The extra you realize about Surrealism, the extra you understand there’s far more to know. Which may be precisely what André Breton, the motion’s instigator and ringleader, needed us to really feel. A motion that celebrates the facility of the unconscious and the unknown wants to stay open-ended. So we will hardly be stunned that within the hundred years because the publication of Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” in 1924 the basic ideas and ambitions that animated Breton and his many associates and collaborators haven’t grow to be any clearer. Not that folks don’t hold attempting to nail issues down.
The centennial introduced a torrent of books and exhibitions, together with a lollapalooza of a present final fall on the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a model of which is able to open on the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork in November. Critics and historians nonetheless look to the early writings of Breton, who till his demise in 1966 saved a tenacious maintain on what might be stated about Surrealism or executed in its identify. However nonetheless tantalizing we could discover some oft-quoted passages from his first manifesto—the definition of Surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state” or the assumption in “the omnipotence of dream”—they’ll’t start to elucidate the maintain that Surrealism continues to exert on artists, writers, filmmakers, critics, curators, and students, in addition to the educated public that takes an curiosity in new exhibitions and the even wider public for whom “surreal” has grow to be the all-purpose adjective to explain something unusual or surprising. When Sarah McBride, the primary transgender member of Congress, was requested the way it felt to search out herself strolling subsequent to Pete Hegseth, the brand new secretary of protection and a person who has made his emotions about transgender folks completely clear, she had one phrase: “Surreal.”
In Why Surrealism Issues Mark Polizzotti, whose finely detailed biography of Breton, Revolution of the Thoughts (1995), is an everlasting achievement, makes a courageous try to outline its countless enchantment. Polizzotti, who in all probability is aware of as a lot about Surrealism as anyone alive, describes it variously as a software, a strategy, and an agent for change. He characterizes Surrealism as a “disruptor,” a “drama,” an “adventure,” a “multinational current,” an “energy,” a “language,” a “state of mind”—and that’s solely in his first forty or so pages. These fluctuating definitions mirror Breton’s personal sense of the fluidity of Surrealism, which from the second it was launched had each political and cultural aspirations. In 1935 he made one in every of his most well-known declarations: “‘Transform the world,’ Marx said; ‘change life,’ Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are but one for us.” I’m wondering how many individuals truly consider that Marx’s financial revolution and Rimbaud’s program of self-transformation can ever be united. Actually the French Communist Occasion, with which Breton sought some sort of alliance within the Twenties and Thirties, had little interest in combining Parisian bohemianism with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Maybe nobody summarized the issue extra succinctly than the author André Thirion within the title of a memoir of the motion revealed later in his life, lengthy after he’d joined Charles de Gaulle’s postwar political group: Revolutionaries With out Revolution (1972).
Surrealism at all times appears to be breaking up, its monumental ambitions sophisticated by the differing claims of public, non-public, political, and inventive life—and competing approaches to experiencing or deciphering all this. The motion’s multidirectional character is mirrored within the books revealed for the centennial, which vary from Forbidden Territories, the catalog of a present wherein 100 years of Surrealist landscapes counsel a luxuriantly otherworldly travelogue, to Surrealism and Anti-fascism, additionally related to an exhibition, an almost seven-hundred-page anthology of writings that features such heavy hitters as Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, and Aimé Césaire. For some Surrealism supplied methods to embrace and rework the favored creativeness—Salvador Dalí’s melting watches come to thoughts—whereas for others, particularly the painters Joan Miró and André Masson, Surrealism’s improvisational practices stimulated lyrical divagations. Anybody who’s dipped into the numerous magazines that the motion produced—some are featured in Les Portes du rêve, 1924–2024: Surrealism By means of Its Journals—can see that from the start the Surrealists had anthropological and sociological goals and a fascination with nontraditional, non-European, and premodern cultures, in addition to an curiosity within the byways of psychological and sexual expertise.
A motion that celebrates the dream, the opposite, and the unconscious presents limitless prospects. The Pompidou exhibition was divided into 13 thematic sections, together with “Trajectory of the Dream,” “Chimera,” “Political Monsters,” “Hymns of the Night,” “Tears of Eros,” and “Cosmos.” If these themes are central to Surrealism, what are we to make of the titles of the chapters in Polizzotti’s Why Surrealism Issues, which embody “Transformation,” “Appropriation,” “Subversion,” “Transgression,” “Disruption,” and “Revolution”? Surrealism is a shape-shifter, mixing eros and revolution, politics and goals, and absolutely anything else.
A brand new technology of students has taken a dialectical method to the motion’s extra retrograde attitudes towards colonialism and sexuality, which they see as upsetting contemporary pondering—the outdated Surrealism reconfigured as a progressive software. Historians dive in, some thirty contributing to the Pompidou catalog and a few forty-five to the catalog of “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” an exhibition on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in 2021. Essays within the Pompidou catalog embody “Surrealism vs. Colonialism, 1930s,” “The Surrealists and Algeria: 1954–1962,” and “Black Flower: Surrealist Revolt in the Age of Rebellion, 1960s,” whereas among the many subjects lined within the Metropolitan’s catalog are “Sufism and Surrealism in Turkey,” “Catholicism and Surrealism in the Philippines,” “Seascapes and Blue Lobsters: Surrealism on the Colombia Coast,” and “Surrealism and the Global Colonial Order.”
Born in 1896, Breton served as a medical orderly throughout World Battle I and witnessed the collapse of a complete technology’s hopes for rational human progress. He spent a number of months working at a psychiatric middle the place he got here face-to-face with the traumatic influence of the conflict on younger Frenchmen and explored the literature of neurology and psychology, the start of a lifelong fascination with Freud’s concepts. Already an aspiring poet, Breton aligned himself with the Dadaist cult of the irrational that had emerged in the course of the conflict in cities in Europe but in addition in New York. The eccentricities and extravagances of Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Hugo Ball, Hans Richter, and others supplied literary, theatrical, and pictorial ripostes to geopolitical mayhem. Breton aimed to take the reins of the avant-garde when he declared the Surrealist revolution in 1924, giving Dada’s incendiary spirit a sturdier theoretical basis, or so he believed. Among the main Dadaists, amongst them Arp and Marcel Duchamp, would within the years to return not occasionally discover themselves allied with the Surrealists.
Surrealism entered an already crowded ideological enviornment. Parisians in Breton’s circle felt the pull of Marxism, Freudianism, and new fashions in mysticism and the occult, whereas artwork for artwork’s sake nonetheless held its personal and the visible arts had been producing an alphabet soup of isms, from Cubism, Orphism, and Futurism to Constructivism, Neoplasticism, and Neoromanticism. Surrealism, which drew from Marx, Freud, Mallarmé, de Chirico, Picasso, and plenty of others, was simply the sort of daring stroke the avant-garde demanded. It helped that Breton had the politician’s present for insisting on his certainties whilst they had been eclipsed by new certainties, to be embraced with equal fervor. Like Marxism and Freudianism, Surrealism wasn’t a viewpoint a lot as a worldview, an omnivorous imaginative and prescient full with precursors—a lot of whom Breton invoked within the first manifesto—together with Swift, Sade, Hugo, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. Alyce Mahon’s The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde explores the lengthy attain of a fascination with the marquis and his writings that started with Breton and his cohort and even now reveals no signal of slowing.
Marcel Raymond, in his sensible e-book From Baudelaire to Surrealism (1933), described Breton’s
quest for the marvelous and for integral poetry; cries of hatred in opposition to what’s; aspirations towards a complete freedom of the thoughts, all this thrown collectively pell-mell in a Manifesto alternately imperious and nostalgic.
Maybe one of many central dilemmas or quandaries—or is it strengths?—of Surrealism was that Breton saved in search of the longer term previously, the brand new portray grounded in outdated goals, the brand new social order in what he at instances appeared to treat as primitive simplicities. Within the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” revealed in 1929, he wrote:
All the pieces tends to make us consider that there exists a sure level of the thoughts at which life and demise, the true and the imagined, previous and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, excessive and low, stop to be perceived as contradictions.
The Surrealists, he continued, had been dedicated to “finding and fixing this point.” They believed that “construction and destruction can no longer be brandished one against the other.” What does it imply to repair a contradiction? No matter it might imply, it has proved an influential thought or anti-idea, right down to Robert Rauschenberg’s 1959 remark, “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)”
My sense is that connoisseurs of contemporary French poetry don’t rank Breton among the many best, however a few his works in prose, Nadja and L’Amour fou (Mad Love), are acknowledged as classics that shatter the road between fiction and poetic nonfiction. No matter his deserves as a author and thinker, with out Breton Surrealism merely wouldn’t exist. And with out the cohort that he labored and argued with, the motion wouldn’t have grown and prospered. At one time or one other it included the writers Paul Éluard, Georges Bataille, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and Robert Desnos, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and the artists Max Ernst, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte; that hardly scratches the floor.
Breton was nothing if not charismatic, a placing determine with a leonine head, massive eyes, the profile of a Roman emperor, and hair worn moderately lengthy. He was adept at ideological and mental warfare, and at instances so dogmatic that he was nicknamed the Pope of Surrealism, an irony that performed on the motion’s violently anticlerical outlook. Polizzotti’s biography presents an unequalled image of Breton’s advanced persona, the overweening narcissism fueling a starvation for associates and acolytes that expressed itself in acts of nice generosity even because it inspired the bitter disputes that characterised the motion. Polizzotti writes that “those who saw the legendary intransigence, the authoritarianism, were often unaware of how much doubt and indecision lay beneath it.”
After fleeing Hitler’s Europe, Breton spent the conflict years within the US together with different members of his outdated Parisian cohort, amongst them Masson, whose work had a decisive influence on the Summary Expressionists. The presence of the Europeans supercharged New York’s already vigorous artwork scene, a narrative properly informed in Martica Sawin’s Surrealism in Exile and the Starting of the New York Faculty (1995). Breton’s postwar return to France wasn’t simple. The French Communists, who had been allied with Stalin and the Soviet Union and admired for his or her braveness within the Resistance, couldn’t forgive Breton his friendship with Trotsky, with whom he’d collaborated on an necessary assertion about inventive freedom. Breton was undeterred, and till shortly earlier than his demise maintained weekly gatherings of colleagues and followers in a beloved café, a observe begun within the Twenties. Though he died too quickly to witness the occasions of Might 1968, in his later years he might see that his unconventional leftism was discovering a sympathetic viewers among the many younger. The aestheticizing of politics that Jean-Luc Godard each celebrated and critiqued in a few of his films had roots among the many Surrealists. In Why Surrealism Issues, Polizzotti observes of the Surrealists that “their sympathies were ultimately more emotional than practical…. It was the poetry of politics that attracted them, not its machinery.”
Though the visible arts weren’t the main focus of Breton’s first and second manifestos, in Surrealism and Portray, revealed first in 1928 and in expanded editions all through his life, he demonstrated a deep, instinctual feeling for the work that visible artists do. Breton was an incisive critic of the artwork of his personal time and an avid collector, not solely of his shut contemporaries however of the sculpture of Africa and the South Pacific. Within the Twenties he made some cash advising the couturier Jacques Doucet on purchases of work, uncommon books, and manuscripts; it was Breton who persuaded Doucet to purchase Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which within the late Thirties was acquired by the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York. Throughout his years within the US he grew to become an admirer and collector of Native American artwork and was one of many first to take an curiosity in Yup’ik masks produced in southwestern Alaska, with their intricate openwork designs. For the previous twenty years a number of works from 42 rue Fontaine, the Parisian tackle the place Breton lived for some forty years, has usually been on show on the Pompidou, the work and sculptures organized chockablock, as they’d been in his condominium. One other new e-book, L’Atelier de André Breton: Mur Mondes, presents an in depth accounting of those eclectic works.
Whereas Breton noticed Surrealism as having implications that went far past the visible arts, he embraced exhibitions of Surrealist artwork as a approach to put it up for sale when its broader social and political packages appeared stalled. That was definitely the case after his return to France. There may be motive to find the start of what quantities to a worldwide obsession with the motion in an exhibition of Surrealist artwork that Breton and Duchamp mounted in Paris in 1947 on the Galerie Maeght, then a comparatively new enterprise that by the Sixties was a pacesetter in postwar artwork in Europe and past. The catalog of that present, designed by Duchamp, with a canopy exhibiting a girl’s breast rendered in three dimensions—a type of mushy sculpture—is now a collector’s merchandise in addition to a reminder of what snickering smartasses the Surrealists might be when it got here to girls.
“Surrealism,” the exhibition that the curators Didier Ottinger and Marie Sarré organized on the Pompidou, left guests in little doubt as to the motion’s complexities. It opened with a dramatic homage to Breton, his cohort, and Paris within the Twenties. You entered by way of a doorway formed just like the mouth of an immense hungry monster, modeled on the doorway to the Cabaret de l’Enfer in Montmartre, a spot beloved by the Surrealists. On the finish of a passage lined with photo-booth portraits that the Surrealists took of themselves and their associates there was an enormous round house that includes a wraparound audiovisual mash-up evoking the rise of the motion out of the chaos of World Battle I, with texts by Breton, pictures of the Surrealists, the clickety-clack of old style typewriters, and swarms of fish, which referred to a bunch of romantic texts entitled Soluble Fish, for which the primary manifesto was initially supposed as an introduction. This Parisian prelude was bookended by a hall towards the tip of the present lined with Brassaï’s pictures of Paris at evening, silken darkish visions of town that the Surrealists saluted in lots of works, amongst them Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926).
The remainder of this capacious present was a geographical, chronological, and stylistic free-for-all, with work, sculpture, pictures, drawings, collages, and assemblages by artists who labored in numerous instances and locations grouped thematically. The themes and choices throughout the themes had been open-ended, so {that a} portray by Picasso, Acrobate bleu (1929), was included in a piece devoted to the Surrealists’ curiosity in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, though I doubt that anyone might convincingly relate Picasso’s well-established curiosity in acrobats, clowns, and the circus to Carroll’s work. This type of thematic exhibition, nonetheless much less frequent within the US than in Europe, can pack a wallop when the curator has the mental breadth of Jean Clair, whose “Identity and Alterity: Figures of the Body, 1895–1995,” on the Venice Biennale thirty years in the past, pushed guests in refreshingly surprising instructions.
The Pompidou present, removed from the impressed recklessness that is perhaps true to sure features of Breton’s legacy, was each overly impressionistic and overly schematic, with little thought for the influence that works have when exhibited collectively. I don’t know what goal was served by hanging Joan Miró’s La Sieste (1925), a blue-gray imaginative and prescient as haunted and austere as one in every of Satie’s Gymnopédies, close to a Dalí dreamscape from 1944 that’s an train in bombastic fantasy, with two hyperrealistically rendered tigers attacking a reclining feminine nude who may need been borrowed from a porn website. “Trajectory of the Dream,” the rubric that introduced these two work collectively, was broad sufficient to additionally embody a clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), wherein Ingrid Bergman performs the psychiatrist analyzing a dream of Gregory Peck’s—the dream staged by Dalí. On this setting no person was going to hassle with Miró, who though by no means a card-carrying Surrealist got here as shut as any artist to giving the motion’s doctrines a visible ineffability.
One of the vital well-known passages within the first manifesto is Breton’s assault on literary naturalism, full along with his mocking response to Dostoevsky’s literal description of a room in Crime and Punishment. Surrealism was alleged to transcend appearances and uncover deeper or totally different realities, an effort that aligned with a number of the targets of psychoanalysis. Within the early pages of the primary version of Surrealism and Portray, Breton embraced Picasso’s most radical Cubist works of the mid-1910s, writing that they supplied “a purely internal model” for this type of investigation and a “drama whose only theater is the mind.” Breton believed that at the very least once in a while visible artists ought to attract with out preconceptions—a pictorial equal to the literary automatism that he advocated as a manner of accessing as but untapped psychological dramas. The reality, as most inventive spirits acknowledged eventually, was that automatism, whether or not writing or drawing with out preconceptions, wasn’t all that free-flowing. Sure patterns at all times appeared to emerge, the meanderings of the thoughts and hand maybe extra culturally conditioned than Breton had hoped. Nonetheless, letting go, at the very least as an preliminary act, as a sort of preparation, was a facet of a number of the best work that Miró, Masson, and Picasso produced within the Twenties and Thirties.
Within the a few years that Breton was writing concerning the visible arts he took an curiosity in works that moved past actuality in numerous and even contradictory methods. He praised artists who had been inquisitive about reimagining the basics of the painter’s craft—the manipulation of line, form, and shade—together with some who had been by no means immediately related to Surrealism, amongst them Paul Klee. He admired the novel experiments in sculptural type of Arp and Alberto Giacometti, though he by no means forgave Giacometti for returning to a direct confrontation with the human determine within the Nineteen Forties. He additionally celebrated artists, particularly Dalí, Magritte, and Tanguy, who remained naturalists within the sense that they rendered their goals, nightmares, and fantasies actually, with methods just about indistinguishable from these of nineteenth-century educational realism. These Surrealist painters is perhaps considered documentarians, their works meticulous transcriptions of their wildest imaginings. Breton referred to Magritte’s work as “object-lessons.”
Magritte’s concepts had been definitely unique. His work keep within the thoughts, whether or not a darkened avenue with a vibrant sky above (L’Empire des lumières, 1954) or a prepare rising from a fire (La Durée poignardée, 1938), each within the Pompidou present. However I discover Magritte’s work unsatisfying, even dismaying, the sensational conceptions given a poker-faced presentation that if it impresses in any respect does so solely momentarily. As for Dalí, he made no bones about his affinities with nineteenth-century educational portray. He praised a few of these earlier artists in his writings, however even when his glittering phantasmagorias are realized with methods that recall eminences of an earlier official artwork world comparable to Meissonier and Gérôme, his paint dealing with isn’t as vigorous as theirs. Dalí’s work have useless, glassy surfaces. They’re narratively fascinating however visually inert.
There was one thing scientific concerning the Surrealists’ perspective towards artworks. Their curiosity within the drawings, work, and sculpture produced by women and men with out typical coaching or with what had been considered psychological impairments was generally a seek for new types of magnificence but in addition had its sociological or psychological side. Breton and his cohort needed to see what otherness appeared like. That would contain revealing the opposite in oneself. Hans Bellmer’s pictures of the limbs of dolls, mixed to create provocatively erotic or sadistic conditions, beg to be approached in a psychoanalytic spirit. The identical holds for the cluttered dreamscapes that Ernst product of clippings from engravings and illustrations of all types, all of the chopping and pasting animated by an archivist’s fascination with retro furnishings, superannuated machines, and Victorian damsels in misery. It’s as if Ernst’s thoughts had been a junkyard the place the stays of pre–World Battle I Europe had been left to rot, albeit in fascinating methods.
The Surrealists regarded artwork as proof. And students have fallen in line, working extra time to decode symbols and look at the extent to which the photographs and narratives in a selected artist’s work will be aligned with the artist’s biography. In current a long time there was a groundswell of curiosity within the girls who managed to ascertain a spot within the motion regardless of the misogyny that was so important a facet of the Surrealists’ erotic mythomania. The painters Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning made an impression on the Pompidou present as inventive explorers with tales to share, however I feel that what fascinates of their work is what it tells us about their very own ideas and emotions, not what it makes us really feel. A late work by Tanning, the set up Chambre 202, Resort de Pavot (1970), occupied a complete room. This mixed-media reconstruction of a nook of a tawdry lodge, with lumpy grey woolen blobs formed right into a chair, a determine or two, and one thing unusual spilling out of the fireside, is a foul dream reconfigured as a diorama, a reconstruction of the state of affairs in a track that apparently Tanning when she was younger. It’s Surrealist taxidermy—undeniably creepy, emotionally useless. Tanning’s work, nonetheless participating as an account of the artist’s reminiscences, goals, and fantasies, doesn’t tackle a lifetime of its personal. It’s illustration, with out the pictorial openness and unpredictability that may broaden and generally even explode a story.
The Pompidou present was each extra and fewer than an artwork exhibition. It was a historical past lesson. It was a stroll down reminiscence lane. It was Psych 101. The curators appeared keen to check museumgoers’ responses to darkish forests, sexual fantasies, political horrors, cosmic visions, and one or one other sort of monster. The favored success of exhibitions dedicated to Surrealism was in fact one thing that Breton hoped for. However he was additionally conscious of the risks concerned when unruly experiences and perceptions—all of the features of life he believed had been ignored, if not buried—grow to be a part of the mainstream. Within the Thirties Dalí excitedly wrote to Breton from New York that “the influence of Surrealism is enormous; they’re decorating the windows of the most luxurious stores with Surrealism. The creators of animated cartoons are proud to call themselves Surrealists.” In his biography Polizzotti observes that for Breton this “seemed to be taking Surrealism in precisely the wrong direction: Surrealism as fashion, to be flattered for a moment, then thrown out with yesterday’s news.”
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André Breton, Paris, March 1920
Breton had many causes to really feel uneasy about Dalí, who was a political reactionary within the Thirties and whose obsession with cash Breton skewered with a nifty anagram: Avida {Dollars}. However Breton should have additionally seen that Dalí’s widespread success urged how harmful it might be to search out your wildest daydreams—and perhaps your nightmares—paraded in public. There was a danger that in the long run your experiences had been going to be sanitized, revelation giving approach to glib sensation. Surrealism has for generations now been a sort of open supply, ubiquitous within the cultural world. It has formed the work of artists who present in a number of the largest business galleries, amongst them Lisa Yuskavage, Dana Schutz, George Condominium, and Neo Rauch. We see it in promoting and the films. J. Hoberman, writing after the demise of David Lynch, noticed that “if classic surrealists celebrated irrationality and sought to liberate the fantastic in the everyday, Mr. Lynch employed the ordinary as a shield to ward off the irrational.” Surrealism retains spinning, with what Hoberman refers to as Lynch’s “performative normality” maybe now one other model of the surreal.
One of many extra fascinating books to seem in time for the centennial is a set of essays by Mary Ann Caws, for many years a major determine amongst students and writers within the Surrealists and French modernism extra usually. By titling her e-book Symbolism, Dada, Surrealisms, Caws has chosen to fly within the face of a bent amongst her colleagues to give attention to the specifics of this or that artist or motion. Artwork historians, cautious of sweeping generalizations, have a tendency to withstand what had been historically considered as the numerous connections between Dadaism and Surrealism. Among the newer scholarship is terrific, particularly “Dada,” the sensible present that Leah Dickerman organized on the Nationwide Gallery in Washington in 2006 in collaboration with Laurent Le Bon of the Centre Pompidou. However nonetheless totally different Dada and Surrealism could have been, there’s additionally a lot to be stated for seeing a by way of line, one which begins within the nineteenth century with the Symbolists, who generally blended artwork for artwork’s sake and radical politics in ways in which prefigure Breton. A living proof is the fascinating determine of Félix Fénéon, who was each an aesthete and an anarchist.1 Roger Shattuck, in a forceful consideration revealed in these pages greater than fifty years in the past, insisted on becoming a member of Dada and Surrealism in what he dubbed the “D-S Expedition.”2
Caws enjoys weaving collectively a number of generations. She’s unflappable as she strikes from Mallarmé to Duchamp and Breton. She has recognized a number of the artists and writers, in a single occasion recalling tea with Jacqueline Lamba, Breton’s spouse within the Thirties and Nineteen Forties, however even when she hasn’t truly met them she approaches their work with a simple familiarity and a conversational tone. Within the essay “How to House the Surrealist Imagination?” she embraces inside a few pages Joseph Cornell’s bins, the architect Frederick Kiesler’s Limitless Home, works by Bellmer, Duchamp, Tanning, and Leonor Fini, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “meditation in Being and Nothingness on the embarrassment of someone looking through the keyhole of a hotel room, seen by someone else.” “The imagined Surrealist house is about the mind,” she writes, “so that the expansion of the setting takes place mentally for the viewer—like the Symbolist theater of Stéphane Mallarmé, a mental scene for the poetry of place.”
What some could dismiss as Caws’s meanderings appear to me true to the spirit of open-ended investigation that animated the motion. Writing about Masson, she considers the concept his work is Baroque:
The reds and the blacks—the flaming solar and the shadowy Earth-Mom—the violence, the our bodies struggling and erotic of their ghastly, enlivening and mortal writhing in all places in these works: had we not already suspected the intimacy of Surrealism and the baroque, we might certainly see it now.
Caws operates much less as a scholar of Surrealism than as a sort of Surrealist. I just like the play of her thoughts. She underscores the extent to which Surrealism is unfixed, constructing on a cultivation of uncertainties that reaches again deep into the nineteenth century, when Baudelaire first spoke about “a forest of symbols,” and she or he finds this fluid Symbolism recapitulated within the early twentieth century with Odilon Redon’s ceaselessly floating and fleeting work and pastels, works that Breton admired.
Breton was such a fierce polemicist that we’re generally in peril of forgetting that at their finest his polemics had been devoted to features of expertise which are troubled, unruly, enigmatic, unresolved. For all his didacticism, there was one thing versatile about his pondering. Within the Twenties he criticized Braque for loving “the rule that corrects emotion,” arguing that his “sole concern” was “to deny this rule violently.” And but by the Fifties he was writing of Miró’s nice sequence Constellations—a number of had been within the Pompidou present—that they signify “an order of things over which the calamities of the external world could finally never prevail.”
Maybe Breton’s final argument wasn’t between order and dysfunction, however a seek for each the order and dysfunction that lie beneath appearances, the germinating forces that make for artwork, for all times. In his final e-book, Magic Artwork—solely now translated into English—Breton wrote about Leonardo da Vinci, whom he argued should not be consigned to “the oubliette of la belle peinture.” Leonardo was extra fascinating than that, “one of the most fraught artists in the history of art,” at the very least should you turned to “the confused but definite richness of his Notebooks.” Regardless of the terribly public life that Breton lived, the search to which he was devoted—the Surrealist seek for a actuality past actuality—was a really non-public one.
