THE LIGHT POURS OUT OF ME

1. WE WILL DRINK YOUR BLOOD

Immediately after the 1914-18 War, the cultural sensibility of Europe was in an incendiary state among those young people whom the slaughter and the high-minded propaganda of the war-mongers had driven to a state of desperate protest. Among others it was still somnolent, seemingly atrophied by nationalist manifestations and the depressing fear that all the best people were dead. The period before the war had been rich in discoveries and innovations: in painting there had been Fauvism, Cubism, the abstractions of Kandinsky and the Blue Rider movement (centred on Munich), the extension of Expressionism from the last sparks of the Jugendstil version of Art Nouveau; in poetry the works of Apollinaire, Reverdy, Max Jacob, Marinetti and the Futurists; in fiction the novels of Proust and Joyce; in sculpture Boccioni and the first exploitations of the potential of reinforced concrete (Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius); in music the achievements of Stravinsky and Schonberg; in the theatre Claudel, Copeau, Appia, Edward Gordon Craig; in dance Isadora Duncan and Diaghilev; and in the cinema a new wave headed by the Feuillade pulp series Les Vampires and Fantomas which, amongst other things, made film the kind of popular art which was to inspire the likes of René Magritte. Europe was certainly not without genius, which was about to flourish until war brought a murderous rebuff to the optimism of industrial civilization.

Dada was carving out its place. The anti-art manifestations of Marcel Duchamp which had been building up from 1914 were supplemented from 1916 by the uproar organized and promoted by Tristan Tzara and the leading lights of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The ironic fury of the Dadaists was directed against art, and particularly academic art, but also against political society as a whole, and against manners and conventional ideas. Tzara arrived in Paris in 1919, at a time when the review Littérature, which had just been founded, was bringing Louis Aragon and André Breton in touch with such writers as Fargue, Gide and Valery. Littérature was destined to become the centre of Parisian Dadaism, and the first ‘Monday articles’ of the journal, in January 1920, provoked a scandal and a riot. Meanwhile, in Berlin events had taken a more tragic turn: the Communist politicians and writers Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg had been assassinated. Der Dada (Huelsenbeck, Hausmann) proclaimed the death of art and that Dada was now ‘politics’. The only issue of Der Ventilator, in Cologne, printed 20,000 copies. Max Ernst and Hans Arp together with Johannes Baargeld, the founder of Der Ventilator, organized an exhibition which brought the police to the little restaurant where it was held.

The methods used by this severe agitation passed at the time for anti-art, but they very soon became an integral part of a renewal of true artistic activity: phonic poems (Schwitters), ‘words in freedom’ from the Futurist Marinetti, noise recitals by the Futurist Russolo, ‘ready-mades’ from Marcel Duchamp, drawings combined with texts (Picabia), collages (Ernst), ink blots (Picabia), assemblages of garbage (Schwitters), Mona Lisa moustaches (Duchamp, Picabia, the cover of 391, No. 12, March 1920), and a recourse to the strangest materials as well as to sheer chance (Arp, Sophie Taeuber). A number of technical processes and creative approaches later applied by the Surrealists were invented by the Dada movement.

André Breton, like most of the future Surrealists, took part in the Dada meetings, and the first ‘automatic’ text that he published with Philippe Soupault in 1921, Les Champs Magnétiques was only classified as Surrealist much later on. Inspired by Freud, it was written in the spirit of Dadaist spontaneity. But it also proves, by the power of its imagery and a certain experimental seriousness, that Breton in spite of all the Dada furore, never lost hold of the thread which joins his poetry to that of Apollinaire and Reverdy, and to Symbolism. That was why he was soon to break with Tzara and Picabia.

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, Picabia had shocked the Salon d’Automne, of which he had been a member since the time of Udnie and of Catch as Catch Can (1912), which are among the most important non-figurative paintings of the twentieth century, by exhibiting the products of his mechanist period. His playful, audacious works were loaded with ‘adjunctions’, or additions, such as matches, feathers and fuses. During the same period, Marcel Duchamp was in New York working on his large painting on glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, which he abandoned unfinished in 1923 in order to devote himself – so he claimed – to chess. After his success in the Armory Show, a major exhibition of modern art in New York in 1913 among the works Duchamp showed there was his Nude Descending a Staircase – he had signed, from 1914 onwards, ready-mades or mass-produced commercial objects obtainable from an ironmonger, and had exhibited them as sculptures. The most provocative of these was Fountain, a porcelain urinal signed ‘Richard Mutt’, which the Independents’ Show in New York had indignantly rejected. Duchamp never allowed his renunciation of art to separate him from his friend André Breton, and he was one of the inventors of Surrealist objects who remained most faithful to the Dada spirit; his inventiveness was to prove invaluable to the great international Surrealist exhibitions. He had worked in New York, in the same circle as Alfred Stieglitz, together with the young Man Ray who, as draughtsman and photographer, was to become one of the assiduous illustrators of the Surrealist review La Révolution Surréaliste.

But on the eve of the Barrès trial – a mock prosecution in which right-wing author Maurice Barrès, represented by a dummy, was accused of “crimes against the security of the mind” – in 1921, the break came between Breton and Dada. It was not because Breton wanted some kind of return to peace; the Surrealist ‘interventions’ show rather that it was a question of making the effect of public scandals more obviously offensive: more serious and less diffuse, in fact. The Barrès trial, the celebration of the death of Anatole France by the pamphlet Un Cadavre (A Corpse, 1924), the Lettre Ouverte a Paul Claudel, ambassadeur de France au Japon (1925), and the outrageous Saint-Pol Roux banquet at the Closerie des Lilas (1925), sufficiently indicate the aggressiveness of the young Surrealists. It is true to say that the essence of the matter was already elsewhere, and the spirit of experiment was trying to link poetry and knowledge. That association is a basic principle of Surrealism. The title of the review Littérature was a ‘wholly imaginary label’ (Breton); it records the results of the decisive experiments which are at the roots of Surrealism: the ‘sleeping period’ or ‘era of dream-work’, which Aragon was to speak of in Une Vague de Rêve (Commerce, 1924), which covered the years 1920-3. Littérature published Breton’s text, Entrée des Mediums, which contains descriptions of the hypnotic sleep sessions during which Creval and Desnos talked, wrote and drew. Accounts of such sessions appear in the issue of 1 December 1922. There is Desnos asleep, playing language games which from time to time conjure up a sparkling image. But Surrealism was in no position to become a metaphysical research institute, and experiments on the periphery of insanity aroused a certain fear that they might plunge too deep. This was reinforced by the incident in which René Crevel attempted to lead a mass group suicide (Crevel would finally kill himself in 1935). Breton cancelled these exercises, and art and poetry assumed their rightful places once again.

Littérature, New Series issue 3 (May 1922); cover by Man Ray

2. WE WILL EAT YOUR FLESH

In 1923 Littérature published a list of the"official" literary precursors of the group. Such names as Lautréamont, Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, Rimbaud, and, especially, the Marquis de Sade were added to that of Sigmund Freud as the cornerstones of their nascent Surrealism were laid. When Dada split into mini-groups, a single, compact Surrealist group eventually formed. In June 1924 the last issue of Littérature appeared. The headquarters of Surrealism, the Centrale Surréaliste, were established and from here was published on 1 December 1924 the ‘most shocking review in the world’, La Révolution Surréaliste. And when Breton published the First Manifesto, Surrealism (a term first coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917) had officially arrived.

The vagaries of history have obscured many people and events, yet the lasting products of the movement are increasingly brought into sharp relief; the written and 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 Pierre Naville and Benjamin Péret, then from issue No. 4 (1925) by André Breton, twelve numbers of La Révolution Surréaliste appeared between December 1924 and December 1929 – the year of Salvador Dali’s arrival, but also and most importantly the year of the Second Manifesto, which Breton used for a fierce purification of his group. This effectively signalled a split between two distinct Surrealst camps – those centred on rue Blomet, and those on rue Fontaine (where Breton lived). Those in the Blomet faction – who tended towards a philosophical spectrum inspired by Nietzsche – included Michel Leiris, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Robert Desnos. Many of these began to side with the radical intellectual Georges Bataille, who had courted the Surrealist since 1926 but by now was emerging as a major antagonist to Breton, producing his own journal Documents. Bataille, who in 1928 had written the most subversive pornographic novel of the 20th century, The Story of the Eye, was denounced by Breton in the Second Manifesto as an “excremental philosopher”.

Aragon, Breton, Eluard, Péret, Unik were then, and had been since 1926 members of the Communist Party. They were expelled in 1933, the year of the last issue of the review Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution (L.S.A.S.D.L.R.), six numbers of which were produced between July 1930 and May 1933. La Révolution Surréaliste deliberately practised 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 Française; the portrait appeared surrounded by photographs of all the members of the group. It also raised the question: ‘Is suicide a solution?’ and contained a number of dream reports and ‘automatic’ texts. The second issue (January 1925) featured the text ‘Open the prisons, disband the Army!’. Open letters, such as those of Breton to Delteil, or of Desnos to Pierre Mille, an address to the ‘warped Pope’ (No. 3, 1925), and a ‘letter to the medical directors of asylums for the insane’, are complemented by a dispute between Aragon and the Communist journal Clarté.

However, a committee for action against the war in Morocco having issued a manifesto, the Surrealists associated themselves with it, made their peace with Clarté, and signed the violently anti-nationalist text ‘La Revolution encore et Toujours’, published in La Révolution Surréaliste No. 5 (1925). Violence and black humour did not put a stop to the poetic and ethical experimentation: issue No. 9-lO (October 1927) was devoted to ‘automatic writing’ and the last issue posed the famous question: ‘What hope do you place in love?’ The illustrations in this review, intentionally austere in appearance, were much less politicized than the content, and less anxiously polemical. Man Ray, Chirico, Ernst, Klee, Masson, Picasso, Magritte, Miró, Tanguy and Arp let the others speak out, secretly sure that in the long term they would be the vehicles of a real revolution in sensibility. That revolution also took place through the medium of automatic writing; especially Paul Eluard’s poems, such as Capitale de la Douleur, 1926, and novels such as Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, 1926, and Breton’s Nadja (1928). Breton knew what Surrealism owed to the painters, and in La Révolution Surréaliste No. 4 had begun a series of articles on painting which were collected in 1928 as the first edition of his now famous book Le Surréalisme et la Peinture.

La Révolution Surréaliste, issue 1 (December 1924)

3. WE WILL FUCK YOUR SKULL

Automatism in drawing and painting was at the heart of the cult of insanity within the Surrealist ranks, a cult galvanized in 1922 when Max Ernst gave Eluard a gift in the shape of Hans Prinzhorn's Art of the Insane. In this precursor of Art Brut, the Surrealists found the elements of positive asocial flux which they themselves aspired to. Breton himself was an avid collector of works by "psychotic" artists such as Joseph Crépin and Hector Hyppolyte, and had also been inspired by Janet's L'Automatisme Psychologique of 1889, a report on the outpourings of hypnotized mental patients. In 1930, he and Eluard attempted a literary equivalent entitled Possessions, a collaborative text aimed at simulations of pure psychosis. That same year, when the first issue of L.S.A.S.D.L.R. appeared, the Second Manifesto had already made its ravages in the ranks of the Surrealists, and those expelled answered Breton with a caustic pamphlet, Un Cadavre. 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 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’ (of the Right) and ‘imbecilic Moscow’. Leaving his friends in 1931, he turned as violently against the dreams of his youth as Giorgio di Chirico, whose ‘apostasy’ he had condemned. In spite of this crisis, 1930 was a vintage year for Surrealism: in addition to the new review, there appeared one of the most beautiful poetic texts of the movement: L’Immaculée Conception, which included the pathological simulations of Breton and Eluard. Giacometti also produced his first ‘dumb mobile object’, The Time of the Traces. Henceforth there was no stopping the creative impulse of Surrealism. In 1931, Breton published Les Vases Communicants and even allowed himself the luxury of a dispute with Freud. Dali was breaking out, and together with Buñuel produced his second film, L’Age d’Or, which was almost as lyrically shocking as their earlier Un Chien Andalou (1929); both films provoked riots upon being screened in Paris.

“‘Transform the world’, said Marx; ‘change life’, said Rimbaud; these two instructions are one as far as we are concerned”, Breton wrote in 1934 in Position Politique du Surréalisme. But, to do it justice, L.S.A.S.D.L.R. did make an attempt to unite free poetic and moral creation with the discipline of revolutionary struggle, as if individualism and ‘party spirit’ were really compatible. The political stalemate of Surrealism arose from its inability to overcome this contradiction, which was perhaps one that never could be surmounted. Zhdanov imposed on the Soviet Union in 1934 the notion of art as 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 Surrealists withdrew into the labyrinth of myth. The review Minotaure was about to be launched.

In 1933, for the first time for nearly ten years, Surrealism had no review of its own. It was entering a phase of worldwide expansion. The exhibitions, such as that of 1932 in New York and that of 1933 at the Pierre Colle gallery in Paris, André Breton’s lectures and interviews (Prague, Zurich), the founding of several groups abroad (in Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Great Britain, Japan), showed not only the inward vitality of the movement, but the need for it in a world where anxiety about the immediate future recurred on the fringe of full-blown Fascist regimes, industrial civilization could hardly overcome a crisis for which capitalism was responsible, 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 and fabulator, he had become associated with the Surrealists in 1929 and had suggested – mainly in his tract La Femme Visible – a new means of achieving a fusion of the imaginary and the real – his ‘paranoiac-critical method’. His paintings, for instance The Enigma of William Tell (1933) – which outraged Breton with its depiction of Lenin with 9-foot buttocks – had abandoned automatism for a kind of dream record.

The review Minotaure, beautifully produced by Skira, appeared for the first time in June 1933. It was edited by E. Tériade and ran until 1939. The Surrealists co-operated with each other to some extent and in 1935 published an International Bulletin of Surrealism (No. 1, Prague; No. 2, Brussels; No. 3, London, 1936). Breton and Bataille both took part in the anti-Fascist group Counter-Attack. It was only with the tenth issue of Minotaure (December 1937) that the Surrealists took complete control of the magazine. Some newcomers, Hérold, Bellmer, Paalen (1935), Dominguez, who invented his ‘decalcomania’ technique in 1936, Ubac, and Seligmann (1937) swelled the ranks of the painters and object makers who together with Picasso (then very close to the Surrealists) illustrated the review. In spite of its lasting though uneasy political concern (a tract against the Moscow trials in 1936, Péret’s part in the Spanish Civil War, the expulsion of Eluard and Dali for otherwise contrary political reasons, the meeting of Breton and Trotsky in Mexico in 1938), Surrealism made an ‘artistic’ turn emphasized by the considerable success of the major international Surrealist exhibitions, in London in 1936 and in Paris in 1938. Breton was running the Gradiva gallery in Paris and published L’Amour Fou, a lyrical essay in which questions of premonition appear together with those of automatic writing.

Minotaure, issue 10 (1937); cover by René Magritte

4. WE WILL SMASH YOUR BONES

In the Minotaure era Surrealism really came into its own, both on the theoretical and political levels and on that of the various arts. The international exhibition at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1938 was deeply innovatory in its very conception: instead of exhibiting works, the Surrealists poetically transformed an office building into a quasi-magical location, and the Surrealist Street, decorated with suggestive models, was as successful as the whole enterprise (though this success owed nothing to the scandals that had marked the first stage of Surrealism). Breton and Eluard were already generally respected major poets; Dali, Ernst, Miró and Tanguy, just like Magritte later, were acknowledged as first-rank painters, and Arp developed – half-way between Abstraction. and Surrealism – a form of sculpture that won its own acclaim. The Surrealist objects that, in the manner of Giacometti, all the sculptors in the group produced at the level of an independent art-form, were typified by Hans Bellmer’s Doll and Meret Oppenheim’s found objectss. In short, Surrealism was in the process of becoming a School.

It was then that the Second World War broke out. In 1939 Dali, Tanguy (who followed his wife, Kitty Sage) and Matta went to the United States. Paalen moved to Mexico, where Breton and the painter Rivera published the bulletin Clé, the organ of the F.I.A.R.I. – the French initial letters of International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Artists. An international Surrealist exhibition was held in Mexico in 1940. In the same period France experienced both exodus and collapse. Most of the Surrealists, including Breton, who had returned to Paris in the meantime, and Ernst, released from Milles camp where the French had interned him (he was German by nationality), met at the Château d’Air-Bel, near Marseilles. There the Fry Commission was looking after refugee artists. They played Surrealist games; they invented the Marseilles ‘tarot’; then they were all taken by sea to America. Eluard, Picasso, Brauner, Dominguez, Hérold, and Bellmer remained in France, and Magritte in Belgium. Their diverse fates (or destinations) had two main consequences: on the one hand, the Surrealists in exile gave new strength to the American artistic avant-garde; on the other, the return of the exiles after the war did not provide the opportunity for a general regrouping of the Surrealists, since the experiences of those who had stayed in France had been too different from those of the refugees.

In the United States Breton broadcast on the radio. In 1941, he took his bearings in Genèse et Perspective Artistiques du Surréalisme. The word ‘artistic’ in the title shows how far he was from the anti-art concerns of early Surrealism; the Minotaure era had not truly come to an end. Breton met the painter Motherwell and members of the New York School who were then followers of Picasso. Motherwell, Gorky, Baziote and Pollock were stimulated by the example of Ernst, Masson and Tanguy. Breton published Prolégomènes à un Troisième Manfeste du Surréalisme on Non, which recalled the principles of the movement, and David Hare published the review VVV, edited by Breton, Duchamp and Ernst. Three issues came out from June 1942 to February 1944.

VVV, issue 4 (1944); cover by Roberto Matta

5. WE WILL KILL YOUR SONS

The lack of café society in the United States, and the way in which the painters were dispersed – with some in Arizona (Ernst, Dorothea Tanning), some in California (Man Ray), and some in Connecticut or elsewhere – did not allow the re-establishment of the European pre-war system in which the Paris cafés had played such a major part. This dispersion was complemented by various differences made worse by disputes. Masson parted company with Breton; Paalen left Surrealism in order to start the review Dyn in Mexico and the Dynaton movement. Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century gallery in New York exhibited the Surrealists, but Abstract Expressionism was already making itself felt in Pollock’s work. Only one major exhibition was held in New York under the aegis of the Surrealists: the First Papers of Surrealism (1942).

In the same period the Surrealists in Europe had gone to ground. Miró went from Varengeville to Montroig, in Catalonia, to finish his Constellations series. Bellmer hid in the Toulouse area. Brauner, one-eyed in the Alps, started painting in wax, for want of other materials. In Paris, the young poets, supported by Picasso, published the La Main à Plume issues, especially Poésie et Verité 12 by Eluard. Antonin Artaud, director of the Bureau of Surrealist Research from 1925-1927, was in the psychiatric clinic at Rodez, 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 Ernst exhibition. Maurice Nadeau published his Histoire du Surréalisme, in which he seemed to set the movement in a buried past.

This is the time of the Solar Eclipse.