Читать книгу Surrealism - Nathalia Brodskaya - Страница 9

Even before it had obtained its official name, Surrealism was already rapidly gathering momentum. Over the course of 1922 and 1923, the journal of the movement that was taking shape was Littérature, a collaboration between Breton, Aragon, Éluard, Picabia, Peret and Ernst, together with Robert Desnos, who wrote under the pseudonym of Rrose Sélavy which he had taken from Marcel Duchamp. New, youthful forces were constantly finding their way into the journal. Surrealism, like Dadaism before it, manifested itself most obviously in literature in the initial phase of its development. Its head, without a doubt, was the highly energetic and single-minded André Breton.

Adrienne Mounier, who ran a bookshop on the Rue d’Odeon, described André Breton as she saw him in 1916 as follows: “He was beautiful, with the beauty, not of an angel, but of an archangel (angels are graceful and archangels are serious…). His face was massive and well-outlined; he wore his hair fairly long and brushed back with an air of nobility; his gaze was always distant from the world, even from himself, and with its lack of animation, it resembled the colour of jade… Breton did not smile, but he would sometimes laugh, with a brief and sardonic laugh which would suddenly appear in the middle of his conversation without disturbing the features of his face, in the way you see with women who are careful about their looks. With Breton, it was his violence that made him like a statue. His weapon is the sword. He has the motionless quickness of perception found in mediums.”[46] He wore green spectacles purely to catch attention. The André Breton of the 1920s in which this attractive young man had been transformed, possessed qualities which made everyone who had joined the new world of Surrealism drawn to him, and led them to gather around him. His contemporaries spoke of the peculiar magnetism of his personality. He was a man who proved capable of persuading others, and of forming a circle of supporters who made up the driving force of the movement. But Breton also knew how to take command; he had the particular type of authority that comes from the exercise of power.

In 1924, the poet Ivan Goll, who had been involved in the Dada movement in Zürich during the war, published a journal entitled Surrealism. In an attempt to steal Breton’s thunder, he published his own personal Surrealist Manifesto. He accused Breton of confusing art with psychology, and of creating a false version of Surrealism through his misleading notions about the all-importance of the dream. However, the most brilliant Dadaists and the young generation of literary talent that had joined them formed a group around Breton, in spite of the wide range of individual characters and conflicts between different personalities that often proved impossible to resolve.

“It is said that every day, at the time when he went to sleep, Saint-Pol-Roux would tell someone to put a notice on the door of his manner, Camaret, which read: THE POET IS WORKING.” For Breton, the legend of the symbolist poet was almost a formula of the method of Surrealist creativity.[47] A man’s whole experience of real, everyday life enters into contradiction with his imaginative capability, with the experience of a different life, the life of his dreams. Breton therefore rejected everything in art that was connected to realism and, in the final analysis, to all the classics that the Dadaists were trying so hard to destroy. “… The realist attitude, inspired as it is by positivism, from St. Thomas to Anatole France, actually strikes me as hostile to intellectual and moral progress of any kind. I have a horror of it, because it is the product of mediocrity, hatred and dreary self-satisfaction.”[48] For genuine creative work one requires freedom, and it is essential to throw off the weight of everything that oppresses man in real life, everything upon which the structure of realism is founded. “We are still living under the reign of logic… But logical processes, in our time, can now only be applied to the resolultion of problems of secondary importance. The absolute rationalism which is still the fashion only allows one to consider the facts that narrowly pertain to our experience. What we have lost, on the other hand, are logical aims. Needless to say, even experience has got to the stage of assigning itself limits. It turns around in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to get it to come out. It, too, rests on immediate utility, and it is watched over by common sense. Under the guise of civilization, under the pretext of progress, we have reached the point of banning from the mind everything which can be criticised, rightly or wrongly, as superstitious or chimerical; of forbidding any method of seeking after truth that does not conform to the standard approach.”[49] What has to take the place of rationalism, and of the source of inspiration provided by the realities of everyday life, is the imagination: “The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting its rights. If the depths of our mind contain strange forces that are capable of adding to those at the surface, or of winning the fight against them, there is every interest in capturing them, in capturing them first, to tame them afterwards…”

Valentine Hugo, Toad from Maldoror, 1936.

Gouache and pencil on paper, 47 × 30.5 cm.

The Neshui Ertegun and Daniel Filipacchi Collections.

Jindrich Styrsky, Book-Object, 1937.

Private Collection.

The Surrealist poet had at one time embarked on a medical career in psychiatry, and so, when he went in search of the sources of the imagination, he turned to the experience of Freud, who was the first man to appreciate the vast place in the life of man occupied by dreams. “Man, when he is no longer asleep, is above all the toy of his memory, and in his normal state the latter gratifies itself by feebly retracing for him the circumstances of the dream, depriving the dream of any real importance, and causing what he thought was the only determining factor at the time he left it a few hours earlier to disappear: whatever firm hope he cherished, or fear he felt. Afterwards he has the illusion of carrying on with something that is worthwhile.”[50] The objective of Surrealism is to make use of the dream, which will open the way to the Great Mystery of Life in the cause of his own art – which for Breton basically meant literature. “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, so contradictory in appearance, that are the dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, a “surreality”, if one can put it that way. This is what I am striving to attain…”[51]

The imagination of André Breton erected a castle, at once fantastic and real, inhabited by both the former Dadaists and the Surrealists: “This castle belongs to me, I see it in a rustic site, not far from Paris… Some of my friends have come to live there: Louis Aragon is just leaving; …Philippe Soupault gets up when the stars come out, and Paul Éluard, our great Paul Éluard, is not yet back. Here are Robert Desnos and Roger Vitrac, who are in a park deciphering an old edict on the duel; Georges Auric, Jean Paulan; Max Morise, who rows so well, and Benjamin Peret, engaged in his funny equations; and Joseph Delteil; and Jean Carrive; and Georges Limbourg…; and Marcel Noll; here comes T. Fraenkel who is signalling to us with his captive balloon, Georges Malkine, Antonin Artaud, Francis Gérard, Pierre Naville, J.-A. Boiffard, and then Jacques Baron and his brother, hale and hearty, and so many others as well, and some ravishing women… Francis Picabia comes to see us, and last week, in the hall of mirrors, a gentleman named Marcel Duchamp, who had not previously been introduced, came to call. Picasso hunts in the grounds.”

After sketching a portrait of the Surrealist circle, Breton eventually gives his definition of what Surrealism is:

Surrealism, n. A purely psychological form of automatic reflex by which one sets out to express, either verbally, or in writing, or in any other fashion, the operation of thought. Dictation from thought, in the absence of any exercise or control on the part of reason, outside every aesthetic or moral preoccupation.

Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Surrealism rests on a belief in the superior reality of certain forms of associations that, until it appeared, had been neglected, on a belief in the absolute power of the dream and in the disinterested play of thought. It aims to ruin conclusively all the other psychological mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in the resolution of the principal problems of life.[52]

In this fashion, Breton consolidated the language of Surrealism, for the sake of which the Dadaists had been striving to destroy the outdated language of art. Breton’s automatism of composition was basically a literary affair. In his manifesto he gives a lesson in this kind of writing, asserting that: “[L]anguage was given to man for him to use it in a surrealist way.”[53] When it came to the language of other fields of art, such as painting and sculpture, Breton’s disciples would have to find it by themselves in their own individual fields.

From December 1, 1924, the journal La Révolution surréaliste, run by Pierre Naville and Benjamin Peret, and printing the work of Aragon, Éluard, Soupault, Vitrac and numerous others, became the printed mouthpiece of the Surrealists. It was dressed up to look serious, outwardly imitating such scientific journals as La Nature, and became one of the most talked-about journals in Paris. From 1925, Breton was in charge of the journal. They established an “Office of Surrealist Research”, rather like a laboratory, where they would engage in Surrealist experiments. “At number 15 on the Rue de Grenelle”, wrote Aragon, “we opened a romantic hostel for unclassifiable ideas and ongoing revolts. Anything in this universe of despair for which there is still hope, may one day look up in its final delirium towards our pitiful little workshop: we were trying to arrive at a new declaration of the rights of man.”[54] They sent briefings to the press – their “butterflies” flew out of the office at very frequent intervals. Every Surrealists’ get-together, at the apartment of one of the group, or at one of their favourite cafes – Certa, Cyrano, the tabac on the Place Pigalle, or the Café de la Place Blanche – was usually accompanied by games. In 1925, the Surrealists published their first “exquisite corpses” – the result of their favourite game. “A game with folded pieces of paper, which consists in having a sentence or a drawing put together by several persons, without any of them being able to take account of the contribution or contributions that preceded it. The example, now a classic, which has given the game its name, is contained in the first sentence obtained in this fashion: “The exquisite corpses will drink the new wine.” For the Surrealists, this game was an example, first of all, of automatic, absolutely unpremeditated creativity, and second, of the creativity of a team.

La Révolution surréaliste carried on the business of Dada, overturning the authorities of the old art. A pamphlet against Anatole France was entitled “A Corpse”. “An old man like the rest of them”, wrote Éluard. “A ridiculous character, and so empty”, Soupault seconded him. “Have you ever given a dead man a slap in the face?” inquired Aragon, and gave a summing-up: “On certain days I have dreamed of a rubber to erase the squalor of humanity.”[55] All this created a loud scandal, as did the special events they organised. One of them was the “Homage to Saint-Pol-Roux” organised by “Les Nouvelles littéraires” on the Boulevard Montparnasse, at La Closerie des Lilas. Here the Surrealists poured scorn on writers who, in their eyes, belonged to the category of obsolete literature. Their conduct itself was abusive and unacceptable: Soupault, for example, swung on the chandelier. The woman writer Rachilde later complained that a tall fellow there with a German accent kicked her (it was probably Max Ernst). The scandalous situation which had started in the restaurant spilled out onto the street. However, for the future of Surrealism, the views they expressed that were related to art and the language of painting were of much more importance.

In addition to the journal, the Surrealists published separate declarations as well. The “Declaration of 27 July 1925” stated: “Surrealism is not a new or easier means of expression, nor even a metaphysic of poetry. It is a means of total liberation of the mind and of everything in common with it. …Surrealism is not a poetic form. It is a cry of the mind…”

In 1926, collections of Surrealist poems by Aragon, Paris Peasant, and Éluard, The Capital of Pain, rolled off the press. Éluard’s poems were enigmatic and refined:

Despite their seemingly accidental quality and spontaneity, and the word-games and automatic writing they employ, these poems produced a striking image of the Surrealist world which the poets and the artists alongside them were creating:

Kay Sage, I Saw Three Cities, 1944.

Oil on canvas, 92 × 71 cm.

Princeton University Art Museum, gift of Kay Sage Tanguy, Princeton.

Félix Labisse, The Camp of Drap d’Or, 1943.

Private Collection.

Sometimes an Éluard poem is limited to only one line, to give the maximum possible concentration to its expressive impact:

She tells the future. And I am responsible for confirming the truth of it.[58]

Sometimes the poet, it seems, forgets about mystery, about Surrealism, and reveals realistic human emotions:

The heart bruised, the soul aching, the hands tired out, the hair white, the prisoners, all the water has come upon me like an open wound.[59]

In 1925, there also occurred an event of exceptional importance: the first joint exhibition of Surrealist painting was held in Paris at the Galerie Pierre. The artists involved were Arp, de Chirico, Ernst, Klee, Man Ray, Miró, Picasso and Pierre Roy. It was the beginning of the succession of displays of painting and sculpture that make it possible to speak of Surrealism both as a phenomenon and at the same time as the union of diverse and outstanding aesthetic talents. In the same year, the Galerie Pierre organised an exhibition of Juan Miró. On 26 March 1926, the Galerie Surréaliste was solemnly opened, and it showed work by Duchamp and Picabia, as well as those artists already named. In 1928, the Galerie Bernheim put on an individual exhibition of Max Ernst. The ranks of the Surrealist artists in Paris were reinforced by incomers from other countries. In 1927, René Magritte arrived from Belgium. In 1928, Salvador Dalí came from Spain to Paris for the first time, and he had his first personal exhibition in Paris in 1929. In 1931, Alberto Giacometti, a native of Switzerland, exhibited his Surrealist sculpture-objects for the first time. The Surrealist artists illustrated books, painted scenery for contemporary theatrical productions, and made Surrealist films. It would be fair to say that at this stage, the Surrealists’ creative work pointed in different directions: literature ceded pride of place to the visual arts which were steadily gathering momentum.

However, Surrealism as a movement had already experienced the moment of its triumph. Even in the early stages, absolute unity had not been one of its characteristics, but now disagreements were becoming increasingly acute. The events in the political and social life of Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century were bound to be reflected in a movement which took such an uncompromising, even anarchist position on the subject of the bourgeois world. First the Revolution in Russia and the wave of unrest that hit the whole of Europe as a result, along with Lenin and Trotsky’s writings; then the war in Morocco, and the necessity for the French intelligentsia to determine their own position in relation to it – all this provoked not only heated polemics from the Surrealists that were directed against other groups of intellectuals in Paris, but also sharp disagreements within the movement. It seemed as though the Surrealists only had to go one step further before they found themselves moving into social and political activism. In any event, in the middle of the twentieth century they left their ivory tower, feeling that they had a bond with the destructive forces of the revolution. “The authentic art of today is hand in glove with the social function of revolution: art, like the latter, aims to confuse and to destroy capitalist society”, Breton wrote.[60] In this situation, the question arose: what in practical terms could the Surrealists accomplish? Pierre Naville put this question in his article, “Intellectuals and the Revolution”. According to him, the Surrealists had the choice of two directions: “either to persist in a negative attitude along anarchist lines, a false attitude from the outset because it does not justify the idea of revolution which it proclaims, an attitude which is subordinate to the refusal to compromise one’s own existence and the sacred character of the individual in a fight which would lead towards the disciplined action of the class struggle; or, commit oneself resolutely to a revolutionary course, the only revolutionary course, the Marxist course.”[61] Breton affirmed his solidarity with the Communist Party.

Oscar Domínguez, The Minotaur, 1938.

Private Collection.

The most decisive position on the political level was taken by the Five (“Les Cinq”): Aragon, Breton, Éluard, Peret, Unik. In November 1926, they excluded Antonin Artaud and Philippe Soupault from the Surrealist movement for “incompatibility of aims”. They thought that it was now no longer enough to state one’s position: one had to take the side of the party of revolution. Ties which had once seemed so strong were cut as friendships were destroyed by these heated arguments. The framework of Surrealism seemed to some of them to be too narrow. Desnos and Naville left the movement. Breton was implacable towards his former friends. He demanded that the performance which Artaud was arranging should be taken off the stage, despite the fact that Artaud had already been excluded from the group, and he got the police to come to the theatre. Breton’s position gave rise to an increasing level of discontent, and he was reproached for his tyrannical treatment of the members of the group. Breton thought that it was necessary to manage every Surrealist to make sure that his individual activity conformed to the revolutionary line. In 1929, La Révolution surréaliste published the Second Surrealist Manifesto. Breton thought it was his duty to remind everyone else what the principles of Surrealism were and to purge it of everything that, from his point of view, was a betrayal. In response to this, his former friends published a stinging pamphlet under the same title as the one given to their pamphlet against Anatole France: “A Corpse”. As a result of these political conflicts, by the 1930s the Surrealist movement had arrived at a state of bifurcation: on one side was Breton’s group, which took a position of revolutionary engagement; on the other side were those artists who from the mid-1920s were providing a demonstration of Surrealism in the visual arts, and establishing its place within them.

Aside from the growing activity of the artists in Paris, Surrealist art was now in evidence beyond France’s borders. In 1931, the first important Surrealism exhibition was held in the United States, with works shown by Dalí, de Chirico, Ernst, Masson, Picasso, Miró and others. Personal exhibitions of the Surrealists came to various American cities. Additionally, in 1933 a Surrealist exhibition was held in Teneriffe. By the end of the 1930s, exhibitions of the Surrealists had covered the whole of Europe, reaching Belgium and Holland, Zürich, Copenhagen, Prague and London. Japan and Latin America also received their fair share of Surrealism. In the 1940s, the activities of the Surrealists continued primarily in America where many of them had gone to escape the Second World War. During the war, a large exhibition of Surrealist art was held in London. In 1945, a collection of Breton’s writings on painting came out in the United States, entitled Surrealism and Painting. In June 1947, the International Exhibition of Surrealism was held in Paris at the Galerie Maeght. It could truly be said that the visual art of Surrealism had conquered the whole world. The fame of its artists, and the huge interest in its painting was far greater than the public profile of Surrealism in literature, although this was where the movement had started. A moment in the history of art had probably come when art needed an influx of new forces. If the visual language of painting at the beginning of the twentieth century had been the focus of concern of Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism, of Matisse, Picasso and Kandinsky, then the nihilism of Dada, in combination with the philosophy and literature of the Surrealists, at once created the conditions which enabled art’s internal vacuum to be filled. And, as will always be the case, Surrealist painting did not spring up out of a desert. The history of European art is remarkable for such a wealth of treasures that here and there the future Surrealists were able to find the first shoots of what would later, with careful nurturing, function to make up the special language of their art. If the first road to Surrealism traversed through Dada, then the second road lay through that existing tradition in art which had constituted a manifestation of Surrealism long before the movement was officially christened in the twentieth century.

Toyen (Marie Cermínová), At the Chateau Lacoste, 1946.

Private Collection.

Yves Tanguy, The Inspiration, 1929.

Oil on canvas, 130.5 × 97 cm.

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes.

Salvador Dalí, The Enigma of Hitler, 1939.

Oil on canvas, 51.2 × 79.3 cm.

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.