In the Beginning the Literary Revolution
Immediately after World War I (1914-18), the cultural sensibility of Europe was
in a lively state. Young people who were left after the high-minded propaganda were
brought to a state of heart felt protest, it was feared that the best people were
killed in the war and that the discoveries and innovations before the war would
be lost. Although Europe was certainly not without genius, the war had brought a
rift in the European art community. Dada was making its mark, and the anti-art manifestations
of Marcel Duchamp were building up until 1916, when an uproar was organized and
promoted by Tristan Tzara. Ironically Dadaism was directed against art, particularly
academic art, but also against the political society as a whole. The pamphlet Der
Dada proclaimed the death of art and that Dada was politics.
There were 20,000 copies printed of Der Ventilator, founded by Max Ernest
and Hans Arp with Baargeld. They organized an exhibition of art which brought the
police to the little restaurant where it was held. The means used by this agitation
passed at the time for anti-art, but they very soon became - to some extent Surrealism
- an integrated part of the renewal of artistic activity. A number of technical
resources and creative approaches applied by Surrealists were invented by the Dada
movement. Most Surrealists took part in Dada meetings and the first text published
Les Champs Magnetiques was not classified as surrealist at first but much
later on it was. It was written in the sprit of Dadist, but it also proves by the
power of the imagination and certain experimental seriousness, that Breton in spite
of all the dada fuss never lost hold of thread of his poetry and symbolism.
Francis Picabia arrived in Paris at the same time as Tzara. He came from America
by way of Barcelona, where the journal 291 became 391 in 1917. This review-pamphlet
reached nineteen issues by 1924. on arriving in Paris he shocked Salon d' Automne
of which he was a member by exhibiting the products of his mechanist period. During
the same period, Marcel Duchamp was in New York working on his large paintings on
glass, "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even" Which he abandoned
unfinished in 1923 in order to devote himself to chess. After his success in the
Armory Show, a major exhibition of modern art in New York 1913 - among which Duchamp
showed his "Nude Descending a Staircase"
When Dada split into mini-groups, a single, compact Surrealist group formed. In
June 1924 the last issue of "Literature" appeared. The headquarters of
Surrealism, the Centrale Surrealiste, were established and from here was
published on December 1, 1924 the "most shocking review in the world', La revolution
Surrealiste. And Breton published the first Manifesto. Surrealism had arrived.
The Surrealist Revolution
The vagaries of history have obscured many people and events yet the lasting products
of the movement are brought into sharp relief; the written painted works, the tracts,
manifestos and reviews - the liveliest expressions of the group's collective life.
The reviews themselves are remarkable signs of the ideological development of Surrealism.
The first two used the word ‘revolution’, then the term disappeared.
Directed at first by Poerre Naville and Benjamin Peret, then from issue No. 4 (1924)
by Andre Breton, Twelve numbers of La Revolution Surrealiste appeared between
December 1924 and December 1929, the year of Dali’s arrival, but also and most
importantly the year of the Second Manifesto which Breton used for a fierce purification
of his group. Aragon, Breton, Eluard, Peret, and Unik were all members of the communist
party since 1926. They were expelled in 1933, the year of the last issue of La Surrealisme
au service de la revolution (l.s.a.s.d.l.r.), six numbers of which were
produced between July 1930 and May 1933.
La Revolution Surrealiste deliberately practiced intellectual violence. The
first issue published a photograph of Germaine Berton, who had just killed Marius
Plateau, a member of the extreme right-wing Action Francaise; the portrait
appeared surrounded by photographs of all the members of the group. It also raised
the question "Is suicide a solution?" and containing a number of dream
reports and ‘automatic’ texts. We must remember that suicide was never
a solution for a Surrealist. The second issue featured the test of ‘Open the
prisons, disband the army!’. The issue also contained open letters such as
Breton to Deltiel, or of Desnos to Pierre Mille, and address to the ‘warped
pope’.
A committee for action against the war in Morocco issued a manifesto, the Surrealists
immediately associated themselves with it and signed a violently anti-nationalist
text published in La Revolution Surrealist. Violence and black humor did
not put a stop to the poetic and ethical experimentation: issue no. 9-10 were devoted
to ‘automatic writing’ and the last issue posted question "What hope
do you place in love?" The illustrations in this review were intentionally
austere in appearance, were much less politicized that the content. A majority of
surrealists let others speak out while they secretly thought that they would be
the vehicles of a real revolution in sensibility.
That revolution took place through the medium of automatic writing; especially Eluard’s
poems like Capitale de la douleur and novels such as Aragon’s Le Paysan
de Paris both written in 1926. Breton knew what Surrealism owed to painters
and in La Revolution Surrealiste had begun a series of articles on painting
which were collected in 1928 at the first edition of his now famous book Le Surrealisme
et la peinture.
When the last issue of La Surrealisme au service de la revolution (l.s.a.s.d.l.r.)
appeared, the Second Manifesto had made ravages in the ranks of the Surrealists,
those expelled answered Breton with a caustic pamphlet, UnCadavre. Breton
had supported Trotsky who had been refused political asylum in France. The following
year, Aragon attended the Kharkov Congress and discovered Soviet reality in the
arms of Elsa Triolet. The Aragon who now became so enamoured of the Stalinist Communism
had previously written of the October Revolution: ‘On the ideological level,
it is at most a vague ministerial crisis’ and had lumped together the ‘tapir
Maurras’. Aragon, leaving his friends in 1931, turned violently against the
dreams of his youth as Chirico. In spite of crisis, 1930 was a vintage year for
Surrealism: in addition to the new review, L’Immaculee Conception, an
attempt at pathological simulation by Breton and Eluard. Giacometti also produced
his first ‘dumb mobile object’, The Time of the Trace. Henceforth
and allowed himself the luxury of a dispute with Freud. Dali was breaking out, and
together with Bunuel produced his second film. ‘transform the world, said Marx;
change life, said Rimbaud; these two instructions are one as far as we are concerned’,
Breton wrote in 1934. The political stalemet of Surrealism arouse from its inability
to overcome this contradiction, that was perhaps one that never could be over come.
Zhdanov imposed on the Soviet Union in 1934 the notion that art was a political
weapon, and laid down the tenets of ‘Socialist realism’. The Stalin era
had begun. It was time to pull back. ‘Traduced’ by a revolution which
they had said they ‘saw only on a social level’ the surrealist with drew
into the labyrinth of a myth. The review Minotaure was about to be launched.
Surrealist Reviews and the End
In 1933, for the first time in ten years, Surrealism had no review of its own. It
was entering a phase of world-wide expansion. The exhibitions, such as the one in
New York in 1932 and the on in the Pierre Colle gallery in Paris. Breton was lecturing
and interviewing, the founding of groups in Great Britain to Japan. This showed
the inward mobility of the movement and the need for it in a world soon to be on
the fridge of full-blown Fascist regimes. Industrial civilization hardly overcame
the crisis of capitalism, and art was typified by the rise of geometrical abstraction
and what Dali was to call ‘our masochistic architecture’. Dali himself
had just proved a great success in New York. A brilliant eccentric, he had become
associated with surrealist in 1929 and had suggest a new means of achieving a fusion
of the imaginary and the real ‘paranoiac-critical method’. His painting,
for instance The Enigma of William Tell, had abandoned automatism for a more
dream like record.
The review Minotaure, beautifully produced by Skira, appeared for the first
time in 1933. The Surrealist co-operated and in 1935 published International Bulletin
of Surrealism. Breton and Bataille took part in an anti-Fascist group counter
attack. By the tenth issue of Minotaure surrealist had taken complete control
of the magazine. Newcomers swelled the ranks of the painters and object makers who
with Picasso illustrated the review. Surrealism was making itself a considerable
success at the international exhibitions in Paris and London, and Breton was running
the Gradiva gallery in Paris. In the Minotaure era Surrealism came into it’s
own, both theoretically and politically. The international exhibitions in Paris
in 1938 were deeply innovatory and conceptionable. Instead of exhibiting works the
Surrealist transformed a office building into a quasi-magical location, decorated
with suggestive models. The whole enterprise was a complete success without the
scandals of the first stage of Surrealism. Breton and Eluard were already generally
respected poets and Dali, Ernst, Miro, Tanguy and Magritte later, were acknowledged
as first-rank painters, Hans Arp had developed half-way between Abstraction and
Surrealism a form of sculpture that won acclaim. In short, The Surrealism was in
the process of becoming a school.
Just as WWII broke out , in 1939 Dali, Tanguy, and Matta went to the United States.
Paalen moved to Mexico, where Breton and the painter Rivera published the bulletin
Cle. An international Surrealist exhibition was held in Mexico in 1940, in
that same period France experienced mass exodus and collapse. Eluard, Picasso, Brauner,
Domingues, Herold, and Bellmer remained in France, and Magritte stayed in Belgium.
Their Diverse fate had two main consequences: the Surrealist exile gave new strength
to the \American artistic group; and on the other the return of the exiled did not
provide a opportunity for regrouping of the Surrealists after France was liberated.
In the United States Breton broadcasted on the radio. In 1941, he took his bearings
in Genese et perspective artistiques du Surrealisme. The word ‘artistic’
in the title shows how far he was from the anti-art concerns of early Surrealism.
The Minotaure era had not quite come to an end yet. Breton met Motherwell
and member of the New York school following Picasso. Breton Published Prolegomenes
a un troisieme manifeste du surrealisme ou non, which recalled the principles
of the movement. David Hare published the review VVV, edited by Breton, Duchamp,
and Ernst. Three issues came out from June 1942 to February 1944.
It is important to note the lack of café life in the US, and the way in which the
painters were dispersed, some in Arizona, some in California, and some in Connecticut
or elsewhere. This dispersion did not allow the re-establishment of the European
pre-way system. This dispersion was complicated by disputes and differences. Masson
parted company with Breton, Paalen left Surrealism in order to start his own movement,
Guggenheim’s art gallery in New York exhibited Surrealists but Abstract Expressionism
was already making itself felt. In the same period Surrealist in Europe had gone
to nothing. Miro went to Montroig, In Catalonian, Bellmer hid in the Toulouse area,
Brauner went to the Alps and started painting in wax, for want of better materials.
In Paris, the young poets were supported by Picasso and published two pamphlets.
Antonin Artaud was in a psychiatric clinic and Desnos died in a concentration camp(1944).
When Breton returned to Paris in 1945 the era of retrospectives had already begun
with a Max Ernest exhibition. Maurice Nadeau published his Histoire du surrealisme
in which he seemed to set it in a buried past.