Australian Surrealism

The Agapitos/Wilson collection

15 February – 11 May 2008

The story of Surrealism in Australia has until recently remained largely unknown. It was only in 1993 with the National Gallery of Australia’s exhibition Surrealism: revolution by night that the extent of Surrealist practice in this country was revealed. That seminal exhibition led the Sydney collectors James Agapitos, OAM, and Ray Wilson, OAM, to focus their energies towards collecting Australian Surrealist art.¹ Assembled with intellect and passion, their collection became the largest and most important repository of Australian Surrealist art in private hands.

The National Gallery of Australia has recently acquired the Agapitos/Wilson collection through a combination of gift and purchase. Covering the period 1925 to 1955, the Agapitos/Wilson collection includes 285 paintings, prints, collages, drawings, photographs and sculptures by the foremost artists associated with Surrealist art practice in Australia.

While there was no organised Surrealist movement in Australia, its importance lies in the fact that some of Australia’s leading artists were influenced by Surrealism at a formative period of their careers. James Gleeson, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, Robert Klippel and Max Dupain all experimented with Surrealist ideas and methods, and the impact it had on their art at that time and on their future development was decisive. Other artists, such as Ivor Francis, produced their best works under its influence. The story of Surrealism in Australia is of artists responding in individualistic ways to the possibilities it offered. With the exception of Gleeson, Australian artists did not become committed Surrealists; rather, they dipped in and out of Surrealism, selectively taking what they wanted for the enrichment of their art.

While Surrealism was not conceived as an artistic movement, its influence was to be felt most strongly in the visual arts, including painting, sculpture, photography and film. Surrealism was officially born in Paris in 1924 with the publication of French poet and intellectual André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism. For the Surrealists, the exploration of the unconscious mind, pioneered by Sigmund Freud, was a way to liberate the imagination from the dominance of reason. This would lead to the breaking of restrictive social conventions, bring to light previously repressed feelings and result in the greater happiness of mankind. The Surrealists’ aim was to revolutionise society at all levels, and Breton argued that the way forward was ‘the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality,
a surreality’.²

Surrealism’s fascination with dreams and the unconscious led the way to a new kind of imagery: the precise portrayal of dream-like scenes and disassociated narratives of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. Just as influential was Breton’s definition of Surrealism as ‘pure psychic automatism’, which opened the door to new creative processes such as exquisite corpse, decalcomania and frottage, all means of liberating the subconscious mind through the relaxation of conscious control.

While it is not possible to speak of a Surrealist style, at the heart of the Surrealist aesthetic was the illogical, unexpected juxtapositions of disparate elements, conveyed by the nineteenth-century writer Lautréamont’s phrase ‘beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella’ from his 1869 novel Les chants du Maldoror. This idea of the junction of disjunctive elements also informed the practice of collage – the quintessential Surrealist medium.

While the 1920s are considered the high point of Surrealism in France, the 1930s saw a resurgence of interest in Surrealism in England and America. The highly successful International Surrealist exhibition held at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936 included almost 400 works. The same year in New York, the Museum of Modern Art staged Fantastic art, Dada and Surrealism and Julien Levy held an exhibition of Surrealism at his gallery. ‘These three major exhibitions in 1936 … together with their various publications, related lectures and newspaper and radio reports firmly cemented the place of Surrealism within the English-speaking world.’³

Australian artist Peter Purves Smith, then living in London, is known to have visited the International Surrealist exhibition and his subsequent works show the stylistic influence of Surrealism in their strange figurative distortion and mood of disquiet. Fellow Australian expatriates James Cant, Clifford Bayliss, Geoffrey Graham and Roy de Maistre all experimented with Surrealism. Of these, Cant was the most strongly influenced and painted in a Surrealist style influenced by Giorgio de Chirico and Magritte. Cant had arrived in London in 1935 and through de Maistre was introduced to the Mayor Gallery, which had held solo exhibitions of the Surrealists Max Ernst and Joan Miró. Almost immediately Cant was invited to become a member of the British Surrealist Group and his work was regularly exhibited in Surrealist exhibitions to critical acclaim. In 1940 at the outbreak of the Second World War, Cant returned to Sydney. Joining the Communist party, Cant repudiated Surrealism in favour of social realism.

In the 1930s in Australia, Surrealism was often more visible in the realm of popular culture than in the fine arts.⁴ In 1938 the fashionable The Home magazine commissioned Max Dupain to take a series of Surrealist inspired portraits of socialites.⁵ Dupain was the only Australian photographer of his generation who felt the lure of Surrealism. In 1935 he had enthusiastically reviewed JT Scoby’s book on Man Ray for The Home, and he experimented with the techniques of solarisation, double exposure and photomontage, also producing his own ‘Rayographs’.⁶ His Doll’s head & goat’s skull c. 1935 uses the Surrealist strategy of juxtaposition: ‘In a bed of straw coiffed into pubic tufts, two unlikely lovers prepare to conjugate … the mannequin’s lips promise pleasure, and the animal’s maw presages death’.⁷ In the implicit erotic content of this, and other of his Surrealist photographs, Dupain was one of the few Australian artists who responded (albeit in a restrained manner) to Surrealism’s espousal of the liberation of sexual desire.

In the realm of painting, the influence of Surrealism had been seen in the works of Melbourne artists Sam Atyeo and Eric Thake in the early 1930s. However, these remained relatively isolated incidents, and as late as 1938 Basil Burdett begun his review of modern art in Melbourne with the observation that ‘surrealism is practically non existent’.⁸

The year 1939 can be seen as the watershed in Australian art when the tide finally turned in favour of Modernism. That year saw the first exhibition of the Contemporary Art Society, a group whose aim was to promote new ideas in art. This exhibition, held at the National Gallery of Victoria in June 1939, was an important showcase for modern art and attracted widespread attention. The exhibition included the Surrealist paintings Happy landing (The happy father) c.1939, The philosopher 1939 and The attitude of lightning towards a lady-mountain 1939 by Thake, Tucker and Gleeson respectively. With the publicity received by these works – The attitude of lightning towards a lady-mountain was reproduced both in the popular press and Art in Australia – Surrealism announced its arrival on the Australian scene.⁹

The ensuing uptake of Surrealism by artists from 1939 must be considered in the light of several factors. The revitalisation of Surrealism in England in the 1930s and 1940s and the increasing availability of publications in English had a decisive impact. Of these, Herbert Read’s Art now, which included a discussion on Surrealism, was the most widely read book on contemporary art of the period.¹⁰ The year 1939 was also the first time that works of European Surrealism were seen in Australia. The hugely successful Herald exhibition of French and British contemporary art of over 200 modernist paintings and sculpture toured Australia in 1939, and included paintings by Ernst, de Chirico and Dalí. Dalí’s L’homme fleur 1932 (now titled Memory of the child-woman) was ‘the prime target for abuse and admiration’.¹¹ In response to the interest generated by these works, Art in Australia asked Gleeson to write an article on Surrealism. ‘What is Surrealism?’ was published in 1940 and includes the first discussion of Australian Surrealist artists.¹² The following year Breton, the ‘pope of Surrealism’, also contributed an article to Art in Australia.¹³ Surrealism was now firmly established as one of the most visible of the modern movements.

The adoption of Surrealism by (almost exclusively) younger artists from 1939 onwards was also related to the widespread anxiety and increasing politicisation of society as Australia entered the Second World War. Richard Haese considers that, ‘To advocate Surrealism (good or bad Surrealism, nobody knew the difference) was to lay claim to being on the side of a radical and anarchic future’.¹⁴ Surrealism, born in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War, found a receptive home in Australia at the outbreak of the second. For many artists the war and Surrealism were inextricably linked and Gleeson recalled:

For a while, especially during the war years, I did think of Surrealism as a revolutionary weapon. I accepted Breton’s contention that by utilising the subconscious one could arrive at a condition that held the rational mind in balance and perhaps prevent such disasters as war, indifference or fanaticism.¹⁵

Gleeson, born in 1915, is the Australian artist who has been most closely connected with Surrealism, its longest practitioner and most prominent spokesman. Indeed, he considers that, ‘I was born a Surrealist’.¹⁶ Gleeson studied at the East Sydney Technical College and the Sydney Teachers College where he had access to a large library of art books and journals. As early as 1938 Gleeson was painting Surrealist inspired images and producing poem – drawings which sought to integrate text and image.

Gleeson’s first exhibited Surrealist painting was The attitude of lightning towards a lady-mountain. Dalí’s influence is strongly evident in the deep space and dream-like qualities of the scene and the precise realism with which it is painted. A towering feminine biomorphic rock formation, its eroded surface recalling the drapery of classical statuary, stands in front of a smaller form. Both anthropomorphic shapes are repeated in a silhouette cut-out on the horizon. The fluid forms of the lightning are juxtaposed with the rigid architectural forms in the foreground. Renée Free has argued that the theory of opposites and metamorphosis are at the core of Gleeson’s art and philosophy. In this work, lightning is the agent of change and of metamorphosis.¹⁷ The attitude of lightning towards a lady-mountain was the first Surrealist work acquired by James Agapitos and Ray Wilson and a key factor in their decision to devote themselves to collecting Australian Surrealism.

In 1947 Gleeson left Australia for England. After a short stay in London he took up residence at ‘The Abbey’, art dealer William Ohly’s property in Hertfordshire, which had been set up as artist studios. There, Gleeson met fellow expatriate Robert Klippel who was to become a lifelong friend.

Klippel had arrived in England earlier in the year on a three-year stipend from his father. His friendship with Gleeson was to have a significant influence on his work and their collaboration on Madame Sophie Sesostoris (a pre-raphaelite satire) 1947–48 (in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales) marks the beginning of a period of Surrealist explorations. In December 1948 Klippel moved to Paris. Together with Gleeson he visited Breton (although Gleeson recalled that the meeting was not fruitful as Breton spoke no English and Gleeson’s French was poor) and soon became part of the Surrealist group centred around Breton at La Dragonne Gallery. In Paris, Klippel turned his energies to drawing, creating an extraordinary series of drawings of sinister biomorphic forms, including Drawing P19 c. 1949. Full of menace, three spiky plant-machines face towards a floating form. We sense that any change to the equilibrium will result in the immediate demise of this unfortunate creature. Gleeson considered that ‘it is with this sequence of drawings that he [Klippel] makes his closest approach to Surrealism, and through them we are drawn into the darkest chambers of his imagination’.¹⁸

Sidney Nolan, born in 1917, was Australia’s most original artist of the late 1930s, exploring Abstraction and Surrealism and experimenting with a wide range of unconventional techniques. Enrolled as a student at the National Gallery School in Melbourne from 1936–37 Nolan attended classes sporadically, preferring to spend his time in the reading room of the state library. There, he encountered the works of the poets Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire and William Blake, and writers James Joyce and DH Lawrence, among others. According to Haese, as late as 1939, Nolan was undecided as to whether to be a painter or a poet, and while he chose the former Nolan maintained a lifelong interest in literature, collaborating with writers and poets, and publishing his own poetry.¹⁹ Arthur Rimbaud, the nineteenth-century poet beloved by the Surrealists, was Nolan’s anti-hero – his poetry and unconventional life a guide in charting his own artistic journey.

During 1939–40 Nolan undertook an ambitious series of collages in homage to Rimbaud. As Bruce James points out, these works are in no way illustrations of Rimbaud’s poems; rather, their blend of ethnographic and geographic source material, ‘white imperialist themes’ and exoticism resonates with the poet’s biography and ‘succeed in emulating the poet’s signature fracturing of mood and sense’.²⁰ Surrealistic in intent, mood and method, these collages are amongst the earliest forays into the quintessential Surrealist medium of collage by an Australian artist.

Constructed of cut-up and re-arranged squares of nineteenth-century black-and-white engravings, which are glued onto another engraving, the result is an unstable, constantly shifting image, a jumbled ‘nonsense’ image, defying visual or narrative interpretation. While Ernst had earlier used steel engraving for his collages, their aims were dissimilar. Ernst used the collage process to create new fantastical imagery whereas Nolan’s collages destroy the conventions of representation and linear narrative. In several of Nolan’s collages, this idea is carried further with the inclusion of completely abstract elements – coloured squares – arranged in a checkerboard pattern over the engravings.

In 1948 Nolan was asked to design the stage set for Jean Cocteau’s Orphée 1926 to be performed by the Sydney University Dramatic Society. Orphée was a modernisation of the Orpheus myth, and Cocteau introduced the device of the mirror as the passageway from the world of the living to the world of the dead. Nolan recalled: ‘I followed all of Cocteau’s instructions quite literally. I had mirrors all over the place made of silver paper … the mirrors blinded the audience at rehearsals’.²¹ Nolan’s painting Orphée, as self-consciously stylish as Cocteau himself, is based on Nolan’s collaged design for the play’s drop curtain. In the painting Nolan uses the silver foil wrapping of a Cadbury chocolate bar to indicate the mirror – appropriately, the embossed ‘Cadbury’ is reversed, as in mirror writing.²²

In Adelaide, Surrealism crystallised around the precocious poet and intellectual Max Harris. In 1940, while still a student at the University of Adelaide, Harris had established the literary journal Angry Penguins. Harris declared himself an anarchist and a Surrealist, and the second issue of Angry Penguins featured a reproduction of Gleeson’s Surrealist painting Images of spring. Ivor Francis was Adelaide’s most prominent Surrealist painter. Around 1940, he met Max Harris and began his own investigations into Surrealism. Francis was also greatly inspired by Harris’s writing, particularly his Surrealist novel The vegetative eye of 1943. Investigation, scientific or otherwise, of matter without form 1943 employs a nightmarish dream-imagery to suggest the fate of man at the mercy of psychic forces.

While Francis’s painting activities declined in the late 1940s after his appointment to the Education Board of the then Australian Broadcast Commission, Adelaide soon received another adherent of Surrealism. Dusan Marek arrived in Adelaide in 1948 after fleeing the communist regime in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). Marek had studied at the Institute of Fine Arts in Prague where his teachers included Frantisek Tichy, a supporter of Surrealism. Gravitation – the return of Christ 1949 is one of Marek’s masterworks. In this meticulously painted work, Marek creates a mood of menace with a canon dominating the left side of the composition. Adding to the sense of unease, a convex mirror on a boat floating on the rolling ocean gives a distorted view back onto the viewer, and acts as an opening onto another reality. The boat and the ocean are suggestive of journeys and transformations, as is the evolutionary appearance of the man–ape who holds aloft another figure.

A Surrealist undercurrent runs through Arthur Boyd’s darkly expressionistic paintings of wartime Melbourne. Franz Philipp considers that ‘[m]etamorphosis – or rather its literal visualization – is a fundamental feature of Boyd’s iconography, and is more closely related to surrealist than to expressionist notions’.²³ Boyd’s remarkable ceramic sculpture The bride 1953/54 is explicitly concerned with this concept. The bride is composed of multiple fleshy protuberances of breasts and buttocks juxtaposed against a beak-like nose. An image of a butterfly, a recurring motif in Boyd’s art symbolic of metamorphosis, is emblazoned across her breasts. Philipp notes that in Graeco-Roman art the butterfly is a symbol of the soul, while in Christian iconography it stands as a symbol of the resurrection of Christ.²⁴ This symbolism is in stark contrast with the earthy fecundity of the bride, and a reminder of the presence of death in the midst of life.

In February 2008, the National Gallery of Australia will mount a special exhibition devoted to the Agapitos/Wilson collection of Australian Surrealist art, which will include The bride and other key works from the collection. Sadly, James Agapitos passed away early this year. The acquisition of the collection by the National Gallery of Australia is the fulfilment of his and Ray Wilson’s long-held dream to make their collection available to the nation for the enjoyment of visitors for generations to come. It constitutes a remarkable act of generosity and will forever remain testimony to the insight, vision and commitment of James Agapitos and Ray Wilson to Australian art.

Elena Taylor
Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture

¹ As they wrote in the foreword to the publication documenting their collection: ‘The exhibition catalogue became a bible to us, a valued guide that led us to a number of our later acquisitions. Our original enthusiasm for Australian art returned with a vengeance. We searched through books and catalogues and enjoyed the chase and each new discovery. We contacted many artists, their families and friends of deceased artists’. Bruce James, Australian Surrealism: the Agapitos/Wilson collection, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2003, p. 14.

² André Breton, ‘The Surrealist manifesto’ (1924), in Lucy Lippard (ed.), Surrealists on art, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1970, p.15.

³ Ken Wach, ‘James Gleeson and Surrealism: the inexhaustible murmur’, in Lou Klepac, James Gleeson: beyond the screen of sight, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2004, p.41.

⁴ Man Ray’s photograph Glass tears c. 1930 was reproduced in The Home magazine in February 1934 accompanying salad recipes. For a discussion of Surrealism and popular culture in Australia, see Christopher Chapman, ‘Surrealism in Australia’, in Surrealism: revolution by night, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1993, pp. 268–75.

⁵ ‘A gallery of Surrealist portraits’, The Home, vol. 19 no. 6, June 1938, pp. 39–46.

⁶ Gael Newton, Max Dupain, David Ell Press, Sydney, 1980, p. 25.

⁷ James, p.56.

⁸ Basil Burdett, ‘Modern art in Melbourne’, Art in Australia, no. 73, 15 November 1938, pp. 12–23.

⁹ With the National Gallery of Australia’s acquisition of Happy landing (The happy father) and The attitude of lightning towards a lady-mountain from the Agapitos/Wilson collection, all three works are now reunited in the Gallery’s collection.

¹⁰ For a comprehensive listing of books and reproductions of Surrealism available in Australia see Christopher Chapman, ‘A bibliographic chronology of Surrealism in Australia 1923–49’, in Surrealism: revolution by night, pp. 310–15.

¹¹ Mary Eagle, Australian modern painting between the wars 1914–1939, Bay Books, Sydney, 1989, p. 201. Mary Eagle also notes that the Empire Loans collection of twentieth-century British art, held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1939, also included a Surrealist section. p. 198.

¹² James Gleeson, ‘What is Surrealism?’, Art in Australia, no. 81, 25 November 1940, pp. 27–30.

¹³ André Breton, ‘Originality and liberty’, Art in Australia, no. 4, 1 December 1941, pp. 11–17.

¹⁴ Richard Haese, Rebels and precursors: the revolutionary years of Australian art, 2nd edn, Penguin, Melbourne, p.105.

¹⁵ James Gleeson, interview with Lou Klepac, in James Gleeson: landscape out of nature, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 1987, p. 14.

¹⁶ Lou Klepac, James Gleeson: landscape out of nature, p. 12.

¹⁷ Renee Free, ‘James Gleeson: ideas from the shadows’, in James Gleeson: beyond the screen of sight, p. 56.

¹⁸ James Gleeson, Robert Klippel, Bay Books, Sydney, 1983, p. 119.

¹⁹ Haese, p. 90.

²⁰ James, p. 119.

²¹ Sidney Nolan, ‘Painting and the stage’, lecture presented to the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1988, quoted in TG Rosenthal, Sidney Nolan, Thames and Hudson, London, 2002, p. 255.

²² Nolan’s Orphée is one of the earliest Australian paintings to incorporate collaged elements. The Agapitos/Wilson collection contains an earlier painting by Herbert McClintock (aka Max Ebert), Approximate portrait in a drawing room 1938, incorporating collage. Nolan himself used collage in the Kelly subject K & Sergeant Kennedy 1945. See James, p. 50.

²³ Franz Philipp, Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, p. 32.

²⁴ Philipp, p. 173.

Saville Park Suites is a proud supporter of the Australian Surrealism: the Agapitos/Wilson collection Exhibition

The above copied from:
http://www.nga.gov.au/AustralianSurrealism/

Making Sense of Modern Art

Magritte and Surrealism
The Liberation of Instinct

View Interactive Guide

This section of Making Sense of Modern Art explores the Surrealist art movement. Inspired by Freud's recently published insights into the hidden reaches of the unconscious, the Surrealists sought to subordinate the rational mind in favor of the liberation of instinct. Led by the poet André Breton, the Surrealists proposed an alternative agenda for the transformation of society. In the movement's later years, Breton described this pursuit in an interview: "Completely against the tide, in a violent reaction against the impoverishment and sterility of thought processes that resulted from centuries of rationalism, we turned toward the marvelous and advocated it unconditionally."

Making Sense of Modern Art offers an extensive and engaging guide to modern and contemporary works in the Museum's permanent collection. Its rich-media format enables you to "zoom in" on full-screen details of individual artworks, explore excerpts from archival videos and films, and listen to commentary by artists, art historians, critics, and collectors.

The above copied from:
http://www.sfmoma.org/msoma/artworks/5760.html

The Vice of Surrealism

Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful. anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.
Andre Breton, 1924

And ever since I have had a great desire to show forbearance to scientific musing, however unbecoming, in the final analysis, from every point of view. Radio? Fine. Syphilis? If you like. Photography? I don't see any reason why not. The cinema? Three cheers for darkened years. War? Gave us a good laugh. The telephone? Hello. Youth? Charming white hair. Try to make me say thank you: "Thank you." Thank you.
Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism

(Surrealism) declares that it is able, by its own means, to uproot thought from an increasingly cruel state of thralldom, to steer it back onto the path of total comprehension, return it to its original purity.
Andre Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.
Andre Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism

Surrealism, as I envisage it, proclaims loudly enough our absolute nonconformity, that there may be no question of calling it, in the case against the real world, as a witness for the defense. It could only account, on the contrary, for the complete state of distraction which we hope to attain here below. Kant's absentmindedness about women, Pasteur's absentmindedness about "grapes," Curie's absentmindedness about vehicles, are in this respect, deeply symptomatic*.
Andre Breton, 1924, Manifeste du Surrealisme

*There is an ascending gradation here in the consequences of absentmindedness. Kant was a confirmed bachelor who completely ignored women all his life. Pasteur on the other hand was involved once in a rather ridiculous incident when, during a meal, he carefully washed grapes in a glass of water, explaining to his guests the importance of eliminating germs from food--and then, distracted, drank the soiled water in the glass. As for Curie, his absentmindedness caused his death: he was run over by a carriage and killed while crossing a street.
Marcel Jean, The Autobiography of Surrealism, p. 125

The above copied from:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rmutt/dictionary/breton.html?Surrealism

Walter Benjamin, Surrealism and Photography

Rajeev S. Patke

National University of Singapore

[Paper presented at Workshop on ‘Literature as Revolt in Twentieth Century Europe’, 17 August 1998, The University of Haifa, Israel (6th ISSEI Conference)]

Benjamin wrote his essay on Surrealism during 1928, when the Surrealist movement was still in what André Breton called its transition from an "intuitive" to a "reasoning" phase.1 Benjamin's recent work, the city-montage of One-Way Street (1928), had taken on the challenges presented to the writer by the natural history of the modern, post-Baudelairean, urban landscape of Europe. It had given him a presentiment of what was to become the Arcades project, the main preoccupation of his last decade. These developments were accompanied by the onset of a highly personal commitment to Marxism. In this context, his relation to the Surrealists was adventitious and fortuitous. He was neither part of the movement, nor close to its members, though he looked on, first with a keen—and then with a disappointed—eye on their activities in Paris.

In 1926, he had found Louis Aragon's Le paysan de Paris exciting, like "the shock of a violent crisis". Aragon's focus on the Opera Arcade in Paris as "one of those absurd and legendary manifestations that made its greatness and its rot",2 anticipated Benjamin's increasing conviction that a new way had to be found for treating the images of everyday bourgeois reality. In July 1925 he wrote to Rilke: "The way language enters the realm of dreams by conquest, authoritatively and normatively, is what particularly moved me about surrealism".3 In "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1935), Benjamin credited Surrealism with having exposed to view "the ruins of the bourgeoisie".4 Art and its institutions had to be pulled down. But the attack on art launched by Surrealism lost its momentum in solipsistic esotericism. So did the political activism. Though Breton maintained a firm polemical grasp of the revolutionary intentions of the Surrealist movement, the political affiliations of the various Surrealists kept changing. Unlike Paul Claudel or Aragon, or Breton, all of whom joined the Communist party at some point, Benjamin kept himself clear of Party affiliation, even though he had written to Scholem in 1924 of generating "a `politics' from within myself".5 The freeplay of associations that was characteristic of Surrealism, and its Dada legacy, did not prepare its anarchist methods for a focussed political praxis. Benjamin's temperament could only politicize itself through the mediation of writing. Surrealism's forte remained shock tactics; Benjamin's meditation. Their means forestalled their intended political ends.

But Benjamin was alert to how developments in the technological means of production affected the nature of art. The Surrealists were indifferent to this issue, given their preoccupation with the subliminal, and their active opposition to technique as a resource for the conscious manipulation of materials. The creative powers of the unconscious were celebrated by the Surrealists. Benjamin too approved of the element of chance in creativity, and the relief offered by the subliminal to consciousness. He also welcomed the Surrealist desire to disorder the senses. But he was never insistent on automatism in art as both means and ends. He was not primarily interested in objects created or discovered by the unconsciousness. His objective was to uncover the objects of external, socio-historical reality, as these might be redeemed by the "profane illumination" of the artist. Benjamin development took a divergent path from that of Surrealism, but he never lost touch with his original sympathy for the shared impulses behind their ideas.

An enthusiasm for spontaneous images remained one of the strongest links between the Surrealist and Benjamin. Benjamin experimented with drugs from 1927 to 1934, and chronicled his surreal experiences in eight "Protocols".6 The fifth, dated March 1930, speaks of the "tumultuous production of images" made possible by hashish with "images like those familiar to us from surrealist paintings". While the fortuity of imagery was a means towards an integrated imagination for Benjamin, the Surrealists treated the found image as a cherished end in itself. The connection between creativity, the unconscious, and states of trance induced by drugs interested Benjamin. Unlike the Surrealists, he was also preoccupied with the connection between the trance of hallucination and that of mysticism. "Hashish in Marseilles" identifies several features of the drug-trance. One is an expanded sense of inner space and time;7 another is the fascinated gaze with which Benjamin contemplates "the faces I had around me, which were, in part, of remarkable coarseness and ugliness". The transmutation of such ordinariness was the burden of the secular mystery that Benjamin undertook as one of his tasks.

Benjamin's hashish trances made a connection between the sacred and the profane when mediated by his notion of the aura. "Protocol 5" posits three aspects of the aura:

First of all, the genuine aura appears in all things, not just specific ones as people imagine. Secondly, the aura changes completely and fundamentally with each movement made by the object whose aura it is. Thirdly, the genuine aura can in no way be thought of as the immaculate, spiritualistic magic ray as depicted and described in vulgar, mystical books. On the contrary, the distinguishing feature of the genuine aura is the ornament, an ornamental periphery in which the thing or being lies fixed, as if confined in a sheath.8

Nothing in Surrealism corresponded to Benjamin's preoccupation with the aura. Aragon celebrated the fortuity with which the Surrealist found his images: "in this enviable peace, how easy is daydreaming. Let dream carry itself forward.... Images come down, like confetti. Images, images, everywhere images".9 Benjamin shared this pleasure. But the images of his own writing were self-conscious rather than accidental. The notion of a dream from which the age has to be awakened served Benjamin as a metaphor for the revolutionary function of art. The idea and image were derived from Marx: `The reformation of consciousness lies solely in the awakening of the world... from its dream about itself".10 Benjamin applied this image to "dialectical thinking" as "the organ of historical awakening".11 Breton takes the opposite stance in "What is Surrealism?" (1934): "for us... at the point where we found it, the dialectical method in its Hegelian form was inapplicable".12

Benjamin's association of dream and dialectic with image was a curious one:

... image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of the Then to the Now is dialectical—not development but image leaping forth.13

He speculated further:

Can it be that awakening is the synthesis whose thesis is dream consciousness and whose antithesis is consciousness? Then the moment of awakening would be identical with the "Now of recognizability", in which things put on their true—surrealistic—face.14

Adorno took Benjamin to task for what he believed was a confused utopianism:

... the dialectical image should not be transferred into consciousness as a dream, but in its dialectical construction the dream should be externalized and the immanence of consciousness itself be understood as a constellation of reality.15

Subsequent readers of the Benjamin-Adorno debate have generally conceded that Adorno may have been the more correct—but less intuitive—Marxist. We meet the dialectical image in a more viable way, in Benjamin's account of photography.

"A Small History of Photography" appeared in 1931.16 Photography exemplifies his belief that developments in the technology of production alter the scope of what an artist or author can do as producer in relation to materials, vocation, and their impact on society. In 1934, "The Author as Producer" makes the political relevance explicit: "technical progress is for the author as producer the foundation of his political progress".17 The photograph is celebrated for the capacity it shares with the Dada image, to transmute "the tiniest authentic fragment of daily life". The technique of montage is singled out because "Much of this revolutionary content has gone into photomontage". The modernity of the photograph resides in its power to transmute: "it can no longer depict a tenement block or a refuse heap without transfiguring it". The photograph becomes a metaphor for art as a form of revolutionary action.

"Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" continues this train of thought. Photography is treated as an instance of the development of technical means against which, from the middle of the nineteenth century, painting has been forced into a series of rear-guard actions. The same position can be discovered in Breton. His essay "Surrealist Situation of the Object" (1935) remarks on how, "Unable to engage in the seemingly futile struggle with photography, painting was forced to retreat and reorganize its ranks in an invulnerable position, under the necessity of visually expressing internal perception".18

Benjamin takes the history of photography to embody the political potential of surrealism in at least four ways. Photography renovates representation by emancipating it from degenerate conventions and debased social functions. Benjamin replaces the notion of "photography as an art' with the idea of `art as photography".19 The reorientation foregrounds the social relevance of art. Photography practises what Benjamin calls "a salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings".20 Breton described what Surrealism hoped to accomplish along identical lines in "The Automatic Message" (1933): "The `disordering' of the senses, of all the senses, remains to be achieved or, what comes to the same thing, the education (practically speaking, the dis-education) of all the senses remains to be done".21 Photography offers to consciousness modes of reality that would remain in the unconscious without its action: "It is through photography that we discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis".22 The analogy is striking and apt. The photograph preserves in space that which is transient in time. The rapidity of movement with which mutability exercises its fugitive effect on human perception, the complexity of detail at the micrological level that slips through the wide net of the human visual apparatus, all these the photograph redeems by preserving.

That is how Benjamin again comes up with the idea of the dialectical image. Evanescence—the decay of material reality as it is lived in time—is accurately transfixed; and yet, in being so held back from time, it is sublated. The swell of nostalgia that Benjamin both succumbs to, and resists, is thus aroused and allayed by photography. The force with which this happens in Benjamin separates his concerns from Surrealism. Photography helps him recover the hope that the very idea of redemption may be redeemed. Finally, photography is magical in a special way. The Surrealists had aimed at restoring the phantasmagoric quality to everyday objects. In "What is the Mechanism of Collage?", Max Ernst described one technique for achieving this: by "The pairing of two apparently unpairable realities on a plane apparently unsuitable to them".23 For Breton, conscious of modernity as the epoch of "a fundamental crisis of the object",24 the technique was not collage or montage but frottage: "intensifying the irritability of the mind's faculties".25

Benjamin saw his own work on European cities as a linguistic extension of photomontage. He was the revolutionary disguised as a cultural historian strolling amidst the ruins of the museum that was the nineteenth century. In this crisis, photography looked at persons as inscrutably as it looked at objects. The photograph was the image of that looking. Thus we arrive at Benjamin's notion of the gaze: "I find among my notes the surprised comment `How things withstand the gaze'".26

In 1931, Benjamin compared an image of modernity—a photograph of Kafka aged six, staring out with "immensely sad eyes"—with the earliest photographs. In them, "people did not yet look out at the world in so excluded and god-forsaken a manner as this boy. There was an aura about them, an atmospheric medium, that lent fullness and security to their gaze even as it penetrated that medium".27 Thus Benjamin constructs a myth of dispossession, in which photography is the medium which preserves utopia: the one-that-never-was for the sake of the-one-that-might-be. Through the course of the nineteenth century, "the aura" was "banished from the picture' because of `the deepening degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisie".28

Yet the essay goes on to applaud "Atget's Paris photos" as "the forerunners of surrealist photography", because "he initiates the emancipation of object from aura which is the most signal achievement of the latest school of photography".29 The ambivalence about the aura deepens:

He looked for what was unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift, and thus such pictures too work against the exotic, romantically sonorous names of the cities; they pump the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship. What is aura actually? A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be.30

The ambivalence has to do with the attitude he takes towards the aura in different frames of mind. When charged with revolutionary materialist fervor, the aura looks like the torn pellicle of the epoch of idealist metaphysics. But when his Lukácian zeal is less strident, the aura can again become the sheath through which the translucence of Messianism again reveals itself as the redemptive force that shall transmute natural history. In 1931, Materialist hopes prevailed over metaphysical memories, and in the spirit of the Surrealists, Benjamin celebrated the augury of universal utopia:

The stripping bare of the object, the destruction of aura, is the mark of a perception whose sense of the sameness of things has grown to the point where even the singular, the unique is divested of its uniqueness—by means of its reproduction.31

The same somewhat strained hope that reproducibility matters more than uniqueness is renewed in "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935).

From the middle 1920s to the middle 1930s the conjunction between Surrealism and Benjamin would sustain a commonalty which may be summed up in terms of two descriptions he provided Scholem. In both, he was thinking of his project on the Paris Arcades. In the first, from 1928, he described himself as a philosophical Fortinbras who "will take possession of the inheritance of surrealism in purely temporal terms".32 In the other, dating from 1935, he wrote of his project as representing "both the philosophical application of surrealism—and thereby its sublation".33 Those are the most accurate descriptions we have of the relationship between Benjamin and Surrealism.

What then was the Hamletian legacy? And what the sublation? To be surreal was to sustain actively a sense of acute historical crisis about consciousness, society, art, and culture. The unconscious had to be let in. The human urge to shape had to be unmade, and then remade, in acts of finding. Layers of convention and complacency had to be ripped away. The cleansing quality of violence had to be savored without distraction. Familiar modes had to be abandoned, their names erased, and new ones with no names discovered. The object had to be dismantled and reconstituted. Its patina of the familiar had to be wiped. Startling juxtapositions and wrenched transpositions had to convert surprise to shock. A state of perpetual shock had to be cultivated. Strangeness had to be returned to the familiar; the phantasmal had to become as commonplace as the ordinary. All this Benjamin shared with the Surrealists. But other compulsions had to be answered too, and about these, the Surrealists were like a Horatio to Benjamin's Hamlet pretending he was Fortinbras. The timeless was to be discovered in the mutable. Eternity was lost or found only in fragments of the Now. The fragments had to come from the unconscious, but the unconscious of the collectivity, not the individual. Adorno criticized Benjamin for this Jungian swerve, but the move had a simple logic. To valorize the individual unconscious was to slip into the narcissism of a Dali or the solipsism of an Eluard or the vocational transgressiveness of a Bataille. Another fate was reserved for Benjamin. Means were vacuous if pursued as ends. The debris of a degenerate reified culture had to be retrieved and reviewed. He took that to be his task. Like Browning's Grammarian, he studied to be worthy of the responsibility all his life. He had the temperament to follow a vision; while always being prepared to fall back upon the bank of nostalgia, shored with ruins in what Wallace Stevens would have called "the stale grandeur of annihilation".

Notes

1 André Breton, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont (London: Pluto Press, 1978), 116.

2 The Autobiography of Surrealism, ed. Marcel Jean (New York: The Viking Press, 1980), 73.

3 Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994) 274.

4 Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 161.

5 Benjamin, Correspondence, 258.

6 S. Thompson, "On Hashish" (Unpublished translation of "Protokolle zu Drogenversuchen", from Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Herman Schweppenhäuser and Rolf Tiedemann. Franfurt a.M., 1974-89, vol. VI: 558-603, 607-18), 1996. All quotations from the Protocols are from this source.

7 Benjamin, Reflections, 138.

8 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, London: Collier Macmillan, 1977), 275.

9 The Surrealists Look at Art, ed. Robert Shapazian (Venice, CA: The Lapis Press, 1992), 145.

10 Walter Benjamin, `N', in Gary Smith (ed.) Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 43.

11 Benjamin, Reflections, 162.

12 Breton, Selected Writings, 130.

13 Benjamin, `N', 49.

14 Ibid., 52.

15 Adorno, in Ernest Bloch, et al., Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Ronald Taylor (London and New York: Verso, 1977), 111-12.

16 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London and New York: Verso, 1979), 240-57.

17 Benjamin, Reflection, 230.

18 Shapazian, The Surrealists Look at Art, 179.

19 Bloch, Aesthetics and Politics, 116.

20 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 253.

21 Ibid., 251.

22 Shapazian, The Surrealists Look at Art, 183.

23 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 243.

24 Shapazian, The Surrealists Look at Art, 183.

25 Ibid., 161.

26 Ibid., 183.

27 Benjamin, Reflections, 144.

28 Benjamin, One-Way Street, 247.

29 Ibid., 248.

30 Ibid., 249-50.

31 Ibid., 250.

32 Benjamin, Correspondence, 342.

33 Ibid., 505.

The above copied from:
http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ellpatke/Benjamin/benjamin_surrealism.htm

History of the Surrealist Movement

Chapter Two
1924-1929
Salvation for Us Is Nowhere
by Gérard Durozoi
Translated by Alison Anderson

On October 11, 1924, the existence of a surrealist group was publicly confirmed by the opening at 15, rue de Grenelle (the premises were on loan from Pierre Naville's father) of a Bureau for Surrealist Research, whose aim was to "gather all the information possible related to forms that might express the unconscious activity of the mind." The press was notified of the opening and of the imminent publication of a new periodical, La Révolution surréaliste—an undertaking Breton had decided on by the beginning of July, while he was correcting the proofs of the Manifeste du surréalisme. Word of the opening spread quickly enough for the Journal littéraire to publish an account of the event the very same day: "The promoters of the surrealist movement, in their desire to appeal to the unconscious and to set surrealism along the path of greatest freedom, have already begun to organize a Bureau to unite all those who are interested in expression where thought is freed from any intellectual preoccupations; . . . all those who are closely or remotely concerned with surrealism will find all the information and documentation relative to the Mouvement surréaliste." The same commentary in Les Nouvelles littéraires: "No domain has been specified, a priori, for this undertaking, and surrealism proposes a gathering of the greatest possible number of experimental elements, for a purpose that cannot yet be perceived. All those who have the means to contribute, in any fashion, to the creation of genuine surrealist archives, are urgently requested to come forward: let them shed light on the genesis of an invention, or propose a new system of psychic investigation, or make us the judges of striking coincidences, or reveal their most instinctive ideas on fashion, as well as politics, etc., or freely criticize morality, or even simply entrust us with their most curious dreams and with what their dreams suggest to them."

Not only did such announcements emphasize the collective nature of the movement, they also indicated the bureau's primary intention of remaining open to all those who dared venture into the vicinity. The bureau was indeed organized in such a way that a daily presence was assured by two people, who were responsible for greeting visitors (journalists, writers, onlookers, even students) and for taking note of their suggestions and reactions in a daily "Notebook"; the office would also guarantee a regular amount of daily publicity for the movement (press relations, various mailings), while in another room, on the first floor, other members of the group could meet for discussions, or exchange ideas and projects, or work on their own texts, or help to edit the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste.

The premises were "decorated," as captured in a famous photograph by Man Ray, with a few paintings (De Chirico: Le Rêve de Tobie; a watercolor by Robert Desnos; a canvas by Max Morise), posters, and, before long, a headless plaster statue of a boar in a stairway. The surrealists archived works that had already been exhibited, as well as the notebooks in which they would jot down their automatic texts and manuscripts. An atmosphere of effervescent research reigned, where the gifts of chance were always welcome (a poster glimpsed on a wall might be pointed out or the ludicrous content of a classified advertisement), along with the marvelous, thought to be ever latent in everyday life and ready to suggest incongruous juxtapositions of objects and arouse the imagination by reinforcing the victory over mental habits. But the bureau was anything but a simple place for accomplices to gather, even if their affinity was confirmed daily by the communication of dreams and fantasies and by shared laughter, spontaneous exchange, and the joy of the ongoing discovery: the bureau, like the Manifeste or La Révolution surréaliste, also served a strategic purpose.

In 1924, a specter haunted Paris—at any rate, the specter of surrealism—and it was up to Breton and his friends to prove that they did not intend to allow anyone else to clarify its significance (or, inversely, to trivialize it). An evening at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées was the occasion for a first skirmish: "surrealist dances" were scheduled to be performed by Valeska Gert, whose impresario was Ivan Goll; the group disrupted the performance with a concert of whistles, and then a row broke out between Goll and Breton, and the event ended abruptly with the arrival of the police. On August 23, Breton and ten of his friends printed a collective text in Le Journal littéraire, "Encore le surréalisme," in response to Goll's declarations maintaining that a surrealist school had existed at least since the time Apollinaire first used the adjective to describe Les Mamelles de Tirésias, and among its proponents were not only Goll himself but also Pierre Albert-Birot and Paul Dermée. The collective declaration affirmed that "Monsieur Dermée involuntarily exploited the grotesque usefulness of Dadaism and his activity was always foreign to surrealism"; also, it stated that "surrealism is something quite different from the literary wave imagined by M. Goll," before introducing texts that were soon to be published (La Révolution surréaliste, the manifesto, texts by Desnos, Péret, Aragon, and Roger Vitrac) that would reinforce their claim that they had "nothing to do with Mr. Goll, or with his friends either." Le Journal littéraire then published Goll's replies (reiterating the definition he put forward in 1919, to describe playwrighting: "The surrealist poet will evoke the distant realm of the truth, by keeping his ear to the wall of the earth") as well as those of Dermée (who, in the journal L'Esprit nouveau went back over his efforts to "ensure that the term surrealism is still in force" and "keep it separate from petty cliquish quarrels"; he also reproached Breton for wanting to "monopolize a movement of literary and artistic renewal that dates from well before his time and that in scope goes far beyond his fidgety little person"). Breton responded with countersignatures from his close collaborators: "One cannot get into a discussion with such phonies and nitwits," followed by an excerpt from the manifesto that outlined the history of the issue. The quarrel did not bring an end to the debate: Le Figaro and L'Intransigeant, on October 11, both confused the opening of the bureau and the publication of a journal edited by Ivan Goll whose title alone, Surréalisme, continued to feed the confusion. The unique issue of Surréalisme opened with a "Manifeste du surréalisme," followed by an "Exemple du surréalisme: Le cinéma" (Goll cited as a model La Roue by Abel Gance); among the contributions were pieces by Albert-Birot, Dermée, Pierre Reverdy, Joseph Delteil, Marcel Arland, Jean Painlevé, René Crevel, and Goll himself (an interview with Robert Delaunay). Though such eclecticism might have seemed spicy or even, from a distance, in good taste, in the actual context of the era it only contributed to the obscurity. At almost the same time, a special issue of L'esprit nouveau was devoted to Apollinaire; Dermée brought together a good number of writers who were opposed to Breton (Albert-Birot, Céline Arnauld, Goll, Picabia, Tzara, and Ungaretti, among others) to remind people of the fact that surrealism did indeed begin with Apollinaire. As proof, he published the letter sent to him by Apollinaire, the author of Alcools, in March 1917: "All things considered, I believe

On October 11, a letter was sent from the Bureau for Surrealist Research to Pierre Morhange, a collaborator on the periodical Philosophies, where he had recently evoked surrealism in terms that were particularly vague: "This art form, invented by the genial Max Jacob . . . finds beauty only when rounded out by a lively lyrical painting, in other words, instinctive and natural." The letter is brief: "We would like to notify you once and for all that if you give yourself the right to use the word 'Surrealism' spontaneously and without notifying us, more than fifteen of us will be there to cruelly set you right." The response this provoked was Messianic in tone: "Unfortunate gentlemen, I will not address you with words of hate. You are coming forward for me to fight you. I will fight you. And I will vanquish you with Goodness and Love. And I will convert you to the Almighty," and so on. This letter hardly improved their relations.

These skirmishes show just how much Breton and his friends sought to disengage surrealism from any narrowly literary, or even poetic, significance—if one persists in seeing poetry as nothing more than a somewhat refined form of literature. The bureau, from this point of view, was also the place where this principle could be periodically reasserted—because it needed to be—within the group itself: preparations for a first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, noted in the logbook, showed the efforts made to gather texts, illustrations, human interest stories, and anonymous information. Such heterogeneity would assure a multifaceted relation with life in all its aspects rather than with the aseptic, inefficient world of literature.

The Surrealist Manifesto

Breton's work, the subject of much discussion in the weeks before its publication, was published on October 15, 1924, in a volume with Poisson soluble by Simon Kra's Éditions du Sagittaire. Although it hardly took the author's close friends by surprise, it immediately took on the significance of a global challenge for the intellectual public. Initially conceived as a preface to Poisson soluble (traces of this initial intention can still be felt in its composition), the manifesto quickly acquired the status of an independent text, delineating the goals and challenges of surrealism, even if its insistence on the supremacy of the poetic image was due to its originally intended application.

The manifesto begins with a defense of the rights of the imagination (even as far as the limits of madness) as being the only rights capable of helping the individual avoid a "fate without light " and of compensating for the burden of "imperious practical necessity." The text establishes a relation between the imagination and a taste for freedom: "Dear imagination," says Breton, "what I love most about you is that you are unforgiving," and he added right away that "the word of freedom alone is all that still exalts me."

It was vital, therefore, to reevaluate the realistic attitude born of the positivist tradition, which was "hostile to any intellectual and moral uplift." In passing, this reevaluation seemed to criticize the novel, guilty of preventing the reader's imagination from taking flight because of its descriptive nature and also of stifling emotions by the use of psychological analysis, perforce simplistic and sterile. To the professionalism of novelists—always ready to fill pages in order to conceal the lack of necessity of what they were writing, Breton opposed a categorical objection: "I want one to be silent, when one ceases to feel . . . I'm saying only that I do not report the vacant moments of my life, and that it might be unworthy for anyone to crystallize those moments that do seem vacant."

But realism was also the fetishism of logical procedures, which were in fact incapable of solving the authentic problems of existence, while their overestimation had banished from the mind "anything that could be rightfully or wrongfully accused of being a superstition, a chimera . . . any means of searching for truth that does not conform with standard usage." Given such an ossification, Freud's contributions naturally deserved the highest praise, thanks to which "imagination may be about to regain its rights."

Subsequently, the importance of dreams was emphasized, because they reinforced the idea that thought, in humankind, had a much wider scope than the dominant tradition. Breton formulated four questions to try to define a terrain for research: What are the possibilities for the continuity of dreams and their application to life's problems? Do dreams explicitly harbor the causes of our preferences and our desires? What form of reason "broader than all others" gives dreams their "natural allure," where everything seems possible, for as long as the dream lasts? How can one conceive the "future resolution" of dreams and reality, apparently so utterly contradictory, in "the surreal?"

In the sparing tone of the manifesto, the attention given to dreams led to praise for the marvelous, synonymous with beauty, capable in and of itself both of instilling interest into the fabrication of novels, as witnessed by Mathew Gregory Lewis's The Monk, and of lending a character a dimension of "continuous temptation." While the marvelous had taken on different forms throughout history, Breton proposed giving it a contemporary form by evoking a castle that he and his friends could haunt at their leisure; any attempt to contrast its existence with what could be known of the place where Breton "really" lived would be in vain. This appeal to the poetic imagination invited an examination of its very sources, and Breton, using elements already evoked in "Entrée des médiums," retraced his itinerary, from his first experiments, which sought a definition of lyricism, to the crucial experiment of Les Champs magnétiques. The definition proposed by Reverdy in 1918 had had a considerable impact in helping to define the nature of the poetic image (it "is born, let's say, of the rapprochement of two relatively distinct elements. The greater and more just the distance between the two approaching realities, the stronger the image"). Also influential was the strange phrase of half-sleep captured one evening ("There is a man cut in two by the window"), as was the long quest for "spoken thought," encouraged by Freud's discoveries and by psychiatric activity during the war.

After this historical reminder, which enabled him to sweep aside, once and for all, surrealism's very inadequate references—such as Goll or Dermée—Breton went on to state his definition and did not hesitate to give it the allure of a dictionary item, since the aim was to make up for a lack that Apollinaire himself had felt.

SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism with which one proposes to express the real process of thought, either orally or in writing, or in any other manner. Thought's dictation, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, outside any esthetic or moral concerns.
ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism rests on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of hitherto neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends banish, once and for all, any other psychic mechanisms and to replace them in the resolution of the principal problems of existence. Have professed to absolute surrealism Messieurs Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, Desnos, Éluard, Gérard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon, Soupault, and Vitrac.

"These individuals seem to be the only surrealists so far," added Breton, "and there would be no doubt about this, were it not for the fascinating case of Isidore Ducasse." But this list was followed by a second list, specifying that point of view, or aspect of their work or existence qualified others (relatively) to be considered surrealists—among them Young, Roussel, Jarry, Rimbaud, Saint-Pol-Roux, and Vaché (of whom Breton would say, maintaining an ongoing and flawless spiritual continuity between Vaché and himself: "Vaché is surrealist within me.") Nor was this list definitively closed, but it united those thinkers who were still subjugated, sometimes quite voluntarily, to a "certain number of preconceived ideas" and who clung to them "because they had not heard the surrealist voice" and were thus condemned to be "instruments of too much pride," too tensely concerned with controlling their production, instead of allowing themselves to become, like the "absolute" surrealists, simple and "modest recording instruments" in the service of that surrealist voice that they were preventing from welling up freely within them.

Breton gave a few examples of that voice, quoting excerpts from Soupault, Vitrac, Éluard, Morise, Delteil, and Aragon. These were excerpts from written work; Desnos, in contrast, "speaks surrealist as much as he likes," and this was a confirmation that the true functioning of thought could be, as the definition suggested, expressed "either orally, or in writing." It was also, if need be, a reminder to those who insisted on seeing surrealism as nothing more than a new conception of literature that it was possible to be very genuinely surrealist, that is, given over to automatism, without, however, feeling obliged to write. It should have been clear that the apprehension of "the real functioning of thought" could not be confined to a narrowly literary goal or, more precisely, that the constraints imposed by the practice of literature were not compatible with the exploration of true thought, of thought as it takes shape, well short of reason and logic as they are ordinarily defined. Insofar as human activity, however, was organized by logic and reason, it was foreseeable that thought would feel narrowly enclosed therein and that it would declare a necessary war of independence on the limits reality was trying to impose on it: as the penultimate paragraph of the manifesto affirms, "only very relatively is the world a match for thought." This, in sum, was the basis of the revolt that for years now had been drawing those who refused to submit. The control exerted by reason and aesthetic or moral concerns could only stifle authentic thought and confine it to too narrow a framework. Doubtless this framework might appear to have the advantage of corresponding to a material or social reality, as it was initially responsible for what that reality became; but if thought freed itself from its censorship yet still found itself in disagreement with that same reality, it should by rights endeavor to modify it. Thus, as soon as surrealism was historically defined, it was able to claim a political dimension. In the manifesto however, any political dimension remained implicit, although Breton, using as his starting point the experimentally demonstrated principle that "language was given to man so that he might make a surrealist use of it," envisaged the so-to-speak local effects of surrealism, where certain social relations could be legitimately questioned. The enumeration—a parody of ancient books of magic—of the "Secrets of the Surrealist Art of Magic" was fairly ambiguous, for as soon as it had listed the conditions for automatic writing, it went on to suggest recipes for avoiding boredom in company (it would suffice to formulate some revolting banality), for making speeches (the surrealist "will be sitting pretty amidst all the failings" and "will be truly elect"), and for writing fake novels (and become rich as a result). Then came the transformations that surrealism would work on conversation, letter writing, and dialogue. The pages of Barrières, in Les Champs magnétiques, exemplified the absolute truth reestablished by "poetic surrealism" in dialogue: interlocutors would be freed from any obligations to be polite and words and images would spring up spontaneously. Breton went on to describe the responsibility of the writer and said that he could respond in all good faith to any accusation his text might evince, that he was not its author; it would be enough for this type of situation to become widespread for one to surmise that when surrealist methods were widely practiced, one would need "a new moral code to replace the current one, which is the cause of all evil."

On the nature of the poetic image, Breton demonstrated, using a number of examples, that it could not be premeditated: "It is the somewhat fortuitous rapprochement of two terms that has caused a particular light to give off a spark, the light of the image, to which we are infinitely sensitive." The image, instead of being manufactured, imposes itself on the poet as if in spite of himself, and Breton disagreed with Reverdy on this point: "The two terms of the image are not deducted one from the other by the mind with a view to the necessary spark . . . they are the simultaneous products of the activity I will call surrealist, and reason confines itself to the recognition and appreciation of this luminous phenomenon." Moreover, the beauty (or, according to the assimilation suggested above, the marvelous) of images constitutes an enrichment for the mind itself: if the mind initially submits to the images, "it soon realizes that images flatter its reason" and discovers, thanks to their fleetingness, the "unlimited expanses where its desires are manifest." Finally, the power of images is proportional to the degree of arbitrariness that they display as the terms draw closer: the more contradictory the referents seem, the more satisfaction the images offer, and the more paradoxically incontestable yet, in a certain still enigmatic fashion, justified they seem. What they can reveal in this way is an underlying current of controlled thought, an effervescence operating in fits and starts, or the immediate passage from one word to another and, beyond the words placed in an unexpected juxtaposition, from one designated reality to another. It is in this multiplicity of paths—which "normal" reason seeks, precisely, to ignore and against which it raises its logical, aesthetic, or moral barriers—that the complete and complex reality of thought resides, the reality that surrealism, heard as if it were a dictation emanating from the mind, has begun to push to the surface.

If, from this point on, on everything is possible in this realm of expanded thought, it becomes clear that the mind that gives itself to surrealism can relive "the best moments of childhood, exultantly"—and is childhood, evoked at the beginning of the manifesto, not the too brief period of existence where imagination dominates and enchants reality? To relive those best moments is to experiment once again with the ability to detach oneself from the world as we know it and to find in oneself the freedom to place that given world at a distance—even if that means one will return to it at some later point to consider it in a new way, with a deeper awareness of what it lacks to satisfy one's desires. Genuine thought goes beyond the limits of a narrow "reality," and that is also why, once its wealth has been rediscovered, there is a risk that it will no longer consent to be mutilated.

When referring to ways in which thought might emerge in written surrealism, Breton had complete faith in an extension of surrealist methods to prevent the appearance, in the immediate, of "surrealist clichés": if one considered how effective the cubist papiers collés were in bringing about unexpected associations, it was conceivable that poetry, too, could work in this way, and in multiple ways, to create associations with all the desired suddenness. These might be texts obtained by reorganizing fragments of lines cut out of newspapers, and Breton gave an example that respected the diversity of the initial typographical characters. But he immediately insisted on his lack of interest in what "surrealist techniques" might consist of: all that mattered was the result—either those techniques would contribute toward that result or not—and the relation that they would establish with the founding automatism or not.

Mingling autobiography, theoretical points of view, and references to the definite existence of a surrealist collective, whose members were listed, the manifesto provided an unambiguous outline of the movement's aims and axes of research. Instead of announcing the appearance of a new school or trend in the arts (as the futurist or Dada manifestos had done), it validated the ambitions that for some time had already been those of Breton and his close circle. Moreover, the list of authors who had formerly been surrealist only in part suggested that the movement had gained a legitimacy rooted in a particular interpretation of the history of writing, which confirmed all the while that this writing had nothing to do with literature alone; literature remained "one of the saddest roads leading to everything."

The scope of the surrealist agenda—nothing less than altering one's conception of humankind and of thought—was such that the publication of the manifesto sufficed for Goll and Dermée's endeavors to seem like simple literary replastering, and they immediately suffered the consequences: from October 1924, both the press and the public considered that "surrealism" referred to the movement led by Breton alone, even if some people (Maurice Martin du Gard, e.g.) continued to believe that Breton was making too much use of a term that belonged to Apollinaire. However, the work was not viewed unanimously by contemporary critics as the de facto inauguration of a new era of ideas: Henri Poulaille saw it as nothing more than a useless and sterile restlessness; Jean de Gourmont viewed Poisson soluble as a variation on the futurist "words at liberty" and surrealism as a mixture of Bergson and Freud; Louis Laloy judged the primacy of the unconscious to be inadmissible; Edmond Jaloux, who devoted a chronicle to the manifesto, Une vague de rêves, and Deuil pour deuil, judiciously found this first work comparable to Novalis and Poe, but feared the development of a literature that would be even more artificial than the one criticized; and Jean Cassou, who asserted that poetry must indeed resist the excesses of rationalism, was disappointed by the criticism of the novel and feared that Breton was preventing himself from obeying his "lyrical power."

In Le Disque vert (January 1925), Henri Michaux questioned the possibility of complete automatism ("It won't be that easy to reach such a complete letting go. . . . There are always concerns."), and as a result he judged Poisson soluble a disappointment, "monotonous, like a clown," envisaging all the while "a fusion of automatism and volition" and the subsequent production of surrealist texts that would "no doubt yield admirable works." In his periodical Manomètre, where in early 1924 he had greeted the "beautiful, pure language, Rimbaldian and personal at the same time," of Clair de terre and announced the foundation of "suridealism," Émile Malespine also revealed his hostility toward automatism, which, as a professional psychiatrist, he intended to reduce to a clinical case: "[The insane] who write in the manner of Monsieur André Breton are a very special category of patient: they are maniacs. Mania is a state of continual agitation, where the patients speak quickly and incessantly. The carping baptized surrealist writing by Monsieur André Breton is called verbal automatism by the alienists." As a result, Malespine considered the manifesto to be a pointless preface to the texts of Poisson soluble; paradoxically, the text as a whole "lacks spontaneity" and suffers from "an impeccable style."

Virtually all of these articles betrayed the obvious difficulty in situating the tenets of the manifesto in the project Breton had defined as extraliterary. Praise and reservations both were applied to a literary context, and it was not so much the life of the mind that concerned these observers as, logically, the life of letters.

Among Breton's close collaborators, reactions were obviously very different. They had agreed long ago with the principles he put forward, so the articles they devoted to his book were more a confirmation of affinity than a critical reaction. For Aragon, Breton "knows the ways between the constellations, and if he doesn't know them, he'll discover them." Éluard was primarily interested in Poisson soluble and accompanied his chosen excerpts with a prose that was poetic in itself; Victor Crastre, more of a theoretician, praised the manner in which Breton linked inspiration, genius, and the unconscious.

Copyright notice: ©2002 Excerpted from pages 63-74 of History of the Surrealist Movement by Gérard Durozoi, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2002 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of University of Chicago Press.

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ANDRÉ BRETON, from The Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930

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. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point. From this it becomes obvious how absurd it would be to define Surrealism solely as constructive or destructive: the point to which we are referring is a fortiori that point where construction and destruction can no longer be brandished one against the other. It is also clear that Surrealism is not interested in giving very serious consideration to anything that happens outside of itself, under the guise of art, or even anti-art, of philosophy or anti-philosophy — in short, at anything not aimed at the annihilation of the being into a diamond, all blind and interior, which is no more the soul of ice than that of fire.

. . . The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level . . .

. . . let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory . . .

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Manifesto of Surrealism

BY ANDRÉ BRETON (1924)

So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feels extremely modest: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty, in this respect he is still a newborn babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it. If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything. Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.

But it is true that we would not dare venture so far, it is not merely a question of distance. Threat is piled upon threat, one yields, abandons a portion of the terrain to be conquered. This imagination which knows no bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance with the laws of an arbitrary utility; it is incapable of assuming this inferior role for very long and, in the vicinity of the twentieth year, generally prefers to abandon man to his lusterless fate.

Though he may later try to pull himself together on occasion, having felt that he is losing by slow degrees all reason for living, incapable as he has become of being able to rise to some exceptional situation such as love, he will hardly succeed. This is because he henceforth belongs body and soul to an imperative practical necessity which demands his constant attention. None of his gestures will be expansive, none of his ideas generous or far-reaching. In his mind’s eye, events real or imagined will be seen only as they relate to a welter of similar events, events in which he has not participated, abortive events. What am I saying: he will judge them in relationship to one of these events whose consequences are more reassuring than the others. On no account will he view them as his salvation.

Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.

There remains madness, "the madness that one locks up," as it has aptly been described. That madness or another…. We all know, in fact, that the insane owe their incarceration to a tiny number of legally reprehensible acts and that, were it not for these acts their freedom (or what we see as their freedom) would not be threatened. I am willing to admit that they are, to some degree, victims of their imagination, in that it induces them not to pay attention to certain rules – outside of which the species feels threatened – which we are all supposed to know and respect. But their profound indifference to the way in which we judge them, and even to the various punishments meted out to them, allows us to suppose that they derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination, that they enjoy their madness sufficiently to endure the thought that its validity does not extend beyond themselves. And, indeed, hallucinations, illusions, etc., are not a source of trifling pleasure. The best controlled sensuality partakes of it, and I know that there are many evenings when I would gladly that pretty hand which, during the last pages of Taine’s L’Intelligence, indulges in some curious misdeeds. I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naiveté has no peer but my own. Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen. And note how this madness has taken shape, and endured.



It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled.

The case against the realistic attitude demands to be examined, following the case against the materialistic attitude. The latter, more poetic in fact than the former, admittedly implies on the part of man a kind of monstrous pride which, admittedly, is monstrous, but not a new and more complete decay. It should above all be viewed as a welcome reaction against certain ridiculous tendencies of spiritualism. Finally, it is not incompatible with a certain nobility of thought.

By contrast, the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity, a dog’s life. The activity of the best minds feels the effects of it; the law of the lowest common denominator finally prevails upon them as it does upon the others. An amusing result of this state of affairs, in literature for example, is the generous supply of novels. Each person adds his personal little "observation" to the whole. As a cleansing antidote to all this, M. Paul Valéry recently suggested that an anthology be compiled in which the largest possible number of opening passages from novels be offered; the resulting insanity, he predicted, would be a source of considerable edification. The most famous authors would be included. Such a though reflects great credit on Paul Valéry who, some time ago, speaking of novels, assured me that, so far as he was concerned, he would continue to refrain from writing: "The Marquise went out at five." But has he kept his word?

If the purely informative style, of which the sentence just quoted is a prime example, is virtually the rule rather than the exception in the novel form, it is because, in all fairness, the author’s ambition is severely circumscribed. The circumstantial, needlessly specific nature of each of their notations leads me to believe that they are perpetrating a joke at my expense. I am spared not even one of the character’s slightest vacillations: will he be fairhaired? what will his name be? will we first meet him during the summer? So many questions resolved once and for all, as chance directs; the only discretionary power left me is to close the book, which I am careful to do somewhere in the vicinity of the first page. And the descriptions! There is nothing to which their vacuity can be compared; they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some stock catalogue, which the author utilizes more and more whenever he chooses; he seizes the opportunity to slip me his postcards, he tries to make me agree with him about the clichés:

The small room into which the young man was shown was covered with yellow wallpaper: there were geraniums in the windows, which were covered with muslin curtains; the setting sun cast a harsh light over the entire setting…. There was nothing special about the room. The furniture, of yellow wood, was all very old. A sofa with a tall back turned down, an oval table opposite the sofa, a dressing table and a mirror set against the pierglass, some chairs along the walls, two or three etchings of no value portraying some German girls with birds in their hands – such were the furnishings. (Dostoevski, Crime and Punishment)



I am in no mood to admit that the mind is interested in occupying itself with such matters, even fleetingly. It may be argued that this school-boy description has its place, and that at this juncture of the book the author has his reasons for burdening me. Nevertheless he is wasting his time, for I refuse to go into his room. Others’ laziness or fatigue does not interest me. I have too unstable a notion of the continuity of life to equate or compare my moments of depression or weakness with my best moments. When one ceases to feel, I am of the opinion one should keep quiet. And I would like it understood that I am not accusing or condemning lack of originality as such. I am only saying that I do not take particular note of the empty moments of my life, that it may be unworthy for any man to crystallize those which seem to him to be so. I shall, with your permission, ignore the description of that room, and many more like it.

Not so fast, there; I’m getting into the area of psychology, a subject about which I shall be careful not to joke.

The author attacks a character and, this being settled upon, parades his hero to and fro across the world. No matter what happens, this hero, whose actions and reactions are admirably predictable, is compelled not to thwart or upset -- even though he looks as though he is -- the calculations of which he is the object. The currents of life can appear to lift him up, roll him over, cast him down, he will still belong to this readymade human type. A simple game of chess which doesn't interest me in the least -- man, whoever he may be, being for me a mediocre opponent. What I cannot bear are those wretched discussions relative to such and such a move, since winning or losing is not in question. And if the game is not worth the candle, if objective reason does a frightful job -- as indeed it does -- of serving him who calls upon it, is it not fitting and proper to avoid all contact with these categories? "Diversity is so vast that every different tone of voice, every step, cough, every wipe of the nose, every sneeze...."* (Pascal.) If in a cluster of grapes there are no two alike, why do you want me to describe this grape by the other, by all the others, why do you want me to make a palatable grape? Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable. The desire for analysis wins out over the sentiments.** (Barrès, Proust.) The result is statements of undue length whose persuasive power is attributable solely to their strangeness and which impress the reader only by the abstract quality of their vocabulary, which moreover is ill-defined. If the general ideas that philosophy has thus far come up with as topics of discussion revealed by their very nature their definitive incursion into a broader or more general area. I would be the first to greet the news with joy. But up till now it has been nothing but idle repartee; the flashes of wit and other niceties vie in concealing from us the true thought in search of itself, instead of concentrating on obtaining successes. It seems to me that every act is its own justification, at least for the person who has been capable of committing it, that it is endowed with a radiant power which the slightest gloss is certain to diminish. Because of this gloss, it even in a sense ceases to happen. It gains nothing to be thus distinguished. Stendhal's heroes are subject to the comments and appraisals -- appraisals which are more or less successful -- made by that author, which add not one whit to their glory. Where we really find them again is at the point at which Stendahl has lost them.

(To read the next section of the Manifesto, go to: http://umintermediai501.blogspot.com/2007/12/first-surrealist-manifesto-andr-breton.html)

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