow travellers of Surrealism especially. Take for instance the Indonesian artists labelled or self-defining as surealis or “Surrealist” since the 1980s. Global Northern curators of a 1993 exhibition on contemporary Indonesian art rejected Indonesian Surrealist work as “mimicking” Surrealism (Supangkat, Indonesian 72): i.e. as neither original nor authentic or, despite the work being recently made, not apparently contemporary enough. The fact that those chrononormative curators were from former coloniser the Netherlands makes this example even more painful. Too, the artists sometimes faced related difficulties in their home context, being chastised, on account of their assumed alliance to what was perceived as an essentially European avant-garde, as not postmodern enough and furthermore still in thrall to imperialist, Eurocentric paradigms. The parameters of an art history that enforces the trajectory Modernism > Postmodernism > Contemporary “are poorly suited for grasping the complicated and asynchronous developments” in the arts in Indonesia (Spielmann 59), as in many other locations around the world. At the very least, we have to let go of the idea that artists move linearly from “tradition” to “modernity,” as several scholars addressing the question of modern art in Asia in general and Indonesia in particular, most importantly John Clark, have pointed out. Jim Supangkat has introduced the idea of a pluralistic “multi-modernism” in Indonesia (Indonesian 9–11, 86; “multiculturalism”). One significant aspect of the multimodern condition is that it amalgamates modern, traditional, and contemporary realities, forming a hybrid that is not only multilayered and multitemporal but also geared towards the subject’s cultural situation. A related conceptual approach is to allow for “contemporaneity”: “an artist’s or viewer’s inhabitation of a conjunctive heterogeneity of times” (Chua 294–295). Associated mainly with contemporary art, Kevin Chua has decisively illustrated the concept’s usefulness in the discussion of historical art. In my view, it applies very well to the situation many artists in Yogyakarta found themselves in in the 1980s, when temporal experiences were disjointed on a regular basis and the very notion of a clear break between a modern present and a past of long-established Javanese and Yogyakartan cultural traditions seemed farcical.

Surealis Yogya The very modest 1985 exhibition in Yogyakarta was self-curated by an independent and incidental collective of artists, including Agus Kamal (b. 1956), Ivan Sagita (b. 1957), Lucia Hartini (b. 1959), and others. Although they were quite diverse in their practices, a penchant for oil painting in forms of realism with a strong undercurrent of magic realism and photorealism— and the bafflement with which this kind of art was met by their art school teachers and by critics—brought these artists together. They opted for the collectivising label “Yogya surealis” more as a conveniently open designation that would indicate that their art was neither abstract 244

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nor expressionistic than out of ideological motivations (Dudley 182–183). Of pan-Indonesian origin, the artists attended or moved in the circles of the Yogyakarta art academy ASRI (Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia; later ISI). In the early 1980s, a new form of a refined, evocative realism arose in ASRI’s milieu, often referred to as Arus Baru (new stream or new direction). Many of those associated with surealis Yogya are considered part of this trend. Martinus Dwi Marianto, one of the first to attempt comprehensive study of these artists, dubbed them the “Jogja surrealists” in recognition of their own designation as much as of Yogyakarta, the city most, if not all, of them studied and worked in at that time. In 1994, Astri Wright (Soul 114) described “young surrealist artists” also working in Surabaya and Malang. Recently Indonesian curator Wisetrotomo (10–12) distinguished three generations of artists working in a Surrealist language, and while Ivan Sagita and F. Sigit Santoso (b. 1964), respectively a “first” and “second generation” artist, still live and work in Yogyakarta, “third generation” artists Putu Wirantawan (b. 1972) and Dita Gambiro (b. 1986) are located in Bali and Bandung, respectively. Nevertheless, Yogyakarta is quite central to the developments relevant here. Following Chua’s (309) reconceptualization of realism, I propose we think also of Surrealism as a “cluster of qualities.” Qualities can be situated and contingent even as they may compare across space and time; while some can concern form, medium, or method, even style, others can, for example, indicate state of mind, so important to many manifestations of Surrealism. If we turn to the art associated with Yogya sur, that is to say, the Surrealist mode of artists in Yogyakarta and sporadically elsewhere in Indonesia, one major quality is a strong tendency towards symbolic visual language filled with paradoxes, strange juxtapositions, and mysterious fragmentation that add up to a depiction of the experience of reality as “ ‘more real’ than the everyday visible world” (Wright, “Hartini” 97). The artworks address but do not resolve experiences of alienation, disjunction between inner and outer worlds, repressed trauma, and complex and unequal sociocultural conditions. They often acknowledge or incorporate the direct bearing of inner upon outer realities that many of the artists experience (cf. Spanjaard, Modern 163). Yogya surealis art is also often characterised by a visionary atmosphere, showing cosmic or dreamlike landscapes. Furthermore, forms, shapes, and patterns occasionally take their cue from Javanese legacy arts, including dance and wayang theatre. Another quality of the Indonesian Surrealist mode is the distinctly spiritual and metaphysical resonances many artists add to their work. These can be rooted in, among other things, local nature religions, classical Hindu myth or Islamic spiritualism, Sufi, and otherwise. Often kept private by the artists anyway, this aspect may baffle viewers unfamiliar with Southeast Asian and Indonesian spiritual repertoires, let alone those deeply invested in hegemonic modernism’s secularisation paradigm. It aligns, however, with the productive intertwining of spirituality and manifestations of Surrealism elsewhere, including Theravada Buddhism and Surrealist practices in Thailand, and Catholicism and the same in the Philippines (Veal 133; Flores 137). Another facet of Yogya surealis is its occasional hybrid character. Contemporary Indonesian art is self-consciously syncretistic (Spielmann 56), which is an important reappropriation of an attribute often associated negatively with the peripheral. This tendency towards syncretism was already clearly visible in the work of the Yogya Surrealists, who, in oil painting that is never completely abstract and often very figurative, blended magic realism, photorealism, pop art, the visual language of advertising, Magrittean fragmentation, and Javanese cultural references, sometimes with a dollop of fantasy art added. To further situate the development of Yogya surealis, several factors should be noted, including, firstly, realism. Realism’s (art) history in modern Indonesian art goes back at least to the nineteenth century and the hallowed painter Raden Saleh (1807–1880). As elsewhere, realist styles became heavily politicised during the twentieth century, with forms of social realism 245

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and socialist realism being promoted by revolutionaries after Indonesian independence and, subsequently, by the state (Chua, passim). During the 1960s, ideological positions hardened, including those concerning aesthetics and especially regarding abstraction versus figuration. Yogyakarta’s art academy and its sibling and rival, IT Bandung, had been caught up in sociopolitical developments in Indonesia since independence, with the Yogya school being associated with revolution, socially relevant art, and realist and expressive styles. Throughout the 1980s, Yogya art school alumni continued to produce nonabstract work, often in interesting blends of photorealism, hyperrealism, and Surrealism. One reason that Indonesian Surrealist modes, most, if not all, of whom originated in the milieu around ASRI, are invariably more or less figurative is that abstraction was associated with the rival art school and burdened with specific connotations. Incidentally, ASRI faculty’s emphasis on expressionist techniques may well account for the young surealis and arus baru artists’ contrary turn towards the highly finished and illusionary forms of oil painting typical for these currents. Many of the connotations to abstraction/figuration were shaped by the political situation, which is a second key factor. While abstraction was first rejected by the young state as “bourgeois” and not Indonesian, after the establishment in 1966 of what is often called the New Order, it became the preferred—because supposedly apolitical—style, generally at the expense of forms of realism. The New Order instituted a top-down policy to depoliticise art, artists, and art schools. By the time the first generation of Yogya surealis artists were associated with ASRI and affiliated institutes (late 1970s, early 1980s), conditions there were primarily geared towards producing good-looking art that was technically sound, usually impressionistic or expressionistic in form, and importantly, free from expression of individual feelings and emotions and politically unsuspicious. Eventually, a response to “the crackdown on socially engaged art” developed (Wright, “Hartini” 97), and Yogyakarta art practitioners especially knew “how to embed political criticism in a broader, widely familiar, and unsuspicious traditional cultural context” (Spielmann 54). This development skewed towards a veiled visual language of fantasy, dream, puns, double meanings, and metaphors. All these are recurring elements in the canvasses of those working in a Surrealist mode. The third factor is the absurdism of regular life. With regard to post-1966 artistic developments in a realist, including Surrealist and magical realist, idiom, more than a few curators and scholars have underlined that for several decades, Indonesian political, social, and cultural reality has been full of paradox and irony. On a daily basis, artists were (and frequently still are) confronted, on a societal as much as individual level, by political repression and corruption, a lack and mismanagement of cultural infrastructure and resources, poor educational institutions, rapid and chaotic modernisation, high social inequality, a large wealth gap, and religious and ethnic tensions and intolerance, among other things. We should also note that Indonesia is by no means a homogenous unity, consisting of over 17,000 islands, around 1,300 ethnic groups, and over 700 local languages. The heritage of colonial rule can differ considerably between regions, and recent history, after independence, is politically complex and full of conflict as much as of partially, even completely, repressed episodes that have generated considerable societal trauma and are often still unrecovered.2 All in all, individually, socially, politically, and culturally, artists in Indonesia face what Wisetrotomo has summarised as “an absurd condition” (9). The pictural language of Surrealism, with its capacity for multiple meanings and its tendency to speak to trauma, made it eminently suitable to the situation, as did the fact that freedom—of the imagination and mind, if not in daily life—is so essential to it. Absurdist ambiguity reflects the artists’ contemporaneity: Marianto (Surrealist¸ 176) and Supangkat (Indonesian 78) have pointed out that a Surrealistic language allowed the artists to reflect upon situations they were otherwise “unable to comment publicly” on and to articulate, albeit cryptically, their search for a “cultural 246

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identity” that took social and economic realities, both historic and present, into account. The particular visual discourse of Yogya surealis also reflects situational specifics of multimodernist Yogyakarta: using indirect and ambiguous languages (in form as much as words) for subtle and highly symbolical conveying of ideas aligns well with traditional Javanese culture, in which the different registers of Javanese and local code-switching and subversive forms of language are central. It allowed Heri Dono, Sudarisman, and Hartini, among other artists, an articulation of sociopolitical concerns and cultural commentary in their work (Marianto, Surrealist 16). Nonetheless, the political angle should not be overdetermined; a number of other first-wave Yogya surealis artists have expressed an apolitical stance or rejected a reading of their art as social commentary (Marianto, Surrealist 162). Two artists still strongly associated with surealis Yogya today are Ivan Sagita and Lucia Hartini, both still active. Sagita (also referred to as Sagito), sometimes directly described as “a surrealist” (e.g. Morelli), often takes Javanese people and their life, habits, and practices as his subject. In his own words, empirical observation of the daily reality around him in Yogyakarta lies at the basis of his work, and he notes in particular poor, disadvantaged, and otherwise-marginalised people and their activities (Sagita cited in Supangkat, “Reality”). The artist presents his observations and subjects in a fragmented manner, juxtaposing transience with the tangible and body with environment. Bodies, especially women’s bodies, frequently appear in fragmented form, possibly acknowledging the amount of physical, social, and emotional labour Javanese women do while also, in its repetitive emphasis on body parts, indicative of a dissecting of the female form often also seen in Surrealist artworks from elsewhere. While Sagita’s art reflects the subjective perception and experience of a fragmented but recognisable social reality, Hartini’s art depicts mainly an inner world. That world is, in her own words, imagined as much as it is fantastical, informed by her daily experiences as much as her daydreams, hopes, and fears (Hartini cited by Marianto, “Srikandi” 111). Spying eyes, mazelike, crumbling brick walls, spirals and vortexes, wild seas and turbulent, often stormfilled skies are recurring motifs in canvases with a strong oneiric atmosphere. An early series of works centred around a pan or wok, usually depicted with apparently nuclear or volcanic explosions occurring in it, incongruously positioned in rocky seascapes and stormscapes. Both a powerful subversion of a deeply domestic as well as feminised object and an outcry against the cultural expectations of women, the exploding-wok-paintings testify to the power of the imagination to escape the daily grind of cooking and cleaning. A recurring motif on paintings from the late 1980s and early 1990s is one or several staring eye(s), as in The Eye (1990) (Figure  27.1). Placed between three planes of stormy sky, rough sea, and a rocky, coral-like foreground with overtones of grattage and frottage, the incongruously floating eye, rays emitting from its pupil, looks straight at the beholder, confronting us with the voyeurism inherent in looking at art. The eyes in Hartini’s canvasses often reference the spying eyes and social control of neighbours and the lack of privacy for many Javanese, especially women. In this case, however, I would interpret it as a mental eye looking out over an inner world and indicating the freedom, privacy, and unlimited space that can be found with and within the imagination.

Points of Contact and Two Other Iterations of Surrealism One result of hegemonic art history’s obsession with a supposed centre is that Surrealists elsewhere are frequently forced to show familiarity with said centre through contact with (what are thought to be) seminal publications and/or key actors. The question whether a Yogya surealis artist read André Breton’s Manifestoes or not is not only uninteresting but also constructs a 247

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Figure 27.1 Lucia Hartini, The Eye, oil on canvas, 75 × 65 cm., 1990. Source: OHD Collection, Magelang, Java, Indonesia. © 2022 OHD Collection and the artist.

vertical lineage of dissemination. This is not to disavow points of contact—which may function multidirectionally, even horizontally, and need not imply hierarchy—as indeed there were during the twentieth century. Firstly, on his journey through the Pacific and Southeast Asia, the French Surrealist Paul Éluard (1895–1952) travelled through what was then called the Dutch East Indies, calling at six ports altogether on the islands of Papua New Guinea, Sulawesi (then Celebes), Java, and Sumatra (McNab 74). While his visits had little impact, the country, its people, and its culture certainly had so upon him. Although there are no records of his thoughts about and travels in the Dutch Indies, Robert McNab (74, 214–215) has still traced several later indications of Éluard’s appreciation for its art and deep concern about the atrocious machinations of Dutch colonial imperialism, for instance, in material responding to the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in Paris. A second example, outlined by Savarese, is the impact that Balinese dance and 248

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music, performed daily in the Dutch pavilion at the same Colonial Exposition, had on Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) and especially his ideas on absurd theatre. Of course, people, ideas, and objects circulated constantly between Indonesia and Europe throughout the twentieth century, and just as Indonesian art was taken to Europe, a stream of cultural products brought by and for the colonial elites travelled the other way. Yet while modern French art was shown in Jakarta (then: Batavia) during the 1930s, for instance, local Indonesians were, by and large, not allowed entrance to such exhibitions (Chua 315 n. 12). It was possible for a Dutch art teacher and artist on Java, Piet Ouborg (1893–1956), to keep abreast of European and especially French Surrealist developments through membership of Cahiers d’Art and Minotaure (shipped in by boat) and his travels to Brussels and Paris in 1931. Ouborg experimented with automatic drawing and developed a Surrealist aesthetic vocabulary, in parallel with another Dutchman and art teacher stationed on Java, Dolf Breetvelt (1892–1975) (Brakel 63). This third point of contact between Indonesia and European Surrealism is an instance of classic French Surrealist primitivism. Ouborg, collecting Wajang puppets and masks, fetishised Java and its culture (“from thousands of years ago”), lauding it (78) for “facilitat[ing] the creation of unconscious expressions.” By the end of the 1930s, both Ouborg and Breetvelt left Java, leaving few traces and certainly no ties to surealis artists active on Java decades later. A fourth interaction between Surrealism and Indonesia concerns the trajectory of Jan Schlechter Duvall (1922–2009). Schlechter, too, was an art teacher educated in Dutch imperial space, although born on Belitung. Moving first to the Netherlands and then the US, he had a Surrealist art practice that came to full flowering in 1962, when he came into contact with Susana Wald (b. 1937) and Ludwig Zeller (1927–2019) in Toronto and the Surrealist group in Chicago. Identifying himself and his art as Surrealist from the mid-1960s onwards, Schlechter took part in several collective and international activities of the Chicago group and the Surrealist allies of Phases, exhibiting solo as well. Spending the last two decades of his life in Indonesia, Schlechter had no contact at all with the Yogya artists, and he is almost completely unknown (Vancrevel and Wils passim). Continuing, after these three art teachers, the theme of art education, I want in closing to highlight a fifth, regularly overlooked point of contact between young artists everywhere— including at ASRI in the 1980s, but also earlier in Thailand (Veal)—and the historicised and canonised French international metropolitan manifestation of Surrealism: the textbook. English-language overview textbooks were used in classes at Yogya art school (Marianto, Surrealist, 145ff). The language barrier, among other factors, meant that many students primarily consumed the illustrations, that is, the stylistic and visual idiom of—a rather-circumscribed selection of—Euro-American artists of name, including Magritte, Ernst, Dalí, and Tanguy. Serious research on the availability, impact, and framing of such sources remains to be done. I highlight this to illustrate that since the 1950s, many artists across the globe have at one point or other encountered French, Parisian Surrealism (1920s-30s) in the form of a stilted, Eurocentric, painting-oriented, and White male canon—in other words, as a paradigm.3 And in a dynamic, usually nonhierarchical relation to this paradigm, as much as in relation to other factors, they developed and articulated their own locally rooted art practice, be it Surrealist, surealis, a Surrealist language, or a Surrealist mode.

In Conclusion The case of Yogya surealis demonstrates that a broadening of not only geographic but also temporal scopes allows for a new view on the many manifestations of Surrealism around the world. Indeed, Surrealism itself—in so many of its iterations a hotbed of anachronisms and general 249

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subversion of temporal norms—has already paved the way. When it comes to local, heterodox, and heterochronic Surrealism, such as here, a thick description of the context in which artists and groups develop is required to assure that the Surrealism in question is fully situated historically, culturally, politically, and socially, both diachronically and in its own contemporaneity. Limitations of space have not allowed for that in this chapter, which has but scratched the surface. Aspects of the Surrealist mode in Yogyakarta and in Indonesia more generally that have remained undiscussed include, firstly, the fact that the complex transition to democracy since 1998 means that young, “third generation” contemporary artists working in a Surrealist mode have matured in significantly different circumstances than those first active in the early 1980s, and the implications for their art practice remains to be explored. Secondly, while some of the artists associated initially (or still) with Yogya surealis broadened their art practice to sculpture, installation, and mixed-media assemblage, such as Sagita, Dono, and FX Hersono, others, such as Hartini, remained faithful to painting. The ideological and cultural subtexts of these media, both in relation to the aspiration of the Yogya surealis artists and in dialogue with their nonSurrealist contemporaries, remain to be excavated; the same is true for the iconography of the Indonesian Surrealist language in sculpture and installation. Surealis media and iconography should be examined in relation to the rather-peculiar development of the Indonesian art market, thirdly (Spielmann passim). Finally, as I hope this case demonstrates, allowing for diversity, asynchronicity, and a plurality of Surrealist histories may lead to a more rounded view of the multivalent manifestations and iterations of Surrealism around the world.

Notes 1. To be clear, something this author has also done. 2. Many of these concern the almost-complete purge of the previous regime and of the once countrywide Communist Party in 1965–1966, a time when an estimated 1.5 million people were imprisoned, murdered, or otherwise made to disappear. 3. Clearly indicated by the metareferences and tributes to conventionally canonical Surrealists in the works of Indonesian artists working in Surrealist vein, such as Agus Sawage’s Wounded Frida (1994) and Hartini’s Portrait of a Celebrity (1990).

Works Cited Brakel, Koos van. “Indië en het surrealisme.” Beyond the Dutch: Indonesië, Nederland en de beeldende kunsten van 1900 tot nu, edited by Meta Knol, Remco Raben and Kitty Zijlmans, KIT Publishers/Centraal Museum, 2009, pp. 62–63. Chua, Kevin. “Courbet after Sudjojono.” Art History, vol. 41, no. 2, 2018, pp. 292–317. Clark, John. “The Worlding of the Asian Modern.” Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-making, edited by Michelle Antoinette and Caroline Turner, Anu, 2014, pp. 67–88. D’Alessandro, Stephanie, and Matthew Gale. Surrealism Beyond Borders. Metropolitan Museum/Yale University Press, 2021. Dudley, Jennifer A. Traversing the Boundaries ? Art and Film in Indonesia with Particular Reference to Perbatasan/ Boundaries: Lucia Hartini, Paintings from a Life. PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 2006. Accessed 5 August 2021. https://core.ac.uk/download/11231344.pdf. Flores, Patrick D. “Catholicism and Surrealism in the Philippines.” Surrealism beyond Borders, edited by D’Alessandro and Gale, pp. 135–137. Leeuwen, Lizzy van. “Postkoloniale Boemerang.” De Groene Amsterdammer, vol. 142, no. 25, 2018, no page numbers. Published online 20 June  2018. Accessed 5 August  2021. www.groene.nl/artikel/ postkoloniale-boemerang. Marianto, Martinus Dwi. “Srikandi, Marsinah and Megawati: The Paintings of Lucia Hartini.” Asian Women Artists, edited by Dinah Dysart and Hannah Fink, ART AsiaPacific/Craftsman House, 1996, pp. 108–113.

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Surealis Yogya and Indonesia ———. Surrealisme Yogyakarta. Rumah Penerbitan Merapi, 2001. ———. Surrealist painting in Yogyakarta. PhD thesis, University of Wollongong, 1995. Research Online. Accessed 21 October 2021. https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/1757/. McNab, Robert. Ghost Ships: A Surrealist Love Triangle. Yale University Press, 2004. Morelli, Naima. “Ivan Sagita, the spirit of Jogja Surrealism.” COBO Social, posted online 23 May 2016. Accessed 18 June 2021. www.cobosocial.com/dossiers/ivan-sagita-the-spirit-of-jogja-surrealism/. Ouborg, Piet. “On the Unconscious in Art, Partly in Connection with My Own Work.” Het masker als intermediair/The Mask as an Intermediary: Piet Ouborg, Wimo Ambalah Bayang, Terra Bajraghosa, Eko Nugroho, edited by Michiel Morel and Jan Wychers, Heden, 2008, pp. 77–79. Saptari, Santy. Revisited: 3 Decades of Surrealist Tendencies in Indonesian Art, Ivan Sagita, F. Sigit Santoso, Putu Wirantawan, Dita Gambiro. One East Asia, 2012. Savarese, Nicola. “1931: Antonin Artaud Sees Balinese Theatre at the Paris Colonial Exposition.” Translated by Richard Fowler. The Drama Review, vol. 45, no. 3, 2001, pp. 51–77. www.jstor.org/stable/1146912. Spanjaard, Helena. Modern Indonesian Painting. Sotheby’s, 2003. Spielmann, Yvonne. Contemporary Indonesian Art: Artists, Art Spaces, and Collectors. Translated by Mitch Cohen. NUS Press, 2017. Supangkat, Jim. Indonesian Modern Art and beyond. The Indonesia Fine Arts Foundation/Yaysan Seni Rupa Indonesia, 1997. ———. “Multiculturalism/Multimodernism.” Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms, edited by Elaine O’Brien, Blackwell, 2013, pp. 106–119. ———. “Reality in the works of Ivan Sagita.” Curator’s note for Ivan Sagita: Death-Containing Life (18–6 to 29–7–2005), CP Artspace, Jakarta, 2005. Accessed 19 July  2021. Via: cp-foundation.org/past/ ivansagita_cur.html. Vancrevel, Laurens, and Esther Wils, editors. Jan Schlechter Duvall: schilderijen, tekeningen en gedichten van een Indo-surrealist. Brumes Blondes & West, 2016. Veal, Clare. “ ‘Sur’ within and beyond Surrealism in Thailand.” Surrealism beyond Borders, edited by D’Alessandro and Gale, pp. 132–134. Wright, Astri. “Lucia Hartini, Javanese Painter: Against the Grain, towards Herself.” Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O’Connor, edited by Nora A. Taylor, Studies in Southeast Asia 29, Cornell University Press, 2000, pp. 93–121. ———. Soul, Spirit, and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters. Oxford University Press, 1994.

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28 SURREALISM IN JAPAN Chinghsin Wu

As with other regions of the world, in Japan Surrealism was one of the most significant modern art movements of the twentieth century. Although Surrealism was the subject of extensive debate and controversy, it also became one of the longest-lasting modern art movements in Japan, emerging at a troubled time in Japan’s prewar period, when fascism was on the rise, surviving the trauma of wartime, and leaving a lasting legacy on postwar Japanese art. At a time when Japanese artists were frequently confronted with dilemmas of selfhood between public and private discourses, Surrealism became a powerful tool for bridging these divides (Clark 183–192). On the one hand, debates over and criticism of Surrealism in Japan reflected the process by which Japanese intellectuals and artists struggled to establish their own artistic subjectivity. On the other hand, Surrealism emerged during one of the most chaotic social and political moments in Japan’s modern history, and thus this art practice unavoidably faced social pressures from outside the fine arts world, first encountering resistance from the Proletarian Art Movement and, later, censorship from state-nationalist forces. These social and historical pressures and the constant debates over the definition of Surrealism that arose in Japan resulted in an astonishing multiplicity of interpretations of this movement. Indeed, it was precisely Japanese Surrealism’s embrace of ambiguity and decentering of artistic form that attracted such a wide range of artists across generations and from different classes and social statuses, including professionals, students, and amateurs. Many of these artists found in Surrealist approaches an ideal means to express their personal emotions, dreams, and traumas, as well as to respond to political oppression, social injustice, and national defeat in war.

Early Surrealism in Japan: Multiple Interpretations of Surrealism The emergence of Surrealism in Japan closely paralleled its emergence in Europe and other regions around the world while, at the same time, fostering artistic debates and novel approaches that diverged in important and interesting ways from those found elsewhere. The term Surrealism first appeared in Japan not long after André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto was published in 1924. As early as in 1925, a literary group led by the poet and critic Nishiwaki Junzaburō began to practice Surrealist writing as a means to break away from conventional norms of rational expression. Soon, a number of Japanese poets and writers began to claim the mantle of 252

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Surrealism for their writing (Wada 94), and many French Surrealist texts began to be translated and published in various Japanese journals from the mid-1920s. By the late 1920s, Surrealist practices had emerged across multiple artistic genres, including literature, poetry, fine arts, and photography, and Surrealism had come to be viewed as one of the most avant-garde artistic movements by the early 1930s. However, during this initial phase, the newly emerging Surrealist movement was not always positively received. Western-style art had undergone a lengthy process of internal development in Japan since Western artistic ideas had first been imported in the late nineteenth century. By the 1920s, Japanese artists and intellectuals had developed sufficient self-awareness and selfconfidence to question and criticize new modern art movements originating in Europe. Moreover, during this early period, theoretical works by Breton and other Surrealist theorists were often incompletely or incorrectly translated into Japanese, when they received translations at all (Wu, Parallel Modernism 127). This hesitation regarding wholesale adoption of European art theories and practices, combined with the lack of clarity regarding the precise definition of Surrealism, led to vigorous debates in Japan regarding the true nature of Surrealism and its proper role in the art world, as well as a great variety and multiplicity in Japanese Surrealist art practice. Thus, although the term “Surrealism” was widely circulated and often cited, there never existed a unified definition of “Surrealism” in Japan. In 1928, several Japanese visual artists began to create Surrealist-style works, and in 1929, the works of three Japanese painters, Abe Kongō, Tōgō Seiji, and Koga Harue, that were shown at the Nika (“Second Section”) art exhibition were labeled “surreal” by critics, marking the beginning of Surrealism as a visual practice in Japan. Nika was the most established avant-garde art society in Japan, and thus these artists’ Surrealist paintings attracted considerable attention. Around the same time, Japanese artists and critics began to express their “personal” points of view on Surrealism in articles published in magazines and newspapers. For example, the art journal Atorie published a special volume on Surrealism in January 1930, collecting nine essays and forty-two comments on Surrealism from Japanese artists and critics, who provided a great diversity of viewpoints on the nature and definition of Surrealism. Within Japanese debates on the theory and practice of Surrealism, negative comments also appeared. By 1930, artist and critic Kanbara Tai was already asserting that Surrealism was in decline. Such negative responses arose partly from the fact that Surrealism’s emergence coincided with the rise of the Proletarian Art Movement in Japan, a movement which insisted that art should support and be more accessible to the masses. Accordingly, many Japanese artists and critics who supported the Proletarian Movement considered Surrealism a kind of degenerate art that reflected only bourgeois tastes and sensibilities and ignored reality (Wu, Parallel Modernism 117–118). For example, Koga Harue, whose paintings attracted great media attention, was criticized as an “escapist” whose art did not reflect the realities of modern society (Kanbara 18). Responding to this type of criticism, Koga and other Japanese artists sought to distinguish their Surrealist practice from the definition propounded by Breton, which emphasized automatism and bypassing reason by accessing the unconscious mind. To distinguish themselves from Breton, poet Takenaka Kyūshichi, Koga, and others proposed a “Scientific Surrealism” that would respond to, rather than avoid, reality (Takenaka 25). Takenaka argued that “if we first oppose the objections of the proletarian artists to the internal contradictions of Breton’s school of Surrealism, we can achieve an even higher form of Surrealism—a new Surrealism which is Scientific Surrealism” (Nakano 340). This new form of Surrealism also reflected kikai-shugi (“machine-ism”), a larger interest that swept Japan in the 1920s in response to the increasing ubiquity of machines and mechanization of daily life, and explored the potential of mechanized processes for producing or 253

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even mass-producing art. Because machines were viewed as lacking emotion and following the dictates of logic and order, many Japanese artists and critics felt that reason and rationality were essential to the accurate depiction of the “scientific” aspects of the machine (Wu, Parallel Modernism 131–136). Koga Harue, in supporting the idea of a “scientific” Surrealism, incorporated contemporary machines and scientific diagrams into his large-scale Surrealist paintings. For The Sea (1929, Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), he assembled a variety of cutting-edge mechanical objects, including the latest German airship, Graf Zeppelin, and placed a monumental female figure wearing a swimsuit on the right side of the composition; she dominates and even seems to direct the various mechanical objects in the painting. This figure derives from a set of postcards published in Japan featuring beauties from various Western nations. Koga’s works represented the initial period of Japanese Surrealism, which arose in response to the growing complexity of the relationship between human beings and the mechanical world, the mass-production of popular visual culture, and the spread of a globalized, transnational modernity (Wu, Parallel Modernism 168).

Surrealist Painting and Photography in the 1930s By the 1930s, Surrealism had gained widespread acceptance in Japanese visual art circles, most notably among painters and photographers. Takiguchi Shūzō, an influential art critic, energetically translated and interpreted Breton’s texts and introduced European Surrealist artists to Japan. Japanese Surrealists drew inspiration from the dreamlike scenery, fragmented and disordered bodies, and antirational depictions of space and time found in works by leading European Surrealists. At the same time, they incorporated imagery found in the works of the early Japanese Surrealists, including mechanical objects, scientific diagrams, and objects referring to everyday life in Japan. By the end of the decade, Japanese Surrealists also began incorporating aspects of traditional Japanese culture, such as references to haiku poetry and Zen gardens. As a result, Japanese Surrealism reflected transnational trends and local concerns. These works also spoke to both desires and anxieties regarding modern life as well as conflict between the self and the nation. Various individuals and small art collectives used the term Surrealism in their manifestos and claimed Surrealism as their main art practice. Yet since there was no single authority or leading theorist who could be singled out as representing a mainstream definition of “Japanese” Surrealism, the definition of Surrealism, both terminologically and visually, remained open to personal interpretation. In 1931, artist Fukuzawa Ichirō, who seven years earlier had moved to France to study art, moved back to Japan. Featuring uncanny and unsettling motifs and compositions, Fukuzawa’s works offered a new approach to Surrealism. Although Fukuzawa, like earlier artists such as Koga, similarly appropriated images of Western women and technological devices found in scientific publications, his works abandoned the logic of classicist principles, such as stable composition with accurate depictions of human anatomy, and embraced randomness and irony. In The Good Cook (1930, the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and Hayama), for example, Fukuzawa deployed imagery from various scientific experiments, but in contrast to the original diagrams, where items were placed in a rational, orderly fashion to represent scientific laws and principles, in Fukuzawa’s painting these items have become unreasonably sized and are arranged in a disordered and unscientific manner. With this approach, Fukuzawa used images of science to question the nature of science itself (Wu, “Beyond Reason” 223). Fukuzawa’s Surrealist approach provided a new solution for the main criticism Surrealism had faced in Japan, namely, that Surrealists indulged themselves in pure art and failed to engage 254

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with social and political realities. Fukuzawa wrote that Surrealism could be placed in direct dialogue with social reality and that Surrealists should incorporate social reality into their artistic practice. Fukuzawa employed the technique of dépaysement, appropriating images seemingly at random from both contemporary and older sources and assembling them on canvas to create conflicted and irrational relationships. In Fukuzawa’s Surrealist practice, consciousness and unconsciousness both play an important role; the seemingly random selection and assembling of images often results in an intentional or conscious comment on social reality. Fukuzawa frequently used a Surrealist mode to satirize, mock, or criticize contemporary society. This new approach to Surrealism proved attractive to many younger artists, especially those affiliated with a newly established avant-garde art group, the Independent Art Association. Under Fukuzawa’s leadership, Surrealism became one of the dominant modes of art practiced by this group (Fukuzawa Ichirō ten; Ōtani, Gekidōki no avangyarudo 102–107; Winther-Tamaki, Maximum Embodiment 145). Surrealist practices also extended to photographic experiments in Japan. Ei-kyū, an artist who became interested in photography and photograms in the 1930s, drew inspiration from both works by Japanese Surrealist painters such as Koga and Fukuzawa, as well as European theories of automatism. Modern urban culture was another source of inspiration for Ei-kyū, who insisted that new methods of expression were necessary to respond to new modes of urban living imposed by electric trains and neon lights. Ei-kyū argued that the ultimate goal of art is “realizing reality beyond the conscious conclusion of thinking.” Accordingly, his photography in the 1930s consisted of random fragments of shapes that seemed to be vaguely related to aspects of popular culture, organized unconsciously to result in an inscrutable combination (Stojković, 28–29). In 1932, a large international exhibition including Surrealist works by a number of European artists was held in Japan. The Paris-Tokyo League of Emerging Art Exhibition, which traveled to Tokyo, Osaka, Kumamoto, and Dalian, featured 116 works by 56 avant-garde artists, including Max Ernst, Man Ray, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Giorgio de Chirico. By the mid-1930s, more European Surrealist writings were translated and widely disseminated in Japan. With this greater access to European Surrealist art and theory, ideas such as automatism, unconsciousness, madness, and fantasy began to be widely discussed in Japan. However, the following year, 1933, Japan entered into a “time of emergency” (hijōji), due to its withdrawal from the League of Nations in the aftermath of the Japanese conquest of Manchuria, and Japanese artists’ activities began to be increasingly impinged upon by political circumstances and militarist rule. In 1934, the government heavily suppressed the Proletarian Art Movement, to the degree that its leaders were arrested and the movement was forcibly disbanded. The militaristic police state began to enforce cooperation with the war effort, emphasizing conventional masculinity, social order, and national unity. Parallel to this increasing suppression, artists were encouraged to cooperate with military activities rather than express their individual thoughts or criticize society. On the one hand, Surrealism was gradually forced to respond to the mounting pressure from the Japanese government. On the other hand, however, because of the disbandment of the Proletarian Art Movement, Surrealism ironically began to attract former members of the movement who had previously harshly criticized Surrealism. Several artists formerly associated with the proletarians found in Surrealism a way to continue their avant-garde practice. These avantgarde artists recognized that the ambiguous nature of Surrealism possibly allowed space to carry out oblique artistic critiques of the wartime social structure and state-enforced nationalism. Yazaki Hironobu, for example, argued that if Surrealists could sublimate social commentary into the realm of “unconscious desires,” then Surrealism could be an active mode of expression 255

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that continued to address social reality. For Yazaki, Surrealist paintings were situated at the intersection of the “real world that thwarts desires” and “unconscious desires that yearn to break free from suppression.” By illuminating these “contrasting visions,” Yazaki felt Surrealist paintings might even bring about social change. His painting Factory in Kōtō Ward (1936, Chino City Museum of Art), for example, uses a Surrealist mode to critique harsh working conditions, as the grotesque mass of bodies in the foreground conveys the suffering taking place in the factory in the distance (Ōtani, Gekidōki no avangyarudo 175–177; Wu, Parallel Modernism 182–183). Although the social criticism inhering in Yazaki’s work is fairly legible, social criticism in other Surrealist works in late-1930s Japan was often more subtle and more difficult to decode. In order to escape state censorship and persecution, artists wove metaphorical meanings into seemingly ordinary depiction of everyday objects. Kitawaki Noboru’s 1937 painting Symbol (Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art), for example, depicts a classical marble sculpture of a female body, a seemingly ordinary subject matter for a painting. However, the sculpture’s missing head and arms, as well as the image of a butterfly pinned to a red ribbon on a dismembered tree trunk, suggest a subtle critique of state control and censorship, including strictures on free expression and freedom of movement (Ōtani, Gekidōki no avangyarudo 305–307; Kitawaki Noboru ten 65). Similarly, the Surrealist photographer Yamamoto Kansuke, who founded the photography collective Nagoya Photo Avant-Garde in 1937, created the photographic series Birdcage at a Buddhist Temple beginning in 1940. The most famous photograph from this series depicts a telephone imprisoned inside a birdcage, obliquely alluding to limitations on free expression (Maddox 200). Authorities were not entirely blind to these critiques, however; in some cases, portrayals of seemingly ordinary objects with a slightly negative nuance became the subject of censorship. For example, another Surrealist painting from 1937, Komaki Gentarō’s Ethnic Pathology (Prayer), depicted a broken artillery carriage and a shadowy military-style airplane, attracting negative attention from the military police, who demanded it be removed from an art exhibition (Komaki Gentarō isakuten 4). In contrast to Japan’s growing diplomatic isolation in the 1930s, increasing exchanges between individual Japanese Surrealists with their artistic counterparts in Europe marked the mid-1930s as a period of internationalization for Japanese Surrealism. For example, Japanese Surrealist poet and photographer Yamanaka Chirū pursued reciprocal exchanges with Surrealist artists in France. Yamanaka’s correspondence with Paul Éluard speaks to European artists’ interest in the development of Surrealism in Japan. Some European Surrealists even traveled to Japan, most notably the Swiss Surrealist artist Kurt Seligmann in 1935. Seligmann’s paintings were well received and proved inspirational to Japanese artists. Japanese Surrealist painter Ai-Mitsu, for example, began experimenting with line drawings that clearly draw upon Seligmann’s work (Winther-Tamaki, Maximum Embodimnt 54; Munro 77–80). In 1938, Takiguchi Shūzō attempted to organize a comprehensive exhibition on Surrealist photography in Japan, cooperating with the English Surrealist artist and poet Roland Penrose. Although the exhibition ultimately did not come to fruition, their correspondence reflected the increasing globalization of the Surrealist movement (Stojković 70–71). These exchanges between Japanese and European Surrealists resulted in the largest international exhibition of Surrealist works held in Japan prior to the end of the war. In 1937, an exhibition of overseas Surrealist works was held at the Tokyo Prefectural Art Museum before traveling to the Asahi Art Museum in Kyoto and Maruzen department stores in Nagoya and Osaka, displaying 400 works by 42 artists hailing from a number of nations, including Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium, England, and the United States. Although many of the works were photographic reproductions, 60 were originals. A  climate of state censorship precluded the 256

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exhibition from receiving extensive media coverage, but it nevertheless attracted great attention among a younger generation of Japanese artists, and many new Surrealist groups emerged around this time. Many of these were small art collectives which only exhibited their works in small private galleries rather than at national exhibitions, which were increasingly reserved for artworks celebrating wartime patriotism (Nihon no shūrurearisumu). Although the trend toward the fragmentation of Japanese Surrealist organizations and individual Surrealist approaches continued in the late 1930s, by the end of the decade the influence of the Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí became increasingly apparent. One reason for Dalí’s appeal in Japanese Surrealist circles was that his art provided a possible resolution to perennial debates in the Japanese art world, dating back to the 1920s, regarding the proper balance between subjectivity and objectivity. Surrealist paintings had previously been criticized by Japanese critics for overemphasizing the artist’s individual subjectivity by focusing on themes such as personal nightmares, dreams, and memories and failing to convey the materiality of painting in a suitably objective manner. Dalí’s paintings, which placed great emphasis on the materiality of objects while remaining in a Surrealist mode, offered Japanese Surrealists a new way forward for navigating the fraught relationship between the artist/author and subjects/objects (Wu, Parallel Modernism 179). Drawing inspiration from Dalí’s works, many younger Japanese artists began depicting ordinary objects in more photorealistic detail while rearranging them into Surrealistic assemblages to provide new readings of everyday items, found objects, or ready-mades, as seen in works such as Yonekura Hisahito’s Monument (1937, Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art) (Wu, Parallel Modernism 179). Surrealist photography in Japan witnessed a parallel trend of an increasing deployment of “photo objects,” which emphasized the exploration of objects beyond their normal utilitarian use. Takiguchi, who first articulated the relation between the Surrealist object and photography in a 1938 essay, argues that when photographing Surrealist objects, one should disregard any potential practical application or relevance beyond pure aesthetic appreciation. Receptive to Takiguchi’s approach, Surrealist photographers such as Abe Yoshifumi sought out “photo objects,” which they treated as akin to “found” art, photographing them in ways that called into question the very ability of photography to render a true representation of objects (Stojković 96–99). Another aspect of Dalí’s paintings that was adopted by the younger generation of Japanese Surrealists was the strong presence of a horizon line in their Surrealist landscapes. This horizontal line creates a virtual space that distinguishes objects very close to the viewer/artist from those that are farther away (Ōtani, “Chiheisen no yume” 13). The uneasy coexistence of the far and the near reflected the mental state of these younger artists, many of whom had already been conscripted into the armed forces or knew that their conscription was certain to come in the near future. Ominous horizon lines can be found in works by artists such as Asahara Kiyotaka, Ōtsuka Kōji, Hasegawa Hiroshi, and Mori Takayuki. For several of these young artists, a Dalí-style Surrealist painting was the last artwork they produced before dying in battle (Ozawa 83–86). Surrealist practice was also brought to bear on Japan’s colonial enterprise. Especially after Japanese forces occupied Manchuria in 1931, the Japanese colonial government actively recruited Japanese migrants to immigrate to the newly conquered territories and mobilized artists, including several Japanese Surrealist artists, to produce propaganda on behalf of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. The attitude of these artists toward the Japanese colonial project varied, and the precise relationship between their art practice and colonial or war propaganda is often far from clear. Some artists did not necessarily oppose the war effort and colonial policies and utilized their state-funded visits to capture the new landscapes of the Japanese Empire 257

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in a Surrealist mode, one example being the Surrealist photographer Abe Yoshifumi (Stojković 143–147). Other artists, however, encountering a disjuncture between nationalist propaganda and the reality of Manchuria, employed Surrealism as a tool to subtly convey the existence of this unspeakable and uncanny divide. Fukuzawa’s Oxen (1935, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), for example, depicts two oxen in a wild landscape, indicating the location is Manchuria. The unnatural pinkish earth and the multiple empty holes around the oxen give the painting an uncomfortable and nightmarish surreality, providing a stark contrast to the healthy and optimistic landscapes normally portrayed in colonial propaganda (Ōtani, Gekidōki no avangyarudo 107–112).

From War to Postwar In the 1940s, the ongoing war affected every aspect of life in Japan. On the one hand, Surrealism faced ever greater surveillance from the wartime state; on the other hand, Surrealism remained one of the few artistic modes that could be used to consciously or unconsciously express individual artists’ critiques of wartime society. In the early 1940s, Japan’s ruling militarists viewed Surrealism as antithetical to an idealized vision of the Japanese national character; instead, the state promoted so-called “war paintings,” valorizing heroic Japanese soldiers and triumphant battle scenes as depicted in a realistic and academic style, and even artworks that did not directly depict war scenes were expected to respond to the patriotic wartime ideology of a “return to Japan” (Nihon kaiki). Under these circumstances, Surrealist artworks that did not represent overtly “healthy” and “positive” images of Japan were accused of conveying a sense of desperation, powerlessness, and hopelessness detrimental to the war effort and singled out for suppression. The heightened scrutiny from the authorities was reflected in the fact that in 1941, several Surrealist writers and artists came under investigation by the Special Higher Police (tokkubetsu keisatsu, the socalled Thought Police). Eventually, two leading Surrealists, Fukuzawa Ichirō and Takiguchi Shūzō, were imprisoned as suspected thought criminals. Although both were released after a few months due to a lack of evidence, Japanese Surrealists were profoundly affected by this “Surrealism incident,” coming to an awareness that even Surrealism was no longer immune to suppression and persecution by the state (Munro 171–177). Artists responded to this new reality in different ways. Despite the fact that the term Surrealism was no longer allowed to be used, some Japanese artists found that the ambiguity of the Surrealist style could still be used to express the otherwise inexpressible. These artists created artworks that carefully straddled the border line between self-expression and patriotism. In other words, even in the “dark valley” of the war-torn 1940s, Surrealism still provided a means by which artists could continue their avant-garde art practice while appearing to support the war effort and sometimes even participating in government and military exhibitions. In an effort to comply with the government’s call for a “return to Japan” and the “Eastern Spirit,” Surrealists turned to motifs from Buddhism and other traditional Asian belief systems. At the same time, classical motifs from the Western culture, such as stone ruins and Greek-style buildings and statues, became more common, as artists sought to create a mode of expression that could balance both national and international demands (Volk 215). As early as in the mid1930s, Fukuzawa had pointed out the similarity between the Surrealist strategy of dépaysement and Zen rock gardens and compared the practice of creating Surrealist art to the writing of traditional Japanese haiku poems. He stated that one of the defining characteristics of haiku poetry, which often ends with a question or contradiction, is a surprising juxtaposition between two 258

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seemingly incompatible images. Fukuzawa’s stated goal in producing Surrealist paintings was to undermine conventional thinking and shatter “absurd idealism” through a similar process of juxtaposition (Fukuzawa 76; 46). Similarly, Takiguchi argued that the arts of premodern Japan, such as Zen painting, ikebana flower arranging, and haiku poetry, possessed a “Surrealist spirit” (Volk 214–218). As artists strove to contextualize their Surrealist art practice as falling within the “return to Japan” ideology, this kind of drawing of connections between Surrealism and traditional Japanese aesthetics became increasingly common in the 1940s. Kitawaki, for example, began to explore a wide variety of traditional Japanese and Asian motifs in Surrealist paintings, including the Zen rock garden at Ryōanji temple in Kyoto, diagrams from Buddhist mandalas or the I Ching, and Japanese noh theater masks. Arranging these premodern subject matters within schematic diagrams, Kitawaki emphasized the analytical and the scientific while de-emphasizing his own personal subjectivity. Other painters, such as Komaki Gentarō, similarly ceased painting subjects related to the contemporary world. Instead, Komaki devoted himself to a series of paintings with Buddhist motifs. This return to premodern motifs reflected an effort to escape the grim realities of wartime Japan and a search for stability in the face of an uncertain and changing world (Ōtani, Gekidōki no avangyarudo 284–339). Following Japan’s defeat, Fukuzawa resumed his original practice of aiming Surrealist broadsides at the ironies and foolishness of modern life and the social transformations of the postwar period, a practice he continued until his death in 1992. Some Surrealists sought to convey the horror and trauma of the war. For example, Hamada Chimei’s series of prints Elegy for a New Conscript (1951–1954, Museum of Modern Art, New York) depicted dismembered and disfigured human bodies in battlefields or ruins. Some artists used a Surrealist mode to record the aftermath of the atomic bombings, as in Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi’s The Hiroshima Panels and Tōmatsu Shōmei’s photography of Nagasaki (Jesty 1–4; Reynolds 148–149; Weisenfeld 302–303). During the 1950s and the 1960s, a new generation of artists, such as Nakamura Hiroshi, Ikeda Tatsuo, Yamashita Kikuji, Katsuragawa Hiroshi, Bitō Yutaka, and Ishii Shigeo, increasingly employed Surrealism to criticize the social injustices that attended the US military occupation and the continuing presence of US military bases on Japanese soil. For example, Nakamura’s painting Gunned Down (1957), depicting numerous gun barrels surrounding the prone and distorted figure of a Japanese woman, reflected nationwide outrage at the murder of a Japanese housewife by US soldier William S. Girard in the so-called Girard Incident. Gunned Down represented a shift in Nakamura’s style from the socialist realism he had practiced in the 1950s and spoke to the renewed currency that Surrealism held for Japanese artists in the 1960s and 1970s as they sought to individuate their art practice from the early postwar dominance of the Japan Communist Party’s socialist realist aesthetics (Kunimoto 89–91; Kapur 16–17, 183–193). Okamoto Tarō became one of the most influential Japanese Surrealist artists during the postwar era. Based in Paris from 1929 to 1940, Okamoto met several important Surrealists, including André Breton and Georges Bataille. Forced to return to Japan in 1940 and drafted into military service, Okamoto was sent to the battlefront in China and was imprisoned as a prisoner of war by the Chinese for a few months following Japan’s defeat. In the postwar period, Okamoto carried on the Surrealist idea of breaking away from reason and resumed his prewar study of ethnology, with a particular emphasis on the norms and values of prehistoric cultures. Okamoto’s monumental Tower of the Sun (1970), which took inspiration from prehistoric Japanese artifacts and aesthetics of pre-Columbian Mexico, became a symbolic icon representing his intention to challenge normative and putatively rational thinking of the nation, the world, and art itself (Reynolds 54–85; Winther-Tamaki, “To Put on a Big Face”). 259

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Works Cited Clark, John. Modernities of Japanese Art. Brill, 2013. Fukuzawa, Ichirō. “Gadai ni kanshite (About the Subjects of Paintings).” Dokuritsu Bijutsu, 73–82. Reproduced in Takizawa Kyōji ed. Fukuzawa Ichirō: Pari kara no kichōsha [Fukuzawa Ichirō, A Returnee from Paris]. Hon no Tomosha, 1999, pp. 43–51. Fukuzawa Ichirō ten: kono dōshiyōmonai sekai o waraitobase (Laugh Off this Hopeless World: Fukuzawa Ichirō). Tokyo kokuritsu kindai bijutsukan, 2019. Jesty, Justin. Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan. Cornell University Press, 2018. Kanbara, Tai. “Nika hyō” (A Critique of the Second Section). Atorie, vol. 7, no. 10, October  1930, pp. 16–24. Kapur, Nick. Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo. Harvard University Press, 2018. Kitawaki Noboru ten. Kyōto Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1997. Komaki Gentarō isakuten: zōshokusuru imēji (Komaki Gentarō: Multiplica- tion of Images). Kyōto Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1996. Kunimoto, Namiko. The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Maddox, Amanda. “Disobedient Spirit: Kansuke Yamamoto and his Engagement with Surrealism.” Japan’s Modern Divide: The Photographs of Hiroshi Hamaya and Kansuke Yamamoto, edited by J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013, pp. 180–203. Munro, Majella. Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan, 1923–1970. Enzo Press, 2012. Nakano, Kaichi. Zen’ei shi undō shi no kenkyū: modanizumu-shi no keifu (A History of the Avant-garde Poetry Movement: The Lineage of Modern Poetry). Ōhara shinseisha, 1975. Nihon no shūrurearisumu: 1925–1945 [Japanese Surrealism: 1925–1945]. Nagoya-shi Bijutsukan, 1990. Ōtani, Shōgo. “Chiheisen no yume: Joron” (The Dream of the Horizon Line: Introduction). Chiheisen no yume: Shōwa 10-nendai no gensō kaiga (The Dream of the Horizon Line: Fantastic Paintings from the Showa 10s). Tōkyō Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 2003, pp. 11–19. ———. Gekidōki no avangyarudo: shururearisumu to nihon no kaiga, 1928–1953 (The Avant-Garde in an Era of Upheaval: Surrealism and Japanese Painting, 1928–1953). Kokusho Kankōkai, 2016. Ozawa, Setsuko. Avangyarudo no sensō taiken: Matsumoto Shunsuke Takiguchi Shūzō soshite gagakuseitachi (Avant-Garde in Wartime: Matsumoto Shusuke, Takiguchi Shūzō, and Art Students). Aoki Shoten, 2004. Reynolds, Jonathan M. Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture. University of Hawai’i Press, 2015. Stojković, Jelena. Surrealism and Photography in 1930s Japan: The Impossible Avant-Garde. Routledge, 2021. Takenaka, Kyūshichi. “Shūrurearisumu kenkyū: shu to shite puroretaria geijutsu to no kankei ni tsuite” (Research on Surrealism: Mainly Regarding Its Relationship to Proletarian Art). Atorie, vol. 7, no. 1, January 1930, pp. 21–34. Volk, Alicia. In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art. University of California Press, 2010. Wada, Keiko. “Nishiwaki Junzaburō ron” (On Nishiwaki Junzaburō). Nihon no shūrurearisumu (Japanese Surrealism), edited by Sawa Masahiro and Wada Hirofumi, Sekai Shisōsha, 1995, pp. 93–105. Weisenfeld, Gennifer. Imagining Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923. University of California Press, 2015. Winther-Tamaki, Bert. Maximum Embodiment: Yōga, the Western Painting of Japan, 1912–1955. University of Hawai’I Press, 2012. ———. “To Put on a Big Face: The Globalist Stance of Okamoto Tarō’s Tower of the Sun for the Japan World Exposition.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society, vol. 23, December 2011, pp. 81–101. Wu, Chinghsin. “Beyond Reason.” Surrealism beyond Borders, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021, pp. 216–219. ———. Parallel Modernism: Koga Harue and Avant-Garde Art in Modern Japan. University of California Press, 2019.

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29 SURREALISM IN MEXICO Melanie Nicholson

In André Breton’s 1938 essay on Frida Kahlo’s painting, the founder of French Surrealism evokes Mexico as an ideal site for the flourishing of the European imagination: “There is a country where the world’s heart opens out . . . where creation has been prodigal with undulations of the ground and species of plant-life, and has surpassed itself with its range of seasons and cloud architectures” (Surrealism and Painting 141). Breton associates his idea of Mexico directly with his vision for a new kind of art, one that would “deliberately sacrifice the external model to the internal model,” yet within the context of this great aesthetic dream, he is aware of the dangers of “fragmentary images plucked from the treasure-chest of childhood.” Their “magical power . . . nevertheless left [him] with certain gaps” (141). Breton’s vision of “magical” Mexico, juxtaposed with his awareness of “gaps” in his understanding, provides a paradigm for examining the country’s place in the history of Surrealism as an international movement. As in Latin America overall, tensions between a presumably authentic native culture and an external exoticizing gaze have dogged the relationship between Mexico and the international avant-garde. Put differently, the place that was famously described by Breton as the Surrealist country par excellence also existed as a site of resistance toward Surrealism on the part of some of its most prominent creative and intellectual figures. In the realm of literature, at least from the 1920s through the 1940s, Mexico operated more as a found object than an active subject, although a significant change in that situation would occur in the mid-1950s with the work of Octavio Paz. The story takes on broader dimensions in the realm of the visual arts, where from the early 1940s onward, an influx of European émigrés produced a rich admixture of artistic works that catapulted Mexico into the forefront of international Surrealism. What Mexico meant to these artists, and what their presence in the country meant to native-born artists and writers, cannot be conveyed in simple dichotomous terms. But by embracing the very complexity of the native/non-native divide, we can view Mexico as a crucial point of convergence for a wide arc of creative energies and thus begin to comprehend its unique role in the evolution of Surrealism.

Between Respect and Rebuff: Early Views of Surrealism in Mexico Soon after the publication of the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, news and reviews began appearing in Mexican periodicals or in European publications read by Mexico’s intelligentsia. DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-33

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The full significance of the French movement would not become apparent, however, until more than a decade later. In March of 1938, a journal published by the national university (the UNAM) featured a long pamphlet by the painter and playwright Agustín Lazo, titled “Review of Surrealist Activities.” In it, Lazo explained the basic precepts of Surrealism, illustrated with black-and-white reproductions of work by Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, and Joan Miró, among others. Shortly thereafter, in May of 1938, the respected periodical Letras de México devoted an entire issue to Surrealism. Along with Breton’s seminal essay “Surrealism and Painting” and numerous works by European Surrealists, this issue included poems translated from the French by the Peruvian poet and painter César Moro, who resided in Mexico from 1938 to 1948 and whose endeavors to internationalize Surrealism would prove consequential. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Mexican literary and art world was roughly divided into two domains. The muralistas Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco not only drew inspiration from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 but also promoted an official nationalist view of history and culture. The more negative fortunes of Surrealism in Mexico were initially determined by this nationalist orthodoxy, which precluded any adherence to a movement that had originated in Europe. Subsuming the social role of Mexico’s vast indigenous populations, the ideology that emerged from the revolution championed the mixed-race or mestizo character of the nation. The exploration of la mexicanidad from within by Mexican writers and artists led to tensions with foreign Surrealists on Mexican soil and to a generalized reluctance to embrace Surrealist thought and practice. Across an ideological divide from the muralists and other social realists, the other domain of the literary and artistic world of the 1930s and 1940s was largely mapped by the group of writers, critics, and artists aligned with the journal Contemporáneos. This group—which resisted defining itself as a group—included many of the literary luminaries of the day: Xavier Villau‑ rrutia, Carlos Pellicer, José Gorostiza, Salvador Novo, Gilberto Owen, and Jaime Torres Bodet. More cosmopolitan in outlook than los muralistas, the Contemporáneos explored the themes of dreaming, desire, solitude, absence, and death—all conveyed by means of shadowy and suggestive oneiric imagery. Villaurrutia and Novo experimented with the Bretonian “pure psychic automatism.” Given these characteristics, the movement might have been an ideal place for Surrealism to land in Mexico. The Contemporáneos journal published several reviews of European Surrealism, and Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, the group’s director from 1928 to 1931, wrote essays extolling the virtues of Surrealism. But ultimately, the metaphysical and contemplative orientation of the Contemporáneos poets, as well as their dedication to lucid control over the poetic process, led them away from the zeal for spiritual and poetic freedom that marked Surrealism.

Mexico in the European Imagination Breton was not alone in maintaining a fascination with Mexico that reflected real knowledge while revealing certain crucial “gaps.” In the popular imagination of readers abroad, Mexico was the land of human sacrifices, saguaro-dotted deserts, Indian princesses, and carbine-toting revolutionaries with impossibly broad sombreros. As the French writer Georges Bataille, who had never visited Mexico, states in his 1928 essay “Extinct America”: The life of civilized people in pre-Columbian America is a source of wonder to us, not only in its discovery and instantaneous disappearance, but also because of its bloody

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eccentricity, surely the most extreme ever conceived by an aberrant mind. . . . This observation applies, it is true, mostly to Mexico. (3) The French actor, writer, and drama theorist Antonin Artaud took a somewhat-different stance, defending the vitality of present-day indigenous people and practices, although from a largely mythicized perspective. Claiming that “Europe has lost its way,” Artaud sought realworld corroboration for his idea that cosmic unity and vitality were present only in certain nonEuropean, “primitive” cultures (360). He believed that the native peoples of Mexico embodied this authentic existence and that Europe had much to learn from its native populations (but not from contemporary urban or cosmopolitan Mexico). In 1936, after spending several months as a cultural attaché in Mexico City—a city that left him disenchanted—Artaud realized his dream of traveling to the Sierra Madre to participate in a Tarahumara peyote ceremony. Later recounted in the essay “A Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumaras” and often revisited in his later writings, this journey convinced Artaud that his participation in the Tarahumara rituals had given him glimpses into the very origins of human existence. Artaud’s writings about his experiences in Mexico and about the country’s pre-Columbian and mythic past, which were widely disseminated both in Mexico and abroad, served to stoke the fires of the European imagination. Inspired by Artaud’s essays and eager to confirm the images of magic and mystery suggested by his youthful reading, Breton traveled to Mexico in 1938 as a French cultural attaché. An additional motivation for this journey was his desire to meet with Leon Trotsky, who was then residing in exile with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. For Breton, Trotsky represented the necessary antidote to Stalin’s increasingly disturbing totalitarian policies. Together the two men produced, in July of 1938, a long pamphlet titled Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, which, for strategic reasons, was signed by Breton and Rivera. This internationally disseminated document systematized Breton’s views regarding the revolutionary potential of art, celebrating the free expression of the human spirit and eschewing the strictures of both Hitlerian fascism and Marxist orthodoxy. Still wedded to Stalin’s brand of Communism, many Mexican intellectuals considered this endeavor as further evidence for their attitude of reserve toward Surrealism. Bureaucratic mismanagement did little to assuage these tense relationships. Upon arriving in Veracruz in the company of his wife, Jacqueline Lamda, Breton discovered that no official arrangements had been made for his stay. Of the three lectures scheduled at the UNAM, two were poorly publicized and then canceled. His presentation of Luis Buñuel’s film Un Chien andalou was derided in a review titled “La fiesta Surrealista” by the respected poet Efraín Huerta. In the end, what the founder of Surrealism had perhaps envisioned as a rich dialogue about art and revolution did not extend far beyond the walls of Kahlo and Rivera’s “Blue House.” The cultural exchange did succeed in other ways, however, by exposing Breton to several contemporary Mexican artists whose work he had not been able to fully appreciate, including not only Kahlo but also Manuel Álvarez Bravo, María Izquierdo, and Rufino Tamayo. This exposure would have significant repercussions for the future of Surrealism. During his four-month stay, Breton made several trips with Kahlo and Rivera to the interior of Mexico, journeys that proved crucial in deepening his appreciation for Mexico’s landscapes, its architecture, its traditions, and its everyday ways of life. He returned to France with a trunkful of contemporary artwork, pre-Columbian artefacts, and objects of folk art and popular culture in which he saw the spirit of Surrealism. With these materials (which Kahlo, in a letter to the US photographer Nickolas Murray, termed pura basura—“pure junk”), he organized an

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exhibition at the Renou et Colle gallery in Paris. Called simply Mexique, this show, which also featured works by Kahlo and Álvarez Bravo, seems to have attracted little attention in the French press (Bradu 196).

Mexican Artists in Mexico: A Strategic Surrealism The reticence of most Mexican writers to embrace the practices of orthodox Surrealism was, for various reasons, less prevalent among visual artists of the 1930s and 1940s. These artists, now considered among Mexico’s finest in the first half of the twentieth century, tended to place themselves strategically on the margins of the movement. The question of mexicanidad remained in force, prompting Rufino Tamayo to observe that: However great the individual talents revealed by work accomplished during the initial (post-Revolutionary) period, the anxiety of the painters to produce “Mexican” art (superficially) rather than art as such led them to neglect the true problems of plasticity and degenerate into the picturesque. (in Breton, Surrealism and Painting 233) Surrealism, it seems, provided one escape from the trap of the nationalistic picturesque. Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902–2002), whose work was championed by Breton, was a mostly self-taught artist who began his career as a street photographer. His study of European cubism and abstract art led to a strong sense of formal composition. Beginning in the 1930s, Álvarez Bravo grounded his work in images of Mexican urban life that are simultaneously informed by a sense of the uncanny, leading critics to link his work to Surrealism. Stark Mexican desert landscapes suggest mysterious meanings, while allusions to folk practices, such as those associated with the Day of the Dead, reflect a Surrealist sense of black humor. The influence of his style can be seen in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by younger photographers of enormous talent, such as Lola Álvarez Bravo, Mariana Yampolski, and Graciela Iturbide. As many art historians have noted, in the decades surrounding the Second World War, Mexico became transformed into a cultural space where many women artists flourished. Like their male counterparts, few chose to identify their work directly with Surrealism. Yet these artists moved in Surrealist circles, absorbing many of the movement’s aesthetic tendencies. As a result, Surrealism emerges in their work in the role assigned to chance, in the oneiric— sometimes nightmarish—quality of the images, in the immanent power of isolated objects, in the erotic and sometimes sexually transgressive imagination, and in the metamorphic possibilities of the body. Frida Kahlo and María Izquierdo represent two instances of the important roles that nativeborn Mexican women played in the early days of Mexican Surrealism. Izquierdo, who had moved from the interior to the capital in the late 1920s, maintained strong ties with traditional rural and Catholic iconography, mixing it with avant-garde techniques learned at the Escuela National de Bellas Artes. In that academy, she studied under the renowned painter and collector Rufino Tamayo, whose knowledge of pre-Columbian art and folklore played a crucial role in the development of Izquierdo’s style. In the 1930s, Izquierdo joined the Contemporáneos group, which led her to embrace cosmopolitan artistic and intellectual values within the context of a fiercely Mexican identity. Although her work was promoted at first by Diego Rivera and rapidly gained international recognition, in 1945 he deemed her unqualified to paint a commissioned cycle of murals for the Palacio de Gobierno. In response, Izquierdo famously quipped 264

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that in Mexico, “[i]t’s a crime to be born a woman, [but] an even greater crime to be a woman and to have talent” (in Craven 36). Like Izquierdo, Kahlo’s ties to Mexican Surrealism arise more from her personal and professional associations than from a deliberate identification with the movement. As we have seen, Kahlo and Rivera hosted Breton during his stay in Mexico in 1938, facilitating his access to Trotsky and accompanying him on the trips to provincial cities that would prove crucial to Breton’s conception of Mexico. His essay “Frida Kahlo de Rivera” in Surrealism and Painting singles out Kahlo as one of his discoveries: My surprise and joy was unbounded when I  discovered, on my arrival in Mexico, that her work has blossomed forth, in her latest paintings, into pure Surreality, despite the fact that it had been conceived without any prior knowledge whatsoever of the ideas motivating the activities of my friends and myself . . . I was witnessing here, at the other end of the earth, a spontaneous outpouring of our own questioning spirit. (145) Needless to say, Kahlo was neither devoid of any knowledge of Surrealism prior to Breton’s visit nor the font of a “spontaneous outpouring” of the Surrealist spirit. With international solo exhibitions taking place as early as 1938 (New York) and 1939 (Paris), Kahlo’s work began its trajectory toward unprecedented fame, even eclipsing that of Rivera. Broadly speaking, Surrealism may have been instrumental less in terms of artistic vision than as a means of freeing Kahlo—and other women artists—from nationalistic and patriarchal strictures. As Dawn Ades suggests, “[i]n asserting the rights of the imagination as the means of expressing their own reality, and thus moving in very general terms into the Surrealist orbit, Kahlo and Izquierdo challenged the official cultural ideology in Mexico” (125). The visibility of Surrealism as a movement in Mexico reached its apex with the January 1940 Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo, which was organized by Wolfgang Paalen and César Moro, with Breton acting as a consultant in Paris. Held at the Galería de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City, the exhibition included an array of pieces inspired by the Surrealist aesthetic: in addition to paintings, there were cadavres exquis, frottages and fumages, found objects, and “primitive” art. The show featured a number of renowned European artists with links to Surrealism. Tensions arose when the work of Kahlo, Rivera, and Álvarez Bravo was displayed—at Rivera’s insistence—in the international section, while other renowned national artists—among them Agustín Lazo, Carlos Mérida, and Antonio Ruiz—were relegated to a presumably less-prestigious “Mexican” section. The opening night gala received varying reviews in the press but was met overall with “general disappointment,” even on the part of Surrealist sympathizers (Bradu 200). As Tere Arcq observes, however, the exhibition served the double purpose of acknowledging a strong current of anti-muralista art in Mexico while also opening the door to women artists (68).

The European Exiles in Mexico Recognizing the potential value of an influx of artists, writers, and intellectuals from abroad, Lázaro Cárdenas, President of Mexico from 1934 to 1940, granted asylum to a large number of exiles from Spain and Western Europe. There is a telling irony in the fact that this varied group of creative spirits, many of whom settled for long periods of time in Mexico, succeeded in transforming the country into “the Surrealist country par excellence” that Breton believed he had discovered previously. The list is long, but the major Surrealist-affiliated émigrés include 265

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Leonora Carrington (Britain), Esteban Francés (Spain), José Horna (Spain) and Kati Horna (Hungary-Spain), Edward James (Scotland), Gordon Onslow-Ford (Britain), Wolfgang Paalen (Austria), Benjamin Péret (France), Alice Rahon (France), Eva Sulzer (Switzerland), Bridget Tichenor (Britain), and Remedios Varo (Spain). Working at times with native-born artists and writers, but mainly in isolation from them, these visitors found inspiration in Mexico’s preColumbian history, its geography, and its contemporary cultural practices. After exploring Alaska and the Pacific Northwest of the United States in the company of the photographer Eva Sulzer, Rahon and Paalen arrived in Mexico City in 1939 and remained there until 1952. (Paalen would return later with his second wife, Isabel Marín, residing in the state of Morelos until his death in 1959.) A painter, writer, and art theorist with a passion for archeology and collecting, Paalen collaborated with the archeologist Alfonso Caso and the painter and anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias—two of Mexico’s preeminent intellectual figures—in his exploration of pre-Columbian cultures. Arguably, Paalen’s greatest contribution to the link between Mexico and Surrealism lies in the journal Dyn, published in six issues in Mexico City (although in French and English, rather than Spanish) between 1942 and 1944. After years of close collaboration with the Parisian Surrealist group, many of whom were now exiled in New York, Paalen began to diverge from orthodox Surrealist thought, developing ideas and techniques that would eventually contribute to North American abstract expressionism. Paalen’s essays in Dyn profess his break from the Bretonian movement, but Mexico’s presence in the journal is still heavily weighted with Surrealism in both text and image. Benjamin Péret, the only member of the émigré group to remain unerringly true to Bretonian ideals, lived and worked in Mexico City from 1941 to 1947. Like Paalen, Péret was drawn to pre-Hispanic myth and endeavored to bring these forms of expression to the attention of European readers. Of particular importance was his translation into French of The Book of Chilam Balam de Chumayel (1955), a magnificent postconquest collection of Yucatec-Maya myths, legends, historical accounts, calendrical notations, prophecies, and poetry. In Péret’s own words, his Anthologie des mythes, légendes et contes populaires d’Amérique was researched and written “from the point of view of the marvelous” (in Sawin 265). Like Izquierdo and Kahlo, women in the émigré group discovered new artistic freedoms in the 1940s Mexican capital. Carrington, Rahon, and Varo—all of whom became lifelong residents in Mexico—form the vanguard of a group of women whose relationship to Surrealism began with connections to male figures in the movement. In exile, however, they found both creative independence and a sisterhood of interests that propelled their work—and the Surrealist aesthetic—in new directions. Surrealism had taught them new ways of envisioning their inner and outer worlds, but true artistic independence meant questioning certain mainstays of male-dominated Surrealist thought. Most notably, they rejected the figure of the woman as creative muse, particularly in the guise of the femme enfant, in favor of female figures with the power to effect change in the spaces around them, often through esoteric or mystical practices. For this reason, still lifes and the depiction of domestic spaces provided the opportunity for radical visual experimentation. Likewise, their portraits and self-portraits display idiosyncratic features that imply a critique of patriarchal models of femininity. The representation of animals or human-animal hybrids—influenced by the indigenous belief in the nahual or animal psychic double—allowed women artists to point to the intuitive, irrational, and sexually unfettered aspects of selfhood. Alice Rahon began her creative life as a poet but discovered painting after she journeyed with Paalen to Mexico in 1939. She experimented with a wide variety of media, including collage, sculpture, and found objects; incorporating techniques pioneered by Tamayo, she also experimented texturally with sand and sgraffito. Although often abstract in form, numerous 266

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images culled from prehistoric art, from the Mexican landscape, or from myths and folk practices are evident in her work. Like Rahon, Remedios Varo settled in Mexico permanently and produced work profoundly influenced by Mexican culture. Her interest in Surrealism dates to her school years in Madrid, when Spanish Surrealism was heavily influenced by the French school. In Barcelona and Paris in the 1930s, Varo formed close friendships with Marcel Jean, Esteban Francés, and Óscar Domínguez; in 1936, she met Péret, who introduced her to Breton, Paalen, Ernst, Carrington, and Dora Maar. Briefly imprisoned in France, Varo and Péret managed to escape to Mexico in 1941. In the 1950s, after ending her relationship with Péret, Varo developed her mature artistic style and continued to paint until her death in Mexico City in 1963. Her technically exquisite and rigorously composed paintings often feature elongated female figures with extravagant hair, whimsical vehicles, and human-animal hybrids. Fleeing war-torn France and a fraught relationship with Max Ernst, Carrington arrived in Mexico in 1943 and quickly integrated herself into the émigré group. The friendship she shared with Varo, in particular, would prove mutually rewarding. Of the social gatherings organized by the two women, Susan Aberth observes: [It] continued in spirit the sense of play and fun of those they had left behind in Europe and New York. There were costume parties, provocative all-night storytellings, Surrealist games, practical jokes, and on occasion a fantastical meal prepared by Carrington and Varo. (60) Mexican culinary and herbal medicinal traditions, in fact, are the point of departure for much of the iconography in Varo’s and Carrington’s paintings. Their shared fascination with magic, alchemy, witchcraft, and other esoteric practices—particularly those centered on the archetypal feminine—was intensified by their exposure to certain aspects of Mexican culture. For example, Carrington’s El mundo mágico de los Mayas, a large-scale painting commissioned for the Museo Nacional de Antropología in 1963–1964, is densely populated with images and symbols that represent the syncretism between indigenous beliefs and Catholicism. Best known for her paintings, Carrington also published novels and short stories, all of which are flavored with Surrealist humor, surprising imagery, occult symbolism, and characters who straddle the line between the animal and the human, between social reality and myth. Mexican history and folklore are fully present as a backdrop to mythical plots in such stories as “The Invention of Mole” and “A Mexican Fairy-Tale.” More than any other European for whom Mexico provided a refuge and a stimulus to the creative imagination, Carrington found ways to immerse herself in the country’s concrete modes of being.

Literary Surrealism Awakens: Octavio Paz Out of the near-total void that was literary Surrealism in midcentury Mexico came Octavio Paz. Already a recognized poet and intellectual in his twenties, Paz—who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990—was initially swept into the anti-Surrealist winds of the 1930s. Although a meeting in Paris with Robert Desnos had introduced him to Surrealism in 1938, Paz seemed oblivious to Breton’s presence in his own country a few months later. As the editor of the important literary review Taller, Paz allowed Breton’s visit to pass virtually unnoticed, and in 1940 he published Luis Cardoza y Aragón’s scathingly negative review of the Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo. In that same period, Paz himself commented in the journal Romance that 267

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Surrealism, a mere extension of romanticism, “has fallen into literature. That is, into a language made of commonplaces” (in Schneider 74). Given the Surrealists’ own rejection of literature per se, the insult was patent. Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, the increasing visibility of Stalin’s abuses of power, and Paz’s own favorable encounters with the Surrealist war émigrés in Mexico initiated an ideological shift that would culminate in 1948, when Benjamin Péret introduced him to Breton in Paris. (Shortly thereafter, as a sort of initiation into the movement, Breton would publish Paz’s poem “Papillon d’obsidienne” [Obsidian Butterfly] in his Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle.) Although Paz expressed ambivalence about being labeled a Surrealist, his aesthetic thought and practice had shifted unequivocally in that direction by the mid-1950s. Ever skeptical of automatic writing as a technique, he embraced Surrealism as an ethical stance toward life, one that championed individual liberty, eroticism as a response to alienated existence, and poetry as a prime mode of knowledge. Surrealism represented for Paz, as for many Latin American writers, an actitud vital—a way of living in the world. His extensive studies of pre-Columbian myth and Mexican history, reinforced by the work of Péret and other Surrealists, gave Paz a distinctive set of images and tropes on which to draw. The result, as Schneider points out, was that Paz “brought to Surrealism a creation that contributed profoundly to the renovation of the movement, a voice that prolonged a world of immemorial magic with the tones and the language of strange rites” (77). Most critics agree that a reimagined and idiosyncratic Surrealism became an essential element of Paz’s work, beginning in 1951with the collection of prose poems ¿Águila o sol? (Eagle or Sun?). Observing that many precursors of Surrealism, such as Rimbaud and Lautréamont, had experimented with the prose poem, José Emilio Pacheco notes that this collection represents “the creative use of a form perfected in Europe, which Paz adopts in order to approach Mexican reality and to write a kind of poetry never before written in Spanish” (50). And what of Paz’s influence over attitudes toward Surrealism in Mexico? In 1954, Paz—now an internationally recognized intellectual—gave a lecture at the UNAM titled “El Surrealismo” as part of a series dedicated to “the great themes of our time.” The lecture was later published as “Estrella de tres puntos: El Surrealismo” in the widely disseminated volume Las peras del olmo (1957). Although he was able through these means to give credence to the principles of Surrealist thought, and although his own poetic practice remained forever changed by Surrealism, no movement flourished in Mexico under that “three-pointed star.” Pacheco concludes that Octavio Paz’s adherence to Surrealism in the 1950s initiated a “battle” in Mexican literary circles in which commentary and rumor “[formulate] as dogma the hypothesis of a great poet corrupted by European decadence who returns to his country and infects the new generation with the virus of Surrealism” (50). Herein lies the question that will repeat itself ad infinitum in the context of Latin American Surrealism: how to find clarity and originality in work inspired, on the one hand, by a movement begun on the “old Continent” and, on the other hand, by the incisive realities of one’s own time and place? How to draw inspiration—that is, creative breath—from techniques developed abroad without being “infected” by that very breath? Speaking concretely of the influence of Surrealism in Mexican literature, Pacheco insists that literary history is not made of straight lines but of curves and spirals (53). Fittingly, then, Paz wrote a poem called “Circulatory Poem (for General Disorientation)” that was printed on the walls of a spiral staircase in a 1973 Surrealist art exhibition in Mexico City. The spiral constitutes both form and content for this poem: as its verses trace a curving, winding path, the poem speaks of multiple and overlapping metaphors for movement, for turns and returns—metaphors that from the beginning have marked Paz’s meditations on poetry and history. Paz, whose return to Mexico twenty years earlier as a “triumphant Surrealist” had been met with ideological reserve

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or outright hostility, uses his “Poema circulatorio” to remind his compatriots of Surrealism’s continued presence in his country.

Later Developments Even in the absence of an organized movement, Surrealism continued as a profound substratum in the work of individual artists—Mexicans by birth, such as the painter Guillermo Meza, whose parents were both Tlaxcaltecan curanderos, or ex-patriates who had long resided in Mexico, such as Gunther Gerzso. Younger artists and writers imbued with the Surrealist spirit continued to be attracted to Mexico. The Canadian artist Alan Glass settled in Mexico City in 1963 after moving in Surrealist circles in Paris in the 1950s; he continues to work there, primarily in the assemblage mode. Ludwig Zeller, a poet and collage artist born in Chile, made his home in Oaxaca in the early 1990s and remained faithful to a Surrealist aesthetic until his death in 2019. Zeller’s partner, the Hungarian Chilean painter Susana Wald, continues to live in Oaxaca, creating Surrealist work that often champions the figure of the female creator. In 1962, the Mexican writer and critic Salvador Elizondo printed five issues of his profoundly anti-nationalist, anti-idealist journal S.NOB. Founded on a Bataillean rather than a Bretonian version of Surrealism, the journal highlighted contemporary counterculture tropes, such as violent sexuality, jazz, and psychedelic drugs. S.NOB welcomed contributions from Carrington, Kati Horna, and the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, who, since 1960, has divided his time between Mexico City and Paris. Film was in fact a medium in which Surrealism flourished in the latter half of the twentieth century, and the most extraordinary Surrealist-affiliated artist to make his mark on global culture was Luis Buñuel. Born in provincial Aragón in 1900, as a young man, Buñuel joined Dalí and Federico García Lorca in Madrid as the leaders of the Surrealist-influenced Spanish avant-garde. Settling in Paris in 1925, Buñuel intensified his studies of film and, in 1929, produced with Dalí the silent 16-minute short Un Chien andalou. Buñuel resided primarily in Mexico from 1945 to his death in 1983, becoming a Mexican citizen in 1949. Arriving in the golden age of Mexican cinema, he brought an avant-garde eye to the social realist and melodramatic currents of the day with such films as Los olvidados (1950), for which he won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival, El ángel exterminador (1962), and Simón del desierto—the latter two being unapologetically Surrealist in their vision of the decadence of contemporary bourgeois society. It is not difficult to see the shadow of Buñuel’s Surrealist artistry in Jodorowsky’s Fando y Lis (1967), El topo (1970), and The Holy Mountain (1973), all of which have become modern classics of experimental film.

Works Cited Aberth, Susan. Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy, and Art. Ashgate, 2004. Ades, Dawn. “Orbits of the Savage Moon: Surrealism and the Female Subject in Mexico and Postwar Paris.” Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation, edited by Whitney Chadwick, MIT Press, 1998, pp. 106–127. Arcq, Tere. “En el país de la belleza convulsiva.” In Wonderland: Las aventuras Surrealistas de mujeres artistas en México y los Estados Unidos, edited by Susan Fort and Tere Arcq, DelMonico-Prestel, 2012, pp. 42–87. Bataille, Georges. “Extinct America.” Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-Knowing. October, vol. 36, Spring 1986, p. 7. Bradu, Fabienne. André Breton en México. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012. Bretón, André. Surrealism and Painting. MFA Publications, 2002. Craven, David. Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990. Yale University Press, 2006.

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Melanie Nicholson Lazo, Agustín. “Reseña sobre las actividades sobrerrealistas.” Universidad Nacional de México: Cuadernos de Arte 3, March 1938, pp. 1–18. Paalen, Wolfgang. “Birth of Fire: A  Mythological Hypothesis suggested by the Appearance of a New Volcano.” Dyn, no. 4, p. 71. Pacheco, José Emilio. “La batalla del Surrealismo (Octavio Paz y la revista Estaciones).” Surrealismo/Surrealismos: Latinoamérica y España, edited by Peter G. Early and Germán Gullón, University of Pennsylvania, 1975, pp. 49–54. Paz, Octavio. The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957–1987. New Directions, 1987. ———. “Hieroglyphs of Desire: A  Critical Study of Villaurrutia by Octavio Paz.” Xavier Villaurrutia, Nostalgia for Death. Copper Canyon Press, 1993, pp. 91–148. ———. On Poets and Others. Arcade, 1986. Sawin, Martica. Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. MIT Press, 1997. Schneider, Luis Mario. “Octavio Paz en los avatares del Surrealismo.” Avatares del Surrealismo en el Perú y en América Latina, edited by Joseph Alonso et al., Institut Français d’Études Andines-Pontificia Universidad Católica, 1992, pp. 69–77.

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30 ROMANIAN SURREALISM Cosana Eram

The Romanian Surrealist group, also known as the Surrealist Group of Bucharest, or InfraNoir, was led by Gherasim/Ghérasim Luca (Salman Locker), Gellu Naum, Paul Păun/Paon (Zaharia Herşcovici), Virgil Teodorescu, and Dolfi Trost, all active within Romanian avantgarde circles before World War II. They created and produced literary and visual works as well as exhibitions as a distinct collective entity whose existence de facto, including the breakups and disagreements, is roughly circumscribed by the years 1941–1947. In 1947, André Breton included the Romanian group’s collective contribution called Le Sable Nocturne (Nocturnal Sand) in the catalog of the international Surrealist exhibition at the Gallerie Maeght in Paris. It was a description of a poetic experiment in which imagination would be stimulated by the objects encountered in a pitch-black room (which echoed Dalí’s neverrealized “objets psycho-atmosphériques-anamorphiques” [psycho-atmospheric-anamorphic objects] alluded to in Surrealism in the Service of Revolution in 1933). Breton added that, “based on the felicitous formulation of [their] friends in Bucharest, ‘knowing by not knowing’ remains the guiding statement of Surrealism.” Since this text has remained the sole visible contribution of the group to the movement, the paradoxical position of existing by not existing could characterize the group at that time. What was its fate, and why was Romanian Surrealism shrouded in such a veil? In order to sketch an answer, we must first refer to the reception of Surrealism in Romania. Long before the artists who would officially call themselves Romanian Surrealists congealed as a group, Breton’s manifestos, books, and initiatives were largely unknown in Romania outside avant-garde groups whose existence was limited and marginalized in a dominant conservative culture impervious to cultural nonconformism. Nonetheless, Romanian avant-garde and experimental groups were aligned to the European trends and favored constructivism with strong expressionist, Dadaist, and even futurist accents. Magazines such as Contimporanul, Punct, Integral, unu, and Alge chronologically featured important avant-garde figures, such as Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco before their Dada adventures, together with the local writers Saşa Pană, Ion Vinea, Ilarie Voronca, Marcel Cosma, Geo Bogza, and others. Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism was advertised in a note in the November 1924 (no. 49) issue of Contimporanul. A month later, it was referred to in a series of interrogations about the meaning of poetry, inspiration, and writing. Since Breton’s intimation of the possible manner of creating poetry by assembling titles and fragments from newspapers was so close to Tzara’s famous “method” DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-34

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to make a Dadaist poem, Romanian avant-gardists may have initially felt that Surrealism was just a hijacking of Dadaism, an idea openly expressed by Marcel Janco, Tzara’s creative companion in Zurich. In fact, magazines such as Punct (November 1924–March 1925) and Integral (March 1925–April 1928) accused Surrealism of lacking “virility” and originality. According to Ilarie Voronca, it was only a renewed version of the “Romantic nasal lamentations.” In Barbu Florian’s view, as expressed in Suprarealizmul în cinematograf (Surrealism in Cinema) from Integral, no. 4, 1925, André Breton “discovered a new art, descended directly from Tzara’s dadaism.” This initial attitude changed in unu (1928–1932), where Saşa Pană, Ilarie Voronca, and Stefan Roll adopted the Surrealist principle of exploiting dreams and occasionally practiced automatic writing. The magazine Alge (1930–1933) continued to expound Surrealist principles, particularly forms of social protest that were continued by the Romanian Surrealist group. Among its contributors, we can find Gherasim Luca, Paul Păun, Jules Perahim, and Sesto Pals. In 1936, Breton wrote a letter to Saşa Pană in which he asked about the “Surrealist angle” in the intellectual and artistic life in Romania. He was also probably prompted by his appreciation for Victor Brauner, who had become one of the most important Surrealist painters in Paris. It was Brauner, together with Ilarie Voronca, who had founded the Romanian revue 75HTP (single issue, October 1924), where they used the notion “surrationnel” that Breton would later attribute to Gaston Bachelard. In fact, Breton’s ideas found their real echo chamber in the works of Gellu Naum and Gherasim Luca, for whom Surrealism was a catalyzer of their artistic inspiration and production. In June 1940, Luca and Naum returned to Bucharest after two years spent in Paris. Victor Brauner, already established among the Parisian Surrelaists, was their guide, and he introduced them to André Breton and other French Surrealists and to their intellectual debates. Gellu Naum commented in his book Medium (1945) about a feature on the “demonology of objects” to appear in a special issue of the magazine Minotaure. Nonetheless, the project remained unaccomplished because of the war. In Bucharest, Luca and Naum floated the idea of a Romanian Surrealism meant to carry over the principles from Breton’s manifestos. In an environment not quite prone to subversive artistic activities, they contacted old friends—the physician Paul Păun, the doctor of law Dolfi Trost, and the poet Virgil Teodorescu—and they refused other postulants, among them the poet Paul Celan and the inventor of Lettrism, Isidore Isou. The French language was the umbilical cord to Surrealism underscoring the cosmopolitan aspirations of the group, the practice of bilingualism perceived as a necessary condition of their existence. According to Monique Yaari, French, the language of Romanian intellectual elite, allowed them to communicate with their peers in Paris and aim toward a wider audience. Bilingualism, however, was also a source of discord that encountered the refusal of at least one of them, Gellu Naum, who opposed it with an almost-mystical attachment to Romanian (see “Surrealist Group”). Naum declared that all benefited from having their texts translated; nonetheless, they all ended up proving their mastery of French. It is possible that Naidine Krainic, Trost’s friend of Syrian origin naturalized in France, extensively helped them, although more research is needed regarding her role as muse, liaison, and translator for the group. Păun and Trost systematically and permanently alternated between Romanian and French. In turn, Gherasim Luca comfortably adopted the new idiom and developed a style that earned him the reputation of one of the greatest French-language poets in an environment overloaded with masterpieces and experiments. During the years in which Romania was part of the Axis Powers (1940–1944), a series of laws that aggravated various human rights was passed, including severe discriminations against Jewish citizens. Within the Surrealist group, three authors were Jewish, and all five were Leftists; consequently, apart from Gellu Naum, who was drafted, the others were forced to pursue their 272

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activities clandestinely. The project of a literary review called Gradiva was abandoned because of the war. They were cut from immediate access to the international cultural environment, and lacking the possibility to correspond with their friends abroad, many in the South of France at that time waiting for an American visa (which some, such as Jacques Hérold and Victor Brauner, would never obtain). The members of the group found refuge in covert creative enterprises, despite the impossibility of publishing. They shared ideas, research topics, obsessions, occult experiments, blind drawings, and creative principles, while keeping in sync with what they thought to be the larger methodological and theoretical tenets of Surrealism. At the end of World War II, freedom was apparently regained in Romania. This partial and fleeting state before the installment of the Communist regime and its restrictive cultural policies allowed the Bucharest Surrealists to break their silence for a short while. Between 1945 and 1947, they took advantage of the political confusion; in an accelerated rhythm, they founded the Surrealist Collection, where they self-published books and plaquettes (seven-page, uncut, folded-and-gathered sheets) at the Infra-Noir and Éditions de l’Oubli printing houses. They also organized an eponymous exhibition accompanied by the manifesto Infra-noir. The activity of the group made André Breton contend that “the center of the world has moved to Bucharest” (in Brough-Evans 161). Nonetheless, the echoes were weak, and they found no public acceptance or praise. The newly established Stalinist authorities in Bucharest shared Leftist convictions but did not tolerate avant-garde expression that violated the principles of socialist realism. In a letter found among André Breton’s papers on the occasion of the sale of his collection in 2003, Trost summarized the activity of the group as follows: theoretical and experimental works on love, the main revolutionary force, the negation of all non-Surrealist political activity, surreptitious and secret tendencies, the development of somnambulist states, the negation of the Oedipal subconscious mind, mediumistic studies, an accent on “poetic satanism,” and an urge to act as a one-minded, homogeneous group (in Răileanu 105–106). Breton’s existence was still regarded as providential. In a letter addressed to Victor Brauner on March 1945, Gellu Naum wrote about the difficult war years that eroded the group’s resistance, while never defeating its resilience. This is the period when two manifestos cosigned by all five members were published: L’Infra-Noir (The Infra-Black, 1946) and Eloge de Malombra: Cerne de l’amour absolu (Eulogy to Malombra: A Representation of Absolute Love, 1947). Two other important texts, Critica mizeriei (The Critique of Squalor) and Dialectique de la Dialectique (The Dialectic of the Dialectic, 1945), marked the beginning of the scissions in the group. The former, cosigned by Gellu Naum, Paul Păun, and Virgil Teodorescu, gave Naum the opportunity to blast against older avant-garde representatives who had written about Surrealism without understanding it and to attack Gherasim Luca, who allegedly departed from Surrealist principles in favor of a “grandiose mysticism.” The main tenet of the manifesto was a need to “oneirize life” and thus resolve the contradiction between the imaginary and the real via automatic writing and the liberation of the object. The latter, a thirty-page manifesto, opposed from the start any schools of thought and established precepts. It was metaphorically a message in a bottle, acknowledging isolation, impasse, and the impossibility to communicate with fellow Surrealists: Separated from our friends since the beginning of the imperialistic world war, we haven’t heard anything from them. But we have always nurtured the secret hope that on this planet, where our existence seems to become more precarious every day, the real functioning of thought has never ceased to guide the group that holds in its hands the highest ideological freedom that has ever existed. (Plural 91) 273

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Conceived as “a message addressed to the international Surrealist movement,” The Dialectic of the Dialectic reinforced its adherence to dialectical materialism and asserted the ongoing need for a revolutionary stand—the theory of the “negation of the negation” (14). Surrealism could only exist in a state of negation as to itself and the world, “a position that may at any time expand beyond any conceivable limit, over everything and everybody” (15). Objective chance was the sole manner to discover the contradictions of a class-based society; objective, unconstrainted love, in all its aspects, was the general revolutionary method of knowledge and action for Surrealism (17). The continuous desire to overpass Freudian complexes and rediscover love was called a “non-Oedipal stand,” in which antinomies coexisted without contradicting each other (21). Alluding to Luca’s first non-Oedipal manifesto, L’Inventeur de l’Amour (The Inventor of Love), this enabled the theoretical position of the working class in a state of negative symmetry with regard to the bourgeoisie, exempt from a brother-father position, and in a reverse position to Oedipus complex. In other words, the proletariat was not only an antagonistic class but an entity that was supposed to find the force lines of its own negation (21). Most importantly, by keeping in sync with the principles of automatism and chance, Luca and Trost detailed the principles of “surautomatism” and the “knowledge through the image” for the visual artistic production. They described newly invented Surrealist objects and techniques: “cubomanias,” “objectively offered objects,” and “entoptic graphomania” (25).1 These were already presented by Trost in Le Profile navigable: négation de la peinture (The Navigable Profile: A Negation of Painting) and in the catalog called “Presentation de graphies colorées, de cubomanies et d’objets” (Presentation of Colored Graphies, Cubomanias, and Objects) for the exhibition of January 1945. Paul Păun did not participate in such theoretical or creative enterprises, but his subsequent mode of drawing, a type of abstract automatism, showed clear influences. In turn, he supported a literature devoid of Communist norms: in Les Esprit Animaux (Animal Spirits, 1947), he claimed that objective chance represented the only politics to abide to. Le Vampire passif and Medium (both from 1945), Luca’s and Naum’s first Surrealist programmatic and theoretical works, respectively, featured explicit references to Breton and his manifestos. He was added to the panoply of authors, characters, objects, and invented notions that created the idiosyncratic mythology of the group. Heraclitus, Marquis de Sade, Nerval, Aurélie, Lautréamont, Maldoror and Le vieil Océan, Rimbaud, Jarry, Hegel, Brauner, and Breton coexisted with poetic avatars called Certitudinea eruptivă (Eruptive Certitude), Vampirul pasiv (Passive Vampire), and Miss Terria. Central to the Surrealist tradition were strange, invented, subversive, and haunting objects. This was theorized by Paul Păun in La Conspiration du Silence (The Conspiracy of Silence, 1947) and is also found in Naum’s writings and is further investigated by Luca. Naum wrote: Utility, beautiful, good, value—what are they good for? We only have to strip the object of all these cretinized uniforms. Sometimes I  catch myself providing it with them. Then the object looks crippled, fettered. The force of habit, this idiotic habit that disfigures us. To know the object does not mean to enclose it in one or another of these relations. To know it means to free it. (ICR) In Medium, he took Nerval as a guiding literary figure and used a motto from Paracelsus’s Livre des rêves et des somnambules (Dream Book of the Somnambulists) in his exploration of dreams as primordial realities that culture made us lose. Out of the shackles of chronology and featuring pulverized identities, the dreamlike structure was the governing principle of his entire writing. 274

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Figure 30.1  Gherasim Luca, Andrea Mantegna Cubomania, undated Collection of Cosana Eram.

The dream morphed into complete freedom, viewed as the very condition of the artist whose place was in the interstices between worlds. Le Vampire Passif (The Passive Vampire) represented the artistic culmination of Romanian Surrealism. It revisited the myth and consecrated the literary trope of a creature who dwells between the worlds of the living and the dead. As a common image in Naum’s, Brauner’s, and Luca’s writings, it can be associated with their mediumistic experiments as well as their desire to connect with a community of authors preoccupied by the world beyond, such as de Sade, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Huysmans, and Breton himself. The opening pages of the book are dedicated to the “objectively offered object” that may alter its qualities based on “new relations established in the inner life of an individual who is seeking a new equilibrium in himself and in the outside world.” The found object favors the action of objective chance prone to produce fortuitous encounters. Creating objects and 275

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offering them is the equivalent of magic that brings two persons in a mediumistic relationship while it facilitates the foresight of events in their life. As a matter of fact, during his experiments with “offered objects,” Luca claimed that he could communicate with André Breton and that he predicted the 1940 earthquake in Romania. The second part of The Passive Vampire is a eulogy to love and women. Luca reviews categories of love already inscribed in the repertoire of Surrealism: passion love, fetish love, and mad love, with an end goal in absolute love, which is described as “objective love” in The Dialectic of Dialectic. Along the same lines, Dolfi Trost’s most important contribution was his book Vision dans le cristal (Vision in a crystal, 1945), with the subtitle Oniromancie obsessionelle (Obsessive Oneiromancy), wherein he proposed effacing the differences and artificial separations between diurnal and nocturnal life as well as consciousness and subconsciousness. Objective chance and automatism were preferable to Freudian psychoanalysis, he contended, in the quest for the image that would reveal the secrets of the objective world. His theoretical essay Le profil navigable: Negation concrete de la peinture (Navigable Profile: Concrete Negation of Painting) contests the value of images created with the help of traditional painting techniques. These are replaced by the “surautomatism” of his “colored graphies” exhibited in 1945, which were produced by the involuntary movement of the hand without any intention or prior reflection. The Romanian world was changing but remained outside international artistic circles. As they did during the war, the Surrealists in Bucharest felt isolated, marginal, and unlucky again. Among the letters in the Gellu Naum Archive in Bucharest and the Victor Brauner Archive at the Kandinsky Library, the key words are periphery, desolation, geographical inferiority, and bad luck. In this context, apart from Virgil Teodorescu, all the members of the Surrealist group envisaged leaving the country for good. Their biographies register desperate moments: emigration was a painstaking process, and Naum did not manage to obtain his papers. At the beginning of what was going to be a long period of deprivation and silence, he wrote in 1947 a text in French called Albul osului (Bone White), which he sent to his Surrealist counterparts all around the world. Ironically called a “decree,” the text was a passionate plea against the “ideological gusts sweeping through the brains of the present.” It was officially censored, and the group was shortly banned altogether (255). Luca and Trost made an unsuccessful illegal attempt to cross over the western Romanian border in the winter of 1947–1948, after which they decided to demand immigration to Israel, which was at first refused by the authorities. They could only leave Romania for Israel in 1950, but in 1952, they went to Paris, the space of all intellectual and poetic affinities. During this time, they sent several letters of solidarity to André Breton. They contained original works, such as Luca’s poem objects and Trost’s autograph manuscripts, descriptions of Surrealist revolutionary activities in Romania, and theoretical essays.2 One such document from August 1951 is Trost’s L’âge de la reverie (The Age of Daydreaming), in which the principle of the “invisible” is put forth as the field that should concentrate all Surrealist efforts to unite theory and practice, poetry and action. These letters are equally testimonies of disappointments and conflicts. Trost, who now claimed to be the real founder of the Romanian Surrealist group, notified Breton of the breakup between himself and Luca, which made them find their separate ways to Paris. Their dissolution also put Gherasim Luca in the position of an intruder for a while, making it impossible for him to appear in Surrealist publications (Alexandrian 38–39). Ultimately, the group self-dissolved when the ethos of friendship collapsed. It was, after all, the principle that supported their political positions, choice of linguistic and visual pursuits,

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and international aspirations. To this day, the most striking features of the Infra-Noir Romanian Surrealist group are the linguistic and geographical reinvention. Apart from the four main actors, there were other artists by and large associated with Romanian Surrealism, such as Saşa Pană, Jules Perahim, Jacques Hérold, Lucian Boz, Constantin Nisipeanu, Sesto Pals, and so on, who were all censored by the Communist authorities. In the end, three Romanian Surrealist authors, Luca, Trost, and Păun, referred to as la trinité in Biro and Passsron’s Dictionnaire du surréalisme, lived and died abroad. With minor name spelling changes, Ghérasim Luca stayed in Paris and dedicated himself to poetry and art, D. Trost went to the United States (New York and Chicago), and Paul Paon, who practiced medicine in Romania and kept his artistic activities secret, left in 1961 for Haifa, Israel. Virgil Teodorescu became a protégé of the Communist regime and even the president of the Writers’ Union. At the end of the 1960s, Gellu Naum revitalized the Surrealist activities in Romania and gathered a productive artistic following active to this day.

Notes 1. Cubomania is the practice of cutting an image into squares and then reassembling by random or automatic means; objectively offered objects were typically assemblages of found objects constructed with a specific recipient in mind; entoptic graphomania is a technique in which one draws out forms apparently latent within an existing image. 2. www.andrebreton.fr/fr/catalogue. Also in Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, fonds Andre Breton; Gherasim Luca et Dolfi Trost a Andre Breton, Tel-Aviv, le 27 janvier 1951, BRT.C.1060 1.2/5.

Works Cited Alexandrian, Sarane. L’Evolution de Gherasim Luca à Paris/Evoluţia lui Gherasim Luca la Paris. Ediţie îngrijită de Nicolae Tzone, Ioan Prigoreanu, Marilena Munteanu, Vinea, 2006, pp. 38–39. Biro, Adam, and René Passeron. Dictionnaire générale du surréalisme et ses environs. PUF, 1985. Breton, André. “Devant le rideau.” Le surréalisme en 1947: Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme presentée par André Breton et Marcel Duchamp, Éditions Pierre à Feu, 1947. Brough-Evans, Vivienne. Sacred Surrealism. Dissidence and International Avant-Garde Prose (Studies in Surrealism). Routledge, 2016, p. 161. Finkenthal, Michael. D. Trost. Între realitatea visului şi visul ca realitate. Tracus Arte, 2013. Luca, Gherasim. Inventor of Love & other Writings. Translated by Julian and Laura Semilian. Introduction by Andrei Codrescu, Essay by Petre Răileanu, Black Widow Press, 2009. ———. Le Vampire passif, avec une introduction sur l’objet objectivement offert, un portrait trouvé et dix-sept illustrations. Éditions de l’Oubli, 1945. ———. The Passive Vampire. Translated by Krzystof Fijalkovski. Twister Spoon Press, 2008. ———. Vampirul pasiv/Le Vampire passif, bilingual edition by Petre Răileanu and Nicolae Tzone, Editura Vinea, 2016. Luca, Gherasim, and Dolfi Trost. “Dialectique de la Dialectique.” Romanian Culture. www.romaniancul ture.org/downloads/trost_dialectique.pdf. Naum, Gellu. “Albul osului.” Opere II: Proza, Polirom, 2012. ———. Medium. Editura Modernă, 1945. ———. Medium. Institutul Cultural Romăn. www.icr.ro/pagini/medium/fr. Pană, Saşa. Născut în 02, Memorii, file de jurnal, evocări. Editura Minerva, 1973. Păun, Paul. Les Esprits animaux. Collection Surréaliste Infra-Noir, 1947. Pop, Ion, editor. La Réhabilitation du rêve: une anthologie de l’avant-garde roumaine. Maurice Nadeau/ICR/ IST, 2006. Răileanu, Petre. Gherasim Luca. Oxus, 2004. “The Romanian Avant-Garde.” Plural 3, The Romanian Cultural Foundation, 1999, p. 93. Teodorescu, Virgil. Au lobe du sel. Collection Surréaliste Infra-Noir, 1947.

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31 SCANDINAVIAN SURREALISM Kerry Greaves

Surrealism was a significant influence in the development of radical art in Scandinavia during the 1930s, when the ideas and tenets of the French movement achieved noticeable momentum with artists and writers in the region. From the mid-1930s until World War II, Surrealism heralded an unprecedented period of international activity and creative experimentation in the Scandinavian countries, propelling artists to new modes of avant-garde experimentation and elaboration. As is the case with most local translations of international art movements, this took on a particular form that was inspired by, but also differed importantly from, the original phenomena. Engagement with Surrealist ideas within each Scandinavian country—the constitutional monarchies of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—unfolded in distinctive ways and at varying paces so that to speak of Scandinavian Surrealism as a unified concept is somewhat of a misnomer.1 Nevertheless, while acknowledging the dangers of oversimplification such labels entail, the following essay will sketch a brief history of the development of Surrealism in those countries in the 1930s, introducing the main players and manifestations to outline some general tendencies in visual art that can be said to characterize Scandinavian Surrealism as a whole during its formative period before World War II. Drawing on these examples, I will argue how and why Scandinavian Surrealism during the period was not only unique but also innovative in ways that fundamentally expand our understanding of the so-called historical avant-gardes.2

Denmark and Linien While some individual Symbolist writers had experimented earlier with Surrealist writing, it was only in the mid-1930s that Surrealism gained a significant foothold in Scandinavia, and Denmark was the initial and most important channel for this transmission. By this time, experimental Scandinavian artists had already been working with abstraction as their main artistic concern, which they came to through various influences of the preceding decades, including cubism, constructivism, and expressionism. All these movements, moreover, like Surrealism, followed a general pattern of the dissemination of modernist art in Scandinavia, in which central European aesthetic innovations reached the region about a decade after their initial conceptions abroad, when artists combined them with local conventions and traditions. As a result of this phenomenon, in addition to strong native preferences and partially owing to the intimate art worlds of Copenhagen, Oslo, and Stockholm, Scandinavian artists did not generally adhere to DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-35

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strict aesthetic maxims, instead amalgamating elements of various styles and approaches within single images in individual and at times ambiguous ways. Danish artist Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, who had studied at the Bauhaus in 1930–1931 and had been to Paris, where he met André Breton by 1934, was the foremost visual and theoretical proponent of Surrealism in Scandinavia throughout the 1930s with his publications, artworks, networking, and exhibitions. His books Symboler i abstrakt kunst (Symbols in Abstract Art, 1933) and Surrealismen (Surrealism, 1934) introduced the movement to the Danish, and later Norwegian and Swedish, environments. In 1934, Bjerke-Petersen founded the journal and exhibition group Linien (The Line, 1934–1939) with the artists Ejler Bille and Richard Mortensen. Illustrating the composite nature of avant-garde Scandinavian art, despite the Surrealist preoccupation of Linien, these artists considered Wassily Kandinsky the forefather of abstraction, naming the group after the Russian artist’s book Point and Line to Plane (1926) and signaling their dual preoccupation with modernist abstraction, at the same time as this reflected Surrealism’s expansion in the mid-1930s toward including artists like the Russian master. Through its journal issues and exhibitions, Linien would become the primary disseminator for Surrealist ideas and debates in Scandinavia. Already in 1935, however, after an ideological disagreement with Bille and Mortensen, Bjerke-Petersen left Linien and started the Surrealist journal Konkretion (Concrete Art, 1935– 1936), which would further expand, albeit briefly, Denmark’s Surrealist purview by relating the latest Bretonian discussions to a local audience over the course of six issues.3 With Konkretion, an ideological and aesthetic divide took shape in the Scandinavian Surrealist landscape, with Bjerke-Petersen maintaining a prevalent fascination with psychoanalysis, sexual drives, and Bretonian ideology (Paldam, “Erotic” 413–427). Visually, these interests were mirrored most strongly in the work of Danish artist Wilhelm Freddie, who was and continues to be the most visible Scandinavian Surrealist, even as he remained an individual figure unaligned to any specific group or faction. For decades, Freddie consistently and infamously deployed naturalistic Surrealism in service of experimentation with sexual and unconscious taboos in works, such as the provocative mixed-media sculpture Sex-paralysappeal (Sex-Paralysis Appeal), 1936 (KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art Aalborg), or oil painting Venetiansk Portræt (Venetian Portrait), 1943 (Statens Museum for Kunst). The Linien-affiliated artists, in contrast, were more interested in the potential of developing a fantastical, abstract visual language more directly aligned to the realm of art, which emerged out of the strong legacy of colorful expressionism in Scandinavia. Between 1934 and 1939, Linien’s fifteen issues reproduced a wide variety of international Surrealist artworks and texts along with local examples.4 Many of the contributions were written by Bille and Mortensen, as well as Bjerke-Petersen, while he was involved in the first year, and they covered a broad spectrum of topics like Surrealist theory, visual art, music, contemporary film, African sculpture, art criticism, fashion, and exhibition reviews. These subjects were supplemented with other material, like psychoanalysis and physics. Artists’ profiles were similarly important and featured pieces on Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, André Gide, Danish modernist Harald Giersing, Picasso, and Arthur Rimbaud, among others. Linien also disseminated some of the first Danish translations of texts by Breton, Salvador Dalí, Paul Éluard, Kandinsky, and Joan Miró. Scandinavian artists’ work that was reproduced, meanwhile, included those by Norway’s first Surrealist painter, Bjarne Rise, while Scandinavian women were also represented, including artwork by the former Cercle et Carré member Danish cubist painter Franciska Clausen, Danish Surrealist artist Rita Kernn Larsen, and Danish sculptor Sonja Ferlov Mancoba. Other written contributions included poems by the Danes Bodil Bech and Hulda Lütken, as well as by the Swede Edith Södergran. Indeed, the 280

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journal prioritized poetry, reproducing the verses of the Danish poets Jens August Schade and Gustaf Munch-Petersen, among others. As the first and arguably most important conduit of Surrealism in Scandinavia, Linien’s contents reflected a well-developed understanding of the French movement, especially in terms of its visual preoccupations, emphasizing it as a means by which artists could experiment with creative freedom and achieve artistic and social revolution divorced from naturalism and conventional society. Yet Scandinavian artists’ prioritization of automatic drawing, the unconscious, fantasy, and dreams was mobilized primarily as an aesthetic rather than sociopolitical apparatus. Indeed, formalism remained a strong concern as artists tended to combine Surrealist techniques and ideas along with other modes of modernist abstraction as well as experimentation with different media. Already the cover of the first issue of Linien, which was printed in a minimal Bauhaus style, reflected a synthesized version of Surrealism. It combined the group’s mission statement with a large advertisement for Minotaure, along with a brief definition of Surrealism by Bille and an automatic drawing entitled Kvinders Bøn (Woman’s Prayer) by Mortensen. In this first brief and explicit explanation of Surrealism to a Scandinavian audience, Bille wrote, “Our art is a representation of the existing realities in the depths of our inner life—hence the word: sur-realism.”5 Just what this meant, however, depended on the artist, and the words “spontaneous-abstract” were used more frequently to describe Surrealist-oriented artists than the latter term, indicating the general ambiguity regarding the reception and translation of Surrealism in the region. Equally important as the Linien and Konkretion journals for the promulgation of Surrealism in Scandinavia were several early pioneering exhibitions held in Denmark. The figures involved with Linien showcased international Surrealist art by organizing milestone exhibitions that created substantial dialogue with international artists as well as among the different Scandinavian countries. Linien put together major exhibitions in 1934, 1937, and 1939, while Bjerke Petersen’s 1935 landmark Kubisme = Surrealisme (Cubism-Surrealism), organized after his break with Bille and Mortensen, was a watershed event in Scandinavian art history. For these shows, international collaboration and representation were paramount: the artists traveled to Paris to acquire works and develop relationships and maintained active communication with Surrealists there. Linien’s inaugural exhibition in the building of Den frie Udstilling (The Free Exhibition) in Copenhagen in 1934 was the first major display of Surrealism in Scandinavia, widely attended and covered in the press, and included works by important European artists that were also connected to abstraction, like Ernst, Hans Arp, Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. These were complemented with works by local artists, such as Henry Heerup, Bille, Bjerke Petersen, and Mortensen. The international focus continued in 1935 with Kubisme = Surrealisme, also at Den frie, which Bjerke Petersen organized with Swedish artist Erik Olson. This similarly brought into close proximity works by international as well as Scandinavian artists, including those from the Swedish Halmstad group (see below), Kernn-Larsen, Clausen, Heerup, Bjerke Petersen, Freddie, Dalí, Valentine Hugo, Arp, Victor Brauner, Ernst, Giacometti, Klee, Rene Magritte, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim, and Yves Tanguy, among others. Notably, Breton and Ernst co-organized the international component, with Breton even going so far as to characterize the Scandinavian artists as important colleagues in the foreword to the exhibition catalog (Breton, “Forord” 7–12).6 Linien’s 1937 exhibition, Efter-Expressionisme, Abstrakt Kunst, Neoplasticisme, Surrealisme (Post-Expressionism, Abstract Art, Neoplasticism, Surrealism), as the title suggests, was again a composite affair and held at Den frie. It was the largest show to date, with more than 250 works, a quarter of which were by artists outside of Scandinavia, which Bille, Mortensen, and the painter Hans Øllgaard negotiated while in Paris earlier that year. The exhibition augmented 281

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works by traditional Danish landscape artists with recent work of international and Scandinavian Surrealism, like Bille’s Dyr i forskellige rum (Animals in Different Compartments, 1937), abstract drawings by Ferlov, Ernst’s biomorphic sculptures, and Tanguy’s barren landscape scenes, among others. The organizing artists wrote in the accompanying catalog that their aim was to stimulate more local awareness of and debates about avant-garde art. They also emphasized a support for the diversity of works on display and aesthetic approaches rather than taking one resolute artistic standpoint. The favoring of an amalgamation of both radical and more traditional artists in one exhibition was again apparent in Linien’s final show at the University of Copenhagen Students’ Union, a strategy explicitly explained in the catalog by artists like Bille (see Bille, “To Slags Kunst” 1–2). This show was also the last international exhibition in Denmark before the outbreak of World War II. The mixture of radical and conventional approaches extended to the exhibitions’ design: while jazz had been played at one of the shows and they were all viewed skeptically by the mainstream critics and public because of their radical content, they were nonetheless hung traditionally and varied little from installations at the Statens Museum for Kunst just down the road.

Sweden and the Halmstad Group If Linien and Konkretion can be viewed as the first systematic organization of Surrealist ideas in Scandinavia, there were also early and important currents that took shape in Sweden in the early 1930s, initially through literary publications and modernist and avant-garde journals like Kontakt and Karavan, where French Surrealist texts and ideas were translated and debated. As early as 1931, Swedish writer, poet, and translator Eyvind Johnson, who knew Philippe Soupault and would become an ardent translator and practitioner of Surrealism, wrote the essay “Om surrealismen” (On Surrealism) and translated selections of Breton’s 1924 manifesto along with some skeptical commentary. This judicious introduction of Surrealism to a Swedish audience, according to literary scholar Mats Jansson, not only introduced it as a new and “vigorous force in modern literature” that readers should become acquainted with but also that they should do so critically (Jansson 681, in Hjartarson 47). In the realm of the visual arts, the most important proponent for avant-garde and Surrealist art in Sweden was the Halmstad group, which was established in 1929 by a group of abstract painters who were well versed in the modernist trends of and had spent time in Berlin and Paris in the 1920s. Members included Sven Jonson, Waldemar Lorentzon, Stellan Mörner, Axel Olson, Erik Olson, and Esaias Thorén. Named for a provincial town on the west coast of Sweden where they based themselves during the 1920s and 1930s, the group had their first exhibition at the Galerie Moderne in Stockholm in 1931. Influenced by cubism and constructivism, the Halmstad artists initially worked in a colorful, geometric abstract style before Surrealism began to make a mark on their work in the mid1930s. More and more they synthesized compositional techniques developed from earlier styles with the dreamlike, poetic, and figural aspects of Surrealism. Characteristic of this mixture is Erik Olson’s Ljuset bryter igenom (The Light Breaks Through, 1936), where both biomorphic and tectonic shapes create an almost totally abstract image that also suggests an otherworldly landscape. Mörner’s Den synliga urnan (Invisible Urn, 1936) also demonstrates the dual fascination with coloristic planes that emphasize a structured composition paired with narrative and dreamlike elements. This dual exploration of both aesthetic and compositional choices more aligned to earlier abstract styles in parallel with Surrealist ideas and techniques had an impact on the understanding of the group as either modernist or avant-garde, depending on the point of view. Art 282

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historian Helen Fuchs has documented the reception of the Halmstad artists, demonstrating that contemporary critics in Sweden differentiated between what they viewed as the greater refined aesthetic of the Swedes, which they compared to the more politically engaged and less-artful Danish practitioners (see Fuchs 241–256). But artists from both countries collaborated and exchanged ideas regularly, not least with the participation of the Halmstad group in Kubisme = Surrealisme in Copenhagen in 1935, which Erik Olson, who lived in Copenhagen, where he mixed with the local avant-garde from 1935 to 1944, cocurated. It was in fact Olson who was the initial point of contact for and introduced Bjerke-Petersen to the Surrealist circles in Paris (Paldam, “Denmark” 218–219). Unsurprisingly, it was the Halmstad group that first organized Surrealist exhibitions in Sweden. Already in 1932, the artists held a major international showcase at Galerie Moderne, which coincided with the exhibition Paris 1932 at the National Museum, both in Stockholm. Paris 1932 featured 245 postcubist and Surrealist works by international and Swedish artists such as Picasso, Miró, Ernst, Erik Olson, Otto G. Carlsund, and Eric Grate. A  similar combination of postcubism and Surrealism was on display at the Halmstad exhibition. Paris 1932 helped to draw attention to the Galerie Moderne show and created a robust debate about Surrealism, with critics, as Fuchs has shown, generally acknowledging the group as the face of the new Swedish avant-garde. With the 1932 exhibitions, Surrealism was solidified as an avant-garde force to be reckoned with in Sweden, and by 1934 the Halmstad group was considered Surrealist (Paldam, “Denmark” 245). Three years later, in 1937, Surrealism got its own pan-Scandinavian exhibition with Nordic Surrealism, which took place at Skånska Konstmuseum at Lund University. The show, which also included works by Danes such as Heerup, Clausen, Kernn-Larsen, and Freddie, was popular, with 5,000 people visiting during its two-week duration (246). The large numbers, however, were most likely due to a curious public wanting a peek at the strange spectacle in the quiet university town. Critical reception of the exhibition continued the Danish/ Swedish dichotomy, which Fuchs argues was representative of the 1930s, with critics continuing to position the Danes as sloppy and, at least in the cases of Bjerke-Petersen and Freddie, overly preoccupied with the erotic, versus the Swedes, who they viewed as more cultivated and sophisticated (246–248). By 1939, the Halmstad group was fully established as the representatives of Surrealism in Sweden. In February of that year, the group organized a ten-year retrospective exhibition with more than 600 works at Liljevalchs Konsthall in Stockholm. Like the earlier exhibitions, this iteration was controversial but very well visited. It also witnessed an attempt by the artists to solidify the group’s particular profile as a Swedish avant-garde. Yet both artists and critics debated about how to situate the group and its approach within the larger context of the more political, revolutionary, and provocative ideas of mainstream Surrealism. With the Halmstad group, an ambiguous understanding of the nature of the international connections, influences, and affinities continued to cause tensions as to whether it constituted a local or internationally engaged avant-garde.

Norway, Karen Holtsmark, and Bjarne Rise The account of Surrealism in Scandinavia thus far has focused predominantly on Denmark and Sweden because it was there that the most widespread exchange took place. Indeed, Norway did not witness a sustained relationship with the movement or produce any major organized artists’ groups like Linien or Halmstad. There were two important factors that affected the general development of avant-garde art in Norway: its history as a formerly colonized nation 283

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(at different periods by the other two countries covered here) and the considerable impact of the work of Edvard Munch (1863–1944). In the 1930s, Norwegian artists were still coming to terms with the deeply emotive and expressive work of Munch, who was still alive and producing at that time. Thus, color and painterly facture were important elements that informed artists’ distillation of Surrealism. Nevertheless, there were a few noteworthy exhibitions and artists who adopted a Surrealist idiom in the 1930s. In fact, Norwegian artists were exposed to Surrealism relatively early, primarily through Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, who had, along with his future wife, the Surrealist painter Elsa Thoresen, studied with painter Axel Revold at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts from 1927 to 1929. Bjerke-Petersen’s active participation in the Norwegian art world continued into the 1930s through exhibitions and artistic collaborations, especially with the painters Karen Holtsmark and Bjarne Rise, the two most important proponents of Surrealism in Norway at that time. Further, with the introduction of the Surrealist interest in eroticism, sexuality, and psychoanalysis via Bjerke-Petersen, a public debate emerged about the moral nature of the artistic movement that was similar to that in Sweden. Rise had studied at the academy at the same time as Bjerke-Petersen, where they became friends and shared a studio, and he participated in the Kubisme = Surrealisme exhibition in 1935 with ten works. Characteristic of his work at that time is Abstrakjon II (Abstraction II, 1934 or 1935). Here the lingering influence of Munch’s expressive colorism is apparent where planes of thick color collide across the surface while suggestions of insects and creatures float in undetermined spheres of space. Rise’s connection with Bjerke-Petersen was strong: he wrote an essay for the first issue of Konkretion in 1936 entitled “Følelse, Fornuft, Kontroll” (Emotion, Reason, Control), where he reasoned through these hotly debated issues within a Surrealist context (Rise 14–16). Holtsmark also participated in Bjerke-Petersen’s 1935 exhibition, and her 1931 abstract work Petrouchka, (1934) was reproduced in the exhibition catalog. Like Rise, she also appeared in Konkretion’s first issue, with a short essay discussing her works by none other than the pioneering Norwegian expressionist Henrik Sørensen, who concluded by declaring, “With Karen Holtsmark’s pictures Norwegian color can achieve a whole new movement and new expression. Feeling and thought have found each other” (26–27).7 Reproduced with the essay was Mennesket og Vilkårene (The Human and the Conditions, 1935), which betrays a strong commitment to the architecture of the composition, with multiple planes of opaque color dividing the space, while three semi-biomorphic figures emerge from their recesses to create suggestions of a mysterious narrative. Holtsmark’s work of the 1930s consistently explored this balance between coloristic compositional experimentation and playful Surrealist elements. Both Holtsmark and Rise took part in a group exhibition at the Kunstnerforbundet (The Artists’ Association) in Oslo with Bjerke-Petersen and the Norwegian artist Johanens Rian. And the Norwegians again collaborated with Bjerke Petersen in the 1938 exhibition Konstruktivisme, Neoplasticisme, Abstrakt Kunst, Surrealisme (Constructivism, Neoplasticism, Abstract Art, Surrealism) in Oslo. Organized by Bjerke-Petersen in collaboration with Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, the show, like its Swedish and Danish counterparts, reflected Scandinavian Surrealism’s unabashed attraction to multiple modern and avant-garde styles at once. The attitude toward Surrealism was fairly hostile in Norway and reflective of the relative conservativism of the Norwegian art world and its skeptical attitude to imported styles, not least to those disseminated by former colonizers. This and the lasting influence of Munch meant that Surrealism did not really gain any real staying power in Norway. Indeed, Rise’s relative isolation as one of the few practitioners possibly informed his transition to a more naturalistic painting style after the 1930s, while Holtsmark eventually focused on expressive and colorful landscapes. 284

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Figure 31.1 Rita Kernn Larsen, Festen (The Party), 1935, oil on canvas, Museum Sønderjylland— Kunstmuseum i Tønder. Source: © Rita Kernn Larsen/VISDA.

Scandinavian Synthesis While the purpose of this chapter has been to focus on the unfolding of Surrealism within Scandinavia, the movement’s many exchanges with the region were most certainly not a onesided affair. Many Scandinavian artists partook in crucial Surrealist experiments internationally. While these activities are too numerous to all be listed here, a few warrant mentioning. Erik Olson participated in the Salon des Surindépendants in 1933, and his works, along with those of Bjerke-Petersen and Stellan Mörner, were part of the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936. These artists were also represented in the landmark Exposition internationale du surréalisme in Paris in 1938, which also included works by Esaias Thorén and Elsa Thoresen, whose Atmospheric Landscape was prominently reproduced in Breton’s accompanying Dictionary of Surrealism. It is well worth mentioning that prolific Danish painter Rita Kernn Larsen, one of the handful of women involved in Scandinavian Surrealism, also took part in the London and Paris shows, and she had a solo exhibition at Guggenhiem Jeune in London in 1938—nothing less than the first exhibition Peggy Guggenheim devoted to Surrealism. Characteristic of Kernn Larsen’s style at this time is Festen (The Party, fig. 1, 1935), a work commemorating a rowdy 285

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Surrealist party in Copenhagen in which the artist combines naturalistic and biomorphic elements to depict a dreamlike scenario that balances both celebration and the cerebral while also emphasizing woman’s subjectivity from her own point of view. The nude figure, the artist herself, sits with her back to us, eating a piece of fruit while contemplating a cacophonic mélange of colorful biomorphic beings whose swirling bodies perform a tornado-like dance. She occupies an ambiguous position between active subject and passive object, watcher and watched, imagined and actual. Photos of Kernn Larsen’s work were displayed in Alfred Barr’s 1936 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; mentioned in the accompanying catalog’s chronology of Dada and Surrealism is a “large exhibition” in Copenhagen that “reveal[ed] many Scandinavian Surrealist painters,” further stating there are “photographs of work by Scandinavian Surrealists” presented in the group of “20th century pioneers” at the exhibition (Barr 19, 231, in Hjartarson 51). The development of Surrealism in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway reflects the synthesized nature of the movement in Scandinavia, or what I have termed elsewhere as an “apply and remodel” approach (Greaves 1–32). Such a posture denotes Scandinavian artists’ dexterous ability—developed out of necessity and resourcefulness—to absorb and distill nonimmediate influences and continuously mediating those with local currents while also expressing a healthy skepticism toward any dogmatic art style. This productive and critical approach helped ensure the consequential dissemination of Surrealism beyond France and throughout Scandinavia, while also enhancing our understanding of Surrealism as a multifaceted and far-reaching impulse.

Notes 1. When one takes into account the previously colonized nations and territories making up the Nordic region, such as Finland, Iceland, Greenland, and Sápmi, where Surrealism had a much more sporadic and belated reception, if any at all, things get even more complicated. As such, this brief chapter deals solely with the Scandinavian countries. Of the relatively few publications that touch upon on avantgarde art in these regions, see for example Ingólfsson and Veivo, in Ørum. 2. More and more scholars are arguing how “regional” or “local” manifestations of canonical avant-garde movements present us with a tantalizing array of examples that expand conventional understanding of radical twentieth-century art. In the case of Scandinavian Surrealism, see for example Hjartarson and Noheden in Ørum. 3. The term konkrete (“concrete”) stood in for and was used interchangeably with the word abstraction in Denmark during this period and stemmed from Theo van Doesburg and Breton’s concept of concretion, or the materialization of thought. For more on Linien and Konkretion, see Greaves 33–70. 4. Twelve issues of Linien appeared between January 1934 and April 1935, in addition to a special Christmas number and two additional issues published in connection with the group’s exhibitions in 1937 and 1939. 5. “Vor kunst er en afbildning af de i vort sj leliv (dybet) eksisterende realiteter—deraf ordet: sur-realisme.” Ejler Bille, “Sur-realisme,” Linien 1, no. 1 (January 15, 1934): 1. 6. The foreword was later reprinted in the original French version in Cahiers d’art. See Breton, “Préface aux expositions surrealists” 97–98. 7. “Med Karen Holtsmark’s bilder kan norsk kolorit få en helt ny bevægelighed og et nyt udtryk. Følelse og tanke har fundet hverandre.” Henrik Sørensen, “Tre Bilder ad Karen Holtsmark.”

Works Cited Barr, Alfred H., editor. Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Museum of Modern Art, 1936. Bille, Ejler. “Sur-realisme.” Linien, vol. 1, no. 1, 15 January 1934, p. 1. ———. “To Slags Kunst.” Liniens Udstilling i studenterforeningen. University Students’ Union, 1–15 December 1939, pp. 1–2.

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Scandinavian Surrealism Breton, André. “Forord.” Kubisme  =  Surrealisme: International kunstudstilling, Den frie Udstilling, 15–28 January 1935, pp. 7–12. ———. “Préface aux expositions surrealists de Copenhague et de Tenerife.” Cahiers d’Art, vol. 10, nos. 5–6, 1935, pp. 97–98. Fuchs, Helen. “The Reception of the Halmstad Group in the 1930s.” A Cultural History of the Avant-Gardes in the Nordic Countries, 1925–1950, edited by Tania Ørum et al., Brill Rodopi, 2019, pp. 241–256. Greaves, Kerry. The Danish Avant-Garde and World War II. Routledge, 2019. Hjartarson, Benedikt. “Cosiness and Subversion—From Post-Cubism to Functionalism and ‘Scandinavian Surrealism’.” A Cultural History of the Avant-Gardes in the Nordic Countries, 1925–1950, edited by Tania Ørum et al., Brill Rodopi, 2019, pp. 1–74. Ingólfsson, Aðalsteinn. “The Birth of a Vanguard—Icelandic Art 1940–1950.” A Cultural History of the Avant-Gardes in the Nordic Countries, 1925–1950, edited by Tania Ørum et al., Brill Rodopi, 2019, pp. 272–286. Jansson, Mats. “Crossing Borders. Modernism in Sweden and the Swedish-Speaking Part of Finland.” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe 1880–1940, edited by Peter Brooker et al. Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 666–690. Noheden, Kristoffer. “Expo Aleby, 1949—Wilhelm Freddie, Gösta Kriland and Surrealist Magic Art in Stockholm.” A Cultural History of the Avant-Gardes in the Nordic Countries, 1925–1950, edited by Tania Ørum et al., Brill Rodopi, 2019, pp. 831–848. Ørum, Tania et al., editors. A Cultural History of the Avant-Gardes in the Nordic Countries, 1925–1950. Brill Rodopi, 2019. Paldam, Camilla Skovbjerg. “Erotic Utopia: Free Upbringing, Free Sex, and Socialism.” Utopia. The AvantGarde, Modernism and (Im)Possible Life, edited by David Ayers et al., De Gruyter, 2015, pp. 413–427. ———. “Surrealism in Denmark—Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen’s Book Surrealismen, 1934.” A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries, 1900–1925, edited by Hubert van den Berg et al., Brill Rodopi, 2012, pp. 208–224. Rise, Bjarne. “Følelse, Fornuft, Kontroll.” Konkretion, vol. 1, 15 September 1935, pp. 14–16. Sørensen, Henrik. “Tre Bilder ad Karen Holtsmark.” Konkretion, vol. 1, 15 September 1935, pp. 26–27. Veivo, Harri. “Trajectories, Circulations and Geographical Configurations of the Avant-Garde and Modernism in Finland, 1922–1939.” A Cultural History of the Avant-Gardes in the Nordic Countries, 1925– 1950, edited by Tania Ørum et al., Brill Rodopi, 2019, pp. 459–476.

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32 SURREALIST DIALOGUES IN SOUTH AMERICA María Clara Bernal

During the 1920s and the following decades, Surrealism experienced a unique dissemination throughout Latin America, where it catalyzed cultural drives that took on different nuances in diverse locations. The movement was a vital presence in journals and intellectual groups and networks, and many intellectuals, writers, and artists embraced its proposals and attitudes in their work. However, its role in the development of Latin American art in the postwar period was and remains a topic of debate. Responses to Surrealism ranged from assimilation and adaptation to rejection and opposition, and both of these poles were typically overdetermined by local preoccupations. Authors like Alejo Carpentier and Juan Larrea strongly resisted the notion that certain strains of Latin American literature and art could be described as local epigones of Surrealism, an interpretation that struck them as enforcing a kind of aesthetic colonialism. Instead, they championed the use of the term “magical realism” as a locally generated category. Others viewed Surrealism as a project that had quickly run its course. In February 1930, in Paris, Peruvian writer César Vallejo authored a brief critical report titled “Autopsia del superrealismo” (Autopsy of suprarealism). In this “autopsy,” published in several cultural journals in Latin America—including Nosotros in Buenos Aires, Variedades and Amauta in Lima, Gong in Valparaiso, and Letras in Santiago—Vallejo declared the death of Surrealism and lambasted the movement’s claims to political significance. Later, in his book El arte y la revolución (Art and revolution), Vallejo stated: Intelligence works, and must always work, under the control of reason. Away with Surrealism, a decadent system that openly opposes the Soviet intellectual avant-garde: away with Freudism, away with Bergsonism. Away with “complexes,” “libido,” “intuitions,” and “dreams.” The method of artistic creation is and must be conscious, realist, experimental, scientific. (Vallejo 114) Also in Peru, José Carlos Mariátegui argued just the opposite. In his text “Balance del suprarrealismo” (Stocktaking of suprarealism), published in Variedades in the same year, Mariátegui celebrated the movement’s adherence to Marxist orthodoxy: Rather than launching a Surrealist political program, the movement accepts and adheres to the program of a concrete revolution in the present: the Marxist program 288

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of a proletarian revolution. It acknowledges the validity of the Marxist movement, and of no other movement, when it comes to social, political, and economic issues. It would never think of subjecting politics to artistic rules and preferences. . . . Surrealists only exert their right to nonsense and absolute subjectivism in art; everywhere else they behave reasonably. (Mariátegui 45) Others valued the movement’s potential to unleash what they imagined to be a truly comprehensive revolutionary process and openly instrumentalized Surrealist devices in order to lend a voice to the continent’s own collective psyche. One of them was the Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar, who in 1949 firmly rebutted those who questioned the vitality of Surrealism: It is worth remembering that the first Surrealist game, played with little pieces of paper, produced this verse: “The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.” Look out for this very living dead man who wears the most dangerous costume, that of false absence. Present as never before, there where no one suspects it, he lays his enormous hands on time and prevents it from moving on without him, for its meaning comes from him. (Cortázar 350) Explorations of Surrealism in the Americas were considerably informed by successive waves of travel, migration, and exile. Although André Breton only visited Mexico and the Caribbean, Surrealism’s Latin American incarnation did not hinge on his protagonism, and other travelers made significant contributions to its dissemination. Notable instances include Marcel Duchamp’s stay in Buenos Aires in 1918, Benjamin Péret’s visit to Brazil in 1929, and Roger Caillois’s trip to Buenos Aires in 1939. Although these forays were undoubtedly important, they were not the determining factor in the consolidation of transatlantic Surrealism. In fact, the abundance and complexity of Latin American Surrealism is better understood as the result of a two-way exchange. French Surrealism was known in most of Latin America since its inception. The manifestos were translated and published in Latin America and the Caribbean almost as soon as they were available in Europe.1 Moreover, in the early twentieth century, a growing number of Latin American intellectuals and artists traveled to Paris and Madrid to study and develop their careers, and many of them took an early interest in the Surrealist program. Poets and artists from Latin America who joined the movement in Paris before the Second World War include César Moro from Peru, Roberto Matta from Chile, and the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam. Later, in the 1940s, Latin American artists interacted with the exiled French Surrealists who came to cities like Mexico and New York. This shuttling of individuals, sensibilities, and ideas between Europe and Latin America indexes the movement’s openness to fluid interlocal exchange. As the Italian scholar and collector Arturo Schwarz phrased it: Surrealism could not be Italian, just as it could not be French, Belgian, German, or Spanish. That would be as irrelevant as trying to establish the geographical origins of the person who invented the wheel, the first Surrealist, according to Apollinaire, himself a Surrealist. Like all true creators, Surrealists transcend borders. (Schwarz) Actual trips and virtual journeys, migration and exile: the circulation of images and texts, writers, artists, and intellectuals in transit played a crucial role in the emergence of Surrealism as a cultural phenomenon, and this is particularly true for its Latin American varieties. 289

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Deeply committed to Surrealist ideas, the poet César Moro settled in Paris in 1925, only a year after the Manifesto of Surrealism was published. Proficient in French, he soon became a contributor to the journal Surrealism in the Service of Revolution. The Argentinian painter Antonio Berni reports having met Louis Aragon in Paris in 1926, and in 1928 his compatriot Aldo Pellegrini, a poet, assembled what many describe as the first Surrealist group in Latin America. The group published Qué (What), a journal devoted to tapping the unconscious through manifestos and poetry that challenged conventional uses of language. Although only two issues of Qué were published (in 1928 and 1930), in retrospect it can be said to have played a crucial role in spreading Surrealism in South America, partly due to Pellegrini’s wide network of associates. In a manifesto published in the second issue, the group called for an oneiric utopia directed against conformist society, wholeheartedly aligning themselves with the Surrealist program. Using the pseudonym Esteban Dalid, Elias Piterbarg wrote: A spark will jump out of the jumble of our thoughts to shed light on our enthusiasm, which we offer, and request, so that we may disarrange it all, and straighten the routine on the route of deeply denied affection, and accept the uncertain yet to come, dreams, for ourselves; so that we may certify the tireless rebellion against reality, against all stable forms of living, against any summons to spiritual repose, against any situation in which, refraining from gruesome sacrifice, we conform. (qtd. in Schwartz 470) Qué was the first of what would become a well-connected network of cultural journals and publications created to promote Surrealist experimentation. The network included journals like Mandrágora, published between 1938 and 1943 in Chile by Braulio Arenas, Enrique Gómez-Correa, and Jorge Cáceres. Mandrágora ran for seven issues and featured contributions by authors like Vicente Huidobro, a local precursor of Surrealism. Arenas openly acknowledged that “Mandrágora came directly out of Surrealism” (Baciu 35), and the editorial group as a whole made a sustained effort to maintain contact with other initiatives and intellectuals whom they knew to share their interest in the avant-garde movement, including Moro and Pellegrini. The cluster of publications that gathered those who felt close to the Surrealist ethos included Dyn and El hijo pródigo (The Prodigal Son) in Mexico, El uso de la palabra (The Use of the Word) and Las moradas (The Abodes) in Peru, Tropiques in Martinique, and journals like Amauta in Peru and El Gráfico in Colombia, which, without militantly espousing Surrealist ideas, followed the movement attentively and reported on its development. There were also cases like that of painter Tarsila do Amaral and poet Oswald de Andrade in Brazil, whose Manifesto antropófago (Anthropophagist Manifesto), published in 1928, was certainly written in conversation with Surrealism. Their affinity is explicit in the text, where the Anthropophagists claim that they “already had the Surrealist language” and situate themselves within a lineage that goes “from the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Surrealist revolution” (qtd. in Schwartz 175). However, and in keeping with their anthropophagic principles, they appropriated, or rather “cannibalized,” some aspects of Bretonian Surrealism in response to their own vision of a new direction for local culture. They shared the Surrealist interest in reawakening primitive and mythical dimensions of individual and social life to create an artistic practice that could liberate humankind from bourgeois constraints, and like Breton they relied on Freud’s theories as a resource in their quest for freedom. In addition to these shared interests, the two movements also established an exchange through seminal encounters. On March 24, 1928, their journal Revista de antropofagia published an article entitled “Péret trajo el magnífico coraje de la libertad” (Peret brought the magnificent courage 290

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of freedom) in response to a lecture given by the French Surrealist during a visit to Sao Paulo. Péret then spent two years living in Brazil, from 1929 until 1931, when he was expelled by the government of Getúlio Vargas, which accused him of being a Communist revolutionary. During those two years he published articles in Revista de antropofagia and other journals, promoting the methodologies of automatic writing: You are no longer interested in knowing what is logical and what is not, you no longer want to know what it is that they want to tell you. Write as fast as you can to avoid missing any of the secrets that you confide to yourself, and, above all, do not reread. (Péret, “La escritura” 133)2 A few years later, Moro established yet another node in this complex network. After meeting with Breton in Paris, he returned to Lima and then went on to Mexico, where he wrote La tortuga ecuestre (The Equestrian Turtle), a book of fourteen poems with clear Surrealist inflections. In 1940, still in Mexico, he collaborated with Breton and the Austrian Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen in organizing the Fourth International Exhibition of Surrealism, for whose catalog he wrote an introduction that reads as a true profession of faith: [C]astles hold a thousand secret doors whose springs have not yet been tested, and from the heights of their battlements the night reads, as her eyes protrude high above her head, the thick path of blood that spells the new century’s magic word: Surrealism. (Moro) After returning to Lima in 1948, Moro continued to promote Surrealism until his death, ten years later. These are only a few significant examples of how Latin American intellectuals creatively responded to, embraced, and transformed various aspects of the language, ideas, and methodologies expounded by European Surrealism. Overall, the sensibilities of those who aligned themselves with Surrealism were predominantly attuned to the movement’s capacity to ignite revolutionary flares in their own locations. As the Mexican writer Octavio Paz recalled: [W]e were seduced by its intransigent affirmation of certain values that we regarded— as I still do—as precious among all: imagination, love, and freedom, the only forces capable of consecrating the world and of really making it into an “other.” (qtd. in Nicholson 205) Bearing in mind that the development of Surrealism in Mexico and the Caribbean will be discussed in other chapters of this volume, in the remaining part of this text I would like to focus my attention on the work of two remarkable South American artists, Maria Martins from Brazil and Roberto Matta from Chile, both of whom deployed Surrealist tropes to flesh out their vision of a cultural revolution based on the creation of new myths. As Surrealism scholar Franklin Rosemont puts it, “[t]hroughout the 1940s, one of the Surrealists’ central themes was, precisely, the quest for a new myth: an emancipatory myth that might—just might!—help humankind toward a truly desirable society founded on poetry, freedom, and love” (Rosemont 34). In distinctive ways, both Martins and Matta worked toward assembling just such a new mythology, and they both focused on the creation of landscapes that could function as the setting for unfolding new mysteries. 291

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As Rosemont suggests, the themes of a new mythology and a numinous landscape gradually grew into robust components of the Surrealist repertoire as the movement matured. In two texts published in the journal Minotaure toward the end of the 1930s, Péret evoked the image of a voracious nature eager to overcome any constructed obstacle that may block its path (see Minotaure 10, 20–21 and 12–13, 57–61). The image was addressed as a defiant challenge to the understanding of progress deployed by France as justification for its colonial campaigns, and it portrayed the agency of nature herself as a form of resistance to colonization. According to Péret, in “Equatorial America,” nature exerted a capacity for renewal unchecked by any imposed order. In these territories “the rifle chases the bird that it fails to kill, and the serpent crushes the rifle like a rabbit”3 (Péret, “La nature” 20). Thus, Péret experienced Latin American nature as an unbounded driver of change and transformation and, in that sense, as a new, extrahuman foundation for Surrealist practice. Péret’s poetics are, in many respects, a key source for understanding how encounters with Latin American nature and culture informed the Surrealist interest in myth. The years that he spent living in Brazil and Mexico (1941–1947) had a significant impact on his work, most notably in the compilation of myths, legends, and folk tales that he began to work on in 1942 and which he eventually published in 1960 with the title Anthologie des mythes, légendes et contes populaires d’Amérique (Anthology of Myths, Legends and Folk Tales of America). In these texts, features of the landscape such as volcanoes, jungles, and rivers often function as metaphorical counterparts for bodily and mental states and processes. In their works, Martins and Matta variously explore this play of refracted metaphors linking the natural, the social, the cultural, and the mental.

Maria Martins: Amazonia and the New Myth The 1943 exhibition New Sculptures at the Valentine Gallery in New York marked the beginning of a fruitful relationship between Maria Martins (1894–1972) and the exiled Surrealists. Martins presented a body of work titled Amazonia, consisting of a group of sculptures and a book. The sculptures played with the intertwinement of plant and human bodies to explode the self-contained presence of sculpted form and hint toward cultural frameworks and experiences that overwhelmed the tenets of civilized modernity. The works were enthusiastically received by Breton, who, in his Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Not (1942), had described the new stage of his project as a quest for the Great Transparents, an invisible race of giants camouflaged in nature and tasked with toppling anthropocentrism. Martins’s sculptures of female figures, invested with a charge of ambiguity about the confines of the human, were probably read by Breton as contributions to this new program. As he put it: To begin with, we must question the universe about man, and not man about the universe. This is a prelude to Maria’s great acrobatic chords, to the tour de force of this total flexibility in the rigid, this is no “lost wax,” these are the saps. (Breton and Duchamp 124) Breton described Martins as one of those artists who were “connected as if by a thread, near or far, to the equatorial belt of the globe” (Breton) and whose work could thus produce powerful geographical dislocations that could allow viewers anywhere in the world, even in midtown Manhattan, to reconnect with primordial nature. He interpreted these artists as bearers of an important message about the urgent need to re-establish contact with the earth and rekindle a

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connection with nature. Recounting his own experience of the show at the Valentine Gallery, he wrote: [I]t was the Amazon itself which sang in her work that I had the joy to admire in New York in 1943. With all its voices from time immemorial, it sang of the passion of man, from birth until death, condensed, as it were, in symbols more all-encompassing than all others. . . . Maria, better than anyone, was able to tap into the primitive source of her origin, and draw forth wings and flowers, owing nothing to sculpture, past or present. (Breton) At the opening reception, Martins explained that it was while cruising over the Amazon in an airplane during her latest trip to Brazil that the beauty of the land, the river, and the tropical forest had motivated her to delve deeper into myths and to cultivate new ways of expressing them (Gómez and Martins). The series Amazonia depicts the region as a “land of metamorphosis,” a processual nature visualized through a syncretism of the human body and the natural elements. This view is paradigmatically rendered in figures like Iacy, whose arms stray from her body and become forest vines, transforming her body into a tree trunk, or Yemenjá, whose hair seems to meld into a mixture of seaweed species. Martins used myth as a field of significations within which to develop this metamorphosis of the female figure into nature, an interest that clearly accounts for her mutual affinities with Surrealism. Thus, she created a range of Brazilian female figurations of the rain forest with which she rephrased, in a different key, Péret’s idea that nature ought to overcome and devour civilization. The exhibition also included a book with photographs of some sculptures and texts written by Martins based on the orally transmitted cosmogonies of Brazil’s indigenous and Afrodescendant communities. The texts refer to the governing forces of nature in mythological terms, evoking monsters that lurk in the humid nights of the jungle, and visualizing the creative and destructive vectors that configured Amazonia as space for her own yearnings and desires. In these sculptures and texts, Martins assembled a codex of metamorphoses that functions as the key to her unique interpretation of the Surrealist program.

Roberto Matta’s Surrealist Landscapes Along with Wifredo Lam and Frida Kahlo, Roberto Matta (1911–2002) was one of the few Latin American artists to figure in André Breton’s book Surrealism and Painting. In 1933, Matta traveled to Paris to study architecture with Le Corbusier. In 1935, during a brief stay in Madrid, he met the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Captivated by his drawings, the poet referred Matta to Salvador Dalí, who in turn introduced him to Breton. But the repercussions of his encounter with García Lorca went far beyond these introductions. In 1936 Matta wrote a filmscript entitled La tierra es un hombre (Earth Is a Man) to honor García Lorca, who had been murdered the previous summer. Describing how the script came about, Matta wrote: Between 11 at night and 4 in the morning, I set myself to write as if I were a camera in the center of a seed, in the center of the earth, in the center of sperm. . . . I was sinking in quicksand; everything that was familiar to me was losing its value. I felt another materiality, I was about to change. (Matta)

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Figure 32.1 María Martins, Iacy, 1943, bronze, 30 × 13 × 8 in. Source: Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Gift of Colonel J. W. Flanagan through Mrs. Jesse Jones. Photograph ©The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, photo by Thomas R. DuBrock.

The story, if one can call it that, has three characters: two mother figures and a son, with very little dialogue. Although the script describes tracking shots that follow the different characters, it often deviates into a kind of automatic poetry conceived in mental images. In scene 32, for instance, Matta writes: “[I]n a 24-hour landscape he walks in heat and moon through flights and steps. In heels and backs he dances, for he knows that he is a name” (Matta). The script ends with the following sentence: “To grow from song-shaped clouds. Tracking shots of falling through the feast of stars” (Matta). Although it is difficult to imagine how a director might have interpreted the script if the film had actually been made, it seems clear that

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Matta was looking for ways to construct a uniquely psychological kind of landscape through visual imagery. The following year, Matta met the British artist Gordon Onslow Ford, with whom he shared an interest in the fourth dimension. Their mutual exploration of the topic led Matta to conceive a new field of study that he called “psychological morphology,” which he defined in 1938 as: [A] graph of the transformations produced by the absorption and emission of energies in the object, from its initial appearance until its final form in the geodesic medium of the mind. . . . In the terrain of consciousness, a psychological morphology would be the graph of ideas. It should be conceived before optical images provide us with a form for these ideas, if we want to remain within the medium in transformation. (qtd. in Constantini and Wechsler 102) With this complex concept, Matta was attempting to capture those psychological spaces that configure a kind of previsual oneiric background. Until then, Matta had been working on automatic painting-drawings, but following his conceptualization of psychological morphology, all his work was permeated by the sense of a primordial landscape. This new framework also allowed Matta to materialize the ideas underlying his 1936 script, no longer as a film, but as one of his most renowned paintings, which bears the same title. La tierra es un hombre (Earth is a Man) (1941) portrays an apocalyptic, moonlike landscape with a sun that sheds gob-like rays that seem to sink into the soil. As he later explained, the painting purports to visualize a kind of psychic geography, and it can arguably be understood as an example of what Paalen described as “totemic landscapes.” Paalen coined this notion in the 1940s to denote a kind of space constituted by the inextricable entwinement of a natural setting and its inhabitants.4 In Paalen’s view, such landscapes were not simply experienced by their inhabitants as a useful storage of resources but rather enabled a transcendental connection with plants, bodies of water, and mountains. In the same spirit, Matta developed his intuitions in a series of paintings inspired by the idea of an earthly explosion brought on by the violent surfacing of subcontinental energies. In this Surrealist framework, volcanic eruptions evoked the convulsed potentialities of beauty, of a matter that was experienced as both enchanting and dangerous in its hidden presence, looking for cracks through which to bloom, shapeless but capable of solidifying and reconfiguring the landscape. This brief survey of Latin American writers and artists who worked in synchronicity with Surrealist thought and practice during the first half of the twentieth century shows that a multiple and complex set of convergences enabled a truly interlocal exchange of cultural sensibilities. As we have seen, in certain Latin American cities, incoming news about European Surrealism often resonated with local practices that went in the same direction, while the movement was differently received and relayed by Latin American artists and writers living outside of their native countries, who maintained their connections back home and created vital networks. Despite skepticism on the part of intellectuals like Carpentier, Larrea, and Vallejo, Surrealism played an undeniable role in intensifying progressive cultural debate in Latin America, and it did so through its capacity to create a space for encounters between intellectuals and artists who were interested in liberation as a multidimensional endeavor. The pursuit of a new myth, set in a new landscape, was the opening door for many Latin American creators who, like Martins and Matta, sought to imagine freedom as a truly encompassing overhaul of so-called “civilized modernity.”

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Notes 1. Journals like Martin Fierro and Proa in Argentina and El Gráfico in Colombia published the translated version of the first manifesto as early as 1925. 2. This text was published in 1967 in the journal A phala, accompanied by an editorial note that reads: “This text was handwritten by Elsie Houston and signed by Péret, who brought it to the editors of the journal Diário da noite, which did not print it. Probable date: 1929.” 3. By “Equatorial America” Péret meant rain forest areas of Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and the Guyanas. 4. When he published “Paysage totémique I” in the first issue of his own journal, Dyn (1942, pp. 46–50), Paalen was in the process of distancing himself from orthodox Surrealism to find a second life for the movement in the Americas.

Works Cited Baciu, Stefan. Surrealismo latinoamericano: Preguntas y respuestas. Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso, 1979. Breton, André. Preface to Maria Martins’s exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery, 1947. Breton, André, and Marcel Duchamp. Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain. D’Arcy Galleries, 1960. Constantini, Maria Teresa, and Diana Beatriz Wechsler. Los Surrealistas: Insurrectos, iconoclastas y revolucionarios en Europa y América. Longseller, 2005. Cortázar, Julio. “Un cadáver viviente.” Realidad, vol. 15, no. 5, 1949, pp. 349–350. Mariátegui, José Carlos. “Balance del suprarrealismo.” Variedades, 19 February 1930. Matta, Roberto. “La tierra es un hombre” (film script), unpublished manuscript, 1936. Getty Research Institute. Moro, César. Introduction to the catalog Exposición Surrealista. Galería Inés Amor, 1939. Nicholson, Melanie. Surrealism in Latin American Literature: Searching for Breton’s Ghost. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Péret, Benjamin. “La escritura automática.” A phala: Revista do movimento Surrealista, no. 1, 1967, pp. 133–134. ———. “La nature dévore le progrès et le dépasse.” Minotaure, no. 10, 1937, pp. 20–21. Rosemont, Franklin. Introduction to André Breton, Martinique: Snake Charmer. University of Texas Press, 2008. Schwartz, Jorge. Las vanguardias latinoamericanas: textos programáticos y críticos. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002. Schwarz, Arturo. Dadá y Surrealismo. Malba, 2004.

Vallejo, César. El arte y la revolución. Mosca Azul, 1973.

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33 SURREALISM AND SPAIN Maite Barragán

Spanish Surrealism consists of two intertwined stories. The best-known narrative recounts how artists Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, and Oscar Domínguez became fixtures of André Breton’s inner circle in Paris in the 1920s and played a central role in transforming Surrealist engagement with visual arts and cinema. All four artists pioneered techniques and advanced theoretical premises that elevated the philosophical bases of the movement. This chapter is concerned with the other account—one of equal importance and that predates the participation of the latter three artists in the Parisian milieu. A focus on the Iberian networks, especially that of the Madrid nucleus, reveals the exchanges that informed the avant-garde activity in Spain. Specifically, the Surrealist work of Maruja Mallo functions as an entry point for understanding how the individuals who participated in the peninsula’s cultural dialogues shaped Surrealism inside and outside of Spain. To comprehend how Surrealism developed in Spain and to assess its impact, it is worth examining the state of the avant-garde in Spain before 1924, the year that marks the official launch of the movement, with the publication of Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism.” Narratives that rely on singular episodes like the 1909 translation and publication of the futurist manifesto in the literary magazine Prometeo or the 1912 cubist exhibit in Barcelona’s Galeries Dalmau—the first Cubist exhibit outside of Paris—obfuscate the reality of a rather hesitant and anemic Spanish avant-garde (Vidal 9–10). Early introductions to vanguard innovations had limited influence; not until the cataclysmic Great War, when numerous international artists escaped the conflict in neutral Spain, did Cubism, Orphism, Vibrationism, Rayonism, and other isms attract wider attention (Julián 90; García García 229–233). Even then, the fragmentary character of the Spanish avant-garde persisted, accentuated by the uneven support for artistic activity across Spain (Ades 71). Barcelona, an industrialized and prosperous city, was best positioned to take the lead, as it maintained the most significant connections with Paris and had greater support for the arts due to the political separatist objectives of Catalan nationalists. The wealthy bourgeois class invested in local artists as part of a deliberate strategy to differentiate Catalan culture from the Castilian culture promoted by the central government. They sought to project the cosmopolitanism and international prominence of their region—and especially that of the region’s capital. Josep Dalmau, an antiquarian and art dealer, emerged as a crucial figure in the promotion of modern art and the development of Surrealism in Catalonia. As the owner of the Galeries Dalmau, he facilitated milestone events, including DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-37

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the introduction of André Breton to Spain in 1922, when the Frenchman spoke at an opening of a Francis Picabia exhibit, as well as Dalí’s earliest solo exhibit in 1925 (Bonet 191–192; Neira 124, 137). In 1920, Dalmau had sponsored Miró’s trip to Paris, which led to the painter’s early association with future Surrealists. Like Picasso, Miró never officially joined the ranks of the Surrealists, but his art was pivotal for Breton’s vision of a Surrealist revolution that could transform all creative forms. Miró’s ties with Dalmau and cultural critics like Sebastià Gasch and J. V. Foix ensured that his Parisian success reverberated in the Catalan press and influenced another generation of artists, including a young Dalí (García Gallego 358–360). Outside of Catalonia, where modern art saw even less support, Surrealism proved to be a dramatic shift for the avant-garde. The movement’s expansive potential—including its Freudian foundation, experimental techniques, and celebration of irreverence—appealed at first to writers and later to visual artists. Most artists rejected Breton’s doctrinaire Surrealism but nonetheless adopted its approaches, such as exalting dreams and chance, seeing in them valid and valuable modes for unleashing creativity (Morris 160). But it was not only Surrealism’s inherent flexibility that helped the style take root. Art historian Lucía García de Carpi argues that Surrealism, unlike previous movements, benefited from an especially receptive public in Spain, where Freudian ideas had already permeated intellectual circles due in part to philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (22–23, 28–29). Ortega y Gasset, among the best-known public intellectuals, referenced Freud in his philosophical analyses of human subjectivity, and in his role as editor and collaborator in newspapers and academic journals, he helped introduce Freud and psychoanalysis in Spain (Glick 539–542). It was Ortega y Gasset’s recommendation that propelled the translation and 1922 publication of Freud’s work. Only two short months after the appearance of the Surrealist manifesto in France, news of it appeared in the Ortega y Gasset–headed Revista de Occidente, a journal committed to strengthening intellectual discourses between Spain and Europe. Fernando Vela introduced Surrealism to the readers of Revista de Occidente and explained the manifesto’s references to the unconscious and automatism (419–423). Surrealism, then, appeared to level what intellectuals and artists saw as the historically uneven fields of play between the international and Spanish modern cultural scenes. By the 1930s, Surrealism resonated across Spain, with active hubs in Madrid, Catalonia, Tenerife, and Zaragoza.1 Artists educated and established in Catalonia, including Artur Carbonell, Antoni Clavé, Leandre Cristòfol, Ramón Marinel.lo, Ángel Planells, and Eudald Serra, had access to a more amenable local market and to a responsive press. Madrid’s universities and art academies drew artists from disparate regions, including Alfonso Buñuel (Luis Buñuel’s brother, both originally from Aragon); José Caballero, Alfonso Ponce de León, Antonio Rodríguez Luna (all three from Andalusia); Francisco Lasso (from the Canary Islands); and Nicolás de Leukona (from the Basque Country), where they were exposed to Surrealist modalities. Despite the Spanish capital’s conservative cultural environment, the city provided the setting for early interactions and the formation of crucial relationships. These figures, in turn, were critical to the emergence of the Tenerife- and Zaragoza-based Surrealist groups; neither location had a history of avant-garde activity before Surrealism. Much of the early scholarship on Surrealism in Spain focuses on whether referring to artists as Surrealist is appropriate, since so many of them, including some of the most famous exponents like poet Rafael Alberti and filmmaker Buñuel, insisted on having no prior knowledge or interest in the movement, rejected the label, or recoiled at the notion of being conscripted into any sort of movement (Navas Ocaña 553–554; Edwards 22–23). Indeed, except for the Futuristinspired Ultraístas, Spanish artists generally worked as individuals and did not create coherent programs or carry out concerted pursuits. And Surrealist activity followed suit; no groups were intent on participating in Breton’s project. So-called “little magazines” and periodicals that 298

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formed crucial nodes in the Spanish and Latin American avant-garde networks echoed—or perhaps shaped—artists’ apprehension about official integration into any group. Within their pages, little magazines introduced readers to Surrealism alongside other isms. Alfar (1924–1950), Les Amics des les Arts (1926–1929), D’Ací De Allá (1918–1936), and Hèlix (1929–1930) attempted to showcase the expansive plurality of modern movements without officially associating the publications with the principles of any one artistic movement or political ideology (de Diego with Brihuega 55–56). The ambivalent articles of La Gaceta Literaria (1927–1931), a significant promoter of the avant-garde in Spain—thanks to its outstanding roster of writers—exemplify the internal wrangling of Spanish periodicals. The publication of a 1927 article by Gasch offered an overview of modern art, beginning with Cubism, but he situated Surrealism as the opposite of the rationality represented by Purists and therefore condemned the convulsive movement as neo-Romantic and instinct-driven (5). A few years later, in a 1930 interview with Dalí, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, the editor of La Gaceta Literaria, called Buñuel and Dalí’s first film collaboration, Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog), brilliant. But he quickly dismissed L’Age d’or (The Golden Age), a film he declared as profoundly bourgeois and lacking the individualism of the earlier film (3). Both Gasch’s and Giménez Caballero’s critiques disclose a certain discomfort with harnessing an individual artist’s creativity to advance what they perceived as Breton’s dogmatic collective. Gaceta de Arte (1932–1936), published in Tenerife, is unique in this sense, as its founders officially associated their enterprise with Breton’s Surrealist group after his visit to the island in 1935 to attend a Surrealist art exhibit. Before Breton’s sojourn, Gaceta de Arte had promoted Surrealism alongside Bauhaus’s architectural rationalism, social realism, and international Constructivism (Bonet 260–261; “Boletín internacional de surrealismo”). During the 1930s, within the increasingly polarized political climate of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939), Surrealists in Spain began to more explicitly align their creative output with their political ideologies. Art historian Robin Adèle Greeley argues that, up to that point, the style had functioned primarily to demonstrate modernity through its aesthetics rather than as a stylistic revolutionary tool toward a determinate social transformation (99). Early Surrealist expressions were made to fulfill both left- and right-wing agendas—an especially notable divergence with the French movement, in which Breton had forced questions of politics and ethics as he became insistently vocal about Surrealists’ role in the socialist revolution. When politics appeared in Spanish Surrealism, these were provoked by the growing political tensions that ultimately set off the Spanish Civil War in 1936 (99). But speaking of Spanish Surrealism as politically untethered and as a mere formalist approach limits our understanding of how the embrace of Surrealist innovations effectively operated as an act of rejection of the rationalist and regenerationist vision that the elite intellectual class of Spain had been developing since the late 1890s. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War (1898), which resulted in the loss of any remnants of Spain’s overseas empire, intellectuals of the Generación del ’98 (Generation of 1898) grappled with Spain’s weakened status on the world stage. Thus, they positioned themselves as the leaders of a project aimed at national regeneration, a project that would elevate Spain to the standards of other European powers (Balfour 25). This generation of intellectuals fervently believed that rationalist ideologies and systemic order were crucial to Spain’s renewal, but these beliefs appeared increasingly incongruous in the face of a post–Great War reality of new radical politics and rampant modernization. Beginning in the 1920s, artists who explored Surrealist transgressions represented a challenge to the sociocultural status quo of conservative Spain. Importantly, these Surrealist artists also evidenced their integration into the European avant-gardes while forcefully focusing their production as a rejection of the passé and pernicious rationality and bourgeois sentimentality they perceived in the regenerationist enterprise. 299

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The Emergence of a Spanish Surrealist Style Despite the instability of affiliations among artists who introduced explorations of the unconscious and desire, Surrealism was a tool to repudiate moral and time-honored aesthetic values and explore the boundaries of eroticism and degradation. Examinations of eschatological and scatological themes, sexual desire, and suppressed appetites characterize the early Surrealist activity. Maruja Mallo offers an especially compelling case study in her painting series Sewers and Belfries (Cloacas y campanarios) (1928–1932), which attacked the dominant culture of the conservative Catholic country. Before this series, Mallo was best known for her paintings of popular themes, including her famous series of picturesque verbenas, or fairs. Rather than romanticizing the events, the colorful paintings balanced the chaotic sensorial charge of the celebrations along with innovative compositions that attest to her knowledge of modern art. Her other paintings of sports equipment or shop windows similarly evince her immersion in avant-garde discourses as a woman fully engaged in the discourses of modernity. She arrived in Madrid in 1922 to study art at the Academia San Fernando and became friends with her classmate Salvador Dalí, who in turn introduced her to his friends, the young Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel. Mallo is firmly ensconced within the Generation of 1927, the group of young writers and artists who came of age in the late 1920s. Her friendships and interactions established her place within the dialogues of early Spanish Surrealism in Madrid. Although the Spanish capital’s public institutions did not promote the avant-gardes—and Madrid lacked the robust art market of Barcelona—some of the most significant events of Surrealism took place in the capital, and a unique style gestated there. Specifically, the elite Residencia de Estudiantes (Student Residence), a university dormitory for men, and its companion institution, the Residencia de Señoritas (Young Ladies’ Residence) for women, became focal points of creative activity. The initial meeting and early collaborations of Dalí, future director Buñuel, and the poet and playwright García Lorca took place in the Residencia de Estudiantes. The Residencia did not merely offer room and board; it was designed as an immersive educational program for the future leaders of Spain. In 1925, as part of the Residencia’s conference cycle devised to complement residents’ university education by allowing them to engage with preeminent European thinkers, Louis Aragon presented his stream-of-consciousness-styled “Surréalisme” lecture (Aragon 23–25; Bergamín 21).2 Aragon’s speech referred to Surrealism not merely as an aesthetic or psychic phenomenon but as a revolt in all areas of life—and the threshold where present and past confronted each other. In the years leading up to Mallo’s Sewers and Belfries series, one can trace the circulation of Surrealist ideas, the sources of inspiration, and the nascent contours of a distinctive strain of Surrealism in Spain. Den of Fossils (Antro de fósiles), a spectral landscape of darkened earth strewn with skeletons and elements of debris, embodies the aesthetics and objectives of the peninsula’s Surrealists. Mallo depicts sharply outlined artifacts within a murky realm defined by unstable rules of perspective. An aged hypostyle hall structure recalls the highly ordered metaphysical landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico, but unlike the enigmatic qualities of de Chirico’s compositions, Mallo’s desolate scene oscillates between the ordinary and the abject. Lizards crawl across the canvas, worn-out horseshoes lie half buried in the dirt, and a tattered sole of a shoe remains suspended, never to fall to the ground. A broken amphora discharges smoke, and another holds up the pole of a ragged, blackened flag as if to signal some sort of conflict. Prostrate skeletons and a dead frog explicitly reference death. The lifeless animal’s twisted legs echo those of the human remains, as if to suggest that mortality—human or otherwise—is not transcendental but merely mundane. Literary scholar Robert Havard describes Mallo’s paintings as containing an “aura of apocalypse and spiritual dilapidation,” whereby the discarded objects ultimately reveal 300

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a “haunting human presence, axiomatic in a footprint or discarded clothes.” The seemingly random elements create the disorienting atmosphere that Surrealists sought (100). Den of Fossils reveals Mallo’s academic training as well as her refusal to bow to its strict rules. Rather than experiment with automatism or introduce new media or techniques, the painting’s facture is quite traditional. Mallo works in a highly organized manner that recalls the strong influence of Purists and the Return to Order in Spain. But the subject matter deviates from the genres of academic painting. In 1937, Mallo described how the desolate, nightmarish series— with its references to destruction and the inclusion of cassocks and frock coats—functioned as a critique and revealed her anticlerical sentiment (Zanetta 115). Although at that point she did not position the artworks within a Surrealist framework, her description speaks to the period’s cultural tensions and reveals how Surrealism was primed to explore such themes. Indeed, this painting acts as a point of convergence for two modalities of Surrealism in Madrid: the analysis and definition of the putrefacto, or putrid, as critique, and the exploration and engagement with the local geographies, specifically the outskirts of Madrid. Mallo’s attention to decaying matter, excrement, and ruins unifies the Sewers and Belfries series and evokes the discourses of Dalí, Buñuel, and other Residentes. The group coined putrefacto as a category that defines anyone and anything that they believed represented the old values they considered bankrupt, including sentimentality, the outdated, and the anachronistic. According to them, the putrefacto mired Spain in a stultifying stasis, preventing it from advancing. Expressions of distaste for anything deemed putrefacto functioned as a rebellious challenge to social order. Dalí, Buñuel, and Lorca sought to antagonize whatever they perceived as passé

Figure 33.1 Maruja Mallo, Antro de fósiles (Den of Fossils), oil on canvas, 1930. Source: Collection Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VEGAP, Madrid.

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and nostalgic of bourgeois standards—the very standards which with all three had been raised— rather than use the putrefacto as part of a strategic plan to propel a renewal of Spanish culture (Greeley 70–75; Mainer 212–213). But the visual vocabulary that developed around the putrid provided Dalí with some of the Surrealist imagery he consistently deployed throughout his career. His unfinished collaboration with Lorca, Libro de los putrefactos (Book of the Putrid) (1925–1926), reveals the extent to which Dalí developed the concept. Un Chien andalou presented the idea to the public: the scene where two dead, rotting donkeys lie atop pianos being dragged by ropes immortalized a private jape of the Residencia friends. It has been interpreted as a critique of Modernist writer Juan Ramón Jiménez, a representative of the older generation and a one-time resident of the Residencia de Estudiantes, whom Dalí and Buñuel scorned, seeing him as the embodiment of conventional values. The film telegraphs their shared opinion of what they saw as the saccharine sentimentality of Jiménez’s most famous book, Platero and I (Platero y yo), about a boy and his donkey (Gala 476–477). The putrefacto revolted against the standard order and resonated with Surrealist ideas while fully attending to the reality of Spain. But Mallo’s composition should not be perceived as a replica of her peers’ obsessions. Her work was never explicit or parodic and instead resonates with her careful study of the local—both art historical and geographic. These dark, ominous paintings recall Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings as well as the early-twentieth-century tremendista paintings by José Gutiérrez Solana, which emphasize the grim and the grotesque. Both Goya and Solana, celebrated as individualists, remained committed to Spain while denouncing the country’s moral decay, an undertaking equally present in Mallo’s oeuvre. Mallo’s acknowledgment of a local history of art inserted her into the Spanish artistic tradition, but her artwork also speaks to her lived experience in the outskirts of Madrid. Beginning around 1928, she frequently accompanied sculptor Alberto Sánchez and painter Benjamín Palencia on their five-kilometer journeys into the northern outskirts of Madrid. They began their journeys at the edge of the city and followed train tracks until they arrived in Vallecas, a poor rural municipality that evidenced the uneven development of modernization. Other artists, like Pancho Lasso, and poets, like Rafael Alberti, Miguel Hernández, and Pablo Neruda, at times joined the artists. Alberto and Palencia, the two leaders of this loose collective, sought to create a local art that could compete with the international avant-garde. Through an emphasis on material and form, the result has been called a “telluric Surrealist” aesthetic that uniquely responded to the conditions of the territory. Art historian Eugenio Carmona argues that they were inspired by the principles expounded in Cahiers d’Art, as the revue tended toward a more evocative and poetic handling of materials and never aligned with the orthodox Surrealism of Breton (Carmona, “Materias” 122–125). Palencia and Alberto responded to the Vallecas environs with biomorphic aesthetics that were well suited to the themes of nature, erosion, and rural life they explored; their art elevated the terrain as a site of potential renewal and transformation. But while Mallo’s Sewers and Belfries shared the source of inspiration in these journeys, her depictions concentrate on themes of displacement, abandonment, and inattention of a languishing territory. Reveling in the waste, debris, destruction, and decomposition present in Vallecas, artworks by Mallo critiqued the bourgeois romanticization of the countryside and transformed the sites into evidence of Spain’s decline (Carmona, “Tres consideraciones” 130, 134; Sánchez Vidal 71, 82–85). Sewers and Belfries is a point of convergence for two facets of the evolving Spanish Surrealism. Mallo relied on Surrealist modes of inner exploration to produce imaginary landscapes tied to her lived physiographic experience. And like Dalí and Buñuel, she included motifs related to the Catholic Church to ascribe part of the blame for Spain’s degeneration to this powerful institution. In so doing, she was able to imbue the series with biting social denunciation 302

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and anticlericalism and appeal to viewers’ emotions without relying on the hollow sentimentality of putrefactos. Surrealism in Spain functioned as a tool of rebellion—rejecting the old order and bringing attention to the underlayers of Spanish reality—and an experimental style that sought new mechanisms for exploring the conditions of modernity.

Breakthroughs and Breakdowns Surrealism’s presence in Spain was undeniable by the 1930s. Spanish participation in Surrealist exhibits abroad, including the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition, which included artworks by Dalí, Domínguez, Miró, Mallo, and Planells, evidences the international resonance of Spanish Surrealist production. The 1935 Surrealist object exhibit in Tenerife and the 1936 Logic-phobist (Logicofobista) exhibit in Barcelona proclaimed the success of the movement in Spain. An essential part of most artists’ trajectory included travel to France—Mallo, for example, exhibited the Sewers and Belfries series during her nine-month stay, and Breton purchased one of the paintings. The artists who decided to establish themselves in Paris became channels that strengthened the connections between Spanish experimentation and international networks. Notably, Oscar Domínguez’s induction into Breton’s circle generated momentum for the Tenerife group. More important still was Dalí, who left Spain and reignited the Parisian movement’s engagement with visual art when he joined in 1929. By then, Breton’s domination of the Paris group had weakened due to questions of political alliances and challenges to his vision for the movement’s objectives. Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method expanded the potential forms of engagement past automatism in painting. Paranoia, as a mental disorder, became the source of a new form of Surrealist engagement that explored the latent possibilities of the information an individual observes. For Dalí, paranoiacs’ neurosis distorted reality and allowed them to find evidence that fit their individual delusions, that is, those delusions disproved the existence of a fully objective reality and fueled Dalí’s exploration of double images that resisted any singular interpretation. He also sought to uncover potential hidden meanings in popular culture and art, as exemplified in his analysis of Jean François Millet’s Angelus (Mendelson 189–194). The 1931 establishment of the Second Spanish Republic and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 transformed Spain’s artistic landscape. For some former advocates of Surrealism—like Giménez Caballero, who had experimented with Surrealist writing and collage techniques—it led to the wholesale rejection of the movement. In this polarized historical moment, the battle being waged was between the preservation of individual creative freedom that characterized earlier Surrealist activity and the introduction of ideological stances that connected artistic production to the political moment. The clearest manifestation of Surrealism’s political positioning appeared in the Spanish Republic’s Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. Alberto, Buñuel, and Miró coordinated or exhibited their work in the building, while Picasso’s Guernica and Miró’s The Reaper, made specifically for the venue, represent the culmination of Spanish Surrealism’s political commitment. The 1939 Republican defeat and establishment of the Franco regime led many Surrealist artists, including Alberto, Mallo, Eugenio Granell, José Moreno Villa, and Remedios Varo, into exile. Some, like Varo, who found great success in Mexico, continued to engage Surrealist motifs. Others, like Alberto, who was exiled in Moscow and abandoned his sculptural practice for years, disappeared from the Spanish cultural networks for decades. Mallo continued to work and moved past Surrealist tendencies, refocusing her paintings on an examination of order and structure, concepts that had always been present in her work; by the 1980s, she declared the identification of her work with Surrealism (Mallo 189–194). In Spain, Franco’s government did not promote modern art, and the artists who remained in the country, such as Palencia, 303

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returned to more traditional styles so as not to bring attention to themselves. Nonetheless, Surrealist practices remained crucial for the rebirth of modern art in Spain, most visibly in the emergence of Dau al Set, a Surrealist collective of artists that emerged in 1948. Not surprisingly, the group appeared in Catalonia, where Surrealism had the strongest roots and one of the regions that suffered the greatest suppression under Franco’s regime. Dau al Set adopted Surrealist ideas, including the valorization of instinctual feeling and an interest in the re-evaluation and displacement of everyday objects as part of their artistic political project (Dent Coad 299–300; Sturm 386). Thus, even under the oppressive dictatorship, Surrealism continued to exert influence and forge resistance against authoritarian order and control.

Notes 1. García Carpi points out the importance of speaking of Surrealism in the Catalonia region as there were active Surrealist hubs outside of Barcelona (30–31). 2. The Residencia’s conference program brought to Spain an impressive array of speakers, including Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Max Jacob, and Paul Valéry, among others.

Works Cited Ades, Dawn. “Internationalism and Eclecticism: Surrealism and the Avant-Garde in Painting and Film 1920–1930.” Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction, edited by Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, Oxford Univesity Press, 1995, pp. 71–79. Aragon, Louis. “Fragments d’une conference.” La Révolution Surréaliste, 15 July 1925, pp. 23–25. Balfour, Sebastian. “The Loss of Empire, Regenerationism, and the Forging of a Myth of National Identity.” Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction, edited by Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, Oxford Univesity Press, 1995, pp. 25–32. Bergamín, José. “Nominalismo supra-realista.” Alfar, May 1925, p. 21. Boletín internacional del surrealismo. October 1935, no. 2. Bonet, Juan Manuel. Diccionario de las vanguardias de España 1907–1936, Alianza Editorial, 2007. Carmona, Eugenio. “ ‘Materias creando un paisaje’. Benjamín Palencia, Alberto Sánchez y el ‘reconocimiento estético’ de la naturaleza agraria. 1930–1933.” El Surrealismo en España 1924–1939, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1994, pp. 117–155. ———. “Tres Consideraciones sobre la Escuela de Vallecas.” Alberto, 1895–1962, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2001, pp. 123–138. Coad, Emma Dent. “Painting and Sculpture: The Rejection of High Art.” Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction, edited by Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 299–304. De Diego, Estrella with Brihuega, Jaime. “Art and Politics in Spain, 1928–36.” Art Journal, vol. 52, no. 1, 1993, pp. 55–60. Edwards, Gwynne. A Companion to Luis Buñuel. Tamesis, 2005. Gala, Candelas. “De la parodia al patetismo: Lorca, Dalí y Buñuel.” Cauce Revista internacional de filología, comunicación y sus didácticas, nos. 22–23, 1999–2000, pp. 469–488. García de Carpi, Lucía. “La respuesta Española.” El Surrealismo en España 1924–1939, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1994, pp. 21–44. García Gallego, Jesús. “La recepción del Surrealismo en Cataluña.” Imágenes de Francia en las letras hispánicas, edited by Francisco Lafarga, Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, 1989, pp. 355–364. García García, María Isabel. “La influencia de los artistas extranjeros en la vanguardia española (1910– 1950).” El Arte español al final del siglo XX: su perspectiva al final del milenio, edited by Miguel Cabañas Bravo, Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2001, pp. 229–238. Gasch, Sebastiá. “La moderna pintura francesa: Del cubismo al superrealismo.” La Gaceta Literaria, October 1927, p. 5. Giménez Caballero, Ernesto. “El escándalo de L’age d’or en París: Palabras con Salvador Dalí.” La Gaceta Literaria, 15 December 1930, p. 3. Glick, Thomas F. “The Naked Science: Psychoanalysis in Spain, 1914–1948.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 24, no. 4, 1982, pp. 533–571.

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Surrealism and Spain Greeley, Robin Adèle. Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War. Yale University Press, 2006. Havard, Robert. The Crucified Mind, Rafael Alberti and the Surrealist Ethos in Spain. Tamesis, 2001. Julián, Inmaculada. “Las artes plásticas del siglo XX en España.” El arte español al final del siglo XX: su perspectiva al final del milenio, edited by Miguel Cabañas Bravo, Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2001, pp. 89–104. Mainer, José Carlos. La Edad de Plata (1902–1939) Ensayo de interpretación de un proceso cultural, Cátedra, 1983. Mallo, Maruja. “El surrealismo a través de mi obra.” El surrealismo, edited by Antonio Bonet Correa, Cátedra, 1983, pp. 189–194. Mendelson, Jordana. Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation 1929–1939, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Morris, C. B. Surrealism in Spain 1920–1936. Cambridge University Press, 1972. Navas Ocaña, Isabel. “La crítica al surrealismo en España.” Bulletin Hispanique, vol. 111, no. 2, 2009, pp. 551–581. Neira, Julio. “Notas sobre la introducción del surrealismo en España.” Boletín de la Real Academia Española, vol. 63, no. 228, 1983, pp. 117–142. Sánchez Vidal, Agustín. “Carnuzos, cloacas y campanarios.” El Surrealismo en España 1924–1939, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1994, pp. 71–89. Sturm, Christa. “Miró y las consecuencias del surrealismo en la producción de obras de arte al final del siglo XX.” El arte español al final del siglo XX: su perspectiva al final del milenio, edited by Miguel Cabañas Bravo, Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2001, pp. 375–386. Vela, Fernando. “El suprarrealismo.” Revista de Occidente, no. 18, December 1924, pp. 419–423. Vidal, Mercé. 1912: L’Exposició d’Art Cubista de les Galeries Dalmau. Universitat de Barcelona, 1996. Zanetta, María Alejandra. La subversión enmascarada: Análisis de la obra de Maruja Mallo, Biblioteca Nueva and Siglo XXI, 2014.

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34 SURREALISM AND POSTWAR WEST GERMANY Patricia Allmer

The existence of Surrealism in postwar Germany has repeatedly been denied or regarded as significantly less prominent in comparison with other countries. One persistent argument for this has been the apparent absence of an identifiable Surrealist group in Germany. The Romanianborn poet Paul Celan, whose own poetry and writings were influenced by Surrealism, also translated Surrealist writings into German, including in 1967 a cotranslation with Kurt Leonhard of the first substantial volume of poetry of the Belgian-born Surrealist Henri Michaux. A review of this volume epitomizes the critical convention surrounding Surrealism in Germany: “Literary Surrealism has never really found a home in Germany—at least its representatives never formed groups like in France that went public with programs and manifestos” (Kesting, “Land der Magie,” n.p.).1 Michael Richardson echoes this point in his 2016 essay “Other Surrealisms: Centre and Periphery in International Perspective”: Strangely, although there have been some prominent German and Italian Surrealists, and despite the pre-eminence of German thought in the constitution of Surrealist ideas, these are two places in which no sustained Surrealist centres or peripheries have ever been established—a short-lived collaboration in Germany between the painter Edgar Jené and the poet Max Hölzer after the war seems to have been the only attempt to form a group. (140) For Richardson, the formation of a group seems to be the single criterion determining whether Surrealism existed in Germany. Bernhard Albers’s “Vorwort” (Foreword) to his collection of German Surrealist texts, Aus zerstäubten Steinen (From Atomized Stones), offers another version of this argument but notes also that Surrealism’s origins were significantly more “German” than critical convention suggested: Though the activities of Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim and the Germanspeaking Ivan Goll show that Surrealism was not only a French affair from its very beginning, Germany itself was unable to put down deep roots after the Second World War. Neither Max Hölzer, K.O. Götz and Rudolf Wittkopf with their magazines Surrealistische Publikationen (1950–54), Meta (1948–53) and Profile (1953–55), nor Dieter 306

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Wyss with his study Der Surrealismus (1950) gained significant ground. Although most of the German Surrealists of the post-war period were friends or at least exchanged ideas, a Surrealist group did not form as in Paris. (5) These debates suggest tensions between the evident presence of Surrealist art and writing in postwar German traditions and an equally evident critical difficulty with grasping its significance within those traditions. A further problem resides in the division of the nation into East and West until reunification in 1990, resulting in radically distinct cultural contexts. Recent publications and conferences, such as the July  2021 exhibition Surrealismus in Deutschland? at the Panorama Museum Bad Frankenhausen, and the 2017 book of the same name, edited by Karina Schuller and Isabel Fischer and based on an interdisciplinary conference in Münster in 2014, suggest an ongoing process of critical reassessment of this debate, though they hold the question in suspension by adding a question mark to their titles. The latter publication explores a number of key moments in the history of Surrealism in Germany and includes contributions on artists and writers such as Carl Einstein, Hans Henny Jahnn, Ingeborg Bachmann, the contemporary writer Ginka Steinwachs, and on the important postwar artist cabaret Die Badewanne (1949–50), which was headed by the artist, dancer, and cabaret performer Alexander Camaro, who was at that time the partner of Unica Zürn and who introduced her to drawing and painting (see Lenk). The editors note that Surrealism, “[u]nlike any other -ism, resists a definitional fixation,” and they stress their aim to explore Surrealism “not as a national, but transnational, European movement” (Schuller and Fischer, “Einleitung” 6). The German artists and authors, they argue, should not be seen as “self-sufficient, self-contained communities, nor should a specifically German-national criterion be worked-out” (ibid). Such debates over the very existence of Surrealism in Germany and what form(s) it might take have been ongoing since the end of World War II. This chapter uses postwar West German coverage by the German national weekly Die Zeit, established in 1946, to trace some of Surrealism’s various manifestations in and intersections with West Germany up to 1971, as the late sixties and their resonances were a particularly significant period for Surrealism’s presence. This newspaper coverage shaped Surrealism’s representation and perception in West Germany, offering insights into significant moments and figures in the country’s rich tapestry of Surrealist cultural and artistic production. A wide range of translators, scholars, gallerists, collectors, and curators presented Surrealist art and writing to postwar generations of artists and audiences through their translations, publications, radio programs, and exhibitions, which established contexts, enabled access, and drove intellectual and public debate. The history of Surrealism in postwar West Germany is, furthermore, inevitably closely enmeshed with the country’s National Socialist past and its ongoing process of reconciliation (or otherwise) with that history. There was no Year Zero or “Stunde Null” at the war’s end, no new “Beginning” (to echo the title of a recent exhibition of postwar art in Austria), but rather a historical continuum characterized by persistence rather than rupture and bound by an undercurrent of complex relations between key figures who stayed in Nazi Germany and (in many cases) joined the NSDAP and those who did not. From early 1933, the migration from Germany of many avant-garde artists, along with Nazi censorship laws, effectively closed down avant-garde practice in the country. In the immediate postwar period, publications and translations were crucial in introducing a new generation of artists, writers, and audiences to previously inaccessible ideas and material, invigorating new contexts, understandings, and artistic practices. Immediately after the war, a small group of artists who exhibited at the Galerie Gerd Rosen in Berlin offered a “specifically German variation” 307

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(Lindner 26) of Surrealism. They included Heinz Trökes, Hans Uhlmann, Hans Thiemann, and Mac Zimmermann. A public scandal (“entirely in the Surrealist manner,” as Judith Elisabeth Weiss puts it) resulted from a window display accompanying the gallery’s Fantasten exhibition in 1946; the window exhibited a painting placed between a pile of rubble, a skull, and a ticking metronome and had to be protected from angry crowds by the military police (Weiss in Schuller and Fischer, eds. 185). Trökes’s publications, such as his 1946/47 essay “Der Surrealismus” in the journal Das Kunstwerk, were particularly focused on demonstrating the contemporary relevance of Surrealism (ibid). Alain Bosquet’s edited volume Surrealismus: 1924–1949: Texte und Kritik was published in 1950 by Verlag Henssel. The timeline of this publication clearly situates Surrealism as an ongoing and contemporary movement, and the book included excerpts from André Breton’s Manifestoes of Surrealism and Communicating Vessels and poems and texts by Paul Éluard, Aimé Césaire, Robert Desnos, and Henry Miller. No women writers or poets were included, and Bosquet mapped a version of Surrealism’s development closely linked to France and Breton, in which Yvan Goll’s Manifeste du surréalisme, which predated Breton’s, was not mentioned in an otherwise-extensive section on the “Beginnings of Surrealism.” Also in 1950, the German psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and writer Dieter Wyss (who would go on to present radio programs on Surrealism in the mid-fifties)2 published Der Surrealismus, and the first issue of Surrealistische Publikationen, edited by the German artist and Surrealist Edgar Jené and Austrian Max Hölzer, was published in Klagenfurt, Austria. This included an international range of Surrealist works and writings by artists such as Breton, Benjamin Péret, Maurice Nadeau, Georges Henein, Césaire, Ernst, and Toyen. It also included work by contemporary German artists and writers, including Celan, Jené, and the German-Austrian Walter Behrens. The second and final issue of Surrealistische Publikationen, published (but barely circulated) in 1953/54, included an increased German representation with texts by Wyss and writers Anneliese Hager and Rudolf Wittkopf, both of whom were also significant translators into German of Surrealist and avant-garde writings. The growing importance of Surrealism in 1950s publications is clear from volume 11 of Anthologie der französischen Dichtung von Nerval bis zur Gegenwart (Anthology of French Poetry from Nerval to the Present), selected and edited by Flora KleePalyi and published in the Limes-Verlag, Wiesbaden, in 1953. Reviewing this anthology in Die Zeit, Erich Köhler stressed the editor’s inclusion of a large amount of Surrealism-oriented poetry and noted that it was evident that Surrealism’s “main artistic expressions are still anything but overcome.” This comment is echoed in Ruth Lutz’s review of Walter Karsch’s 1954 anthology “Im Rathaus”: 32 deutsche Erzählungen aus dieser Zeit (In the Town Hall: 32 Contemporary German Stories); Lutz writes, “In the numerically largest group of authors of middle-age are those most strongly influenced by Surrealism, such as Günter Eich, Ernst Kreuder, Kurt Kusenberg, Geno Hartlaub, Hermann Stahl.”

The Venice Biennale and documenta The Venice Biennale in 1954, and early documenta exhibitions, focused attention on Surrealism in West Germany and contributed significantly to establishing German Surrealist art in the public eye. While coverage of the 1950 Venice Biennale described Surrealism “even with the French as a ‘far memory’ ” (Beer n.p.), the 1954 Biennale, curated by Rodolfo Pallucchini, took Surrealism as its theme, stimulating further focus and debate in Germany. In particular, Max Ernst’s receipt that year of the Grand Prize for Painting significantly enhanced his prominence in West Germany; as Werner Haftmann’s Biennale review in Die Zeit of September 16, 1954, notes, while “Surrealism really seems at its end,” the recipients of the prize were “great masters.” 308

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Another major contribution to the establishment and dissemination of Surrealism during the 1950s and 1960s came from the first three documenta exhibitions in Kassel, founded by artist, lecturer, and curator Arnold Bode in 1955. Bode recruited Haftmann as his lead adviser for the first three documentas soon after Haftmann had published his two-volume Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert (Painting in the 20th Century), which became for many years the definitive book on twentieth-century art in West Germany. Haftmann’s influence as a scholar and arts administrator on the postwar establishment, promotion, and reception of Surrealism in West Germany gives some indication of the problematic historical continuum that avant-gardes there were forced to navigate. During the war, Haftmann had been the leader of a Nazi commando unit which hunted down partisans in Italy, participating in the torture of prisoners and shooting of civilians (Voss and Welty). Despite this personal history of direct involvement in Nazi war crimes, the particular aim of the first documenta was to show works by artists labeled by the Nazi regime as “degenerate.” Haftmann’s participation had (according to the historian and curator Julia Voss) direct effects on documenta: no works were shown that addressed the violent crimes of the Nazis, and nothing by Holocaust victims of the Nazis was exhibited (ibid.). Haftmann’s appointment in 1967 as the first director of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie extended this apparent hypocrisy. A major task of this role was to fill the gaping holes left by the Nazis’ actions in the collection’s French impressionism and classic Surrealism sections (Jessen). His first purchases included works by Ernst, Klee, Matta, and Lam (ibid). The 1955 documenta featured a range of international and German artists associated with Surrealism, including Camaro, de Chirico, Ernst, André Masson, Werner Heldt, Trökes, Picasso, and Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (a.k.a. Wols). In 1959, the second documenta expanded this range, including the Germans Hans Bellmer, Ernst, Richard Oelze, Bernard Schultze, Zimmermann, Unica Zürn, Wols, Trökes, and Heldt and a significant number of international Surrealists, such as Lam, Masson, Dorothea Tanning, Raoul Ubac, Alexander Calder, Alan Davie, de Chirico, Simon Hantaï, Eduardo Paolozzi, Yves Tanguy, Henri Michaux, Matta, and Paul Delvaux. The third documenta in 1964 continued this representation of earlier and contemporary generations of Surrealists—among the artists included were the Germans Bellmer, Oelze, Schultze, Wols, Ernst, Paul Wunderlich, and the Austrian Herbert Bayer, while the international artists connected to Surrealism included Dalí, Lam, Giacometti, Calder, Davie, de Chirico, Masson, Paolozzi, Michaux, Matta, Cocteau, and Bernard Réquichot.

Max Ernst A member of Breton’s original Surrealist group in Paris, Max Ernst had his work exhibited in Germany’s Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition. He was interned in France as an enemy alien in 1939 and then arrested by the Gestapo, before fleeing in 1941 (with Peggy Guggenheim’s assistance) to America. After the war, he was quickly rehabilitated as a leading German example of currently-practicing Surrealism, and his generation of Surrealists was repeatedly linked to, and thus became influential upon, younger artists in exhibitions and translated publications, talks, and radio appearances. Die Zeit coverage of Ernst starts in 1951 with insistent dynastic metaphors, hailing him (for example) on his 60th birthday as “the father of Surrealism” (Pretzeii). An article covering his first retrospective in West Germany, at Schloß Brühl in 1951, calls him the “great son” of his hometown (A.S.V.). The gallery Der Spiegel, based in Cologne, supported this retrospective and hailed Ernst’s long-delayed recognition in Germany. Der Spiegel had been founded in 1945 by the couple Hein (who also advised documenta) and Eva Stünke with a focus on Nazi-repressed classical modern art, expanding its remit to include artists who immigrated to France, including Wols and Ernst. The career of the art dealer, 309

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gallerist, and exhibition curator Rudolf Zwirner (who staged the first Magritte exhibition in West Germany in 1965) began with his volunteering in Der Spiegel in 1956, when he abandoned his studies after falling in love with contemporary art at the first documenta. Another significant figure in the promotion of Ernst was Michael Hertz, who in the 1950s became the sole representative of Ernst’s paintings in Germany and alerted museums to Ernst’s contemporary works, selling and mediating significant paintings and sculptures to museums in Cologne and Düsseldorf. Hertz also promoted Picasso’s work in West Germany and, in 1962, opened his own gallery in Bremen, where he showed works by Matta, Miró, and Masson, and (in 1963) held the first major retrospective of Oelze’s paintings and drawings (See “Kleiner Kunstkalender”). A significant contributor to the 1960s dissemination of Ernst’s work and Surrealism more generally was Renate Gerhardt, who founded the Gerhardt Verlag, after the suicide of her husband, Rainer Maria Gerhardt. Gerhardt had previously translated Sartre and, with her husband, published Fragmente (1951–1952), an international revue for modern poetry showcasing Surrealist and avant-garde work by international writers, including Ezra Pound, Antonin Artaud, Michaux, and Césaire. The Surrealist-focused publications of Gerhardt Verlag included a 1962 reprint of the original 1929 French edition of Ernst’s La femme 100 têtes (The 100 Headless Woman), a limited-edition reissue of Bellmer’s Die Puppe/Die Spiele der Puppe/Die Anatomie (The Puppet/Games of the Puppet/Anatomy), and (in 1963) Hans Arp and Vincente Huidobro’s Drei und drei Surreale Geschichten (Three and three Surreal Stories).

Exhibitions The exhibition history of Surrealist solo and group shows during the 1950s and 1960s offers insights into the ways in which West German culture industries promoted and disseminated Surrealist art and thought, established the reputations of German Surrealist artists, and developed postwar international links and contexts in relation to German avant-gardes. Significant key moments in the early 1950s include the 1952 Internationale Surrealisten Ausstellung (International Surrealist Exhibition), curated by the Swiss Surrealist Walter Grab and opening at the Kunstverein Wessenberghaus in Constance before touring to the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe. Edgar Ende and Jené were members of Grab’s Internationale Vereinigung der Surrealisten (International Union of Surrealists), founded in 1951, which Breton also joined. Grab also lent works from his exhibition to Jené’s 1952 show Surrealist Painting in Europe at the Saarland Museum in Saarbrücken (see Schieder). Breton, who remained for both exhibitions the Surrealist figurehead, wrote a foreword to Jené’s catalog. The Saarbrücken show included works by the Germans Jené, Rudolf Schlichter, and Ende and was divided into artists belonging or having belonged to the Surrealist movement and artists with Surrealist tendencies outside the movement. From the late 1950s to the 1960s, there was an increased focus on Surrealist exhibitions, with a particularly strong concentration around 1968/69, suggesting Surrealism’s burgeoning relevance to the generation of students who led the protests in 1968. As Berndt Schulz notes in his 1986 edited volume Gib acht, tritt nicht auf meine Träume: Geschichten des deutschen Surrealismus (Look Out, Don’t Step on my Dreams: Stories of German Surrealism): The basic program of Surrealism is: “Put fantasy into power!—Art is life!”. German authors, even if they did not explicitly see themselves as Surrealists, have tried to implement this program in their stories. And sometimes also in reality, as the events surrounding the student revolt of 67/68 have shown. (Schulz) 310

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Most of these exhibitions included contemporary artists, suggesting that Surrealism was regarded as an ongoing movement. Also evident was an increasing conflation between Surrealism and fantastic art. Surrealisten, staged in 1957, showed 24 artworks and was organized with the assistance of Wilhelm Gilly, Director of the Oldenburg Stadtmuseum. Loans came from French collections and galleries arranged by the gallery Christoph Czwiklitzer in Cologne, and the exhibition toured from Cologne to Oldenburg, and then to the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf. Gottfried Sello’s review of this exhibition in Die Zeit notes that it is “not a retrospective, even though old masters, the classics of surréalisme international, are represented”—these “old masters” included the likes of Hans Arp, de Chirico, Ernst, and Picabia. “The younger Surrealists,” Sello continues, “are also included: Francis Bott, Victor Brauner and the famed Leonor Fini, whose soft mother-of-pearl colored dreams are shown here for the first time in Germany” (Sello, June 20, 1957). In 1959, the thematic focus of the Deutsche Künstlerbund’s annual exhibition, which took place in the Städtisches Museum Wiesbaden, was “Art and Myth.” The exhibition emphasized Surrealism and included works by Dalí, de Chirico, and Ernst. A review by Sello (again) emphasized the “German Surrealists” being given the “opportunity of a stronger presence. One sees Mac Zimmermann, . . . Edgar Ende, Johannes Molzahn, . . . Trökes and Meistermann show works from their Surrealist early days” (Sello, 15 May 1959). In 1965, the Städtisches Museum Schloß Morsbroich in Leverkusen showed Metamorphosen: Surrealismus Heute (Metamorphoses: Surrealism Today). This was the debut exhibition of the new director, Rolf Wedewer, who opened his catalog introduction with a sentence from Breton’s foreword to Ernst’s La femme 100 têtes: “The Surreal is the function of our will to defamiliarize” (n.p.). The catalog situated the artists exhibited within a Surrealist lineage; its contributors included Édouard Jaguer, a French poet and critic and founder in 1952 of the Paris-based Phases group and (in 1954) its associated journal. The exhibition included an international (and exclusively male) range of artists, such as earlier-generation Surrealists like the Cuban Lam, the Romanian-born Jacques Hérold, the French Réquichot, and Belgian artists Jacques Zimmermann and Jacques Lacomblez, both heavily involved in Phases—a selection emphasizing the continuing significance of Surrealism as a contemporary, rather than historical, manifestation. German artists were also well-represented, with fantastical and automatic paintings and drawings by Schultze, Surrealist juxtapositional paintings and etchings by Friedrich Meckseper, leather-and-wood “caissons” by Düsseldorf-born painter, graphic artist, and sculptor Horst Egon Kalinowski, and H. (Heinz) Ridder’s “gawking . . . fantastic figures” (Wedewer n.p.). An exhibition called Traum und Wirklichkeit (Dream and Reality) ran from November 18, 1966, to January 15, 1967, at Galerie Gmurzynska in Cologne, bringing together roughly 150 works by 38 international artists, such as Lam, Delvaux, and Freddie, and the Germans Battke, Schultze, Ursula, Oelze, Bellmer, Hartmut Lincke, and Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (Sello, December 23, 1966). The exhibition opened a month after Breton’s death. A detailed obituary in Die Zeit on October 7, 1966, by Alain Bosquet, titled “The Pope of Surrealism: On the Death of André Breton,” emphasized Breton’s contemporary relevance. The gallery was founded by Antonia Gmurzynska in 1965 with a significant focus on Surrealism, staging shows on Bellmer (e.g., 1966 and 1970), the Austrian Ernst Fuchs (1969 and 1970), and on Ensor— Delvaux—Magritte in 1969. The preface of Traum und Wirklichkeit’s catalog consisted of a passage from Breton’s Surrealism and Painting (1928) taken from the German translation of the Franco-American art critic Patrick Waldberg’s Der Surrealismus, published in Köln by DuMont Schauberg in 1965. Waldberg’s book was translated into German by Ruth Henry, a Paris-based German scholar with close ties to the Paris Surrealist group. Henry was a close and supportive friend of Unica Zürn and in 1971 (together with Robert Valançay) translated several of Zürn’s 311

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writings into French, including Der Mann im Jasmin (The Man of Jasmine, written 1965–1967, published in French in 1971) and Dunkler Frühling (Dark Spring, published in German in 1969 and French in 1971). The latter text received much attention in West Germany and France, as Rainer Werner Fassbinder was working on his film adaptation of it when Zürn committed suicide in 1970. Henry also translated Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto for the publisher Rowohlt in the crucial year of 1968, a book likely to have been read by the young revolutionaries of Berlin. A Die Zeit review on November 8, 1968, by Marianne Kesting of this publication emphasized the contemporary relevance of the manifestos politically and for a new generation of (West German and, implicitly, international) Surrealists: [I]f one delves into the individual manifestos . . . one realizes that almost all positions . . . are still relevant to an astonishing degree for contemporary discussions. . . . Some of the old Surrealists are still alive, but meanwhile there is already a young Surrealism. Above all, the walls against which the old Surrealists banged their heads still exist . . . thus the cause of the Surrealist revolt persists. (“Die Protestspirale”) In the 1962 exhibition Surrealismus: Phantastische Malerei der Gegenwart (Contemporary Fantastic Painting), at the Kunsthaus in Vienna, fantastic art was regarded as part of Surrealism, and works by Dalí, Delvaux, Tanning, Matta, Masson, and Magritte were exhibited alongside a strong German presence, including Mac Zimmermann, Schröder-Sonnenstern, Oelze, Ende, Ernst, and Bellmer. The show premiered works from the Austrian “Wiener Schule” of fantastic realists which formed around Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner, and Anton Lehmden. The exhibition was assembled by a committee which included Patrick Waldberg, who also contributed to the catalog. The foreword by the Federal Ministry of Education notes: The Surreal and fantastic, which are documented in this exhibition, lives in an unbroken tradition; we can trace threads running back from the modern Surrealists just as much as the visions of the fantastic realists, to Bosch, Cranach, and Grünewald, to the apocalypses of the 15th century, to the allegories of the 16th, to Arcimboldo and Moreau, to Goya and William Blake. (n.p.) Fantastic art was prioritized over Surrealism in the title of the large 1967 exhibition Ars Phantastica: Deutsche Kunst des magischen Realismus, phantastischen Realismus und Surrealismus seit 1945, organized by the Albrecht Dürer Society in Nürnberg. Sello’s review of this exhibition noted that it documented a direction which has “currently won ground and significance in Germany: fantastic art as a collective term for magic realism, fantastic realism and Surrealism” (Sello, July 28, 1967). The catalog’s introduction, by the art historian Reinhard MüllerMehlis, emphasized (contra critical convention) the contemporary prevalence of Surrealism in Germany: For a long time it was claimed that Surrealism was dead in Germany. Barely was there talk about the most important painters of this movement which is absolutely and constantly contemporary—neither of Richard Oelze, Edgar Ende and Rudolf Schlichter nor of Zimmermann, Cremer, Gugel, Kunz, Dittberner and Winkler, just to note older generations. At one time it was claimed that in the strict sense of the programmatic position of the 1920s Parisians these were not real Surrealists. That they were a 312

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bunch of irresponsible loners (if they were even known). Then it was said that these Germans were all epigones of long-dead Surrealism. (n.p.) Müller-Mehlis’s essay traced precursory developments toward contemporary German Surrealists, such as Franz Radziwill from Bosch, Goya, Callot, and Seghers, the latter of whom he also positioned as an immediate precursor of Ernst and Oelze. He noted “the romantic-natural mythic approach” (n.p.) related to German romantic traditions and connected to C. G. Jung’s exploration of the collective unconscious, observable in Oelze’s volcanic landscapes and also evident in Ernst’s paintings as part of a specifically “German Surrealism” (n.p). Artists represented in this exhibition include Ende, Schröder-Sonnenstern, Schultze, Trökes, and many others. Unlike most of the exhibitions discussed here, female artists were better represented, with works by Elida von Alten, Bele Bachem, Gisela Breitling, Helga Jahnke, Margrit von Spreckelsen, Tessa Traut, Ursula (Schultze-Bluhm), and Unica Zürn. Further linkages between Surrealism and fantastic art can be observed in the exhibition Surrealismus in Europa, held at Baukunst in Cologne in 1969. The catalog essays were written by José Pierre, who belonged to the postwar Paris Surrealist group; the Czech art historian František Šmejkal (on Surrealism in Czechoslovakia); and the Austrian art historian Wieland Schmied, a key promoter of Surrealism in Germany through many of his publications, including books on de Chirico, Oelze, and Dalí. An international range of older and newer generations of artists was presented with works from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and Czechoslovakia. Most of these dated from the 1950s and 1960s, again demonstrating the intention of displaying Surrealism as a contemporary rather than historical movement. The German artists in this exhibition showed a wide range of styles, traversing the generic scale between Surrealism and fantastic art and displaying an insistent critical concern with Germany’s recent National-Socialist past. They included Otto Dix, Thomas Häfner, Siegbert Hahn, Horst Janssen, Siegfried Klapper, Hartmut Lincke, Roger Loewig, Pit Morell, Schröder-Sonnenstern, Oelze, Franz Radziwill, Schultze, Tessa Traut, Ursula, Paul Wunderlich, Mac Zimmermann, and Hans Bellmer. Sello’s exhibition review in Die Zeit notes the problems arising from increasingly blurred critical categories: If one accepts the thesis of José Pierre in the catalogue, that Surrealism rests in its totality on the method of automatism, then 95 percent of the paintings in this exhibition would need to be disqualified. In practice however, everything which is not abstract nor realist is potentially taken as Surrealist. This is also echoed in Sello’s review of a 1969 Magritte exhibition: “Meanwhile Surrealism has significantly won in prominence, as historical phenomenon and in its current, indistinctlyblurred form of a fantastic art” (October 24, 1969). It seems at this moment that, far from there being no Surrealism in postwar West Germany, Surrealism was apparently everywhere. That José Pierre was also concerned about this blurred terminology is clear from the organization of a second exhibition on Surrealism at Baukunst in 1971, titled Der Geist des Surrealismus/L’Esprit du Surréalisme (The Spirit of Surrealism). The selection of works tried to avoid overlaps with the earlier show, with sections like “Hommage à Prinzhorn” including Karl B. (Brendel), Peter M. (Moog), and August N. (Neter), artists represented in the Prinzhorn collection of the psychiatric clinic of the University of Heidelberg. The two other sections showed, again, a significant international range of older and newer generations of artists, such as Arp, Leonora Carrington, Adrien Dax, Marcel Duchamp, Magritte, Nicole, Toyen, Isabelle Waldberg, and 313

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Clive Barker. The German artists in the “At the Heart of Surrealism” section included Jené, Konrad Klapheck, and Meret Oppenheim, and Germans were represented in the final section, “Around Surrealism,” by Klaus Geissler, Jochen Hiltmann, Kalinowski, Eric Paetz, and Trökes. Pierre writes in his catalog essay for this second exhibition that its aim was to “complement and correct” the first one’s failure to distinguish clearly between Surrealism and fantastic art (9). He stressed the separation of the Wiener Schule from Surrealism and emphasized (with reference to the 1952 Saarbrücken show) this exhibition as the second one organized by actual Surrealists rather than curators (ibid.). Pierre’s essay “Der Geist des Surrealismus” (The Spirit of Surrealism) insisted on the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s principle of the “Große Weigerung” (“great refusal”)—a guiding principle for the student revolts in 1968—as a key feature of Surrealist art (7). The essay was published in French and accompanied by a German translation by the art historian Kurt Leonhard, himself an important mediator between German and French postwar avant-gardes and translator of French texts by (among others) Michaux and Michel Leiris. As this survey of some of the postwar exhibitions, publications, and critical debates demonstrates, Surrealism not only existed but also developed in new directions in postwar West Germany in a wide variety of forms, as new generations of artists and writers were able to encounter and engage with earlier works. Ironically, Nazi suppression managed to sustain the freshness of Surrealist experimentation for the younger generation. A wide variety of writers and artists found numerous forums in which to publish and exhibit their work, as the nation sought to overcome the burden of its history through embracing internationalism and experimentalism in the arts, celebrating Surrealist traditions that straddled the ostensible ruptures of the Third Reich and the war and asserted not disruption and destruction but continuity and innovation.

Notes 1. All translations are my own. 2. For example: 1954, 29 July 1954, 22.20, Frankfurt Radio; 1955, Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk Stuttgart, 1955, 23.00.

Works Cited Note: All Die Zeit articles are available in the newspaper’s online archive. www.zeit.de/1946/index Albers, Bernhard, editor. “Aus zerstäubten Steinen: Texte deutscher Surrealisten.” Rimbaud, 1995. Albrecht Dürer Society. Ars Phantastica: Deutsche Kunst des magischen Realismus, phantastischen Realismus und Surrealismus seit 1945, Schloß Stein/Nürnberg, July 1967. A. S. V. “Surrealismus auf Schloß Brühl.” Die Zeit, 23 August 1951. Baukunst, Köln. Surrealismus in Europa: phantastische und visionäre Bereiche. Baukunst Köln, 1969. Beer, Otto F. “Schaufenster der abendländischen Malerei.” 29 June 1950. Bosquet, Alain. “Der Papst des Surrealismus: Zum Tode von André Breton.” Die Zeit, 7 October 1966. ———. Surrealismus: 1924–1949: Texte und Kritik. Verlag Henssel, 1950. Haftmann, Werner. “Im Zwielicht der modernen Existenz: Die künstlerische Bilanz der Biennale 1954.” Die Zeit, 16 September 1954. Jessen, Wolf. “Individualist als Museumsdirektor.” Die Zeit, 10 March 1967. Karsch, Walter, editor. “Im Rathaus”: 32 deutsche Erzählungen aus dieser Zeit. Herbig, 1954. Kesting, Marianne. “Die Protestspirale: Bretons immer noch aktuelle Manifeste.” Die Zeit, 8 November 1968. ———. “Im Land der Magie: Die Dichtungen und Schriften von Henri Michaux.” Die Zeit, 3 March 1967. Klee-Palyi, Flora, editor. 11. Band einer Anthologie der französischen Dichtung von Nerval bis zur Gegenwart, Limes-Verlag, 1953. “Kleiner Kunstkalender.” Die Zeit, 15 March 1963.

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Surrealism and Postwar West Germany Köhler, Erich. “Wettstreit der Übersetzer.” Die Zeit, 25 June 1953. Lenk, Elisabeth, editor. Die Badewanne: Ein Künstlerkabarett der frühen Nachkriegszeit. Edition Hentrich, 1991. Lindner, Brigitte. Heinz Trökes—Das gemalte Gesamtwerk. PhD dissertation, Rheinischen FriedrichWilhelms-Universität zu Bonn, 2002. Lutz, Ruth. “Deutsche Erzähler.” Die Zeit, 9 December 1954. Pierre, José. “Der Geist des Surrealismus.” Translated by Kurt Leonhard, in Baukunst Köln, Der Geist des Surrealismus, 1971. Pretzeii, Lothar. “Das magische Bild: Max Ernst, Vater des Surrealismus, wurde sechzig Jahre alt.” Die Zeit, 19 April 1951. Richardson, Michael. “ ‘Other’ Surrealisms: Center and Periphery in International Perspective.” A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, edited by David Hopkins, Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 131–143. Schieder, Martin. “À la conquête de la Sarre: L’exposition Peinture surréaliste en Europe à Sarrebruck en 1952.” Le Surréalisme et l’argent, edited by Julia Drost, Fabrice Flahutez and Martin Schieder, PASSAGES Online 2021, pp. 338–356. https://d-nb.info/1230073841/34 Schuller, Karina, and Isabel Fischer, editors. “Der Surrealismus in Deutschland (?)”: Interdisziplinäre Studien, Wissenschaftliche Schriften der WWU Münster. Münsterscher Verlag für Wissenschaft, 2016. ———. “Einleitung.” Schuller and Fischer, editors, pp. 3–13. Schulz, Berndt, editor. Gib acht, tritt nicht auf meine Träume. Eichborn Verlag, 1986. Sello, Gottfried. “Die bewaffnete Rose.” Die Zeit, 20 June 1957. ———. “Kunstkalender—Ars Phantastica.” Die Zeit, 28 July 1967. ———. “Kunstkalender—Surrealismus in Europa.” Die Zeit, 24 October 1969. ———. “Kunstkalender—Traum und Wirklichkeit.” Die Zeit, 23 December 1966. ———. “Maler und Bildhauer suchen den Mythos.” Die Zeit, 15 May 1959. Surrealismus: Phantastische Malerei der Gegenwart. Künstlerhaus, 1962. Traum und Wirklichkeit. Galerie Gmurzynska, 1967. Voss, Julia in conversation with Ute Welty. “Werner Haftmann: Der SA-Mann, der die documenta miterfand.” 18 June 2021, Deutschlandfunk Kultur. www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/werner-haftmann-der-samann-der-die-documenta-miterfand.1008.de.html?dram:article_id=498973 Wedewer, Rolf. Metamorphosen: Surrealismus Heute. Städtisches Museum Schloß Morsbroich, 1965. Weiss, Judith Elisabeth. “Surrealismus zwischen Subversion und Ordnung: Deutsche Nachkriegsmoderne und Aussellungspraxis nach 1945.” Schuller and Fischer, pp. 177–195. Wyss, Dieter. Der Surrealismus: Eine Einführung und Deutung Surrealistischer Literatur und Malerei. Lambert Schneider Verlag, 1950.

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PART IV

Critical Dialogues

The Politics of Collecting

35 L’ÉLAN SURRÉALISTE Surrealist Aspirations and the Power and Primacy of Oceanic Art Maia Nuku

A Reconfigured Map of the World The startling prominence of the Pacific Ocean and its islands in The World in the Time of the Surrealists was an early and clear indication of Surrealist aspirations and their strong identification with the art and cultures of the Pacific. The striking hand-drawn image appeared in 1929 among the pages of a special issue of the Belgian periodical Variétés (Varieties). The Surrealists’ playful reorganization of the world saw a much diminished Europe pushed to the margins, allowing the Pacific to take center stage and strategically disrupting conventional cartography in a masterstroke of dépaysement. The twin northern landmasses of Russia and Alaska have bulked up and threatened to overwhelm the Southern Hemisphere, while once-diminutive Pacific Islands are now swollen to unprecedented scale. No longer tethered to strictly Cartesian principles, the outlines of islands have apparently taken on a life of their own, with Easter Island’s borders now so enlarged the island appears to be in animated confrontation with its eastern neighbor, its dimensions almost matching the entire southern portion of continental America. Even the equator is elusive, its thin line dynamically cresting like a wave as if this reshuffle has interrupted its efforts to encircle the globe. This was precisely the kind of radical shift in orientation the Surrealists were committed to instigating through their art and writing, upsetting accepted hierarchies as a means to disturb normative régimes of power and influence. Yet the displacement it urged was more than one of physical geography. The Surrealist project was intent on going much further and looked to target a complete revolution of the senses. Stirred by the brutality of the First World War, Breton believed a radical transformation was necessary to jolt this complete reawakening. Art, aesthetics, and beauty would stage a revolt in retaliation against the dull banality (ennui) of bourgeois life. Couched in the new language of psychoanalytic theory, Breton proposed shock treatment therapy “or convulsion—to . . . unlock the rich repertoire of imagery located in the depths of the unconscious” (Tythacott, “Convulsive Beauty” 43). Oceanic art was specifically enlisted to achieve these ends. Its surprising forms and uniquely compelling aesthetics were the perfect foil to galvanize change and challenge the jaded conventions of the day. A complete reconfiguration would question the parameters of accepted reality. These Surrealist acts were considered far more than simply artistic, or avant-garde, gestures. For its proponents, Surrealism was revolutionary and a way of life. DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-40

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Exhibitions and Collecting: The Primacy of Oceania Oceania, though still a relatively unknown region in Europe, was a pivotal force in Surrealism’s early-twentieth-century orbit. The visual culture of Oceania so stirred the imaginations of the Surrealist circle of Paris-based creatives in the 1920s that it is intimately associated with the emergence of the movement itself. André Breton was emphatic about the prestige the very notion of Oceania held for both him and his collaborators when he declared: It has always had the supreme ability to unlock our hearts. Not only has it let loose our dreams into the most vertiginous and boundless currents, but, more than this, so many objects that bear its stamp of origin have aroused our crowning passion. (Breton, “Oceania” 172) The words seem to spill out of Breton as he wrangled with its fascinating allure and uncanny ability to enchant: Oceanic art inspired our covetousness as nothing else. Among the things that others count the treasures of the world it reigned supreme.  .  .  . From the beginning, the course of Surrealism is inseparable from the power of seduction, of fascination, that [it] exerted over us. (172) Oceania, as an idea, a proposition, was magnetic and captivating. If Breton indeed detected something profound in the arts he encountered from Oceania, the appeal, he believed, was twofold: it was its “ability to overturn conventions (from a Western viewpoint) and [its] poetic power” (Sowels 173–174). They believed in and valued its transformative potential. Above all else, it was an open vessel on which to project their own desires and fantasies. While Breton waxed lyrical about the “sheer power of evocation” in art and objects from Oceania, he acknowledged it was this aspect that “overwhelm[ed] . . . with the conviction that they constitute the repositories, in art, of that which we long to recapture” (Breton, “Surrealist Exhibition” 283). Far from disinterested, Breton’s engagement was visceral: a deeply felt, instinctive, and emotional encounter that would manifest itself in abundant ways throughout his life. One such avenue was the important collection of Oceanic art objects that Breton assembled over the course of his lifetime. These he described as close companions: I often need to come back to them, to watch them as I am waking up, to take them into my hands, to talk to them, to escort them back to their place of origin in my mind so as to reconcile myself to where I am. (“Oceania” 174) In 1908, aged just 12, he acquired a Rapa Nui (Easter Island) figure, a first purchase that is said to have scandalized his parents. From the age of 20, he began to collect more seriously under the guidance of the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who was a friend and mentor. Like other aficionados of the time, Breton sought Oceanic objects out in the assortment of flea markets and antique shops that one could visit in towns and cities across Europe. “There was a time,” he explained, “when every trip abroad . . . [with] friends . . . was motivated by the hope that we would discover after incessant day-long searching, some rare Oceanic object” (Cowling 180).1 Peltier observes: “These [were] objects of desire as much as they [were] desirable objects. 320

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They belong[ed] to another world, not connected to our own” (Peltier, “Objects” 61). Collecting, acquiring, and owning them was one way to try to close that gap. Oceania continued to be a strong motivating force for Surrealist circles in Paris during the late 1920s and early 1930s, with many artists acquiring and displaying Oceanic objects, building personal collections and staging exhibitions. These became a focal point for dialogue as well as a channel for the galvanizing energies of the movement. Printed images of Oceanic artworks elucidated Surrealist contributions to art magazines, illustrating articles in journals where they were featured in startling or unsettling juxtapositions with other material. The most noteworthy collections belonged to André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Louis Aragon, as well as Tristan Tzara and Max Ernst, who were all frequent lenders to the numerous exhibitions springing up in Parisian art galleries and museums at that time. One highly publicized show in 1926 featured over 60 sculptures from islands in Indonesia and the Pacific, installed alongside recent photographs and paintings by Man Ray. The catalog was illustrated with an elaborately staged photograph by Man Ray of a Nias statue that appeared to be bathed in moonlight. Entitled “The Moon shines above the Island of Nias,” it sparked shock and outrage in some quarters by those alarmed at the statue’s explicit nature. The renowned Surrealist Exhibition of Objects opened at Galerie Charles Ratton in 1936, a collective and experimental “quasi-spontaneous” test of Surrealism’s capacity to “disorient and subvert the quotidian through objects” (Sowels 172). The exhibition’s displays broke firmly with tradition and featured a dazzling array of art in unsettling juxtapositions. Art and objects were “assembled [in] a subversive taxonomy” that mixed diverse media and genres, combining “found” objects with indigenous artworks from the Pacific and North America alongside new works from contributing artists and poets who were both part of the immediate Surrealist circle in France and adjacent to it, in Belgium, England, Germany, and Spain (172). Objects were not organized by authorship, date, or provenance, a strategy which it was hoped would “liberate . . . items from their established use and meanings to stimulate and awaken imagination and desire” (Breton in Sowels 174). A Duchamp “ready-made” was deliberately juxtaposed with a New Ireland malagan (an openwork sculpture associated with Pacific mortuary rites) as a challenge and provocation to visitors. Sowels suggests such novel encounters were intended to “magnif[y] the subversion of Eurocentric classifications, sparking poetry” (174). The installation was intended as a radical challenge to Western values and demanded the public interact and engage fully with the things on display. Surrealist organizers no doubt hoped viewers would not only “receive it but . . . activate it” for, as Sanja Bruhn reminds us, in a Surrealist mandate “only interactive engagement is transformative” (Bruhn 179).

Surrealism and Modern Ethnography Several exhibitions in the 1930s gave audiences rare opportunities to experience an almostcomplete panorama of the arts of Oceania. In April 1933, the exhibition Tapa of Dutch New Guinea was organized by Paul Rivet and Georges-Henri Rivière at the Musée d’Ethnographie in Paris and featured artworks recently collected in the field by author and Surrealist associate Jacques Viot. Viot had arrived disenchanted in Paris after WWI and, like many others of his era, began eking out a living buying and selling art. By 1925 he had signed up artists Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró, each unknown at that time (Peltier, “Enchanted Castle” 49). With Miró’s first show under his belt, Viot organized the first collective exhibition of Surrealist painting at Pierre Loeb’s newly established Galerie Pierre, later that same year, in 1925. The two decided to continue thier collaboration when Loeb offered to sponsor Viot in a buying trip to New Guinea, where he could purchase sculptures and painted bark cloths (maro) directly from local 321

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artists. The 1933 exhibit organized on Viot’s return was dynamic and bold, featuring a vast array of over 60 painted bark cloths (maro) that Viot had collected in the village of Tobati in Humboldt Bay. While a handful of Sentani sculptures were shown, these appear to have been overshadowed by the sensuous textural quality and colorful, animated designs of dozens of Pacific bark cloths. The exhibit featured 44 pieces from Loeb’s collection alone, with a further ten from Viot, and others including three from Charles Ratton, all framed and mounted directly on the wall like the contemporary paintings that they were.2 The focus on a single genre of Pacific art was an innovation. As Tythacott notes: The vibrant, stylised imagery of these tapa . . . immediately caught the attention of art collectors and surrealist painters. Such imaginary landscapes, painted onto bark cloth, [and] populated by geometric, figurative motifs, had an influence on the work of such artists as Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Joan Miró. (Tythacott, “Convulsive Beauty” 48) Metamorphosis is a key narrative that resonates in the painted designs of maro, whose wealth of iconography includes formal aspects that are highly suggestive of fish, birds, insects, and flying foxes. These morph into geometric motifs that are repeated in an imperfect symmetry, creating a uniquely fluid and dynamic aesthetic that surely thrilled Parisian audiences (Peltier, “the Maro of Tobati” 171). Three of the maro Viot collected from Humboldt Bay were included the following year in the first ever exhibition in New York entirely dedicated to Oceanic art. The Parisian dealer and entrepreneur Charles Ratton was instrumental in organizing the exhibition, the first of its kind in the United States, which presented 44 works at the Pierre Matisse gallery in 1934. All the art was from New Guinea, with the exception of seven works from Polynesia, namely, a handful of sculptures from Easter Island and the Marquesas, whose art traditions had long captured the Surrealist imaginary. The gallery produced a pamphlet with a brief text by Rivière, then Associate Director of the Musée d’Éthnographie in Paris. Peltier notes Rivière was one of just a handful of critics to confront this genre of Oceanic art in the context of the avant-garde and modernist painting in particular (“the Maro” 170). Describing the maro at the close of his article in the catalog to the Oceanic show in New York, Rivière wrote, “Such an art, which does not seek to copy nature but to reproduce it through a sort of code of signs, is very close to our modern arts,” and alluded to its “pristine freshness, the magic realism which the most representative of the century’s painters have been able to revive” (170). The interaction of networks between Paris and New York was a key factor in the exposure and increased profile for Oceanic art. In tandem with Surrealist exhibitions on the art gallery circuit where Oceanic artworks were strategically deployed as disruptors of the status quo, many of Paris’s metropolitan institutions were also staging influential exhibitions. These museums featured a wide range of art from Oceania and were equally important sites of engagement for Surrealist encounters. The Musée d’Éthnographie du Trocadéro was undergoing an energetic revival under the guidance of Paul Rivet and Georges-Henri Rivière, who were leading a new approach to the collections and restoring the somewhat-faded reputation of the institution (Peltier, “Enchanted Castle” 49). Established in 1878 and housed in the Palais du Trocadéro, Rivière favored displays that were well ordered, no longer fusty and cluttered but organized according to a “scientific” rigor typical of new modern ethnography. The boundaries between art gallery and museum were becoming increasingly blurred. Rivière forged friendships with painters and musicians, including jazz entertainer Josephine Baker, who became a close friend. His close circle also included writers, and he had a long 322

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friendship throughout his time at the Trocadéro with Surrealist writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris. Balancing the aesthetic demands of display but avoiding the heavy and ratherstifling didacticism that had hitherto prevailed, Rivière oversaw important innovations in museological practice that skillfully shifted the parameters of ethnographic display to accommodate a new French ethnology, moving installations away from the “folkloric” to something that felt fresh and altogether more modern. Ethnology as a discipline was undergoing its own overhaul, reinvigorated by intellectuals such as Paul Rivet, who would go on to found the Musée de l’Homme in 1937 (the newest iteration of the Musée d’Ethnographie, which both he and Rivière were helping to guide toward a new future). In 1925, renowned sociologist Marcel Mauss had founded the Ethnology Institute of the Sorbonne University of Paris, and a new French school of anthropology was developing that saw itself as actively aligned with the social and political agenda of populations residing in France’s colonies. Even if the principles of colonialism were implicitly defended, there was no doubt the metropole’s august Musée d’Éthnographie had become a popular center for culture in the city, attracting intellectuals who met and socialized at its monthly exhibits. Oceanic art was a definitive mark of this “modernity,” and as appreciation for its uniqueness continued to gather momentum among avant-garde circles, it exercised its own transformation, moving beyond the confines of “ethnography” and shifting from artefact to modern art, where it was afforded access rights to both.

The Appeal of Oceania The visual arts of Oceania were a rich source of inspiration for Surrealist artists who assembled some of the most outstanding collections of Oceanic art in France between the wars. For Breton, the primary appeal of Oceanic art was the glimpse of a rich interior life it prompted, the “poetic sublime,” as he described it. It was this revelatory aspect—a hidden “poetic energy”— that Surrealists aimed to release from its latent state in objects (Sowels 174). In his preface to the Exposition surréaliste d’objets (1936), Breton enthused: “These are the god-objects of certain regions and certain epochs, noteworthy above all for the brilliant negation they flaunt in the face of our accepted rules of plastic representation” (Breton in Sowels 173). Surrealist artists and poets clearly reveled in Oceanic art’s singular aesthetic, its uniqueness of form. The extreme novelty and diverse materiality of Oceanic objects (which could include hair and teeth, shell, feathers, and bone) was not only endlessly fascinating but also struck a strong visual accord with their own Surrealist techniques of assemblage and collage (Peltier, “Enchanted Castle” 53). Surrealists saw transgressive potential in Oceania’s unconventional aesthetics. As Hal Foster points out, “non-Western” or “primitive” arts were never assimilated smoothly into pre-existing art traditions “but were seen as a rupture, a means of subverting such systems” (Foster 200). Oceanic art was proving itself up to the task of challenging the jaded classificatory systems of the West. In 1920s Paris, it still retained its energy and charge and still possessed the kind of “convulsive beauty” and shock factor that could help “decolonize aesthetics” (Howard 180; Tythacott, Surrealism 128–172). Oceanic art stood outside the boundaries of “classical” taste, distinct even from the classicism that was appraised in African art by the Paris avant-garde. Unlike African objects, which had, to a large extent, been co-opted into the mainstream through the formalist analyses of cubism, Oceanic art remained a relatively unknown quantity (Cowling 181). African art was extremely fashionable and now far less of a visual challenge to European sensibilities than the formal complexity and materiality of Oceanic art. With La Revue Nègre exploding onto the stage of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées in 1925 and the jazz scene in full swing, 323

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Paris was the creative center of the world. An article published in L’Esprit nouveau in 1924 described the “extremely pure plastic language” of African sculpture which was generally more familiar to European audiences at that time, even as it was “exotic.”3 Oceanic art, by contrast, was flamboyant, strange, incongruous. It bore no relationship to any known tradition of art in the West or beyond and was a departure from the more naturalistic realism of African art.

Disdain toward European Culture: Anti-Colonial Sentiment and Disillusion The Surrealists’ enthusiasm for indigenous arts was a way to reinforce their antipathy toward European culture and its values. The insertion of Oceanic artworks into Surrealist exhibitions was calculated, a deliberate act intended to cause outrage and undermine the art establishment. The nuance of these debates as they pertain to cultural appropriation is complex. As d’Alessandro and Gale skillfully outline, the affinity, or shared vision, that early European Surrealists perceived in the art created by Pacific Islanders (or the indigenous peoples of continental America, or Africa) was as much fantasy as fallacy (d’Alessandro and Gale 171). This “fantasy of solidarity” was a Surrealist “blind spot,” brought forth and made visible in the plethora of artifacts and content they produced and assembled, acquired, shuffled, and displayed in their exhibition projects and journalistic enterprises (171). Stripped of original context or meaning, the non-Surrealist works that were assembled for display in exhibitions such as the Exposition surréaliste d’objets (1936) were, in many respects, little more than “fantastical acknowledgements of people with rich creative lives beyond their own,” simultaneously deployed as “powerful emblems of an imagined convergence” according to Surrealist agendas (171). The appropriation was unsound inasmuch as it was based on affiliations that were purely imaginary. This perceived common ground between European Surrealists and their non-European counterparts was of course bound up with the Surrealists’ sustained attack on Western rationalism, in a bid to unleash creativity and move society closer to liberation and intellectual freedom. Even if their overarching ambitions were anti-colonial, Surrealist ambitions nevertheless imposed an exacting appropriation, reinforcing boundaries they had been at pains to erase, ones that distinguished their own sphere of influence from that of a “non-European” world. The result was nothing short of a Surrealist paradox: an inherent flaw in a project which saw the “people, art, and cultures distinct from Europe . . . simultaneously positioned as allied and exotic” (171, emphasis added). As d’Alessandro and Gale clarify, such practices, when we evaluate them almost a century later, are even more fraught “in light of the support of many Surrealists for the political aspirations of the colonized peoples whose work they collected” (171). It was also ironic, given Breton likely also believed that by reasserting its value in their eyes, Surrealists were “rescuing primitive art from neglect, [and] dishonor” (Cowling 181). The reinvestment of emotional power in Oceanic art that Breton and others were committed to was grounded in an understanding that the art of non-European cultures has been misappropriated by colonial officers, ethnographers, and missionaries who had returned with them to Europe from colonial territories as “curios” and “trophies.” Just as the Surrealists’ map of the world had been a profoundly political gesture, Breton’s acknowledgment of the primacy and spiritual power of Oceanic art—and his ambitions to restore its emotional charge—was a statement of “total opposition to the ethics and premises of colonialism and Christianity” (181). Yet even these liberal and progressive ambitions were a romantic imposition, borne of Surrealist

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imaginings about what art in Oceania could really “mean” or “stand for.” Fundamentally, the art languished still in a highly idealized utopia, a “prelapsarian paradise,” as Cowling describes it, “uncontaminated by Western mores” (181). Jules-Marcel Monnerot, a Paris-based Martinican writer and one of the first Black intellectuals to collaborate with André Breton in the 1930s, coined an apt name for his Surrealist associates. The nickname “rodeurs des confins” (or “prowlers at the farthest reaches”) perfectly encapsulated the Surrealist propensity for roaming at the outermost bounds of modern sensibilities, as they looked to push further against, and finally undo, its limits (in Edwards 84; Nunes 123). The geographic metaphor was a deliberate one, anchored in Monnerot’s observation of his Surrealist associates as constantly “[g]nawing at the edges of Europe through their fascination of its others, its outcasts, and in particular its ‘primitives’ in the colonies of Africa, Asia, and Oceania” (Edwards 84; Nunes 123). Like Clifford, Edwards understands this insistence of seeking out what lies “beyond the frontier,” this practice of “turning to non-European cultures to understand the social function of myth, the sacred, and the irrational” linked Surrealism to another discourse that had begun to coalesce in 1920s France, that of the burgeoning discipline of modern ethnography (Edwards 84; Nunes 123). This, for Monnerot, was smoke and mirrors. The evocation of “other” cultures in early ethnographic works was inherently flawed, of course, and could never be a portrait of real life in those places. All it did was establish that other position, that set of coordinates with which Europe could see itself satisfactorily reflected. It was clear, Monnerot argued, this “other” was a “hallucination . . . an expression of everything lacking in the postwar European sensibility, conveniently projected onto the peoples Europe had colonized; you needed the primitive to define the modern” (Edwards 84; Nunes 123). Furthermore, as Edwards points out, during the same period, “these colonial ‘mirages’ were beginning to talk back: soldiers, artists, migrant laborers, and students settled in the métropole after World War I, their presence challenged easy assumptions about the primitivism of ‘natives,’ breaking the illusion of silence, distance, and straightforward acquiescence” (Edwards 84).

Conclusion: Breaching Thresholds Pacific islanders have always been at the center of their own world(s). The inhabitants of Rapa Nui (the mighty L’île de Paques in the Surrealist map) refer to their island as Te Pito o te Henua, which means “the navel (end, center) of the world.” Rather remarkably, the centering of the Pacific in the Surrealist imagination has enormous synergy with Pacific Islanders’ own vision of their centrality. In a Polynesian worldview, the ocean is an ancestral homeland inhabited by the spirits of one’s antecedents. The islands themselves were forged into being by the creative aspects of darkness and light (which is knowledge), and this cosmological landscape is reflected in local, indigenous names. Art in Oceania mediates all aspects of life, and much like Surrealist endeavors, its production is not so much anchored in the creative expression of individuals but in the dynamic of the collective. The art of customary practice is a vital component of life (and death) and attends to the appropriate ritual practices that shuttle between the two. Artworks in the Pacific are designed to operate on these potent borders, mediating the porous thresholds that shape life and configuring relationships just as people negotiate life and death, managing the “here” and “there” (space) with the “then” and “now” (time). Agency—and its active qualities—endows the art of Oceania with enormous transformative potential. The towering slit gongs of northern Vanuatu, among the largest musical instruments in the world, are installed on ceremonial grounds in villages as

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an ensemble and are beaten in time by men who strike the edge of the long vertical slit which is its mouth (tute). The sonorous tones that resonate from the inner chamber produce the “voice” of the ancestor emerging forth, and rhythms of immense complexity can be produced by the carefully coordinated actions of multiple drummers. For ni-Vanuatu, the “beauty” of a slit gong is directly linked to visual qualities, such as radiance, and the quality of the sonorous tones produced. These are indicators of inner life and spiritual force. The empty vessel now imbued with ancestral agency. In his appraisal of the agency of art, British anthropologist Alfred Gell insisted that the distinctive aesthetics of art in Oceania were grounded not so much in ideas of beauty but in its “capacity to accomplish a task,” to motivate action (Gell, Art and Agency 84). Anthony Forge, his precursor in this line of thinking, concurred that Oceanic art seemed to value transcendence via “a sense of the presence of the supranormal, or more power than humans alone can achieve” (Forge 284). In other words, the expression of human talent was attributed directly to the animating influence of ancestors. For Islanders, a mask or shield can be enhanced by the application of a vivid layer of fresh paint or affixing a spray of glossy foliage to embellish the carved contours of its nose and ears. These acts, accompanied by the rhythms of spoken word and gesture, may encourage ancestral presence to pierce through into the present. Convinced that the appeal of Oceanic art resides in this inherent capacity to captivate, Gell contended that artworks were “technologies of enchantment”—designed to “fascinate, compel, and entrap as well as delight the spectator” (Gell, “Technology” 40–67 and Art and Agency 23). Their material efficacy rested in a prodigious (or magical) “technical excellence .  .  . [that] appear[s] to exceed the limits of human possibility” and thus incites those who witness their animation and display to believe the works are far beyond the creative capacities of the human realm (“Art and Agency” 23). Alongside the question of what art in Oceania is, there lies a far richer account of precisely what it does. Was it this charged encounter with Oceanic art’s vitality—its active matter, the “stuff” of its inner life—that so enchanted Surrealists? Looking to tear down the bourgeois limitations imposed on life, they effected a broad assault on the conventions of their day. More than a reorientation of formal aesthetics, the drive was to get “under the skin” of this compelling art: to penetrate the known world and access what lay “beneath” (psychologically) and “beyond” (geographically)—the extraordinary, the supranormal. If European avant-garde interest in Oceanic art was motivated by the search for this more expressive, or “raw,” essence, it was daily confronted with its apparently elusive nature. André Breton acknowledged it a fraught enterprise,4 while Vincent Bounoure noted: Never were the totemist peoples afflicted with this near-sightedness which makes us see in appearances the only reality compatible with technical use. For them . . . there is no reality that is not ready to slip towards another and more revealing one. (Bounoure 27–28) Sensing its powerful agency, the Surrealists approached the borders of this vigorous art but failed to completely breach them; it remained alien, unknowable. In fact, the formal complexity of Oceanic art continues to be absolutely central to an understanding of it. For its apparent indecipherability is intentional—a raison d’être, if you will—precisely because it defies any straightforward consumption by uninitiated eyes (Pacific or otherwise). Access to the depth of ritual knowledge required to decode its secrets is reserved for senior leaders equipped to manage its power. Here, then, ontological difference insists upon distinct interpretations of

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the art in terms of subjectivity and agency. Carving out a necessary space of “in-between,” it is the art itself, released from the constraints of meaning, which creates a space for expansion, for action, for the radical enchantment that so enthralled its Surrealist admirers.

Notes 1. One such artwork in Breton’s collection is a korwar (ancestor figure) from Cenderawasih Bay, now in the collection of Oceanic art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: www.metmuseum.org/ art/collection/search?q=2001.674. 2. Peltier clarifies that an adjacent room featured a display of Polynesian tapa drawn from the museum’s own collections, with a more didactic focus that included a contextual map as well as a mannequin and examples of bark cloth beaters that it was presumably felt would assist people in understanding techniques of the making and manufacture of bark cloth (Peltier, “Enchanted Castle,” p. 49). 3. Cowling explains the author, given as Saint-Quentin, is almost certainly Ozenfant, who frequently published under pseudonyms in the journal; see Cowling, p. 189, endnote 8. 4. Aware of the ontological gap and constant difficulties in breaching cultural distance, Breton acknowledged the gulf felt unbridgeable, commenting that ethnography had failed “to reduce, despite our impatience, the distance which separates us from ancient Maya or contemporary Aboriginal culture of Australia, because we remain largely ignorant of their aspirations and have only a very partial knowledge of their customs” (“The Presence of the Gauls” 333).

Works cited Bounoure, Vincent. “Surrealism and the Savage Heart.” Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters Domain, D’Arcy Galleries, 1960, pp. 27–28. Breton, André. “Oceania.” Free Rein, University of Nebraska, 1996. ———. “The Presence of the Gauls.” Surrealism and Painting, Icon, 1972, pp. 333–336. ———. “Surrealist Exhibition of Objects.” Surrealism and Painting, Icon, 1972, pp. 282–283. Bruhn, Sanja. “Marko Ristić’s Surrealist Wall, Belgrade.” Surrealism beyond Borders, edited by d’Alessandro and Gale, Yale University Press, 2021, pp. 176–179. Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Surrealism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 23, no. 4, October 1981, pp. 539–564. Cowling, Elisabeth. “L’oeil Sauvage: Oceanic Art and the Surrealists.” The Art of Northwest New Guinea, edited by Rizzoli International, 1992, pp. 177–189. D’Alessandro, Stephanie, and Matthew Gale. “The Fantasy and Fallacy of Elsewhere.” Surrealism beyond Borders, edited by d’Alessandro and Gale, Yale University Press, 2021, p. 171. ———, editors. Surrealism beyond Borders. Yale University Press, 2021. Edwards, Brent Hayes. “The Ethnics of Surrealism.” Transition, no. 78, 1998, pp. 84–135. Forge, Anthony. “The Problem of Meaning in Art.” Exploring the Visual Art of Oceania: Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, edited by S. M. Mead, University of Hawai’i Press, 1979, pp. 278–286. Foster, Hal. “The Primitive Unconscious of Modern Art.” Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, edited by H. Foster, Bay Press, 1985. Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. The Clarendon Press, 1998. ———. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.” Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, edited by J. Coote and A. Shelton, The Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. 40–66. Howard, Claire. “The Enchanter’s Domain: Oceania, the Northwest Coast, and New York.” Surrealism beyond Borders, edited by d’Alessandro and Gale, Yale University Press, 2021, pp. 180–183. Monnerot, Jules. La poésie modern et le sacré. Gallimard, 1945. Nunes, Zita Cristina. “Antropofagía and Surrealism in Brazil.” Surrealism without Borders, edited by d’Alessandro and Gale, Yale University Press, 2021, pp. 123–127. Peltier, Philippe. “Jacques Viot and the Enchanted Castle.” Ancestors of the Lake: Art of Lake Sentani and Humboldt Bay, New Guinea, edited by Virginia Lee-Webb, Menil Foundation, 2011, pp. 48–55. ———. “Jacques Viot, the Maro of Tobati and Modern Painting: Paris-New Guinea, 1925–1935.” The Art of Northwest New Guinea, edited by S. Grueb, Rizzoli, 1992, pp. 155–175.

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Maia Nuku ———. “Objects of Revelation and Desire.” New Guinea Art: Masterpieces from the Jolika Collection of Marcia and John Friede, Vol. 2. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in association with 5 Continents Editions, 2005, pp. 56–69. Rivière, Georges-Henri. Oceanic Art. Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1934. Rubin, William. “Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction.” “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, vol. 1, edited by William Rubin, Museum of Modern Art, 1984, pp. 1–81. Sowels, Katia “Exposition Surréaliste d’Objets, Paris.” Surrealism beyond Borders, edited by d’Alessandro and Gale, Yale University Press, 2021, pp. 172–175. Tythacott, Louise. “A ‘Convulsive Beauty’: Surrealism, Oceania and African Art.” Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 11, May 1999, pp. 43–54. ———. Surrealism and the Exotic. Routledge, 2003.

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36 THE SURREALIST EXPERIENCE OF INDIGENOUS NORTH AMERICA A Second “Discovery” of the Americas Marco Polo Juarez Cruz During their two-month tour around the Pacific Coast in 1939, Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, and Eva Sulzer visited the renowned Bear Totem Store in Wrangell, Alaska. In the shop— specialized in selling Tlingit handicrafts, carvings, and totem poles collected by its owner, Walters C. Waters—Paalen bought a 15-feet-high house screen that had belonged to the Chief Shakes of the Tlingit Naanya.aayí clan. Carved around 1840, the screen shows the typical elements of Tlingit wood carving: the ovoidal form line in red and black colors delineating the head and torso of a female bear with small faces in joints, eyes, nostrils, and hands. The bear represents the crest of the Shakes family, a symbolic figure that celebrated the physical and spiritual union between their ancestors and the brown bear.1 Fascinated by the Tlingit myths of rebirth and the animist communion between humans and the natural landscape, Paalen took the screen to Mexico City and promoted its exhibition and promotion. The 1945 exposition El Arte Indigena de Norteamerica, organized in Mexico’s Museo de Antropologia, presented it as the show’s opening piece. The exhibition’s curator Miguel Covarrubias included the screen in The Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Serpent (1954), his study of the Indian art of North American countries that proposed the existence of a cultural spirit shared by non-Western cultures in the region. The anthropologic interest of Paalen to study, exhibit, and absorb the symbolism of the Chief Shakes House partition screen exemplifies the complex relationship between learning and exhibiting Indigenous artworks and the reconceptualization of the Surrealist experience influenced by local mythologies of the Americas. His association with local tribes across the region provoked an ambivalent approach to the material culture of these communities. Paalen recognized the colonizing processes followed by the avant-garde—that devaluated and exoticized pre-Columbian art—and criticized their unwillingness to study and research the local context that originated these pieces. Even though he attempted to disrupt this approximation, his recollections of the Pacific Northwest cultures do not lack the indulging idealism that gave prevalence to the ruins as links with a fictional past, disregarding contemporary cultures as reminiscences of a glorious past and omitting the usual processes of acculturation and integration. In the process of challenging the cultural structures imposed by Western canons, Surrealist artists discovered a novel visual vocabulary in the material objects created by Native communities living in Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. During the early decades of the twentieth DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-41

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Figure 36.1 Tlingit artist, House Partition with Shakes Family Crest, about 1840. Wood, paint, and human hair, 180 × 108 in. Denver Art Museum: Native Arts acquisition fund, 1951.315. Source: Photography courtesy Denver Art Museum.

century, Surrealism shared with other avant-garde movements an interest in ethnographic and anthropologic explorations and archeological excavations to establish formal comparisons, propose new categories, and promote the importance of art as a factor to change society. Indigenous communities from Canada, the United States, and Mexico inspired this reimagination of Surrealism through the diverse activities and objects of dances, myths, textiles, and handicrafts. Distinct factions of Surrealism, like the Breton group, the dissident Surrealism of Bataille, and the artists rooted in the Americas—such as Wolfgang Paalen and Carlos Mérida—shared this interest, adapting their objectives and intentions to the cultural milieu around them. Diverse factors participated in introducing Surrealism to Indigenous communities across North America. Ethnographic explorations promoted by institutions such as the American 330

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Museum of Natural History (New York) and the Direccion de Arqueologia (Mexico City) collected Indigenous artworks and registered cultural and religious practices, bringing the artworks to museums and cultural institutions. Galleries and antiquity shops introduced masks and sculptures in the art market. Inspired by a new aesthetic and the magic involved in the myths and dances, Surrealists valued more the noncanonical representations of religion and magic over the prevalent bourgeois ideologies of Europe. By looking at the diversity of interactions with Indigenous art, this text contributes to the analysis of Surrealism’s attempt to expand the categories of art and to reflect upon colonialist practices in museum galleries and the art market. Despite the genuine interest in learning about Native cultural traditions, it is possible to identify in the Surrealist enterprise the same approach of other contemporary avant-gardes that fell into the mistake of misinterpreting and co-opting the Native art to their particular agendas.

The Search for Original Art in the “New World” In his seminal work The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, James Clifford explains that avant-garde artists found in non-Western artworks exhibited in Paris a reservoir of new images and religious beliefs. Their confrontation with other cultures persuaded them that “The Other” needed to be an object of modernist research, experienced through dreams, fetishes, or a “primitivist” mindset (Clifford 152). Distinct enterprises intended to present Indigenous artworks from the Americas to Parisian audiences. The issue 9–10 of The Surrealist Revolution (October 1927), for example, included a Kachina figure made by Hopi people.2 In 1928, the Louvre Museum organized the exhibit Ancient Art of the Americas that included artworks from Surrealist and archaeological collections. During the exile provoked by the WWII, the European avant-garde took an ethnographic and aesthetic interest in Indigenous artworks in the museums and galleries of New York, Mexico City, and other cities. Ethnographic expeditions sponsored by the American Natural History Museum in New York, such as the Jesup North Pacific Expedition,3 collected artworks to document the cultures in the process of undergoing change due to colonialism and acculturation. George Gustave Heye sponsored archaeological surveys in the Southwest, acquiring Alaskan artworks that formed the basis for the Museum of American Indian’s collection. Another source that allowed Surrealists to observe and acquire objects for their collections was the antique shop owned by German immigrant Julius Carlebach. The Swiss sculptor Isabelle Waldberg looked back at Carlebach’s shop as “the place of our desires on 3rd Avenue, where we breathe in Alaska, we dream Tlingit, we make love in Haida totem poles” (Ades 240). Max Ernst—who bragged about being the “discoverer” of Carlebach’s and attempted to hide it from other Surrealists—acquired a large-scale figure of Dzunukwa, a mythical entity from the Kwakwaka'wakw people. The totem-like sculpture accompanied him to Sedona, Arizona, into the house he shared with Dorothea Tanning and, eventually, back to France. The relationship between Surrealist artists and Native communities was not fixated only on predispositions and artistic objectives. It fluctuated in consideration of the individual experiences and the encounters with living cultures. Andre Breton’s visit to the Zuni and Hopi reservations in the American Southwest reaffirmed his objectives to connect artistic production with social life. George Bataille’s subversive Surrealism positioned ethnography in the same level of archaeology and the fine arts as a methodological stance to criticize Western culture. Antonin Artaud traveled to Mexico in 1935 and attempted to connect the pre-Columbian religion to a revolution of the mind that could liberate people from their capitalist alienation. Max Ernst reinterpreted his apocalyptic vision of the destruction in Europe through the lens of the Southwest landscape. Wolfgang Paalen and Alice Rahon’s excursion through the Pacific Coast 331

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confronted them with a new visual vocabulary connected with their interest in mythological narratives of origin and totemism.

Surrealists in Exile: Breton, Ernst, and Artaud in North America Even before his first trip to Mexico in 1938, Breton had already amassed a vast collection of artworks from the Americas’ Indigenous cultures. The Louvre exhibition Ancient Arts of the Americas included artworks Breton has collected from antique Mesoamerican civilizations—such as Aztec, Mixtec, and Teotihuacan—and contemporary living cultures from North America, such as Haida and Kwakwaka’wakw. Reflecting on his Mexico visit, Breton found it “Surrealist in its topography and flora, in the dynamism that the mixture of races confers it, as well as in its highest aspirations” (Gilbert 32). These aspirations were part of the new policies started by the post-Revolution government that promoted socially oriented programs. In his essay “Memory of Mexico,” published in Minotaure in May 1939, Breton described Mexico as virgin land rooted in Aztec culture, soaked with blood, and infatuated by desire and danger, driven by a power that conciliates life and death (31). The Indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest provided Breton an opportunity to delve into non-Western ways of life and contemplate atavistic symbols that had survived since preindustrialization time. The perception of a humid landscape where totem poles covered with moss emerged from the soil gave him a concept of a “primitive” art that could criticize the social crisis of European societies. Totem poles, coppers, and other ceremonial artworks of the Pacific Northwest communities were supposedly made by anonymous hands, connecting them to primal expressions of civilizations uninterrupted and untouched by colonialism.4 In 1941, Breton escaped the Vichy regime and occupied France and settled in New York, where he could look further into American Native cultures. After studying the Museum of American Indian collections, he visited the Zuni and Hopi communities of the American Southwest in 1945 and acquired new Kachina dolls. Beyond his collecting practices, Breton was also interested in the spirituality that connected the objects with local mythologies and religious beliefs and the social inclusion of the arts in communitarian practices (Semerjian 248). As integrating arts into daily life was one of the objectives of Breton’s faction of Surrealism, the experience in the Indian reservations in Arizona (Hopi) and New Mexico (Zuni) provided him with new arguments to criticize the living conditions in Europe. The Zuni and Hopi people are part of the Pueblo people, who descended from an ancient homonymous civilization. Puebloans were usually represented as agrarian communities with a peaceful lifestyle based on agriculture. This romantic way of life attracted the American modernist artists who moved to Santa Fe and Taos in the early twentieth century. Breton embraced this approach, celebrating the “peaceful, pre-industrial social existence” in the remote and austere regions of Arizona and New Mexico (Semerjian 248). He displayed his Kachina dolls collection in his New York studio, arguing that the Hopi and Zuni way of life validated the Surrealist vision of integrating the arts into a society in peace and dignity. The “utopian” lifestyle of the Pueblo people clashed with the constructed stereotype of another Southwest group, the Navajo people, whose supposedly “warlike nature” was inconsistent with Breton’s Surrealist enterprise and therefore was not the subject of study and collection. German painter and poet Max Ernst was also interested in Hopi and Zuni cultures, specifically in the ritualistic nature of Kachina figures. Max Among Some of His Favorite Dolls, published in the Surrealist magazine View in April 1942, shows him looking kindly to his collection of 29 Kachina figures. Kachina dolls exemplify introducing Indigenous cultural objects into mainstream circuits by cultural tourism and collecting practices, elements that 332

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influenced the Surrealist experience (Butler-Palmer 57). The Hopi figures materialize mythological beings that served as messengers between humans and the ethereal world. Their physical presence in the threshold between distinct realities was optimal for the Surrealist experience. Ernst arrived in the United States in July 1941. During his time in the Americas, he sought an ideologic connection with the Southwest’s folklore, a region that he visited in 1941 with his wife, Peggy Guggenheim. Interested in learning more about the local cultures, he returned in 1943 and later settled in Sedona, Arizona, in 1946 with his wife and fellow Surrealist, Dorothea Tanning. According to art historian Samantha Kavky, Ernst fictionalized his migration to Arizona and modified his visual vocabulary through a process of mimetic adoption of rites, myths, and cultural practices (221). Ernst collected Indigenous art and frequented the Museum of the American Indian along with Breton and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Through his interaction with the Kachina dolls, Hopi masks, and other ceremonial artifacts, Ernst attempted to create a vehicle between his strangeness as a German exiled in an unknown territory and a community that experienced another form of ostracism. Lee Miller’s photographs of Ernst show him wearing an Indigenous robe in front of the wild landscape of Arizona or using a Hopi mask while doing daily activities. This mimetic process evidenced the construction of a Surrealist identity as a unique mechanism to deal with exile and personal redefinition. Recently, the problematic nature of such collecting practices has been acknowledged by Aube Elléouët-Breton, daughter of André, who repatriated a ceremonial headdress from her father’s collection to the Kwakwaka’wakw people of Alert Bay in 2003. Though it was apparently unbeknownst to Breton, the headdress had been seized in a 1921 raid in the 66-year period in which potlatch ceremonies were illegal in Canada. Other Surrealists were more attracted to their preconceived understanding of pre-Columbian civilizations. Georges Bataille advocated the revival of myth and spirituality by focusing on the Aztec civilization. In “Extinct America,” Bataille praised the Aztecs’ religiosity as a practice filled with mad violence, terror and necromancy, and black humor (5). “Extinct America” included a representation of a human sacrifice from the Codex Vaticanus, exemplifying Bataille’s interest in the aesthetic of human sacrifice and its connection with slaughterhouses as evidence of Western hypocrisy and shyness to violence. Antonin Artaud arrived in Mexico in 1936, attracted by the post-Revolution cultural movement that attempted to reconnect with the nation’s Indigenous roots. Artaud’s liberation of the mind was not intended as a political movement but as a revival of indigenous cosmologies and ancient rites that could create a balance between humans and nature. During his time in Mexico, he decided to register the rituals of an isolated Indigenous community, the Rarámuri people. Located in the remote Sierra Madre, Rarámuri people exemplified to Artaud the animist way of life that survived Western colonialism. However, his experiences were not enlightening. He became disappointed with the syncretic union of Catholic and pre-Hispanic practices followed by Tarahumaras, especially in rituals involving peyote, an endemic hallucinogenic plant. Exiled European Surrealists engaged in a complex and fluid relationship with folk art and ceremonial artifacts of Indigenous people of the Americas. On one side, they demonstrated an aesthetic interest and ideological appreciation of religious practices and myths, promoting an anthropological approach to studying and preserving local communities’ material culture. On the other, they were usually driven by Eurocentric perceptions of understanding these cultures as noncivilized or in the early stages of development. Collecting practices were constantly motivated by the interest of novelty, formal reaffirmations of avant-garde practices, or a paternalist interest in preserving the communities external to Western influence. Indigenous artworks in Surrealist journals contributed to creating a scientific perspective and increasing awareness of 333

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their aesthetics and ceremonial practices. However, it also produced a unique narrative co-opted by Western actors and directed to respond to the Surrealist enterprise.

An Exploration of the Local Origins: The Latin American Experience with Indigenous Cultures For Latin American artists associated with Surrealism—and those who made the Americas their home—the approach proposed by the avant-garde movement could establish a connection with the pre-Hispanic civilizations subjugated during colonization. In the introduction of the 1940 Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City, the Peruvian poet Cesar Moro celebrated the potential instauration of the pre-Columbian spirit that survived through the cultural hiatus of colonial occupation. Since the first decades of the twentieth century, Latin American countries experienced distinct processes of modernization, attempting at the same time to document and celebrate their national heritage. Countries like Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru acknowledged the existence of Indigenous communities within their borders and attempted to integrate them into a nationalistic discourse, incorporating their culture to the broad definition of national spirit. For many Latin American artists, Surrealism was a liminal category that both defined and constrained the understanding of their artistic practice. This unfixed approach to Surrealism provoked a varied experience of artistic practices. Gunther Gerzso did not categorize himself as a Surrealist painter but used automatic drawing and hidden allusions throughout his artistic career. Frida Kahlo argued that she painted not dreams but her daily reality. Nevertheless, Breton imposed a Surrealist narrative around her paintings and physical presence. Alice Rahon and Wolfgang Paalen constructed metaphysical imageries that reinterpreted animist religious practices of the Pacific Northwest. Instead of aligning under a particular Surrealist ideology, Latin American artists constantly used other concepts, such as oneiric, subconscious gestures, and personal introspection, to explore their position in a world in change and their interest in folk art, pre-Hispanic civilizations, and popular traditions. Gunther Gerzso’s artistic practice combined his experience in stage designing and his relationship with the group of Surrealists that found refuge from the war in Mexico City, among them Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Benjamin Péret. One of his early paintings— The days of Gabino Barreda Street (1944)—depicts a formal portrait of the Surrealist group that coincided in Péret and Varo’s home in the San Rafael neighborhood in Mexico City. Gerzso’s Surrealist experience was influenced not only by his friendship with other artists; during the 1940s, Gerzso also frequented the Museo de Antropologia, excavations sites, and collected pre-Hispanic sculptures and pottery. He also traveled to pre-Columbian sites in Mexico—such as Uxmal, Labná, and Chichen Itzá in the Maya region—and Peru, like Machu Picchu and Tiwanaku. These experiences allowed him to construct avant-garde imagery with traces of pre-Hispanic architecture. In Gerzso’s artistic production, the space is assimilated into its surroundings as a mimetic act that dissolves the boundaries of each figure. Ancient Structures (1955) evidences Gerzso’s interest in Mesoamerican architecture. A volume emerges from the landscape, organized by a series of square shapes reminiscent of the stucco reliefs, friezes, and decorations of Mayan sculptural stelae. Cenote (1947) exemplifies Gerzso’s approximations to a Surrealist abstraction in the use of abstract volumes that suggests the geology of the Maya landscape. Cenotes are subterranean bodies of water used by pre-Hispanic Maya as a threshold between the material and the subterranean worlds. The geometrical composition presented by Gerzso invites the observer to associate it unconsciously with the ceremonial space used for offerings and human sacrifices. The geometrical shapes that emerged from the subterranean lake occlude any representation 334

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but suggest the atavistic nature of the pre-Hispanic rites and sacrifices. By using formal elements that unchained reminiscences of the pre-Hispanic past, Gerzso integrates them to local modernism with international and archaic origins. Born in Guatemala, Carlos Mérida had traditional training as an artist, studying with local artists before traveling to Europe to a Parisian atelier. Mérida arrived in Mexico in 1919; in the following decades, he was part of an effervescent artistic scene, integrating the formal languages and ideologies of cubism and Mexican muralism into the Surrealist experience. To Mérida, Surrealism was an alternative to a chauvinistic appropriation of folklore that liberated him from following the defined languages of social realism and other avant-garde movements. This personal approach allowed him to combine geometrical compositions that suggested dancers and wizards—as in the triangle-shaped figures shown in Los Hechicheros (The Magicians) (1958)—with biomorphic figures that levitate around the canvas surface in paintings such as Rainy Gray (1943). In 1943, Mérida designed the portfolio Prints of the Popol Vuh, a series of lithographs illustrating ten mythological scenes of the Guatemalan K’iche’ people’s book of origins. In the portfolios’ introduction, Mérida praised the Mayan civilization as one of the most advanced in the Americas and celebrated their rich heritage of myths and folklore. The lithographs focus on the Maya Hero Twins—Hunahpu and Xbalanque—portraying them as transparent entities that fight against biomorphic creatures in an oneiric landscape. Mérida collaborated in the magazine DYN, favoring Paalen’s dissident Surrealism that attempted to form connections to the past by collecting, registering, and celebrating folk art and Indigenous traditions. Beyond adhering to established formalisms, Mérida agreed on the invitation to recover the agency of Native artistic practices as an opportunity to subvert the structures of Western culture. Wolfgang Paalen arrived in New York in 1939, accompanied by Eva Sulzer and his partner, Alice Rahon. Before traveling to Mexico City, the destination chosen for their exile, they met Kurt Seligmann, a Swiss American painter who had spent four months in British Columbia during 1938 documenting the ritual practices of the local communities. Seligmann published in Minotaure the article “Entretien avec un Tsimshian,” a dialogue with a Tsimshian Indian that compared the symbolism of totem poles and European heraldic imagery as similar remains of mythical beasts (Seligmann 66). Determined to experience the life of the Pacific Northwest Indian communities, the group spent two months around Alaska, Vancouver Island, and British Columbia, documenting their trip with personal diaries, photographs, and film. The train journeys introduced Paalen to a new environment of fallen trees that appeared as “natural totems” and abandoned totem poles covered with moss as if they had returned to their vegetal state. Paalen associated the Northwest Coast’s cultural landscape with his previous interest in totemic objects that connected humans and spirit beings. Before arriving in the Americas, Paalen painted Totemic Landscape of my Childhood (1937), a group of phantasmagoric presences that emerged from the canvas using Surrealist processes, such as mimeticism and automatism, through the use of fumage.5 The Surrealist journal DYN—coordinated by Paalen in Mexico City—encouraged the revolutionary character of imagination and the “anticipatory energy” of images that can activate a new order. The Amerindian Number (DYN 4–5, 1943) contained collaborations of anthropologists, archaeologists, and photographers who utilized Indigenous art to subvert Western culture critically. It explored the origins of Mesoamerican culture—connecting it with the ancient Olmec culture—and published illustrations and photos of the recent excavations in Mezcala and Tlatilco.6 In his article “Totem Art,” Paalen argued that abandoned totem poles—like the ones in Sulzer’s photographs published in DYN—embodied a closer connection to its animist origins, achieved by the erosion of rain and time. Although this approach broadened the visual 335

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vocabulary of Western art and invited the liberation of minds, it included what Aldona Jonaitis has defined as the “White Man’s perception.” This compared non-Western cultures to “primitive” and underdeveloped stages of humankind (Winter 167) and stressed an urgency to collect and register the material culture to “save” it from the contemporary process of acculturation. Other Surrealist artists incorporated concepts and icons of Indigenous art into their visual repertoire of images. Frida Kahlo gave new form to the Surrealist experience, incorporating oneiric symbols of pre-Hispanic civilizations with biographical scenes of love and suffering. In Self-Portrait on the Borderline of Mexico and the United States (1932), Kahlo portrays herself in the threshold that divides the industrialized America and Mexico, a land of natural abundance, clay figurines, and ancient pyramids. Alice Rahon—a member of the Paalen tour in the Pacific Coast—admired the materiality and craftsmanship of totem poles and petroglyphs. Rahon’s Surrealism utilized incisions, sand, and other materials to evoke geological formations representing the abstract landscape of ruins and abandoned lands. Throughout her career, Leonora Carrington built an imagery that combined humanoid entities with zoomorphic figures placed in magical spaces. Influenced by midcentury studies in Jungian psychology and religion, she integrated totemic elements into her canvases that allude to rites of medieval Christianity, the Kabbalah, or Tibetan Buddhism. In 1964, Carrington painted The Magical World of the Mayas for the ethnographic galleries of the Maya region at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia. The painting condensed the ritual practices of the ancient and contemporary Maya people, a syncretic communion of Christian and pre-Hispanic beliefs and traditions. Carrington integrated iconic elements of the ancient Maya rites—such as the feathered serpent, sinister creatures from the Underworld, or the ceiba tree that connects the heavens and earth—with Christian rituals, like a procession coming out from the church or a group of missionaries teaching the gospel to the contemporary Maya people.

Notes 1. According to a legend of the Shakes clan, an ancestor was captured by bears and married to a female bear. After escaping, he adopted the bear crest as a symbol of communion with the natural land and reborn. 2. Kachinas are spiritual beings in the Hopi system of beliefs that represent ethereal entities, such as natural elements, celestial bodies, or ancestors. The Kachina dolls are wooden figures made for instructional purposes. Contemporary Katchina dolls are also commercial souvenirs, made without spiritual connections. 3. Ethnographic expedition coordinated by Franz Boas between 1897 and 1902 that investigated the cultural connections between Indian groups across the Northwest Coast and Siberia. 4. Totem poles are markers of ancestry, lineage, and connection with spiritual and animal beings, usually carved with red cedarwood. Coppers are shield-like plaques used as symbols of the wealth and renown of clan chiefs. 5. Fumage is an art technique that implies the use of a candle or kerosene lamp to create stains of smoke or impressions on the canvas. 6. Mezcala (Guerrero) and Tlatilco (Estado de México) are two archaeological sites of the Mesoamerican preclassic period. Excavations during the 1940s allowed Surrealists and archaeologists to historicize the genealogy of civilizations in Mesoamerica.

Works Cited Ades, Dawn, and Vancouver Art Gallery. The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art. Vancouver Art Gallery, 2011. Ades, Dawn et al. Surrealism in Latin America: Vivísimo Muerto. Getty Research Institute, 2012.

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Surrealism of Indigenous North America Baackmann, Susanne, and David Craven. “Surrealism and Post-Colonial Latin America. Introduction.” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, vol. 3, nos. 1–2, 2009, pp. i–xvii. Bataille, Georges. “L’Amérique Disparue.” Les Cahiers de la République des lettres, des sciences et des arts, no. 11, 1928, pp. 5–14. Butler-Palmer, Carolyn. “Max Ernst and the Aesthetic of Commercial Tourism: Max among Some of His Favorite Dolls.” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, vol. 10, no. 1, 2019, pp. 46–68. Castañeda, Luis M. “Surrealism and National Identity in Mexico. Changing Perceptions, 1940–1968.” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, vol. 3, nos. 1–2, 2009, pp. 9–29. Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Surrealism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 23, no. 4, October 1981, pp. 539–564. Clifford, James et al. Dilemas De La Cultura: Antropología, Literatura Y Arte En La Perspectiva Posmoderna. Gedisa, 2016. Dickson, Kent L. “Surrealist Views, American Landscapes. Notes on Wolfgang Paalen’s Ruin Gazing.” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, vol. 8, no. 1, 2014, pp. 51–73. Du Pont, Diana C. et al. Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2003. Garza Usabiaga, Daniel. El Gran Malentendido: Wolfgang Paalen En México Y El Surrealismo Disidente De La Revista DYN. Instituto Nacional De Bellas Artes, Museo De Arte Carrillo Gil, 2018. Gerzso, Gunther. Gunther Gerzso. El Esplendor De La Muralla. Conaculta, 1994. Gilbert, Courtney. “Negotiating Surrealism. Carlos Mérida, Mexican Art and the Avant-Garde.” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, vol. 3, nos. 1–2, 2009, pp. 30–50. Jordan, Keith. “Surrealist Visions of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the Legacy of Colonialism: The Good, the (Revalued) Bad, and the Ugly.” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008, pp. 25–63. Kavky, Samantha. “Max Ernst in Arizona: Myth, mimesis, and the hysterical landscape.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 57/58, Spring/Autumn 2010, pp. 209–228. Lecrecq, Sophie. The Surrealist Appropriation of the Indiegenous Arts. Arts & Sociétés, 23 November 2006. Leddy, Annette et al. Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico. Getty Research Institute, 2012. Mahon, Alice. “The Lost Secret Frida Kahlo and the Surrealist Imaginary.” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, vol. 5, nos. 1–2, 2011, pp. 33–54. Mesch, Claudia. “ ‘What Makes Indian Laugh.’ Surrealism, Ritual, and Return in Steven Yazzie and Joseph Beuys.” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, vol. 6, no. 1, 2012, pp. 39–60. Seligmann, Kurt. “Entretien avec un Tsimshian.” Minotaure, nos. 12–13, 1939, pp. 66–69. Semerjian, Victor. In Search of the Primordial Communists: André Breton, Surrealism and the Indigenous Societies of North America. PhD dissertation, The University of British Columbia, 1997. Winter, Amy. Wolfgang Paalen: Artist and Theorist of the Avant-Garde. Praeger, 2003.

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37 FEMINIST ENCOUNTERS WITH SURREALISM Revisiting the Formative Critiques Anna Watz The early 1970s saw the emergence, almost simultaneously in France and the United States, of feminist scholarship on Surrealism. This paradigm shift, energized by feminism’s second wave, generated numerous new critical approaches to Surrealist art and literature, many of which remain pertinent to scholars in the twenty-first century. Indeed, in 2021, as I write this, feminist explorations of Surrealism are thriving and have resulted not only in a rich library of critical literature but also in a wealth of curatorial and publishing projects focused on Surrealist women artists and writers. This chapter seeks to map the key feminist critiques of and debates around Surrealism in the 1970s and 1980s, after which point feminist Surrealist scholarship underwent a marked proliferation and, building on these earlier insights, developed in fresh and innovative directions. Focusing primarily on francophone and anglophone scholarship, I aim to establish how these bodies of work both diverge from and overlap with each other, as well as to account for the ways in which they intersect with and contribute to broader contemporaneous cultural and theoretical debates. From its emergence in the early 1970s, feminist scholarship on Surrealism has largely followed two lines of inquiry: a critique of male Surrealist representations of women on the one hand, and a gynocritical effort to recover and promote the work of previously marginalized women artists and writers on the other. The pioneering critique was Xavière Gauthier’s Surréalisme et sexualité, which appeared in 1971 and which largely falls into the former category. Catching momentum from the growing second feminist wave, Surréalisme et sexualité rapidly became a best seller in France; it was reissued several times and translated into Italian (1973), Japanese (1975), Spanish (1976), and German (1980). An English translation was also commissioned, but as a result of a series of complications and misunderstandings between the translator (British novelist Angela Carter) and the prospective publishers (Calder and Boyars in the UK and Basic Books in the US), the English edition was never published (see Watz “Angela Carter”). Surréalisme et sexualité offers a detailed critical investigation of Surrealism’s representations of women. Like many early second-wave feminist scholars, Gauthier draws on Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis in The Second Sex (1949) of the Western patriarchal construction of “Woman” as other (although, as we shall see, her engagement with Beauvoir’s thought is not entirely straightforward). Beauvoir herself had indeed noted that André Breton “does not speak of woman as subject” and concluded that: “Truth, Beauty, Poetry, she is All: once more all in the figure of the other, All except herself ” (252). Adopting this methodological framework, Gauthier DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-42

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subjects not only Breton but also the entire Surrealist movement to a thorough demythologizing analysis, finding that most male Surrealist images of women—whether depicted as femme-enfant, flower-woman, ethereal being, femme fatale, or praying mantis—perpetuate a phallocentric notion of femininity as embodying otherness. Gauthier’s catalog of problematic Surrealist representations of femininity closes with her conclusion that in all her guises, “the Surrealist woman is a male construct” (1971, 190). Gauthier, furthermore, traces a discrepancy between how women are represented in Surrealist writing compared to visual art, stating that “[i]n Surrealist poetry, woman is beautiful and loved. In Surrealist painting, woman is malicious and hated” (331). In the last part of the study, she employs a psychoanalytic model to argue that Surrealism is predicated on an Oedipal desire for the lost womb, which results, on the one hand, in veneration and idealization of female purity and, on the other, in aggression directed toward the female body, caused by castration anxiety. Yet Surréalisme et sexualité does not constitute a categorical rejection of Surrealism as a philosophy; as Gauthier acknowledges early in the study, the Surrealist quest to liberate desire and sexuality had the potential to revolutionize human experience and shatter bourgeoispatriarchal moral and social structures. This subversive pursuit, however, fails to adequately inform Surrealist practice. “The spirit of Surrealism as seen in its works is very often at odds with the spirit of Surrealism in its declarations,” Gauthier writes. “Surrealist writing and painting is full of internal contradictions, unkept promises and missed opportunities” (276). Gauthier’s ambivalent faith in the revolutionary but unfulfilled potential of Surrealist doctrine and her disappointment in the movement’s sometimes banal or problematic gender politics operate dialectically throughout the study. J. B. Pontalis, in the book’s preface, aptly notes that: The reader wonders whether this book is meant to be an indictment or a “defence and illustration”? The answer varies from chapter to chapter, sometimes from page to page. . . . This vacillation has not been produced by vague thinking; it reflects an ambivalence inherent in Surrealism. (9) At the root of this contradiction is Surrealism’s cult of romantic love, which turns on the idealization of woman as object and which, for both Gauthier and Pontalis, is incommensurable with true liberation of desire and sexuality. Indeed, the exaltation of “Woman” as object rather than subject, Gauthier declares, is what ultimately causes “l’échec surréaliste”—Surrealism’s failure (269). However, whereas Gauthier concludes that most Surrealists failed to challenge the “phallocentric myths that are some of the most solid founding blocks of our bourgeois society” (276), a small handful realized an expression of desire and of femininity that were not complicit with phallocentric structures and definitions of women. Gauthier coins the term “femellitude” to describe such a subversive aesthetic, which she uses to characterize the work of Leonor Fini and Pierre Molinier and, to some extent, that of Hans Bellmer, Georges Bataille, and Antonin Artaud. Their radical depiction of gender and sexuality, Gauthier states, is predicated on “perversion,” which not only “advance[s] our cultural choices” but ultimately results in both questioning and eschewing phallogocentrism (357). Gauthier’s discussion of femellitude gestures toward what would become a major concern in French feminist debates in the latter half of the 1970s: the question of whether language and creative expressions could be marked by sexual difference (see Watz “Surrealism”). This problem would split the women’s liberation movement in France into two factions: materialist feminism, which was aligned with Beauvoir’s foundational feminism of equality and rejected any notion of sexual difference, on the one hand, and so-called “difference 340

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feminism,” which elaborated a set of theories on écriture féminine in dialogue with psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, on the other. By the mid-1970s, Gauthier had become firmly allied with this latter group and renounced the thought of Beauvoir, but her position in Surréalisme et sexualité—written before the two feminist factions had crystallized—oscillates between them; thus, she adopts a Beauvoirian methodology in her critique of Surrealist representations of women, while also noting that equality feminism fails adequately to challenge the patriarchal structures that continue to define language and psychosexual development. While Gauthier’s core analysis in Surréalisme et sexualité, as Pontalis showed, is marked by ambivalence, the tone of her writing is highly polemical. Several of her “conclusions” are often put forward in a language that reads as contentious and, at times, reductive. Another problematic aspect of the study is its lack of attention to historical context. These features, in addition to the fact that an English translation was never published, likely played a role in the marginalized position Surréalisme et sexualité assumed in anglophone Surrealist scholarship in the 1980s and after; its critique was typically dismissed as overly simplified and one-dimensional. In France, Gauthier’s book spurred some further feminist research into Surrealism (see e.g. Maryse Laffitte’s 1976 article “L’image de la femme chez Breton: contradictions et virtualités”), but it also provoked a vitriolic response from writers amenable to or associated with Surrealism. In her polemic Lâchez tout (Let Go, 1977), Surrealist writer Annie Le Brun proclaimed the feminist movement to be a “sinister army of conformism” which insisted that all women must be sisters and embrace their shared feminine specificity—a dangerous threat, for Le Brun, against individuality and artistic creativity. Grouping together disparate thinkers such as Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Gauthier, Kate Millet, and Germaine Greer, as well as art critic Griselda Pollock, under the epithet “neo-feminists” (to distinguish them from firstwave feminists like Flora Tristan, Louise Michel, and Virginia Woolf) and accusing them of moralizing indoctrination and sexual puritanism, Le Brun arguably misrepresents and flattens the multidirectional and often-contradictory threads that make up 1970s feminism. Le Brun’s specific attack on Gauthier suggests that Lâchez tout was motivated primarily by a desire to defend Surrealism against censure spurred by the publication of Surréalisme et sexualité. The title of Le Brun’s book—with its overt reference to Breton’s essay “Lâchez tout” (1922)—further confirms its rationale as a specifically Surrealist attack on feminism. In 1977, the French journal Obliques published a special double issue, entitled La Femme surréaliste, which attempted to bridge the dichotomous positions represented by Gauthier and Le Brun by publishing extracts from both Surréalisme et sexualité and Lâchez tout, together with other pieces of scholarship on the figure of woman in Surrealism. Referencing the antagonistic nature and tone of contemporary French debates, Roger Borderie writes in the issue’s foreword: Right now, it seems appropriate, if not urgent, to avoid discussions, polemics and quarrels, and to SHOW what women have drawn or painted, to urge audiences to READ texts that they have written, to bring together their collages and creations. (3) The main section of La Femme surréaliste is thus devoted to showcasing art and writing by and about women associated with Surrealism, which had been omitted in previous historiographies. Structured as a “dictionary,” the nearly 200-page-long and richly illustrated section introduces the work of 35 women artists and writers in alphabetical order. This important revision of critical narratives of Surrealist art and literature had been initiated by Gloria Orenstein’s pivotal essay “Women of Surrealism,” published in 1973 in the newly started anglophone Feminist Art Journal (see Allmer). Orenstein’s essay, extracts of which 341

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were reproduced in French translation in La Femme surréaliste, constitutes the first gynocritical effort to make visible women Surrealists such as Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Meret Oppenheim, Remedios Varo, Toyen, Dorothea Tanning, and Joyce Mansour: “The translation, publication, dissemination, exhibition and serious study of the works of these women artists and writers is imperative at this time,” Orenstein states. She concludes of such an intervention: [It] would help to fill a large gap in our knowledge of Surrealism, and would enable us to study the ongoing history of one of the most important artistic movements of the twentieth century whose full impact continues to be felt today. (21) A handful of efforts in this direction were also made in French (and Italian) scholarship in the 1970s and early 1980s, the most prominent of which being La Femme surréaliste; other noteworthy contributions include Gauthier’s monograph Leonor Fini (1973), Jacqueline ChénieuxGendron’s introduction of the writings of Leonora Carrington to French audiences, as well as Lea Vergine’s exhibition and subsequent catalog L’Altra metà dell’avanguardia 1910–1940 (The Other Half of the Avant-Garde 1910–1940; 1980), which includes a substantial discussion of Surrealist women’s art. The general revision of canonical narratives of art and literature, prompted by the swell of feminism’s second wave in the early 1970s, produced concepts such as “women’s art” and “women’s writing,” which were employed critically and curatorially to make visible and promote the work of female artists and writers who might otherwise have remained unknown or overlooked. This revision fed into and animated feminist debates regarding the possibility of art and literature to express a specifically feminine sensibility or voice and, if so, whether such a feminine aesthetic was determined by biological, social, or linguistic factors (see GoumaPeterson and Mathews). On the whole, women associated with Surrealism fervently rejected notions such as women’s art or writing and asserted that creativity had no sex or gender. Leonor Fini, for instance, wrote to Borderie, as he was preparing La Femme surréaliste, that “the idea to dedicate an issue of [his] journal to women Surrealists suggests a kind of harem. [He] surely wouldn’t have thought of doing this with ‘Surrealist men’?” (quoted in Borderie, ed. 115). Nelly Kaplan, furthermore, argued: Films are made by filmmakers, period. That’s all there is to it. If a woman has a cinematographic eye, a film made by a woman is no different from a film made by a man. . . . All creation is androgynous. (quoted in Dupont) Dorothea Tanning, meanwhile, stated: “Women artists. There is no such thing—or person. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘elephant artist’ ” (quoted in McCormick). This clash between feminist academics or curators, who sought to promote previously overlooked art and writing, and Surrealist women artists, who felt that singling them out for special study constituted a kind of ghettoization that perpetuated their marginalization even further, contributed to the latter group’s considerable distrust of feminism as a movement. With the notable exception of Chénieux-Gendron’s work, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a decrease in explicitly feminist interrogations of Surrealism in French. Anglophone feminist scholarship of Surrealism, however, followed a different trajectory; while Orenstein’s short piece was pathbreaking, it would nevertheless take until the mid-1980s for feminist investigations of Surrealism in English to commence in earnest—and after this point they proliferated rapidly. 342

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The first book-length study on the topic was Whitney Chadwick’s Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. Commenting on the book’s gynocentric focus, Chadwick writes: Earlier articles I had written on images of women in Surrealist painting had revealed contradictions between images of women and those by women. A growing interest in the work of women artists generally, prompted by feminist reappraisals of the early 1970s, led to the realization that while the names of women artist appear frequently in the literature of Surrealism, discussions of the content and meaning of their images has been too often unavailable in English. . . . It seemed important to make the histories of these artists available as part of a larger thematic study of Surrealism. (10) Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement covers subjects such as the position of women artists in the largely male-dominated Surrealist milieu, their engagement with central Surrealist themes, such as revolution and eroticism, and their specific interest in topics such as nature and the hermetic tradition. The most significant contribution of the book, however, is its presentation of a substantial number of Surrealist women (and women associated with Surrealism) who had previously been largely unknown to English-speaking audiences; in addition to the artists and writers discussed by Orenstein, Chadwick showcases the work of Eileen Agar, Ithell Colquhoun, Nusch Éluard, Valentine Hugo, Frida Kahlo, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Jaqueline Lamba, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Grace Pailthorpe, Valentine Penrose, Alice Rahon, Edith Rimmington, and Kay Sage. Chadwick’s book constituted a major intervention in Anglo-American scholarship on Surrealism, and it remains one of the most consulted overviews of Surrealist women’s artistic production, 35 years after it was published. It had a considerable impact on received anglophone historiographies of Surrealism, which had, before the publication of Chadwick’s book, constructed the role of women in the movement as peripheral. However, certain aspects of the book, most notably its strong biographical focus, now appear somewhat problematic. Indeed, Chadwick devotes almost as much space outlining the details of these artists’ personal lives as she does analyzing their art, a methodology that risks underplaying the latter’s complexity and significance. Chadwick’s biographical focus was criticized by several contemporary reviewers, one of which also noted the author’s tendency to dwell, rather uncritically, on Surrealist women’s physical beauty (Butler 86). It is also worth noting that Chadwick’s book appeared at a time when many of the women featured therein were still alive and, furthermore, still active as artists and writers. Indeed, Chadwick met and interviewed several of them, which adds a unique dimension and authentic voice to her revised history of Surrealism. At the same time, numerous quotations from conversations with these artists reinforce the already-strong biographical impetus of the study. Moreover, these artists’ availability to Chadwick likely presented a challenge for the author in her pursuit to rectify the male bias of previous critical narratives, since a number of them showed unwillingness to be included in a publication devoted only to women’s art; Oppenheim, for example, expressly requested that none of her artworks were reproduced in the book (Chadwick 12). As I  have demonstrated, early American scholarship on Surrealism was stimulated by the general feminist revision of literary and art-historical canonical narratives that had begun in the 1970s. Toward the end of the 1980s, contemporary debates around pornography and representation further inflected anglophone scholarship on Surrealism. One side in these so-called feminist “sex wars” of the 1980s considered images depicting sexual violence against women in exclusively realist terms, judging their effects to be as harmful as physical violence. The 343

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opposing viewpoint stressed that aesthetic experiments cannot to be reduced to bluntly literal meanings. On this view, images of exposed female bodies might be read variously as a critical diagnosis of patriarchy, as an ironic comment on gender stereotypes, or as a means of unsettling (gendered) subjectivity and producing, in Susan Sontag’s words, “the estrangement of the self from the self ” (58). American Surrealist scholarship of the late 1980s and early 1990s registers echoes of these debates in controversies regarding how to interpret Surrealist visual art that portrays manipulated, violated, bound, or fragmented female bodies—arguments that split critics into two antagonistic camps: those who saw male Surrealist representations of women as misogynistic, and those who, adopting a poststructuralist theoretical framework, interpreted these scenes of sexual violence as avant-garde experiments with language and form. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan, Rosalind Krauss positioned herself firmly in this latter category, famously stating in her 1985 essay “Corpus Delicti” that “the frequent characterizations of surrealism as antifeminist seem to me to be mistaken” (95). Referring to representations of women in Surrealist photography, Krauss argued that: Having dissolved the natural in which “normalcy” can be grounded, surrealism was at least potentially open to the dissolving of distinctions that Bataille insisted was the job of the informe. Gender, at the heart of the surrealist project, was one of these categories. (95) In a footnote, Krauss names Gauthier as a typical example of critics propelling the idea that Surrealism was an antifeminist movement. This characterization is both correct and incorrect; as we have seen, Gauthier did argue that most literature and art by male Surrealists was complicit in perpetuating problematic stereotypes about women and femininity. At the same time, however, her discussion of femellitude—an aesthetic language that both deconstructs normative conceptions of gender and expresses a version of femininity that is noncomplicit with phallocentric structures—overlaps in significant ways with Krauss’s poststructuralist analysis of gender in Surrealism. Indeed, Gauthier’s main point of contention with Surrealism was its idealization of the figure of woman, which she identified most strongly in the poetry of Breton, Aragon, and Éluard. Even though she does not condone all Surrealist representations of eroticized, fetishized, and violated female bodies, she holds that some of these possess the potential to unsettle the social and linguistic structures that keep women in a subjugated position. “If Surrealism has amounted to anything,” she states by way of conclusion, “it is because of the perversions promised by the Surrealist painters and a few Surrealist writers” (1971, 357; italics mine). Krauss’s suggestion that Surrealist photography might be seen as protofeminist caused quite a stir in anglophone Surrealist studies. Mary Ann Caws, in a 1986 piece entitled “Ladies Shot and Painted,” responded with an analysis of the split position women spectators are forced to inhabit in their confrontation with the dismemberment and fragmentation of the female body in Surrealist photography and painting. Drawing on John Berger’s foundational analysis in Ways of Seeing (1972), Caws showed that the female onlooker becomes the holder of the male gaze as well as, simultaneously, the object of the violence done to the female form in the image. In “A Double Margin: Reflections on Women Writers and the Avant-Garde in France” (1988), Susan Rubin Suleiman echoes Caw’s analysis, stating that while Krauss’s discussion of Surrealist photography on the whole is “brilliant,” nevertheless: [It] elides the difference between the subject who is agent of the assault (and who is invariably a male photographer) and the object that is the target of the 344

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“active, aggressive assault on reality” [Krauss 65], this object being also invariably the female body. (1988, 153) Robert Belton adopted a similar view, noting that Krauss had “failed to pay sufficient attention to the historical specificity of Surrealism” (xxvi). The most hostile response came from Rudolf E. Kuenzli, who accused Krauss of “collusion with the male gaze,” which, in his opinion, made her “unable to recognize the obvious misogyny” in male Surrealist art (24). In his editorial statement to the influential special edition of Dada/Surrealism entitled Surrealism and Women (1990), he states: Faced with the female figure, the male Surrealist fears castration, fears the dissolution of his ego. In order to overcome his fears, he fetishizes the female figure, he deforms, disfigures, manipulates her; he literally manhandles her in order to reestablish his own ego, and not his own informe. By consistently refusing to see these mangled bodies as female bodies, Krauss is unable to see the aggressive sexual-visual politics acted out in these photographs. (24) While Kuenzli’s critique applies to depictions of women in art by male Surrealists, the majority of the essays in Surrealism and Women negotiate the complex question of how women artists might achieve artistic and subjective autonomy in a context where woman was seen as “man’s mediator with nature and the unconscious, femme-enfant, muse, source and object of man’s desire, embodiment of amour fou, and emblem of revolution” (Raaberg 2). One of the volume’s coeditors, Gwen Raaberg, writes in the introduction: “The purpose of this collection of criticism is not to reject Surrealism but to rethink it . . . to work toward a revision of Surrealism” (3). Yet many of the essays do subscribe to the idea that historical Surrealism had been misogynistic—a critical notion whose currency in many ways peaked with the publication of Surrealism and Women. The early years of the 1990s also saw the emergence of studies on Surrealism (often focusing particularly on its literatures) that employed a dialectical method of analysis that combined an Anglo-American material-feminist critique with French poststructuralist theories of gender and sexuality. In the most influential of these, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the AvantGarde (1990), Suleiman proposes that much Surrealist women’s work eschews the apparent dichotomy between aesthetics and politics and instead operates according to a model of “double allegiance”: [O]n the one hand, an allegiance to the formal experiments and some of the cultural aspirations of the historical male avant-gardes: on the other hand, an allegiance to the feminist critique of dominant sexual ideologies, including the sexual ideology of those same avant-gardes. (1990, xvii) Suleiman’s model also recognizes that male and female artists inhabit different subject positions in culture and language and that these positions have an impact on the meanings created by their works. She writes: A woman Surrealist cannot simply assume a subject position and take over a stock of images elaborated by the male imaginary. In order to innovate, she has to invent 345

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her own position as subject and elaborate her own set of images—different from the image of the exposed female body, yet as empowering as that image is, with its endless potential for manipulation, disarticulation and rearticulation, fantasizing and projection, for her male colleagues. (26) Suleiman’s book signaled a new direction in feminist Surrealist studies, one that moved beyond arguably simplified accounts of historical Surrealism’s perceived misogyny. Feminist scholarship on Surrealism continued to grow in the 1990s and the new millennium and remains, in 2021, a dynamic and prolific field that extends well beyond French and American academia. Even though more work is needed in terms of addressing the structural underrepresentation of women in historiographies of Surrealism, it is nevertheless evident that feminist scholarship has had a powerful formative impact on how critics think about the movement today compared to 50 years ago. An unprecedented number of research projects focused on Surrealist women writers and artists are currently underway, and fresh feminist theories and methodologies are employed to (re)interrogate the work of Surrealist men as well as women. The legacies of feminist critiques of Surrealism of the 1970s and 1980s are firmly embedded in all these.

Works Cited Allmer, Patricia. “Outside in: Translating Unica Zürn.” Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration, edited by Anna Watz, Manchester University Press, 2020, pp. 142–155. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex (1949). Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. Vintage, 2011. Belton, Robert. The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art. University of Calgary Press, 1995. Borderie, Roger. “Avertissement.” Obliques, nos. 14–15 (La Femme surréaliste), 1977, pp. 1–3. ———, editor. Obliques, nos. 14–15 (La Femme surréaliste), 1977. Butler, Stephen. “Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement by Whitney Chadwick.” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 9, no. 1, 1986, pp. 85–89. Caws, Mary Ann. “Ladies Shot and Painted.” The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman, Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 262–287. Chadwick, Whitney. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985). Thames & Hudson, 2002. Chénieux-Gendron, Jacqueline. Le Surréalisme et le roman, 1922–1950. L’Age d’homme, 1983. Dupont, Joan. “An Interview with Nelly Kaplan.” Film Quarterly, 21 April 2019. Accessed 10 September 2021. https://filmquarterly.org/2019/04/21/nelly-kaplan-in-conversation-with-joan-dupont/ Gauthier, Xavière. Leonor Fini. Musée de poche, 1973. ———. Surréalisme et sexualité. Gallimard, 1971. Gouma-Peterson, Thalia, and Patricia Mathews. “The Feminist Critique of Art History.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 69, no. 3, 1987, pp. 326–357. Krauss, Rosalind. “Corpus Delicti.” L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, edited by Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985, pp. 56–112. Kuenzli, Rudolf E. “Surrealism and Misogyny.” Surrealism and Women, edited by Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg, The MIT Press, 1991, pp. 17–26. Laffitte, Maryse. “L’image de la femme chez Breton: contradictions et virtualités.” Revue Romane, vol. 11, no. 2, 1976, pp. 286–305. Le Brun, Annie. Lâchez tout (1977). Vagit-prop et autres textes. Ramsay, 1990. McCormick, Carlo. “Dorothea Tanning.” Bomb Magazine, 1 October 1990. Accessed 10 September 2021. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/dorothea-tanning/ Orenstein, Gloria. “Women of Surrealism.” The Feminist Art Journal, vol. 2, no. 2, 1973, pp. 15–21. Pontalis, J. B. “Préface.” Surréalisme et sexualité, by Xavière Gauthier, Gallimard, 1971, pp. 9–18.

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Feminist Encounters with Surrealism Raaberg, Gwen. “The Problematics of Women and Surrealism.” Surrealism and Women, edited by Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg, The MIT Press, 1991, pp. 1–10. Sontag, Susan. “The Pornographic Imagination” (1967). Styles of Radical Will, Delta, 1978, pp. 35–73. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “A  Double Margin: Reflections on Women Writers and the Avant-Garde in France.” Yale French Studies, no. 75 (The Politics of Tradition: Placing Women in French Literature), 1988, pp. 148–172. ———. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde. Harvard University Press, 1990. Vergine, Lea. L’Altra metà dell’avanguardia 1910–1940: Pittrici e scultrici nei movimenti delle avanguardie storiche. Gabriele Mazzotta editore, 1980. Watz, Anna. “Angela Carter and Xavière Gauthier’s Surréalisme et sexualité.” Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 4, no. 2, 2010, pp. 100–113. ———. “Surrealism and écriture féminine.” Cambridge Critical Concepts: Surrealism, edited by Natalya Lusty, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 363–379.

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38 SURREALIST VISIONS OF ANDROGYNY Abigail Susik

Gender and Surrealist Performance Art1 The French word “le surréalisme” is designated as a masculine noun in the 1924 Manifesto (Manifestes 36). How different might things be if instead this neologism broke with the dictates of French grammar and was elected by the movement’s adherents to be a feminine noun, la surréalisme? This would have been in contradistinction to the earlier artistic “isms” that France had already cataloged—le néoclassicisme, le réalisme, le cubisme . . . each designated masculine, too, as are all French words ending in this suffix. By uttering the word “le surréalisme” in its language of origin—in reference to an artistic group founded predominately by cisgender straight White men in Paris—we are already participating in an inflected social system that differentiates between the constructed gender categories of male and female on every level of culture. Surrealism questioned the “realness” of our shared reality, but even its name, a newly invented word readapted for purportedly visionary purposes, bowed to the gendered structures embedded in language and culture. Yet Surrealism, was an “adventure” without conclusion, always meant to exceed itself (“High Frequency” 49). Despite this conspicuous masculine gender for the noun “le surréalisme,” there can be no clear designation with regard to any hegemonic gendering tendencies of the movement itself. Surrealism’s exceptionally expansive durational and transnational scope over the course of the last century, and also the complexity of its conceptual and aesthetic investments, ultimately resist sweeping summaries about how the movement’s gender relations and fantasies played out. Surrealism’s anti-bourgeois and libertine attitude toward sexuality must also be taken into consideration when it comes to characterizations of the movement’s orientation toward gender. This is so even though it is evident that, as attempted traitors to their own bourgeois class and French national designation, the culturally embattled Paris Surrealist Group, for example, did not always achieve the full-scale social treason they sought—especially, perhaps, when it came to unsettling the hierarchies of the gender binary. Following statements by Surrealists such as André Breton, who wrote in 1929 that “the problem of woman is the most marvelous and disturbing problem there is in all the world,” since the late-1960s scholars and Surrealists themselves have forged a vibrant discourse and debate about the movement’s contested relationship to the female gender and feminism (Manifestoes 180, see also Watz, this volume). In the wake of postmodernist approaches to the humanities, 348

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which expanded hermeneutic perspectives on sexuality as well as gender, research devoted to Surrealism has increasingly engaged interdisciplinary masculinity studies and, to a lesser extent, nonbinary, transgender studies, and intersectional studies. Queer theory has been incorporated into the field to some degree, leading to analyses that begin to address homophobic, queer, and heterosexist scenarios or perspectives in Surrealism’s history and modulating the second- and third-wave feminist approaches taken by prior scholars grappling with the topic of sexism and misogyny in Surrealism (see, for example Miller, Richards, and Knafo). Queer theory has also influenced increasingly nuanced discussions about nonessentialism and nonnormativity in Surrealist gender studies, highlighting transvestite, gender-fluid, and feminizing themes and trends apparent even within the many examples of the movement’s homosocialism (see, for example Lyford, Marcella, and Pierre Molinier). Continued excavation of intersectional monographic and biographic studies devoted to genderqueer, transgender, and female participants, artworks, and themes remains crucial in the effort toward a greater conceptual and historical gender diversity, social justice, and representational equity in the field. Another promising avenue for development in the discourse entails returning to the subject of Surrealism’s frequently experimental approach to conceptualizing and reconceptualizing gender and the nature of its fundamental (but not always successful) challenge to patriarchy. This area of inquiry might include, for instance, Surrealism’s long-standing investment in the mythology of the androgyne, understood by many group members to be an idealized bigender or intergender fusion of male and female, as I will address in greater detail ahead in a discussion of a 1965 Surrealist performance in Paris (see Chadwick). Alternatively, we might consider those cases of Surrealist aspirations for a future return to a matriarchal society, or the movement’s interest in a possible post-gender world, in which the gender binary and gendered reproduction become obsolescent altogether (see Susik 110–166). Certainly, many other avenues of exploration related to what might be called Surrealism’s topical gender experimentalism abound (see, for example, discussions of Sadeian Surrealism in McAra and Mahon). In addition, there is great potential for disrupting the dominance of masculinist or gender-essentialist narratives in Surrealism studies if we augment our examination of constructed or even unconscious episodes of artistic gender performance in the movement’s history, or those that can be found in its favored references and precursors. That is to say, if we analyze Surrealism’s varied gender expressions and adopted cultural examples in its representations and proclamations—rather than solely the gender and sexual orientation of its actual participants, or Surrealism’s favored areas of investigation in relation to the subject of gender—a wider field of phenomena presents itself for scrutiny. As I have argued elsewhere in a discussion devoted to psychic automatism as a type of reperformative labor, performative modalities are foundational to Surrealism’s conception as a whole, including its extra-artistic bureaucratic and social manifestations. Frequently, the movement’s performative modalities feature a conspicuously imaginative or experimental gendering or regendering of subjectivities (Susik 50–110). Along this line of thought, one obvious method for studying episodes of gender performativity in Surrealism is to examine relevant moments in the history of performance and dance in the movement. Although there has been a significant amount of scholarly attention granted to the topic of Surrealist theater, and to a lesser extent, that of Surrealist dance, there exists no comprehensive secondary survey of Surrealist performance art in this contemporary sense of the phrase (see, for example, Matthews, Orenstein, and Melzer). Scholars have completed various detailed studies of individual performances or dances by Surrealist artists (see, for example, LaCoss). And yet we can retroactively apply the label performance art to a number of Surrealist performances also that clearly fit this criteria, and in doing so, we establish an accessible compendium of such works and also provide a corrective to modern art history, 349

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which has often occluded Surrealism in the history of this medium. Furthermore, so much Surrealist performance art exhibits an investment in the politics and aesthetics of gender that the study of these works can bring us closer to an understanding of what was at stake for these artists in that regard. This is so because Surrealism’s attitudes toward gender tend to be condensed or heightened in those performance art pieces in which issues of sexuality, love, identity, or transgression are focused upon. Often, Surrealism deployed the performance art medium in order to confront and challenge aspects of quotidian gender performance as part of its overarching critique of bourgeois society. This condensation of gender themes in Surrealist performance art is, in some senses, a result of the parameters of this art form itself. Performance art is a flexible artistic medium created through actions or movements involving a performer’s body (or multiple performers), in a particular time and place, either recorded or live, and sometimes involving an audience. The centrality of the body of the artist or artists to the execution of performance art is precisely what became a key advantage of this medium in a number of Surrealist performances wherein the gendered, ungendered, or regendered body of the performer became a major focus of the artwork. In both live performances and photographed mise-en-scène scenarios over the past century, Surrealists such as Claude Cahun, Leonor Fini, Pierre Molinier, Jean Benoît, and several others demonstrated that the rhythms of gender performance in daily life have the potential to be exaggerated, undone, re-envisioned, made hybrid, or completely overhauled in the space of performance art.

Amorous Gender Fusion in Surrealist Performance Art: La Carte absolue (1965) and the Androgyne To demonstrate the nature of the gender exploration so prevalent in Surrealist performance art, let us consider in some depth one rarely discussed example that sought to symbolically overcome the gender binary by fusing it into the composite gender figure of the androgyne. Although Surrealism’s long-standing interest in the myth of the androgyne did not necessarily challenge the movement’s largely heterodominant collective orientation, examination of this topic nevertheless gives clear evidence of a persistent Surrealist desire to undermine the rigidity of the gender binary. On the afternoon of November 13, 1965, the husband-and-wife artist duo Giovanna (Anna Voggi) and Jean-Michel Goutier debuted their collaborative performance artwork La Carte absolue (Absolute Card) for a private audience of fellow Surrealists at the apartment of Marianne and Radovan Ivšić on the Rue Galande in Paris (Pierre 33–39).2 This performance was part of the Eleventh International Surrealist Exhibition of that year, L’Écart absolu (Absolute Deviation), which opened on December 7, 1965, at La Galerie l’Œil on rue Séguier. However, Giovanna and Goutier’s piece could not be performed in the space of the gallery due to safety issues related to the building’s lack of an emergency exit. A series of photographs by Radovan Ivšić documents the event, which occurred roughly a month in advance of the opening night for L’Écart absolu: Giovanna is poised astride Goutier’s shoulders as he gazes upward in an expression of wonder. About 20 Surrrealists from the café La Promenade Vénus group attended the performance, including the artist Toyen, who also created a photomontage for the event (Figure 38.1). In the sole existing film still of a second version of the performance staged for RTB (Radio-Télévision Belge), the performers pause in an arched opening cut into a paper backdrop near a piece of furniture from the Ivšić apartment, the carved olive wood bar cabinet Antropomorfo IIII (1965) by the Italian design duo Officina Undici (Ugo Sterpini and Fabio de Sanctis; Officina 11).3 350

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Figure 38.1 Toyen. La Carte absolue, 1965. Photomontage with drawing. Source: Published in L’Archibras 2 (October 1967): 63. Courtesy of Giovanna. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

In their written proposal for La Carte absolue submitted to the Paris Surrealist group earlier that year, Giovanna and Goutier stipulated that they were extending the exhibition’s overarching tribute to the utopian socialist philosopher Charles Fourier (1772–1837) by contemplating the way in which Fourier’s work critiques given social mores. Goutier also explained in a later account of the performance that La Carte absolue spoke to one of the early themes originally 351

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considered by the Surrealists for the 1965–1966 international exhibition: “woman,” from a Surrealist point of view (Goutier 72). The medium of performance art was for them part of this overcoming of limitations. They sought a “suppression of scene, actors, play, setting, for an explosive unity, a localized source of agitation” (Giovanna and Goutier). The performance medium heightened their chosen theme of the androgyne, which was, in their view, a figure of ecstatic unification that abolished sexual dimorphism and gender difference. The “explosive unity” of the performance medium echoed the antibinary nature of the androgyne that the performers sought to invoke. The subject of the androgyne had been important to proto-Surrealism and Surrealism since the early 1920s (see Warlick). By the end of that decade, the Surrealist interest in alchemy found a complement in André Breton’s interest in the notion of overcoming antinomies. This idea was developed in his concept of the supreme point or sublime point (the disappearance of contradiction) described in the Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929) (123–134; see also “What Is Surrealism?”). Texts such as Albert Béguin’s historical overview “L’Androgyne” in Minotaure 11 (1938) configure the cult of romantic, heterosexual love, or alchemical coitus between male and female as a means of achieving a transcendent, genderless state of being (Béguin Minotaure 10–13, see also Grew). Béguin characterized this alchemical type of androgyne as a myth that served as a collective escape from divisionary gendering and an embrace of the “nostalgia for a return to Unity” (Béguin in Matheson 546–547). Soon thereafter, the androgyne reappeared in the catalog of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in New York in 1942 in a picture-essay organized by Breton about old and new myths: the androgyne is represented by an alchemical drawing of the fusion of the opposites water and fire, in a drawing by Leonora Carrington called Brothers and Sisters Have I None (1942), and in a reference to Honoré de Balzac’s 1834 novel about an androgynous angel, Séraphîta (Breton, “De la survivance” n.p.). However, rather than broadly referencing all the previous Surrealist citations to the androgyne, Giovanna and Goutier chose a set of particular postwar sources as their anchoring for the notion of the androgyne as a perfect entity beyond gender (rather than the constitution of a third sex). These references for La Carte absolue echoed some of the themes that had been present in Béguin’s 1938 essay: Benjamin Péret’s Anthologie of Sublime Love (1956); a text by Gérard Legrand, “The Dilemma of the Androgyne,” published in the catalog of the 1959 Exposition InteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS) exhibition in Paris; and finally, Érotique du surréalisme by Robert Benayoun, which had just been published that year, in 1965. Legrand’s concept of the crystallization of being that occurs when femininity and masculinity converge and then disperse in the body of the androgyne is highlighted in the artists’ proposal, as is a quote that Benayoun included in his book from the German Romantic philosopher and scientist Johann Wilhem Ritter (from his Fragments from the Estate of a Young Physicist, 1810) about the androgyne as a dissolution of male and female into a shimmering radiance (Giovanna and Goutier n.p.).4 Underlining this theme of dispersal and reconstitution, the extreme intertextuality of the 1965 performance by Giovanna and Goutier extended far beyond the anchoring texts by Péret, Legrand, and Benayoun. A fundamental aspect of La Carte absolue was the constructed dialogue that the two performers recited continuously during the event. Snippets of appropriated text from a collage of literary sources (all by male authors) that symbolized Péret’s cut-and-paste method of homage to amour sublime, an absolute form of fixated, singular love, were read aloud by Giovanna and Goutier. José Pierre later called it a “montage”—at once “very fluid and very condensed”—of passages from a series of plays, poems, and novels that the performers had selected. These were works that were either explicitly Surrealist or had been previously lauded by Surrealists: the Arthurian play Roi pêcheur (The Fisher King) (1948) by Julien Gracq; 352

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La Forêt sacrilège (The Sacrilegious Forest) (1964); Gothic tales by the Irish writer Charles-Robert Maturin, such as Bertram: Or,  The  Castle  of St.  Aldobrand  (1816) and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820); the patricide play King Gordogane (written 1943) by Radovan Ivšić; a tragedy about incest, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (c. 1626), by John Ford; and a book of poems by contemporary poète maudit and Surrealist associate Jean-Pierre Duprey, who had taken his own life in 1959 following a police beating and commitment to a psychiatric hospital after pissing on the eternal flame of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe (Wall-Romana 246). The proposal for La Carte absolue also mentioned other texts as possible collage sources, such as Heinrich von Kleist’s Amazonian tragedy of love gone rabid, Penthesilia (1808), and Oskar Panizza’s notorious tragedy about venereal disease and the Catholic Church, The Council of Love (1894), for which the author was imprisoned on charges of blasphemy (Brown). By electing these precursors as sources for their performance, Giovanna and Goutier also distinguish their conceptual orientation from more venerable models of the androgyne mythos in Occidental culture and history, such as the rotund four-limbed hermaphrodites described in Plato’s Symposium (see Weil, Rothstein). Subtitled with a Mallarméan reference, “A  card that will always abolish the hourglass of death,” the performance was, in a certain capacity, fashioned as a game of fate that could resolve differences and ward off the inevitability of mortality and metaphysical isolation through the apotheosis of heterosexual love (Giovanna and Goutier).5 Adding yet another layer of signification, the set and costumes for the performance were based on the Surrealist card game Jeu de Marseille, created in March 1941 by a group of Surrealists fleeing Nazi-occupied France at Varian Fry’s Villa Air-Bel near the Mediterranean coast of France (Giovanna July 13, 2021). Giovanna and Goutier adopted the card suits of the Jeu de Marseille for their 1965 performance: the same four “pip” card symbols appearing in their event were black stars (for dreams), a red flame (for love), red wheels (for revolution/blood), and (in the case of La Carte absolue, golden rather than black) locks (for knowledge) (Giovanna and Goutier).6 The artists were also influenced by color symbolism derived from Fourier, and also the various historical figures and characters that populated the Marseille deck, in particular, the image for the “fool” card, which featured Alfred Jarry’s 1986 woodcut of Père Ubu, a corpulent, hooded persona with an indeterminate gender (Giovanna 13 July 2021 and Foucault n.p.).7 Emblems of the four suits adorned the corners of the seven-foot card that framed the performers’ bodies as they recited their excerpts of appropriated texts (Pierre 38). As indicated on the proposal for the performance, the top of this single card was to have been adorned with images of a white bedframe and yardage of blue velvet fabric, evoking the conflation of poetry and lovemaking in the performative actions of Giovanna and Goutier. Just as these artists deployed the medium of performance art to explore the possibilities of a monadic temporality that might echo the state of gender unification in the androgyne, the card set that served as their framework was another emblem of multiplicity-cum-singularity. All four suits were combined onto a single card that also served as a lovers’ bed, whereupon two bodies, male and female, could join together in ritualized sexual union. In the second issue of the Surrealist journal L’Archibras (October 1967) (which also featured a photograph by Marcel Lannoy of Giovanna wearing a necklace made with a photograph of Baudelaire and an upside-down cross), the photomontage for La Carte absolue by Toyen indicates the specific layout of this card backdrop. The performers superimposed themselves on the card through a frame in the shape of an erect phallus, which is flanked on each corner by the four card suits. At the same time, Toyen’s representation of the phallus also encompasses a double image of priapic presence as an absence—an association that also renders the positive form of the phallus as a quasi-vaginal cavity. 353

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In Ivšić’s photographs of the performance, the phallus shape is perceivable as a paper cutout, a negative space, through which the performers slowly emerge surrounded by a curtain of sheer black ribbons. Once again, Toyen’s empty phallus framework on the card emphasizes the merging of male and female bodies into the androgyne, a process of becoming that is likened in La Carte absolue to a transformation enabled by the act of heterosexual intercourse and mutual orgasm, the coalescing of void and mass in a process of transformation, rebirth, or the reinvention of meaning. As Ivšić wrote in his 1967 essay “Unleash the Skin’s Masks!” which also featured a photograph of the performance and a reproduction of Toyen’s montage: “In the black interior of the card, Giovanna’s body writes with orgiastic phosphor; for a few moments, speech did not possess the exclusivity of poetry” (Ivšić 62–63). In a 2018 interview with Giovanna and Goutier, Anne Foucault noted that Ivšić’s essay describes a performative type of body-writing (écriture corporelle) in La Carte absolue, one in which female orgasm (jouissance) becomes the epicenter of utterances. In La Carte absolue, the two performers appeared before the audience as an incarnation of the Aristotelian twin flames of reunited soul mates, or the sororal notion of the âme sœur (literally, soul sister), with the clothed Goutier supporting the nude Giovanna on his shoulders. In this position, his head was superimposed over her groin. Robert Benayoun’s Érotique du surréalisme had included a similar body coupling, a 1943 drawing by André Masson called The Androgynous Hourglass (Le Sablier androgyne). Perhaps portraying sex magic, Masson’s female figure is penetrated by a standing, headless male (acéphale). Her body is positioned upside down, and her legs are spread in the air; she stabilizes herself by wrapping one arm around his ankle (Benayoun 180). In comparison, the proposal for the Giovanna/Goutier performance includes a drawing that shows the male performer resting on a low stool as the female performer sits with her legs folded, the full weight of her body on his shoulders.8 Another drawing gives schematics for a specially designed altar, which featured a half-circle cut out to accommodate Goutier’s head, and a board on trestles that could support her weight while seated in a cross-legged position. Two-arm candelabras were arranged on each side of the altar schematic, and the drawing also features a sumptuous gold-and-white tablecloth draped over the surface. Although this altar feature was ultimately abandoned for the performance itself, a ritualistic atmosphere nevertheless infused this symbolic absorption of Goutier’s head (masculine logos) into Giovanna’s sex (feminine Eros) in their body positioning. However, La Carte absolue was above all charged with the spirit of Panizza’s The Love Council, and in their conceptualization of the project, the artists sought to subvert religion in a seditious, demonically sulfurous way, breaking taboos related to the sacred. For the performance on November  13, Mimi Parent applied makeup around Giovanna’s eyes, creating a masklike effect (Foucault). Giovanna’s torso was partly concealed behind the oversize card and hanging ribbons that surrounded the performers’ bodies. In the proposal for the piece, both performers planned to wear masks, but during the event at the Ivšić home, Goutier’s star-shaped mask (with a triangle suspended over catlike eyes) did not appear. Parent’s makeup application may have approximated the masks. The proposal for the performance stipulated that Goutier’s mask would have been worn upside down, in the manner of the iconography of a reversible court playing card in which the queen’s head, for instance, is represented twice, once upright and then inverted (and this reference to the rulers of the court, king and queen, had its own alchemical resonance). This “absolute card” that their bodies composed was therefore an encapsulation of the process by which two bodies might become psychically dedifferentiated in sexual love. One of the proposal drawings showing the arrangement of the performers’ bodies indicates that a related costume element may have been a piece of fabric or string running from just under Giovanna’s 354

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chin, down to Goutier’s head, and extending to his chest—perhaps a symbolic umbilical cord tying the performers to one another. Their bodies were revealed as double—fraternal twins in the same âme sœur “womb” of the “absolute card”—or as mirror images reversed on opposite sides of the silvered glass. This visual symbolism of an eroticized fraternalism or sisterly affinity that was constructed by the details of the performance was echoed in the collage of appropriated texts recited in a ten-minute durational loop by the performers (Giovanna July 13, 2021). Mad passion, murderous lust, and forbidden love were summoned repeatedly in lines that underscored the desperate and uncontrollable nature of delirious desire, such as those describing the passion of incest shared between brother and sister in John Ford’s seventeenth-century play ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, or Maturin’s character Melmoth telling his lover and wife, Isodora, that “the woman who loves must forget her individual existence” (Giovanna and Goutier). This frenzy of erotic language extracted from a dramatized interpenetration of Western texts devoted to the possessive and (as indicated in the lines chosen by Giovanna and Goutier) oftendestructive drive of heterosexual love is, to some degree, depersonalized from the various plots of the appropriated literary works. Characters’ names were indicated on the performance script but not spoken aloud during the performance itself; Giovanna read parts by female characters, and Goutier the male.9 Breathless confessions of incestuous desire uttered by Ford’s characters Giovanni and Anabella from ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore melt into the sexually explicit lyrical rhapsodies of Hersende and Estern in Duprey’s World War II–era The Sacrilegious Forest. The bounds of dramatic narrative and authorial identity are destabilized in the process of this performative collage recitation, and to some degree, the passages by various male and female characters dissolve into one another, bending difference into homogeneity. Although heterosexual love and sexual consummation are proffered as the prime vehicle for overcoming the gender binary, thus stamping La Carte absolue with a distinctly heterophilic orientation, the ultimate message of the performance speaks to a Surrealist yearning for gender nondistinction. The “absolute card” of Giovanna and Goutier’s performance for the 1965 L’Écart absolu (Absolute Deviation) exhibition in Paris thus explores one way in which Surrealist meditations on heterosexual love might (attempt to) symbolically deviate from the gender binary toward a supreme point of post-gender being.

Notes 1. Special thanks go to Giovanna, whose assistance since 2018 made this text possible. Translations are the author’s, except as indicated. 2. For an overview of Giovanna’s oeuvre and also a summary of her critical distance from feminism, see Chénieux-Gendron. For a history of Giovanna’s other collaborations and performances with Goutier before and after La Carte absolue, see Santone. For a discussion of Giovanna’s automatic typewriter drawings from the mid-1960s, see Susik 243–244. I am grateful to Anne Foucault for sharing her 2018 interview with Giovanna and Goutier with me. I also thank Rachael Grew for sharing her dissertation. 3. Currently, there is no evident trace of this missing footage (Giovanna July 13, 2021, and Sonuma: Les Archives Audiovisuelles). 4. Legrand weighs the alchemical notion that the female principle is passive and negative and that only one drop of feminine being is needed to achieve an androgynous state in the male. 5. The reference is to Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard” (“A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”) (1897). 6. Goutier related in a statement that Breton gave the artists a “magnificent starfish” to use for the aspect of stars in the performance (“La Carte absolue”). A single candle illuminated the performance, symbolizing the flame of love. Otherwise, the performance was lit solely by daylight from two picture windows in the Ivšić apartment (Giovanna, August 9, 2021). 7. In the proposal for the performance, the artists list an article by Adrian Dax in La Brèche 4 (February 1963), “A propos d’un talisman de Charles Fourier,” as influencing their color choices.

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Abigail Susik 8. Giovanna and Goutier claim that La Carte absolue was influenced by Meret Oppenheim’s event Le Festin (1959) and Toyen’s painting Relâche (1943). Both of these works feature a prostrate (reclining or upsidedown) female body (Foucault). 9. A program containing the names of the various authors quoted in the performance was intended for distribution to audience members, informing them of the intertextual foundation of the performance; however, no such program was ever produced (Giovanna, July 19, 2021).

Works Cited Béguin, Albert. “The Androgyne.” The Sources of Surrealism: Art in Context, edited by Neil Matheson, Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2006, pp. 546–547. ———. “L’Androgyne.” Minotaure, vol. 11, Spring 1938, pp. 10–13. Benayoun, Robert. Érotique du surréalisme. Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1965. Breton, André. “De la survivance de certains mythes et de quelques autres mythes en croissance ou en formation.” First Papers of Surrealism, Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, Inc., 1942. ———. “Manifeste du surréalisme.” Manifestes du surréalisme, Gallimard, 1979, pp. 13–60. ———. “Manifesto of Surrealism.” Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, University of Michigan Press, 1972, pp. 3–47. ———. “Second Manifesto of Surrealism.” Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, University of Michigan Press, 1972, pp. 119–187. Brown, Peter D. G. Oskar Panizza and the Love Council: A History of the Scandalous Play on Stage and in Court, with the Complete Text in English and a Biography of the Author. McFarland & Company, 2010. Chadwick, Whitney. “Eros and Thanatos: The Surrealist Cult of Love Re-examined.” Artforum, vol. 14, 1975, pp. 46–56. Chénieux-Gendron, Jacqueline. “Giovanna.” The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, vol. 2, edited by Michael Richardson et al., Bloomsbury Press, 2019, pp. 324–327. Foucault, Anne. “Entretien de l’auteur avec Giovanna et Jean-Michel Goutier, Bonneuil-sur-Marne, 27 février 2018.” Unpublished manuscript. ———. Reconsidération du surréalisme, 1945–1969: du Déshonneur des poètes au surréalisme éternel. PhD thesis, Université Paris Nanterre, 2019. Giovanna. Personal interview. 13 July 2021. ———. Personal interview. 9 August 2021 Giovanna, and Jean-Michel Goutier. “Propositions pour l’exposition: La Carte absolue.” Unpublished typescript with drawings, 1965. Association Atelier André Breton. www.andrebreton.fr/en/ view?rql=la+carte+absolue&__fromsearchbox=1&_fsb=1&subvid=tsearch. Goutier, Jean-Michel. “La Carte absolue.” Supérieur inconnu, vol. 3, no. 3, 2009, p. 72. Grew, Rachael. The Evolution of the Alchemical Androgyne in Symbolist and Surrealist Art. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2010. “High Frequency.” Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations, edited by Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijałkowski, Pluto Press, (1951) 2001, pp. 49–51. “Inaugural Rupture.” Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations, edited by Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijałkowski, Pluto Press, 2001, pp. 41–49. Ivšić, Radovan. “Déchaînez les masques dans la peau!” L’Archibras, vol. 2, October 1967, pp. 62–63. Knafo, Danielle. “Claude Cahun: The Third Sex.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality, vol. 2, no. 1, 2001, pp. 29–61. LaCoss, Don. “Hysterical Freedom: Surrealist Dance & Hélène Vanel’s Faulty Functions.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 15, no. 2, 2005, pp. 37–61. Legrand, Gérard. “Le Dilemme de l’androgynat.” Boîte alerte (the Exposition InteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS) catalogue, 1958–60), pp. 102–109. Lyford, Amy. Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France. University of California Press, 2007. Mahon, Alyce. The Marquis De Sade and the Avant-Garde. Princeton University Press, 2020. Matthews, J. H. Theatre in Dada and Surrealism. Syracuse University Press, 1974. McAra, Catriona. “Sadeian Women: Erotic Violence in the Surrealist Spectacle.” Violence and the Limits of Representation, edited by Graham Matthews and Sam Goodman, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 69–89. Melzer, Annabelle. Latest Rage the Big Drum: Dada and Surrealist Performance. UMI Research Press, 1980.

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Surrealist Visions of Androgyny Miller, C. F. B. “Surrealism’s Homophobia.” October, vol. 123, 2020, pp. 207–229. Munson, Marcella. “Eclipsing Desire: Masculine Anxiety and the Surrealist Muse.” French Forum 29, no. 2, Spring 2004, pp. 19–33. Musée des Beaux-arts de Bordeaux et al. Pierre Molinier, jeux de miroirs. Le Festin, 2005. Orenstein, Gloria. The Theater of the Marvelous: Surrealism and the Contemporary Stage. New York University Press, 1975. Pierre, José. “La Carte de L’Écart: De L’Écart absolu à La Carte absolue.” Pleine Marge, vol. 27, May 1988, pp. 33–39. Richards, Jill. The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes. Columbia University Press, 2020. Richardson, Michael, and Krzysztof Fijałkowski. “The Supreme Point.” Surrealism: Key Concepts, edited by Krzysztof Fijałkowski and Michael Richardson, Routledge, 2016, pp. 248–254. ———. Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations. Pluto Press, 2001. Rosemont, Penelope. “Giovanna.” Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, edited by Penelope Rosemont. University of Texas Press, 1998, pp. 309–312. Rothstein, Marian. “Mutations of the Androgyne: Its Functions in Early Modern French Literature.” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 34, no. 2, 2003, pp. 409–437. Santone, Laura. Écouter, écrire, signifier: sur l’art verbal de la créatrice surréaliste Giovanna. Artemide, 2018. Sonuma: Les Archives Audiovisuelles. Personal correspondence, 16 July 2021. Susik Abigail. Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work. Manchester University Press, 2021. Wall-Romana, Christophe. Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry. Fordham University Press, 2013. Warlick, M. E. “Alchemy.” The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism, vol. 1, edited by Michael Richardson et al., Bloomsbury Press, 2019, pp. 153–155. Weil, Kari. Androgyny and the Denial of Difference. University Press of Virginia, 1992.

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39 RADICAL MUSES Catriona McAra and Jonathan P. Eburne

JE:

I like that we are conversing. I have La Jeune née (The Newly Born Woman) in mind, and particularly the idea of dialogue as a medium for thinking together (see Clément and Cixous, esp. Part 3 and Suleiman 5–10). Do you want to begin with some remarks? CM: Yes, mainly around the etymology of “radical muses,” because the words “radical” and “muse” are loaded. I  would suggest that the “radical” aspect is not only historically motivated but historiographically reorientated, so maybe we can get to the secondary scholarship in a moment. What about the pre-Surrealist understanding of the “muse”? So much of this language comes from ancient Greek mythology, the nine muses of poetic inspiration, the daughters of patriarchal Zeus, and the goddess of memory. The term “radical” is endlessly compelling, and perhaps why so many of us are so drawn to Surrealism, because it still feels like a genuine possibility for a left-wing politics that wants to achieve something meaningful. What do you understand by that term in this context? JE: It’s important not to metaphorize the term “radical,” as you suggest. I think that the periodic waxing and waning of political and critical interest in Surrealism over the decades tends to hinge on the ways in which metaphorizations of “radical” resonate with other people’s proclivities at the moment. What I consider to be important in Surrealism, in its polemics, its imperfections, and its temporal relations—insofar as the Surrealisms that proliferate in the 1930s are not the same as those in 1924 or 1945 or 1965—is the question of what radicalism designates in practice. What kinds of intensities are invoked by that term? It’s not a singular definition, just as there are multiple genealogies for “muse” in Surrealism, genealogies that recombine according to the shifting gender politics of the movement. One iteration of radicalism is embedded in uprooting and rerouting phallocentric art history, which differs from, say, the radicalism of producing conditions of autonomy or fighting in the streets. In this sense, the question for me is, What is the praxis we’re naming as radical, and what forms of structural violence does it uproot—the epistemological, structural, historical forces that impede this praxis and which it must therefore confront? Radicalism engages with its goals and obstacle as a sustained commitment rather than being content with instantaneous results. That’s how I approach the notion of “radical.”

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-44

Radical Muses

CM: When it comes to visualizations of the muse, one imagines the Pygmalion tale. That Gérôme image (1890) comes to mind; it’s quite transformative. The muse is a marble, becoming human: anthropomorphized and racially problematic. Gérôme was an Orientalist, so it’s difficult to look at his work now, but what’s intriguing to me about this image is its ubiquity and use of apotheosis. Is the muse always-already gendered? Does the muse have to be feminine? JE: I love this image. It dramatizes the categorical blur between a model, an art object, an “object” of desire, and a living agent. The concept of “muse” proceeds from this blur. As far as the gender of a muse, I find it significant that the Gérôme image leaves a lot to the imagination. We’re looking at the model’s backside; is it necessarily female or feminine? The painting’s title and iconography name the figure as Galatea, the goddess of the sea, but the figuration itself is more ambiguous.   Another categorical blur has to do with the role of classical figuration in our reflections here. To invoke a muse is to draw on a kind of classical inheritance, yet this is a tricky proposition, even prior to what it says about the gender and sexual politics of “muses” in Surrealism. Certainly, classicism was part of the education of many of the young European men (and women) who formed the movement in the early 1920s. There’s a presocratic classicism in Aragon’s work, and Breton has his classical references; Soupault wrote a book called Terpsichore (1928), after the muse of dance. Iterations of classicism percolate through Cahun’s early writings and Leiris’s as well, no less than in the work of de Chirico, Fini, and Masson. Yet it’s an uneasy archive. It’s certainly not classicist in the same way that T. S. Eliot was classicist. The classicism of a paternalistic and, indeed, White supremacist Western European education. Surrealism doesn’t sit within this order of classicism very comfortably, and thus, whereas the classical idea of a muse is very much in circulation within Surrealist discourse, I’m more interested in the microgenealogies at play within the movement, as well as those that have been shaped by feminist criticism from the 1960s onwards.   Chadwick, like Gauthier, develops a genealogy for “muse” that proceeds from the symbolist-era femme fatale (Chadwick 13). As a derogatory figuration of women’s agency, the femme fatale attributes the capacity for seduction-aggression to a woman, but never in a way that benefits the woman herself. Rather, the attribution privileges the perspective of the man who “falls for” the femme fatale, the alleged “victim” of her transgressive agency. The idea of a femme fatale invokes agency, but it’s a projected agency that functions under the aegis of male control, compensating for the man’s lack of self-determination by attributing the capacity for determination to somebody else. The femme fatale stands in for and as the workings of fate—another classical allusion.   The genealogy that traces a line from femme fatale to muse, or to other designations of feminine quasiagency in Surrealism, such as the femme-enfant, is of fundamental importance. The very idea of a singular genealogy for “the muse” might already be the product of critical discourse, insofar as it collapses the distinctions between a model, a medium, an inspiration, a lover, a fellow artist, a protégé, and so forth—thereby fusing various ways of describing the deeply imbalanced power relations between maleidentifying and female-identifying artists, writers, and intellectuals in the early decades of the movement, especially when those relations also involved an age disparity. But what happens when these roles and imbalances are not collapsed but instead disarticulated? I propose instead that the question of “What is a muse?” works as a kind of litmus test for tracing the multiple and potentially very different kinds of relationships within

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Surrealist gender, sexual, and racial dynamics, not only in the lived practice of its writers and artists, but also in its figural and conceptual discourse. CM: I deliberately started with the feminine presumption because of Theory of the Young Girl by the Tiqqun collective (1999), which is a fascinating and complicated text, perhaps more so now than during the time in which it was written. In their view the “young girl” is gender-neutral, and that’s what they come out with in the early pages (Tiqqan 14). We see androgyny in a lot of early Surrealist imagery; I’m interested in that. But I cling to this idea of femininity, and that may be subjective on my part. I’m conscious of my own positionality and identity politics, so I come to this discussion biased. JE: Could you address that positionality further? Would you mind talking about that experience and substantiating the notion of “femininity” you’re gesturing toward? It’s important, especially since the experience that goes along with it seems less a bias than an investment. CM: I’ve long identified with the femme-enfant as a feminist. Carrington, for example, was extremely radical for her time: running away with the avant-garde. That was huge, given the background she came from, wealthy, new money (Moorhead 32–33). They would have been shocked by this move by an “impressionable” debutante. She’s a remarkable measure, someone I could emulate as a precedent and legitimizing force. I have a much more supportive family when it comes to the arts, but her sense of bourgeois rebellion was very alluring when I was starting out in the academy. I’m many years in now, but I’m still attached to that early sense of self-identifying with that kind of persona in Surrealism. So it’s personal. JE: There’s an important distinction at work in identifying reasons for resisting the position of the muse or femme-enfant and, on the other hand, in redefining such figurations as figures of resistance or insurgence. The first version names some of the ways in which the young scholar is potentially subject to all of the toxic behaviors of the academy, whereas the second version names the imperative to populate the academy with other kinds of people. CM: In terms of resistance, ideas like “rebel muse” and “reversal of the muse” are already out there in the currency of debate (Ashenden and Gilroy). I’m excited that we might use Chadwick as a kind of departure point. Her book is essential reading. I argue with it; I’m willing to argue with it, in a way that many of my contemporaries are not. But it’s also profoundly paradigm-shifting. “Pioneering” is often used. Which it is. And it was many people’s gateway into a kind of feminist Surrealism, certainly something I read quite early on. It was exhilarating seeing these practitioners together on the same platform.   Obviously there’s a lot in Chadwick et al. that I find useful, and there are aspects of her argument that I question because it’s become the orthodox narrative. The difficulty for me, coming to this from the subject position as a younger woman, as a woman-child to some extent, is that I find the implications of that narrative ageist, because it insisted that the femme-enfant didn’t have any agency or viewpoint. When I look at the truth of the pictures and biographies, it’s clear that these women were very proactive and embodied. One aspect that I do really like about Chadwick’s writing is how she talks about the revenge of the femme-enfant (188). There’s a behavioral aspect; she is wise and insubordinate, and that carries its own gesture or power within it. If you look at Breton, he championed Carrington from the very beginning of her career! JE: That’s such an important point, because it presupposes the predatory, toxic sexual politics of projection and appropriation.1 But it doesn’t end up there. Rather, you’re suggesting 360

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an agency that’s already a reaction against one’s designation as “femme enfant” or muse, precisely because such designations name the relations of sexualization and infantilization Chadwick uses them to diagnose.   You’re identifying a kind of radical insistence: of persisting in doing one’s work. With this in mind, I want to think with you about the femme-enfant figure as another iteration of “muse.” There are very few complete genealogies of the term; Chadwick provides one, as does Gauthier, and most understandings follow these formulations in turn.   Chadwick’s book, and scholarship by Georgiana Colvile, Mary Ann Caws, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Xavière Gauthier, Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Anna Balakian, Gloria Orenstein, and a little later, Kate Conley, fundamentally changed the discourse, as well as the archive, of what is knowable as Surrealism (see Allmer). It’s a profound illumination not only of the role of women artists, writers, and thinkers in the movement but a reframing of the geographical, historical, and discursive contours of what is knowable as Surrealism. That’s really important to my work. It was paradigm-shifting, and that work is ongoing. Rather than thinking that there’s a “real” period in Surrealism, the 1924–1929 moment in Paris, there are other timelines, other geographies, and as you explore in your curatorial work and scholarship, new and emerging iterations of feminist-Surrealism now. Chadwick writes very early on in her book—and this formulation is fantastic—“I’m unconvinced about the usefulness of attempting to define what makes an artist a Surrealist. I’ve chosen instead to write about a group of artists who are associated with Surrealism” (Chadwick 10). She’s interested in this open-ended construction of what it means to associate or be associated with Surrealism. She continues: “In some cases they have accepted the designation Surrealist and in others, they have rejected it entirely.” It’s not her main argument, but it’s one of the enormously impactful contentions of her work, a critical reorientation of the field. It suggests that we concentrate less on defining what is Surrealism is than instead on defining what the discourse of Surrealism should be.   As a consequence of this formulation, Chadwick even mentions the resistance that certain artists had to their inclusion in her book. Chadwick had the opportunity to work with many of the then-living artists whom she writes about, and there were all these problems with inclusion. Oppenheim, Tanning, and Fini resisted the project, feeling that books devoted to women “unnecessarily isolate and perpetuate their exile” (Tanning in Chadwick 14–16). Do you have thoughts about what is going on in that resistance? What might it reveal about the very complexity of association? CM: “Surrealist-associated artists” explains who they were, but not only that. More than that. Longer careers! I think their resistance comes from that need not to be pigeonholed and concerns about the prefix “women Surrealist.” There is a question mark for me as to why someone needs to have that prefix. There isn’t the same political need for “man dentist.” Why “woman artist”? Why perpetuate it? I write within that context, so I’ve come gradually, begrudgingly, to accept that category as historiographical. But the resistance involves trying not to be pinned down by someone who’s claiming to champion you. It’s saying, “If you want to champion me, then understand me and the position I come from.” And it’s generational, because Chadwick et al. are second-wave scholars and at times militant in that positionality, saying, actually, this is what we have to write for. It’s necessarily unapologetic. Tanning came from a different generation, when feminism wasn’t understood in the same way. She misinterpreted feminism’s intentions as exclusionary but would have likely been more receptive to recent feministSurrealist thinking because of its nuance and intersectionality (Watz xix). Oppenheim 361

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and Carrington were also sensitive to their legacies. They were older artists by 1985 and conscious of how they were going to be represented posthumously. JE: One of the divergences of the “radical” in speaking of such figures (or Zürn, or Mitrani)—one of the pivots between a radicalism directed toward the history of Surrealist art and a radicalism embodied in the praxis of living artists or activists—hinges on their canonization as young women. Like the figures on Keat’s urn, they’re frozen in youth— thereby eclipsing their full artistic careers. You suggest instead that by working against the second-wave discomfort with terms such as “femme-enfant” or even the idea of a muse, one can actually recognize artists who had long careers.   This begs the question, A muse for whom? A femme-enfant for whom? Your forthcoming book meditates the difference between considering someone as a muse for whatever male artist might have been obsessed with her in the 1930s and, on the other hand, considering a muse for feminism, a muse for contemporary artists, a muse for oneself. That’s a far different sense of the one for whom a muse might serve as an inspiration and medium. Is this not why Carrington offers such a model, transgenerationally, a muse for you? CM: Carrington is worth dwelling on because she and her work are experiencing such an intergenerational currency across the contemporary arts, particularly by creative intellectuals who identify as women. I’ve become preoccupied with why that might be and have found it is not only her iconographic universe (homunculi, tarot, alchemical symbols) and feminist themes (parenthood, safe spaces, witchcraft) but an overriding sense of her as a medium. Her innate and expansive sense of curiosity and intellectual source material (archaeology, occultism, world religions) play a part in why she offers such productive ground. JE: You once published an essay on Surrealist curiosity, in which you traced the genealogy of Carroll’s Alice in Surrealist discourse (McAra). Your attention to the role of curiosity is critical to any conversation on the “muse” because it articulates what’s at stake in issues of artistic attribution and agency. Given the ambiguities, to say the least, of Carroll’s real-life relationship to Alice Liddell, the figuration of an intellectually precocious young girl is deeply intertwined with (at least) two forms of projection. One has to do with a Freudian insistence on the fact of childhood or infantile sexuality as inextricable from “curiosity,” constitutive of the very “the desire to know” (Mulvey 59). It’s an epistemological drive, which is anything but an argument for conflating this kind of infantile sexuality with adult sexual relations. The Freudian position is not an argument for sexualizing children, nor is it an alibi for pedophilia.   A second form of projection is the fictional presumption of an older, and likely male, adult to identify with or otherwise comprehend the nature of a child’s curiosity. This is a very different kind of projection than the Freudian one, and it’s far more distressing.   What is striking about your discussion is that Alice’s curiosity takes center stage, no longer as a projection but as a project. This is an insistence throughout your own career, is it not? While certainly acknowledging how Surrealist discourse both sexualizes and feminizes curiosity, you emphasize the extent to which terms like “muse” and “femmeenfant” hinge on curiosity rather than on bodies alone.   What is the status of curiosity as it relates to practices of intellectual and political agency within Surrealist power relations, in Surrealist discourse, as well as in your own thinking about women-identifying Surrealist figures? I have Perry Zurn’s work on curiosity and power in mind here in thinking about claims to know somebody else’s curiosity. Curiosity may always be sexualized and related to power, but its relationship to 362

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power and sexuality is very different when describing how these relations are constitutive of one’s own curiosity rather than when describing someone else’s claim to know it, appeal to it, or police it. CM: Curiosity is deviant because it doesn’t conform; it can’t be disciplined. One’s own known is unknowable to other people. It’s an internal process. I was struck by Mulvey’s epistemophilia, thinking about Pandora and the desire to know rather than just see. Because seeing, in the Freudian structure, which Mulvey rails against, is aligned with fetishism. It’s a particular approach to looking at art objects, whereas the desire to know is to find out everything about them. It could be more sensory, more tactile; it could be more olfactory, more aural. Bal argues that “the act of looking is profoundly impure” (Bal 12).   We’re so reliant on that ocular dimension (especially when it comes to how the muse operates), but in practice it’s multifaceted and often eludes us. And this was part of the reason for embodying the Alice figure as an entrainment of curiosity. But also, the fact that the White Rabbit is her object of curiosity, the cipher for her quest, and she never actually catches that rabbit, it’s elusive. In the Western capitalist tradition, everything has to be bound up with output, whereas intellectual practice and art-making are process or journey-based which are just as vital, if not more so, than the final destination or product. The muse as practice, I wonder. JE: Zurn’s book argues, “not that curiosity becomes political but that curiosity is political. Curiosity is a political practice; and curiosity-formations are constitutive of politics.” With regard to the elusiveness you’re talking about, Zurn continues: “Knower(s) and knowns always exists in a network of relations, such that curiosity is only ever a process of making connections, building constellations, finding links, and following threads. It is collective and interconnective, functioning across intimate webs and (eco)systems” (Zurn 12). The White Rabbit is elusive, but the rabbit, like Alice, is also part of the fiction written by Carroll, whose very name is a fiction, a pseudonym for Dodgson, who writes the story for an Alice. CM: It’s a fantasy literary world, but also an inquiry into the power structures of an ancient institution. You have an Oxfordian mathematician who is writing a story for a little girl who, technically, cannot participate in academic discourse at that point but lives within the academy, an insider. JE: Carroll’s novel is also Oxfordian as a work of tutelage and pedagogy. You do these exercises, deform everything, and eventually you come to master the game. Alice, as the novel’s intended reader, is also a stand-in for all other readers; we are Alice. Alice’s story facilitates the act of using one’s own curiosity. Inquiries attuned to the politics of curiosity ask how this process works: how is our inquisitiveness trained, cultivated, and reproduced? What are the social conditions and effects of certain questions, and from whence do our questions hail? And whither do they go? CM: We are edging towards the muse as self-appropriation. Here’s a mathematician who is supposedly identifying with this little girl in the way that Flaubert identifies with Madame Bovary, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” One sees this idea of the young feminine as alter ego with Bellmer and Cornell. I’m not excusing anything, but the idea of a homme-enfant is worth considering as muse too. The Surrealists liked Alice, but they also take Freud and Sade as part of their Marseille card deck (1943). Here’s a fictional girl alongside real-life authors. Again, who gets to be a muse? JE: This goes back to the genealogy question you began with: What is the difference between a muse, a model, a precursor, and an ego ideal? 363

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CM: Muses need not be ancestors. Precursors need not influence. Creatives should be free to identify with whomsoever or whatever they choose (as long as it doesn’t cause any harm to their subject). Carrington deliberately chose an older woman as her heroine and protagonist in The Hearing Trumpet (1974) to challenge the youth cultural fixation (Zurn 12)! JE: This acknowledges the plasticity, as well as the politics, of laying claim to artistic or intellectual genealogies. Curiosity is, in some ways, appropriative: the sovereign designation of “choosing” or even manufacturing one’s precursors and ego ideals.   There’s another ego idealism I’d like to throw into the mix here; it’s at work very early on in Surrealist thinking, and it has very much to do with the role of a young woman in shaping the questions Surrealism was in the process of asking itself; the anarchist assassin Germaine Berton, as a kind of muse or ego ideal—and femme fatale—for the Surrealist group. In December 1923, Simone Breton, Morise, and Aragon brought a bouquet to Berton’s prison cell, where the 21-year-old was awaiting trial for killing Marius Plateau, the publishing secretary of l’Action Française. As Simone Breton wrote in a letter, the bouquet was dedicated: “To Germaine Berton, who did what we didn’t know how to do” (Breton 165). This formulation speaks volumes. With a gesture that resembled that of a theatrical or romantic admirer, the Surrealists looked to Berton as a model for political agency. Was she a muse? She may have inspired certain aspects of the nascent movement, but not to go out shooting people. Rather, she served as a proxy, through whom the poets approached the political—from an impassioned distance. This wasn’t necessarily sexualized in the same way as some of the more toxic projections. Rather, the “impassioned” distance occasioned a kind of epistemophilia, the span across which a Surrealist curiosity took shape. Berton did what the Surrealists did not know how to do.   Coming back to the femme-enfant, I was trying to trace a genealogy of the term, and I was struck by how much Dalí was using it when he joined up with the Surrealists in Paris. There are two paintings: Imperial Monument to the Femme-Enfant (1929) and Memory of the Femme-Enfant (1932). Claire Nouvet writes Dalí’s use of the compound signature “Gala-Dalí,” suggesting that the term “femme-enfant” is likewise a compound signature for Dalí. In this light, it refers not to a “child-woman,” in the sense of a young woman who is both a woman and a child, but is instead the name for a composite authorship where “femme” is Gala and “enfant” is Dalí, the Freudian little boy of Dalí’s self-figuration. And that’s what constitutes the hybrid agency of the femme-enfant. CM: Gala is a slippery figure in this history, mainly because, unlike some of the other women of Surrealism, she’s not necessarily a practitioner; she’s a collaborator (Galatea). JE: Thinking about such agency through Dalí’s paranoia-criticism signals the weird, spectral doubling at stake in the femme-enfant figure: one thing is always another. Crevel wrote, “Dalí où l’anti-obscurantisme” (1932), taking issue with what he calls the “fetishism of the instrument of labor” in capitalism. That’s obscurantism. What Dalí does in his work, by contrast, is to adopt fetishism as instrument of labor. That is what Crevel refers to as “anti-obscurantism,” the work of fetishism’s perverse doubleness as a laboring device. This rhymes with Gauthier in Le Surréalisme et la sexualité: Surrealism is most meaningful when it’s working in the name of perversion. All of the commingling of causes that a fetish entails, all that overdetermination, becomes an instrument of conceptual and political labor rather than a product of mystification. It functions as an engine of that epistemophilia. This amounts to another name for radical curiosity. This isn’t a romanticized curiosity; it’s perverse, dangerous. Crevel calls it “unsafe.” 364

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  This speaks to the idea that the term “femme-enfant,” no less than the term “muse,” is resonating with radical epistemophilia. Later, Breton rewrites Dalí’s femme-enfant formulation, as a father during the war, to signify the precocity of his own child. Having split from Dalí, Breton’s revision of the term corresponds to a reappropriation of critical paranoia, an epistemological shift from Freud and Marx to the broader spectrum of indigenous knowledges. CM: Dalí’s images are pertinent, not least because the ur-muse Mona Lisa is part of Dalí’s phallic vision, and links to Freud’s Leonardo case (1910) featuring the child’s sexual research. These paintings play out like Surrealist allegories of the nine muses and femme-enfant.   Speaking of allegories, I  notice that you have a Rikki Ducornet print, Mandrigore magique (1975/2020). I have a Lee Miller photograph on my desk portraying Tanning playing electrician (1950). I find it liberatory. The Ducornet is also a radical muse. Not Rikki herself, but the material she’s depicting, the exquisite corpse of Surrealism as a radical muse technique. A mermaid-hybrid creature. It’s sorceress-like, and magical— and possible. Going back to the start of this conversation, I wonder whether the muse comes off that pediment in Surrealism, as in the Gérôme image, and thus reframes the way we think about muses. JE: I love this formulation. Even running with the muse as a fetish in both the pejorative and affirmative senses of that words—that is, whether as a mystification or as a critique of the gender politics of the Surrealist movement—your description of the Ducornet image nonetheless gets us to the idea of a fetish in the sense of that which organizes and prompts. CM: That’s why Cixous and Clément fall out in La Jeune née. They’re trying to get to this. To paraphrase: “Oh, I don’t fetishize Dora. I don’t!” And the other one says, “Yes, you do. You do! You’re fetishizing Dora. That’s what you’re doing with this conversation” (Clément and Cixous 157). That also gets us to the desiring possibilities of Surrealism and what it gives us and what we bring to it, and what it gives us back.

Note 1. An instructive instance of this toxicity is the 1927 Surrealist tract “Hands Off Love,” which forms part of Chadwick’s genealogy of the Surrealist femme-enfant: here, the Surrealists defend Charlie Chaplin against the abuse charges levied against him by his second wife, Lita Grey, whom Chaplin forced into marriage when she was sixteen.

Works Cited Allmer, Patricia. “Feminist Interventions: Revising the Canon.” A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, edited by David Hopkins. Wiley Blackwell, 2016. Ashenden, Rachel, and Molly Gilroy. The Debutante. 2020. Bal, Mieke. “Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture.” The Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 2, no. 5, 2003, p. 9. Breton, Simone. Letter to Denise Lévy, 24 December 1923. Lettres à Denise Lévy. Ed. Georgiana Colvile. Joelle Losfeld, 2005. Chadwick, Whitney. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. Thames and Hudson, 1985. Clément, Catherine, and Hélène Cixous. The Newly Born Woman (1975). Translated by Betsy Wing. University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Lusty, Natalya. Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Ashgate, 2007. McAra, Catriona. “Surrealism’s Curiosity: Lewis Carroll and the Femme-Enfant.” Papers of Surrealism, vol. 9, 2011, pp. 1–25. Moorhead, Joanna. The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington. Virago, 2017.

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40 DISMEMBERED MUSES AND MIRRORS THAT BITE A Trans Perspective on Gender Variance in Surrealist Art Jordan Reznick Surrealism materialized in Paris during a time of profound uncertainty regarding the terms of gendered life. Once regarded as a stable feature of selfhood, by the 1920s, a person’s gender at birth was no longer a reliable predictor of profession, social life, sexual preferences, wardrobe, or sense of self. In this context, Surrealists visualized a range of imaginaries for transgressing gender norms. In some cases, the space of the artwork represented a sanctioned space where deviations from normal gendered behavior remained safely removed from real life. In others, the artwork offered possibilities for reconfiguring the relationship between the gendered body and the psyche not yet available in real life. Whether introspective, idealized, shocking, violent, or all of the above, transgender concepts and identities featured prominently in artworks by Max Ernst, Man Ray, Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, Victor Brauner, Remedios Varos, and others. In this chapter, I pursue several Surrealist engagements with bodies whose gender ambiguities, transformations, and indeterminacies provide insights into how transgender people imagined gender prior to the emergence of the postwar concept of “transsexual” and late-century concept of “transgender”—as well as how they were received by nontransgender people. Not masking my own lack of intellectual distance from trans bodies, I invite your empathy with my responses to finding the trans body in the Surrealist archive. I conclude by reflecting on the scarcity of transgender scholars in studies of Surrealism and the relationships between contemporary transgender identity and Surrealist artworks. Though Surrealism predates suitable vocabulary to describe transgender people, the era’s debates about the social construction of gender prelude today’s recognition that the categories “man” and “woman” enjoy little stability across history and culture—a reality also true of “transgender” (Aizura and Stryker). That reality began to dawn when French men returned from the First World War physically and mentally disabled to find that women had taken over their occupations and household roles. They experienced themselves as “feminized” and women as “masculinized,” destabilizing assumptions about the nature of gender (Lyford). Meanwhile, flourishing new gender identities, such as New Woman, garçonne, and dandy, forcefully blurred the lines between once-discreet domains of “woman” and “man” (Roberts; Latimer). While those identities share some of the ambiguities that denote genderqueer identities today, to portray them as transgender would, as Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici (2018) caution, “risk divesting past gender practice of what made it meaningful in its own time and place” (520). However, it DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-45

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is also unsurprising that within this context of such new possibilities for gendered life, transgender people imagined and realized gender transition despite lacking medical and psychological discourses to facilitate the process. So too did those people encounter phobic backlash to their transgressions of gendered norms. Surrealism’s engagements with gender belong within both of these histories: the history of transgender people and the history of transphobia. That fact is due in large part to Surrealism’s employment of the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. Freud’s framework posited masculinity as normative, femininity as a mysterious other, and gender-variant people as an impossible nothing. While the notion of homosexuality as “inversion” came to dominate sexological discourse during Freud’s time, the term was first coined by sexologist Havelock Ellis in 1897 to indicate transgender rather than sexual identity as a description of the common thread through the autobiographical narratives he studied (Prosser 135–155). However, Freud reauthored transgender autobiographical accounts to support his theory that internalized homophobia would cause a man to imagine he was a woman in order to accept his desire to have sex with another man. Perceiving that Freud’s heavy-handed revisions signaled a disturbing mistrust of the authenticity of patients’ experience, Ellis continued to explore gender as a mutable spectrum unlinked from biology and sexuality in Psychology of Sex (1933). However, Freud’s revisions had already marked an aggressive turn in the sexological literature toward largely studying and explaining sexuality rather than gender identity, leaving a void in psychological discourse that would not be filled until the term “transsexual” emerged in the 1950s as an object of medical discourse whose treatment involved somatic rather than psychological intervention (Prosser 139–152). Surrealists engaged with Freud’s and Ellis’s theories in ways that reflected their own experiences and biases. While women and transgender artists rejected his glaring misogyny, even men who appeared to embrace gender variance sometimes laid bare the transmisogyny underlying Freud’s script.

The Ambivalent Power of the Androgyne The androgynous and intersex bodies depicted in Surrealist art show how trans and intersex concepts created a space of retreat from that which had gone awry with gender in modernity. Believing that the archetypes of myths held clues to the psyche, male Surrealists rose to André Breton’s call for “the reconstitution of the primordial Androgyne” by drawing from varied historical sources, including Plato’s description of a third sex, nineteenth-century notions of alchemy, German Romanticism, and African ritual objects (Knott). Victor Brauner’s sculpture Number (1943) depicts what might be identified as an intersex or transgender body. The figure with a penis, breasts, and womb bears another figure within their womb who in turn holds another figure within theirs, suggesting the androgyne as a fecund ideal from which a more perfect life springs forth. Brauner’s primitivist appropriation of African art invokes an essentialized notion of primordiality. However, it was also calculated to shock. Stylizing “abnormal” genitalia with primitivism’s provocations of disgust, Brauner twists the androgyne together with the hermaphrodite, a medieval figure who was at once an alchemical ideal and a medical “monster” associated with (ongoing) violence and degradation of intersex people (DeVun). To that end, though such androgynes potentially signaled an embrace of embodied difference, the confusion between spiritual ideal and revolting gendered racialized Other reveals that gesture to be profoundly ambivalent. Androgyny as a signifying strategy functioned differently with women Surrealists. Rather than fetishizing genitalia, women utilized androgyny as a means of self-representation that refused the specular pleasure of the male gaze and rejected phallocentric signs of sexual difference. Androgynous figures took form as mythic beasts in the works of Leonora Carrington, 368

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Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, Meret Oppenhiem, and Frida Kahlo. For Remedios Varo, androgynous figures assume roles of supreme authority as alchemists, clockmakers, plant scientists, cosmic musicians, and explorers of primordial depths, each engaged in acts of creating the nature of existence itself. Like Brauner, her androgynous beings hearken back to the primordial alchemy of legend. However, their propagative power suggests that transgender concepts might unlock a liberated yesteryear prior to patriarchy (Chadwick 12–13).

The Dreaded Nothingness of the Trans Muse When nontransgender Surrealists depict and imitate real trans people is when things become decidedly more complicated. Breton once stated, “I wish that I could change my sex as often as I  change my shirt” (Tashjian 37). While this casual remark seems to express a desire for something like a transgender life, its blasé frivolity suggests that gender transgressions are nothing more than everyday amusements. Breton betrays the way that an embrace of transgender concepts can counterintuitively be used to secure gender’s normative terms. Similarly, the incorporation of trans women into Surrealist men’s artworks seem, at first glance, to signal a radical openness to trans identities. However, in each case they ultimately serve to buttress the heteronormative social world against gender variance by cutting transgender muses down to nothing. In the most famous instance, Marcel Duchamp adopted the female alter ego Rrose Sélavy beginning in 1920 until his death. Often considered to be an early instance of performance art, Rrose posed for photographs, authored essays, created artworks, signed documents, and wrote letters to friends. With all the qualities of Duchamp’s back-and-forth enigmas, “Rose” suggests (among other things) the scent of cheap perfume and the common Jewish American nickname for Ruth, but also the eroticism of cheap pornography (cinema rose). Though she is not exactly one thing or another, to some extent she derives from the class of New York’s Jewish nouveau riche women, mixed with a hint of smut to shock good tastes. In this sense, Rrose bears qualities of what Breton referred to as the “readymade human type” in the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), and she should be understood as one of Duchamp’s ready-mades (Johnson). Several other ready-mades also turned the binary of art/life into an indeterminate inside-out game by bouncing art’s signifiers through the binary of male/female, such as the mustache drawn on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) and the female mannequin dressed in Duchamp’s clothes displayed at the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism (See also Blessing). To that end, transgender concepts serve a similar purpose as the ready-made itself. They are a foil. They are neither revolutionary statements on the nature of gender nor imaginaries of alternate modes of gendered life, but instead a phraseology of surprises and tricks that pronounce a series of unanswerable questions. In other words, Rrose was never meant to be a person. She is a trick. If she has any substance, it is in the transphobic sense of the shocking material “truth” transgender people “hide” behind a “false” appearance. As Susan Stryker (2006) explains of transphobia, “transgender people who problematize the assumed correlation of a particular biological sex with a particular social gender are often considered to make false representations of an underlying material truth, through the willful distortion of surface appearance” (9). Rrose is not a trans woman. She is a phobic parody. A collaborative series of photographs of Rrose’s “coming out” by Duchamp and Man Ray (1921–1923) make evident the fact that Rrose was always intended to suggest such phobic distortions. Man Ray adopts two aesthetic styles, each with its own gender “surprise.” In one style, he photographs Rrose with a harsh spotlight aimed directly at her face, making her face look manly and pockmarked. Combined with her cheap clothing, outdated hat, and fake jewelry, 369

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she is nothing more than a pathetic sham. This set of photographs contrasts clearly with those in which Rrose enjoys flattering soft light and soft focus in her designer hat and fur-trimmed coat. However, the punchline is not so different. The hands with which Rrose coquettishly clutches her coat belong to woman Dada artist Germaine Everling and have been purposely placed to appear too small and at an unnatural angle to Rrose’s body—betraying her disguise. Though others have posited that the series manifested sincere transgender concepts or homosexual desires for Duchamp and Man Ray, I find that interpretation implausible and troubling (Johnson; Tashjian). While the artists may have had repressed wishes, in collaborating to create Rrose, they explore gender variance only to the extent that it serves as a device to sow ambiguity and confusion. In another rendition of the transgender “trap,” Duchamp and Man Ray pair Rrose’s voice with photographs of actual transgender and gender-variant people. Man Ray’s monograph Photographs by Man Ray, 1920 Paris 1934 contained within it a neatly binary pair of portrait series, “Men Before the Mirror” and “Visages of Women,” each accompanied by a translation of Rrose’s essay “Men Before the Mirror” and punctuated with a photograph of a gendervariant person. Masculine lesbian Gertrude Stein concludes the portraits of women while transgender trapeze artist Barbette finishes the portraits of avant-garde men. Barbette served as a muse both for Man Ray and Surrealist poet and cinematographer Jean Cocteau, whose 1926 essay “Le Numéro Barbette” celebrated her wildly popular trapeze act as a “box of tricks where the true is no longer valid” (Steegmuller, Cocteau 366). Together the men completed a series of photographs of Barbette that same year. As with his photographs of Rrose, Man Ray manipulated lighting, shadow, and pose to “shocking” ends. In one photograph, the severe lighting and square camera angle directed at her made-up face and bare chest emphasize the masculinity of her torso and face, rendering her makeup as a ruse. The effect is heightened by a hand-mirror-shaped shadow covering her lower half, insinuating the drama of a dark secret hiding behind it. In the photograph selected for “Men Before the Mirror,” we are invited even closer to Barbette’s “secret.” Photographed in the act of dressing, Barbette wears nothing but undergarments. With the light focused on her girdle, the viewer is invited to scrutinize her genitals for signs of her “material truth.” At the end of a long line of named male countenances, her picture stands out. It is not a portrait. It does not bear the name of its subject. Man Ray treats Barbette not as a person but as a shocking foil. Cocteau’s descriptions of watching Barbette dress before a show make clear the expected reaction: “Jekyll is Hyde. Yes, Hyde! Because now I find myself frightened” (Steegmuller, “Barbette”). Such portrayals conform to stereotypes of trans women as deceitful, monstrous, and shocking. However, the real deceit here is not Barbette’s but the Surrealists’. She does not hide who she is. They formed friendships, even sexual relationships, with Barbette so they could mask their degradation of her in false admiration (Gils). It makes me tremendously sad to imagine that this was the quality of the friendships Barbette enjoyed during her time in Paris, which she later regarded as the zenith of her life (Steegmuller, “Barbette”). Barbette died of suicide in 1973. There may be no direct correlation between her suicide, gender identity, and treatment by the Surrealists. However, given the prevalence of suicide as a cause of death for trans women, I wonder if Barbette felt herself to be living an impossible life. If so, Man Ray and Cocteau undoubtedly reinforced that sense. A more violent dehumanization of trans women appears in one of Max Ernst’s first Surrealist paintings, Men Shall Know Nothing of This (1923). The painting’s subject derives from Freud’s 1911 analysis of the memoirs of gender-crossing German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, who documented her own experience of becoming Ms. Schreber (Hinton). As one of Freud’s most

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famous case studies and the first psychoanalytic inquiry on transsexualism, Freud’s diagnosis of Schreber’s gender transformation as delusional paranoia resulting from an “outburst of homosexual libido” set the tone for a century of psychoanalytic treatment of trans patients (Hansbury). In contrast to Freud’s perception, Schreber wrote the text as proof of her irreproachable sanity to make the case for being freed from an asylum where she was incarcerated against her will for six years—a case she won (Gherovici). Mirroring Freud’s disregard for Schreber’s selfperception, Ernst also misconstrues her words to phobic ends. Two pairs of legs hover at the top of the painting in a phobic imaginary of an intersex body that recalls Schreber’s sensations of being “a man and woman in one person having intercourse with myself ” and “floating in voluptuousness” (547). With these words as a cue, Ernst slices Schreber into a mutant of the psyche. She has an abundance of genitals and legs, but nothing else. Limb upon limb upon limb, she floats in a sterile and lonely outer space. Where Schreber imagined her internal organs being miraculously removed when her body transformed into femininity, Ernst disembowels her like a butcher, tossing her entrails in an unceremonious heap onto the flat wasteland. Even if Ernst purports to take her words literally, I find it unlikely Schreber would have found herself mirrored in this canvas. Ernst depicts her without the humanity or empathy she sought to beckon with her words. Ritualistically dismembered, disemboweled, and displayed in a netherworld nowhere, Schreber is both the “nothing” and the “this” that shall not be known of Ernst’s title. The scene conforms to what Eric Stanley (2011) documents as the ritualistic killing, dismembering, and sensationalizing aftermath common in murders of trans women. Trans people are not just killed. They are overkilled. As Stanley explains, for transphobic people, the intactness of the nontransgender social world relies upon the utter nonexistence of queer and trans people; phobic murderers do not stop killing when the body dies. Murder continues beyond the “biological time when the heart stops pushing and pulling blood,” because “the aim is not simply the end of a specific life, but the ending of all queer life” (9). Without implying that Ernst’s painting is the equivalent of the very real murders of trans women, I find the correlation useful to make explicit Freud’s phobic perception of the transgender people he analyzed. In Griffin Hansbury’s (2017) analysis of Freud’s anxious countertransference while reading Schreber’s memoirs, he identifies Freud’s fear that he might join Schreber in her psychosis. Hansbury shows that Freud identifies her as homosexual rather than transsexual in a phobic effort to distance himself from the possibility of recognizing femininity within himself and thereby reorienting his sense of self in the stable truth of a nontransgender reality. Freud thus posits her femininity as nothing. But he does not stop there. He tears her apart, psychologically dismembering her self-perception beyond recognition and displaying his analysis ritualistically for public consumption to ensure that trans people would remain nothing in the eyes of psychological discourse. Or as Ernst states in his title, “Men shall know nothing of this.” In this sense, like the much-documented ways in which Surrealists enacted Marquis de Sade’s violences against the female body, they also enacted Freud’s phobic fantasies against trans women.

The Double Eyelid of the Trans Mirror In striking contrast to artists who regard the ambiguously gendered body as threat, foil, or ideal, transgender stepsibling lovers Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore approach the body as the very real, contradictory, and messy site of transgender becoming in an intolerant world. Reflecting on their gender identity, Cahun stated, “Masculine? Feminine? That depends on the occasion. Neuter is the only gender that invariably suits me. If it existed in our language one would not

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observe this oscillation in my thinking” (Latimer 101). Unlike Breton’s facetious sex-change imaginary, Cahun speaks to navigating gender transformation entangled in a social world where one is regarded as an impossible nothing. Though art historians typically cite the period’s Freudian definition of inversion to identify Cahun and Moore as lesbian women, their identification as neuter contradicts such a notion of inversion. Cahun and Moore began researching the sexological discourses of their era and its histories as teenagers. Not finding adequate language to describe themselves, they cobbled nonbinary gender identities together through twisted bio-temporal routes from nineteenthcentury accounts of trans women and effeminate men. Their collaboratively authored “Les Jeux uraniens” (Uranian Games, c. 1913) employs the term “uranian” in reference to a gender category named in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s spectrum of subjectivities relating to trans and homosexual experience. Though uranian is frequently understood in terms of Ulrichs’s later reputation as an advocate of homosexuality, it in fact described his own experience as “the soul of a woman enclosed in a man’s body” (Prosser 143). As Cahun and Moore certainly understood, this cross-gender experience was at the root of the term “invert.” Ellis coined the term by drawing upon Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s studies of Ulrich. Krafft-Ebing theorized that “inverted sexual instinct” was a cross-gender condition that sometimes, but not always, accompanied homosexuality (143). “Les Jeux uraniens” also quotes homosexual playwright Oscar Wilde, whom Cahun frequently emulated in their dandyish public appearance. Cahun intentionally avoided identification with the masculine garçonne identity popular among lesbians in Paris. Their oft-shaved head, sometimes died pink or green, and paired with outlandish eye makeup was atypical for lesbians, who tended to stick to sober male haircuts and wardrobes (Latimer 26–28). Even the Surrealists found Cahun’s indecipherability disquieting (Leperlier 246). Pierre Caminade described Cahun as “the bizarre, the bizarre made into a woman, a kind of lightning strike by surreality” (219–220). His comment reflects that Surrealism’s gender transgressions belonged safely within the psyche and canvas and were not necessarily welcome in the social world. The couple’s photographic works also toyed savvily with psychological and medical discourses that sought to discover the “material truth” within the gender-variant subject’s interior. They mockingly marshal photography’s facticity to contrast neat biological “facts” with the chaotic real of transgender subjectivity. In one 1930 photomontage from their collaboratively authored monograph critiquing French conservatism, Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals), Cahun looks directly into the camera lens, a montaged pistol pressed to their temple, merging gun and camera “shots.” The fatal shot spills Cahun’s entrails onto an X-ray below—four sets of ribs, human parts merged with bird parts inside and out, headless bodies, bodiless heads, and skinless faces. Frustrating the search for “material truth,” Cahun’s interior “facts” are each monstrous spliced-together impossibilities of their own. Cahun (1930) writes that though the “surgical blade” expects to “encounter an ivory core” within the body, what it discovers is “just rubbish, rubbish, piles of rubbish all the way into its unrecognizable center” (195). In another montage, multiples of Cahun’s face stack one on top of another to form an erect phallus that threatens to overtake a traditional French family floating above. Text sheathing the phallus reads: “Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.” They suggest that their perpetual drive for self-knowledge is behind the fecundity of this seventeen-headed erection. In contrast, the hardy biology of nontransgender sex appears to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. The heterosexuals produce only one flabby future patriarch from their coupling. They have been overidealized to the point of emptiness. Cahun thus

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Figure 40.1 Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, I.O.U., 1930, photomontage introducing Chapter 9, in Claude Cahun, Aveux non avenus, Paris, 1930. Source: Courtesy of Jersey Heritage Trust.

volleys the category of nothingness back to its rightful owners: the nontransgender dupes who never question the nature of selfhood. Cahun and Moore’s artworks use the photographic language of lenses, windows, mirrors, cuts, and masks as a means to indicate the medium’s utility for self-exploration. They call the camera a “guillotine window”—an antiquated reference to the blades of the camera shutter, which emphasizes its “cut” of the body from time and space. Adding silver to the guillotine window, the camera doubles as window and mirror, positioning Cahun and Moore each on either and both sides at once (25). Calling the camera’s lens “our double eyelid,” they use it to project the visible surface of the world inward to the camera’s dark interior so that one might

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behold one’s interiority and exteriority at once (Cahun, “Carnaval En Chambre”). Meanwhile “mask” refers to the darkroom technique of blocking the exposure of select areas of an image to make a montage, which also allows them to “unmask nature” by turning the body into visual surface that refracts through lens, eyelid, mirror, and psyche. However, no amount of masks ceaselessly refracting through a hall of guillotine mirrors can settle the question of Cahun’s identity. The mirrors and masks instead bring us into the heart of the dysphoric interior-surface tangle of the transgender subject’s embodiment. In “Bedroom Carnival” (1926), Cahun recounts the accumulations of masks, both “carnal” and “verbal,” acquired during their lifetime: I had spent my solitary hours disguising my soul. The masks had become so perfect that when the time came for them to walk across the plaza of my conscience, they didn’t recognize each other. I adopted the most off-putting opinions one by one, those that displeased me the most had the best chance of success. But the make-up that I employed seemed indelible. I scrubbed so hard to wash it off myself that I took off my skin. And my soul, like a flayed face, no longer had a human form. (284–285) Cahun describes assembling a false persona calculated as the perfect disguise for a self who had no chance of surviving in the society to which it was born. By the time they discern that their appearance is merely a clever facade, it is already too late. Haunted by the sense that another self was once possible, Cahun tries to remove the masks in an interminable labor of self-determination. But the damage done by having once tried to become recognizable by social norms is irreversible. Try as one might, surface cannot be scrubbed from substance: “You apply your mask too heavily, and it bites your skin. . . . You realize with horror that the flesh and its cover have become inseparable. Quick, a little saliva; you reglue the bandage to the wound” (285). The slippage between bandage and mask, self and wound, describes the transgender experience from within. Gender is not a frivolous nothing of puzzles and play but a means of survival which forever alters the self. The always-already quality of the mask that both wounds and bandages anticipates Judith Butler’s theorization of transgender precarity: one is born into a gendered world not of one’s choosing, by which one must gain recognition to survive. In this sense, Cahun and Moore’s works compose a valuable archive of the experience of nonbinary transgender subjectivity before transsexual medicine standardized the “trapped in the wrong body” narratives that would come to dominate descriptions of transgender subjectivity beginning in the postwar period.

Surrealism’s Transgender Touches It is perhaps because conversations on gender and Surrealism largely coincided with an era of feminist interventions in art’s discourses yet preceded transgender interventions in feminism that Surrealism counts almost no openly trans scholars among its experts at the time of this writing. This, despite the fact that it is the only major modern art movement to widely experiment with representations of gender variance. Peruse its texts, catalogs, and didactic exhibition labels and you will find derogatory language for intersex people, trans-exclusionary terms for body parts, misgendering of transgender figures, and claims that denigrating representations of gendervariant people are celebratory and even feminist. All the same, Surrealism has impacted what we know as queer and transgender identity today. Tirza Latimer (2005) recalls her generation of 1970s gender-transgressing lesbians looking to 374

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interwar Paris for “traces of our history” (5). Later, the now-legendary 1997 Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance and Photography exhibition at Guggenheim curated by Jennifer Blessing couched Surrealism within a decidedly genderqueer history bent on destroying binaries. Soon after, transgender activist artist Micah Bazant reproduced Cahun and Moore’s images from Blessing’s catalog in their underground zine TimTum (1999) at a moment when the queer community was searching for words to describe genders beyond the male-to-female and female-tomale stuff of transsexual medicine. Bazant described Cahun as a yearned-for historical figure who embodied a gender “different in ways that had [and] have no name.” Copied and recopied thousands of times by its readers, TimTum brought Cahun into the fold of trans history. Such cross-temporal “touches” are lived relationships between queers past and present that make a clear accounting of distinctions between transgender identities then and now untenable (DeVun and Tortorici; Dinshaw et al.).

Works Cited Aizura, Aren Z, and Susan Stryker. “Introduction: Transgender Studies 2.0.” The Transgender Studies Reader 2, edited by Aren Z. Aisura and Susan Stryker, Routledge, 2013. Bazant, Micah. “TimTum: A  Trans Jew Zine.” 1999. http://www.qzap.org/v5/gallery/main.php?g2_ view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=1552 Blessing, Jennifer. Rrose Is a Rrose Is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography. Guggenheim Museum, 1997. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. Routledge, 2004. Cahun, Claude. “Carnaval En Chambre” [1926]. Translated by Jennifer L. Shaw. Ligne de Coeur 4 (March): translated and reprinted in Jennifer L. Shaw, Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun. Reaktion Books, 2017, pp. 284–286. ———. Disavowals: Or, Cancelled Confessions. Translated by Susan de Muth. The MIT Press, 2008. Chadwick, Whitney. Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation. The MIT Press, 1998. Cocteau, Jean, Francis Steegmuller, and Man Ray. Le Numero Barbette. Jacques Damase, 1980. DeVun, Leah. “The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Europe.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 69 no. 2, 2008, pp. 193–218. DeVun, Leah, and Zeb Tortorici. “Trans, Time, and History.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 5 no. 4, 2018, pp. 518–539. Dinshaw, Carolyn, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher S. (Christopher Shaun) Nealon, and Tan Hoang Nguyen. “Theorizing. Queer Temporalities: A  Roundtable Discussion.” GLQ: A  Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 13 no. 2, 2007, pp. 177–195. Ellis, Havelock. Psychology of Sex: A Manual for Students. William Heinemann Ltd, 1933. Gherovici, Patricia. “Depathologizing Trans: From Symptom to Sinthome.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 4, nos. 3–4, 2017, pp. 534–555. Gils, Bieke. “Le Numéro Barbette: Destabilising Gender on the High Wire and the Flying Trapeze.” Sport in History, vol. 36, no. 1, 2016, pp. 26–46. Hansbury, Griffin. “Unthinkable Anxieties: Reading Transphobic Countertransferences in a Century of Psychoanalytic Writing.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 4, nos. 3–4, 2017, pp. 384–404. Hinton, Geoffrey. “Max Ernst: ‘Les Hommes n’en Sauront Rien’.” Burlington Magazine, 1975, pp. 292–299. Johnson, Deborah. “R(r)ose Sélavy as Man Ray: Reconsidering the Alter Ego of Marcel Duchamp.” Art Journal, vol. 72, no. 1, 2013, pp. 80–94. Knott, Robert. “The Myth of the Androgyne.” Art Forum, vol. 14, November 1975, pp. 38–45. Latimer, Tirza. Women Together/Women Apart. Rutgers University Press, 2005. Leperlier, François. Claude Cahun: l’exotisme intérieur. Fayard, 2006. Lyford, Amy. Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France. University of California Press, 2007. Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. Columbia University Press, 1998. Roberts, Mary L. Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927. University of Chicago Press, 1994.

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PART V

Further Reaches

41 THE INTELLECTUAL RESONANCES OF SURREALISM Bruce Baugh

When Jean-Paul Sartre summed up Surrealism in What Is Literature? he aimed to bury it, not to praise it. In 1947, at the time Sartre was writing, Surrealism seemed a relic of the past; the heyday of what Sartre considered its great works—Breton’s Nadja (1928), Break of Day (1934), and Communicating Vessels (1932)—had given way, in his view, to a bourgeois and reformist conformism content to dazzle the bourgeoisie with disconcerting works of art (221–223). Discussing some of the self-contradictory works of art, such as Marcel Duchamp’s sugar cubes made of marble, at the 1947 Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, Sartre complains that, unlike the revolutionary who destroys particular institutions in order to create a new society, Surrealists create works in order to destroy reality as a whole by putting in question the distinction between what is real and what is not (140, 223). But this movement of total negation is contested by the particular concrete being-there of the created thing, such that: This reciprocal and frozen annihilation of things . . . is neither Hegelian Negativity, nor hypostasized Negation, nor even Nothingness. . . . It would be better to name it the Impossible, or . . . the imaginary point where dreaming and waking, the real and the fictitious, the objective and the subjective, blend together. (136) This fusion is not a synthesis through which opposed terms receive determination and articulation as moments of a larger dialectical process, but mere confusion, an unstable mental fluttering between being and nothingness, affirmation and negation, that in fact changes nothing in the real world (137, 223). Surrealism, in short, has gone from being a revolutionary movement to an essentially conservative one. Except for this last point about Surrealism changing nothing in the real world, Surrealists might very well agree with Sartre’s description of Surrealism, but they would be hard-pressed to see why this would count as a critique. After all, Breton had declared in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism that Surrealism aims to place on trial the very notions of “reality and unreality, reason and irrationality, thought and impulse, knowledge and ‘fatal’ ignorance, usefulness and uselessness” (140–141). Rather than subjecting the Hegelian process of “negation and the negation of the negation” to the limits of a system, Breton wanted to make it an engine of endless transformation and metamorphosis, in art, in poetry, and in thought. So for example, rather than being DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-47

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content with sterile logical transitions such as “A is A, A is not A, yet A is A,” Surrealism wants to take an object such as a rose through a profitable movement of less benign contradictions where it would be successively the rose that comes from the garden, a rose that has a distinctive place in a dream, a rose that cannot be extracted from the “optical bouquet,” one that can totally change its properties by passing into automatic writing, one that retains only what the painter wanted it to retain in a surrealist painting, and finally, the one which, totally different from itself, returns to the garden. (140–141) Rather than being an irritating “fluttering” between being and nothingness, a mere backand-forth movement without resolution or development (223, 225), the Surrealist dialectic transforms particular terms (a rose) in distinctive and determinate ways that do indeed call into question traditional oppositions (real and unreal, useful and useless, waking and dreaming). It is in this liberation of negation and metamorphosis and the attendant dismantling of binary oppositions that Surrealism has had its greatest influence on postmodern thought and practice, from the Situationists to Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze to Judith Butler. Jacques Derrida rarely invokes Surrealism explicitly (e.g., Derrida, Margins 222 n. 23), but named or not, Surrealism inspires Derrida’s project of dissolving all finite determinations through an endless process of negation without synthesis that destabilizes and confounds opposing terms such as memory/image, memory/desire, perception/nonperception (212; Dissemination 210–212). Derrida valorizes precisely that aspect of Surrealism that so irritated Sartre: the thesis of differing terms as two poles between which “indefinite fluctuations” occur, without their cancellation in a higher synthesis that sublates and stabilizes their opposition (Dissemination 225). Although Derrida’s primary philosophical sources are G. W. F. Hegel and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, he nevertheless agrees with Breton that Hegel’s dialectic of “negation and the negation of negation” cannot be confined to the limits of Hegel’s system, a system that both Breton and Derrida regard as untenable in its overreaching positing of a closed totality that grasps the whole of reality through determinate logical relations. And like Breton, Derrida calls into question any hard and fast distinction between reason and madness (see “Cogito”). Unlike Breton, however, Derrida is no poet. At times, Derrida refers to poetic or verbal metamorphoses reminiscent of Breton—such as the verbal sequence hoir (heir), soir (evening), noire (black), miroir (mirror), grimoire (wizard’s black book), ivoire (ivory), armoire (wardrobe), taken from Stéphane Mallarmé (Dissemination 210; see ibid., 281 n. 77)—but his “deconstructive” dismantling of oppositions owes more to a theory of signification than to poetry or dreams. Every linguistic term, every signifier, every concept, says Derrida, is “essentially inscribed in a chain or system, within which it refers to . . . other concepts by the systematic play of differences” (Speech 140; see Derrida, Grammatology 7, 73; Positions 26–27) that leads each term into a process of indefinite becoming-other in which every other is also other than itself (Truth 382; “Living” 84, 115–118, 121–123, 170–172). But because the indefinite referral of one term to another—without any final term or totalizing system that would bring this movement to a halt (Writing 25–26, 155, 162; Dissemination 207–208; Positions 82)—is the positive power of the iteration of a term or concept throughout different contexts (Margins 317–318; Positions 43; “Limited” 197), this limitless becoming-other is free of “the metaphysical or romantic pathos of negativity” (Positions: 86; see Writing 289–292). It is more jouissance than the dissatisfaction of non-attainment, more the joyous affirmation of limitless play than the frustration of not making 380

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progress toward some definite goal (Writing 292). In any case, the result of this indefinite process of becoming-other is that every term, every thing, every category is both itself and other than itself (Grammatology 112; Glas 239; Dissemination 252–253), but without the “return from otherness” into identity or sameness that characterizes Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 110; Derrida Writing 90–91, 104.) The transformations undergone by terms in Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy, then, bear more than a passing resemblance to the metamorphoses of the rose in Breton’s Second Manifesto. Nevertheless, whereas Breton speaks of the reconciliation of opposed terms such as dream and reality, subjective and objective (4, 13, 91–92, 146–147), Derrida invokes “the medium of the between”—le medium de l’entre—that destabilizes terms by keeping them both separate and intimately related (Dissemination 211–212). In short, Derrida reverses Breton’s “Entre des mediums” (Perdus 89–95) and puts asunder what Breton dreams of joining together in “a certain point of spirit at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low cease to be perceived as contradictions” (Manifestoes 123–124). For Derrida, the indefinite proliferation of difference is something other than the reconciliation of contraries. If it were otherwise and dream and reality were united in what Breton calls “a kind of absolute reality, a surreality” (14), then difference would be dissolved in the same. Derrida seeks to preserve the virulence of the opposition and antagonism between terms so that each term can destabilize and undermine the other and call into question its supposed identity and unity (Dissemination 58). Rather than uniting and reconciling terms in a higher unity, Derrida entangles terms with an indefinite plurality of other terms (Truth 278, 284, 332–335, 364, 377), knotting them together in a way that renders impossible any neat and tidy, absolute separation between them, while at the same time ruling out any final synthesis that would cancel their differences. Nonetheless, it remains the case that Derrida’s questioning of oppositions, and in particular the stability of the terms on which those oppositions rely, is heir to the spirit of Surrealism’s putting on trial the traditional oppositions between reality and unreality, reason and madness. It would not be a stretch to see Judith Butler’s feminist philosophy as a further development of the critique of binary oppositions undertaken in their different ways by Breton and Derrida. Of course, the Surrealists of the 1920s were far from feminist; their comments on women are sometimes misogynist and often rely on patriarchal stereotypes, such as the Romantic ideal of “the eternal feminine” embodied by the eponymous heroine of Breton’s novel-memoir Nadja (1926) and Philippe Soupault’s Georgette in his novel Last Nights in Paris (1928). But the postHegelian questioning of binary oppositions in Breton and Derrida is also very much at work in Butler, starting with her own confrontation with Hegel, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1988), a work in which Butler sharpens her own conceptual tools through a critical engagement with Hegel, Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others. The outcome of this philosophical apprenticeship was Butler’s groundbreaking Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), in which traditional notions of sex and gender (male/female, masculine/feminine) are subjected to a radical critique. For Butler, not only is the female sex “not one,” as Luce Irigaray had already proclaimed in 1977, but neither is the supposedly primary male sex. If Irigaray has sometimes been criticized for essentializing sexual difference, Butler questions and destabilizes this difference. It is not that femaleness can be conceptualized through openness and multiplicity and maleness through a closed and unitary egoic totality, but rather that such categories cross over from one sex to the other, undermining any essential distinction between them. Gender and sex, rather than being biologically or anatomically determined, are constituted through social interactions and historically contingent constructions of gender categories; gender is both performed by individuals 381

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seeking to constitute identities for themselves through a process of social recognition and constituted by the contingent and historically determined discourses (vocabularies and institutions) of society. Deconstruction, Derrida has written, is not simply an analysis or critique of written texts, but an intervention that “interferes with solid structures, ‘material’ institutions” (Truth 19). By the same token, Butler’s “deconstruction” of gender binaries is more than just a critique of how we speak and think about sex and gender—a heteronormative and patriarchal ideology; it is a critical examination and an intervention in the material effects in and on bodies of society’s practices of establishing and enforcing norms of sex and gender. Indeed, the metaphysical distinction between signification and discourse on the one hand and bodies and experience on the other presupposes “a set of metaphysical oppositions between materialism and idealism” that has been handed down by the Western philosophical tradition and which Butler calls into question both with respect to its presuppositions and its effects (“Performance”; see Bodies 27–55). In both theory and practice, Butler’s “confusion” of genders and sexes—to use the term Sartre uses to castigate Surrealism’s attempt to transcend binary oppositions (Sartre 136)—has been influential. “Gender non-binary” individuals and “gender fluidity” are more than mere terms or concepts; they are social and empirical realities as well. The ambition of Surrealism was to reach a point where conventional oppositions would cease to be regarded as contradictory; thanks to Butler and other feminists and gender theorists, that point has been reached in at least one domain, however partially and imperfectly. There is a crossing over and confusion of gender and sex that has increasingly become part of mainstream culture. There is also an increasing recognition of the mutual implications of socially constructed discourses and the embodied, lived experiences of human beings. The divide between ideal and material, conceptual and empirical, is subjected to the same sort of blurring in Butler as are gender categories. The critical investigation and resistance to binary oppositions is also carried out in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator, Félix Guattari. Long before Butler, Deleuze and Guattari had argued for a classification of bodies that did not rely on the male-female binary or the grosser and more obvious features of human anatomy: If we consider the great binary aggregates, such as the sexes or classes, it is evident they also cross over into molecular assemblages of a different nature, and that there is a double mutual dependency between them. For the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into play not only the man in the woman and the woman in the man, but the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.: a thousand tiny sexes. (Plateaus 213) Bodies, for Deleuze and Guattari, are not complete and fully constituted wholes, but assemblages of material parts in a particular configuration and with a particular ratio of motion and rest that expresses that body’s capacity for feeling and affect and for thinking and action (see Gatens 165–166). Bodies are open and permeable: they mix with other bodies, the mixture either allowing one or both to increase its powers of acting and being affected (one body “composes” with another) or causing the destruction or “decomposition” of the configuration and ratio of motion and rest among its parts that constitute that body’s “essence” (Baugh). When Deleuze and Guattari invoke Antonin Artaud’s “body without organs,” they mean not that the body will be eviscerated but that its parts will no longer be understood in terms of a hierarchically ordered system of functions that establishes a determinate and fixed boundary between the flows of energy and parts within a body and outside of it (Plateaus 153). Each body is a multiplicity of parts and forces that interact with other multiplicities that are themselves “open” and permeable. 382

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Deleuze and Guattari’s projects of thinking the body differently and of overcoming rigid sexual and gender distinctions are part and parcel of their critique of binary thought in general. For Deleuze and Guattari, any system of binary oppositions has the function of stabilizing and limiting difference (Anti-Oedipus 242) inasmuch as each term is determined in relation to the opposite that it is not (Deleuze, Difference 203–205). Such a “movement of the negative and exclusion” assumes a minimal stability and unity of the term being negated and a negative conception of difference (Logic 172–173). Genuine difference, according to Deleuze, is nonnegative, “free from opposition and privation” (Spinoza 60). Taking his inspiration from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, Deleuze wants to make difference affirmative: not the negation of some contrary or other, but an affirmation of one’s own potentials and capabilities of becoming, beyond and outside the dualistic apparatuses of power and language that break up flows of becoming and confine them to the limits of identity, selfhood, or fixed categories of any sort (see Deleuze and Parnet 19, 21–22, 33–34; Deleuze Logic 107)—including, as Deleuze’s work with Guattari makes clear, categories of sex and gender. Moving from one term to its contrary, however many reversals this entails and however many times the operation is carried out, leaves the established oppositions intact, along with the structures of power relations those oppositions serve. The point is not to understand those oppositional relations but to subvert and overcome them through revolutionary becomings that open up new modes of being (Deleuze and Guattari Plateaus 293). In that respect, Deleuze and Guattari share a common agenda with Butler, however different their approaches are otherwise. Both Butler’s and Deleuze’s approaches seek to undo established binary oppositions by destabilizing the identities of the terms in play and by opening up the field to new terms that do not fit into the traditionally accepted categories. Their approaches differ from Surrealism’s search for a point at which contraries ceased to be perceived as such, and from Derrida’s related deconstruction of categories through the proliferation of negations without any final synthesis, but the debt to Surrealism’s questioning of the oppositions of dream and reality, reason and madness, is nonetheless evident. Breton’s metamorphoses of the rose— such that when the rose returns to the garden, it is entirely different from when it left it—here reach their apogee. In practical and material terms, Butler, Deleuze, and Guattari enact Breton’s demand that the imagination—which alone tells us what can be—reassert and reclaim its rights (Manifestoes 5, 10). Perhaps the most dramatic and explicit attempt to give the imagination its due through real and practical actions came in May 1968, when the Paris university students proclaimed, “All power to the imagination!” For those students, Surrealism may have been old hat, but there was a more proximate source for their ideology, a movement that itself was steeped in Surrealist thought and practice: Situationism. Despite the insistence by Situationism’s principal exponent, Guy Debord, on the differences between Surrealism and Situationism, the celebrated Situationist practices of psychogeography and the dérive have obvious affinities to the Surrealist attempts to merge the subjective and objective realms such that external circumstances come to express and answer to unconscious desires. In Communicating Vessels (1932), Breton had declared that “the poet will come to surmount the depressing idea of the irreparable divorce between action and the dream,” between “the objective consciousness of realities” and “their interior development” in the human mind (146– 147). In Mad Love (1937), Breton develops his theory of a fusion of the subjective and objective realms through his notions of chance (hasard) and the found object (la trouvaille). What we call chance, says Breton, far from being accidental, is “the form of the manifestation of external necessity which clears a path for itself in the human unconscious,” a revelation of the link between external, objective causality and internal, psychological need, “a second finality” according to which 383

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external nature seems shaped to meet human desires (23–24, 34; see Vessels 91–92). The most dramatic example of this phenomenon is la trouvaille, the “found object”: a thing, image, or word revealed through a “spontaneous, undetermined, unforeseeable [and] unlikely” encounter (Love 1987 23) that seems to be a solution “that is always surplus, . . . rigorously adapted to and yet greatly superior to the need” (13). It’s well-known that, in practice, the fusion between unconscious desire and external reality was explored in artistic practices, such as automatic writing (poetry) and automatism in painting, in which words and images arising unbidden from the unconscious are written down or painted without the intervention of the ego’s moral strictures or its subservience to “the reality principle.” But equally crucial was the practice of going for aimless walks, usually in groups, in search of what Aragon calls “the marvelous of the everyday” (16), or, as Merlin Coverly puts it, “correspondences, coincidences and uncanny ‘juxtapositions’” in which external chance and subjective desire overlap, subverting our usual perceptions and transfiguring the everyday reality of the street (73, 75). Such strolling encounters with “chance” and the “marvelous” form the heart of Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Soupault’s Last Nights in Paris (1928), as well as their joint production, Les champs magnétiques (1919; see McNab 22). Free from a determinate destination and what Breton calls “the constraints that weigh on supervised thought,” the stroll involves “an endless and imperceptible moving to and fro between dream and reality” that sets the imagination adrift (McNab 30, 33). Breton describes the strolls he undertook with Soupault, Aragon, Max Morise, Roger Vitrac, and others as “automatic writing in real space, in which the act of walking was distinctively imprinted on the map of a mental territory” (Cateri 79) by traversing two roads at once: one running through the external world and one running through the unconscious (McNab 37). If we look at what the Situationists and their antecedents, the Lettrists, call the dérive (“drift”) and psychogeography, their debt to Surrealism leaps out (see Coverly 21, 82). The leading representative of both these groups, Guy Debord, defines the dérive as “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances” of the street “automatically followed in aimless strolls” (Debord 10, 62). When freed from what Breton calls “the constraints that weigh on supervised thought,” or from what Debord calls their usual activities and social relations, the aimless strollers “let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (62) in order to discover, as McKenzie Wark says, “the lineaments of intersubjective space” (28). According to Wark, psychogeography “is a practice of the city as at once objective and subjective space,” a fusion of “the external social space of the city [and] the internal private space of subjectivity” (26–27). Although both Debord and Wark add, almost in the next breath, that the derive is “fundamentally different” from the Surrealist stroll and its reveries (Debord 63; Wark 27–28), it is hard to deny their affinities (see Coverly 96). To be drawn by the ambiance and psychic atmosphere of a place during a stroll without any particular destination or practical purpose is very much like ambulatory automatic writing. The way that a place “resonates” with moods and affects in psychogeography involves the same fusion of subjective and objective as the Surrealists found in chance and the found object: an intersection of external reality and causality with psychological needs and desires. When Debord’s Situationist comrade Raoul Vaneigem called for a bridge to be built between imagination and reality in The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967), he echoes the theories and practices of the Surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s (see Coverly 119). What, then, are we to make of Sartre’s claim that Surrealism’s search for a fusion of dream and reality produced only a fluttering between being and nothingness, affirmation and negation, that in fact changes nothing in the real world (Sartre 137, 223)? It seems that with respect to Surrealism’s intellectual resonances, nothing could be further from the truth. Deconstruction, Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-binary philosophy, Butler’s questioning of sex and gender, the 384

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Situationist dérive and psychogeography are all indebted to Surrealist’s questioning of binary oppositions between subjective and objective, the dream and waking reality, reason and madness. And all these theories have had profound and real effects on the lived reality of the contemporary world.

Works Cited Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant (1926). Translated by Simon Watson Taylor. Exact Change, 1994. Baugh, Bruce. “Real Essences without Essentialism.” Boundas, pp. 31–42. Bloom, Harold, Paul De Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, Jr. Deconstruction and Criticism. Seabury Press, 1979. Boundas, Constantin V., editor. Deleuze and Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Breton, André. Communicating Vessels. Translated by Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris. University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books, 1990. ———. Lost Steps. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. University of Nebraska Press, 1996. ———. Mad Love. Translated by Mary Ann Caws. University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books, 1987. ———. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. New. University of Michigan Press, 1972. ———. Nadja. Translated by Richard Howard. Grove Press, 1960. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. Routledge, 1993. ———. “Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler.” Radical Philosophy, no. 67, 1994. ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. ———. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. Columbia University Press, 1988. Cateri, Francesco. Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice. Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2002. Coverly, Merlin. Psychogeography. Pocket Essentials, 2010. Debord, Guy. “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” “Theory of the Derive,” in Knabb 2006, pp. 8–12, 62–68. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. Columbia University Press, 1994. ———. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin Joughin. Zone Books, 1990. ———. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. Columbia University Press, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley et al. University of Minnesota Press, 1983. ———. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. “Cogito et l’histoire de la folie.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, vol. 68, 1963, pp. 460–494 and vol. 69, 1964, pp. 116–119. ———. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. University of Chicago Press, 1981. ———. Glas. Translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand. University of Nebraska Press, 1986. ———. “Limited Inc.” Translated by Samuel Weber. Glyph, vol. 2, 1977, pp. 162–251. ———. “Living On: Borderlines.” Bloom et al. 1979. ———. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. University of Chicago Press, 1982. ———. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ———. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. University of Chicago Press, 1981. ———. Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Translated by David B. Allison. Northwestern University Press, 1973. ———. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. University of Chicago Press, 1987. ———. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. University of Chicago Press, 1978. Gatens, Moira. “Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power.” Patton 1996, pp. 162–187. Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford University Press, 1977. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Cornell University Press, 1985. Knabb, Ken, editor and translator. The Situationist Anthology. Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006. McNab, Robert. Ghost Ships: A Surrealist Love Triangle. Yale University Press, 2004.

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Bruce Baugh Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford University Press, 1996. Patton, Paul, editor. Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What is Literature? (1948). Translated by Bernard Frechtman. Methuen, 1978. Soupault, Philippe. Last Nights in Paris (1928). Translated by William Carlos Williams. Exact Change, 1994. Wark, McKenzie. The Beach Beneath the Street. The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International. Verso, 2015.

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42 SURREALIST RESONANCES IN CONTEMPORARY ART Craig Adcock

Surrealism. Pure psychic automatism. The word, almost a neologism when André Breton used it in the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, is now part of everyone’s vocabulary (26). Surreal has become simply another word for strange or weird. Just as the word itself has become commonplace, the influence of Surrealist techniques has become ubiquitous in contemporary art. Perhaps the most obvious historical movement to bear the direct influence of Surrealism is abstract expressionism. Most of the abstract expressionists went through a “Surrealizing” period during the 1930s and early 1940s, often producing works that simply looked Surrealistic. The Surrealists often used biomorphic forms, as can be seen in the works of Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, Kay Sage, and many others. The living architectural and geometrical constructions that inhabit Sage’s arid deserts and the bizarre dinoflagellates that thrive in Tanguy’s underwater landscapes are bizarre. The beings in Mama, Papa Is Wounded, by Tanguy, 1927, or I Saw Three Cities, by Sage, 1944, exist in a kind of parallel universe. The various concretions of Hans Arp and the apocalyptic dissolutions of Max Ernst inhabit environments that are corrosive and repugnant. Compositions like Head with Three Annoying Objects (Arp 1930) and Europe After the Rain (Ernst 1940–42) depict hybrid creatures of unknown origin and scale. The flora and fauna of these alternate ecosystems are very different from those ordinarily encountered. The Surrealists invented them in order to evolve and to generate new ways of seeing. Young abstract expressionists, not counting de Kooning, such as Herbert Ferber, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock, were all drawn to abstract, biomorphic forms, and they used them in their early works. However, much like the Surrealists, the abstract expressionists wanted to produce work that was authentic, that came from inner needs and necessities. The Surrealists used self-reflection to exit the mundane and to enter the ultramundane. Key artists who carried on with Surrealist ideas at the same time that they were influencing the beginnings of abstract expressionism were Matta, Wifredo Lam, and Arshile Gorky. What unites them is their approach to figuration. They all create figures that, despite being suggestive, do not cohere into recognizable personages. Surrealist imagery embraced willful distortion. Abstract expressionist imagery, however, typically eliminated figuration. Willem de Kooning’s paintings of women are, famously, the exceptions to this rule. One of his best-known paintings, Woman I (1950–52), for example, shows an aggressive and powerful female figure. Great slabs of thick, impasto paint create dynamic, broken planes of bright colors DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-48

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from which the figure emerges. Her face is a grimacing visage with bared teeth, lips pulled back. Her body recalls the prehistoric Woman from Willendorf, and her hands and fingers seem to flutter away into feathers. Her fierce countenance and taloned feet suggest a harpy, the raptorial half-bird, half-woman creature familiar from the Odyssey. The work of de Kooning develops from the bravura techniques used by the more expressionistic Surrealists, such as André Masson and Miró. As the Surrealists set out to change the world, to initiate their revolution, they adopted several broad approaches that involved automatism and random association. They used automatic drawing and stream-of-consciousness writing to unlock what lay hidden in the recesses of their subconscious minds. The Surrealists’ playful actions helped them to think creatively and to articulate novel ideas. As Breton put it in the Surrealist Manifesto: Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life. (26) Unanticipated turns and divagations revealed new possibilities for their poetry and art. The Surrealists appreciated accidents, and they welcomed the unexpected. Indeed, discursive processes, and the surprises they entailed, were lionized by the Surrealists. Artists such as Pollock developed their action painting, in particular, in response to the overall, painterly fields of color in the backgrounds of Masson’s and Miró’s paintings. In a work such as Mural, 1943, Pollock almost mimics the work of Miró. He suggests, but he does not fully disclose. Pollock and other action painters emulate the “psychic automatism” of Surrealism, but they want their subconscious motivations and desires to manifest themselves on the canvas directly through the act of painting. The exploration, almost the archaeological excavation, of their canvases allows them to discover their ambitions. They are often surprised by what they find. The figural forms that seem to march across the surface of Pollock’s Mural suggest the totemic sculptures of David Smith, but they are also like the excoriated striding figures of Alberto Giacometti, a Surrealist who explored existential alienation. The Surrealists liked to manipulate words and sometimes to transform them into images. We think particularly of Miró in this context. A word, or a sentence, becomes an emblematic sign, a floating syntagmatic structure that is both word and image. In Magritte, words can be contradicted by images—as in the text “This is not a pipe” in The Treason of Images. The Surrealists liked to use surprising configurations of words and images. Accidents of thought and language could be mined for significance. Midcentury movements, such as Lettrisme, have been inspired by Surrealist wordplay. Maurice Lamaître, for example, begins where earlier figures such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Ernst left off. The Surrealists admired strange objects and strange techniques. An unusual approach could engender an unusual result. Frottage and decalcomania revealed patterns that were then explored by the artists, who found figures or landscapes in the textures of the procedures. Taking a rubbing from a floor or wall or pressing wet paint between sheets of paper or canvases might lead to surprising and unreal scenes. A decalcomania by Oscar Domínguez, Untitled (1936–37), shows a bicycle turning into a lion. Such figures arise accidentally from the process. Decalcomania is a way of elaborating on the trace, the leftover echo of meaning, the hint, the suggestion. The work becomes a sibilant exhalation that recalls Duchamp’s infra-mince, marrying tobacco smoke to the mouth that exhales it. Such infinitely thin separations can change the world. This 388

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last desire looks forward to the ambitions of the Surrealists, and later to the aspirations of the situationists. These groups wanted to dream a social revolution and to act upon that dream in whatever way they could. Asger Jorn and other artists associated with Art Brut and CoBrA used figurative expressionism to query lived experience. During the late 1950s and the 1960s, a number of artists continued to explore the possibilities opened up by Surrealism. They operated in a space that was somewhere between abstract expressionism and pop art. Their work comprised a return to realism, a reintroduction of figurative elements into the messy tumult of action painting. The constructions of Bruce Conner and Edward Kienholz figure prominently here. Or the combines of Robert Rauschenberg that seem to emerge from a pile of debris. Such works are tied to the traditions of collage and assemblage. The proto-pop works of Rauschenberg and his close associate, Jasper Johns, both of whom exhibited work in the Surrealist EROS Exhibition of 1959–1960, use found objects and images much as their predecessors in Dada and Surrealism had done. Their works suggest collisions, wrecks of the ordinary against the regret of lost promise revealed at the end of the war. Just as the early Surrealists had been disillusioned by the First World War, the abstract expressionists and the figurative expressionists had been disillusioned by the Second World War. Edward Kienholz’s Roxy’s (1960–1961), for example, uses the ordinary, or the underbelly of the ordinary, to expose the horror of the real. By exacerbating the real through appropriations of actual objects, like sewing machines and cow skulls, Kienholz can engender a world of suffering that defies representation. In France, the Nouveaux Réalistes followed a similar path. By engaging with ordinary objects, by creating sculptural collages or plexiglass boxes full of objects, or by compressing automobile bodies, or by wrapping objects in fabric, the surfeit of things, the redundancy of things could be exposed or occluded by sheer overabundance. The Holocaust has been described as making poetry “impossible,” and the atomic bomb swept up the future into a firestorm. This turmoil and its associated gale-force winds were mined by a new generation of artists. Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Christo, and JeanneClaude among the Europeans and Lucas Samaras, Claes Oldenburg, and Marisol among the Americans all produced works that develop out of Surrealism. These artists expanded on the insights of the Surrealists. They recognized the capacity of the real, the ordinary, to navigate deep currents of disillusionment during the postwar period, and they understood that objects could intensify and aggravate disgust. Photographs are also primary source material in Surrealism. Superrealistic images—and sometimes nonrealistic photographic effects—exerted a powerful hold on the artists’ imaginations, though surprising images were, of course, already part of photography. In the innovative work of Man Ray and other Surrealists such as Brassaï, we see radical, revealing photographs. The “rayographs” of Man Ray, for example, accommodate the found object into the photoemulsion or isolate it by taking instantaneous slices out of busy life. Just by utilizing random things, Man Ray’s photograms discover a place for the irrational to unfold, and they provide a way for the manic beauty of the unrecognizable to figure forth. Surrealist photographs break from the coherent images of modernist photography and lead to the “neglected associations,” the “superior reality,” mentioned by Breton (26). Such abutments can displace, or discomfit, facile knowledge and cast doubt on our surety about the stability of existence. Man Ray and Brassaï, and others like Raoul Ubac and Jacques Boiffard, document circumstances that are, at best, unlikely. In their works, the purposive nature of the photographic image swerves off path, and something that is already strange is made more so. The automatic nature of the recording device also seems predisposed to engendering the unfamiliar. Simply by slowing down events, freezing them, the camera distorts the passage of time or perhaps enjoins it with disclosing 389

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visionary scenes. The Surrealist observer sees through the specific moment and finds discontinuities in the flux of experience. Abstractions, too, can take on the aura of superreality. The kinds of strange abstractions that I have in mind can be seen in the work of Lucas Samaras. During the early 1960s, he created strikingly “Surrealistic” objects: books and boxes covered in pins, needles, and razor blades, aichmophobic nightmares. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he transformed portraits of himself by manipulating the emulsions of Polaroid film. His often-grotesque and macabre images were preeminently Surrealistic. More recently, Samaras has used computer programs such as Photoshop to achieve even more strikingly Surrealistic self-portraits, as in Untitled (2008–2020). Although these works are almost wholly abstract, with only the slightest remnants of any reference to human form, they are enigmatically affective. The residual human form, the body, has transmogrified into great, brightly colored swirls that seem to hang in an ultrastill atmosphere, and their strangeness seems doubly Surreal for being abstract. Among the most important tactics that the Surrealists inherited from the Dadaists was photo collage. What they called photomontage was a chance-based practice. The absurd combinations of fragments of photographs prefigure the surprising effects sought by the Surrealists. For the situationists, such approaches informed détournement. In contemporary practice, the expressive possibilities of photo collage have been enhanced by digital techniques. Images can now be wholly generated by digital means, and laid down pixel by pixel. The results can become Surreal in a new sense. Digital images question where the real is located, and transform the Surreal into the hyperreal. In this context, one might consider the photo collage work of Wangechi Mutu. In her work, we see many fragments of various things, human bodies, in particular, but mixed with patches of foliage, parts of machines, and rich textures from colorful fabrics. Mutu’s photo collages often recall, in particular, the works of Berlin Dadaist Hannah Höch produced during the heyday of Surrealism. Especially, Höch’s series “From an Ethnographic Museum,” 1924–1930, evokes Mutu’s work. In an interesting collage entitled Homeward Bound, 2010, Mutu builds up a figure from various fragments. A face coalesces out of bits and pieces of anatomy, eyes, lips, forehead. Cheeks shift around in terms of scale and, on close inspection, reveal the fact that all sorts of images were used in its construction. Clearly, Mutu is an artist deeply involved in choosing strange things and then putting them together in order to reveal new amalgamations, but also to create ecologically promising combinations. Her work is sometimes called “Afrofuturist,” a term that was first used during the 1990s to refer to “African” patterns in the work of such artists and writers as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Renée Cox, Samuel Delaney, and Octavia Butler. Many important contemporary artists have expanded upon Surrealist techniques. Louise Bourgeois, whose career blossomed during the 1980s, had long since been a Surrealist. Her later installations liked to recall Surrealist environments, such as Duchamp’s suspended coal bags at the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism. She, like other artists, including recent neoSurrealists like Mona Hatoum, for example, use changes in size and scale to derange the real and to supplant it with the superreal. Random order and spontaneous choices defied ratiocination and gave the Surrealists ways of tapping into the mental orders that were postulated and systematized by Sigmund Freud, whether these be painterly expanses of color or hand-painted dream photographs. The Surrealists felt great affinity for the psychoanalyst, and they believed that his theories could help them in their quest for understanding a destroyed world. They tried to use imagery that was commensurate with psychoanalysis, and in a sense, they illustrated Freud’s theories. Here were strategies that provided escapes from rational and scientific ways of thought—ways of thought that the Surrealists believed had contributed to the disaster of the First World War. 390

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The Surrealists adopted many of the tenets of psychoanalysis. Their use of dreams, hypnotic trances, and other subjective techniques was fundamental to their work. They used selfreflection to exit the mundane and to enter the ultramundane. Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (1919) was highly influential, particularly in its discussion of the unsettling effects of dolls and mannequins. Duchamp’s avenue of mannequins at the 1938 Surrealism exhibition reflected the Surrealists fondness for these curious, or “uncanny,” figures. We also think, in this context, of the mannequins in the installations of Salvador Dalí, the photographs of Umbo and Eugène Atget, or the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, such as the famous “metaphysical” painting titled The Disquieting Muses (1916–1918). Part of what makes this proto-Surrealist’s work uneasy and disquieting is its preternatural stillness. The streets and plazas are empty and mute. Somehow, mannequins seem to be the most appropriate inhabitants of such spaces. Many contemporary artists continue to use mannequins to create Surrealistic effects. The interests of the Surrealists in mannequins is continued in the work of contemporary artists such as Jake and Dinos Chapman, John Miller, Richard Hoeck, and Heimo Zobernig. These artists use the not-exactly-dead, not-exactly-alive mannequins to engage with the increasingly otherworldly aspects of contemporary life. Their Surrealistic forms make them ideal vehicles for exploring the undisclosed dimensions of modern life. One of the most interesting of the movements described as “neo-Surrealist” in the late 1960s and 1970s was Chicago Imagism. This direction is closely linked to funk art, and it makes use of figurative, expressive imagery inflected by comedic takes on the absurdity of life. But the work is not just funny; it is also horrific. Members of anonymous groups like the Hairy Who, the False Image, and the Non-Plussed Some were also interested in examining the darker sides of human behavior. They were engaged with the outré and the cruel, and they considered the lower depths of society and the depravity of people. Their works exposed the errant disfigurement of the urban environment, and they reveled in scrutinizing the psychoses of society at large. Their responses were marked by ironic outrage, and they made use of subjects that ranged from bondage and wrestling to horror movies and black underwear. The Chicago Imagists have been influential in later art. To take one example, Julie Curtiss has been deeply affected by the imagists. In particular, she has been drawn to the work of Christina Ramberg. As was often the case in the work of the Surrealists, and in the work of precursors to the Surrealists like Henri Rousseau and Giorgio di Chirico, her works are attentive to niggling detail. Curtiss’s paintings, such as No Place Like Home, 2017, recall paintings by Ramberg, such as Istrian River Lady, 1974. Their figures wear nose cone brassieres and ribbed corsets that reference bondage and sexual deviance. Both painters use themes and patterns that are derived from all-too-familiar representation of women in fetishistic ways. Strange hairdos, comprised of tightly woven buns and braids, and costumes that border on the masochistic (or sadistic) are seen in both Curtiss’s and Ramberg’s works. The Chicago Imagists were seeking to escape from the boring lifestyles of the bourgeoisie. A number of artists from the 1960s and 1970s have used slightly different strategies. They make use of the ordinary in their articulations of political protest. Martha Rosler, for example, opposed the Vietnam War by bringing it home to ordinary domestic interiors. Her approach goes back to Dada and Surrealism, but it does so in more cinematic, or televisual, ways. She collages together scenes of housework, like vacuuming the drapes, and combat troops in Southeast Asia converging on a target. Rosler first created House Beautiful: Bring the War Home, 1967–1972, at the height of the Vietnam War. She expanded and reissued these works in 2004 to bring them up-to-date with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the other side of this arc, there are deep connections with the sublime running from Surrealism to its successors. These connections still operate in the late-twentieth and early 391

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twenty-first centuries. Breton explained that he and his fellow Surrealists were after a sense of the marvelous and that one way to engender such an effect (or affect) was through putting objects and images together that did not belong together. Strange pairings, odd conjunctions, mixed metaphors were the common currency of Surrealism. Such junctures were surprising, and they had the potential to jar people out of their complacency. The Surrealists wanted to complicate the ordinary and to encourage the extraordinary. They did this in their daily practice, in their performances, and in their environments. As a result, simple acts of living took on new urgency, a theme prevalent among the Situationists as well who shared their desire to dream and to fantasize in the face of materialist progress. Among the artists who have made direct reference to French Surrealism is Thomas Hirschhorn. In his Bataille Monument, 2002, he stacks up and piles together all kinds of material, social detritus, and information about the Surrealist writer. The result suggests some organic, bricolage Merzbau. Kurt Schwitters took an ad hoc approach to his construction, assembling everything from urine samples to guinea pigs. Hirschhorn engages with critical theory. His (and Bataille’s) philosophical poststructuralism is on display, and it informs his choices and his purposes. He wants to disfigure the neoliberal scenarios behind much contemporary life and to create nonnormative institutional critiques of postcolonial displacements. Nonnormative is also a term that could be used to describe Glenn Brown’s paintings of futuristic spacecraft and other offbeat subject matters. His science fiction illustrations depict possible futures that seem as much Surrealistic as futuristic. Brown also takes on various kinds of paintings as his subjects. He has, for example, repainted, after slightly redesigning, Dalí’s Premonition of Civil War: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans. He also takes on various expressionist paintings using a kind of excessive realism. Surrealism itself, of course, pushes beyond realism, but Brown pushes even further. He redoes the works of several expressionists and mimics, or replicates, their style. He also repaints a number of Romantic artists. In particular, he has adapted the fantastical landscapes of nineteenth-century artist John Martin in works such as The Aesthetic Poor (for Tim Buckley) after John Martin (2002). He is also known for his renditions of expressionist paintings, such as his amusing The Day the World Turned Auerbach (1991). In this vein, he has also copied works by de Kooning and Karel Appel. The photorealistic, sloweddown depictions of rapid expressionist brushstrokes is already enough to make them seem strange, but as the Surrealists before him had done, Brown also manages to make straightforward realistic representation seem somehow mendacious. He focuses on the “real” part of Surrealism by perfectly rendering other artists’ work and, in the process, manages to transform all those works into an oneiric kind of hyperrealism. The historical avant-garde, especially as comprised by Dada and Surrealism, continues to inform much postmodernist production. An important, perhaps even central, characteristic of contemporary art hinges on the notion of hybridity. The hybrid, or the mixed form, was fundamental to Surrealism, and in recent decades, during postmodernism, artists have made use of complex, mixed objects as never before. Hybrid objects, and hybrid approaches, have become absolutely essential to contemporary practice. Polymorphous objects are possessed of a kind of critical utility that allows them to penetrate into important matters—identity politics, postcolonial justice, climate change. The influence of Surrealism can be seen everywhere in modern and contemporary art. There are, of course, nearly infinite connections and multitudinous associations in the world of the imagination. Surrealism is both a source and an approach. It informs art in culturally and socially ramified ways. Its broad scope and far reach have had manifold effects on recent art history. Many of the most important twentieth-century artists, including Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Louise Bourgeois, were involved with Surrealism. And their influence, in turn, has been extensive. Since thinking takes command in postmodernism 392

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and artists these days seem to think even more than they see, representation has generally been subsumed under conceptualization. This state of mind, fundamental to Surrealism, continues to imbue art with high purpose. Under idealist prerogatives, artists tap into emotional wellsprings that flow forth spontaneously, innervated by the omnipotence of dreams. From these inner emotional sources, the affective is what matters. The imaginative and automorphic expressionism of the interior psychology of the creator is paramount, and it holds sway over and dominates the production of art. Even when that production is inflected by skepticism or when the artist is plagued by self-doubt and hesitation, the expressive provides new perspectives and new ways of seeing and living. Artists cross things up in order to access the dream and the nightmare, and when the normal becomes abnormal, when the acute becomes critical, we enter the Surreal and appreciate its continuing vitality.

Works Cited Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism.” Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press, 1969. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Complete Psychological Works, vol. XVII, Hogarth Press, 1953.

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43 THE HYBRID AND SURREAL MEMOIRS OF TAMECA COLE, RAYMOND TOWLER, SHAY YOUNGBLOOD, AND STEVE CORMANY Rochelle Spencer Our most terrifying situations plunge into Surrealism. Still, what happens to the healthy psyche immersed in a paranoid world? The poet and scholar Erica Hunt describes poetry as a way of “mapping” our experiences of time, which can be personal and emotional, a compendium of “geologic time, earth time . . . ancestral time, CP time, solar time, dream time, our time” (338). Is Hunt’s argument about poetry true for the autobiographical Surreal text? When the world itself engages in a paranoia around Blackness, does Surrealism, or more specifically, AfroSurrealism, help us reset the clock and understand? If fear and hate extend and distort time, do movements based in love and imagination enlarge our capacity? Nicole R. Fleetwood’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, with a title that references modernism (“art in the age of mass reproduction”) and its process of flattening and alienating our experiences, makes us aware of the present and tilts us toward understanding the necessity of change. The devastation caused by mass incarceration seems ever-present and uniform (directed at communities of color), but the courageous artists in Marking Time resist, challenge, and set forth new models. Artists such as curator/painter Ronnie Goodman, Russell Craig, Michael Moses El, Tyra Patterson, James “Yaya” Hough, and George Anthony Morton may create portraits, including self-portraits, that blur “representations of their subjects with landscapes or objects of fantasy and flight” (Fleetwood 135). Their work blends “histories, memories, and dreams that exceed their criminal indexes” (Fleetwood 142). In other words, Fleetwood reminds us that with their work, “[t]hey self-fashion. They self-define. They mark penal time” (italics mine). By marking and defining time, these artists challenge a system that unjustly and inhumanely criminalizes Black and Brown people. Fleetwood points out that “Black men are incarcerated at a rate of 2,336 per 100,000 compared to the national average of 440 per 100,000 US residents” (italics also mine). Black people and other marginalized people creating new imaginary spaces/temporalities while “doing time” intercepts harsh and authoritarian attempts to control someone’s experience of time and imagination. This is disruptive, necessary work and could be considered Surreal or AfroSurreal. The avant-garde “challenges power” (Sell 769). Part of an avant-garde movement, the AfroSurreal text displaces traditional power structures. 394

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Several of the artworks in Marking Time could be described as Afrofuturist or third-wave AfroSurreal texts; they disrupt time, explore the psyche, and help us understand what passes for “the real world.” Two of the works in Marking Time that make a specific appeal to AfroSurrealism are Tameca Cole’s Locked in a Dark Calm and Raymond Towler’s Passing Time. These works appear to have autobiographical elements, yet they also position themselves within dream landscapes and suggest loss, but also the possibilities of hope and “future trajectories of action” (Cook 391). Cole’s title reminds us that we’re locked in space and time, even as a swirling purplish-gray cloud suggests the possibility of movement. The central figure in the cloud is formed from a collage of images, and perhaps it’s inaccurate to call Cole’s collage “autobiographical.” Yet Cole talks about how Locked in a Dark Calm resulted from having “to remind myself that I had selfworth” after she experienced being mistreated by prison staff (40). With two different-size eyes that stare back at you, Cole recalls the Surrealist eye (from Dalí and Buñuel, from Kasi Lemmons, from Boots Riley) that dares to peer back at you. We’re in a space with no specific time, or, perhaps, with a time that moves back and forth between the future and the past. The calm, almost bemused, look on the figure’s face suggests someone who can move beyond any circumstance. However, the face, wrapped in shadows and mystery, won’t reveal how. Towler’s Passing Time toys with Dalí’s melting clocks and with what Fleetwood describes as “penal time” or the “multiple temporalities that impact the lives of the incarcerated and their loved ones” (39). With constricted social networks, few new experiences, or little sensory variability, days can seem repetitive and time “functions differently” (Fleetwood 39). Towler, who spent twenty-nine years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, said that his painting reflected his experience of prison as a place where the “years just blend together” (42). Towler’s clocks resemble bicycle tires, compasses, and balloons pressed against desert sand. Towler’s clocks are less malleable than Dalí’s, perhaps because of the inflexibility of penal time. The acclaimed playwright, novelist, short story writer, and installation artist Shay Youngblood’s Architecture of Soul Sound opens with slow, meditative dance across a background of natural images. Youngblood’s dancer-performers—Florinda Bryant, G’beda/Tonya Lyles, and Tuyên Quang Thái—resemble clocks; Andrea Zarate’s gentle choreography releases thought and emotion with the ease of a breath. You watch the dancer-performers slowly unwind their way forward and back, reaching into the courageous and tender moments of Youngblood’s life against a changing backdrop: leaves that glow like little firecrackers, drawings and schematics of different homes. Through Youngblood, we understand the changing seasons of our lives. While Youngblood transcribes and translates our lives, like any worthwhile artist, she listens with care to a voice we rarely hear in the public sphere, outside the meme. She listens to the Black Southern woman, a voice that’s caricatured and stereotyped, and takes it across geographic regions. Youngblood’s confident, Southern-twinged voice anchors the piece: We hear about big mamas, the Black Southern women who often raise children, but we also hear about having homes in several places—Japan; Costa Rica; Houston, Texas; Hawaii; and Germany—and not feeling you have a home at all, how to honor and make drawings of the home. The piece teaches us how to survive earthquakes. Described by Allgo, an organization supporting and celebrating queer artists of Color, the piece explores “the connections between architecture, memory, history and the environment.” Allgo produced this piece in Texas, and its tone teaches us about specific roots, but it also suggests that we can go anywhere and thrive. The mobility in Youngblood’s work creates a powerful temporal disruption. We move back and forth against time, against the expanse of Youngblood’s travels. The gifted Stephen Cormany’s memoir, “A Common Survival,” also provides a meditation on home, on a migrant and nomadic way of life. It travels through geographies and temporalities, 395

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leaping back and forth through varied spaces. Although Cormany is not a person of Color, his autobiography examines economic injustice and mental illness; Cormany identifies as an outsider. Cormany incorporates short stories, history, and memory as he details leaving Kent State and the Midwest behind in the aftermath of the Kent State massacre. As Cormany travels across the country, we learn that Cormany, like Youngblood, doesn’t quite fit in. Cormany writes of the “impulse to explore and accept my Bible Belt agnosticism in light of the Woodstock Nation spiritualism that had hovered over me since college.” The idealistic Cormany is too progressive for his small Ohio town and too conservative (not open enough) for the Bay Area. Cormany writes of his disadvantages—a diagnosed bipolar disorder, a working-class background—and his advantages—a $10,000 nest egg in 1983 dollars, the societal racism he sometimes benefited from, with candor. Cormany alludes to Toni Morrison’s encyclopedic knowledge of geography and her deep understanding of Lorrain, Ohio; the Jackson State shootings; and memory. It’s thoughtful, strange, and unsettling. Individual memoirs help us understand collective identities. We see this in the genius of four avant-garde, or, more accurately, Surreal, artists: Tameca Cole, Raymond Towler, Shay Youngblood, and Stephen Cormany.

Works Cited Allgo Homepage. https://allgo.org/. Cook, Julia Anne. “Hope, Utopia, and Everyday Life.” Utopian Studies, vol. 29, no. 3, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Cormany, Stephen. “A  Common Survival: My Story of Kent State and after.” www.academia. edu/50810375/A_Common_Survival_My_Story_of_Kent_State_and_After_by_Stephen_Cormany_ July. Fleetwood, Nicole R. Marking Time. Harvard University Press, 2020. Hunt, Erica. “Statement on Poetry.” Furious Flower, edited by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne, TriQuarterly Books, 2020, pp. 337–338. Sell, Mike. “Resisting the Question, ‘What Is an Avant-Garde?’.” New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 4, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, pp. 753–774. www.jstor.org/stable/23012705.

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44 INQUIRY ON SURREALISM IN 2024 Jonathan P. Eburne, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Andrea Gremels, Melanie Nicholson, Michael Richardson, Penelope Rosemont, Rachel Silveri, Rochelle Spencer, Abigail Susik and Pierre Taminiaux Looking toward the centennial of Breton’s first Manifesto, what sort of hope do you place in Surrealism in 2024?

Jonathan P. Eburne If one defines “hope” etymologically, according to the Old English hopa, as “confidence in the future,” then my response will be a brief one: none. What sort of hope do you place in Surrealism? None. None, that is, on behalf of a future that concerns the planetary scope of social and environmental justice, the dismantling of White supremacy and colonial capitalism, the equitable redistribution of the means of life on earth. On the subject of futurity, I have little confidence to invest, whether in Surrealism or in anything. I do not have hope and thus can neither place it in Surrealism nor derive it from Surrealism. What I do have are hopes, in plural and more vernacular sense: that is, I have desires, however desperate, maintained in the very face of my hopelessness. And these are hopes that require a verb form, that require actions as well as persistence in the face of the limits of any such actions: I hope that my trans child, like all gender nonconforming people, might live a safe and happy life. I hope that there might be clean water to drink. I hope that nonhuman and human life on earth might still be possible in the decades to come. I hope . . . I hope . . . What can Surrealism do for these hopes? Whereas I  greatly admire Pierre Naville’s ideas about “revolutionary pessimism,” I find it an all-too-seductive proposition to invest any more confidence in pessimism than I might in hope (in the singular) or in the future. The seduction here is that intentionality alone risks inaugurating a pseudoagency expressed—and exhausted— through the language of political proprioception or the rhetoric of radicalism. Who cares what my intentions are, whether expressed with starry eyes or with a ferocious grimace? I’m far too susceptible to rhetorical positioning on my own, without wishing to foist any of this onto Surrealism. What Surrealism offers me instead—and, perhaps, for others as well—is a medium for both multiplying hopes (in the plural) and for interrogating the limits of mere intentions. Yes to a better world. Yes to our desires, in the plural, in the not-merely-my-own, in the collective, in the underrepresented or marginalized; yes to our desires, in the more-than-human as in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003139652-50

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human, and yes to the voicing and revoicing of these desires. And yes to their continual interrogation, which means also yes to making, yes to doing, yes to exploding and exploring. Yes to mutual aid and self-care for all; yes to love, to poetry, to a futurity that might surpass our fears and expectations and ambitions and limits. Does Surrealism give me hope? No. Does it give me courage? Yes.

Krzysztof Fijalkowski On the Time When the Surrealists Were Right was the title of a political tract by the Surrealist group in France in 1935. For a century now, the Surrealists have been right so many times and on so many matters, anticipating the ways in which subsequent knowledge might be framed and unlocking so much critical and poetic thinking in its wake that it feels hard to judge just how much the qualities of today’s maps, conversations, and questions of contemporary thought are owed to Surrealism and its collaborators. It might help here to distinguish between the ideas and knowledge proposed by historical Surrealism, which is now largely the domain of historians or scholars and those that continue to be explored by members of the recent and present Surrealist movement around the world, for which only Surrealists themselves properly have the right to speak. But both, nevertheless, remain current and vital. If the strength of yesterday’s and today’s Surrealist movement lies more in its occultation than in its former public visibility or vague popular notions of the “Surreal,” meaning that Surrealism’s knowledge will, by definition, always be emergent and in dissent, what feels clear is that Surrealism’s ideas and legacies will continue to be among the most significant as the world faces fundamental and urgent questions, particularly those around freedom and justice, especially in the domains of race, gender, and sexuality and in proposing fresh relationships between the collectivity, the individual, and the world; in framing new alignments with the planet and the environment, as much as in the ways in which communities might understand and align with them as in the imperative to avert ecological disaster; and in allowing a radical thinking about the nature of our being within an increasingly alienated realm in which concepts such as reality or truth are contested and recuperated by technologies, powers, and interests fundamentally hostile to our liberty and landscapes. However much creative practice may have wonderfully articulated the movement’s challenge so far, it would seem that what Surrealism might bring to these incredible but not insurmountable problems would not be predominantly at the level of cultural production (above all the limited academic lens of art, literature, and the avant-garde) but as a passionate and critical philosophy, poetry, and utopian thinking as it unfolds in our times and places.

Andrea Gremels In his essay “Tunnel Theory,” written in 1947, the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, who lived a great part of his life in Paris, sustains that Surrealism goes far beyond any literary or artistic activity. Instead, it is a way of life that involves the challenge to never accept reality as it is, but to engage in a continuous questioning of its conditions, perceptions, and appearances. With his dictum “todo es y puede ser llave de acceso a la realidad”—“everything is and can be a key to access reality” —he claims a poetic worldview that moves beyond the realm of logic to grasp reality in all its bewildering otherness. Regarding the hope I place on Surrealism in 2024, what is even more interesting for me than Cortázar’s “cosmovision” of Surrealism as a poetic worldview is his call to disobedience

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and nonconformity, his claim to develop through the lens of Surrealism an attitude of a general distrust toward conventional and established orders. If in 2024 and beyond Surrealism could have the role of being that global “troublemaker” who teaches us to keep on challenging and changing our perception of any given reality and order, then, I believe, there would still be hope for the world.

Melanie Nicholson In 1940, the Chilean Surrealist writer Enrique Gómez-Correa spoke to the importance of the movement for his Mandrágora group: “Surrealism is to us what Baudelaire was to romanticism: the most recent expression of beauty.” As I look to 2024 and beyond, I find myself hoping that Surrealism—in the visual arts, in literature, in film, and even in popular culture—can bring a renewed sense of beauty to those who are paying attention. Beauty is an almost-boundless word, but for the Surrealists—then and now—it has always pointed to the free exercise of the imagination. For Surrealism to keep showing us ways to imagine ourselves better, stronger, healthier, kinder—this is my hope.

Michael Richardson I’m not sure it is appropriate to place any hope in Surrealism since to do so would be to reify it and suggest it is a kind of religion. What sort of hope Surrealism does embody today might be more appropriate. Surrealism is perennially faced with the two contrary pulls already perceived by Breton in 1929 that impelled him to write the Second Manifesto: of becoming, on the one hand, so diffuse that it ceases to have any real meaning and, on the other hand, so precious that it becomes the preserve of a closed circle of initiates. If these tendencies become too pronounced, then it will cease to embody any hope. Today there are essentially two groups of people concerned with Surrealism: those who consider themselves practitioners of it and those devoted to its scholarship. In the past, they were often hostile to one another, with the former tending to consider the latter often ill-intentioned and the latter inclined to ignore or disparage the former (considering that Surrealism had “died” at some point in the past or that present activity was, almost by definition, inferior to that of the past). In more recent years, however, they seem to have become closer, as scholarship has improved immeasurably. Nevertheless, the tendency toward the diffusion of Surrealism remains marked within the scholarship when it seeks out the most obscure evidence of the supposed influence of Surrealism based on entirely subjectivist criteria or tries to establish an idea of “other Surrealisms” with a supposed “Bretonian Surrealism” as merely one stand of a range of different versions of something that, in the process, becomes inchoate. Both unscholarly and anti-Surrealist, this inevitably reduces the seditious quality essential to the Surrealist attitude. Correlatively, groupuscules that lay claim to being Surrealist often lack a critical relation to it and are content to rest on past laurels, assuming the label “Surrealist” as a kind of badge of honor that gives a certain legitimation to their own artistic activities. This similarly divests Surrealism of its seditious quality. Perhaps we need to consider Surrealism to be like the god at Delphi, which, as Heraclitus says, “conceals nothing and says nothing, but gives indications.” It is from these indications that we might draw hope from Surrealism into the future.

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Penelope Rosemont Will Surrealism star in Broadway musicals, decorate museums, costume parties, circuses, academic celebrations? Of course—all this will pass in five years. But fascinated by Toyen’s painting “One in the Other,” or Lam’s “Jungle,” or Baj’s “Body Snatcher,” certain persons will be irresistibly drawn, will use this key to the darker mysteries. In a bookstore or online, they will find Freedom Dreams by Robin D. G. Kelley or Surrealist Subversions by Ron Sakolsky or What Will Be? by Her de Vries and Laurens Vancrevel. They will find “What Is a Woman?” by Leonora Carrington, or “Sacred Trees” by Jayne Cortez. It will change their lives. In 1924, in the “First Surrealist Manifesto,” André Breton wrote, “Niceties vie in concealing true thought in search of itself ” and “experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed.” Today we experience life as consumers of niceties. Work is even more alienating. We complete nothing. We are all bureaucrats or unemployed. We have access to the entire world, but only through a screen. That screen is being overwhelmed by advertising. Sexuality is liberated, but only on Netflix. Religion revokes the rights of women, and politicians attempt to reinstitute racism. Surrealism reasserts itself: “Poetry must be made by all.” Painting is only a small part of Surrealism: “Winning or losing is not the question if the game is not worth the candle,” wrote Breton. Surrealism demands nothing less than a revolution of everyday life. Guided by desire and the power of dreams, it seeks to solve the fundamental questions of life. Surrealism discovered and exalted the power of the image. The image newly created: the chance encounter of an umbrella and sewing machine on a dissecting table; a fur-covered cup and sauce; an octopus typewriter. Celebrating chance as its guide, talent plays no part in Surrealism. There are many imitators of Surrealism, fabulous images in movies; the word “surrealist” will be used as a synonym for inexplicable, unimaginable. But Surrealism itself is play, a group, a game, a body of ideas, a philosophy, a way of life, a critical tool that is all important. Surrealists form groups, issue manifestos, organize exhibitions, and publish their own journals: Alcheringa, Brumes Blondes, Arsenal, A Phala, Peculiar Morimids, the Jungle, the Room, Analogon, Dreamdew, etc. Only found if you are seeking it, Surrealism has a past, has left a trail of nonconformism, of absolute divergence (L’ Ecart absolu). It is a history of the defense of freedom, of revolutionary romanticism, of utopian thinking, of the transformation of everyday life. Suzanne Césaire called it the “tightrope of our hope;” Enrique de Santiago, “the memory of the future;” and Michael Löwy, “the wanderer that makes the path.” This is the time.

Rachel Silveri Approaching the question as to what sort of hope I might place in Surrealism in 2024, the word that I first fixate upon is that of “hope.” The catastrophes we face at the time of writing are astounding. Two years into a worldwide pandemic and counting. The politicization of public health. The unwillingness or inability to reckon with the legacies of slavery, structural racism, settler colonialism. Environmental crises. Global warming. Wildfires. A broken political system. An unending attack on women’s self-determination over their own bodies. The persistence of a heterosexist, two-gender binary system. Pharmaceutical greed. Capitalism and its ensuing poverty. Mass shootings. Prisons. An assault on voting rights. Digital surveillance. Drone attacks. Border

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patrol. Protofascisms. Surging nationalisms. A new Cold War. Too many problems to count, and hope feels fast receding. And still, here is André Breton writing on the Gaspé Peninsula in 1944, reckoning with his own moment of monumental catastrophe: “I say that when the nature of events tends to take too painful a turn, people’s personal ways of feeling find in spite of themselves a refuge and a springboard in the most perfect expressions of the untimely [l’inactuel], by which I mean those expressions where a completely other ‘present’ [actuel] could suddenly emerge from the eternal, until resorbed over time.” Or here is Suzanne Césaire, writing under colonial Vichy rule in Martinique during the Second World War: “But in 1943, when liberty itself is threatened throughout the world, Surrealism—which has not ceased for a moment to remain resolutely in the service of the greatest emancipation of mankind—can be summed up with this single magic word: liberty.” “Surrealism,” she declares, “the tightrope of our hope.” Or here is D. Scot Miller in the “Afrosurreal Manifesto” of 2009, writing in San Francisco amid the city’s ongoing gentrification and the declining population of its Black inhabitants: “Afrosurreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it.” This is all to say that the practitioners of Surrealism, both historical and contemporary, have found strength and hopefulness in this movement. They insist that in history’s darkest hours, the human mind will creatively fashion alternative realities for the future, that our imaginations will both nurture resilience and provide the sparks for social change. The inner worlds we create out of survival and necessity are the very tools we need to transform the external one. Keep working towards liberty, do not give up in cynicism or despair. Of the many ways to define Surrealism, of all its various aspects, its philosophical underpinnings, its vast artistic and literary output, the core element that has attracted me from the very beginning is this: that one’s inner life matters and deserves to be materialized. As a queer woman who desired to live my life differently than it was planned and who still aspires to see the world transformed into something other than it is, that element of Surrealism has had both its appeal and role in my life. And I suppose that is the hope I place in it for 2024 and beyond. To those who desire to live otherwise, who take refuge in dreams, who seek to rupture this stale present with all the forces of the untimely, and who strive to unmake and remake this world anew, Surrealism can and will be an ally.

Rochelle Spencer Surrealism points at the blistered tree. It allows us to see the wedding of purple and understand our purpose and our connections; it helps us leave an uneventful trance. (Words inspired by Uche Nduka, Tiphanie Yanique, and Jewell Parker Rhodes.)

Abigail Susik Contemporary Afrosurrealism in art, literature, criticism, film, fashion, and political consciousness continues to push the horizon of Surrealism beyond the troubled present and into a better future.

Pierre Taminiaux I just hope that the sense of urgency and the need for universal revolt included in the Manifesto of 1924 can be maintained in the twenty-first century. In his landmark essay, Breton

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clearly stated the following when defining automatism: “The time is now.” This sentence is even more relevant today, at the end of a pandemic that forced us to reconsider some of our most entrenched values and life habits. Radical change should not be a mere Utopia but the common reality of those who look for alternative forms of both social order and artistic expression.

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Note: Page locators in italics indicate a figure. Appel, Karel 188, 392 Arab Surrealists in Exile 172 – 173 Arab world Surrealism 163, 173 Aragon, Louis: on Breton 54; the Bureau 147; colonial exhibition 66, 77, 192; Dada in Paris 100, 119 – 121, 124, 128; dream experiments 13; erotic writings 220.344, 364, 384; real/ surreal differences 29, 31, 38, 40, 93, 96; on revolution of 1917 138, 141; social revolution 79, 83 – 84 Arcq, Tere 265 Arnaud, Noël 149 – 150 Aron, Raymond 110 Arp, Hans Peter Wilhelm (aka Jean) 17, 54, 99, 119, 227, 281, 284, 310 – 311, 387 Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion 60, 199, 201 art: canonical 342 – 343; contemporary 6, 189, 213, 238, 310, 387, 392; critic 176, 238, 254, 311, 320, 341; degenerate 167, 253, 264, 309; fantastic 311 – 314; histories 5, 151, 166, 173, 250, 343, 372; modernist 2, 39, 100, 166, 176, 197, 279; movements 3, 5, 136, 223, 252, 279, 342; of the Pacific 248, 319, 322, 329, 331 – 332; religion of 122; trans perspective 367; underground 7, 221, 223 – 224, 240; what is not permitted to be said 124 Artaud, Antonin 94, 128, 139, 172, 249, 263, 310, 331 – 333, 340 artistic: expression 119, 186, 188, 223, 402; journals 192, 230, 291 see also journals; productions 274, 303, 307, 331, 334, 343 artwork 104 – 105, 257, 263, 350, 367, 395 Australian Surrealism 175 automatic: drawing 102 – 103, 105, 147, 173, 214, 249, 281, 334; poems 234, 294, 384; writing

Aberth, Susan 267 abstract expressionism 2, 105, 161, 241, 384, 389 Action Committee Against the War in Morocco 165 action painting 388 – 389 Adès, Dawn 21, 115, 265 advertising 65, 116, 159, 187, 245, 400 African Americans 199 – 200, 204 – 205 Afro-Cuban culture 195 AfroSurreal Manifesto 206, 401 AfroSurrealism 394 – 395, 401 Agar, Eileen 229 – 231, 343 alchemical: imagery/concepts 17, 48, 50 – 51, 57, 352, 368 Aleppo 168 – 170 Alexandrian, Sarane 147 Algerian War 68, 77, 171 American abstract expressionism 102, 104, 266 Ampatzopoulou, Frangiski 240 anarchism: anarcho-individualism 120; shifting politics of irreverence 119, 122 anarchy 115, 119, 137 Anderson, Margaret 199 Andrade, Oswald de 290 androgynous creativity 51, 342, 368 animism, total 55, 57 – 59 Anthology of Black Humour 11, 14 – 15 anthropology 13, 128, 323 anti-colonial convictions 72, 157, 165, 172, 192, 324 anti-imperialist politics 65, 157 anti-racist 1, 6, 202 anticlericalism 79 – 80, 83 – 84, 87, 125, 303 Apollinaire, Guillaume 48, 90 – 91, 119, 218, 289, 320, 388

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Index 11 – 12, 20 – 21, 54, 93 – 96, 101 – 103, 147, 211, 273 automatism: appeal of 102 – 104, 110; paranoia, as compliment to 107; psychic 12, 92 – 93, 98, 262, 349, 387 – 388; techniques 21, 114; theories of 255; understanding of 93 – 94, 100 avant-garde: Chinese 212, 215; commercial and 159; Czechian 218 – 220; exhibitions 103; French 124, 217, 240; groups 187, 271; international 261, 302; Latin American 299; Romanian 271 – 272; Spanish 269, 297, 299; Swedish 283

Bugs Bunny Gallery 201, 203, 205 Buhle, Paul 201, 203, 205 bulletism 105, 106 Buñuel Portolés, Luis: dreams, mythical (with Dalí) 11, 14, 34, 54, 84; filmmaker 115, 269; Un Chien Andalou (collaboration with Dalí) 109, 110, 111 – 115 Burdett, Basil 176 Bureau of Surrealist Research 4, 11 – 13, 29, 152 Butler, Judith 374, 380 – 384 Butler, Octavia 390 Butler, Rex 177

Balakian, Anna 48, 361 Ball, Hugo 92, 119 Bardaouil, Sam 168 Barr, Alfred 156 – 160 Bataille, Georges 4, 32, 69, 76, 114, 127 – 134, 142, 195, 220, 259, 262, 333, 340, 344 Baudelaire, Charles 16, 31, 43 – 44, 47, 353, 399 Baxter, Glen 231 Bay of Pigs invasion 171 beauty: convulsive 37 – 42, 44, 110, 323, 326; of nature 194, 293, 295; physical 343; tribute to 123, 129, 175 Belgian Surrealism 183 – 185, 187 – 189 Belkahia, Farid 171 – 172 Benchemsi, Rajae 171 Bernal, María Clara 195 – 196 Bevan, Paul A. 208 Bille, Ejler 280 – 282 Birkenmaier, Anke 32 Biro, Adam 277 Black: community 192; history 201; humour 1, 15, 17 – 18 Black Panther 199 Blake, Jody 66 – 67 Blake, William 53, 312 Boiffard, Jacques-André 64, 129, 130, 389 Bolt Rasmussen, Mikkel 4 Brauner, Victor 47 – 48, 236, 272 – 274, 276, 281, 311, 367 – 369 Breton, André: American Indigenous culture 329, 332 – 334; Aragon Affair 133; automatism 80, 92 – 94, 100 – 103, 107; Bretonian Surrealism 2, 51, 91, 143, 266, 269, 280, 290, 399; childhood 103, 188, 261; collections of 66, 321 – 323; culture of Surrealism 127; Czech Surrealism 218; founder of Surrealism 2, 11; Oceanic art 319 – 322; spiritualism 12, 93 – 94, 102 bricolage 100, 392 Brinton Lee, Diana 228 British Surrealist group 177, 229 Brough-Evans, Vivienne 32 Brouk, Bohuslav 220 Brunius, Jacques 110, 230 – 231

Cabanas, Kaira 152 Cabaret Voltaire 92, 119 Calas, Nicolas 200, 235 – 236, 238, 240 Camatte, Jacques 143 Čapek, Karel 218 capitalism 54, 63, 77, 139, 172, 186 – 187, 213, 397, 400 Caribbean Surrealism 191 Carpentier, Alejo 30 – 31, 191, 194 – 195, 288, 295 Carrington, Leonora: alchemy, use of 29, 49 – 51, 336, 342, 352; exile, exploration in 266 – 267, 269, 334; feminist humour, use of 17, 360, 362, 368; nature, use of 54; new perspective of Surrealism 200, 203, 205 Carroll, Lewis 227 Castro, Fidel 171 Catholicism/family values 4, 79, 81, 84, 245,  267 Černý, David 224 Césaire, Aimé 30, 56, 151, 192 – 193, 197, 201, 205, 308, 310 Césaire, Suzanne 30, 59, 151 – 152, 193, 205, 400 – 401 Chalupecký, Jindřich 221 – 222 Chapman, Christopher 175, 177, 180 Chia-Chiu Tsai 209 Chicago Surrealism 199; Chicago Surrealist group formation 151, 200, 206; Marvelous Freedom exhibition 172, 199, 202, 206; Revolutionary Surrealism: Chicago Surrealism from Object to Activism 206 childhood 33, 58, 80 children 17, 29, 33, 82, 148, 229, 362, 395 Chinese Communist Party 140, 214 Chinese Surrealism –210, 213208 Christian era 68, 80, 82 Christianity 54, 68, 84, 86 – 87, 170, 324, 336 Chua, Kevin 244 Clark, John 244 Clark, Stephen J. 231 Cold War 171, 401 Coleman-Smith, Pamela 47 collections 6, 24, 219, 230, 240, 331 – 332 Cologne 80, 100, 309 – 311

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Index Dion, Mark 150 Disabling Surrealism: Reconstituting Surrealist Tropes in Contemporary Art 7 dolls, mannequins and puppets 25, 32 – 33, 249, 391 Domínguez, Oscar 47, 86, 104 – 105, 107, 236, 267, 297, 303, 388 Donaldson, A.D.S. 177 Drake, Hamid 202 drawings: automatic 91, 103, 105, 147, 173; pen and ink 102, 222 dreams and humour: dream experiments 12; paintings 99 Durozoi, Gérard 149 Dutch East Indies 248 – 249

colonialism: capitalism and 63; French 192, 195; principles of 323 – 324 Colvile, Georgina 361 communicating stones 56 Communism 86, 132, 138; Surrealism and 143, 185, 223; threat of 65 concrete 34, 38 constant (theme) 69, 80, 188 constructivism 136, 222, 271, 279, 282, 284, 299 contemporary art. see art Contemporary Art Society (CAS) 179 convulsive beauty/mad love 37, 323 Cortázar, Julio 289, 398 cosmopolitan 208, 262 – 264, 272 cosmopolitanism 119, 297 counterculture 7, 203, 269 court cards 47 Crastre, Victor 138 Craven, Arthur 16 Crevel, René 85, 93, 133, 141, 149, 192, 235 crime: gory 111 – 112, 115; violent 75 Cuban Surrealism 171, 194 – 196 cubism 99 – 100, 241, 264, 279, 282, 297, 299, 323, 325 Cubism and Abstract Art 156 – 157 cubist 22, 99, 122, 280, 297 Cultural Revolution 210 – 212, 214 – 215 curator 77, 160, 245, 309 – 310, 329, 394 Czechian Surrealism 217 – 224

Eburne, Jonathan P. 6, 31, 77 Edwards, Brent Hayes 152, 325 Effenberger, Vratislav 201, 223 El Janabi, Abdel Kader 172 Élaurd, Paul 34, 64, 80, 94, 120, 157, 177, 192, 248, 256, 280, 308, 321 Elytis, Odysseas 235 – 238, 240 Embeirikos, Andreas 235 – 238, 240 English Surrealism 226 Engonopoulos, Nikos 235 – 236, 237, 238 – 239 Ennis, Helen 176 Ernst, Max: alchemy 47 – 48, 50 – 51; automatism 21; childhood 80; colonialism 64; exile/ dislocation 332, 80105; mixed-media work 54; paintings 55, 98, 100, 103 – 105, 179 – 180, 236, 370 eroticism 17, 220, 268, 284, 300, 343, 369 esotericism 29 ethnography, modern 321 – 322, 325 ethnology 259, 323 exhibitions: avant-garde 103; colonial 65; documenta 308 – 309; Surrealist (see Surrealist) exile/dislocation 119, 159

D’Alessandro, Stephanie 206, 324 Dada: antiauthoritarianism 120 – 122; artistic movement 11, 119 – 122, 148; attempts to provoke 79; beginnings of (Zurich) 92, 119; Futurism and 185; Great Dada Season (1921) 124; in Paris 119; Surrealism and 99, 161, 180, 199, 231, 240, 286, 389, 391 – 392 Dadaist 92, 120 – 123, 125, 148, 176, 240, 271, 390 Dalí, Salvador: automatism 105, 109; Breton-Batille polemic 129; paintings 107, 114, 130, 257; paranoia and 31, 105 – 107 Darwin, Charles 54 Davies, Sykes 177, 180, 226, 228 de Chirico, Giorgio 34, 75, 98, 107, 146, 178, 230, 241, 255, 262, 280, 300, 309, 311, 313, 359, 391 de Hartog, Harry 178 Debord, guy 2, 187 – 188, 200, 383 – 384 Decoster, Lawrence and Dottie 199 – 200 Delons, André 110 Dermée, Paul 122 Descartes, René 55 desire 11, 23, 80, 83, 147, 262 see also sexual Desnos, Robert 13, 29, 84, 93, 102, 125, 132, 147, 192, 267, 308 dictators, rise of 172

Faegre, Tor 199 – 200 Fantastic Art 156, 158, 286 fascism 30, 68, 75, 133, 142, 150, 159, 221, 252, 263 fashion 7, 100, 105, 155, 159, 280, 401 Fauré, Michel 149 female body 220, 256, 340, 344 – 346, 371 feminism 85, 340 – 342, 361 – 362, 374 Feminist Surrealism 339, 360 – 361 femme enfant 49, 266, 340, 345, 359 – 362, 364 – 365 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 203 film: automatism or intertextuality 114 – 115; dreams and 112 – 113; gender roles 115 – 116; materiality 113 – 114; reading the 112 First World War. see World War I Fleetwood, Nicole R. 394 – 395

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Index International Surrealist Exhibition 176, 208, 214, 228, 231, 236, 285, 303, 350 internationalism 142, 314 intersex 115, 368, 371, 374

Francis, Ivor 178 French Communist Party (PCF) 4, 64, 66, 68 – 69, 128, 131 – 133, 138 – 143, 165 Freud, Sigmund 87, 93, 100, 115, 146, 177, 199, 368; animism and mechanism 55; dolls and children 32 – 33; dream/psychic phenomena 12 – 14, 47; humour 16, 22; involuntary repetition 34; psychoanalysis 93, 220, 235, 276 Fukuzawa, Ichirō 254 – 255, 258 – 259

Jablowski, Joseph 199 Jaguer, Édouard 202 – 203, 205, 231, 311 James, Bruce 178 Janco, Marcel 119, 271 – 272 Jansson, Mats 282 Japanese Surrealism 252, 254, 256 Jarry, Alfred 48, 274 Jean, Marcel 160, 267 Jennings, Humphrey 226 – 229, 232 Jewell, Edward Alden 156 Jiang, Jiehong 213 Jiang, Zhi 213 Joubert, Alain 200 journals: avant-garde 218, 226, 282; cultural 169, 288, 290; emergence of 5, 48, 149; literary 120, 172 Jung, Carl 110

Garon, Beth 202 – 203, 206 Garon, Paul 199, 201, 203 Gascoyne, David 178, 227 – 229 Gatsos, Nikos 235, 237 Gauthier, Xavière 339 – 342, 344, 361, 364, 3559 Genauer, Emily 159 gender: binary 348 – 350, 355; gender-fluid 349, 382; nontransgendered Surrealism 369; politics and 340, 358, 365 General Post Office Film Unit (GPO) 227 German Surrealism, post-war 306, 313 Girard, Guy 204, 210 Girard, William S. 259 Gleeson, James 178, 181n1 Goemans Gallery 83, 111 Great Depression 141 Greaves, Kelly 5 Greek Surrealism 234, 236, 238, 240 Green, Robert 199 – 202 Guggenheim Juene (Museum) 229, 375 Guggenheim, Peggy 160, 285, 333

Kachina dolls 332 – 333 Kachur, Lewis 160 Kahlo, Frida 212, 261, 263 – 266, 293, 336, 343, 369 Kanbara, Tai 253 Kanellis, Orestis 235 – 236 Kaspařík, Karel 221 Kelley, Robin D.G. 2, 12, 151, 203, 205,  400 Kershaw, Alistair 176 Klee-Palyi, Flora 308 – 309 Klee, Paul 98, 209, 281, 322 Krainick, Sibylla 166 Král, Petr 223 Král, Wayne 202 Kyūshichi, Takenaka 253

Haese, Richard 175 Hare, David 48, 105 Harris, Max 179 – 180 Harris, Stephen 7 Haitian Surrealism 196 Heisler, Jindřich 221 – 223 Hennings, Emmy 119 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art 178 – 179 hermectic tradition 343 historical: continuum 307, 309; events 31, 76; narratives 2, 159 Hongtu, Zhang 212 – 213 Hope, Alec Derwent 179 Housefield, James 160 Huelsenbeck, Richard 119 Hugnet, Georges 157, 177, 228, 235 Hýnek Mácha, Karel 221, 223 hysteria 7, 40, 43, 49, 82, 94, 147

L’Esprit Nouveau 122, 124, 324 L’Etudiant noir (journal) 191 – 192 La femme 100 tetes 80, 310 – 311 Lacaze-Duthiers, Gérard 121 Lam, Wifredo 47, 77, 151, 191, 193 – 197, 241, 289, 293, 309, 311, 387 language: of Surrealism 3, 6, 20, 22, 90; texture of 92, 121, 148, 240, 247 Lazo, Agustín 262, 265 Lee, Rupert 228 left-wing 229, 299, 358 Légitime défense (journal) 139, 191 – 193 Lenssen, Anneka 169 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 55, 193, 333 Lévi, Eliphas 48, 56 – 57, 239 Levy, Julien 155 – 157, 159 literary activity, empowerment 125

Icelandic Surrealism 243 improv 199 Indigenous Surrealism, North American 227, 329 Indonesian Surrealism 243 insurrection 120, 201

406

Index literature: art and 188, 226, 339, 341 – 342; use of 17, 119, 184, 195 Littérature (magazine) 50, 79, 83, 119, 121 Little Review 199 Liu, Mia Yinxing 214 living nature 56 – 57 Löwy, Michael 69, 203 – 204, 400 Luca, Gherasim 100, 271 – 274, 275, 276 – 277 Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes 175 Lynch, David 11, 116

Miró, Joan 25, 91, 98, 128, 161, 227, 255, 262, 280 – 281, 297, 321 – 322, 387 modernism 40, 46, 169, 172, 176, 234, 238 – 239, 335, 394 modernist: abstraction 280 – 281; models of 2, 53, 197, 279, 331 Montes, Eugenio 110 Moore, Henry 227 – 228 Moore, Marcel 367, 371 – 372, 373, 373 Morning of a Machine Gun 201 Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situationism, Utopia 203, 205 Moro, César 262, 265, 289 – 291, 334 Mortensen, Richard 280 – 281 movements: AfroSurreal 394 – 395, 401; avant-garde 11, 150, 189, 290, 334, 394; far Right 72, 141; modern (art) 252, 374 Mumford, Lewis 159 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 156 – 160, 286 Muyassar, Adnan 168 Muyassar, Urkhan 168 mystical 50 – 51, 170, 266, 272 myths 33, 75, 85, 266, 292 – 293, 329 – 331, 333, 335, 368

machine 41, 56, 100, 253 – 254 Maddox, Conroy 104, 201 – 202, 229 – 231 magazines. see journals magic, witches, and witchcraft 49 magical realist painting 34, 42, 44, 47, 49, 55 Magritte, René 34, 86, 111, 176, 183 – 187, 209, 241, 281, 310, 388 Mallarmé, Stéphane 119, 380 Manifesto of Surrealism: Second Manifesto of Surrealism 21, 47, 131, 140, 379; Third Manifesto of Surrealism 84, 392 Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) 11, 13 – 14, 16, 37, 44, 80, 271, 290, 297, 369 Manifesto of the Dada Movement 121 – 122 mannequins. see dolls, mannequins and puppets Marianto, Martinus Dwi 245 – 246 Mariátegui, José Carlos 288 Mariën, Marcel 100, 184, 187 – 189, 211 Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration 394 – 395 Marszalek, Bernard 199 – 200, 206 marvelous: notion of 28 – 32; uncanny and 28, 32 – 35 Marvelous Freedom: World Surrealist Exhibition 199 Marx, Karl 66, 69, 80, 85, 137, 365 Marxism 86, 139, 157, 185, 188, 196, 236 Marxist Surrealism 81 masculinity 112, 115, 255, 349, 352, 368, 370 masks 211, 249, 259, 333, 354, 374 materialism 93, 114, 129, 131 – 133, 141, 219, 235, 274 Matheson, Eric 201 Matta, Roberto 47 – 48, 57, 107, 241, 289, 291 – 295, 309 – 310, 312, 387 Mayor Gallery 227, 229 McNab, Robert 64, 248 memory: cultural 214, 219, 358; role of 33, 58, 99, 113, 146, 380, 395 Ménil, René 30, 69, 151, 192 – 192 mentally ill 38, 91, 94 Mesens, Édouard Léon Théodore 201, 228 – 231 methods, visual 4, 98 Mexican Surrealism 261, 264 – 265 Miller, Lee 32, 76, 333, 343, 365 Minglu, Gao 212

Nadeau, Maurice 148, 308 Nash, Paul 227 – 228, 232 nationalism, resistance to 71, 74 Naum, Gellu 271 – 274, 276 – 277 Naville, Pierre 98, 139, 151 – 152 Nazi occupation 76, 149, 167, 221, 237 Nezval, Vítězslav 218 – 221, 223 Nicholson, Ben 227 Nicholson, Melanie 5, 31 Noheden, Kristoffer 4, 30, 206 Non-Aligned Movement 1961 171 nostalgia 63, 352 Nougé, Paul 184, 186 objects, mechanical 254 occult: disciplines 49 – 51; in nature 55, 57, 59; seers and 46 – 47 Oceania: appeal of 323, 325 – 326; exhibitions, collections 320 October Revolution 1917 136, 138 orientalism 166 Ouborg, Piet 249 Paalen, Wolfgang 104, 107, 265 – 267, 291, 295, 329 – 331, 334 – 336 Pacheco, José Emilio 268 Pacific Islanders 325 Pacific Northwest 266, 329, 332 – 335 paintings: of Brunner 48; dream 99; female subjects 49 – 51, 59; of Moreau 41, 43; representation of marvelous/uncanny 29, 34; Surrealist 180, 229, 253 – 254, 256, 259

407

Index Pan-Africanism 171 – 172 Pan-Arabism 171 – 172 Pană, Saşa 271 – 272, 277 Papanikolas, Theresa 4 Paris International Surrealist Exhibition 1938. see International Surrealist Exhibition Parisian Surrealism 4, 84m 227, 249 Passeron, René 277 Pastoureau, Henri 87, 147 patriotism/militarism 71, 74, 123, 257 – 258 Paulhan, Jean 122, 125 Păun, Paul 271 – 274, 277 Paz, Octavio 200, 202 – 203, 261, 267 – 268,  291 Péret, Benjamin: animism 53; anticlerical defender 87; automatism 125; exile/dislocation 291 – 292; French Surrealism 76 – 77; Greek Surrealism 235; insulting a priest 81, 83; Mexican Surrealism 266 – 268; poetry collection 176 Persistence of Memory 33, 155 – 156 Philosopher’s Stone 48, 50 – 51 Picabia, Francis 79, 83, 100, 120 – 122, 124, 227, 298, 311 Picasso, Pablo 75, 98, 179, 209, 211, 280, 283, 298, 309, 392 Pierre, José 313 – 314, 352 poetry: art and 186, 189, 191; modern 57, 179, 310; psychoanalysis and 184; Surrealist 134, 172, 203, 240, 340 poets 76, 81, 94, 119, 167 – 168, 302, 321, 323; American 205, 222; Belgian 184 – 185, 189; Caribbean 191, 193, 196 – 197; Danish 281; Greek 238, 240; Japanese 252 politics: gender 340, 358, 365; sexual 218, 359 – 360 Pollock, Griselda 341 Pollock, Jackson 160, 387 – 388 Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art 7 postmodernism 244, 392 Power, Susan 160 Preston, Margaret 178, 181n1 Proletarian Art Movement 252 – 253, 255 psychoanalysis 11, 14, 37, 54 – 55, 80, 93, 101, 201 see also Freud puns, visual 22 – 23, 188, 240, 246 puppets. see dolls, mannequins and puppets

Ray, Man (Radnitzky, Emmanuel) 41 – 42, 98, 176 – 177, 210, 218, 228, 236, 255, 281, 321, 367, 369 – 370, 372, 389 Read, Herbert 177, 180 – 181, 227 – 228, 230 – 231 ready-mades 257, 369 reality: new 80, 258; social 189, 247, 255 – 256, 267 religion, organized 74, 79, 83 – 84, 123, 125 Remy, Michel 176, 226, 228, 232 Retoridis, Thalis 235 revolution: Surrealist (see Surrealist) rhetoric 6, 111, 120, 143, 397 Ribemont-Dessaigne, Georges 120 – 124, 176 Richardson, Michael 1, 4, 7, 32, 206, 306, 399 Richter, Hans 119 Rif War 70n2, 72, 76, 138, 165 right-wing 84, 121, 229, 299 Rimbaud, Arthur 16, 57, 75, 80, 84, 87, 119, 180, 192, 268, 275, 280 Rise, Bjarne 280, 283 – 284 Roediger, David 203 Romanian Surrealism 271 romantic: drama 111, 115; love, cult of 340, 352; neo-romantic 232, 299; nostalgia 63; traditions 226, 313, 324, 332, 381; writers 53, 56 – 57, 90, 221, 272, 352 romanticism 5, 218, 268, 399 – 400 Rosemont, Franklin 2, 151 – 152, 172, 199 – 203, 204, 205 – 206, 291 – 292 Rosemont, Penelope 2, 60, 100, 172, 199 – 203, 204, 205 – 206, 400 Roussel, Raymond –9291 Rubin, William 160 – 161 sadism 83, 87 Saint-Pol Roux 165, 167 Sakolsky, Ron 203, 205 – 206 Sandro, Pau; 113 Saturday Night Live 199 Scandinavian Surrealism 279 Schaffner, Ingrid 156 Schanoes, David 201 Schneider, Luis Mario 268 Schwarz, Arturo 203, 289 science fiction 392 Scutenaire, Louis 185 séance 93, 102, 173 Second City 199 Second World War. see World War II Seligmann, Kurt 48, 256, 335 sewing machine 38, 400 sexual: desire 300, 340, 345, 350 sexual behaviour 269 sexuality: attitudes towards 220, 348 – 349; gender and 6, 75, 115, 340, 345, 368, 398; infantile 362

Que (What) 290 queer 7, 371, 374 – 375, 395, 401 queer theory 349 Radcliffe, Ann 227 Radcliffe, Charles 200 Radical America 201 radical muses 358 Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt 4

408

Index Sherwin, Jeffrey 231 silent transformations 69 Silveri, Rachel 4, 400 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 262 situationists 2, 143, 187 – 188, 200, 380, 384,  390 sketches 102, 173, 177, 212, 222 Smith, David 388 Smith, Hélene 102 Smith, Joan 201 Smith, Peter Purves 177 Smith, Syndey Ure 181 Smith, Winston 206 social realism 245, 299, 335 Socialism 85, 185, 187, 219 Sørensen, Henrik 284 Soupault, Philippe 79, 93, 100, 119, 124 – 125, 149, 218, 226, 282, 359, 384 South American Surrealism 288 Spanish Civil War 5, 68, 75 – 77, 85, 111, 230, 299, 303 Spanish Surrealism 267, 297, 299 – 300 spiritualism 12, 93 – 94, 102, 245, 396 Spiteri, Raymond 4 St. Clair Drake, John Gibbs 200 Stabakis, Nikos 230, 240, 242 Stalinism 76, 133, 140 Stalinist Communism 81, 137, 220 Steris, Gerasimos 236 Stirner, Max 120, 122 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) 201 Suleiman, Susan Rubin 16, 344, 361 Supangkat, Jim 244, 246 – 247 Surrealism: American reception/expansion 155; canonical 151, 229; contemporary 6, 231, 387; culture of 127; inquiry into 397; intellectual 379; multidisciplinarity 157; nature and 53; public interfaces 146; visual methods 98 Surrealist: Arab 172 – 173, 202; aspirations 319, 349; exhibitions 73, 133, 205, 283, 310, 322, 324; games 21, 23 – 24, 27, 199, 202, 205, 267; images 28, 114, 340; knowledge, source of 48; practitioners 104 – 105; revolution 138 – 139, 173, 290, 298; visions of androgyny 348 Surrealist Insurrection 201 Surrealist Objects and Poems 54, 229 Surrealist Revolution, The 12 – 13, 40, 43, 127 – 128, 146 – 148, 172 Susik, Abigail 206, 401 Švankmajer, Jan 54, 59 – 60, 116, 201, 223 – 224 Švankmajer, Václav 224 symbolism 44, 50 – 51, 90, 176, 180, 267, 329, 335, 353, 355

Taiyamg, Yang 209 Taminiaux, Pierre 2, 5, 401 Tanguy, Yves 48, 107, 218, 235 – 236, 249, 281, 387 Tarot 47 – 48 Tauber-Arp, Sophie 119 technology 39, 53, 189, 215, 326 Teige, Karel 218 – 219, 221 – 223 Tengour, Habib 173 Teodorescu, Virgil 271 – 273, 276 – 277 terrorism 77 Thirion, André 25, 66, 83, 140, 192 totality 42, 313, 380 – 381 toys 66, 395 trans women 369 – 372 transformations 214, 236, 258, 295, 367 transgender: people 349, 367 – 370; subjectivity 372, 374 transsexual 367, 369, 371 transvestite 349 Trevelyan, Julian 226 – 227 Tropiques (journal) 30, 191, 193 – 194,  290 Trost, Dolfi 271 – 274, 276 – 277 Trotsky, Leon 5, 80, 136 – 137, 139, 142 – 143, 168, 263, 265 Truth About the Colonies (exhibition) 66 – 67, 67, 140, 192 Tucker, Albert 175 – 176, 179 Tung, Wei Hsiu 214 Tzara, Tristan 4, 66, 79, 92, 119 – 121, 124, 133, 192, 235, 271, 321 Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) Bunuel/ Dali 109, 110 uncanny 42, 150, 177, 220, 236, 254, 264, 320, 391 see also marvelous unconscious: dreams and 12, 15, 20 – 22, 73, 93, 111, 113, 147; exploration of 33, 44, 54 – 56, 236, 253, 290, 300; expressions 23, 249 University of Copenhagen, Student’s Union  282 University of Heidelberg 313 University of Massachusetts 200 University of Michigan 206 University of Paris, Sorbonne 323 University of Texas Press 205 untimely 401 Valaoritis, Nanos 237 – 240 Valjakka, Minna 213 Vallejo, César 288, 295 Vancrevel, Laurens 202, 400 Vigo, Jean 115 Vitto, Mario 241 Volontes (journal) 192

tactile 158, 363 Taiwanese Surrealism 213

409

Index World War II (Second): aftermath of 2, 47, 56 – 57, 169, 230, 238, 258; Surrealism during 166 – 168, 234, 389 Wright, Astri 245 Wright, Frank 204 Wu, Chinghsin 209

Walker, Kara 12 Western art 188, 214 – 215, 336 Williams, Joel 202 Williams, Linda 113 Wilson, Mary 238 – 240 Wilson, Robert Anton 200 Wirth, Oswald 48 witchcraft 29, 48 – 49, 362, 367 witches 49 women: cis and heterosexual 2; portraits/paintings of 370, 387; representation of 80, 339, 341, 343 – 344 Wordsworth, William 129, 177 World War I (First) 63, 71 – 72, 75 – 76, 92, 119, 136, 319, 367, 389 – 390

Xiaogang, Zhang 212 Xingwei, Wang 213 Yaari, Monique 272 Yates, Gavin 5 youth 37, 192, 212, 362, 364 Zalman, Sandra 4 Zwemmer Gallery 229 – 230

410