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David Hopkins
DADA AND
SURREALISM
A Very Short Introduction
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford o x 2 6 d p
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First published as a Very Short Introduction 2004
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ISBN 0–19–280254–2
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Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall
Contents
List of illustrations
viii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
xiv
Dada and Surrealism: a historical overview
1
‘Rather life’: promoting Dada and Surrealism 30
Art and anti-art 62
‘Who am I?’: mind/spirit/body
Politics
97
123
Looking back on Dada and Surrealism
References
146
157
Further reading 161
Dada: the main centres – key individuals and events
Key Surrealist events
170
Key figures associated with surrealism 171
Index
173
167
List of illustrations
1
Sarah Lucas, Get Off Your
Horse and Drink Your
Milk
xvii
6 The mock trial of
Maurice Barrès
© Sarah Lucas. Courtesy Sadie
Coles HQ, London
7 Installation view of the
International Exhibition
of Surrealism at the
Galerie des Beaux Arts,
Paris, 1938
39
2 Marcel Janco, Cabaret
Voltaire
5
© ADAGP, Paris, and DACS,
London 2003. Kunsthaus Zurich
3 Marcel Duchamp,
Fountain
10
© Succession Marcel Duchamp/
ADAGP, Paris, and DACS,
London 2003. Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art
4 Max Ernst, Pietà/
Revolution by Night
19
© ADAGP, Paris, and
DACS, London 2003. Photo
© Tate, London 2003
5 Installation view of
the First International
Dada Fair, Berlin,
June 1920
34
© bpk, Berlin
37
© Archives du Wildenstein
Institute, Paris
8 ‘Our colleague Benjamin
Péret in the act of
insulting a priest’
47
Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art
9 Cover: La Révolution
Surréaliste, 1 (1924)
49
10
‘The Papin Sisters:
Before and After’
Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art
51
11
Francis Picabia, Young
American Girl in a
State of Nudity
54
16
Jedermann sein eigner
Fussball (Everyman his
own Football)
55
17
© DACS 2003
13
George Grosz, Daum
Marries her Pedantic
Automaton ‘George’ in
May 1920. John
Heartfield is Very Glad
of it
58
© DACS 2003. Berlinische
Galerie, Berlin, Landesmuseum
für Moderne Kunst, Photographie
und Architektur
14
72
© ADAGP, Paris, and DACS,
London 2003. The Museum of
Modern Art, New York. Purchase.
Digital image © 2002 The
Museum of Modern Art/Scala,
Florence
© ADAGP, Paris, and DACS,
London 2003. Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art
12
André Masson, Birth
of Birds
Max Ernst, Santa
Conversazione
75
© ADAGP, Paris, and DACS,
London 2003. Private collection
18
Hannah Höch, Bourgeois
Wedding Couple –
Quarrel
78
Private collection
19
Joan Miró,
The Hunter
79
© Successio Miro, DACS 2003.
The Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Digital image © 2002 The
Museum of Modern Art, New
York/Scala, Florence
The ‘Palais Idéal’ of the
Postman Cheval.
59
© Collection Roger-Viollet, Paris
15
Hans Arp, Rectangles
Arranged According to
the Laws of Chance
70
© DACS 2003. The Museum of
Modern Art, New York. Purchase.
Digital image © 2002 The
Museum of Modern Art/Scala,
Florence
20 René Magritte, Le Viol
(The Rape)
82
© ADAGP, Paris, and DACS,
London 2003. The Menil
Collection Houston, USA. Photo:
Paul Hester
21
Salvador Dalí,
‘Paranoiac Face’
83
© Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador
Dalí Foundation, DACS, London
2003. Scottish National Gallery
of Modern Art
22 Meret Oppenheim,
My Nurse
27
89
© DACS 2003. Moderna
Museet, Stockholm. Photo:
Per-Anders Allsten
Ronald Grant Archive
25
128
San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art. Gift of Robert
Shapazian. Photo: Ben Blackwell
23 Luis Buñuel and Salvador
Dalí, frames from Un
Chien Andalou
94
24 J.-A. Boiffard,
‘Carnival Mask’,
reproduced in
Documents, 2
(Paris, 1930)
Claude Cahun,
Self-Portrait
28 Frida Kahlo,
My Birth
29 Wifredo Lam,
The Jungle
107
Jan Švankmajer, Natural
Science
113
© Jan Švankmajer. Galerie
Gambra, Prague
130
© 2003 Bank of Mexico, Diego
Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums
Trust, Del. Cuauhtémoc, Mexico.
Private collection
136
© ADAGP, Paris, and DACS,
London 2003. The Museum of
Modern Art, New York. InterAmerican Fund. Digital image
© 2002 The Museum of Modern
Art/Scala, Florence
26 Man Ray, ‘Monument
to D. A. F. De Sade’
119
© Man Ray Trust/ADAGP,
Paris, and DACS, London 2003.
Photo: Telimage 2003
The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions
in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at
the earliest opportunity.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Paul Stirton for encouraging me to write this in the first
place. Beyond that I am extremely grateful to Kate Tregaskis, Katharine
Reeve, and Neil Cox for their comments on the manuscript.
This page intentionally left blank
To Benjamin
Introduction
Question: How many Surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?
Answer: A fish.
Everybody knows something about Dada and Surrealism. Dada,
born in 1916 and over by the early 1920s, was an international artistic
phenomenon, which sought to overturn traditional bourgeois notions of
art. It was often defiantly anti-art. More than anything, its participants,
figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Hans
Arp, Kurt Schwitters, and Raoul Hausmann, counterposed their love of
paradox and effrontery to the insanities of a world-gone-mad, as the
First World War raged in Europe.
Surrealism, Dada’s artistic heir, was officially born in 1924 and had
virtually become a global phenomenon by the time of its demise in the
later 1940s. Committed to the view that human nature is fundamentally
irrational, Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Joan
Miró, and André Masson conducted an often turbulent love affair with
psychoanalysis, aiming to plumb the mysteries of the human mind.
For many people Dada and Surrealism represent not so much
movements in 20th-century art history as ‘modern art’ incarnate.
Dada is seen as iconoclastic and confrontational; Surrealism as similarly
anti-bourgeois in spirit but more deeply immersed in the bizarre. But
why Dada-and-Surrealism? Why are they yoked together? They
constitute two movements but are regularly conflated. Art historians
have traditionally found it convenient to generalize about Dada ‘paving
the way’ for Surrealism, although that was only really the case in one of
Dada’s locations, namely Paris. This book will certainly rehearse that
story again, but it will also present these movements as distinctly
different, so that they can be played off against each another. Dada, for
instance, often revelled in the chaos and the fragmentation of modern
life, whilst Surrealism had more of a restorative mission, attempting to
create a new mythology and put modern man and woman back in touch
with the forces of the unconscious. Such differences touch on important
distinctions which I have aimed to make as vivid as possible.
More than any other art movements of the last century Dada and
Surrealism now permeate our culture at large. Surrealism especially has
entered our everyday language; we talk of ‘surreal humour’ or a ‘surreal
plot’ to a film. This very continuity means that it is difficult to place
them at one remove from us in ‘history’. Critical and historical accounts
of both movements have admittedly become more and more elaborate.
Dada, which might be thought to be anti-academic, is now widely
studied in universities. Similarly monographs on notorious Surrealist
artists such as Dalí and René Magritte are ubiquitous. But very often the
sheer plethora of information is dazzling, and we lose critical distance.
Conscious of this problem, I have structured this book around key
thematic issues. Chapter 1 charts the historical development of Dada
and Surrealism, and deals with the assumptions involved in approaching
them together. Chapter 2 looks in detail at the way both movements
disseminated their ideas, particularly in terms of public events and
publications. In the process, it shows how they established a dialogue
between art and life. Chapter 3 looks closely at aesthetic questions,
focusing on poetry, collage, and photomontage, painting, photography,
object-making, and film. Issues of anti-art and the positioning of each
movement within modernist aesthetic debates are centrally important
here. The last two chapters highlight recent research, by both myself and
others, in line with current historical perspectives on the movements. I
examine Dada and Surrealist attitudes to a range of key topics from
irrationalism to sexuality, before focusing closely on their politics. The
book concludes with some reflections on the afterlife of the two
movements, particularly in relation to recent art.
My main concern has been to ask the questions of Dada and Surrealism
that correspond to our current cultural preoccupations. For instance
identity – whether racial or sexual – is a central concern for many of us,
and Surrealist artists, such as the French photographer Claude Cahun
or the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, were pioneers in addressing it. But
to appreciate the force of their concerns it is necessary to recreate the
contexts to which they were responding. Similarly, given Surrealism’s
current popularity in culture at large (for example, the ubiquity of Dalí’s
works on posters) it is safe to assume that the ‘darker’, unconscious
aspects of our psychic lives, which were celebrated by both Dada and
Surrealism, are now widely thought to be ‘positive’ things. However, in
cultures where Fascism was once powerful many would question the
virtues of surrendering to the irrational, while modernist critics have
argued that, however anti-bourgeois they might have considered
themselves, the Dadaists and Surrealists simply helped to extend the
range of experience which bourgeois culture could assimilate into its
system of values. In our ‘postmodern’ culture we all too readily
aestheticize our darker motivations and impulses. This book looks at
the historical roots for such attitudes and clarifies why, and in what
contexts, they were once ‘radical’. In doing so, questions about our
own motivations might inevitably arise.
This kind of enquiry, which does not necessarily place Dada and
Surrealism on a pedestal but seeks to establish why they are still such
vital forces in our culture, seems particularly pressing given that
contemporary art is very much in thrall to these movements. This can be
made apparent by glancing at a work by Sarah Lucas, one of the most
visible British artists of the 1990s.
Lucas’s work reveals a continuation of the desire to shock that was once
the stock-in-trade of Dada. At the same time, she uses substitutions or
1. Sarah Lucas, Get Off Your Horse and Drink Your Milk, set of
photographs, 1994
displacements of bodily imagery that were once the currency of
Surrealism. Her work implicitly relies on the achievements of Dadaists
and Surrealists such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and René Magritte.
But does Lucas’s work simply confirm that Dada-style shock has become
institutionalized? Or does it build on this tradition in a culturally
significant way?
These, it seems to me, are the kind of questions that a contemporary
engagement with the implications of Dada and Surrealism might throw
up. By the end of this book, we should be well placed to answer them.
The central task of the coming chapters, however, is to establish the key
historical and thematic contours of Dada and Surrealism.
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 1
Dada and Surrealism:
a historical overview
The early 20th century was a period of tumultuous change. The
First World War and the Russian Revolution profoundly altered
people’s understanding of their worlds. The discoveries of
Freud and Einstein, and the technological innovations of the
Machine Age, radically transformed human awareness. In cultural
terms, the novels of Joyce or the poetry of T. S. Eliot – the former’s
Ulysses and the latter’s The Waste Land were both published in
1922 – registered distinctively new ‘modernist’ modes of feeling
and perception characterized by a marked sense of discontinuity.
Hence the theorist Marshall Berman sees a simultaneous sense
of exhilaration and impending catastrophe, reflective of the
fractured conditions of life at the time, as defining modernist
sensibility.
Early 20th-century art movements powerfully reflect this new
mind-set. Daringly innovatory in technical terms, movements such
as Cubism and Futurism, both of which were at their height around
1910–13, moved beyond the calm surface of traditional painting to
probe the structure of consciousness itself. Arguably, though, it is to
Dada and Surrealism that we should look for the most compelling
explorations of the modern psyche, not least because both
movements placed considerable emphasis on mental investigation.
Dada partially saw itself as re-enacting the psychic upheaval caused
by the First World War, while the irrationalism celebrated by
1
Surrealism could be seen as a thoroughgoing acceptance of the
forces at work beneath the veneer of civilization. This chapter
summarizes the overlapping histories of both movements, but, first
of all, what attitude links them to the other art movements of the
early 20th century?
Dada and Surrealism
The ‘avant-garde’
More than anything else, Dada and Surrealism were ‘avant-garde’
movements. The term ‘avant-garde’, which was first employed by
the French utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon in the 1820s,
initially had military connotations, but came to signify the advanced
socio-political as well as aesthetic position to which the modern
artist should aspire. Broadly speaking, art in the 19th century
was synonymous with bourgeois individualism. Owned by the
bourgeoisie or shown in bourgeois institutions, it was a means by
which members of that class could temporarily escape the material
constraints and contradictions of everyday existence. This state of
affairs was challenged in the 1850s by the Realism of the French
painter Gustave Courbet, which, by fusing a socialist agenda
with a matching aesthetic credo, arguably represents the first
self-consciously avant-garde tendency in art. By the early
20th century, several key art movements – such as Futurism in
Italy, Constructivism in Russia or De Stijl in Holland, as well as
Dada and Surrealism – were pledged to contesting any separation
between art and the contingent experience of the modern world.
Their reasons for doing so were inflected in different ways by
politics – the Constructivists, for instance, were responding directly
to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia – but they tended to share the
belief that modern art needed to forge a new relationship with its
audience, producing uncompromising new forms to parallel shifts
in social experience. For the cultural theorist Peter Bürger, writing
in the 1970s, the mission of the early 20th-century European
avant-garde thus consisted in undermining the idea of art’s
‘autonomy’ (‘art for art’s sake’) in favour of a new merging of art
into what he calls the ‘praxis of life’.
2
Dada and Surrealism thus shared the defining avant-garde
conviction that social and political radicalism should be bound up
with artistic innovation. The artist’s task was to move beyond
aesthetic pleasure and to affect people’s lives; to make them see
and experience things differently. The Surrealist goal, for instance,
was nothing less than the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s call to
‘change life’.
Dada and Surrealism were certainly beholden to Cubism and
Expressionism, alongside Futurism, for their new pictorial
languages. Cubist collage, for instance, led directly to the Dadaists’
development of ‘photomontage’. But the Dadaists and Surrealists
would have been deeply uncomfortable with the idea, implicit in
much of Cubism, that formal innovation alone provides a rationale
for art. Much as the art of Cubism aimed to shock or disorientate its
viewers into rethinking their relations with reality, it was ultimately
‘autonomous’ art; art about art. For Dada and Surrealism the stakes
were considerably higher than this. Like certain other 20th-century
art movements such as Futurism, which reflected the speeded-up,
3
A historical overview
As already noted, the modern art of the early 20th century – the
pictorial fragmentation of Picasso and Braque’s Cubism, for
instance – represented a startling break with traditional artistic
conventions. The standard art-historical way of understanding this
break is to see it as representing the legacy of late 19th-century
French artists such as Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh and Cézanne,
alongside a general shift of sensibility that had been effected by
European Symbolism in the 1880s and 1890s. In the paintings of
Cézanne and Gauguin, for instance, space was flattened out and
colour distorted in a radical departure from naturalism. Such
conditions paved the way for the abandonment of Renaissance
pictorial conventions, such as linear perspective, in Picasso’s
watershed painting of 1907, the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon. At the same time German Expressionism and French
Fauvism experimented further with expressive, non-naturalistic
uses of colour.
Dada and Surrealism
multi-sensory world in which people in the first decade of the
20th century were living, Dada and Surrealism were committed to
probing experience itself.
This commitment to lived experience meant that Dada and
Surrealism were ambivalent about the idea of art as something
sanctified or set apart from life. This is a fundamental point,
and it is why it is inappropriate to treat Dada and Surrealism as
identifiable stylistic ‘isms’ in art history. In actual fact there was
comparatively little stylistic homogeneity among the artists
involved, and literature was as important to them as visual art.
It would be more accurate to describe these movements as ideasdriven, constituting attitudes to life, rather than schools of painting
or sculpture. Any form, from a text to a ‘ready-made’ object to a
photograph, might be used to give Dada or Surrealist ideas
embodiment. In Dada a basic distrust for the narrowness of art
frequently translated into open antagonism towards its values and
institutions. At this point, therefore, we should put generalities
aside and examine the overall historical outlines of Dada. A
discussion of Surrealism will arise out of this.
Dada’s origins: Zurich and New York
The ‘myth of origins’ of Dada centres on one man, the poet
and theorist Hugo Ball, and the cabaret bar, called the Cabaret
Voltaire, which he opened in the Spiegelgasse in Zurich in
February 1916.
The cabaret was initially modelled on prototypes in cities in which
the itinerant Ball had previously lived, namely Munich and Berlin.
Like the cabarets there, it offered a heterogeneous programme of
events ranging from the singing of street ballads to the recital of
poems in the dominant Expressionist mode. Ball’s early associates
at the cabaret, all of whom were expatriates like himself, included
Ball’s girlfriend the cabaret performer Emmy Hennings, the
Romanians Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco, a poet and artist
4
2. Marcel Janco, Cabaret Voltaire, oil on canvas (photograph of lost
work), 1916
respectively, the Alsatian poet-artist Hans/Jean Arp (his alternating
name reflecting his dual French/German nationality) and Arp’s
partner, the Swiss-born textile designer and dancer Sophie Taeuber.
Shortly they would be joined by the German poet Richard
Huelsenbeck and later by the likes of the German writer Walter
Serner and the experimental filmmakers Hans Richter, from
Germany, and Viking Eggeling, from Sweden.
Although the performance events staged by this group at the
Cabaret Voltaire were initially fairly conventional, they quickly
turned into provocations. Tzara was to recall a particularly
notorious performance in July 1916:
In the presence of a compact crowd . . . we demand the right to piss
Dada and Surrealism
in different colours . . . shouted Poem –shouting and fighting in the
hall, first row approves second row declares itself incompetent
the rest shout, who is the strongest, the big drum is brought in
Huelsenbeck against 200.
To a degree such confrontational proceedings followed in the wake
of a series of performances in Italy and other European locations by
the Italian Futurists during 1909–13. Although their knowledge of
Futurism was partial, Cabaret Voltaire performers such as Ball
and Huelsenbeck were aware of its leader Marinetti’s experimental
poetry or ‘parole in libertà’ and the Futurist performers’
confrontational use of cacophonous or ‘bruitist’ barrages of noise.
Ball developed a form of ‘phonetic’ poetry in which made-up
words jostled rudimentary linguistic fragments. His ‘Karawane’ of
1916, a poem which appears to mimic the trumpetings and slow
movements of a caravan of elephants, begins ‘Jolifanto bambla ô
falli bambla’. Other Dada poets and performers joined forces to
recite ‘simultaneous poems’, in which texts were read aloud or
chanted simultaneously. To some extent, such techniques were
extrapolations from Futurist prototypes. However, Dadaist
phonetic poetry was often more uncompromisingly ‘abstract’ than
the Italian precedents, and the Dadaists themselves had little of
6
the Futurists’ faith in technological progress and none of their
pro-military fervour.
Dada performances also borrowed elements from Expressionism,
the style which had been dominant in German art up until that
point, and from which the German-born participants in the Cabaret
Voltaire were gradually departing. There had been a cult for African
art among the Expressionists, as there had been among the French
Cubists, and the performers at the Cabaret Voltaire occasionally
engaged in ‘negro dancing’. Further primitivizing undertones could
be found in the incessant drum-beating with which Huelsenbeck
famously baited the audience at the Cabaret.
7
A historical overview
The artistic activities at the Cabaret Voltaire were diverse. They
extended beyond performance poetry and dance to the radically
simplified geometrical collages of Hans Arp, which were often
displayed during performances. This demonstrates the equality
accorded to visual and literary production by the Dadaists, an
attitude which was essentially an inheritance from 19th-century
cultural movements such as Romanticism and Symbolism, as well
as from Futurism and Expressionism. But the group’s lack of
adherence to any delimited sense of art, and their confrontational
ethos, was ultimately determined as much by social and political
realities as anything else. Their very reason for being in Zurich was
its neutral position at a time when their home countries were
involved in the carnage of the First World War. There is an
important way in which the Zurich Dadaists equated the war which
was raging elsewhere with a conviction that the values attaching to
pre-war art were largely decadent ones. If oil painting and bronzecast sculpture had become synonymous with the interiors of highclass boudoirs, the Dadaists would assemble new structures from
bits of paper or from pre-existing objects. If poetry was synonymous
with refined sensibility, they would wrench it apart and reorientate
it towards babble and incantation. As a group they were united in a
hatred for the professionalization of art, seeing themselves as
cultural saboteurs, but it was not necessarily art per se that they
rejected; rather it was the way art served a certain conception of
human nature. In his writings, Arp in particular would equate the
art produced prior to the war with egotism and a too-high valuation
of humanity. Voicing commonly felt Dadaist sentiments he would
later write:
Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich
devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the
distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all
our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure
the madness of the age, and a new order of things that would restore
Dada and Surrealism
the balance between heaven and hell.
It is interesting that a fundamentally constructive note is struck by
Arp’s talk of a curative role for art and a ‘new order of things’ here.
Other Dadaists would be considerably more negative, seeking to
destroy art as a concept. Arp himself had an almost messianic sense
that it could be reinvented. But what would the coming of Dada
represent? Turning to the origins of the word ‘Dada’, which are
profoundly confusing, since various group members claimed to
have discovered it in different circumstances, it seems that it was
the word’s sheer open-endedness that attracted them. Writing in his
diary of the Dada years, Flight Out of Time, now one of the crucial
primary sources for knowedge of the Zurich movement, Hugo Ball
recorded that, after a few months of activities at the Cabaret
Voltaire, the group began to see the need for a collective publication
and hence for some form of label:
Tzara keeps worrying about the periodical. My proposal to call it
‘Dada’ is accepted . . . Dada is ‘yes yes’ in Rumanian, ‘rocking horse’
and ‘hobbyhorse’ in French. For Germans it is a sign of foolish naiveté,
joy in procreation, and preoccupation with the baby carriage.
By contrast Huelsenbeck recalled that he discovered the word while
leafing through a dictionary with Ball and was moved to exclaim
that ‘the child’s first sound expresses the primitiveness, the
8
beginning at zero, the new in our art’. It is significant that Ball
stresses the international mobility of the concept, seeing it as a kind
of cultural esperanto, while Huelsenbeck stresses notions of rupture
and renewal. Both attitudes were key ingredients of Dada. Beyond
this, the word paradoxically stood for everything and nothing. It
amounted to a kind of absurd admixture of affirmation and
negation, a kind of pseudo-mysticism. Art was a dead religion.
Dada was born.
Duchamp’s antipathy towards the ‘craft’ associations of visual art,
and his concomitant belief that ideas should replace manual skill as
the prime components of works of art, led to his selection of
9
A historical overview
A complication here, however, is that Dada was born elsewhere
simultaneously. In 1915 two French expatriates Marcel Duchamp
and Francis Picabia arrived at a similar position, at a somewhat
greater remove from the European war, in New York. Both artists
had been prominent in French artistic circles before the war, but
gravitated to America feeling that it would be more receptive to new
ideas. Duchamp’s Cubist-influenced painting Nude Descending a
Staircase no 2 had found little success with the Parisian avant-garde
but had travelled to New York and been a success at the ‘Armory
Show’ exhibition of 1913. By 1915 Duchamp had come to formulate
what he described as an anti-retinal stance in relation to the visual
innovations introduced into French art by Matisse, on the one hand,
and Cubism on the other. Duchamp’s distaste for art which
appealed solely to the eye rather than the intellect went hand in
hand with a cynicism about the effects the machine age had
wrought on the human psyche. Humanist rhetoric continued to
uphold notions of the soul and romantic love, but, seeing this as
self-deluding in the face of society’s increasing mechanization,
Duchamp and Picabia began around 1915–16 to develop a parodic
language of machine/human hybrids, most significantly in
Duchamp’s painting-on-glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by her
Bachelors, Even (or Large Glass), a work which was to be
abandoned as ‘definitively unfinished’ in 1923.
Dada and Surrealism
3. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, readymade, photograph by Alfred
Stieglitz as it appeared in the journal, The Blind Man, 2 (Mar. 1917)
‘readymade’ items as art objects from 1913 onwards. Most
notoriously, he submitted a men’s urinal – playfully signed ‘R. Mutt’
and titled Fountain – for the New York Society of Independent
Artists exhibition in April 1917.
The work’s rejection by a hanging committee, in spite of a policy
whereby payment of a member’s fee guaranteed exhibiting rights,
became a Dada manifestation in itself.
By this point there appears to have been some knowledge of Zurich
10
Dada activities on the part of Duchamp and Picabia, but the label
itself was barely used in New York until the early 1920s. For this
reason the activities of Duchamp and Picabia of 1915–17 are often
labelled proto-Dada. Certainly a sizeable avant-garde network
quickly developed around the Europeans. It included members of
the so-called ‘Stieglitz circle’ who were associates of the American
photographer Alfred Stieglitz, a crucial advocate of avant-garde art
in the USA through his 291 gallery in New York, and members of
the ‘Arensberg circle’, named after the wealthy art collectors Walter
and Louise Arensberg, who acted as Duchamp’s patrons. Its key
figures, however, were the American photographer Man Ray, who
was to collaborate on a number of later projects with Duchamp,
and two people who were to become Dada mascots, on account of
their innate eccentricity: the mercurial Arthur Cravan and the
German-born writer Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven.
In 1918 Dada extended to Berlin as an outcome of the polemical zeal
of Richard Huelsenbeck, who had arrived there from Zurich the
previous year. In Berlin the validity of art-for-art’s sake attitudes
were even more clearly undermined by the stark social realities
gripping the city. Germany had, at this point, lost the war and was
undergoing economic collapse as an outcome of the reparations
demanded by France and Belgium. In addition to its economic
instabilities, it was teetering on the verge of social revolution in the
wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia of 1917. The relatively
conservative socialist government in power met forceful opposition
from Communists, particularly the Spartacist faction, and reacted
with acts of brutal suppression. It is not surprising then that
the Berlin Dadaists tended to be highly politicized. Aligned
communally as ‘Club Dada’, they broke down into two groups
of friends. One group, which included Walter Mehring, Wieland
and Helmut (later John) Heartfield, and George Grosz, were
Communist sympathizers (the last three were card-carrying
members of the Party). The other group, including Raoul
11
A historical overview
German Dada
Dada and Surrealism
Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and Johannes Baader, were more
sympathetic towards anarchism.
Anti-art in Berlin manifested itself in open opposition to the
main aesthetic trend in Germany, Expressionism. Duchampian
distase for humanist iconography and the sensual indulgences
of ‘retinal art’ transmuted in Berlin into a discomfort with
‘inwardness’ and the spiritualized expressive gesture. Despite
the fact that Berlin artists such as Grosz and Hausmann had
previously worked in graphic idioms attuned to Expressionism,
Richard Huelsenbeck now berated the previous artistic
generation in a key manifesto of 1920 asserting ‘On the pretext of
carrying out propaganda for the soul, they have, in their struggle
with naturalism, found their way back to the abstract, pathetic
gestures which presuppose a comfortable life free from content
or strife.’ By contrast, Huelsenbeck argued, a new art – that of
the Berlin Dadaists – would be ‘visibly shattered by the explosions
of last week . . . forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s
crash’.
Not surprisingly the Berlin Dada group spurned traditional
painting in favour of Hausmann’s phonetic poetry, or the highly
original deployment of photomontage techniques by Hausmann,
Höch, Grosz, and Heartfield. The fragmentary shards of
photographic imagery in their early photomontages, often picturing
machinery in a manner broadly analogous to the New York
Dadaists, eventually gave way to the apparently seamless surfaces
in which John Heartfield specialized. Heartfield’s slick montages
made use of essentially Surrealist techniques of juxtaposition for
savagely satirical purposes. After Berlin Dada’s demise in the
immediate aftermath of its major public manifestation, the ‘Dada
Fair’ in Berlin of June 1920, Heartfield was to become a merciless
commentator on the rise of Nazism in Germany, and his
photomontages appeared regularly on the covers of Communist
journals such as the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Workers’
Illustrated Newspaper).
12
Cologne, a far less turbulent city than Berlin, and one which fell
under British occupation immediately after the war, provided the
setting for a further offshoot of Dada in 1918–20. Here the key figures
were Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld, a pseudonym adopted by
Alfred Grunewald with the surname translating as ‘money bags’, an
oblique reference to Grunewald’s banker father. Cologne Dada’s
13
A historical overview
Elsewhere in Germany there were further Dada outposts. Hanover,
considerably more conservative and sedate than Berlin, was home
to Kurt Schwitters. Friendly with Berlin artists such as Hausmann
and Höch but refused membership of ‘Club Dada’ by Huelsenbeck
for his lack of political commitments and supposedly ‘bourgeois’
demeanour, Schwitters ploughed his own distinctive furrow,
pioneering a form of collage in which urban detritus (discarded bus
tickets, sweet wrappers, etc.) was implicitly revalued by being
corralled into abstract visual structures. Schwitters adopted the
label ‘Merz’, abstracted from the word ‘Commerzbank’ in one of his
collages, to designate his activities, which by the mid-1920s had
extended to the creation of an enormous proto-installation, known
as the ‘Merzbau’, which developed organically through several
rooms of his house. In the early 1920s Schwitters established close
contacts with artists involved with the International Constructivist
movement, as its principles of geometrical abstraction percolated
through Germany and Holland. The co-founder of the Dutch De
Stijl movement, Theo van Doesburg, was to participate somewhat
vicariously in Dada around this time, under the pseudonym ‘I. K.
Bonset’. He along with Schwitters, Arp, Richter, Hausmann and
Tzara attended a ‘Dada–Constructivist Congress’ at Weimar in
September 1922, forging contacts with important German-based
Constructivists such as László Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitsky. For
a few years sporadic collaborations occurred in and among these
groups. In a sense this episode falls outside of Dada proper, at
least to the extent that Dada was opposed to purely aesthetic
experimentation. But Arp and Schwitters, with their abstract
interests, were exceptions to this rule, and the rhetoric of Zurich
Dada had in any event included calls for a ‘new order’.
membership extended to a more politicized faction including Franz
Seiwert and Heinrich and Angelika Hoerle, but the group only really
coalesced around one key event, the anarchic ‘Cologne Dada Fair’
of April 1920 (see Chapter 2). Beyond this, the essentially apolitical
but bitterly absurdist collages and photomontages of Ernst,
characterized by startling collisions of imagery, set the tone for this
Dada formation. As with Duchamp and Picabia’s work elsewhere, a
savage indictment of the art of the past could be found in Ernst’s
reworkings of traditional religious iconography.
Dada and Surrealism
French Dada
Just as Cologne was positioned in cultural terms between Germany
and France, so Ernst tended to look to Paris to a much greater
degree than other German Dadaists. He eventually moved there in
1922. Dada in Paris is a complex affair, in terms of its shifting
clientele and their allegiances. It was born early in 1919 with the
arrival of Picabia, Dada’s self-appointed ambassador of nihilism. He
had just spent a period in Switzerland during which he had turned
up in Zurich, representing, for Zurich Dada’s chronicler Hans
Richter, ‘an experience of death’. Zurich Dada in its final phase was
nihilistic in any case, with Walter Serner declaiming a particularly
bleak Last Loosening Manifesto at the final public manifestation of
the movement in April 1919. In Paris Picabia paid host to Duchamp
who was revisiting his home country. Duchamp’s enigmatic
persona, expressed in gestures such as the iconoclastic LHOOQ
consisting of these letters (producing the French equivalent for ‘she
has a hot arse’ when read aloud ) written beneath a reproduction of
the Mona Lisa with pencilled-in moustache and beard, quickly
elicited the admiration of a group of young Parisian poets grouped
around the journal Littérature. This group – notably Louis Aragon,
Théodore Fraenkel, Paul Eluard, and Philippe Soupault – was
effectively ‘led’ by André Breton.
A charismatic personality in his own right, Breton was profoundly
affected by the example of others. Centrally important for him was
14
the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the associate of Picasso and
critical advocate of Cubism, who had died in 1918. In many ways
Breton was to assume Apollinaire’s role as avant-garde catalyst.
Another influence was Breton’s friend Jacques Vaché, a dandy
whose bitter humour (christened by himself ‘umour’) and sense of
futility led him to commit suicide with an overdose of opium,
shortly after the Armistice was signed, in 1919. With such
precedents in mind, alongside that of Duchamp, Breton developed
his own essentially cerebral brand of Dada.
Paris Dada was bluntly negativistic in tone. Opposed though it was
to the right-wing government that had come to power in France
after the war, it was rarely overtly political like Dada in Berlin, and
far removed from the proto-constructive ethos of Dada’s early phase
in Zurich. Its key manifestations were a series of public
provocations in one of which, in March 1920, Breton read out
Picabia’s ‘Cannibal Manifesto’:
What are you doing here, planted on your backsides like a load of
serious mugs . . .
. . . you serious people, you smell worse than cow dung
DADA, as for it, it smells of nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing.
It is like your hopes: nothing
like your heaven: nothing . . .
15
A historical overview
In early 1919 Breton looked to the example of Tristan Tzara whose
powerful 1918 manifesto had appeared in the third edition of Dada,
a magazine published by the Zurich group. ‘The Principle ‘‘Love thy
neighbour’’ is hypocrisy. ‘‘Know thyself ’’ is utopian but more
acceptable because it includes malice. No pity. After the carnage we
are left with the hope of a purified humanity’, wrote Tzara, shifting
from the rhetoric of nihilism to that of redemption in familiar
Zurich style. Tzara himself arrived in Paris in January 1920 but over
the next couple of years Breton, whose tendency to seek coherence
of outlook gradually alienated him from the anarchic Picabia, as
well as Tzara, inevitably assumed avant-garde leadership.
like your politicians: nothing . . .
like your artists: nothing . . .
Fundamentally, Paris Dada, like Dada manifestations elsewhere,
waged war on the outworn rhetoric of art. At the same event,
Picabia presented a canvas with a stuffed monkey attached to it
surrounded by the words: ‘Portrait of Cézanne, Portrait of
Rembrandt, Portrait of Renoir . . . ’
Dada and Surrealism
Surrealism: beginnings
By mid-1922 Paris Dada, the final full-blown incarnation of the
movement, had become mired in its own negativity. Its demise was
signalled by Breton’s organization of a ‘Congrès de Paris’ which, in
aiming to pinpoint the overall direction of avant-garde activity,
tacitly asserted that Dada was what it wanted to avoid becoming:
another movement in art history. Breton’s penchant for cultural
politics is evident here. Accusing Dada of ‘insolent negation’ and a
taste for ‘scandal for its own sake’, he seized the opportunity to
reorientate avant-garde priorities. The way was prepared for
Surrealism.
Max Ernst arrived from Cologne late in 1922, providing a link with
German Dada activities, although not at their most politicized. For
a couple of years, between 1922 and 1924, there was a kind of hiatus
between Dada and Surrealism, a phase christened by its
participants the ‘mouvement flou’ (indistinct or hazy movement)
during which Breton, Aragon, and Eluard, along with newer
recruits to the Littérature circle such as Robert Desnos and René
Crevel, engaged in a variety of experimental activities. Most
dramatic of these were the ‘seances’ in which certain group
members, notably Desnos, responded bizarrely to questions when
in self-induced trances. An interest in the irrational which had
manifested itself in Dada as anti-bourgeois psychic free play was
now being systematically explored. While serving as a medical
orderly in the French army during the war, Breton had become
16
acquainted with Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious.
The psychoanalyst’s works were first translated into French during
the early 1920s, and Breton and his friends rapidly assimilated the
scientific idea of the unconscious to their poetic interests,
developing techniques of ‘automatic writing’ whereby, partly on
the model of Freudian ‘free association’, rapid flurries of writing
were carried out in the absence of any preconceived idea. However,
a meeting between Breton and Freud in Vienna in 1921 clearly
established that Freud had little sympathy for such artistic
adaptations of his therapeutic techniques.
By 1924 Breton saw fit to consolidate these tendencies under a
label, and after its lengthy gestation Surrealism was born with the
publication of Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto.
17
A historical overview
The word Surrealism had originally been coined in 1917 by Breton’s
role model Apollinaire, but Apollinaire’s rather vague attempts to
characterise a new supra-logical spirit in the arts were given greater
precision in Breton’s 1924 manifesto where Surrealism was said to
be ‘based on the belief in the superior reality of certain previously
neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the
disinterested play of thought’. The manifesto was essentially a poet’s
charter; little attention was given to the visual arts at this stage and
priority was accorded to ‘psychic automatism . . . by means of the
written word, or in any other manner’. The fact that this was to be
conducted ‘in the absence of any control exercised by reason,
exempt from any aesthetic concerns’ made it clear that Surrealism
had inherited one central principle from Dada, which returns us to
the thrust of the earlier discussion: the critique of a self-referring
autonomous art. Like Dada, Surrealism was dedicated to erasing
distinctions between the claims of ‘art’ and those of ‘life’. Naming
Freud as the guiding light for the Surrealist project, Breton talked
not so much of the aesthetic producer but of the ‘human explorer’
carrying out ‘investigations’. Nothing less than a revolution was
envisaged. ‘The imagination’, it was asserted, ‘is perhaps on the
point . . . of reclaiming its rights.’
Dada and Surrealism
Surrealism began as a literary movement. Its early pantheon
of forerunners were French poets and writers such as Arthur
Rimbaud, Isidore Ducasse (the Comte de Lautréamont), Raymond
Roussel and Alfred Jarry. As the 1920s progressed, visual artists,
particularly painters, increasingly came into its orbit, attracted by
the ideal of a ‘peinture poésie’. Max Ernst, his artistic style decisively
affected by an encounter with reproductions of works by the Italian
painter Giorgio de Chirico, pioneered what might loosely be
described as ‘dream painting’.
Central as dreams were as subject matter for Surrealist artists, the
process of transcribing them visually necessitated considerable
conscious deliberation. As various commentators pointed out, this
was counter to the ideal of bypassing the control of reason. Critical
interventions like this, demanding a constant re-evaluation of
principles, became very much the norm in Surrealism. Indeed, the
attack on ‘dream painting’ prompted the artists André Masson and
Joan Miró to produce visual equivalents of the automatism that had
long been practised by the movement’s poets. Another shortcoming
of ‘dream painting’ was that it could be apprehended all in one go,
while dreams, of course, unfold in time. The way was therefore
opened for film to respond to Surrealist requirements, and the
late 1920s saw the production of two highly significant films:
Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) and L’Age d’Or (The
Golden Age), both the result of collaborations between Spaniards
who had gravitated to Paris, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.
Dalí’s attraction towards Surrealism in 1929 shows how successfully
Surrealism managed to recruit new talent. At the same time
established names occasionally lent support; Picasso allowed
several new works to be reproduced in the Surrealist journal La
Révolution Surréaliste in the mid to late 1920s without ever
officially joining the group. Certain figures became established as
mainstays of the movement; the painters Ernst and Yves Tanguy for
example. Another mainstay was the photographer Man Ray who,
having been a collaborator of Duchamp’s in the New York Dada
18
A historical overview
4. Max Ernst, Pietà/Revolution by Night, oil on canvas, 1923, Tate
Gallery, London
days, became very much the staff photographer of official
Surrealism while also producing his own experimental ‘rayographs’
(cameraless photographs) and studio studies of nudes. Other
individuals sporadically fell in and out of favour with the
increasingly autocratic Breton, and several were summarily
excommunicated for failing to match up to expectations of
19
Dada and Surrealism
doctrinal or ideological purity. The year 1929 was a watershed
in this respect when figures such as Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes,
Robert Desnos, Roger Vitrac, André Masson, Philippe Soupault,
Antonin Artaud, and the ethnographically trained writer
Michel Leiris, in the wake of a specially convened meeting in
which they were accused of failing to observe group protocols,
were publicly denounced by Breton in his Second Manifesto
of Surrealism.
In actual fact, there had been a rift for some time between the
‘Rue Fontaine’ Surrealists, so-named after the street in Paris where
Breton lived and held group meetings, and the ‘Rue Blomet’
faction which incorporated Masson, Miró and Leiris among
others. The latter group’s penchant for Nietzschean philosophy
had always alienated them from Breton and when they began to
be courted by Georges Bataille, an ethnographer and writer who
emerged as a key intellectual rival to Breton in the late 1920s,
mainly via his journal Documents, Breton saw the need to act
decisively. His Second Manifesto was partly aimed at undermining
the appeal of Georges Bataille. As far as Bataille was concerned,
Breton’s thought was flawed by its idealist presuppositions.
Breton’s aesthetics, which were rooted in Hegelian dialectics,
returned constantly to the notion of the new reality produced
when two incompatible images collide. The much quoted
exemplification of this for the Surrealists was Lautréamont’s
extended simile ‘Beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting
table of a sewing machine and an umbrella’. By contrast to such
an aesthetic of revelation Bataille advocated what he called a ‘base
materialism’ whereby art sought to confront the lowest or most
bestial aspects of humanity. Artists in sympathy with Bataille,
such as Masson, therefore tended to produce imagery which, for
Breton, could appear gratuitously offensive. A more direct attack
on Breton was mounted in the form of the pamphlet ‘A Corpse’
published by the Bataille camp in 1930. Breton, pictured as a
martyred Christ, was lampooned for his censorious judgements
and self-importance.
20
Surrealism: politics and internationalism
The Surrealists’ engagement with politics had begun in 1925 when
they opposed the French colonial war in Morocco. By 1927 their
passionate opposition not only to France’s right-wing government
but to capitalism in general led to them joining the French
Communist Party. However, from the beginning it proved difficult
to square their political inclinations with their artistic aims. How, as
internal critics such as Pierre Naville argued, could a political ethos
of collectivism be reconciled with the extreme individualism of
Surrealist poetry and art? Should a revolution of the mind precede a
21
A historical overview
Breton’s Second Manifesto in any case signalled a shift in the
philosophical direction of Surrealism. Previously the emphasis
within the movement had tended to be on the contents of the mind,
or what Breton termed the ‘interior model’. The emphasis was now
placed on the interaction between the interior realm and external
reality, in a dialectical relationship. This new orientation had
repercussions in terms of visual production. In many ways the
meteoric rise of Dalí hinged on a revival of ‘dream painting’ but,
ever the career strategist, Dalí ingeniously swung the emphasis of
his work away from internal reverie to what he described as a
paranoiac ‘delirium of interpretation’ in relation to external reality.
At the same time a veritable cult of the Surrealist object emerged
from around 1930, led by Dalí and the Swiss-born artists Alberto
Giacometti and Meret Oppenheim. Here the emphasis was on the
artist finding an object in the external world which corresponded to
unconscious requirements, hence reinvigorating the relations
between inner and outer reality. A cult of the ‘encounter’, which
went back to the early days of Surrealism, was simultaneously
stepped up. Wandering through a Paris that was magically
informed by a hidden network of meanings, the Surrealist flâneur
would make himself available to the dictates of ‘objective chance’.
True to the underlying avant-garde ethos of Surrealism, however,
this new engagement with the external world manifested itself
more literally in politics.
Dada and Surrealism
social revolution or vice versa? After Breton’s group purges of 1929,
which were themselves partly predicated on the relative claims of
group solidarity and individualism, these questions became
particularly pressing. The Surrealists were now forced to respond to
the requirements of a new Stalinist regime in Russia. Matters came
to a head in 1932 when Louis Aragon officially quit Surrealism in
favour of the Communist Party. As the 1930s progressed, ‘Socialist
Realism’ – a legible, realist art for the masses – became the officially
sanctioned art of Communism, and Breton’s Trotskyist
commitment to a cultural-cum-political revolution alienated the
Surrealists decisively from Soviet orthodoxy.
Despite such ideological turbulence, Surrealism in the 1930s
attracted a number of newcomers. Several of these were women,
ranging from the English painter and writer Leonora Carrington,
who largely explored mythological themes, to the French writer and
photographer Claude Cahun, who produced self-images
questioning her own gender identity. Within male Surrealist art,
primacy had always been given to the expression of sexual desire,
usually conceived of in heterosexual terms, and the 1930s saw the
erotic work of the German Hans Bellmer coming to prominence.
Violent and morally taboo fantasies were licensed in Surrealism by
a cult around the French 18th-century pornographer, the Marquis
de Sade, conceived of as an apostle of liberty.
The later 1930s was also a period in which Surrealism, as a set of
doctrines, spread both to other European countries and to other
continents. In the 1920s Surrealism had attracted important figures
from countries such as Spain or Germany to Paris. As the world
became more politically volatile in the 1930s – with numerous
countries affected to varying degrees by the political polarities of
Communism and Fascism – the movement’s principles and values
appealed to Leftist and anti-Fascist artists and writers in a variety of
new contexts. In this sense it often achieved a political potency
elsewhere that it was incapable of in France. The first substantial
subgroup was formed in Belgium in 1926 by the writer Paul Nougé
22
and incorporated artists such as E. L. T. Mesens, René Magritte
and, later, Paul Delvaux and the photographer Raoul Ubac. By the
mid-1930s Surrealism had gained a foothold in Eastern Europe.
Two Romanians, Victor Brauner and Jacques Hérold, had been
important additions to the Paris group in the early 1930s, but
particularly significant was the formation of a Prague group in
1934, its prominent figures being Karel Teige, the collagist Jindrich
Styrsky and the painters Josef Sima and Toyen (Marie Cernunová).
Both the Belgian and the Czechoslovakian groups had friendlier
relations with their national Communist Parties than the Paris
group.
That same year Breton travelled to Mexico to cement ideological
bonds with Trotsky and the muralist painter Diego Rivera. This
established the foundations for a Surrealist presence in Latin
America, with figures such as the photographer Manuel Alvarez
Bravo and the painter Frida Kahlo being hailed as Surrealists,
however much their work dealt with ‘local’ traditions and concerns.
The Surrealists were always voracious in their annexation of
cultural and social ‘others’. They saw their work as paralleling that
of the art of the insane, and often placed their artworks alongside
objects such as Oceanic masks. Sometimes this amounted to an
insensitive appropriation of quite different modes of
23
A historical overview
In 1936 the important ‘International Exhibition of Surrealism’ took
place in London, serving as the rallying point for a disparate
collection of English talents such as the writer David Gascoyne, the
painters Roland Penrose and Eileen Agar, and the filmmaker
Humphrey Jennings. Large international exhibitions very much
provided the symbolic locus for Surrealism by this time. Dramatic
staging had always been a distinctive aspect of Surrealism (a small
but striking display of objects was shown at Charles Ratton’s Paris
gallery in 1936 for instance), but 1938 saw their most flamboyant
exhibition yet, the ‘International Exhibition of Surrealism’ held at
the Galerie des Beaux Arts in Paris in which the ceiling of the main
room was hung with coal sacks filled with newspapers.
Dada and Surrealism
understanding, but with the onset of the Second World War and the
inevitable dispersal of the Parisian nucleus of the group, Surrealism
as a French-identified phenomenon was forced to adapt to new
cultural imperatives.
In 1941 Breton, along with artists such as Masson and Ernst, left
German-occupied France via Marseilles, although some of his old
allies such as Eluard chose to remain in Paris. Breton’s exile proved
to be a catalyst in various ways. On the one hand, his visit to
Martinique, en route to the US, brought him into contact with the
‘Négritude’ movement that was under formation in the French
colonies, and more particularly with the poet Aimé Cesaire.
Surrealism thus truly became a language of the culturally
marginalized. On the other hand, Breton’s presence in New York
from 1942 to the end of the war meant that the foundations were
laid for an American response to Surrealism, despite the fact that
Breton himself remained defiantly French and refused to learn
English.
Before the war the American take-up of Surrealism had been
confined to isolated instances, such as the work of Joseph Cornell,
who produced poetically allusive tableaux in open-fronted wooden
boxes from the late 1930s onwards. With the presence of Breton
and several key painters in the US, Surrealism now began to inform
the abstract painting that was dominant in New York. Several older
New York painters, notably the Chilean-born Roberto Matta and
the Armenian-born Arshile Gorky, started to incorporate elements
from the painting of Surrealists such as Miró and Masson such as
biomorphism (the use of semi-abstract organic forms) and
automatism into their work. Such experiments eventually proved
instrumental in the development of Jackson Pollock’s variant of
Abstract Expressionism. Abstraction, underpinned by Surrealist
faith in the dictates of the unconscious or the primal, dominated the
immediate post-war period in the US but by the mid-1950s artists
had begun to rediscover the implications of Dada. Duchamp, who
had moved from France to New York just after Breton but whose
24
influence had initially been more ‘underground’, now came to be
seen as the decisive figure. His concept of the ‘readymade’ and his
interest in mass culture seemed much more attuned to American
sensibility and would provide one of the reference points for Pop
Art. Given that the readymade had been a Dada invention, it could
easily be argued that Dada, rather than Surrealism, set the agenda
for post-1945 art in America.
Dada-and-Surrealism?
The above summaries of Dada and Surrealism are intended to
provide the reader with a ‘map’ which can be referred back to while
reading the rest of this book. The narrative they supply is predicated
on the idea that Dada and Surrealism are in some sense ‘wedded’.
This model of Dada-and-Surrealism has been rehearsed almost as a
matter of course in anglophone cultures during the past century. It
was used to underpin the first substantial historical survey of the
25
A historical overview
Breton returned to France after the war, but Surrealism could
no longer command the intellectual authority it had once had.
Existentialism seemed much more pertinent to the changed times.
Arguably Surrealism did not re-emerge as a cultural influence
until the 1960s, and it was once again Dada’s concern with the
readymade or with processes of assemblage which caught the
imaginations of the most prestigious French artists of the 1950s
such as Yves Klein or Arman. Surrealism as a movement certainly
continued until Breton’s death in 1966, and periodically came up
with dramatic flourishes; in the 1959 EROS exhibition in Paris, for
instance, the ceiling of the opening ‘Love Grotto’ ‘breathed’ courtesy
of hidden air pumps. But the movement’s characteristic devices
now arguably bordered on the ‘kitsch’ and it had nothing
approaching the status it had once had. Paradoxically, however,
its influence had become pervasive in the world at large. If it had
once aligned itself with Communism, its artistic techniques of
juxtaposition and disorientation were now fundamental to the
advertising strategies of late capitalism.
movements, Alfred Barr’s exhibition ‘Fantastic Art, Dada and
Surrealism’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1936. Later
it informed the substantial book by another MoMA curator,
William Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, in 1968. It was further
upheld in the important scholarly reassessment of the two
movements ‘Dada and Surrealism Reviewed’ at the Hayward
Gallery, London, in 1978. But how naturally do these movements
sit together?
Dada and Surrealism
It would be argued by some that ‘Dada-and-Surrealism’ as a
portmanteau concept actually betrays a Francophile historical bias.
Indeed from the point of view of a committed Germanist it might be
seen as potentially misleading. As we will see, ‘Expressionism-andDada’ might imply as valid an historical narrative for someone
primarily interested in German-speaking cultures.
To counter this objection we would have to acknowledge that both
movements were avowedly internationalist. Certain figures who
literally moved over from Dada to Surrealism, such as Picabia,
Tzara, Ernst and Arp, also moved freely from one European culture
to another and were bi- or multi-lingual. For political reasons,
both Dada and Surrealism abhorred nationalist sentiment and
tended to see themselves as addressing humanity at large, although
it should be noted that the ‘universalizing’ rhetoric of the early
20th-century avant-garde is widely questioned these days, not least
because it was precisely European assumptions that were thought
to be ‘universal’. However, the fact is that because a very clear, if
gradual, transition from Dada to Surrealism occurred in Paris it has
become customary to produce a model of Dada-and-Surrealism
predicated on what happened in Paris alone, with Surrealism
inevitably emerging as Dada’s ‘destiny’.
In actual fact Dada did not lead to anything approaching
Surrealism in Germany itself. In keeping with other big German
cities, there was a trend towards Neue Sachlichkeit (loosely
translated as ‘new objectivity’) in Berlin and Cologne in the early
26
Similar points could be made about Dada in New York. The ironic
machinist works of Duchamp and Picabia were assimilated by
young American artists such as Morton Schamberg alongside an
indigenous photographic tradition, represented by figures such as
Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, in which the machine was often
celebrated. Machine iconography would become an element in a
drive towards creating a distinctively ‘American’ art by the early
1920s, and a much more straightforwardly realist attitude to the
machine, as part of a so-called ‘Precisionist’ trend, took hold in the
paintings of, say, Charles Sheeler, well before Duchamp left New
York in 1923.
It should be clear from all this that ‘Dada-and-Surrealism’ is in no
way a self-evident formulation if developments in all the centres
associated with Dada are borne in mind. It misrepresents Dada to a
degree. If a microscope were trained on it as a historiographic
27
A historical overview
1920s. We can see an artist such as George Grosz, who had used
elements of intensified realism in late Dada works such as Grey Day
of 1921, shifting toward this new trend, but Neue Sachlichkeit
has little in common with Surrealism. It is outward in orientation,
tending towards social satire, rather than ‘inward’. The
characteristics it shares with Surrealism are a concern with
heightened realism (the term ‘magic realism’ was used by
German critics), as in certain works by Dalí and Magritte, and a
revalorization of painting itself as an activity. If we had to search
for a partner to Dada in Berlin, or Zurich for that matter, we
would have to go backwards, so to speak, rather than forwards,
and look at how closely Dada in these cities was initially allied to
Expressionism. Admittedly this was often in a negative way for
many of the Berliners, but Expressionist-style masks, for instance,
figured prominently in Zurich Dada performances and, although
the performances of simultaneous poems and such like at the
Cabaret Voltaire signalled a pronounced move away from
Expressionist precedents, they were often juxtaposed with song
or poetry recitals harking back to the older style.
Dada and Surrealism
construction, ‘Dada-and-Surrealism’ might even be seen as erected
on the basis of, say, Barr’s above-mentioned exhibition at MoMA,
New York of 1936, or the publication of the French scholar Michel
Sanouillet’s important study Dada à Paris of 1965 in which he
argued that Surrealism was the form that Dada took in Paris.
Alternatively, the formulation could be seen as based on the
attractions of an international figure such as Max Ernst, who moved
from Cologne to Paris in 1922, providing possibly the clearest
bridge between German Dada and French Surrealism.
There are, however, very good reasons for looking at the movements
side by side, not least because their concerns can often be
contrasted in a peculiarly telling manner. Both movements
prioritized the poetic principle and downplayed the concept of art,
endorsing the avant-garde wish to merge art and life. Both
presented themselves as ‘international’ in ethos, and, in its later
stages, Surrealism was virtually global. Both were fundamentally
irrationalist in orientation.
Beyond this, subtle and significant differences existed between
them. Dada was largely anarchic in spirit. The people who held it
together, however tenuously – namely Ball, Huelsenbeck, Tzara and
Picabia – were highly ambivalent about what they were doing, just
as Dada was defined by them as simultaneously affirmative and
destructive. By contrast, Surrealism, impelled by the organizational
proclivities of André Breton, was much more of a ‘movement’ in the
sense that the word implies direction. The Dadaists were largely
unconcerned about making traditionally saleable art objects, while
Surrealist artists such as Dalí and Magritte specialized in that most
traditional and saleable of techniques, oil painting. Admittedly
Breton criticized the commercial preoccupations of certain artists,
but Surrealism might easily be termed ‘reactionary’ if we were to
judge it by the standards of Dadaist anti-commercialism and
technical innovation. The Dadaists were ambivalent about the
values of intellect, seeing excessive rationalism as part of man’s
downfall, but the Surrealists, in their theoretical writings at least,
28
paradoxically employed highly intellectual means to investigate
unconscious phenomena.
29
A historical overview
These, of course, are generalizations, and detailed comparisons
will emerge from the focused case studies and discussions in the
chapters that follow. My approach throughout, as I asserted in
the introduction, will be to examine how Dada and Surrealism
concurred or diverged around a set of key themes. I have avoided
mapping them onto one another as far as possible, but I have
nevertheless seen them as inhabiting a common cultural moment
bracketed by two world wars. One thing that should be evident from
the above historical summaries is how much emphasis they placed
on attracting attention to themselves as avant-garde formations.
I have mentioned manifestos, the changes of direction signalled
by articles in journals, the importance of staged events, and so on.
This emphasis on dissemination is highly characteristic of these
movements. It therefore provides the thematic foundation for the
next chapter.
Chapter 2
‘Rather life’: promoting Dada
and Surrealism
In a poem of 1923, Surrealism’s ‘pope’ André Breton asserted the
pre-eminence of life over art, ending with the words ‘And since
words have become over-rife / Rather life.’ The artists and poets
attached to both Dada and Surrealism refused to subordinate the
experience of life to that of art. Perhaps they were idealistic or
naive in trying to reconcile these principles, but it is this level
of ambition which characterizes Dada and Surrealism as
quintessentially avant-garde cultural formations. How, then,
did these movements penetrate into the fabric of daily life? How
did they attempt to infiltrate the world beyond the art gallery?
How did they promote themselves?
In this chapter I will concentrate on the Dadaists’ and Surrealists’
penchant for the ‘event’ – whether a fleeting performance in some
obscure location or a well-publicized public happening – and
their ability, when they did enter the art gallery, to create
attention-grabbing exhibitions. I will also look closely at
their journals and their uses of photography.
Quite apart from how Dada and Surrealism presented themselves
to the outside world, how did the participants involved in these
movements conceive of their relation with that world, i.e. with the
phenomenon of social modernity? To help focus this issue, I will
look at their relation to popular culture, and how the city itself
30
was understood by them. Building on the basic narrative
presented in the last chapter, certain key ‘moments’ will be dwelt
on in order to build up a collage of Dada and Surrealist
‘snapshots’.
The magic bishop and the Dada fair
The Dadaist poet Hugo Ball is carried onto the stage. According to
his diary:
My legs were in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, which came up
to my hips so that I looked like an obelisk . . . Over it I wore a
high coat collar cut out of cardboard, scarlet inside and gold
outside . . . I also wore a high blue-and-white-striped witch
doctor’s hat.
Once positioned in front of an arrangement of music stands bearing
pencilled scripts, he solemnly declaims:
gadji beri bimba
glandridi lauli lonni cadori
gadjama bim beri glassala . . .
How would we have reacted ? The audience probably jeered. On
another occasion Ball primed them by saying ‘In these phonetic
31
‘Rather life’
Let us begin by reconstructing a foundational Dada moment. If we
had attended the Cabaret Voltaire on the night of 23 June 1916 we
would have been in a room containing a small stage, a piano, and
tables and chairs for about 50 people. A photograph of a now-lost
painting by Marcel Janco (see Figure 2) shows that there was
barely any distance between the performers and their audience.
Eyewitness accounts stress the smokiness of the room and the
rowdiness of the audience of drunken students, socialist
intellectuals, army deserters and vagabonds, as the cabaret
was in the ‘amusement quarter’ of Zurich.
Dada and Surrealism
poems we totally renounce the language that journalism has
abused . . . we must return to the innermost alchemy of the
word’, a statement which goes some way to explaining the sheer
absurdity of his incantation. Ball himself was overwhelmed.
Finding himself chanting at one point in a liturgical style that
transported him back to his Catholic childhood, he was carried
off stage ‘bathed in sweat like a magic bishop’. Shortly afterwards
he left Dada permanently, eventually devoting himself to religious
studies.
Other Dada performances at the Cabaret Voltaire reached a
crescendo around this time. Virtually re-enacting the traumatic
and dislocating effects of the war they were opposed to, the Dadaists
unleashed forces which they themselves found unsettling. As a
consequence there was a lull in Dada proceedings between
mid-1916 and early 1917.
After this, Zurich Dada gradually became ‘respectable’. The group
moved over to the other side of the River Limmat and held soirées
in impeccably bourgeois civic buildings. The Galerie Dada, which
hosted a number of events in rooms above the Sprüngli
confectioners, would eventually be described by Richard
Huelsenbeck as ‘a manicure salon of the fine arts, characterised
by tea-drinking old ladies trying to revive their vanishing sexual
powers with the help of ‘‘something mad’’ ’. High admission prices
were charged and guest lists drawn up. It is clear from this that
Dada, however much we think of it as bohemian in character,
rapidly became assimilated to bourgeois norms. The larger point,
of course, is that the Dadaists ironically found it necessary to appeal
to a well-educated, liberal audience in order to be ‘understood’. It is
an irony that will continue as a leitmotif throughout Dada and
Surrealist avant-garde activity.
The initial scandal of Dada derived from events at which few
people were present. Dada thus relied from the beginning on a
process of self-mythologization. Another way in which the group
32
promoted themselves from early on was via group publications, in
the wake of avant-garde precedents such as the Italian Futurist
magazine Lacerba or the British Vorticist journal Blast. Cabaret
Voltaire, the first of the Zurich group’s publications, produced in
June 1916, was a relatively sober affair, reproducing works by
acknowledged avant-garde names such as Picasso as well as the
works of the Dadaists. It was even printed in a de luxe edition with
original woodcuts. The next Zurich Dada review, Dada, of 1917–19
was more daring in design, making use of jarring typefaces,
particularly in its third issue. It was also more assertively
‘international’, with poems by Dadaist contacts elsewhere, such as
Francis Picabia and Louis Aragon.
Modelled loosely, and highly ironically, on a commercial trade
fair, this event had a notable precedent in the Cologne Dada Fair
of 20 April 1920 which had been designed to cause its audience
maximum discomfort. People entered the Cologne exhibition via
the public urinal of a beer-hall. At the exhibition’s opening they
were treated to a reading of obscene poetry by a young girl
wearing a communion dress. The works on display included a
sculpture by Max Ernst with an axe attached with which to
destroy the object. The Berlin event, held at a commercial gallery
from 30 June to 25 August 1920, dubbed the ‘First International
Dada Fair’, and consisting of some 200 objects in various media,
was equally confrontational, but was set up from the outset with
an eye to obtaining the widest possible publicity. The famous
photograph of the gallery’s main room (Figure 5), which included
a stuffed Prussian officer’s uniform fitted with a plaster pig’s
head hanging from the ceiling and a mannequin, constructed by
George Grosz and John Heartfield, with an illuminated light bulb
33
‘Rather life’
In a sense, though, Zurich Dada, with its legendary cabaret events
and its partially hand-printed magazines, was rather ‘home-made’.
It did relatively little to harness the techniques of modern publicity.
We can look to the later Dada Fair in Berlin to see the opposite
process occurring.
5. Installation view of the First International Dada Fair, Berlin, June 1920
for a head, was reproduced widely. Newspapers throughout
the world – from Paris to Buenos Aires – carried articles on the
event.
The mock trial and the street of mannequins
The two kinds of Dada manifestation we have looked at – one
‘home-made’ but quickly mythologized, the other manifestly geared
towards mass publicity – bore the hallmarks of the movement’s
desire to overturn or to relativize existing values. Turning to two
analogous events – one proto-Surrealist, the other fully so – it is
possible to underline some crucial differences between Dada and
Surrealism. The first of these reveals the shift from Dada to
Surrealism that occurred in Paris, as part of the ‘mouvement flou’,
during 1921 to 1924.
35
‘Rather life’
Like the Cabaret Voltaire, the Berlin Dada Fair would have been a
profoundly disorientating experience. As we can see from the
photograph, the walls of the show included photomontages by the
likes of Hausmann and paintings by Grosz or Otto Dix, but these
vied for attention with posters bearing slogans such as ‘Dada is on
the side of the revolutionary proletariat’, ‘Everyone can Dada’ and
‘Art is dead: long live the new machine art of Tatlin’. It would have
been difficult as a spectator to separate the (anti-)art on display
from the polemical barrage. This, of course, is precisely the effect
that was sought. The slogan supporting Tatlin is particularly
revealing of the overall strategy of the Berlin group. Tatlin, a
leading figure of Russian Constructivism whose work they knew
only partially, was seen as the embodiment of a new materialist
attitude to art, and hence the antithesis of the bogus spirituality
represented for them by the Expressionist generation. But the
main point about the event is that its sloganeering revealed the
Berlin Dadaists’ awareness of the increasing power of advertising
in daily life. Rather than stand aloof from the processes of the
commercial world, they hijacked its strategies to disseminate
their message.
Dada and Surrealism
On 13 May 1921 André Breton and a group of his Dada allies, along
with a number of literary and political personalities, engaged in a
bizarre ‘mock trial’, set up to test Breton’s conviction that Maurice
Barrès, a well-known right-wing author, was guilty of ‘crimes
against the security of the mind’. Looking at a photograph of the
event, we can see that a degree of immediate absurdity was
involved. The Dadaists themselves were elaborately kitted-out as
High Court judges, whilst Barrès – who did not deign to defend
himself – was represented by a dummy. However the event was
carefully orchestrated and sober in tone, abandoning the
spontaneity of previous Dada manifestations such as the Cabaret
Voltaire happening discussed above.
In many ways the trial was conceived from the outset as a ‘position
statement’ on Breton’s part, as well as a photo-opportunity (a
strategy to be discussed further shortly). A few people paid to attend
it, but the emphasis was placed squarely on the participants and
their ideological viewpoints. Significantly, the participants were not
just Dadaists but invited ‘witnesses’. They ranged from the
nationalist novelist Rachilde to Georges Pioch, a Communist who
defended political criminals in the courts. The event was held in
premises once used by the Club de Fauborg, a debating society
formed during the French Revolution, in which prominent public
figures were invited to discuss political matters before a largely
bohemian tribunal. (On one occasion a club meeting had instigated
the attack on the Bastille.)
Breton and his fellow ‘judges’ believed that Barrès, whom Aragon
in particular had once admired, had betrayed the commitment to
the individual conscience shown in his novels of the 1880s and
1890s. In doing so, he had capitulated to the shift to the right in
French politics during the First World War. Breton was thus using
a Dada event not to disorientate but to examine a coherent set of
ideas, albeit ideas which impinged closely on the nascent
Surrealist group’s concern with the rights of the imagination.
The event was also an exercise in cultural politics. To the disdain of
36
6. The mock trial of Maurice Barrès, photograph, 13 May 1921. From left to right: Louis Aragon, unidentified person,
André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Philippe Soupault, Théodore Fraenkel, the dummy representing Barrès, Georges
Ribemont-Dessaignes, Benjamin Péret and other Dada associates
Dada and Surrealism
Tristan Tzara, who was appalled that Dada could assume a
judgemental position, Breton was signalling a move towards a
consolidated avant-garde programme, a process which would
culminate in the ‘Congrès de Paris’, mentioned in Chapter 1, and
eventually Surrealism.
If the proto-Surrealist ‘mock trial’ stands in a pointed relation
to the spontaneity of the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire, a much later
event, this time an exhibition of the fully fledged Surrealist
movement, provides a striking contrast with the Dada Fair in
Berlin. On the whole, exhibition installations had been fairly
conventional in the early years of Surrealism, and it was not
until the later 1930s, largely in order to showcase the increasing
internationalism of the movement, that the group started to
experiment with exhibition design as the Dadaists had. The
large International Exhibition of Surrealism, held at Georges
Wildenstein’s Galerie des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1938, was a notable
turning point.
The talents of the ex-Dadaist Marcel Duchamp were solicited by
Breton for this exhibition’s installation. Duchamp decreed that
1,200 dusty coal sacks, filled with newspaper, be hung ominously
over the main exhibition space, which was lit only by a burning
brazier. The works on display were thus difficult to see, and, at the
opening, visitors were supplied with flashlights. The nocturnal
aspect of the space was further compounded by the presence of two
enormous beds, one in each corner of the room.
There were other dramatic flourishes. In the courtyard of the
building, visitors could peer into Salvador Dalí’s Rainy Taxi to
discover a scantily clad female mannequin, crawling with snails,
perched on the back seat in a cascade of water. Entering the show,
they were compelled to walk along the ‘Street of Mannequins’ and
thus notionally to ‘choose’ among sixteen fetishistically attired
mannequins, which might be construed to be ‘streetwalkers’, each
the outcome of the fantasies of a different Surrealist artist.
38
7. Installation view of the International Exhibition of Surrealism at the Galerie des
Beaux Arts, Paris, 1938
Dada and Surrealism
These effects differ markedly from those used by the Berlin
Dadaists at their Fair. Both groups set out to be disorientating, but
the Surrealists were obviously concerned with the seductions of
unconscious fantasy rather than with the material jolts favoured by
the Dadaists. Dreams were obviously invoked by the nocturnal
trappings of the main exhibition room at the 1938 show, while the
‘Street of Mannequins’ encouraged erotic reverie in a way which
would have been foreign to Dada’s satirical instincts. Like the
Dadaists, the Surrealists used exhibition décor as a means of
attracting publicity, but their engagement with the world of fashion
far exceeded that of their predecessors. The mannequins, for
instance, had been borrowed from leading fashion houses and it
was no coincidence that Salvador Dalí had started to collaborate on
dress designs with Elsa Schiaparelli the previous year. Whilst the
Dadaists had parodied commerce at the Dada Fair, the Surrealists
could be seen as complicit with it to some degree. Admittedly this
was bound up with the international profile they were set on
establishing, as two previous international Surrealist exhibitions
had been held in Prague and London, in 1935 and 1936
respectively; indeed the Berlin Dada Fair looks almost parochial by
comparison. But to some extent the Surrealists risked ‘selling out’ to
the commercial world. If the ‘mock trial’ of 1921 had been a
demonstration of the group’s ideological austerity, the exhibition of
1938 revealed how its instinct for publicity could jeopardize its
politics. This theme will re-emerge later.
Being Dada, being Surrealist
We have so far looked at events. Let us turn now to people. If
Dadaist and Surrealist principles were promoted with maximum
strategic flair in their performances and exhibitions, often with an
eye to commercial practices, to what extent did the poets and artists
of the movements concentrate on personal image-building ? What
was involved in being Dada or being Surrealist ?
We tend popularly to think of Dada and Surrealism as synonymous
40
Whether or not Cravan committed some symbolic form of Dada
suicide is open to debate, but his scorn for convention assured him
of lasting fame. In that sense he typifies the Dada belief that one’s
mode of living could itself qualify as a category of Dada. One
quintessentially Dada characteristic of Cravan’s was his penchant
for false identities (hotel thief, etc.). The movement’s participants
frequently invented aliases for themselves. In Berlin, Richard
Huelsenbeck was known as ‘World Dada’, Raoul Hausmann was
‘Dadasoph’ and Johannes Baader was the self-styled ‘Oberdada’
(Super-dada). Baader, incidentally, cultivated his megalomaniac
streak to a sublimely parodic pitch, vying with Cravan in terms of
sheer bravado. In February 1919, having previously proclaimed
41
‘Rather life’
with outlandish behaviour, and there are numerous examples
within Dada in particular to support this. The most compelling
story, perhaps, is that of Arthur Cravan. Born in Switzerland in
1887, a nephew of Oscar Wilde, Cravan lived a restless, itinerant
existence in various European locations. In Paris between 1912 and
1915 he published a scurrilous literary magazine titled Maintenant
dedicated to insulting members of the artistic avant-garde. By 1916
he was in Barcelona where he challenged the world heavyweight
boxing champion, Jack Johnson, to a fight. A well-built man,
Cravan was an amateur pugilist, given to announcing himself prior
to his fights with an improbable list of credentials: ‘hotel thief,
muleteer, snake charmer, chauffeur’, and so on. Whatever his
qualifications, he was not a match for Johnson and was knocked out
in the sixth round. Not surprisingly, the Dadaist Francis Picabia,
who was publishing his peripatetic 391 review from Barcelona,
became an enthusiastic advocate of Cravan’s and when, in 1917,
Cravan turned up in America, Marcel Duchamp got him to deliver
a lecture to the ‘Society of Independent Artists’ (of which more
below). Cravan put on a suitably Dada show, arriving drunk,
stripping off his clothes, and finally being arrested by the New York
Police. He was to disappear completely in 1918. His wanderlust
brought him to Mexico, from where he reputedly set out in a rowing
boat heading for Buenos Aires, never to be seen again.
Dada and Surrealism
himself ‘President of the Globe’ in a Dadaist manifesto, he disrupted
the inaugural meeting of the National Assembly at Weimar,
demanding that the government be handed over to the Dadaists.
Further afield, Max Ernst in Cologne became ‘dadamax’, while
Duchamp, in New York, had himself photographed by Man Ray,
dressed in fashionable women’s clothes, as the enigmatic Rrose
Sélavy, a deliberately artless pun, when pronounced in French, on
the phrase ‘eros c’est la vie’.
In developing alternative personae, the Dadaists implied that,
rather than being fixed, identity is constantly in a state of flux.
Implicitly they questioned the idea of an immutable core to the
human personality or an intrinsic ‘human nature’, itself part of
bourgeois ideology. This was extended further with Duchamp’s
gender slippages, so that the idea of sexual identity as something
determined by biology was questioned. In terms of our discussion of
the artist’s ‘image’, this suggests that a secure or finite image was
precisely something the Dadaists avoided; hence they admired the
outrageous social posturing of a figure such as Cravan. As was
revealed by the Berlin Dada Fair, they were ambivalent about the
modern age’s mania for publicity and spectacle, simultaneously
endorsing and undercutting it.
Turning to the public personae of Surrealist artists, it is surprising,
given the psychoanalytic preoccupations of the movement, that
alternative identities were less widely adopted. Max Ernst’s alter
ego, the ‘Bird Superior’ Loplop was a notable exception. The artists
generally favoured an outward show of conformism. This extended
to a reassertion of late 19th-century dandyish codes of conduct,
whereby excessive display was considered vulgar. Several leading
Surrealists sported the dandyish attribute of the monocle (as did
many Dadaists) while the Belgian painter Magritte notoriously
suppressed any indication of his imaginative self by adopting the
bowler hat and umbrella of the city gentleman. When the
Surrealists did indulge their fascination for extravagant dress or
disturbing mutations of identity, they often did so in the socially
42
acceptable context of high-class Costume Balls. There are some
memorable photographs of Max Ernst, for instance, dressed as the
aforementioned Loplop at an event in 1958. Salvador Dalí was
the obvious exception to all this.
Dalí’s insistent self-obsessiveness, his love of the politically
incorrect and the aesthetically recherché, can be seen as a deliberate
decision to play the vulgarian in the eyes of André Breton. The
Surrealist leader was to anagramatize his name as ‘Avida Dollars’,
discerning in the later Dalí all of the commercial motivations that
official Surrealism repudiated. However, as was suggested above,
by the time of its late 1930s public exhibitions, Surrealism had,
however uncomfortably, become wedded to capitalism, and Dalí
simply admitted to the fact. The Surrealists were not coy either in
recognizing Dalí’s value as publicity; hence his presence in the 1938
show, at a time when he was officially losing favour with them. It
took Dalí’s genius for bad taste to draw out from George Orwell one
43
‘Rather life’
Dalí’s flamboyant showmanship, emblematized by his famous
upturned moustache, is notorious, but the Dalí phenomenon
warrants further attention precisely because students of modernism
find the artist’s self-promotion so galling. Dalí posed difficulties for
the Surrealists themselves, and was only fully in favour with André
Breton from 1929 to 1934, after which relations between the two
men cooled considerably. Dalí flouted all the ideological protocols of
Surrealism; as the 1930s progressed, he advocated both monarchist
and Fascist sentiments. He also cultivated an innate fondness for
kitsch, developing a fascination for the more excessive flourishes of
Art Nouveau – he wrote an innovative article in the Surrealist
journal Minotaure in 1933 on the tendril-like ironwork of Hector
Guimard’s entrances to the Paris Metro. His garish, showily
accomplished, paintings were designed from the outset to be
anti-aesthetic. He described them as ‘instantaneous colour
photography done by hand of the superfine, extravagant . . .
superpictorial, superplastic, deceptive, hypernormal, feeble images
of concrete irrationality’.
of the few considered mainstream literary responses to Surrealism
of the 1930s. Deciding that Dalí was ‘as anti-social as a flea’ and
his work ‘diseased and disgusting’ Orwell was nevertheless
exercised by its ethical challenge as art. We might deduce from
this that Dalí alone among the Surrealists fashioned a public image
measuring up to Dada standards of irritability.
Dada and Surrealism
Disseminating Duchamp: Dada reviews
We have looked at how assiduously the Dadaists and Surrealists
cultivated their images but how exactly did their reputations
become established? After all, the audience for avant-garde art at
that time was small. At the end of its five-year life, the number of
subscribers for the first Surrealist journal, La Révolution
Surréaliste, was only one thousand. The audience for Surrealism
could not have been substantially larger.
In the case of Dalí, news of his larger-than-life activities travelled
quickly: at the London International Exhibition of Surrealism of
1936, for instance, he wore a deep sea diver’s outfit, attracting
considerable attention. But reputations were often established by
more insidious means. The name Duchamp is synonymous with
some of the most iconoclastic works of Dada and Surrealism, yet the
man himself was private and (deliberately) enigmatic. So how did
the cult of Duchamp become established?
A brief account has been given of the rejection of Duchamp’s
urinal from the New York ‘Independents’ exhibition of April 1917.
A month after that event a slim proto-Dada journal, titled The Blind
Man, had appeared. It contained a photograph of the offending
object and a short anonymously authored article responding, in
mock outrage, to the urinal’s rejection and defending it from an
imputed charge of plagiarism:
Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has
no importance. HE CHOSE IT. He took an ordinary article of life,
44
placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new
title and point of view – and created a new thought for that object.
We can be sure that Duchamp was behind this article – he probably
got one of his female friends, Beatrice Wood, to write it – since it
offers a philosophical justification for his ‘readymades’ (to be
discussed further in Chapter 3). But the most pressing reason for
the piece lay in manufacturing a controversy which would not
otherwise have existed; the actual events surrounding the rejection
of Fountain are hardly known. Even the original object seems
to have disappeared at some point during the ‘Independents’
exhibition. If it has become a Dada icon it is as a result of the
photograph in The Blind Man, taken by the modernist
photographer Alfred Stieglitz (Figure 3), although, later in
his life, Duchamp disconcertingly had ‘replicas’ produced.
The Blind Man was one of the earliest of a spate of journals
published by the Dadaists in the movement’s various locations.
Possibly the most widely influential of these journals, and the
longest running, was Francis Picabia’s 391, which he published
intermittently from 1917 to 1924 from wherever he happened to be
at the time: Barcelona, New York or Paris. Its name implied a kind
of evolutionary progression from the American photographer
Alfred Stieglitz’s earlier magazine, 291, whose title referred to
the address of his gallery on Fifth Avenue, New York.
It was in 391, in an issue of 1920, that Picabia further contributed to
the dissemination of the Duchamp legend. He took Duchamp’s
anti-art provocation L.H.O.O.Q, the ‘assisted readymade’ of 1919
consisting of a print of the Mona Lisa with added moustache and
beard, and replicated it (without the beard, which he appears to
45
‘Rather life’
All of this underlines the extent to which Fountain and its
associated ‘scandal’ were stage-managed affairs. At the same time it
brings into focus a theme which now deserves central prominence;
the way in which Dada and Surrealist publications functioned.
Dada and Surrealism
have forgotten) in close proximity to a reproduction of a work by
himself consisting of an ink splash and titled Holy Virgin. The
notoriety of both works was thus assured. In October 1922, in the
pages of another Dada magazine, this time Littérature, the organ
of the Paris group, Duchamp’s myth was consolidated by a key
article on him by André Breton. Here Breton set in motion the
concept of a cerebral Duchamp, more interested in making gestures
than creating works of art, which would definitively secure his
reputation among the nascent Surrealist group: ‘Could it be that
Marcel Duchamp reaches the critical point of ideas faster than
anyone else?’
Clearly Duchamp’s myth was built up as much via magazines and
enigmatic photographs as via the exhibition of his relatively meagre
output. He did not have a proper one-man show of his works until
his retrospective of 1963. Even the reputation of his greatest work,
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even was built up
through appreciative descriptions and asides in Surrealist journals,
notably Breton’s essay ‘Lighthouse of the Bride’ published in
Minotaure in 1934/5, rather than through people actually seeing
the work. How Duchamp himself orchestrated the build-up of his
reputation is a fascinating question but it can hardly be discussed
here. Dada’s publishing infrastructure clearly did much of the work
for him. It is necessary now, however, to pursue the functioning of
journals from a Dada to a Surrealist context in order to further
explore continuities and differences between the movements.
Journals were of even greater significance for Surrealism than
for Dada. Similarly, if photography was crucial in disseminating
Duchamp, as we saw in the case of Fountain, it became an
absolutely central tool in the Surrealist publications.
Insulting priests in the street and other photoopportunities: the Surrealist reviews
A copy of the Surrealist journal La Révolution Surréaliste of
December 1926 contains a seemingly innocuous photograph of an
46
8. ‘Our colleague Benjamin Péret in the act of insulting a priest’,
photograph reproduced in La Révolution Surréaliste, 8 (Dec. 1926)
exchange between two figures, with the arresting caption ‘Our
colleague Benjamin Péret in the act of insulting a priest’ printed
beneath it (Figure 8).
Dada and Surrealism
The image appears to be a casual, deadpan photographic document
but is surrounded by poems written by the Surrealist poet Benjamin
Péret, one of which parodies the ‘Chicago Eucharistic Congress’, at
which ‘everyone rushes towards the divine excrements and the
sacred spit’. Clearly the image, rather than being an incidental
snapshot, constitutes an elaborate set-piece, its purpose being to
reinforce the blasphemous message of the poem. In effect it records
a kind of ‘performance event’. Péret obviously had a friend at hand
to photograph his act.
This is a good example of the way in which photography operated in
Surrealist magazines. The principal reviews in question were La
Révolution Surréaliste (1924–9), Le Surréalisme au Service de la
Révolution (1930–3), and Minotaure (1933–9), although I shall
also be referring throughout this book to Documents (1929–30), the
organ of the renegade Surrealists who surrounded Georges Bataille.
The kinds of photography these publications employed ranged
from composed studio photographs taken by Surrealism’s
house photographers, Man Ray or J.-A. Boiffard, to ones simply
appropriated from other sources. These images were placed in
the context of scholarly articles, literary essays, accounts of
dreams, and so forth, and frequently competed for attention with
reproductions of Surrealist paintings. The layout of the magazines
was much more sober than Dada journals such as Picabia’s 391,
which experimented freely with typefaces. Indeed the model for
La Révolution Surréaliste was La Nature, an earnest 19th-century
scientific journal.
In using a ‘dry’ presentational style, which made items such as
photographs appear like documents or items of evidence, the
Surrealists declared their commitment to a project of enquiry, a
systematic attempt to interrogate man’s lot vis-à-vis the ‘reality
48
‘Rather life’
9. Cover: La Révolution Surréaliste, 1 (1924)
principle’. The journals should thus be understood as the privileged
sites of Surrealist ideology.
In the case of the Péret photograph, the image clearly related to the
Surrealists’ fervent anti-Catholicism. Many of them had been
brought up according to the religion’s precepts and, as well as
opposing its moralism, they were appalled by the alliance in the
49
Dada and Surrealism
early 1920s between right-wing political parties and Catholic
organizations in France, first under the ‘Bloc National’ government
and then, from 1924, under a ruling alliance of Radicals and
Socialists. Particularly galling for them was a pro-Catholic trend
among French intellectuals in the mid-1920s, including figures
such as Jean Cocteau. Their attitude to this tendency is registered in
a photograph on the cover of the June 1926 issue of La Révolution
Surréaliste. It shows a crowd of people looking skyward and is
labelled ‘The Latest Conversions’. The image had actually been
appropriated from a then little-known, now famous, photographer,
Eugène Atget, a specialist in documentary records of Paris, whom
Man Ray had ‘ discovered’ as an old man living near to him. Atget’s
picture, taken in 1912, had simply been a record of an eclipse, but
the Surrealists, in typical fashion, reinvested the image with their
own meanings.
Photography was clearly employed by the Surrealists to press
home political or social messages. There is one particularly striking
instance where an image was again appropriated, but not even from
a known source; it consisted simply of two anonymous photographs
of the Papin sisters, labelled ‘Before’ and ‘After’, which were
republished in Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution in
May 1933.
The Papin sisters had committed one of the grisliest and most
sensational crimes to hit early 1930s France. A text in the same
Surrealist journal, in a section dedicated to ‘fait divers’ or bizarre
news items, told how these impeccably bourgeois young ladies,
having been placed in service by their mother in a respectable Le
Mans household, had developed a loathing for their employers and
had ended up murdering them with ritualistic precision, tearing out
their eyes and smashing their heads.
On one level the dual photograph of the sisters, which registered an
extraordinary change in their physiognomies, corresponded to the
Surrealist’s fascination with ‘convulsive beauty’; a kind of physical
50
10. ‘The Papin Sisters: Before and After’, from Le Surréalisme au
Service de la Révolution, 5 (May 1933)
Dada and Surrealism
jolt in relation to extraordinary visual phenomena which will be
discussed later. However, the Surrealists also sympathized with
the violent response to servitude represented by the sisters’ act.
Believing that accepted morality often served to cover up ethical
cowardice, the Surrealists had venerated criminals on other
occasions. In the very first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste,
for instance, they had placed photographic mug shots of themselves
around a photograph of Germaine Berton, an anarchist who
had assassinated Marius Plateau, leader of an ultra right-wing
organization. Hence the image of the Papins evoked a whole range
of Surrealist (as well as Dadaist) preoccupations centring on the
relations between criminality and morality.
In using photographs, alongside texts, in their journals, the
Surrealists set up a complex and ironic engagement with the issues
of their day. This further reinforces the point that Surrealism, even
more than Dada, was concerned as much with life, in its public
and ethical dimensions, as with aesthetics. However, neither the
Dadaists nor the Surrealists saw their social interests as confined
solely to the ‘official’ dimension of public life. As shown by the
Surrealists’ interest in the Papins, or the Dadaists’ parodic flirtation
with commerce, there was a desire to engage with the entire
spectrum of social knowledge and representations. Although
most of the Dadaists and Surrealists came from middle-class
backgrounds, they had a strong fascination for mass culture,
or for what in France is known as the ‘populaire.’
Popular pleasures
In one of the most insightful essays written on Surrealism the
German Marxist writer Walter Benjamin posed the question: ‘What
form do you suppose a life would take that was determined at a
decisive moment precisely by the street song last on everyone’s lips?’
In thus invoking the revolutionary potential of supposedly ‘low’
cultural materials, the critic was voicing a running theme in early
20th-century avant-gardism. Movements such as Cubism were
52
deeply interested in breaking down the distinction between ‘high’
and ‘low’ culture, as is shown, for instance, in the French painter
Léger’s introduction into Cubist painting of advertising motifs.
The left-wing commitments of both Dada and Surrealism gave
a particular inflection to their gestures of solidarity with the
‘populaire’, even though in the early 20th century mass culture
was usually something manufactured for the people rather than
arising from them. Benjamin understood their commitment to the
poetics of the ‘everyday’ extremely well. Discussing André Breton’s
novel, Nadja (1928), an account of Breton’s love affair with the
woman of the title, he writes:
Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everything that we
have experienced on mournful railway journeys . . ., on Godforsaken
Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the great cities, in
the first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new
forces of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in these things to the point of
explosion.
In this section and the next I want to draw out some of the ways in
which the Surrealists and the Dadaists before them made their pact
with the ‘everyday’. In doing so, the discussion in this chapter will
shift from the way Dada and Surrealism inserted their message into
the social world to the degree to which that world saturates their
productions and way of life.
Starting with Dada, there are plenty of examples of artists in
particular using vernacular idioms to downplay the ‘artiness’ of
their creations; thus Picabia’s Portrait of a Young American Girl in
a State of Nudity (Figure 11) employs the style of commercial
graphics found in cheap ads or trade catalogues. I have talked
already of the Dadaists parodying the commercial world, and this
could be underlined by the fact that the word ‘dada’, quite apart
from deriving from a dictionary (see Chapter 1) was used, just prior
to Dada’s emergence, by a Zurich company, Bergmann and Co, to
53
‘Rather life’
apartment, into revolutionary experience. They bring the immense
Dada and Surrealism
11. Francis Picabia, ‘Young American Girl in a State of Nudity’, line
drawing illustrated in 291, 4/5 (July/Aug. 1915)
advertise beauty products. But the best way to demonstrate Dada’s
mimickry of mass culture is to look at a further example of a Dada
journal, this time one produced by the Berlin group: Jedermann sein
eigner Fussball (Everyman his own Football) of February 1919,
with a cover bearing one of the earliest examples of Dada
photomontage by John Heartfield.
Unlike other Berlin Dada journals, such as Der Dada where
varied typefaces and multidirectional layouts were employed,
the design here functions as a skit on conservative layout. Beyond
this, as with Berlin Dada in general, it is crucial to appreciate
the piece’s political background. The journal, one of a sequence
produced by the fervently Communist Heartfield–Herzfelde–
Grosz faction of Berlin Dada, came out a few weeks after the
Communist uprising in Berlin, led by the Sparticists Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, had been savagely crushed
by the Free Corps under the orders of the Minister of Defence
54
Gustav Noske. The cover cleverly attacks the new ruling
Socialist (SPD) party, with the heads of its leading figures and
propagandists, including Noske, arrayed around an open fan,
with the words ‘Prize Competition: Who is the Prettiest?’ placed
above them. This is a direct reference to the prize competitions
for poster designs which were then placed in newspapers by
political groups. It also pointedly precedes an article by
Heartfield’s brother, Wieland Herzfelde, in which he questions
whether the election which the SPD had won could be considered
democratic, given that its advertising had been financed by
people with pro-SPD interests. All in all, then, the design
both plays with mass advertising and criticizes its role in
manufacturing political consent. The surreal photomontage of
the bowler hatted man next to the journal’s title – which is also
by Heartfield – was incidentally a visual reinforcement of the
title’s exhortation not to allow oneself to be kicked around by
others but to do it for oneself.
55
‘Rather life’
12. Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (Everyman his own football), cover
of journal, one-off issue (15 Feb. 1919)
Dada and Surrealism
On balance, Heartfield’s cover design could be said to criticize
rather than affirm mass culture, in this case political advertising.
Once again, this establishes a contrast between Dada and
Surrealism since the Surrealists often cultivated a more openly
celebratory attitude towards popular culture. This is typified
by their attitude to Fantômas, the hugely popular French
‘penny dreadful’, published by Fayard from 1911 onwards. The
fictional Fantômas, a perpetually elusive master criminal who
committed blood-chilling murders under a variety of false
identities, was venerated by the Surrealists for his enigmatic
and lawless persona. On 3 November 1933 the Surrealist poet
Robert Desnos read out his epic, 25-verse Complainte de
Fantômas on French and Belgian radio, piling up lurid images,
many of which derived from the covers of the Fantômas books:
Fantômas, in top hat and tails, hovers malevolently over the
rooftops of Paris; a human clapper swings from side to side inside
a gigantic bell, blood and jewels pouring down from it . . . and so
on. Similarly, the Belgian painter René Magritte, whose deliberately
stilted painterly realism owed much to popular graphics (such
as the covers of Nick Carter detective magazines), paid explicit
homage to the 1913–14 film versions of Fantômas directed by
Louis Feuillade. One of Magritte’s most famous images, The
Murdered Assassin (1927) is derived compositionally from a
frame from one of these.
What impressed the Surrealists was the way in which the exploits of
Fantômas conjured up a modern urban mythology, corresponding
to the imaginative needs of thousands of Parisians. Fascinated by
the unconscious life of mass culture, they embraced popular
representations much more uncritically than the Dadaists. More
than anything, though, it was the city in its own right which they
mythologized. This important theme now warrants a fresh
discussion.
56
The city
Grosz’s Dada vision of Berlin is worlds away from Surrealist
representations of Paris, a fact which is not surprising given the
post-war situation in the two cities. For the Surrealists Paris was a
city of revelation. Certain places acquired the character of avantgarde shrines. In 1921 the Paris Dadaists had embarked on bizarre
excursions to unpromising locations such as the church of St Julienle-Pauvre. As Surrealists they sought out particularly quirky or
atmospheric sites. Possibly the most revered of such locations, the
‘Ideal Palace’ of the Postman Cheval, was actually some distance
from Paris, in the village of Hauterives near Lyon, and thus
necessitated a form of pilgrimage. Cheval had constructed his
‘palace’, a heavily encrusted and overgrown-looking structure – like
Brighton Pavilion filtered through an opium trance – with unusual
stones collected over 33 years during his rounds as a postman.
57
‘Rather life’
If we were searching for compelling images of the modern
metropolis, George Grosz’s paintings and graphics of the Berlin
Dada period would be an obvious choice. Grosz, who had developed
a bitterly pessimistic view of human nature while serving in the
German army in 1914–15, depicted the city as a hellish vortex of
unleashed forces. Writing in a letter about his painting Dedicated to
Oskar Panizza (1917–18) he described ‘A teeming multitude of
possessed human beasts’, adding: ‘I am totally convinced that this
epoch is sailing on down to its destruction – our sullied paradise . . .
just think: wherever you step smells of shit.’ In his brilliantly acerbic
drawings, which appeared in Berlin Dada publications such as Die
Pleite (Bankrupt!) or as lithographs in portfolios published by
Wieland Herzfelde’s publishing company Malik Verlag, Grosz
depicted a Berlin dominated by those who had prospered and
suffered through warfare: bloated profiteers and pitiful war
cripples. Even Grosz’s more tender works, such as the watercolourcum-photomontage, Daum Marries (Figure 13), partly referring to
his own marriage in 1920, evokes a Berlin of vice girls and
automatons, with a glimpse of a faceless street in the background.
13. George Grosz, Daum Marries her Pedantic Automaton ‘George’ in
May 1920. John Heartfield is Very Glad of it, pencil, pen, watercolour
and collage, 1920
‘Rather life’
14. The ‘Palais Idéal’ of the Postman Cheval
The obsessive logic informing the ‘palace’, and the fact that its
builder had few conventional artistic pretensions, appealed
irresistibly to Surrealist sensibility. Paris itself offered a multiplicity
of further locations: the previously neglected museum housing
Gustave Moreau’s weird Symbolist paintings; the hauntingly kitsch
Buttes-Chaumont park; the Tour Saint-Jacques connected to the
medieval Parisian alchemist Nicolas Flamel.
Such locations seemed to be part of an alternative city; one hidden
to tourists and miraculously spared by city planners, ruled by the
logic of unconscious desire rather than day-to-day utility. The two
great novels of early Surrealism, Breton’s Nadja and Louis Aragon’s
Paris Peasant (first serialized in 1924–5) both see their authors
59
Dada and Surrealism
wandering through a Paris understood to constitute a ‘forest of
indices’ in Breton’s terms; a network of cryptic signs and augurs of
revelation. The Surrealists can be seen here as the natural heirs to
the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s conception of the modern
artist as ‘flâneur’ or urban wanderer, committed to aestheticizing
urban flux. In Aragon’s Paris Peasant, which was created precisely
in order to pinpoint a ‘modern mythology’, the author provides
a detailed itinerary of Parisian spots which held a poetic resonance
for him. Most famously, he revels in the down-at-heel atmosphere
of the Passage de l’Opéra, an early 19th-century covered shopping
arcade which was imminently to be demolished as part of the
modernizing process set in motion under the Second Empire
by Baron Haussmann. Describing its overall atmosphere as that
of a ‘human aquarium’ Aragon lingers lovingly over various shop
windows; that of a postage stamp dealer, a cane seller, a women’s
hairdresser. The latter provokes a stream of Surrealist fantasy as
Aragon imagines the joys of an apprentice hairdresser whose
life’s work will consist of ‘deciphering those networks which just
a while ago gave a hint of sleep’s disorder’.
The Surrealists systematically allowed the city to penetrate their
psyches; indeed to map out their actions. By the early 1930s this
was part of a self-consciously dialectical process, by which the
interiority that had previously dominated Surrealist writing and
art was set in counterpoint to the dictates of external reality.
Everyday events that appeared merely to be the outcome of
accident – such as apparently chance meetings on the street – were
deemed to correspond to psychic necessity. This principle of
‘objective chance’ was central to certain early 1930s Surrealist
productions such as Breton’s novel Communicating Vessels (1932),
and underpinned the ‘encounters’ with enigmatic and inherently
significant ‘found objects’ which the Surrealists experienced on
their regular visits to the Paris flea markets.
In many ways such ideas about how to negotiate the spaces of the
city amount to a positive conception of modern experience which is
60
peculiar to Surrealism. However, it is worth noting that, following
on from the insights of Walter Benjamin, writers such as Hal Foster
have emphasized that, far from upholding a ‘progressive’ notion
of modernity or modernization, the Surrealists’ emphasis on the
‘outmoded’, as in their reclamation of sites such as the Passage de
l’Opéra, could be seen as criticizing capitalism, in so far as the ruins
from its past are brought back to haunt it. In this sense, despite
their immersion in the city’s matrix of signs, the Surrealists could
be thought to be as scathing about the implications of the urban
spectacle as, say, the Berlin Dadaists.
61
‘Rather life’
This chapter has located Dada and Surrealism in their world,
showing how they seized on modern means of dissemination, and
allowed ‘modernity’ to infiltrate their productions and lifestyles.
The demands of life constantly outweighed those of art. But
however much Dada and Surrealism downplayed art, their
participants have become famous primarily as practitioners of
it. It is time, therefore, to capitulate, and to turn to aesthetics.
Chapter 3
Art and anti-art
Discussing aesthetics, André Breton once noted that, from a
Surrealist point of view, the way in which a picture was painted was
virtually irrelevant. It was the mental reality that the picture ‘ looked
onto’ that was all-important.
The best way of appreciating the distinctiveness of Breton’s attitude
is by reference to the Modernist aesthetics of the critic Clement
Greenberg, which dominated art criticism after Surrealism’s demise
in the late 1940s. Greenberg stressed disciplinary ‘purity’. Far from
opening onto some other reality, painting was required to draw
attention to itself as an artistic discipline; to deal with problems
intrinsic to painting. The rigours of this pursuit, Greenberg
asserted, would lead to the attainment of degrees of formal,
or aesthetic, resolution.
Disciplinary and formal purity were anathema to most of the
practitioners of Dada and Surrealism. In their productions
artistic disciplines constantly overlapped; the textual, the visual,
and the performative were often in a state of free play. By the
same token, formal ‘beauty’ seemed an irrelevant pursuit, given
the world the artists were living in. They were ambivalent in any
case about art as an institution, with the Dadaists often pledged
to destroying it. In looking at Dada and Surrealist artistic and
literary production in this chapter we must constantly bear in
62
mind this deep-seated ambivalence towards traditional art and
aesthetic purity.
Given the primacy of poetry, language, or rather the linguistic
sign, continually underlies the work of Dadaist and Surrealist
practitioners. This will be evident in much that follows. My primary
aim, however, is to establish a series of distinctive differences in
terms of the technical and procedural means by which participants
in the two movements attained their poetic outcomes. Dadaist
utilization of chance will be played off against Surrealist
uses of ‘automatism’. Dadaist techniques such as collage and
photomontage will be pitted against Surrealist techniques such
as painting and photography, The Dadaist readymade will be
contrasted with the Surrealist object, and so on. The obvious
place to begin, though, is with poetry itself.
63
Art and anti-art
Greenberg certainly did his best to discredit what the Dadaists
and Surrealists stood for. In an essay on Surrealism of 1945 he
criticized what he considered to be its ‘literary’ basis. Although
this attitude now seems somewhat dated, it is still remarkably
tenacious. Surrealist artists such as Dalí or Magritte are
frequently denigrated as ‘literary’ while Dada artists are often
thought insufficiently serious due to their preoccupation with
playful or humorous content. For Dada and Surrealist artists,
however, this kind of critique would have completely missed
the point of their work. They would have been proud to appear
literary, having a particular commitment to the poetic. The word
‘poetic’ was generally understood by the Dadaists and Surrealists
as 19th-century Romantic writers and artists would have
understood it, in terms of a ‘state of soul’ or mode of sensibility
rather than a form of practice. All in all, the best way of
understanding Dada and Surrealist aesthetics is not via
traditional notions of beauty but via this notion of a poetic
‘attitude’.
Dada and Surrealism
Poetics
Broadly speaking, Dadaist poetics can be split between approaches
prevalent in Germany and Switzerland and ones prevalent in
France. In the ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ section of Chapter 2 I looked at
Hugo Ball’s attempt in Zurich to return to the ‘alchemy of the word’
via his phonetic poetry. Implicit in this was a rejection of language’s
semiotic capacities, its ability to convey meaning. Ball’s return to
the basic units of language probably owed something to his
awareness of Russian futurist poetry with its emphasis on the
autonomous characteristics of language. However, rather than
being fully ‘abstract’ in spirit, a description which better describes
the phonetic poetry of the Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann, Ball’s
poetry often communicates a mystical desire to find new names or
words for things. In his diary he wrote: ‘Why can’t a tree be called
Pluplusch or Pluplubasch when it has been raining?’ In this respect,
he partly responds to the German philosopher Nietzsche – a major
influence on artists of Ball’s generation – who had written of his
sense of a mismatch between words and the things to which they
refer, seeing language as a ‘mobile army of metaphors’ which had
become worn out. Other German Dadaist poets reveal a similar
despair with language’s signifying capabilities. In Hanover, Kurt
Schwitters produced his own variants of phonetic poetry, intimately
related to his so-called ‘Merz’ abstractions in collage, but also
produced texts in which different orders of language coexist,
destroying any overall sense of coherence. Part of one poem reads:
Greetings, 260 thousand ccm.
I thine,
thou mine,
we me.
And sun unboundedness stars brighten up.
Sorrow sorrows dew.
O woe you me!
Official notices:
5000 marks reward!
64
By contrast, French Dadaist poetry – notably that of the Paris
Dadaists surrounding the journal Littérature – could be said to
be more compliant with semantic conventions although similarly
committed to the irrational. This was partly because figures such as
André Breton and Paul Eluard had more straightforwardly ‘literary’
sources in, for instance, the French Symbolist poetry of Rimbaud
or Paul Roux, the self-styled Saint-Pol-Roux. We will see in the
next section that ‘automatic writing’ was their main technical
innovation, but what unified them more than anything was a
conception of the poetic image. This would prove central to the
Surrealist aesthetics they developed from 1924 onwards.
In full-blown Surrealist poetry we are bombarded with striking
images, such as Eluard’s ‘the earth blue as an orange’ or the
impassioned litany in Breton’s ‘Free Union’ (1931):
My wife with her figure of an otter between the tiger’s teeth . . . My
wife with temples the slate of a hothouse roof
With eyebrows the edge of a swallow’s nest . . . My wife with wooden
eyes always under the axe . . .
Other Surrealist poems characteristically combine startling
juxtapositions of imagery with anarchic humour. Part of a work by
Benjamin Péret reads:
And the stars that frighten the red fish
are neither for sale or rent
for to tell the truth they are not really stars but apricot pies
that have left the bakery.
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Art and anti-art
The Surrealist attitude to the image hinged on the principle of the
meeting of incompatible realties. Breton was to see the French
Cubist poet Pierre Reverdy as the main theoretical exponent of the
device, but examples of its use could be found in many of
Surrealism’s literary precursors, one example being Rimbaud
whose ‘A Season in Hell’ of 1873 described hallucinatory visions
such as ‘a drawing room at the bottom of a lake’.
Dada and Surrealism
What was constantly sought was a glimpse of ‘the marvellous’.
Again and again Breton invoked the electrical metaphor of a spark
to evoke the inspirational jolt produced as unrelated images collided.
Clearly French Dada – and subsequently Surrealism – was
committed to a more lyrical poetics than German/Swiss Dada,
where there was a more thoroughgoing anti-Romantic
deconstruction of language. There are important exceptions to
this: Hans Arp, who would leave Zurich for Paris and Surrealism,
often produced poems revealing a lyricism rooted in German
Romanticism. It has been asserted by critics that deconstructive
Dadaist poetry merely reflects chaos whereas Surrealism, by
compromising with traditional poetic idioms, achieves more lasting
results. Certainly poetry such as Eluard’s now appears to have great
formal elegance. But Dadaist sound poems, such as Schwitters’s
seminal ‘Ur Sonata’ of 1922–32, are far from chaotic in terms of
their abstract internal structures. They also possessed an afterlife,
in terms of the development of concrete poetry and performance
aesthetics in post-1945 European art, that was possibly more
significant than that of Surrealist poetry, which often bred
mannerism and cliché.
The disjunctive nature of Dada poetry is in keeping with the
relativist philosophies espoused by its writers. In his 1918 ‘Dada
Manifesto’ Tristan Tzara asserted that ‘a work of art is never
beautiful, by decree, objectively, for everyone’. The Surrealists also
distrusted normative ideas of beauty, but André Breton would
theorize the Surrealist image, both in its verbal and visual registers,
in terms of a notion of ‘Convulsive Beauty’ in his philosophicalcum-autobiographical disquisition Mad Love (1937). Resolutely
avoiding the criteria of traditional aesthetics, not least because he
was implicitly straddling literature and the visual arts, Breton
talked of the experience of beauty as approximating to a form
of physical convulsion, with a strong erotic undertow. Rather
obscurely, he defined three types of Surrealist ‘convulsive beauty’:
‘veiled erotic’, which characteristically arose from the merging
66
of the animate and inanimate (as in coral), ‘fixed–explosive’,
which came about when motion was translated into repose
(as in a photograph of a locomotive overgrown with vegetation) and
‘magical–circumstantial’, which arose from a ‘magical encounter’
with a seemingly portentous phrase or object.
This attempt to produce new aesthetic categories, which in any
event seems partial, says a great deal about the difference between
Dada and Surrealism. For the Dadaists there could be no normative
aesthetic experience. Art itself was open to question. The Surrealists
by contrast nurtured a lingering utopian longing for a transformed
and experientially transforming poetics/aesthetics.
Automatism versus chance
By 1922, as part of the so-called ‘mouvement flou’ when Paris Dada
gradually metamorphosed into Surrealism, Breton and his friends
experimented with more dramatic means of bypassing conscious
control. For a period one or other of them would willingly enter into
a hypnotic trance and respond to questions from the rest of the
group. The poet Robert Desnos was particularly susceptible to these
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Art and anti-art
Poetry underpinned Dada and Surrealist aesthetics, but how exactly
was the poetic language of these movements generated? Where did
it come from? For the Surrealists in particular there was one clear
answer: the unconscious. In his First Surrealist Manifesto of 1924,
André Breton described how, whilst falling asleep one evening
in 1919, a phrase had occurred to him as though ‘knocking
at the window’. Before long, Breton was making use of such
spontaneously occurring material for poetic purposes and, along
with the poet Philippe Soupault, published the first fully ‘automatic’
proto-Surrealist text, The Magnetic Fields, in 1920. Automatism
was predicated on the conviction that the speed of writing is
equivalent to the speed of thought. Writing rapidly with no
preconceived subject in mind, the poet became, in Breton’s
terms, a ‘modest recording device’.
states and on one occasion responded unnervingly to questions
about the poet Benjamin Péret:
Q. What do you know about Péret?
A. He will die in a crowded car.
Q. Will he be killed?
A. Yes.
Q. By whom?
A. (He draws a train, with a man falling from its door.) By an animal.
Q. By what animal?
Dada and Surrealism
A. A blue ribbon my sweet vagabond.
Eventually the trances threatened to get out of control, with the
poet René Crevel one time attempting to lead a group suicide, and
they were abandoned. Automatism increasingly came to be seen as
a response to discoveries in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Breton’s
original exposure to these disciplines had been in 1916 when he had
practised Freudian techniques of free association on shell-shocked
troops during his military service as a medical orderly. However,
it was not so much Freud who provided a model for automatism
as the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet whose L’Automatisme
psychologique of 1889 had reported extensively on the outpourings
of patients undergoing hypnosis. Janet, however, had tended to
downplay the creative volition of his patients, and by 1924, when
Breton made automatism the pre-eminent Surrealist technique in
the First Manifesto, it was Freudian free association which was
given prominence.
Surrealist automatism was predicated on the suppression of
rational consciousness. It should be stressed, however, that it was
not always used in the creation of Surrealist writing; much of the
Surrealist poetry cited in the last section only made partial use of it.
Nor should it be assumed that it was entirely an invention of
Surrealism; the earlier Dada poetry of Picabia, Tzara, Arp, and
Schwitters had often arisen from similar processes, although Arp
saw the body as much as the mind as its wellspring: ‘Automatic
68
poetry issues straight from the entrails of the poet or from any other
organ that has stored up reserves . . . It crows, curses, stammers,
yodels, just as it pleases.’ It could be argued that automatism was
routinely employed by the Dadaists and simply theorized in
psychoanalytic terms by the Surrealists at a later date. Indeed, if we
now turn to the ways in which the Dadaists, particularly, in Zurich,
had understood the abandoning of creative control, not so much in
favour of automatism but more in conformity with chance, some
significant distinctions between Dadaist and Surrealist aesthetic
attitudes can be established.
Slightly earlier, Marcel Duchamp, who was then in Paris but was
shortly to move to New York and to his own version of Dada, had
done something comparable. Commencing work on The Bride
Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, his magnum opus in glass
which was to end up as a diagrammatic depiction of frustrated
desire, opposing a group of mechanistic ‘Bachelors’ at the bottom to
a ‘Bride’ at the top, he had dropped three pieces of threads and had
‘fixed’ the configurations in which they fell, producing templates
from them which served as variations on a standard measure. He
had then used these ‘Standard Stoppages’ (as he called them) to
help determine the placement of the Bachelors in the Large Glass,
implying that his work conformed to an alternative, irrational set of
physical laws to those of external reality.
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Art and anti-art
Around 1916–17 Arp, the principal visual artist of Zurich Dada, had
produced a series of abstract works in collaboration with his partner
Sophie Taeuber in which squares of paper were collaged in precise
grids onto sheets of paper. As visual abstractions these works
participated in the beginnings of a widespread phase in European
art at that time involving figures such as Mondrian and Kandinsky.
More distinctively ‘Dada’, however, were a few collages which Arp
produced in direct counterpoint to these highly precise works. In
these Arp randomly dropped pieces of paper onto mounts and fixed
them where they landed (Figure 15). He claimed later that they
were produced ‘according to the laws of chance’.
15. Hans Arp, Rectangles Arranged According to the Laws of Chance,
collage, 1916/17, Museum of Modern Art, New York
In showing how the Dadaist understanding of chance conflicts
with the Surrealist understanding of automatism, our reference
points have necessarily shifted from poetic to visual ones. This is
consistent with the constant cross-overs between literary and visual
aesthetics in Dada and Surrealism mentioned earlier. If we turn
now to the visual art of Surrealism, it is interesting to see that, while
verbal automatism found an equivalent in the technical
innovations of certain artists, Dadaist chance was also subtly
incorporated into Surrealist procedures.
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Art and anti-art
Both Arp and Duchamp were departing radically from the model
of authorial control synonymous with art-making at that time.
They were also pioneering a characteristically ‘Dada’ attitude
which stands at the foundations of a tradition of aleatory art
in the 20th century, incorporating figures such as the composer
John Cage. More significantly for our current discussion, both
artists were invoking impersonal or nature-based processes as
opposed to psychologically orientated human ones, albeit
ironically in Duchamp’s case. Arp had an essentially mystical
understanding of what he was doing. Chance for him was linked
to nature and was part of an ‘unfathomable raison d’être . . . an
order inaccessible in its totality’. Whereas the Surrealists were
primarily interested in the individual psyche, the Dadaists
chose to invoke forces which were entirely independent of
themselves. They distrusted human egotism and a too-high
valuation of human reason; a world war had arisen from such
values. They had little respect either for Freud’s systematization
of the irrational. Tristan Tzara described psychoanalysis as a
‘dangerous disease’ which lulls our ‘antireal inclinations’ to sleep
and helps perpetuate bourgeois society. The Dadaists distrusted
Freud for wishing to tame the unconscious rather than allowing it
free play in the service of social critique. They therefore distrusted
the Freudian basis of Surrealist automatism, although it should
be emphasized that the Surrealists valued Freud for plumbing
unconscious mechanisms rather than ‘curing’ the maladies they
gave rise to.
Dada and Surrealism
16. André Masson, Birth of Birds, automatic drawing, c.1925, Museum
of Modern Art, New York
In 1924–5 the French painter André Masson, attempting to find a
visual equivalent for the automatism called for by Breton in the
First Surrealist Manifesto, produced an important sequence of
‘automatic drawings’. In them, a set of intensely personal images –
eroticized bodies, animals and architectural elements – were
poetically fused together as he drew rapidly without premeditation.
72
These elevated ‘doodles’ might initially appear abstract, but the
Surrealists never took the step into complete abstraction that we
saw in Arp. Given some effort, Masson’s Birth of Birds of 1925 thus
reads comparatively straightforwardly as a woman’s body, with
birds emerging from the vulva.
Ernst cleverly harnessed Dadaist chance to Surrealist
automatism, making it answerable to the imperatives of the
unconscious. His case reveals how Surrealist aesthetics often subtly
reverted back to Dada. The Surrealists would devise many other
ways of psychologizing chance; they actually lived their lives
according to principles of ‘objective chance’ as discussed in the
previous chapter. But one wonders whether, in the final analysis,
they did not end up civilizing or domesticating what, in Dada, had
been an essentially anarchic non-human principle.
Collage versus painting
Staying with the visual art of Dada and Surrealism, it is worth
establishing some further differences between the movements in
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Art and anti-art
Slightly later than Masson, the German-born artist Max Ernst, who
had recently moved to Paris from Cologne, similarly reacted to the
Manifesto with his ‘frottages’ of 1925. Here, the artist placed sheets
of paper over raised surfaces, such as wood-graining, and made
rubbings. He then allowed forms to suggest themselves, blocking
out or re-emphasizing parts of the images to conjure up a
personalized flora and fauna. Ernst published these as reproductions
in a portfolio titled Histoire Naturelle. It is interesting that Ernst,
who had once been part of the Dada movement, reveals a much
greater degree of passivity in his working process than Masson.
He thus looks back to the impersonal principle of chance as it had
been understood within Dada, although his direct inspiration was
none other than Leonardo da Vinci who, in his Treatise on Painting,
had recommended that artists should use formless blots as
inspirational triggers for compositions.
their approaches to artistic media and technique. An initial contrast
can be set up by returning to Max Ernst, who bridged the two
movements in any case, and to the transition he made from a
Dadaist use of collage to a distinctively Surrealist mode of painting.
Dada and Surrealism
In 1921, at the invitation of the Paris Dadaists, who had been aware
of his activities in Cologne, Ernst had an exhibition of his collages
at the Au Sans Pareil gallery in Paris. It was a revelation for the
Parisians. If Breton’s and Soupault’s The Magnetic Fields had
foreshadowed textual Surrealism, this exhibition effectively
pre-empted visual Surrealism. Ernst would shortly join the group
and produce work, such as the ‘frottages’ just mentioned, which
conformed to their theories.
So what was so significant about Ernst’s Dada collages? Collage was
already well established as an avant-garde technique at this time.
Bits of linoleum, wallpaper, and so on had been introduced into
their paintings by Picasso and Braque around 1912–14 in the
so-called ‘Synthetic’ phase of Cubism, largely to reintroduce witty
allusions to the real world into their increasingly abstracted
paintings. Ernst, however, assembled his collages from fragments
of recognizable imagery, juxtaposing fragments of encyclopedia
plates, commercial catalogues, anatomical treatises and
photographs to produce disturbing counter-realities. In Santa
Conversazione of 1921, for instance, illustrations of birds and
cuttings from anatomical diagrams were shunted into an alliance
with photographs in a semi-illusionistic pictorial space. Alluding
in its title to religious iconography – namely the traditional
theme of Madonna and Child with Saints – Santa Conversazione
blasphemously invokes the Virgin Birth by depicting a dove perched
on the basin-like ‘womb’ of the main figure.
Once he had moved to Paris, at the height of the ‘mouvement flou’,
Ernst set about translating collage into painterly terms. In 1919 he
had been profoundly impressed by illustrations of works by the
Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. During a fertile period in Paris
74
17. Max Ernst, Santa Conversazione, collage, 1921
Dada and Surrealism
during 1911–15, De Chirico had developed a ‘metaphysical’ mode
of painting in which he envisioned lonely late-afternoon Italian
piazzas flooded with unearthly light, the statues casting long,
melancholy shadows. The ‘faux naif ’ style in which Chirico painted
these visions, involving the use of dizzily receding perspectives and
the diligent cordoning off of flatly painted forms with fine black
lines, provided Ernst with the painterly vocabulary with which to
re-embody the startling juxtapositions of his collages. Under De
Chirico’s influence, the semi-illusionistic indications in certain of
the collages blossomed into suggestions of a palpable psychic
universe. The series of paintings Ernst produced between 1922
and 1924, including Oedipus Rex, Of This Men Shall Know
Nothing, and Pietà (Figure 4) became keystones of visual
Surrealism.
Arguably, though, in being translated into the terms of Surrealist
painting, Dada collage underwent a process analogous to that
which Dadaist chance had undergone in being annexed to
automatism. Employed by Ernst in Cologne, collage had
summoned up a world that was profoundly inimical to human
control; whole systems of ideas and regimes of representation
appeared to be in conflict. But when Breton wrote of Ernst’s collage
in the catalogue of the 1921 Au Sans Pareil exhibition, he linked the
technique to proto-Surrealist poetics, employing his favoured
metaphor of the spark generated by the meeting of separate
realities to underline Ernst’s effects. When Ernst embarked on his
fully ‘Surrealist’ paintings in the early 1920s, partly under the
patronage of Breton, he returned to a technique – namely oil
painting – which had virtually been proscribed by the Dadaists for
its connotations of élitism and tradition.
Photomontage versus painting
This sense of a watering down of Dada principles can be reinforced
by comparing another Dadaist technique, photomontage, with
Surrealist painting. Photomontage was the pre-eminent visual
76
Turning to Surrealist painting, it is obvious that, as an ‘autographic’
technique, in other words one where the very marks made by the
artist’s brush speak of his or her ‘touch’, painting could hardly be
said to signify social interaction or exchange in the manner of Berlin
photomontage. Whereas Hausmann in Berlin once talked of his
fellow artists as ‘photomonteurs’, fitting their pictures together like
construction workers, Surrealist painting spoke by contrast of
individual reverie and of the artist-genius. It intrinsically lacked
Dada’s political edge.
Surrealist painting was distrusted to some degree from within the
movement itself. In 1925 Breton described it as a ‘lamentable
expedient’, and it was to be up to the artists themselves to
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Art and anti-art
innovation of Berlin Dada. Both factions in Berlin, the
Hausmann–Höch faction and the Grosz–Herzfelde–Heartfield
faction, claimed to have ‘discovered’ it, but such squabbles need
not detain us here. It is important, however, to briefly differentiate
the photomontages of the Berlin group from Ernst’s photocollages
as described in the last section. Ernst rarely made overt social
references. His works suggested irrational collisions of ideas or
thought systems, and, to this end, he played down the physical
nature of his materials, rephotographing his collages to create a
seamless effect. By contrast, Berlin photomontage was profoundly
politicized, the very act of cutting up and recombining imagery
from newspapers and magazines bearing connotations of cutting
into the fabric of social reality. Berlin photomontage made the
physical process of constructing the image – the fragmentary
nature of the pieces of imagery, their inconsistencies in terms of
photographic scale, etc. – manifest in the final work. This can be
seen in Hannah Höch’s Bourgeois Wedding Couple – Quarrel of
1919 where the humorous content of the image, a parody of
bourgeois marriage in which an infantilized couple in sports gear
undergo their private traumas among the latest household
gadgets, is subordinated to the sense that these are still cut-out
fragments of printed matter.
Dada and Surrealism
18. Hannah Höch, Bourgeois Wedding Couple – Quarrel, photomontage,
1919
convince him of its applications. Almost from its beginning it was
polarized. On the one hand, there was a veristic mode of painting,
in which irrational alternative realities were depicted with
pseudo-academic exactitude. This tendency was rooted in Giorgio
De Chirico but also in French 19th-century Symbolist painters
such as Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. It tends, for
convenience sake, to be dubbed ‘dream painting’, although, as
will be shown later, examples of it by Ernst and Dalí did not
necessarily make use of personal dreams but often plundered
Freudian case histories.
On the other hand, there was the ‘automatic’ painting,
characterized by the spontaneous production of painterly marks or
blotches to suggest forms, practised by artists such as André
Masson, whose related ‘automatic drawings’ were mentioned
earlier. This technique could claim to be more truly ‘Surrealist’ in
terms of Breton’s theorizing.
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19. Joan Miró, The Hunter, oil on canvas, 1924, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Dada and Surrealism
Along with Masson, Joan Miró is a key figure within this ‘automatic’
tendency. Having moved from his native Catalonia to Paris in
1920–1, he initially developed a highly idiosyncratic pictographic
language in works such as The Hunter (1923–4) (Figure 19). To
the upper left of this work, the ‘hunter’ of the title is depicted as a
stick-man, his alertness signalled by his enormously enlarged ear
and his heart which is shown to be ‘on fire’. At the base of the canvas
is his quarry; a peculiar sardine-cum-rabbit. Miró’s entire oeuvre
would subsequently be characterized by this kind of capricious
poetic transformation, with visual signs undergoing continual
metamorphosis from one painting to the next. Automatism, which
he used from the mid-1920s – sometimes in the planning of works,
or sometimes, as in the important The Birth of the World (1925),
as part of the finished result – perfectly suited his fluid working
methods.
As suggested already, painting had a torrid time at the hands of
Surrealism’s theorists. Just after the First Manifesto the writer Max
Morise wrote an essay entitled The Enchanted Gaze which
expressed doubts about ‘dream painting’. Such works, according to
Morise, were incapable of expressing the temporal or unfolding
nature of dreams. Film, as we will see, was better equipped to do
this. The ‘secondary revision’ involved in producing them also put a
brake on the unconscious. In April 1926 Pierre Naville – at this time
editor of the Surrealist journal La Révolution Surréaliste – declared
more dramatically ‘Everybody knows there is no Surrealist
painting.’ Even painterly automatism was placed under suspicion
since aesthetic habits, such as a sense of compositional balance,
potentially got in the way of complete spontaneity.
Breton rose to painting’s defence and wrote a series of essays and
catalogue introductions in the later 1920s, poetically championing
such artists as the French painter Yves Tanguy whose dream
landscapes, populated with strange biomorphic forms, he
particularly admired. But Breton never fully established a
theoretical justification for Surrealist painting; hence the pointed
80
Dalí’s early Surrealist paintings – such as The Lugubrious Game
and The Great Masturbator of 1929 – were genuinely inventive,
their ‘ultra-retrograde’ technique, in Breton’s phrase, being
entirely appropriate for the realization of the host of psychopathological fantasies, often culled from literary sources such
as Freud or the late 19th-century ‘sexologist’ Richard von
Kraft-Ebbing, with which they swarmed. In the early 1930s
Dalí also did much to shore up the theoretical resources of visual
Surrealism, inventing his so-called ‘paranoiac-critical method’.
He demonstrated this in a short contribution to the journal Le
Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution in 1931, reproducing a
postcard of a group of Africans sitting in front of a straw hut,
which, when turned sideways, reads as a phantom head (Figure 21).
Just as clinical paranoia involves the obsessional reinterpretation of
external phenomena, so Dalí filled his 1930s canvases with skilfully
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Art and anti-art
title these collected writings were eventually given: Surrealism and
Painting. Breton was convinced of the importance of Surrealist
precursors such as De Chirico or Picasso. The latter in particular
was courted unsuccessfully by him over a long period, and the
licence accorded to sexual and violent fantasies by Surrealism
undoubtedly reinvigorated Picasso’s output of the 1920s and
1930s. But Breton was to vacillate in his support of the likes of
Miró and Masson. His perennial point of criticism, in line with the
increasingly Marxist commitments of Surrealism, was that painters
succumbed too easily to the seductions of their ‘métier’ and too
quickly took advantage of the commercial benefits offered to
them. The comparatively academic technique of a relative
latecomer to Surrealism, the Belgian painter René Magritte,
might have led to such compromises, but the literalism
with which Magritte’s best works present hallucinatory
phenomena or philosophical conundrums gives them a distinctly
uncompromising edge (Figure 20). On the other hand, the
technical facility of Salvador Dalí, who made a dramatic entry into
the Paris group from his native Catalonia in 1929, would confirm all
of Breton’s fears.
Dada and Surrealism
20. René Magritte, Le Viol (The Rape), oil on canvas, 1934
contrived double-images; thereby, in his own terms, ‘discrediting
reality’. Ultimately, though, such devices inclined towards
mannerism, and as Dalí inevitably attracted wealthy patrons, such
as the English collector Edward James, so his inventiveness
slackened. He became the ‘Avida Dollars’ of Breton’s famous
anagram.
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21. Salvador Dalí, ‘Paranoiac Face’, page layout from Le Surréalisme au
Service de la Révolution, 3 (Dec. 1931)
Painting ends up as Surrealism’s Achilles heel. It had two major
flaws; in its automatist form it was compromised by its very
aesthetic preconditions; at its most academically realist it could be
seen as allied to bourgeois taste. Arguably, the ponderously ‘surreal’
scenarios of, say, the French artist Pierre Roy, or the Belgian Paul
Delvaux, amount to little more than academicism.
Dada and Surrealism
Photography
If painting failed to match Surrealist aspirations, it is worth
opposing its fortunes to those of ‘straight photography’ (as
opposed to photomontage). In this book I have tended to employ
photography, as the Surrealists themselves did, as much to
document their opinions as to foreground its own status as an art
form, but it could easily be asserted that it constituted the Surrealist
medium par excellence. The very fact that photography is a
mechanical medium meant that it constituted a ‘modest recording
device’, to recall Breton’s description of the Surrealist poets, which
was uniquely qualified to automatically transcribe the surreality
embedded in reality. It is important to recall that Breton’s ideal, in
the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, was always a fusion of the real
and the surreal, by contrast to Dalí who sought, as he himself said,
to ‘systematize confusion’.
Photography is inherently surreal. As Susan Sontag has said,
‘Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the
very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree,
narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural
vision.’ A camera will often pick up uncanny details completely by
chance, making us aware of the strangeness of the familiar. The
Surrealists themselves certainly capitalized on this. Breton, for
instance, asked the photographer J.-A. Boiffard to produce
photographs of seemingly humdrum Parisian locations for his novel
Nadja. As noted earlier, this was an account of a love affair in which
the emotions of the lovers, to say nothing of Nadja’s incipient
insanity, distil chance revelations from the everyday.
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Surrealism undoubtedly had its share of staged ‘artistic’
photography. Pre-eminent were the contrived studio set-ups of the
ex-New York Dadaist Man Ray who had gravitated to Paris, like
Max Ernst, at the very moment of the formation of Surrealism. Man
Ray brought his formidable studio skills to bear on seductive,
classically composed, and highly fetishistic images of the female
body (Figure 26). Photographic manipulation was also widely
practised. Man Ray is again of central importance with his
‘Rayographs’, in which objects were placed on photographic paper
in the darkroom and the whole ensemble exposed, so that ghostly
‘negative’ shapes were left behind, and ‘Solarizations’, in which the
darkroom light was briefly turned on during the developing process,
causing a halo of light to surround the contours of the
photographed images.
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Art and anti-art
Photographic manipulation also extended to processes such as
double exposure and the overlaying or combining of negatives to
produce internally riven and ‘doubled’ images. Such processes, as
carried out by Man Ray or by the French photographer Maurice
Tabard, have been seen by the American art historian Rosalind
Krauss to be peculiarly suited to Surrealism. They seem to suggest
that the reality which the mechanical nature of photography
ostensibly records is inherently unstable: merely a collection of
movable signs, like a text; a point which might remind us again
of the poetic basis of Dada/Surrealist aesthetics. However, Krauss’s
argument notwithstanding, it is perhaps when photography is at
its least self-consciously ‘arty’, as suggested earlier, that it is most
genuinely surreal. If Surrealist painting looks a little conformist in
comparison with Dadaist collage and photomontage, photography
emerges as an eminently ‘automatist’ surrealist medium. Whereas
Surrealist painting had a comparatively disappointing legacy,
at least in the European countries where it grew up, producing
legions of imitators but few heirs, some of the central figures
of mid-20th-century photography – Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Brassai, Bill Brandt, and André Kertesz – were decisively affected
by Surrealism.
Dada and Surrealism
The readymade versus the object
Painting may suffer in comparison to photography within
Surrealism, but at least it survived. By contrast, sculpture in the
traditional sense played a modest role in both Dada and Surrealism,
and a new genre of three-dimensional production usurped its place:
that of the object. The historical starting point here is Marcel
Duchamp and his readymades. The most notorious of these,
Fountain, produced in New York in 1917, has already been
discussed, but it was not the first of the pre-manufactured (hence
‘readymade’) objects which Duchamp appropriated as his own.
That item was the Bicycle Wheel of 1913, produced in Paris just
before Duchamp’s move to America, and actually a combination of
two objects: the wheel and fork of a bicycle, and a wooden stool. The
wheel and fork have been inserted upside down into the stool to
produce a movable ‘sculpture’ on a ‘pedestal’.
It is clear from the above that sculptural terminology is
appropriate, albeit ironically, to Bicycle Wheel. The object
subtly parodies traditional sculpture in so far as it contests the
hierarchical split between base and sculptural object; the stool is
just as much a utilitarian object as the wheel and there is thus
an equality between the work’s structural elements. Duchamp
has freed the objects from art’s hierarchies and ironically
re-aestheticized them at the same time. This use of real objects
to replace sculpted forms certainly represented a massive challenge
to convention, although Picasso had incorporated oilcloth and
a rope in his Still Life with Chair Caning of 1912. As with the
photomontage of the Berlin Dadaists there was an attempt to purge
art of its familiar materials and to engage materially with the world
of industrialized mass production.
Possibly the most important challenge posed by the Bicycle Wheel
was at the level of authorship. Like the sequence of readymades
by Duchamp that followed it, it raises a fundamental question
about the very nature of art. If, as Duchamp once noted, art,
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etymologically speaking, means ‘to make’, Duchamp has exonerated
himself completely from that obligation.
In 1924 the Surrealist leader Breton wrote an important essay
entitled Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality.
In it he discussed an enigmatic book encountered during
a dream:
The back of the book was formed by a wooden gnome whose white
beard, clipped in the Assyrian manner, reached to his feet. The
statue was of ordinary thickness, but did not prevent me from
turning the pages which were of heavy black cloth.
His conviction that such objects should be put into circulation to
‘discredit’ the ‘creatures and things of ‘‘reason’’ ’ heralded the
production, within Surrealism, of ‘symbolically functioning objects’.
However, this phase of activity had to wait until 1931.
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Art and anti-art
It was not until 1917, and the publication of a photograph of
Fountain (Figure 3), that Duchamp turned the readymade into a
conceptual provocation. Prior to this objects had been chosen
almost as private ‘philosophical toys’. As with Bicycle Wheel, the
readymades were not necessarily single objects. By the early 1920s,
possibly registering the literary preoccupations of the nascent Paris
Dada group, Duchamp was producing elaborately poetic ‘assisted
readymades’ such as Fresh Widow (1920), a down-scaled pair of
French windows with squares of shiny black leather in place of its
panes of glass. The interaction between title and object is crucial
here, reminding us again of the verbal basis for Dada/Surrealist
aesthetics. Spoken aloud, both words of the title Fresh Widow
suppress the letter ‘n’, provoking a free-wheeling range of
associations including sadomasochism. Man Ray, at that time one
of Duchamp’s New York Dada accomplices, shared his friend’s black
humour. His Gift of 1921 consisted of a flat iron with a row of tacks
sticking out aggressively from its base. Dada assemblages such as
these acquired a legendary status among the Paris Surrealists.
Its immediate catalyst was a sculpture by the Swiss artist Alberto
Giacometti, the one traditional sculptor within the Surrealist
orbit, who had settled in Paris in 1922. His Untitled (Suspended
Ball) of 1930–1, an enigmatic construction in which a sphere of
plaster hung within a cage-like structure, a groove in its lower
circumference skimming the sharp edge of a plaster crescent placed
directly beneath it, had an enormous impact on the Surrealist group
when a photograph of it was published in Le Surréalisme au Service
de la Révolution. Breton, in particular, extolled its aura of
unfulfilled desire.
Dada and Surrealism
The wave of object-production that followed this group revelation
generated some of the most arresting works of visual Surrealism.
Dalí surpassed himself with an elaborately fetishistic ensemble
which he described as follows:
A woman’s shoe, inside which a glass of milk has been placed, in the
middle of a paste ductile in form and excremental in colour. The
mechanism consists of plunging a sugar lump on which an image of
a shoe has been painted, in order to watch the sugar lump and
consequently the image of the shoe breaking up in the milk.
After a time the group produced less complicated objects. Fur
Breakfast, a cup and saucer lined in fur by the Swiss-born artist
Meret Oppenheim – one of the few women to play a prominent role
in this phase of Surrealism – is possibly the most famous of these
and was the main attraction at the key exhibition of Surrealist
objects at Charles Ratton’s Paris gallery in 1936. But Fur Breakfast
has become over-familiar. Another important piece by Oppenheim
is My Nurse. This work also makes use of notoriously fetishistic
items, namely shoes. It would be interesting to speculate on the
different ways in which Dalí and Oppenheim use them, with the
proviso that, much as Oppenheim’s assemblage appears to speak to
the contrary, psychologists have generally been unwilling to
acknowledge the existence of female fetishism. Oppenheim once
observed that the shoes evoked for her the idea of ‘thighs squeezed
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together in pleasure’, in belated recognition of the ‘sensual
atmosphere’ which her childhood nurse had exuded. Possibly she
is ironizing the whole issue of female fetishism here. Female
fetishism, if it exists, would be predicated on the psychological
function of fetishism for men, which is normally assumed to be
heterosexual in basis. Dalí’s object certainly upholds this. Surely
there is more than a hint of a lesbian fantasy in Oppenheim’s
comment. One could easily see the trussed-up shoes, which double
as a turkey on a platter, as constituting some form of bondage
fantasy on the part of the artist.
If, returning to a contrast between Dada and Surrealism, we further
compare Oppenheim’s My Nurse with a Duchamp readymade such
as Fountain (Figure 3), it is apparent that Oppenheim’s Surrealist
object openly insists on its psychological content while the Dada
readymade mutely awaits our interpretation. Fountain has in fact
been interpreted as a bi-gendered form, with its curves and the hole
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Art and anti-art
22. Meret Oppenheim, My Nurse, metal platter, shoes, string, and
paper, 1936
Dada and Surrealism
at the base giving a ‘feminine’ inflection to an otherwise ‘masculine’
receptacle. If the readymade might, ironically, be thought usable,
were it not temporarily being designated as ‘art’, the Surrealist
object proffers its own uselessness as something of potential value.
Georges Bataille, who was a major critic of Surrealism’s
romanticizing tendencies in the 1920s and 1930s, once derided the
impotence of aesthetics, declaring ‘ I challenge any art lover to love
a canvas as much as a fetishist loves a shoe.’ In this context My
Nurse could be seen as serving precisely the needs of fetishism
rather than those of art.
This comparison establishes a clear division between Dadaist
and Surrealist aesthetics. The readymade serves to collapse the
distinction between art and non-art. It implicitly acknowledges that
art is something to be contested on its own terms. By contrast, the
Surrealist object complies with art’s conventions, however altered
these may have become, in order to fulfil a new experiential
function.
Nothing more powerfully illustrates the catalytic role envisaged for
the Surrealist object than an incident famously recounted by André
Breton in Mad Love (1937). Breton talks of how Alberto Giacometti
had been facing an apparent psychological block in finishing the
head of a sculpture, later to be called The Invisible Object. He and
Breton had gone for one of their familiar Surrealist trawls of the
Paris flea markets and had found themselves drawn inexplicably
towards a peculiar metal half-mask which they were later to identify
as a fencing mask. Giacometti later realized that the form of the
object provided a solution as to how to complete the head of his
sculpture. Here Breton is not so much talking of the Surrealist
object as something that is closer to the Duchampian readymade,
namely the ‘objet trouvé’ – the ‘found object’ which corresponds
mysteriously to the dictates of ‘objective chance’. His point is that
Giacometti’s unconscious desires had effectively predisposed him to
finding the object. Breton would see romantic love functioning in
an analogous manner. But the task of the Surrealist object was, in a
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sense, to render such a search unnecessary and to speak directly to
our desires. Theoretically at least it serves to move us beyond
aesthetics entirely.
Film
While the Dadaists sought to discredit or to redefine art, ironically
creating new art forms (such as the readymade) in the process, the
Surrealists paid less attention to artistic media as such, convinced
that poetic content would render issues of form irrelevant. They
sought a merging of art into life in the distinctively ‘avant-garde’
terms defined at the start of Chapter 1.
Dadaist film is characterized precisely by a self-consciousness
about its material nature as film and a concern with forcing its
audience to appreciate this fact. The German-born Richter and
the Swedish-born Eggeling, who were comparatively late and
relatively peripheral members of the Zurich Dada group, worked
collaboratively to pioneer abstract film during 1919–21. Eggeling,
who was to die in 1925, laboriously produced one major work, his
Diagonal Symphony in which abstract forms evoked musical
patterns and notation. Richter’s work similarly responded to music,
but was more inventive visually. In his Rhythmus 23 (1923), for
instance, a series of rectangular shapes merge together and split
from one another, expanding and receding in the process.
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Art and anti-art
A way of emphasizing this distinction is to turn finally to the ways in
which the movements made use of film. As a medium which had
only come into being in 1895–6, when the Lumière brothers
demonstrated their invention, film was the most unequivocally
‘modern’ of any of the media they employed. The Dada films that
were made by Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling in Zurich or René
Clair and Man Ray in Paris, or the Surrealist films of Dalí and
Buñuel, were part of a massive wave of film experimentation in
the early decades of the 20th century that drew heavily on the
achievements of avant-garde art movements.
Dada and Surrealism
As with the internal divisions of Dada in general, the abstracting
tendencies of the Zurich-based filmmakers, which would eventually
lead them into an alliance with International Constructivism,
contrast with the greater emphasis on anti-bourgeois content in
the Dada films produced in Paris. Possibly the most significant
of these, René Clair’s Entr’acte of 1924, makes use of narrative
conventions, but its storyline is hardly ‘continuous’ in the manner of
contemporaneous Hollywood silent films. The narrative effects of
Clair’s film are constantly disrupted by dramatically angled shots,
superimposed images and slowed-down or speeded-up
cinematography. Montage editing, a technique involving the
dramatic juxtaposition of shots to create strong emotional or
intellectual effects in the viewer, is also employed, but not in the
doctrinaire fashion of contemporaneous Russian ideologues of film
such as Serge Eisenstein. Clair’s formal cinematographic concerns
were constantly held in check by his collaborator, Francis Picabia.
At this time Paris Dada had become completely exhausted and
Breton was in the process of launching Surrealism. The ex-Dadaist
Picabia’s contribution to the film was therefore to intersperse Clair’s
more overtly experimental sections with slapstick sequences
redolent of full-blown Dada irreverence. For instance, a lengthy
semi-abstract sequence, in which the billowing skirts of a
pirouetting ballet dancer are intercut with images such as the
geometrical lines of buildings, ends when the dancer is revealed
to be a bearded man.
Man Ray had also made a five-minute Dada film in Paris the
previous year. His Return to Reason was more formally restrained
than Clair and Picabia’s Entr’acte, but no less anarchic. The artist
scattered objects such as pins and thumbtacks on the celluloid and
then exposed it in the manner of his photographic ‘rayographs’.
These strips worked in counterpoint with others in which objects
such as the torso of a woman and a merry-go-round were shown
slowly rotating.
All of the above Dada films resist any straightforward imaginative
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entry by the spectator. A different logic underlies the small group
of Surrealist films produced between 1927 and 1930 by two pairs of
collaborators: the French dramatist and poet Antonin Artaud and
filmmaker Germaine Dulac, on the one hand, and the Spanish artist
Salvador Dalí and filmmaker Luis Buñuel, on the other. In these,
elements of narration and an emphasis on the emotions of the
actors actively solicit the psychological involvement of the audience,
although this is still frequently upset by dislocating or shocking
images or by rapid montage editing, influenced as much by Buster
Keaton in Buñuel’s case as by avant-garde precedents. The Artaud/
Dulac film The Seashell and the Clergyman of 1927, a Freudian
study of the Oedipal rivalry between an older and a younger man for
an enigmatic woman, was the first Surrealist film, strictly speaking,
but its more gentle ‘poetic’ ambience was to be overshadowed by the
visual pyrotechnics of the Dalí/Buñuel collaborations.
This remarkable prologue has been interpreted in various ways. The
blinding could be seen as a metaphorical assault on the audience’s
vision and, by extension, an assault on cinematic conventions as
such – the ‘cutting’ of a film could well be indicated. But the image
has also been interpreted by film historians such as Linda Williams
in Freudian terms as a symbolic displacement of castration anxiety.
Buñuel himself once said that the only way of interpreting the film
would be psychoanalytically, and Williams builds up a convincing
case by referring to other sequences in the film where the male
hero’s castration anxiety is evoked via mutilated body parts. In one
of these we move, via a dramatic series of disorientating close-ups,
from an image of a hand trapped by a door – with a stigmata-like
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Art and anti-art
The first of these, the 17-minute Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian
Dog), was shot in one week in March 1929, just before Dalí joined
the Surrealists. The opening sequence, which is notorious, shows a
man (Buñuel himself ) sharpening a razor next to a window. As he
observes a wisp of cloud passing across the moon, he slices open
the eye of a woman sitting passively next to him (an ox’s eye in
actual fact) (Figure 23).
23. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, frames from Un Chien Andalou,
film, 1929
wound in its palm pouring forth ants – to an image of a woman,
seen from above, poking a severed hand with a stick.
If the dream-like images of Un Chien Andalou beg to be unpacked
psychoanalytically, the second Dalí/Buñuel film, L’Âge d’Or (The
Golden Age) of 1930, deals more squarely with the real world,
although its images are no less shocking. Its central concern, in
committedly Surrealist fashion, is the social repression of desire,
particularly as an outcome of Catholic dogma. Its climax consists of
a lengthy intertitle announcing the imminent emergence from the
Selliny Castle of the libertines who have engaged in the Marquis de
Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. As the castle door opens we see that the
first of the sodomites is Jesus Christ.
The historical destiny of Dada and Surrealist film makes a broader
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Art and anti-art
If Dadaist film drew attention to itself as film, usually with
subversive intent, Surrealist film aimed to make the viewer forgetful
of the medium, in order to ‘transform consciousness’. Dada’s legacy
in terms of film history was an avant-garde or ‘underground’
tradition which reached fruition in the experimental films of 1950s
and 1960s filmmakers such as Stan Brackhage or Andy Warhol.
Surrealism, on the other hand, would have greater impact on
mainstream film where the audience is characteristically primed for
imaginative release. Buñuel himself had an extremely fertile later
career, producing important films ranging from The Exterminating
Angel (1962) to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972),
while key international filmmakers have continued to extend the
Surrealist possibilities of the medium to the present day. Important
figures here are the Czech film animator Jan Švankmajer and
the American David Lynch whose Mulholland Drive (2001)
demonstrates the extent to which lavish Hollywood production
values powerfully enhance Surrealist effects. These are selfconsciously ‘Surrealist’ practitioners, but mainstream film in
general, with its thirst for ever more startling juxtapositions of
imagery, has effortlessly absorbed the techniques of Surrealism.
Dada and Surrealism
point about the aesthetics of the movements. In Surrealism
there was a tendency to allow the filmic medium to function
‘transparently’, in other words, not to intrude too insistently on
the spectator’s aesthetic expectations, in order to effect a psychic
transformation. This was easier for mass culture to assimilate than
Dada’s insistence on the disruption and negation of the spectator’s
pleasure. In this respect one could point to the enormous impact
Surrealism has had on graphic design and advertising right up to
the present day. Numerous instances could be cited, but the series
of playfully surreal Benson and Hedges cigarette advertisements of
the 1970s are excellent examples. Critics such as Fredric Jameson
have noted that the Surrealist cult of desire, along with the visual
techniques fostered to give it expression, has been hijacked by the
market system to cater to the ‘pseudosatisfactions’ of capitalist
consumerism. In a sense this returns us to a question posed in the
introduction, about our inability to have any real distance from
the aesthetic consequences of Surrealism. It might be tempting to
speak resignedly here of the way two committedly left-wing art
movements, to drag Dada into complicity with Surrealism, failed
to resist assimilation into capitalism. But that would be to foreclose
matters before we have properly considered Dada and Surrealism’s
wider cultural and political aspirations. These, as we will see, were
profoundly inimical to capitalist values. They are also the most
fitting lenses through which to view their art.
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Chapter 4
‘Who am I?’:
mind/spirit/body
‘How can anyone hope to order the chaos that constitutes that
infinite, formless variation: man?’ So asked Tristan Tzara in his 1918
Dada Manifesto. By contrast, André Breton began his Surrealist
novel Nadja with the more hopeful but essentially troubling
question ‘Who am I?’ Questions of identity, of the nature of
consciousness or the relations between mind and body, were
fundamental to Dada and Surrealism and fundamental also to
disagreements between them. I want next to examine how such
questions interconnected in their writings and art, and how they
focus some of the more interesting debates among the theorists and
artists concerned. If both movements espoused the pre-eminence of
the irrational over the rational, how did they conceive of the
irrational? If irrationalism was to be pursued, how did this
contravene traditional humanist values, and to what degree was an
anti-humanist programme desirable? Both Dada and Surrealism
were opposed to conventional religion, mainly because many of
their adherents had received stiflingly moralistic upbringings, but
how could they undercut the mind–body dualism which is endemic
to Western thought?
Their alternatives, as we will see, drew on various philosophical
systems and modes of belief, often linked to mystical or hermetic
thought. Opposing Judaeo-Christian distrust of the flesh, they were
also drawn to a celebratory view of the bodily and the erotic.
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Inevitably such views carried their own ideological baggage, and
this will emerge as an issue during the discussion.
Irrationalism: for and against Freud
Tristan Tzara’s 1918 Dada Manifesto declares: ‘Logic is always
false. It draws the superficial threads of concepts and words
towards illusory conclusions and centres.’ Convinced that any
totalizing system of thought is in essence partial, Tzara, like the
Dadaists in general, prefers to opt for a position of thoroughgoing
relativism:
If I shout:
Ideal, Ideal, Ideal,
Dada and Surrealism
Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge,
Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom
I have recorded fairly accurately Progress, Law, Morals . . . in order,
finally, to say that . . . everyone has danced according to his own
personal boomboom . . .
This relativism is partly ascribable to the influence of the German
philosopher Nietszche, who affected nearly all of the major Dada
theorists. Nietzsche’s sense of human nature as something which
is governed by irrational, essentially egotistical impulses was a
common reference point for them, as was the thought of the French
philosopher Henri Bergson who, in books like Creative Evolution
(1907), had stressed the primacy of intuition in comprehending the
nature of reality. Another common enthusiasm was the French poet
Rimbaud, whose Lettre du voyant of 1871 had advocated ‘a long,
systematic derangement of all the senses’ in order to turn the
modern poet into a ‘seer’.
Beyond these figureheads, it is helpful to draw a distinction
between German and French Dadaist sources for irrationalist
doctrine. Nietzsche’s and Bergson’s thought provided an overall
psychologistic orientation, but it was Freudianism which most
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In Paris, by contrast, the climate was more propitious for orthodox
Freudianism. I have discussed Freud’s take-up by the Paris
Dadaists, establishing that Breton had been introduced to his ideas
as part of his medical training (Louis Aragon’s initiation was
virtually identical) and that Freud symbolically presided over the
First Surrealist Manifesto. Freud was certainly more attractive to
Breton than Nietzsche, not least because, as the 1920s progressed,
Nietzsche’s emphasis on the individualistic ‘will to power’ sat
uneasily next to Breton’s growing Marxist commitments. However,
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‘Who am I?’
decisively asserted the irrational basis for human motivation
in the early years of the 20th century, emphasizing the internally
riven nature of human psychology and the formative importance
of sexuality in human development. Freud was certainly
read by members of the German Dada groups fairly early on
(The Interpretation of Dreams originally appeared in German
in 1900), but, as noted earlier, they were generally suspicious
of the ‘bourgeois’ tenor of his thought, feeling that his therapeutic
goals served to adjust man to his social position. Max Ernst in
Cologne was a major exception to this rule, but the Berlin
Dadaists in particular tended to be more sympathetic towards
left-inclined ‘anti-Freud Freudians’ such as the writer Otto Gross.
As Richard Sheppard has shown, Gross’s psychological critique
of the over-valuation of rationalism and the dangerous repression
of irrational components of the personality was much more
conducive to the Berliners in the face of daily street violence. It
also helped them to focus their opposition to the effete rhetoric of
Geist upheld by left-wing Expressionist writers, such as Ludwig
Rubiner, in the face of ruptures in the German Left. By the same
token, the ideas of Freud’s colleague Alfred Adler, who saw
human beings as motivated by a Nietzschean ‘will to power’ and
felt that a too-high valuation of the masculine principle lay at
the heart of the modern malaise, were much more suited to the
Dadaists in Berlin with their hard-nosed acceptance of
the coexistence of destructive and affirmative impulses in
human nature.
Dada and Surrealism
Freud’s importance for early Surrealism should not be overemphasized. Breton mainly knew Freud via explanatory digests by
the French psychologists Emmanuel Régis and Angelo Hesnard and
was better versed in French neurologists such as Joseph Babinski.
Freud’s works were only gradually translated into French, The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life being one of the first to appear in
1922. A strong case could be made for Max Ernst’s entry into
Surrealism in that year as being the catalyst for in-depth knowledge
of the details of Freud’s case studies. Ernst had read Freud as early
as 1911 when he studied psychology as part of his degree at the
University of Bonn. In 1922–3, as a Surrealist, he was to paint
several important works drawing on this knowledge. Pietà or
Revolution by Night (Figure 4), with its alternative title annexing
the revolutionary project of Surrealism to Freud’s emphasis on
dreams, is a case in point.
But why the ‘Pietà’ allusion? In traditional Christian iconography a
‘Pietà’ is a depiction of the Virgin Mary bearing the dead Christ in
her arms. Here, however, we appear to have a form of reverse Pietà
with a father, rather than a mother, depicted holding his son. From
various clues, notably his moustache, the ‘father’ in the picture can
in fact be identified as Ernst’s own father Philippe. On one occasion
in Ernst’s childhood, Philippe, who was an extremely pious Catholic
teacher as well as an amateur painter, had painted his son as the
Infant Jesus, and from this we can assume that the figure he is
holding represents Max Ernst/Christ. Given the reverse Pietà logic,
the image of Philippe would thus blasphemously evoke God the
Father. Given that the son has been petrified, with his face and
hands painted grey, the implication is that the father has turned his
son to stone.
All of this strongly suggests that Ernst took the basic mechanisms of
the Freudian ‘dream work’ – particularly the processes of
‘displacement’ and ‘condensation’ by which a dreamer’s repressed
desires and anxieties are encoded in the ‘manifest content’ of the
dream – as a means by which he could supply himself with an
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exotic psychobiography, scrambling elements of his own
biography and aspects of Christian iconography together. His
overall point of reference appears to be the central plank of
Freud’s account of childhood sexuality, the Oedipus Complex,
which is predicated on the male child’s unconscious fantasy of
rivalry with the father for the mother’s love, and the violent
(castrative) retribution which would result. The ‘latent content’ of
the painting would thus be that the father has taken revenge for
the son’s infringement of the incest taboo. Ernst, of course, was
not reconstructing one of his own dreams but producing a form
of self-analysis.
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‘Who am I?’
We should be wary, however, of too quickly reaching a finite
interpretation. It is just as easy to read the Pietà as dealing with
an ‘inverted Oedipus Complex’, which would involve a protohomosexual attachment to the father, and in other Ernst paintings
of the period, such as Of This Men Shall Know Nothing, further
esoteric reference points such as alchemy worked in counterpoint to
psychoanalysis. Although art historians have made efforts to see
Freudian themes such as ‘the uncanny’ as all-pervasive within
Surrealism, an artist such as Ernst was probably being far more
ironic about Freudianism than such earnest interpretative schemas
suggest. Ernst’s Freudianism certainly set a precedent for the other
Surrealists, but, possibly with the exception of Dalí, they rarely
played Freud by the book. The 1930 French translation of the
psychoanalyst’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious may,
for instance, have chimed in with the Surrealists’ fascination in that
period with black humour but in 1928 Louis Aragon had been
openly satirical about Freud being fashionable in France, claiming
in his book Treatise on Style that the sentimental 19th-century
novel Paul and Virginia ‘would pass for an astonishing new work
today, provided that Virginia made a few comments about bananas
and Paul absentmindedly yanked out a molar now and then’. Freud
in turn was sceptical about Surrealism. Asked by Breton in 1937 to
contribute to an anthology of dream accounts, he refused on the
grounds that the straight transcription of a dream without the
Dada and Surrealism
associations of the patient would be meaningless for him. The
Surrealists’ poetic interests were far removed from the actual
concerns of psychoanalysis.
A broader question would be the overall status of the unconscious
as a model for the Surrealists. What did it say about human nature
in general? The notion of the unconscious presupposes that man
is governed by an internal ‘other’. To a degree the Surrealists
romanticized this notion of a labyrinthine, potentially conflicted,
inner self. In the tradition of Romanticism proper, they developed a
cult of insanity. Breton was an avid collector of works by psychotic
artists such as Joseph Crépin and Hector Hyppolite, and Ernst
again galvanized visual Surrealism by famously bringing a copy of
Hans Prinzhorn’s book The Artistry of the Mentally Ill to Paris in
1922 as a gift for his friend Paul Eluard. In 1930, in a collaborative
text entitled The Possessions, Breton and Eluard attempted to
simulate states of psychosis. However, the Surrealists coped badly
with insanity when it came too close. Little was done actively to help
Nadja, the muse of Breton’s first novel, after she succumbed to the
insanity whose ‘poetic’ early signs had captivated him. Similarly
Breton seems to have been deeply unnerved by the case of Antonin
Artaud. This incendiary poet and subsequent theorist of the
‘Theatre of Cruelty’ had briefly been placed in charge of a
short-lived ‘Bureau of Surrealist Research’ in 1925 but he and
Breton fell out as it became clear that Artaud’s and Breton’s
conception of revolution differed profoundly. For Breton revolution
was essentially an intellectual position. For Artaud it demanded a
visceral, soul-wrenching submission to unreason. When he
eventually became insane, Breton offered little support.
If they proved unequal to the risks of an actual immersion in the
unconscious, the Surrealists’ theoretical engagement with it meant
they were well placed to carry out a dissection of bourgeois mores,
particularly with regards to sexuality. How far they were able to
overcome their own bourgeois assumptions in doing this will
concern us as we continue. But we would probably have to concur
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with the Dadaists in asserting that social adaptation of a kind
ultimately underlay Breton’s understanding of the unconscious. As
the place where desires are attained, in dialectical counterpoint to
the insufficiencies of daily existence, the unconscious for Breton
was an avenue onto a qualitatively transformed experience of
life. At the same time Breton felt that everyday life should be
transformed on a Marxist model. From the point of view of many
Dadaists, his faith in a new dialectical contract between the
conscious and the unconscious was underpinned by a rather suspect
humanism. By contrast the Dadaists advocated anti-humanist
attitudes.
Anti-humanism
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‘Who am I?’
One of the central themes of Dada in Berlin and New York was
man-as-machine. Feeling that mankind had definitively thrown in
its lot with mechanization, Dadaist artists in both cities developed
a highly sophisticated iconography of ‘mechanomorphs’, human–
machine hybrids. In Berlin in May 1920, George Grosz produced his
Daum marries . . . (Figure 13) which alluded to his own recent
marriage. Depicting his new wife Daum (a play on her nickname
Maud) to the left, and himself, as an automaton, to the right,
Grosz’s picture, according to Wieland Herzfelde, amounted to an
attack on marriage as a bourgeois institution. Marriage, according
to Herzfelde, ‘unfailingly transforms the man into a constituent part
of itself, into a small cog within a larger system of wheels and gears’
so that, whilst the woman is partly set free, the man ‘addresses other
sober, pedantic and calculating tasks’. This verdict may be laced
with misogyny, but it reveals the extent to which the Dadaists
understood mechanization to be all-pervasive. Interestingly the
iconography of marriage was widespread in Dada. In 1919 another
Berlin Dadaist Hannah Höch had produced a feminine take on the
theme, depicting a couple shackled by modern gadgetry (Figure 18).
In New York at that time Marcel Duchamp was laboriously working
on his definitive statement on the man-machine conjunction, The
Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. As noted previously, this
Dada and Surrealism
complex work on glass opposes a ‘Bride’ floating above to her
earthbound ‘Bachelors’ below. Both the bride and her spouses are
depicted as machines. As with Herzfelde’s interpretation of Grosz,
the Bride retains some autonomy, while the Bachelors are seen as
masturbatory husks.
Whatever attitudes to marriage are involved here, it is evident that
romantic love, in Duchamp’s work in particular, is reduced to a
mechanical operation. The human body is posited as a machine
which has no natural relation with the soul or mind. On one level
we could see the ghost of the French philosopher Descartes lurking
behind all of this. Cartesian dualism, which formed the basic
philosophical premise for modern scientific method, notoriously
asserted that mind, as a thinking substance, is disembodied, leaving
the body to be considered, by the likes of La Mettrie, purely as a
mechanism. It could be, then, that the Dadaists were upholding
the Cartesian viewpoint, although tinged with an intense irony.
Duchamp’s New York Dada ally, Francis Picabia, for instance,
produced some extremely cynical responses to sexuality, Portrait
of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity of 1915 (Figure 11)
equating female sexual availability with the operations of a
spark plug.
Most of Picabia’s work of this period speaks of an essentially
anti-humanist distrust of spirituality and deep inward feeling. To
some extent his attitudes were shared by the Berlin Dadaists. Raoul
Hausmann, for example, asserted that ‘Dada is the full absence of
what is called Geist (Spirit). Why have Geist in a world that runs
on mechanically?’ But it is important to realize that it was the
Expressionists’ rhetoric of the struggle of modern man’s soul with
the machine that was the real butt of Hausmann’s critique. In fact
the Berlin Dadaists generally had a more positive conception of
the machine than the New York group, perceiving a mechanical
aesthetic to be a means of undermining individualism and
advocating collectivity. They sought a robust materialism and
shunned humanist platitudes, but, apart perhaps from Grosz, they
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by no means upheld mind–body dualism in the way that the New
Yorkers, however satirically, appeared to do. As we shall see later,
the German-speaking Dadaists, in Zurich as well as Berlin, often
leaned towards a mystically tinged monist philosophical attitude,
whereby dualities like body and soul were brought into a
paradoxical unity. In this respect they might have agreed with
André Breton’s conception of Surrealism had his thought not been
so heavily impregnated with idealism. But what exactly does
‘idealism’ mean here? Let us turn back to Surrealism.
Breton was an idealist in that he advocated the self-realization of
the mind in its dialectical relationship with matter, but did this also
add up to the kind of covert liberal humanism that many Dadaists
would have found objectionable? The answer to this comes not so
much from the Dadaists themselves but from Breton’s most incisive
intellectual combatant, Georges Bataille.
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‘Who am I?’
In the Second Surrealist Manifesto of 1929 Breton famously
asserted: ‘Everything tends to make us believe there exists a certain
point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined,
past and future . . . cease to be perceived as contradictions.’ This
quotation partly helps to add meaning to the ‘Sur’ of ‘Surrealism’ in
terms of its transcendental tone, but it is most interesting as an
indicator of Breton’s fundamental commitment to Hegelian
dialectics. Breton had been introduced to the early 19th-century
German philosopher’s thought around 1912, and later admitted that
he had largely ‘intuited’ its meaning. Fundamentally Hegel was
instrumental for Breton in reconciling his early emphasis on the
exploration of the unconscious with the commitment to change in
the material world that came with his, and Surrealism’s, allegiance
to Communism after 1926. It was the idealist cast of Hegel’s
thought that was most crucial. In Hegel’s elaborately abstract
philosophy, mind or spirit comes to know itself via a progressive
series of dialectical syntheses. For Breton the Surrealist image
similarly operates via the collision of contradictory terms to
produce a new, ‘higher’ unity.
Dada and Surrealism
As noted earlier, Bataille was never part of the Surrealist group, but
rather its interlocutor and scourge. After Breton had expelled
various members of the group in 1929 – notably Michel Leiris,
André Masson and Robert Desnos – several of them transferred
their allegiance to Bataille’s journal Documents. In many ways
Documents, which ran from 1929 to 1930, had a similar ‘scientific’
aura to the Surrealist journals, but its quasi-academic articles
concentrated more closely on issues such as ethnology and
archaeology, offset against jazz and other aspects of popular culture.
Most importantly, given the current discussion, an attack was
mounted from its pages, in Bataille’s writings in particular, on the
idealist presuppositions of Breton’s thinking. At times this is
allegorical rather than direct. In the much-cited essay Big Toe, the
big toe is said to be the part of man’s constitution which separates
him from the anthropoid ape. It is also that part which enables man
to stand upright, with his mind on higher things. But, Bataille
argues, man considers the toe, which is ‘stuck in the mud’, to be
something base and ignoble. Feet, he asserts, are only adequately
valued by fetishists. Bataille therefore seeks a reversal of values
which, in other writings, will constitute a call for the celebration of
the base or excremental aspects of human nature as opposed to the
evasions of idealism.
More than anything Bataille sees Breton’s conception of Surrealism
as being bound to concepts of ‘taste’ and aesthetic beauty, despite
the claims made in the First Surrealist Manifesto regarding the
dethroning of conventional morality. In an essay titled The
Deviations of Nature published in Documents, 2 (1930) Bataille
dwelt on mankind’s fascination with ‘freaks’ of nature such as
Siamese twins. This text can in fact be read as a veiled commentary
on the humanist emblem of the androgyne; the fusion of male and
female beings common in the alchemical allegories to which the
Bretonian Surrealists, as we shall see, were drawn. Alluding, though
indirectly, to the androgyne as a yet further instance of an idealist
synthesis, Bataille dwells on natural occurrences where the
conjunction of two human beings does not produce something ideal
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but something monstrous. Throughout Documents we find a
constant play on the monstrous as a means of countering the ideal
with blunt materiality. For instance, as illustrations to an article on
masks by Georges Limbour, which asserts that the only Western
equivalents for the ritual power of tribal Oceanic masks are items
such as gas masks, there is a remarkable suite of photographs of
carnival masks by J.-A. Boiffard. Presumably redolent of gaiety, one
of them initially appears to have had its eyes burned out.
In 1929 there was a direct clash between Breton and Bataille when
Breton lent on Surrealism’s latest recruit, Salvador Dalí, to refuse
permission for Bataille to reproduce his key painting of that year
The Lugubrious Game alongside an exegesis of it written by Bataille
for Documents. Bataille had to be content with a schematic diagram
of the picture, but his commentary, which dwelt on the anxieties
about masturbation and castration informing Dalí’s painting, reveal
the extent to which Dalí, with his self-avowed obsessions with
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‘Who am I?’
24. J.-A. Boiffard, Carnival Mask, photograph reproduced in
Documents, 2 (Paris, 1930)
Dada and Surrealism
onanism, scatology, and putrefaction, was the exemplary Bataillean
artist. Breton seems to have turned a blind eye to the truly
‘convulsive’ aspects of Dalí’s work, although he was not slow, around
the same period, to take objection to the unsublimated nature of
Antonin Artaud’s Surrealism. Although Dalí might legitimately
have been claimed by Bataille, he remained, for the time being, in
the Breton camp. Other artists would choose to desert Breton more
or less definitively. One of these was André Masson whose leaning
towards Nietzschean thought and violent imagery, in works such as
the ‘Massacre’ drawings of 1933 in which men are depicted
slaughtering women, was too much for Breton.
Bataille’s anti-humanist critique of Breton might appear to resonate
with the Dada critique of Surrealism’s ‘Pope’ but Bataille’s position
was not identical with Dada. In his later years Bataille would
actually appear much closer to Surrealism than he had in the heady
1920s, mainly because he endorsed their overall perception that
part of modern man’s dilemma consists in the absence of myth, or
what he termed ‘the sacred’, to deal with the darker, anarchic
impulses of human nature. When, with the coming of war in 1939,
Dada and Surrealism could be seen retrospectively as bracketing
two world wars, the need to deconstruct the idea of humanist Man
became ever more urgent for their intellectual heirs, and Bataille’s
legacy was taken up by the likes of the French post-Structuralist
thinker Michel Foucault. But Bataille’s own anti-humanism hardly
presented a ‘solution’. There was even a period in the 1930s when
it led him close to Fascism. Another way in which both Dada
and Surrealism attempted to bypass both humanist values and
mind–body dualism was via mystical or hermetic thought.
The mystical and the hermetic
‘The dada hovered above the face of the waters before God created
the world, and when he spake: let there be light! lo there was not
light, but dada.’ This joint proclamation by members of the Berlin
Dada group reflects Dada’s parodic attitude to conventional
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religion. We have already discussed examples of virulent antiCatholicism on the part of the Surrealists. What the Surrealists, like
the Dadaists, particularly abhorred was the Judaeo-Christian split
between soul and body. Although Duchamp and Picabia, as we have
seen, used the language of dualism to satirize modern man’s
technologism, the Dadaists in particular invoked pre-Socratic or
non-Western philosophical principles, in which the spiritual and
the material were held in equilibrium. This was part of a larger
critique of the modern psyche.
In Berlin Raoul Hausmann also appears to have been reading Lao
Tzu around 1918, but in addition he was attracted to the thought of
the German Darwinian biologist Ernst Haeckel who had discerned
a single principle, his ‘Law of Substances’, as uniting spirit and
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‘Who am I?’
The sources the Dadaists drew on here were very diverse. In Zurich
Hugo Ball was particularly attracted to the Greek Pre-Socratic
thinker Heraclitus, who had stressed that everything is in perpetual
flux, while Hans Arp was drawn to Christian mystics such as the
17th-century German writer Jacob Boehme, and Chinese Taoist
philosophers such as Lao Tzu. We know that Arp read out passages
from Boehme at one of the ‘Dada Soirées’ in Zurich in 1917,
significantly choosing sections which stress the importance of
maintaining balance in the midst of flux. In terms of the Chinese
influence, it is possible that he transposed the principles of the
ancient pre-Taoist oracle of change, the I Ching, to produce his
collages in which rectangles are arranged ‘according to the laws of
chance’ (Figure 15). A central influence on Taoism, the I Ching had
been concerned with predicting patterns of change at work in
nature and, by extension, in the human world. When consulting it,
the interlocutor submits him/herself to chance by throwing yarrow
sticks (or coins these days) to produce a series of abstract
‘hexagrams’ which then correspond to one of the book’s oracular
pronouncements. In dropping his rectangles of paper, Arp was
similarly opening himself up to nature’s laws rather than man’s,
although there was clearly no predictive dimension.
Dada and Surrealism
matter. All of this supports the historian Richard Sheppard’s
conviction that the Dadaists’ irrationalism and anti-art iconoclasm
was fundamentally keyed to a deeply philosophical quest. One
pole of Dada, mainly in Zurich, although this extends to nonCommunist Berliners such as Hausmann, was concerned with the
interaction between models of nature as chaotic and models of it as
inherently patterned. The other pole, that represented by Duchamp
and Picabia in New York and Paris, or George Grosz and Walter
Serner in Berlin, was more fundamentally existential and inclined
towards nihilism. This certainly corresponds with the received
wisdom whereby Dada in Zurich is essentially more ‘constructive’
than its New York or Paris counterparts.
Turning to Surrealism, we find little of Arp’s or Hausmann’s nature
mysticism, not least because Expressionism, which had contained
the vitalist impulse for their interests, had little impact on the
French movement. Instead, Surrealist models of anti-dualist
thought often tended to derive from medieval and post-medieval
Western hermetic traditions. Alchemy in particular was of major
interest to nearly all of the major writers and theorists in the
movement. Combined with allusions to astrology and the
four elements, it crops up constantly in visual Surrealism.
Fundamentally alchemy was concerned with transmutation and
thus we find it informing the multivalent imagery of, say, André
Masson. In his Birth of Birds (Figure 16) the image of a bird
soaring up from the woman’s vulva has direct associations with
images of symbolic birds either flying upwards or downwards
in engravings of the alchemical vessel, the place where
transformations of matter were effected, while the whole drawing
employs metamorphic imagery to thematize birth. Masson,
incidentally, is possibly closer to the nature mysticism of Arp than
almost any other Surrealist and was deeply affected by Heraclitus.
However, in Miró’s work (Figure 19) we can also find allusions to a
teeming, mystically patterned universe, this time in line with the
philosophies of Ramon Lull, the 13th-century Christian mystic
whose Catalan roots Miró shared.
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It is important to stress that alchemy was redolent for the
Surrealists of a particular late medieval worldview and had
few of the associations with the occult that it has in the popular
imagination. In general the Surrealists had little interest in the
supernatural, especially in so far as it was associated with
19th-century crazes such as spiritualism. Breton was at pains to
point out that the trances undergone by the Surrealists during the
‘mouvement flou’ had nothing to do with communication with the
dead. Surrealism’s finest critic Walter Benjamin stressed that what
interested the Surrealists was the ‘profane illumination’ to be
obtained from material existence rather than any recourse to
religion or the ‘beyond’, or drugs for that matter, and we should
bear in mind that Surrealist interests often had to be squared
with Marxism.
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‘Who am I?’
Despite this, we know that Breton had an early fascination with
the thought of the French 19th-century writer on magic, Eliphas
Lévi, although Lévi himself was a materialist, dedicated to the
reconciliation of spirit and matter. This returns us to the Surrealist
understanding of alchemy. On the one hand, the group were
attracted to the sheer oddity of old hermetic engravings allegorizing
the spiritual import of the physical processes of alchemy. Max
Ernst’s illustrations for the ‘collage novels’ he produced in the late
1920s and early 1930s owe much to such precedents. On the other
hand, the Surrealists anticipated the sophisticated way the
psychologist Carl Jung would interpret alchemy in his 1944 book
Psychology and Alchemy. Here Jung argued that whereas
Christianity emphasized redemption from sin, implying a distrust
of the flesh, the Hermeticists had used alchemical allegory as a form
of commentary on Christianity, emphasizing the reconciliation of
matter and spirit through the conjoining of the male and female
principles in the symbol of the androgyne. All of this clearly
corresponds with the Surrealists’ overall attack on Catholicism, and
it is not surprising that the androgyne has wide currency in their art
and writing. We should, however, recall the essay by Georges
Bataille discussed in the last section where the fusion of opposites
Dada and Surrealism
produces monstrosity rather than reconciliation. This was the flip
side of Surrealist metaphysics.
If alchemy summoned up an alternative philosophical worldview,
an important strand of Surrealist art dealt with undermining the
categories by which knowledge itself, in the post-Enlightenment
world, has been organized. In this respect the Surrealists were
particularly interested in the 16th- and 17th-century tradition of the
‘Wunderkammer’ or ‘cabinet of curiosities’. Within their confines,
such cabinets had presented alternative modes of ordering and
classifying objects, both man-made and natural, to those employed
in the museums that would eventually replace them. Principles of
analogy or whimsical association took precedence over principles
of species and genus. The Surrealists flirted with alternative
taxonomic systems in various contexts. Their own personal art
collections tended to be organized so that paintings by, say, Dalí or
De Chirico were displayed on a par with exotic natural objects or
‘primitive’ artefacts. By the same token, Dalí produced a ‘Surrealist
object’ in 1936 consisting of a tray of objects, including a shoe,
several decorated pastries, and a small ornament of a couple having
sex, which was painstakingly assembled according to a personal,
fetishistic logic, and Joseph Cornell, the one rather late fully fledged
American addition to the Surrealist movement, devoted his entire
career to the production of open boxes, usually no more than 18 by
12 inches square, in which objects such as clay pipes, apothecary
jars, and star charts evoked a miniaturized world of reverie.
This aspect of Surrealism can be updated a little by looking at a
striking image by Jan Švankmajer, the Czech animator and
filmmaker mentioned in the last chapter, who practises a
sophisticated late form of Surrealism. In the early 1970s
Švankmajer produced a large series of etchings, under the collective
title Natural Science, in which sections of illustrated plates of
animals and their skeletons are yoked together to produce
disturbing hybrids. There is a deliberate homage here to Max Ernst,
who published a portfolio of frottages titled ‘Histoire Naturelle’, but
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‘Who am I?’
25. Jan Švankmajer, Natural Science, etching, 1973
Švankmajer reinvigorates the Ernstian legacy. Švankmajer also
produced outrageous mock-scientific notes to accompany his
aberrant taxonomies. In the case of ‘Fellaceus Oedipus’ (Figure 25)
we are told of a monstrous Australian animal species in which the
female lays eggs from which male progeny emerge by breaking the
shells with their penises. The mothers proceed to fellate their
newborn male young, swallowing their sperm to fertilize more eggs.
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Dada and Surrealism
They then castrate their offspring by shutting their jaws, ensuring
that all adults are effectively ‘females’.
The black humour involved here and the knowing play on
psychoanalytic ideas are fully in line with mainstream Surrealism,
but Švankmajer’s perverse scrambling of natural data is keyed very
precisely to his identity as an artist within the Czech Surrealist
tradition. Prague had been home to possibly the largest late
16th-century Wunderkammer, that of Rudolf II, and Švankmajer’s
work looks back ironically to the marvels of this collection. This
in turn says something about the way in which an alternative
knowledge-system inevitably springs from ‘local’ rather than
‘universal’ roots. It also comments obliquely on the presuppositions
of a Paris-centred notion of Surrealism, a theme which resonates
with the Surrealist discourse around colonialism which, during the
1930s and 1940s, served to temper the movement’s Francophile
tendencies.
Despite the ingenuities of Surrealist subversions of categorization,
it might be asserted that they were still playing to the rules of
Western intellectual traditions. In counterpoint to this, there was
an atavistic return to the ‘primitive’, in both Dada and Surrealism,
which could be seen as combating Western presuppositions about
human nature more directly. This would return us again to the
anti-humanist current of Bataille’s thought; his interest in
opposing the radically unassimilable to the idealist habits of
Western thought. But it is a discussion which will have to wait
until the next chapter. What is clear from the above is the extent to
which the Dadaists and Surrealists employed mystical and
hermetic models of thought to contest Western dualism from
within. What they sought, as the Surrealists constantly affirmed,
was emancipation. But Bataille would no doubt have countered
that this emancipation worked in favour of the spirit or mind. What
was envisaged for the body?
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The bodily and the erotic
This compelling example of the re-emergence of tabooed aspects of
bodily experience speaks to a wider concern in both Dada and
Surrealism with the rejection of conventional moral criteria. But
did all of this simply amount to an Oedipal assault on the paternal
culture or was some new role for the body envisaged?
In Dada, it is surprising to find that the body is rarely seen in
sensual terms. Dance admittedly played a fairly prominent role in
certain of the Galerie Dada performances of the Zurich group. The
Hungarian-born dance pioneer Rudolf von Laban, who, in defiance
of classical precepts, based his dances on the organic movements of
the body and on principles of tension and relaxation, devised a
number of contributions to Dada evenings, with his star dancer
Mary Wigman specializing, as one critic noted, in ‘elegant
deformation’. Dada’s founder Hugo Ball, who was an enthusiastic
proponent of new forms of dance, wrote about an abstract dance
entitled Song of the Flying Fish and the Sea Horses performed at
the Dada Gallery in 1917 by Sophie Taeuber, the partner of Hans
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‘Who am I?’
St Paul, in his Letter to the Romans 7: 21–4, asserted: ‘My inner
being delights in the Law of God. But I see a different law at work in
my body . . . It makes me a prisoner to the law of sin which is at
work in my body’. This kind of religious denigration of the body
brought about a violent ‘return of the repressed’ in Dadaist and
Surrealist art. For instance in March 1920, in the early days of Paris
Dada, Francis Picabia published a reproduction of an ink splash,
with the title ‘Holy Virgin’, in his journal 391. Apart from being an
example of a chance process, which, like Arp’s earlier Zurich
collages, was also ‘abstract’, this Dada ink-pellet had blasphemous
implications. According to Catholic doctrine the Holy Virgin did
not experience ‘venereal pleasure’ in conceiving Christ, and
effectively remained ‘intact’. What Picabia’s splash evoked as
much as anything was the grossly physical outcome of an
all-too-human defloration.
Dada and Surrealism
Arp: ‘It was a dance full of flashes and fishbones, of dazzling
lights . . . The lines of her body break, every gesture decomposes
into a hundred precise, angular, incisive movements.’ However,
these innovatory dances, which bespeak an attempt to rid the body
of constricting habits of expression, and which were at one, in terms
of Laban ideology, with experiments in alternative lifestyle
involving nudism and vegetarianism, were not, in the strictest
sense, motivated by Dada concerns. They sit a little oddly next to the
edgier, more anarchic aspects of Dada performance, including the
‘negro dances’ of the male Dadaists.
Beyond this, the bodies we find in, say, George Grosz’s Berlin Dada
graphics (Figure 13) are ravaged by urban existence and the effects
of war. In a poem of mid-1917, reflecting on a nervous breakdown
suffered as an outcome of his war service, Grosz described himself
as a ‘machine whose pressure gauge has gone to pieces’ and
most of the Berlin Dadaists registered the effects of traumatizing
war-induced disorders such as ‘shell shock’ on the bodies and facial
expressions of the figures they depicted. Hausmann’s sound poetry
might even be understood as mimicking the stuttered recovery of
speech by war neurotics undergoing therapy. By the same token, the
mechanized beings of Duchamp or Picabia invoke bodily alienation.
A separate case should perhaps be made for Duchamp’s Large
Glass. Given that its mechanomorphic sexual participants are
fuelled, according to the notes he made to accompany the work,
by forms of energy such as gas and electricity, it could be seen as
envisaging a newly ‘productive’ bodily economy, albeit one
provocatively set up in dialogue with the sphere of nature.
Like the Dadaists, the Surrealists produced images of wounded or
injured bodies, opposing the French government’s attempts to
restore national confidence after the war with stubborn reminders
of the violence done to the (male) body during the conflict. Figures
propped up by crutches became a recurring motif in Dalí’s work,
particularly his 1933–4 illustrations to Lautréamont’s Chants de
Maldoror, one of Surrealism’s ‘bibles’, in which the book’s narrator,
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Maldoror, is himself an emasculated, mutilated travesty of
masculinity. When it came to representing the female body,
however, the Surrealists openly celebrated it, in line with their
heterosexual impulses. Although frequently fragmented, the
Surrealist body is thus more often pledged to pleasure, or
pleasurable pain, than trauma. ‘The omnipotence of desire’, wrote
Breton, ‘has remained, since its beginnings, Surrealism’s sole act
of faith.’ In line with the pseudo-scientific tendencies of the
movement, a series of twelve ‘Researches on Sexuality’ were
conducted between 1928 and 1932 in which group members were
quizzed, in remarkably frank fashion, about their sexual practices
and preferences:
André Breton: Valentin, what do you think of the idea of
masturbating and coming in a woman’s ear ?
Albert Valentin: I wouldn’t dream of it. . . .
Georges Sadoul: And in the nose?
Paul Eluard: I wouldn’t like that. I hate noses. A complex. I’m
against.
These sessions, only two of which were published in La Révolution
Surréaliste, brought out the profoundly masculine and homophobic
biases of the movement. Breton threatened to leave the room when
one session’s discussion veered too close to an acceptance of
homosexuality. On another occasion, Louis Aragon, who emerges as
more open-minded, particularly with regard to homosexuality,
ventured that the discussion concerned was ‘partially undermined’
by the ‘predominance of the male point of view’.
A male viewpoint inevitably dominates the enormous amount of
erotic art, both visual and verbal, produced by the movement. One
of the most uncompromising examples is perhaps Georges Bataille’s
The Story of the Eye, a pornographic novel first published under the
pseudonym of Lord Auch, in 1928. Although not strictly a Surrealist
production, its delirious and disturbing fantasises of sex and
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‘Who am I?’
Pierre Unik: The ear is made for the tongue, not for the cock. . . .
Dada and Surrealism
violence, which at one point involve its male and female
protagonists raping and murdering a priest, are closer to Surrealism
than his other writings of the period. In 1957 Bataille would see
eroticism as ‘assenting to life up to the point of death’, a
philosophical position which, although faintly redolent of late
19th-century fin-de-siècle linkages between sex and death, is more
profoundly indebted to the thought of the Marquis de Sade. There is
little in the work of female Surrealists comparable with this. Of the
small group of women who achieved prominence in the Surrealist
orbit in the 1930s, only Meret Oppenheim (Figure 22), Toyen
(Marie Cernunová) of the Czechoslovakian group, and the
Argentinian/Italian painter Leonor Fini emerge as committed
proponents of female erotic experience. Fini, who constantly
bridled at the patriarchal attitudes of Breton in particular,
overturned male erotic stereotypes in images of languorous
androgynous male bodies presided over by female deities. In 1944
she illustrated an edition of Sade’s Juliette, celebrating, in highly
personal terms, the independence of a sexualized ‘Sadean woman’.
The Marquis de Sade, who was eulogized by Breton in the Second
Surrealist Manifesto as ‘Surrealist in Sadism’, is a crucial figure for
appreciating Surrealist attitudes towards sexuality. The notorious
18th-century French aristocrat and pornographer had initially
come to the Surrealists’ attention via Guillaume Apollinaire, and
was lauded by the group for having placed an ethical value on man’s
rights to libidinal gratification. Sade had been imprisoned for much
of his life for ‘perverse’ practices, notably sodomy. Although indepth knowledge of Sade’s philosophical position did not emerge
until the mid-1930s, as the result of investigations by the Surrealistaffiliated poet and historian Maurice Heine, the Surrealists’ reading
of him can be grasped by looking at Man Ray’s 1933 photograph
‘Monument to D. A. F. de Sade’.
Man Ray has imposed an inverted crucifix on this photograph to
rhyme with the cleft of the buttocks, but the crucifix clearly also has
phallic/penetrative implications relating to the Sadean practice of
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‘Who am I?’
26. Man Ray, ‘Monument to D. A. F. Sade’, photograph, 1933
sodomy. In their ‘Researches on Sexuality’ the Surrealists
pronounced themselves advocates of (heterosexual) sodomy, seeing
it as an act which, in gratuitously satisfying desire, symbolically
flouts the idea that sex, particularly as understood by the Church, is
a procreative ‘duty’. At the same time it is significant that France,
during this period, was obsessed with its declining birth-rate and
that procreation was indeed considered to be a patriotic duty.
Clearly, then, Man Ray’s image implicitly brings anti-procreative,
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Dada and Surrealism
anti-religious, and anti-nationalist convictions together. Whatever
questions we might raise about the coercive and violatory nature of
the activities which Sade promoted, and it is important to stress
that the Surrealists generally conceived of sex in reciprocal terms,
Sade was basically understood by them to strike a blow for the
body’s rights vis-à-vis those of Church and State.
More than anybody, the German artist Hans Bellmer exemplifies
the Surrealists’ interest in unfettered and subversive sexuality.
Coming to the attention of the group when, in 1934, a remarkable
spread of photographs relating to his first Doll mannequin were
published in the lavish art magazine Minotaure, Bellmer’s work was
uncompromisingly based around fantasies centring on adolescent
or pre-adolescent girls. Heavily influenced by a production he saw
in Berlin in 1932 of Jacques Offenbach’s opera Tales of Hoffmann,
in which a female automaton plays a major role, Bellmer was to
construct two doll mannequins in 1933 and 1935 respectively.
The first, which was four and a half feet tall, is no longer extant,
but the numerous photographs of it reveal a cross between a
heavily abused child’s doll and some form of adult sex toy. Its
arms are missing, its plaster torso is half-open, one ‘normal’ leg is
constructed from plaster, the other is simply a piece of dowelling
terminating in a wooden club foot. The Surrealists, in the wake
of certain paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, had turned the
mannequin into something of a cult – a cult, incidentally, which,
in so far as it extends to the automaton, has interesting relations
with the Dadaists’ fascination with mechanomophs – but
Bellmer’s work enters into much more unsettling psychic
territory. His second doll would renounce any singular ‘identity’
and consist of numerous ball-jointed parts, many of them
duplicated several times, which Bellmer assembled together for
photographic set-pieces. Profoundly disturbing, one of the
photographs reveals an unaccountable creature standing before
us, in a woodland setting, its upper body consisting of a further
pair of legs. In the background a male figure slips behind a tree,
eluding our gaze.
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Not surprisingly, Bellmer’s works have generated a plethora of
critical responses, from those who see the works as irredeemably
misogynistic to those who, given the fact that the dolls were
produced in Berlin in precisely the period that the Nazis were
coming to power, read them as oblique responses to notions of
bodily and sexual ‘normality’ promoted in Nazi ideology.
Much of the erotic art of Surrealism has a fundamentally fetishistic
character. A representative example would be the concentration on
the female torso, hair and neck in Magritte’s The Rape (Figure 20).
But if violation or dehumanization of the body results from this,
as Magritte implies in his title, we are surely left asking some
important ethical questions. If this section, and this chapter in
general, has shown how Dada and Surrealism developed a new
iconography of the body to counter dualist thinking, there can be no
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‘Who am I?’
However, the overriding impression is surely one of a compulsive
fetishization of the female body. The multiplication of parts such as
breasts or legs, locked together in a monstrous algebra, ultimately
stems, as Bellmer was well aware, from the classical Freudian
notion of the fetish. In a key essay of 1927, building on earlier
writings, Freud argued that the male fetishist’s fixation on an object
or part of the body in lieu of the whole, derives from a particular
‘moment’ in the formative passage through the Oedipus Complex.
This is the moment when the male child unconsciously disavows the
mother’s lack of phallus, as evidenced by her apparent ‘castration’.
The fetish thus stands in for the missing maternal phallus and
symbolically allays the reminder of castration evoked by the sight
of female genitalia. The more the fetish object is asserted, via
multiplication or displacement onto other fetish objects, the more
the threat recedes. Interestingly, a number of Bellmer’s delicate
drawings of the 1940s show young girls lying back, entranced, as
erect penises emerge from their vaginas. These drawings deal
overtly with the fantasy of the maternal phallus. All of this, of
course, suggests that Bellmer’s art was, although intensely personal,
also deeply knowing.
Dada and Surrealism
denying that this process was predicated on a male viewpoint.
Female commentators have justifiably argued that women’s
bodies, and, by extension, femininity, are often demeaned via the
objectification and fetishization visited on the female body in
the service of male psychosexual ‘liberation’, and Surrealism
in particular has comparatively little to offer in the way of a
counterbalancing female viewpoint. Dada, simply by virtue of being
less heavily concerned with eroticism, seems less directly culpable.
Here, though, we are starting to think not so much of sexuality or
eroticism in general terms, but of gender positioning. We are
starting to think, in other words, of the ‘politics’ of Dadaist and
Surrealist representations.
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Chapter 5
Politics
‘Everything remains to be done, every means must be worth
trying, in order to lay waste the ideas of family, country,
religion.’
This dramatic declaration from André Breton’s Second Surrealist
Manifesto powerfully evokes the uncompromising nature of
Dadaist and Surrealist politics. But rhetoric aside, how realistic
were the radical political aspirations of these movements? In what
follows I will often look to current perspectives on Dada and
Surrealism to make their ideological blindspots apparent. The first
two sections deal with questions of gender and race. It is here,
perhaps, that we most keenly experience our historical distance
from these movements. Yet the Dadaists often explore gender
issues in ways that are still relevant to us, while the Surrealists
were highly prescient in beginning to question Eurocentric
assumptions. Considerations of gender and race will lead on to a
discussion, in the last section, of the overall political affiliations of
Dada and Surrealism. What were their commitments, in an
intensely volatile period of Europe’s political history, in terms of
actual ideologies and political organizations? Were they truly
‘engaged’? Do they end up, in spite of all that they stood for, merely
as ‘art movements’?
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Gender
Dada and Surrealism
I have already discussed the ubiquity of a male, fetishistic viewpoint
in Surrealist representations of sexuality. But does this amount to
saying that the Surrealists had a predominantly negative attitude
towards women in general? And how does their attitude compare
to their Dada predecessors?
The art historian Whitney Chadwick has certainly argued
persuasively that women in the orbit of the Surrealist movement
tended to be idealized as muses, and thus stereotyped in the male
imagination as archetypes such as the sorceress or child-woman
rather than credited with autonomy of their own. Such women, who
were often girlfriends or wives of the artists, such as Breton’s insane
muse Nadja or Dalí’s wife Gala, existed, in Chadwick’s words, to
‘complement and complete the male creative cycle’. Even women
who acquired prominence within Surrealism as artists frequently
had to do so on the coat tails of a relationship with a male
Surrealist; several of the major female entrants into the movement
of the mid-1930s to early 1940s, namely Meret Oppenheim,
Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning, had
romantic attachments to Max Ernst. In the case of Jacqueline
Lamba, who was Breton’s wife in the later 1930s, it was necessary to
go through a divorce before she could shake off her status as muse
and pursue her own artistic path.
If Surrealism smothered women with idolatry, in line with its cult
of desire, Dada often provided more breathing space for female
creativity. The relationship between Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber
in Zurich is a case in point. Arp and Taeuber worked collaboratively
on some of the earliest Zurich Dada abstractions, produced around
1915–16 in advance of the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire. Certain
of these were wool hangings, designed by Arp but worked by
Taeuber who at that time taught design at the Zurich Art School. By
exhibiting textiles, with their associations with the applied arts or
crafts, in a fine art context, Arp and Taeuber could be seen as
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strategically introducing a technique connotative of ‘feminine’
decoration into a formerly ‘masculine’ domain, and thus not only
challenging the traditional predominance of oil painting in a Dada
spirit, but also questioning a male-centred conception of creativity.
Admittedly Arp often took the credit for these works, but the
strategic import of the gestures remains undiminished.
To return to the male Surrealists, we should be wary, however, of
hasty judgements regarding their approach to women. It could be
argued that they unthinkingly reproduced the attitudes of their
times in relation to women colleagues, whilst often projecting
positive attitudes towards femininity in their work. In this respect,
it is worth returning to a psychoanalytic theme, that of Hysteria.
This condition, which was almost exclusively limited to female
patients, had notoriously been investigated in the late 1870s by
Freud’s teacher, Charcot, who had held public lectures at the Paris
Salpêtrière during which patients obligingly fell into the swooning
states characteristic of the illness. Although Freud eventually
deduced that hysterical symptoms were indicators of sexual
repression, the Surrealists chose to downplay the condition’s
pathological dimension, celebrating it as a ‘means of expression’ in
La Révolution Surréaliste in 1928. Not surprisingly, feminist
theorists have criticized the Surrealists for overlooking the social
marginalization, subordination, and suffering involved in such
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Women flourished in other Dadaist relationships. Raoul Hausmann
and Hannah Höch’s in Berlin, although stormy owing to double
standards on Hausmann’s part, which involved him preaching
about free love while refusing to abandon his marriage, nevertheless
gave Höch considerable creative freedom. Certain of her
photomontages debunked marriage (Figure 18) and others explored
the position of the ‘New Woman’ of early 1920s Weimar Germany,
registering the way in which images of women participating in
sports or popular culture served the commercial interests of
advertisers as much as the political requirements of feminism.
Beyond this, male Dada tended to be as masculinist as Surrealism.
Dada and Surrealism
supposedly ‘poetic’ states. However, Elizabeth Roudinesco, a
historian of psychoanalysis, has linked the Surrealists’ veneration of
hysterics to their advocacy of female criminals such as the Papin
sisters (Figure 10) or Violette Nozières. The latter had been the
focus of considerable interest in France in 1934, having poisoned
both of her parents and proved spectacularly deranged in the
subsequent trial. In applauding such women, Roudinesco sees the
Surrealists endorsing a dangerous, subversive femininity which
was the precursor of a specifically modern form of liberated female
consciousness.
The idea that the Surrealists’ claustrophobic veneration of
femininity was actually politically enabling extends to the art
historian Rosalind Krauss’s argument that even the explicitly
fetishistic, objectifying images of women in Surrealist art can be
seen in proto-feminist terms. If, according to Krauss, fetishism is
understood as a ‘perversion’ of a ‘normal’ relation to sexuality, it
implicitly valorizes the artificial over the natural and suggests that,
far from being a natural given, the category ‘woman’ is a social
construct. On this view, Bataille’s transgressive pursuit of hybridity,
or Bellmer’s obsessive conglomerations of sexual parts, are oddly
liberating in their refusal to idealize an essential ‘femininity’ and
their acknowledgement that representation is in any case
fundamentally unnatural. However, feminist opponents of
Krauss have been quick to argue that being linked to artifice
does not necessarily liberate women; after all, fashion advertising
is pre-eminently based on artifice. Furthermore Susan Rubin
Suleiman suggests that the Kraussian emphasis on fetishism is itself
based on patriarchal assumptions in so far as fetishism, in Freudian
terms, involves the male unconscious blocking out the possibility of
female castration via the substitution of objects connotative of the
maternal phallus. The logic of the phallus is thus left in place. It
follows from this that Surrealism inevitably upholds a masculinist
symbolic system, and that it would be counter-productive, in terms
of gender politics, for women to subscribe to male structures of
representation.
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Female Surrealist artists certainly challenged fixed ideas about their
gender. An important figure here is Claude Cahun. Born Lucy
Schwob in Nantes, France, she adopted her pseudonym in order to
reinforce the sexual ambiguity that is often the subject of the
searching self-portrait photographs she produced in the 1920s and
1930s. This ambiguity fooled historians for many years. Cahun does
not even appear in the index of Whitney Chadwick’s book Women
Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985) and had to wait until
the late 1980s to be rediscovered. Her photographs present her in a
variety of guises – from body-builder to Japanese puppet – such
that her femininity becomes something manifestly ‘constructed’. In
one self-portrait (Figure 27) her severely mannish appearance
clearly hints at her lesbianism. Aware that women in visual
representations are often the object of the (male) gaze, Cahun meets
our look head-on. Meanwhile her mirrored double gazes elsewhere.
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Another recently rediscovered woman artist, this time with links to
New York Dada, is the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven. The
Baroness, who had indeed been married to a German Baron but
ended up in New York penniless and obliged to pose for artists for
a living, was an intriguingly eccentric figure. She often walked
through Greenwich Village wearing a coal scuttle on her head
or with cancelled postage stamps stuck to her face. But her
contributions to the movement were arguably minor, with the
notable exception of God, a readymade of 1917 consisting of
plumbing pipes held upright in a mitre box, and she seems to have
been the butt of the humour of Duchamp and Man Ray, ‘starring’
in a scurrilous, and ultimately abortive, film project conceived by
the pair in 1921 which involved her having her pubic hair shaved.
It is important, then, to be wary of over-zealous revisionism. There
is a danger of skewing a figure’s actual relation to historical
circumstances. The rediscovery of previously neglected women
has been a hugely important enterprise in Dada and Surrealist
scholarship, but it has its own problems. It may seem appropriate
to write artists such as the Baroness into narratives of Dada and
Surrealism rather than ghettoizing them as ‘special cases’. That has
27. Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, photograph, 1928
partly been my strategy in this book. But does that process reinforce
their historical submission to male-centred cultural ideologies?
Historians may, in any case, have failed to appreciate the degree of
self-reflexivity involved in the work of certain male Dadaists and
Surrealists. However much their attitude to women makes them
children of their times – women in France did not receive the vote
until after the Second World War – these men may still have
understood their own masculine identities to be in some way
unstable or open to question.
However idealistic the male Surrealists were in their attitudes to
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Masculinity is expressed in complex ways in Dada and Surrealist
art. Potency, and its procreative outcomes, is a theme which is often
touched upon, though surprisingly rarely discussed in the literature.
Max Ernst, for instance, produced two semi-abstract Surrealist
paintings in 1934 entitled Blind Swimmer in which the title itself
poetically alludes to the male organ and to the passage of sperm,
while simultaneously evoking the sheer ineluctability of libidinal
energy. Blindness in Ernst’s work is linked to the theme of
inward-turned visionary experience, and this suggests a degree of
sublimation of the blatantly sexual implications of the theme. We
can see a similar process at work in André Masson’s Birth of Birds
(Figure 16) where procreation is made analogous to the generation
of images in the (male) artist’s unconscious: the vulva gives birth to
soaring birds which, on the most elementary metaphorical level,
evoke ‘flights of imagination’. If we compare this representation of
birth to one by a female Surrealist-affiliated artist, the Mexican
painter Frida Kahlo, some significant differences emerge (Figure
28). Kahlo’s strikingly original image, in which she pictures herself
emerging from her shrouded mother’s body, was stimulated partly
by her mother’s death and partly by the death of her own unborn
child. In effect she gives birth to herself. Her work implicitly
repudiates the lyricism of male evocations of procreation, asserting
that birth is physically messy and emotionally traumatic.
Dada and Surrealism
28. Frida Kahlo, My Birth, painting, 1932
reproduction (and it would be tempting to resurrect the discredited
psychoanalytic concept of ‘womb envy’), it is clear that they reflected
on their own reproductive capacities, and those of women, with
some candour. Much as they fetishized women, they were
remarkably revealing about specifically masculine ways of
conceptualizing sexuality. In that sense, their approach can be
aligned with our current interest in ‘deconstructing’ masculinity.
This concern is most urgent, however, within Dada.
More than anybody, Marcel Duchamp in New York had explored
the phenomenon of sexual difference in his Large Glass.
Masculinity, or rather male insufficiency, was one of its central
themes. In his notes for the work Duchamp asserted enigmatically
that the Bachelors in its lower half, who are trapped in what he
describes as their ‘malic moulds’, ‘will never be able to pass beyond
the mask’.
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Questions of race: ‘Primitivism’ to anti-colonialism
If Dada attitudes to gender seem more in tune with our current
political attitudes than those of Surrealism, a different case can be
made regarding racial issues. It is necessary first, however, to
consider the question of ‘primitivism’. So-called ‘primitive art’ held
a wide fascination for artists in the early 20th century, ranging from
Picasso to the German Expressionists. A particular cult developed
around African masks. They suggested ways of radically simplifying
the human form (Picasso is famously said to have talked of them as
‘raisonnable’) but also of returning, atavistically, to primal ‘origins’
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In 1921–4 Duchamp himself slipped into the guise of a female alterego, Rrose Sélavy, in a series of photographs taken by Man Ray.
These images sit interestingly alongside the ‘self-portraits’ we have
looked at by Claude Cahun (Figure 27). In comparison to Cahun’s
gender-shifts, Duchamp’s seem somewhat half-hearted. In one of
them Rrose’s facial complexion looks suspiciously rough, as though
Duchamp is acknowledging the ineffectiveness of the masquerade.
To recall Susan Rubin Suleiman’s point about the patriarchal basis
of Dada/Surrealist iconography, this could be interpreted as
indicating that Rrose secretly possesses the phallus: in
psychoanalytic terms, she is a ‘phallic mother’. This might give a
straightforwardly misogynistic inflection to the episode, but it
might equally be argued that Rrose represents some ironic response
to the emergence of the newly liberated ‘femme homme’ (mannish
woman) in France and America in the early 20th century, which, to
a degree, Claude Cahun embodies, although her self-images postdate those of Duchamp. Duchamp seems to have toyed with a male
separatist ethos in his life as much as his work, staunchly
preserving his bachelor status, as well as allegorizing a maledirected art discourse in works such as Fountain (Figure 3). All
of this may be seen as a dandyish response to female separatism.
Rather than harnessing the feminine to ‘transform life’ along
Surrealist lines, he implies that the male artist should redefine his
own gender.
Dada and Surrealism
as part of a modernist critique of the over-sophistication of
European culture.
This attitude spilled over into Dada. Looking again at Janco’s
painting of the Zurich-based Cabaret Voltaire (Figure 2) the artist
has recorded the presence of a large mask hanging on the wall
behind the stage, while the Dadaists on stage could conceivably be
wearing the gaudily painted masks, crudely assembled from
cardboard and twine, that Janco himself produced for their
performances. We know from Hugo Ball’s diaries that ‘negro
dances’ were part of the staple diet of Dada manifestations. The
performers seem to have understood them in ritual terms, as bound
up with the phenomenon of ‘possession’: Ball writes: ‘not only did
each mask seem to demand the appropriate costume; it also called
for a quite specific set of gestures, melodramatic and even close to
madness’. Few of the Dadaists, however, would have appreciated
the exact cultural contexts for the pieces, except perhaps Tristan
Tzara, who later wrote articles on African and Oceanic art. In Berlin
Hannnah Höch produced a series of photocollages around 1925–30
entitled From an Ethnographic Museum in which she provocatively
placed photographs of black tribal masks on white European female
bodies as a critique of normative Western notions of ‘beauty’. These
works implicitly valued African aesthetics over European ones, but
still assumed, in doing so, that Africa was exotically ‘other’.
Turning to Surrealism, ‘primitive’ artefacts were decisive sources of
inspiration for artists such as Max Ernst, André Masson, Alberto
Giacometti, and Victor Brauner. This time, the objects were the
work of American Indians, Eskimos, and Oceanic peoples. African
art was less popular with the Surrealists, partly because of its
formalist uses in Cubism, whereas Oceanic artefacts in particular
were admired for the disorientating liberties they took with
anatomy, as well as their elaborate symbolism. In 1929 the
Surrealists published a redrawn map of the world in the Belgian
Surrealist magazine Variétés. On the map France and the USA were
completely absent and Polynesia, Mexico and Alaska assumed
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gigantic importance. In their works the artists displayed an almost
scholarly eclecticism. Giacometti drew on the formal characteristics
of Mallanggan figurines from New Ireland as sources for the
aggressively disjointed insectoid forms, trapped in an enclosing
scaffolding, in his wooden sculpture The Cage of 1931. Max Ernst’s
plunderings were positively voracious, ranging from allusions to
Easter Island bird-figures in his paintings of the late 1920s to the
use of American Indian Kachina dolls as reference points for his
totemic sculptures of the early 1940s.
This important shift was a driving force behind Documents, the
organ of the dissident Surrealist group around Bataille. Indeed,
among its founders and editorial board were Paul Rivière, who set
up the Musée de l’Homme, Paul Rivet, co-founder of the Paris
Institut d’Ethnologie, and Michel Leiris, former Bretonian
Surrealist and trained ethnographer. Its pages are characterized by
the cavalier switching between culturally ‘high’ and ‘low’ objects and
practices, in the context of a relativizing cultural continuum, that
the American cultural historian James Clifford has dubbed
‘ethnographic Surrealism’. As one of the series of unconventional
‘dictionary definitions’ published in the journal, ‘man’, for instance,
is summed up as follows by an English chemist:
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The scope of the Surrealists’ borrowings developed in tandem with
the remarkable expansion of ethnographic literature in France as
the 1920s progressed. Most of the artists were well versed in the
likes of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Mauss, as well as the English
anthropologist Sir James Frazer. In France the concern with
‘ethnography’, comparable to social anthropology in Britain,
extended as much to ‘belles lettres’ as it did to academic
specialization, and French cultural life in the 1920s and 1930s
saw a massive transformation in attitudes towards ‘the primitive’
symbolized by the supplanting of the old Trocadéro museum in Paris,
with its jumbled collection of tribal exotica, in favour of the Musée
de l’Homme (founded in 1937) with its concern for ethnic specificity
and the non-hierarchical display of divergent cultural objects.
The bodily fat of a normally constituted man would suffice to
manufacture seven cakes of toilet soap. Enough iron is found in the
organism to make a medium-sized nail . . . The phosphorus would
provide 2,200 matches.
Dada and Surrealism
Such startling juxtapositions of information have their own
exoticism, of course, but in this instance they serve to displace the
authority of the Eurocentric notion of ‘man’, predicated on white
skin colour and Cartesian rationality, that had previously been
upheld over and against the notion of ‘the primitive’.
We have here an opening onto a profoundly anti-colonialist spirit in
Surrealist-related discourse, but we have to turn back to ‘official’
Surrealism, and to André Breton’s responses to the rise of the
‘négritude’ movement in the French West Indies, to appreciate the
extent to which Surrealism became actively politicized in relation to
ethnicity. The Surrealists had shown opposition to French
colonialism as early as 1925 when, as one of their first explicitly
political acts, they had publicly supported the Riff tribesmen in
their struggle against the French authorities in Morocco. In 1931
they protested against the large pro-colonial exhibition mounted in
Paris to celebrate France’s territorial might. As well as distributing a
leaflet warning people against visiting the event, they mounted an
alternative exhibition titled ‘The Truth about the Colonies’. One of
the vitrines in the show pointedly commented on Western
conceptions of tribal objects as ‘fetishes’, displaying a Catholic
statuette of the Virgin and Child next to a collecting box in the form
of a black child, with the label ‘European fetishes’, a succinct
allusion to the West’s religious and economic fetishism. The late
1930s, however, saw anti-colonial sentiment stepped up via newly
established links between the Surrealist movement and writers who
were themselves from colonial backgrounds. The prime mover here
was the poet Aimé Césaire.
Originally from Martinique, Césaire had studied in Paris in the later
1930s but returned to his home country in 1939. From 1941
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To return to Césaire’s poetry, or more particularly Return to my
Native Land, it is worth underlining the extent to which, far from
Paris, Surrealist techniques of incongruous juxtaposition were
harnessed to convey a people’s resentment at their past suppression
and yearning for a new language:
but can you kill Remorse with its beautiful face like that of an
English lady stupefied to find a Hottentot’s skull in her soup tureen?
. . . I want to rediscover the scent of great speeches and of great
burning. I want to say storm. I want to say river. I want to say
tornado. I want to say leaf . . .
This level of passion is matched in the visual arts, by the work of
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onwards, he, along with his wife Suzanne and the philosopher Réne
Ménil, published a journal titled Tropiques which combined
opposition to the Vichy government in Paris and admiration of
the libertarian principles of Surrealism with the beginnings of an
ideology of ‘négritude’: an assertion of black identity in the face of
the ‘assimilationist’ ideology underpinning French policy towards
its colonies. In 1941 André Breton, at that point in the process of
fleeing the German Occupation of France and en route for the USA,
visited Martinique, and discovered both Césaire and Tropiques. He
subsequently asserted that Return to my Native Land, a long poem
that Césaire had produced in 1938–9, was ‘nothing less than the
greatest lyrical monument of our times’. This was by no means the
end of Breton’s relationship with the colonies. In 1945, this time
just prior to his return to France from America after the Second
World War, he visited Haiti to lecture on Surrealism. Haiti had seen
a slave rebellion as early as 1804, but had, since 1915, been under
US domination. Breton’s presence seems to have worked as a
catalyst for dissent among young intellectuals and a revolution
broke out, although the Surrealist leader’s only overtly political
gesture appears to have been refusing to meet the American-backed
president of the country. For once, then, Surrealist rhetoric
contributed to an actual revolution.
Dada and Surrealism
29. Wifredo Lam, The Jungle, oil painting, 1943, Museum of Modern
Art, New York
another Surrealist-influenced figure who returned to his colonial
birthplace after a lengthy immersion in European culture: Wifredo
Lam. Originally from Cuba, Lam had trained in Madrid, and been
heavily influenced as a painter by meeting first Picasso and then the
Surrealists in 1938. His return to Cuba, via Martinique in the
company of Breton, led to the production of a major painting,
The Jungle.
Consisting of a frieze of naked figures hemmed in by a
claustrophobic vegetation, the picture employs a generic
‘primitivizing’ vocabulary derived from Surrealism to cross-relate
the innocently exotic forests of the French ‘naı̈ve’ painter Henri
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Rousseau and the formally disjunctive vision of women in a brothel
represented by Picasso’s seminal pre-Cubist masterpiece, Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907. Making us aware of what
colonialism has done to the jungle, Lam wrote:
Rousseau . . . does not condemn what happens in the jungle. I do.
Look at my monsters and the gestures they make. The one on the
right proffering its rump, obscene as a whore. Look, too, at the
scissors in the upper right hand corner . . .
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Politics
The fact that Surrealism was called upon to articulate the early
stirrings of négritude might seem to suggest that it was politicized
in relation to ethnic identity. However, the impetus for such
gestures had come from outside rather than inside the mainstream
Paris-based movement. As late as 1938, the ‘official’ Surrealists, and
Breton in particular, were still capable of exoticizing other cultures.
Mexico, for instance, was perceived as the revolutionary country par
excellence, having undergone a people’s revolution in 1910–17.
When Breton visited it in 1938, keen to endorse an international
expansion of Surrealism, in line with the development of outposts
in Czechoslovakia, Britain, and elsewhere, it was not so much the
work of the Socialist Realist Diego Rivera he admired, but that of
Rivera’s wife Frida Kahlo. Her work, he asserted, was Surrealist,
although she had no knowledge of the movement. Kahlo, by
contrast, saw her paintings, which were primarily autobiographical,
as essentially realist in spirit. Their reference points were highly
specific to Mexico. In My Birth (Figure 28) the excruciating
personal references described earlier were reinforced by the fact
that the image was painted as a Catholic ex-voto on tin, as well as
being a form of invocation to the Aztec goddess Tlazoltéol, sacred to
women who die in childbirth. Breton, for whom identity was
essentially something to be questioned rather than striven for, must
have seemed insensitive to her quest for Mexican roots, and she
appears to have been bored by his theorizing. Fundamentally, he
exoticized her, describing her once as ‘a ribbon around a bomb’, in
accordance with customary male Surrealist attitudes.
Dada and Surrealism
Certain critics of Surrealism, such as the Cuban writer Alejo
Carpentier, have seen its rhetoric as ‘universalizing’ and its desire to
reconcile contradictions, as in Breton’s Hegelianism, as tantamount
to the denial of ‘difference’, especially in cultural terms, although
we have seen that Surrealism was also predicated on a dominant
male subjectivity. For Carpentier, European Surrealism simply
hankered after the conditions of other cultures, while locations such
as Latin America and the Caribbean, where the remnants of
magical belief still survived, were its true homes.
With this viewpoint in mind we might even question the latitude of
the internationalist ethos espoused by both Dada and Surrealism.
Dada, despite the diversity of its locations, was highly Westernized,
although recent research on the Eastern European connections of
the movement – involving the recognition that Janco and Tzara in
Zurich both had ongoing connections with the avant-garde in their
native Romania – and the fact that a Japanese movement flourished
between 1920 and 1925, suggests that we may soon be seeing Dada
as having a broader global scope. In the 1930s Surrealism could be
seen sprouting up in locations such as Yugoslavia, Denmark, the
Canary Islands, and Japan once again, with an international
exhibition being held in Tokyo and Kyoto in 1937, but its overall
viewpoint was essentially eurocentric. In 1955, Breton looked back
on the Surrealists’ veneration for non-Western cultures, and
conceded sadly that ‘The inspiration we were able to draw from
their art remained ultimately ineffective because of a lack of basic
organic contact, leaving an impression of rootlessness.’ The least we
can do is feel the pathos, and admire his honesty.
Political alignments
Dada and Surrealist engagement with the politics of gender and
race sprang naturally from their concern for individual liberty, but
what about the connections these movements had with the world of
‘hard’ politics? If we think of Dada as emerging concurrently not
just with the First World War but also the Russian Revolution, and
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Surrealism as developing simultaneously with the rise of Stalin and
Hitler, we might wonder how their focus on individualism and
irrationalism could possibly measure up to such momentous
political events and options. However, true to the avant-garde
impulse to forge links between aesthetic and social experience,
both movements established political alignments.
As already stated, the Berlin group broke down into an anarchist
and a Communist faction. The anarchist contingent, notably Raoul
Hausmann and Johannes Baader, were, like the Zurich group,
attracted to the ideal of small-scale communities, and suspicious
of organized political formations; hence Hausmann would write:
‘Communism is the Sermon on the Mount organized practically,
it is a religion of economic justice, a beautiful insanity’. It is to
Herzfelde–Heartfield–Grosz, as card-carrying members of the
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Politics
In the case of Dada, it is almost entirely to the Berlin grouping that
we must look. The Dadaists in New York and Paris were largely
disillusioned with party politics, and generally leaned towards
anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist ideas in line with their strongly
individualist positions. The Zurich group also favoured anarchy.
Ball in particular had a deep intellectual involvement with the
writings of its Russian ideologue Mikhail Bakunin, although he
would eventually reject the anarchist presupposition that man is
fundamentally good, and make a dramatic reversion to Catholicism.
As Zurich Dada came to an end and Walter Serner and Tristan
Tzara became increasingly negative, certain members of the
group, temporarily buoyed up by the possibility of a revolution in
Germany, became involved with utopian projects such as the ‘New
Life’ exhibiting group, which looked to the Middle Ages for its ideal
of breaking down arts and crafts distinctions, as Arp and Taeuber
had already been doing. However, when news arrived from Berlin of
the murders of Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, the Zurich
group became terminally disillusioned, settling for abstraction
rather than politics. Schwitters in Hanover made this an article of
faith. In Berlin, however, political realities had to be faced up to.
Dada and Surrealism
German Communist Party (KPD) that we should look to see
whether Dada could translate into political ideology.
Looking at Everyman his own Football (Figure 12), the journal
which this faction published shortly after the murders of
Luxembourg and Liebknecht, and which also shows them, fairly
uniquely, working in tandem with the anarchist wing of the group,
there can be little doubt about their political sympathies. We find
within the publication assertions that ‘The Revolution is in danger’
and a cartoon by George Grosz shows members of the new majority
Socialist government in Berlin, depicted as puppets of the Catholic
Church, stirring up mass fears of Bolshevism. Walter Mehring
recalled how the Dadaists themselves touted this journal through
the working-class districts of the city, accompanied by a small band.
It sold a remarkable 7,600 copies on 15 February 1919 before being
officially banned.
Herzfelde’s left-wing publishing house, Malik-Verlag, next
published several issues of a journal entitled Die Pleite (Bankrupt!).
The markedly pro-Soviet stance of this magazine landed Herzelde
in prison for two weeks. After he came out, issue 3 of the journal
bore a cover by Grosz referring pointedly to the massacre of the
Spartacists, in which the Defence Minister Gustav Noske, a sword
in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other, stands in a street
littered with corpses. The sarcastic caption beneath reads: ‘Cheers
Noske – the Proletariat is disarmed!’
A powerful satirical edge is displayed here, but the Herzfelde–
Heartfield–Grosz faction did little to serve the Communist cause in
Germany after the overthrow of the Spartacists. Herzfelde was
frequently critical of the KPD, ridiculing its anti-intellectualism and
lack of leadership. The Dadaists looked elsewhere for their ideals;
mainly to Soviet Communism, but also to the machine-age
mystique of the USA, the subject of some idealization in certain
Heartfield and Grosz photomontages. Heartfield would later
contribute brilliant attacks on Hitler’s rise in Communist
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publications, but at its height Berlin Dada did little to endorse
Communism in Germany. The KPD in turn was lukewarm towards
Dada. The main criticism levelled at the movement was that it
was producing advanced, revolutionary art before a revolution
had occurred. How could the proletariat possibly understand
its language?
The Surrealists’ first serious setback came in 1927, when, as they
attempted to establish links with the PFC, one of their own
members, Pierre Naville, questioned their assumption that a mental
revolution could precede a material one. Although the Surrealists
officially joined the Party that year, they were constantly viewed
with suspicion because of their bourgeois ‘art for art’s sake’ attitude
and a lack of demonstrable proletarian links. In the Second
Surrealist Manifesto, taking up the position of Trotsky, whose
expulsion from Russia the Surrealists deplored, Breton asserted
that, whilst Surrealist art could hardly be considered ‘proletarian’
it was nevertheless revolutionary, pointing the way to what
proletarian art might be in a post-revolutionary situation. The Party
remained unconvinced, and Breton, having been hauled before
various committees, was duly assigned to a gas worker’s cell in Paris
and asked to report on the economic conditions of heavy industry in
Italy; a task, of course, to which he felt unequal.
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Politics
If this criticism appears to hobble Dada’s politics, it proved to be the
recurrent bugbear of the Surrealists’ concerted attempt to align
themselves with the French Communist Party (PFC) in the period
1926–35. Like the Dadaists, the Surrealists were fundamentally
individualists, but Breton deliberately modelled Surrealism as a
movement, with its constant appeals to group solidarity and its
expulsions, on the principle of a political collective. Essentially, he
sought to reconcile Freud and Marx. Man’s mental freedom, Breton
believed, should be sought concurrently with a revolution on the
social plane. (Little on the whole was said about women’s rights.) In
terms of actual politics, however, this was like attempting to square
the circle.
Dada and Surrealism
In 1932 matters came to a head with the so-called ‘Aragon Affair’.
Louis Aragon had begun to diverge from official Surrealist policy
when, in 1930, he had represented the group at a congress of
revolutionary writers in Kharkov in Russia and had assented to
criticisms of their Trotskyism while misrepresenting their views in
other respects. In 1931 his increasing commitment to the Party
call for ‘proletarian literature’ led to him publishing a poem titled
‘Red Front’ in the communist magazine Literature of the
World Revolution. The poem exhorted the working classes to
revolutionary struggle with phrases like ‘Kill the Cops’ and ‘Fire
on the trained bears of social democracy’. It was essentially
propagandist, and far removed from Surrealist taste, but when the
French authorities, keen to crack down on Communism, threatened
an unprecedented indictment of the poet on grounds such as
incitement to murder, the Surrealists staunchly defended him.
Later, however, when called on by the Surrealists to endorse a
text by Breton defending Salvador Dalí against an attack in the
Communist press, Aragon was unwilling to defy the Party openly.
As a result he split decisively from Surrealism. He was subsequently
to commit himself to the aesthetic position favoured by
international Communism, as it moved in late 1934 from
‘proletarian literature’ to ‘Socialist Realism’.
The Socialist Realist credo, whereby art should be socialist in
content and realist in form, effectively ended any possibility of
Surrealist compliance with Communist policy. In 1935 the group
were officially excommunicated from the Party. Other outposts of
Surrealism fared better than this, incidentally. In Czechoslovakia,
the group’s theoretician, Karel Teige, edited the Communist Party
journal, ensuring that articles on Surrealism appeared in it
regularly. This group was not to break with the Party until 1938.
Back in France, the years of the ‘Front Populaire’, when
Communists and the parties of the Left joined forces to oppose
the rise of Fascism, saw the Surrealists continuing to hold an
anomalous position, being virulently anti-Fascist but suspicious of
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nationalist inclinations on the Left. For a short period Breton and
his old antagonist Georges Bataille joined forces under the banner
of ‘Contre-Attaque’, with Bataille in particular speculating wildly on
how the forces unleashed in the masses by Fascism might be
harnessed to bring down capitalism. In 1936 Benjamin Péret, alone
of all the Surrealists, went to join the anarchists in the Spanish Civil
War. Finally the Surrealists gave up on the Communist Party, with
news of the ‘Moscow Trials’ confirming their long-standing doubts
about Stalin.
This chapter on Dada and Surrealist politics might appear to be
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Politics
In a sense the finale to the story of Surrealism’s frustrated attempts
at political alignment is the manifesto, entitled ‘Towards a Free
Revolutionary Art’, which Breton co-authored with Leon Trotsky
(although Trotsky asked Diego Rivera to sign the declaration on his
behalf ) when, in 1938, the Surrealist leader visited his political hero
in Mexico. With the world on the brink of capitalist collapse,
tyrannized by Stalinism and Fascism, Breton and Trotsky
definitively reiterated a doctrine of artistic inviolability in the
service of Marxism: ‘The independence of art – for the revolution.
The revolution – for the independence of art.’ The sorry aftermath
to this was that, when Breton returned to France, he found that one
of his oldest allies Paul Eluard had been writing for a Stalinist
journal, precipitating another definitive split at the heart of the
Surrealist movement. A defeated Breton was to go into exile in the
USA for the duration of the Second World War. On his return in
1946 he would find that Eluard, along with Aragon and the former
Dadaist Tristan Tzara, had become the literary heroes of the
Resistance, while Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism were poised
to dominate French cultural life. Surrealism, and Breton’s
principled intransigence in relation to commitment, was a thing of
the past. Indeed the general mood was one of bitterness. Tristan
Tzara asked: ‘What is Surrealism today and how does it justify itself
historically when we know that it was absent from this war, absent
from our hearts and from our activities during the Occupation?’
Dada and Surrealism
ending on a down beat. The most obvious conclusion to this final
section would seem to be that, however successful it was culturally,
Surrealism failed in political terms, although its engagement with
colonialism is a significant legacy. Dada, by dint of largely
eschewing conventional politics, could hardly be said to have
failed; its own negativism in any case allowed for that. However,
Surrealism’s idiosyncratic melding of Marx and Freud was only
found wanting in relation to 1930s Communist ideology, and not
everybody would see that as a fair test. Surrealism’s idealist and
fundamentally impractical brand of politics remained out of favour
for many years after the Second World War, but it had a significant
renaissance in aspects of New Left thought in the 1960s. If we look to
Surrealism’s reception by the French Situationists, for instance,
who were to play a small role in the 1968 uprisings in Paris, we can
see a new valuation being placed on its political instincts. The
Situationists inherited from Surrealism, via the Marxist theorist
Henri Lefebvre who had himself been closely associated at one stage
with the movement, the overall conviction that everyday life,
including dreams, sexual relations, the negotiation of urban space,
and so on, is the terrain on which revolution should occur.
In 1970 Raoul Vaneigem, a Situationist theorist who has received
less attention in recent years than Guy Debord, and who had much
to say about the movement’s debt to Surrealism, wrote a short book
(originally under the pseudonym J.-F. Dupuis) entitled A Cavalier
History of Surrealism. Here he lamented Surrealism’s implicit
assumption that it could ‘reach the masses’ via the Communist
Party, not least since this made the movement subservient to a
political bureaucracy that would turn Surrealism’s dream of
cultural revolution ‘on and off like a tap’. Interestingly he points to
Breton’s post-war turn to the writings of Charles Fourier, a French
utopian socialist of the early 19th century, as the means by which
Surrealism might have been truer to its political inclinations.
Fourier was wildly eccentric in certain respects: Breton noted
fondly in his Anthology of Black Humour how Fourier ‘held that the
cherry was the product of the earth’s copulation with itself and the
144
grape the product of the earth’s copulation with the sun’. But
Fourier was convinced that civilization is built on the repression
of ‘the passions’ and based his monolithic social scheme of
‘Phalansteries’ (communes) on the principle of ‘passionate
attraction’. It is hardly surprising that Breton, who particularly
balked at the Communist Party’s dour advocacy of ‘labour’, was
drawn to Fourier’s idea that work should be an outcome of
‘attraction’, with people matched to tasks they naturally relish: the
Phalanstery latrines for instance would be cleaned out by hordes
of children who enjoy filth. Breton’s distinctive personal melding
of sexual libertarianism and systematicity was similarly catered for
by the elaborately orchestrated orgies envisaged by Fourier for the
Phalansteries.
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Politics
That such dreams should end up as Surrealism’s final ideological
refuge seems thoroughly appropriate. Fourier’s Byzantine
projections are almost a parody of the political bureaucracies the
Surrealists had had to deal with, but they were at least predicated
on the sovereignty of desire; the true starting point for Surrealist
politics. As it was, in adjusting to Communist imperatives, the
social aspirations first of Dada, and then of Surrealism, were
dragged down by compromise.
Chapter 6
Looking back on Dada
and Surrealism
The afterlife of Dada and Surrealism is a subject in its own right,
and can only be touched on schematically here. Art, literature, and
ideas in general, as well as advertising, film, and TV, were affected
by the movements to such a degree that one would virtually end
up writing a history of post-1945 culture.
In terms of art, Dada could be said to have had the most wideranging post-war impact, a fact which is paradoxical given Dada’s
anti-art inclinations. For numerous European and American
artists of the 1950s and 1960s, Dada performances and the
Duchampian readymade represented a radical challenge as to
what visual art might be. Ironically, they usually ended up
extending the frontiers of art as a result. One important American
tendency of the 1950s, involving the artists Jasper Johns and Robert
Rauschenberg and the experimental musician John Cage, was
fleetingly termed ‘Neo-Dada’. Arguably, the works produced had
little of Dada’s anti-bourgeois acidity. Rauschenberg’s assemblage
Bed of 1955, consisting of a bed raised upright with its pillow and
coverlet smeared and dripped with paint, has a confrontational
edge due to the way the artist denies the object’s normal function,
but the productions of Neo-Dada quickly became icons of a new
artistic latitude. This process is emblematized by Johns’s Painted
Bronze of 1960, consisting of two casts taken from ale cans
mounted on a plinth. Essentially this is a reversal of the idea of
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the readymade back into the terms of art. Its implications were not
lost on the ageing Duchamp who commented frustrated in the
1960s that he had thrown his readymades into the public’s face
in a spirit of defiance, only to find them admired for their
aesthetic beauty.
Dada’s consequences for the aesthetics of the immediate post-war
period were far more decisive than Surrealism’s. Admittedly, the
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Looking back on Dada and Surrealism
If the works of Johns and Rauschenberg can partly be seen as
elaborate extrapolations from the idea of the readymade, other
variations on Duchamp’s gesture were rife in the 1950s and 1960s.
These ranged from examples of ‘Nouveau Réalisme’ in France, with
its key practitioners being Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, and Arman,
to American variants of Pop Art; notably the work of Andy Warhol
in which the logos of products such as Coca Cola were utilized with
little modification, thus constituting ‘readymade’ subject matter. By
the later 1960s and 1970s the terms of Duchamp’s reception had
shifted in favour of his conceptual approach to art, whereby, to
recall the mock-defence of Fountain in The Blind Man, ‘Whether
Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no
importance. HE CHOSE IT.’ The physical production of art
objects was now widely under question, and texts or photographs
documented a wide range of conceptual propositions by artists
such as Douglas Huebler and Robert Barry. It is important, though,
to realize that, in these and many other cases, the Duchampian
inheritance rarely went far beyond the issue of ‘nomination’: the
designation of something as art if the artist so decrees. Conceptual
Art would develop a variety of thematic and philosophical concerns
that ranged far beyond Duchamp. At the same time, Dada in
general became a significant precedent for tendencies such as
‘Fluxus’ (at its height 1962–5) and various aspects of Performance
Art. It could even be asserted that the entire structure of 1960s
avant-gardism, with its internationalist ethos and its reliance on
the dissemination of cheaply produced ephemeral publications, was
beholden to Dada’s example.
Dada and Surrealism
proto-abstract or ‘automatist’ side of Surrealist art – as in the art of
Masson or Miró – was profoundly important for certain Abstract
Expressionists in America in the mid to late 1940s, notably Arshile
Gorky and Jackson Pollock. However, after this important phase,
it is surprisingly difficult to perceive debts to Surrealism in
the mainstream art of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. There are
significant exceptions within Pop Art, such as James Rosenquist’s
disorientating juxtapositions of fragmentary imagery or Claes
Oldenburg’s ‘Soft Sculptures’ in which familiar forms such
as light switches or drum kits undergo sexually inflected
metamorphoses from hard to soft. But often the movement’s
legacy persisted in the work of offbeat fantasists rather than
central innovators. At the same time certain outstanding
individuals, such as the French-born sculptor Louise Bourgeois,
chose to build up discrete bodies of work exploring themes such as
sexuality rather than the aesthetic problems synonymous with late
Modernism. As the formal underpinnings of Modernist art were
eroded during the 1980s and 1990s, Surrealism came into its own as
a forerunner of post-modernist sensibility. In 1986 the art historian
Hal Foster ventured that ‘much contemporary criticism and art,
much theory and practice of our postmodern present is partly,
genealogically, a theory and practice of ‘‘Surrealism’’ ’, a comment
related to his sense of a return to earlier moments of avant-gardism
in late 20th-century art on the model of Freud’s ‘return of the
repressed’.
Foster’s observation seems borne out by the rise of American artists
such as Robert Gober or, more recently, Matthew Barney, who
clearly look back to the baroque extravagance of Surrealist
iconography, using its abject or fetishistic bodily imagery to express
contemporary anxieties about issues such as AIDS, in Gober’s case,
or to resurrect myth, in Barney’s. Gober’s Untitled of 1991 consists
of a wax cast of the lower half of a male body, wearing underpants,
socks, and plimsolls. When shown in galleries it is placed facing
downwards on the floor with the stomach flush against the wall so
that the figure appears to be disappearing through the wall. More
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In Britain Surrealist-related issues have become ubiquitous in
contemporary art, although their guiding rationale is less clear. The
Surrealist fascination with classificatory systems can be found for
instance in the work of Susan Hiller, who, as early as the mid-1970s,
produced a work entitled Dedicated to the Unknown Artists, in
which she collected together over 200 seaside postcards, with the
inscription ‘Rough Sea’, depicting waves lashing the British coast.
The work amounted to kind of pseudo-anthropological survey of
the popular representations of an island-bound race. Cornelia
Parker, a nominee for the prestigious Turner Prize in 1997, inclines
more to the Surrealist’s fascination with the tradition of the
‘Wunderkammer’ or curiosity cabinet. Hence her photographic
work, Grooves in a Record that Belonged to Hitler of 1996 invites
the spectator to peer at a close-up photograph of the surface of a
long-playing record as though some residue of its one-time owner’s
dark motivations might be discerned in its grooves. Other artists
keep alive the Surrealists’ interest in incongruous juxtaposition.
The Scottish artist Douglas Gordon’s Between Darkness and
Light (After William Blake) of 1997 consists of two films, The Song
of Bernadette and The Exorcist, projected simultaneously on either
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Looking back on Dada and Surrealism
disturbingly, a series of drainage holes are inserted into the
buttocks and legs of the figure. Gober thus uses Surrealist devices
to make a complex metaphorical statement relating to male
sexuality, disease, and mortality which, at the time the piece was
made, resonated powerfully with widespread concern about the
AIDS epidemic. At the same time, the Surrealist tradition provided
another American artist, Cindy Sherman, with a more direct
means of attacking the US establishment’s moral retrenchment
in the face of work such as Gober’s. Drawing on the disturbing
‘poupées’ of Hans Bellmer, she produced a sequence of
photographs in 1992 in which highly detailed medical mannequins
were arranged with their genitalia prominently displayed. Given
that the American government was at that time attempting to
curb the use of explicit sexual imagery, Sherman was making a
provocative gesture.
Dada and Surrealism
side of a transparent screen, so that the films – which deal with good
and evil respectively – enter into dialogue with each other. Such
works might be said to be allied with the ‘softer’ poetic side of
Surrealism. However, certain artists synonymous internationally
with the so-called ‘yBa’ (young British artists) phenomenon have
produced work which is comparable in its gritty intensity to that of
Americans such as Gober. Sarah Lucas, whose work was discussed
at the start of this book, is a case in point.
If we look at Lucas’s photographic work Get Off Your Horse and
Drink Your Milk of 1994 (Figure 1) in relation to one of its generic
reference points, René Magritte’s Surrealist icon The Rape of 1934
(Figure 20), we can see that she presents an aggressively feminine
take on Magritte’s self-reflexively misogynistic image. Lucas prods
at a Surrealism gone flabby through its assimilation into the market
place. She replaces the markers of virile masculinity with symbols
of infantilization (milk bottles, digestive biscuits) and therefore
effects a meeting between the ‘high’ cultural sphere to which
Surrealism belonged and the vernacular sphere of street culture,
where issues of male and female identity are continually contested.
For Sarah Lucas Surrealist devices are simply part of the currency
of mass culture. Although she clearly shares the Surrealists’ interest
in sexuality, Surrealism is referenced as much in terms of the
intensification of commodity culture during the last century, largely
through advertising, as anything else. In fact this essentially ironic
or revisionary attitude lies behind many of the works I have been
discussing. Numerous artists have taken Surrealism as a jumpingoff point for their explorations of identity politics but few would
wholeheartedly endorse Surrealism. For many it has become too
easily identified with images on posters by the likes of Dalí and
Magritte. Its populist currency has all but obliterated its underlying
value.
Is it possible to find a truly sympathetic continuation of the
Surrealist project? The answer lies not so much with mainstream
150
One of our comrades has advanced a theory of states-of-mind
quarters according to which each quarter of a city would be
designated to provoke a specific basic sentiment to which the
subject would knowingly expose himself.
By the middle 1960s the utopian tenor of Situationist thought was
shared by various counter-cultural formations. In many ways this
could be seen as the last great moment of the Surrealist impulse.
The pages of the 1960s British underground magazine Oz, with
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Looking back on Dada and Surrealism
(post)modern art as with counter-cultural formations or artisticcum-political manifestations which have something of the selfconsciously ‘avant-garde’ impetus that was identified at the start
of this book as characterizing Dada and Surrealism. In this sense,
Surrealism’s immediate historical progeny would be a group of
politicized art formations that emerged in the period before 1968;
namely COBRA, an alliance of Belgian, Dutch, and Danish artists,
architects, and writers, which lasted from 1948 to 1951; Lettrism,
a French movement led by Isidore Isou, and later, as the Lettrist
International by Guy Debord, which existed from 1946 to 1957; and
Situationism, a mainly French phenomenon spanning the years
1957–72. As noted earlier, Situationism, which by the mid-1960s
had actually shed its artistic interests, could be understood as the
inheritor of Surrealism’s politics of everyday life. Opposed to the
modernist rationalization of the city, the Situationists indulged in a
kind of wandering, theorized by them in terms of ‘dérive’ or ‘drift’,
and called in their writings for a ‘unitary urbanism’ whereby the
spaces of the modern metropolis would be reorganized to fulfil the
requirements of fantasy or play. There was a direct debt to
Surrealism here. In an essay of 1950 entitled ‘Pont-Neuf ’ André
Breton had written of the ambiences attaching to streets in cities,
such that in familiar streets one could demarcate ‘zones of wellbeing
and malaise’. We find an echo of this in an important ‘report’ of 1957
by the Situationist leader Guy Debord, where, envisaging how the
‘emotional effects’ of an experimental city might be orchestrated,
he writes:
Dada and Surrealism
their delirious mergers of New Left and anarchist politics,
psychedelia and sexual provocation, might thus stand as the
last, debased, glimmerings of Surrealist ideology. With both
Situationism and the counter-cultures of the 1960s it is appropriate
to invoke the notion of avant-gardism that was used to define the
historical nature of Dada and Surrealism earlier in this book. To
a certain extent, the political interests of counter-cultural groups
overlapped in this period with art movements such as Fluxus. With
this in mind, cultural historians have made tentative use of a notion
of the ‘neo-avant-garde’ to characterize this momentary return to
attempts to merge art and life.
It follows from this that if we were looking for a meaningful
contemporary legacy for Surrealism, and for Dada as well, we
would need to find current equivalents for the artistic-cum-political
approach of the historical avant garde or neo-avant-garde.
Numerous commentators on post-1970s culture have noted,
however, that an avant-garde stance no longer seems viable, not
least because it is difficult to imagine any one group having the
kind of position on the periphery of social processes that Dada and
Surrealism once possessed. Artistic radicalism has been assimilated
into the structures of late capitalist culture. Few ambitious artists
today would be satisfied with waiting for major exhibitions until the
end of their lives, as was the case with, say, Duchamp or Heartfield.
Counter-cultural groups of various kinds have sprung up in the
wake of the late 1960s, but they have been attached to particular
causes such as ecology or women’s rights, and have thus avoided
the totalizing ethos of Surrealist ideology. The sheer heterogeneity
of our current globalized culture means that the idea of speaking
‘for humanity’ – which is what the Surrealists frequently assumed
they were doing – in any event seems absurd.
If the avant-garde is a thing of the past it may also be because
credible cultural figureheads of the calibre of a Tristan Tzara or
André Breton have simply not emerged. There is no shortage of
major French intellectuals who have acknowledged the decisive
152
formative importance for them of Surrealism. The list would
include Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Julia
Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida. Such figures, however, have felt
more comfortable with academic cult status than active cultural
leadership. The very idea of such leadership seems hubristic and out
of kilter with our age.
Aside from this speculation about Dada and Surrealism’s ‘survival’,
it is finally worth asking more bluntly whether the movements
actually deserve to survive. Is Sarah Lucas’s acceptance that
Surrealism is now simply part of commodity culture a recognition
that, ultimately, the movement was a historical dead-end?
153
Looking back on Dada and Surrealism
To focus this issue it is worth returning to the critique of
Surrealism by the Situationist, Raoul Vaneigem, as discussed at
the end of the last chapter. Vaneigem had a number of valuable
things to say in his Cavalier History. He argued, for instance, that
Bretonian Surrealism often fell short of liberating man on the
moral plane. The free play of desire and so on could be seen
merely as ‘stimulants to the regeneration of the old order’. By
contrast Vaneigem advocates the thinking of more extreme
Surrealists such as the Sade scholar Maurice Heine, who, in one
text, counterposed the dubious pleasures of torture to what
Vaneigem describes as the ‘negation of a slow reification’. It is
better, in other words, for man to become instrumentalized at the
hands of another man than by the State. Vaneigem’s sense that
Surrealism was essentially too humanist, too ‘romantic’, leads him
to make the telling point that its fundamental aversion to modern
industry and its anti-functionalism (an attitude, incidentally,
which Dada hardly shared, although it was deeply ironical towards
the machine) meant that Surrealism was incapable of binding
modern technology to its vision. As a result, that vision, in
Vaneigem’s words, ‘became co-opted by the dominant mechanisms
of deception and fascination’. It is hard to know precisely what
Vaneigem would have wanted the Surrealists to do, beyond
embracing mass reproduction in the way that Walter Benjamin
Dada and Surrealism
advocated, but he makes the valid point that Surrealism’s
understanding of modernization was insufficient for it to resist
commodification. This critique was in line with Vaneigem’s
position as a Situationist, opposed to what Debord called ‘The
Society of the Spectacle; a world where capital had congealed into
an enveloping sensorium.
It is undoubtedly this sense that Surrealism lacked the resources to
resist its own assimilation into capitalism that makes one wary of
advocating its ‘continuation’. Indeed, in its popular forms,
Surrealism can be understood as constituting the ideology it
professed to oppose, caught in a distorting mirror. In an essay
entitled ‘Looking Back on Surrealism’ the Marxist theorist Theodor
Adorno adapted the insights of his colleague Walter Benjamin to
suggest that Surrealism, in being predicated on the use of montage,
recirculated an image-culture from an earlier stage of capitalism,
thereby producing a revelatory jolt of recognition for its viewers.
However, its reliance on these obsolescent materials gave it a
lifeless, simulacral cast. In Marxist terms, it exemplified man’s
‘reification’ under capitalism.
But can we say that Dada has survived any better than this? At the
risk of appearing anachronistic, I want to finish with Vaneigem’s
polemical The Revolution of Everyday Life, written in the build-up
to 1968, in which Dada, rather than Surrealism, provides the model
of radicalized cultural practice. Seeing Dada’s nihilism as the
jumping-off point for social revolution, Vaneigem castigates
Surrealism for not ‘beginning again with Dada’s initial nihilism,
without basing itself on Dada-anti-Dada, without seeing Dada
historically’. We might, of course, be tempted to castigate Vaneigem
for not understanding Dada historically. We have seen that Dada
did not simply amount to nihilism. It was far more mystical than
the Situationists would have liked. But its reserves of awkwardness
and its love of paradox and effrontery, which even today make it
‘difficult’ for many, are an antidote to Surrealism’s relatively
untroubled assimilation into the spectacle.
154
As well as clarifying their historical and philosophical contours, this
book has continually weighed Dada and Surrealism against one
another. Surrealism has necessarily taken up more of the discussion
because, as well as lasting longer as a movement, its theoretical
premises were far more rigorously formulated. It seems
appropriate, however, to finish with a reversal of the historical
formulation by which Dada ‘evolved’ into the more self-consciously
revolutionary Surrealism and to tilt the balance in favour of Dada’s
short but incendiary moment. As Vaneigem, with an exuberance
now foreign to us, declares: ‘The beginning of Dada was the
rediscovery of lived experience and its possible delights – its end
was the reversal of all perspectives, the invention of a new universe.’
Looking back on Dada and Surrealism
155
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References
Chapter 1
Tristan Tzara, ‘Zurich Chronicle’, in R. Motherwell (ed.), The Dada
Painters and Poets (Belknap, 1989), p. 236
Hans Arp, ‘Dadaland’, tr. H. Richter, in Dada: Art and Anti-Art
(Thames & Hudson, 1965), p. 25
Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time, tr. A. Raimes, ed. J. Elderfield (University
of California Press, 1996), p. 63
Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Dada Lives’, Transition, 25 (Fall 1936), 77–80
Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Dada Manifesto 1918’, in R. Motherwell (ed.),
Dada Painters, pp. 244, 243
Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto’ (1918), in Seven Dada Manifestoes and
Lampisteries, tr. B. Wright (John Calder, 1981), p. 5
Francis Picabia, ‘Cannibal Manifesto’, in R. Huelsenbeck (ed.),
Dada Almanach, new edn. presented by M. Green (Atlas, 1993),
pp. 55–6
André Breton, ‘Après Dada’, Comedia (March 1922)
André Breton, ‘First Surrealist Manifesto’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism,
tr. R. Seaver and H. R. Lane (University of Michigan, 1972),
pp. 26, 10
Chapter 2
André Breton, ‘Rather Life’ (Clair de Terre, 1930), from André Breton,
‘Selected Poems’, tr. Kenneth White (Cape Editions, 1969)
Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time, pp. 70–71
157
Salvador Dalí, ‘The Conquest of the Irrational’, tr. H. Finkelstein, in The
Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí (Cambridge University Press,
1998), p. 265
George Orwell, ‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí’ (1944),
Essays, ed. J. Carey (Everyman, 2002), pp. 654, 660
Marcel Duchamp, ‘The Richard Mutt Case’, The Blind Man, 2 (1917)
André Breton, ‘Marcel Duchamp’, tr. M. Polizzotti, in A. Breton, The
Lost Steps (University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 86
Benjamin Péret, ‘The Chicago Eucharist Congress’, from Remove Your
Hat and Other Writings, tr. D. Gascoyne and H. Jennings (Atlas,
1986), p. 37
Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European
Intelligentsia’, in W. Benjamin, Reflections, ed. P. Demetz, tr. E.
Dada and Surrealism
Jephcott (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 182
George Grosz, letter to Otto Schmalhausen, 15 December 1917, from
H. Knust, George Grosz (Hamburg, 1979), pp. 56–7
Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, tr. Simon Watson Taylor (Pan Books,
1980), p. 52
Chapter 3
Hugo Ball, ‘Dada Manifesto’ (1916), in Flight Out of Time, p. 221
Kurt Schwitters, ‘Murder Machine 43’, in K. Schwitters, Poems
Performance Pieces Proses Plays Poetics, ed. J. Rothenberg and
P. Jorris (Temple University, 1993), p. 29
Paul Eluard, L’Amour la poésie (Gallimard, 1922), p. 122
André Breton, ‘Free Union’, tr. R. Howard, in Maurice Nadeau, The
History of Surrealism (Penguin, 1978), pp. 309–10
Benjamin Péret, ‘Quatre à Quarte’ from ‘De Derrière Les Fagots’ (1934),
tr. A. Balakian in her Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (Unwin
Books, 1972), p. 151
Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto 1918’, in Seven Dada Manifestoes, p. 5
Excerpt from the trances from André Breton, ‘Entrée des Médiums’, tr.
M. Polizzotti, in A. Breton, The Lost Steps, p. 94
Hans Arp, ‘Dadaland’, in his On my Way: Selected Poetry and Essays
(Wittenborn, Schultz, 1948), pp. 46, 40
Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto 1918’, in Seven Dada Manifestoes, p. 9
158
Susan Sontag, On Photography (Penguin, 1977), p. 52
André Breton, ‘Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality’,
tr. B. Imbs, in A. Breton, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed.
F. Rosemont (Pluto, 1978), p. 26
Salvador Dalí, This Quarter (Paris, 1932), p. 199
Meret Oppenheim (on ‘My Nurse’), text by Jennifer Mundy, Surrealism:
Desire Unbound (Tate Publishing, 2001), p. 45
Georges Bataille, ‘L’Esprit moderne et le jeu des transpositions’,
Documents, 8 (1930), 490–1
Chapter 4
Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto 1918’, from Seven Dada Manifestoes, pp. 5, 8
Louis Aragon, Treatise on Style, tr. A. Waters (University of Nebraska,
1991), p. 72
Wieland Herzfelde, catalogue of the First International Dada Fair,
Berlin, 1920
André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, in Manifestoes of
Surrealism, p. 123
Berlin Dada members, ‘Legen Sie Ihr Geld in Dada!’, Der Dada, 1
(June 1919)
André Levisan (on Mary Wigman), Theatre Arts (Feb. 1929), 144
Hugo Ball, ‘Occultism and Other Things Rare and Beautiful’, as quoted
by Hans Arp, ‘Dadaland’, in On my Way, p. 40
George Grosz, ‘Kaffeehaus’, Neue Blätter f ür Kunst und Dichtung, 1
(Nov 1918), p. 155
André Breton, Qu’est ce que le surréalisme? (Paris, 1934), p. 25
Excerpt from the ‘Recherches sur la sexualité’, eleventh session, 26
January 1931, tr. J. Imrie, in J. Pierre (ed.), Investigating Sex:
Surrealist Discussions 1928–1932 (Verso, 1992), pp. 196–7.
Aragon’s comment was from the second session, published in La
Révolution Surréaliste, 11 (Mar. 1928).
Chapter 5
André Breton, Second Surrealist Manifesto in Manifestoes of
Surrealism, p. 128
159
References
Raoul Hausmann, ‘Dada in Europa’, Der Dada, 3 (April 1920)
Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement
(Thames & Hudson, 1985), p. 13
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even
(The ‘Green Box’ notes), tr. George Heard Hamilton (Percy Lund,
Humphries & Co. and George Wittenborn, 1960), unpaginated
Hugo Ball, as quoted in Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 23
Documents, definition of ‘man’, tr. I. White, in Robert Lebel and
Isabelle Waldberg (eds.), Encyclopaedia Acephalic (Atlas, 1995),
p. 56
Aimé Césaire, Return to my Native Land, tr. J. Berger and A. Bostock
(Penguin, 1969), p. 49
Wifredo Lam, as quoted in Max-Pol Fouchet, Wifredo Lam (New York,
1976), p. 199
Dada and Surrealism
André Breton, ‘The Presence of the Gauls’, in his Surrealism and
Painting, tr. Simon Watson Taylor (Icon Editions, 1972), p. 333
Raoul Hausmann, ‘Pamphlet gegen die Weimarische Lebensauffassung’
(164/1: 44), as cited by Richard Sheppard, Modernism – Dada –
Postmodernism (Northwestern University Press, 2000), p. 336
André Breton, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky, ‘Towards a Free
Revolutionary Art’, tr. in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in
Theory 1900–1990 (Blackwells, 1992), p. 529
Tristan Tzara, ‘La Surréalisme et l’après-guerre’ (Paris 1948), tr. in
Helen Lewis, Dada Turns Red (Edinburgh University Press, 1990),
p. 164
André Breton, ‘Charles Fourier’, in his Anthology of Black Humour, tr.
M. Polizzotti (City Light Books, 1997), p. 39
Chapter 6
Hal Foster, ‘L’Amour Faux’, Art in America (Jan. 1986), p. 128
Guy Debord, ‘Excerpt from Report on the Construction of Situations
and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of
Organisation and Action’ (June 1957), as reprinted in Iwona Blazwick
(ed.), An Endless Passion . . . an Endless Banquet (ICA and Verso,
1989), p. 26
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, tr. J. Fullerton and
P. Sieveking (Rising Free Collective, 1979), p. 177
160
Further reading
Many key primary sources have been cited as references. The following
are also useful.
Edited collections
Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets (Harvard University
Press, 1989); Lucy Lippard, Dadas on Art (Prentice Hall, 1971);
Franklin Rosemont (ed.), André Breton: What is Surrealism? Collected
Writings (Pluto Press, 1978); Mary Ann Caws, Surrealist Painters and
Poets (MIT Press, 2001).
English translations of important works
Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer (University
of California Press, 1991); André Breton, Nadja (Grove Press,
1960) and Mad Love (University of Nebraska Press, 1987);
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, ed. A. Stoekl (Manchester
University Press, 1985) and The Story of the Eye (Penguin,
1982).
Reprints of Dada and Surrealist journals
Dada (Zurich Reviews, Jean-Michel Place, 1981), 391 (Editions
Pierre Belford, 1975), La Révolution Surréaliste (J.-M. Place, 1975),
Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution (J.-M. Place, 1976),
Minotaure (Flammarion, 1981), Documents (J.-M. Place,
1991).
161
Chapter 1
Although contested now, Peter Bürger, The Theory of the Avant Garde
(University of Minnesota, 1984), is the key work on its topic. The best
general history is Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (Arts
Council of Great Britain, 1978), with its emphasis on both movements’
publications, but see also Matthew Gale’s chronology, Dada and
Surrealism (Phaidon, 1997). In terms of Dada, a major eight-volume
study is in progress, with each volume dedicated to a different centre
(ed. Stephen Foster, G. K. Hall & Co., 1996–
). Richard Sheppard’s
Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism (Northwestern University Press,
2000) collects his important essays on Dada together. For branches of
Dada see: Francis Nauman, New York Dada 1915–1923 (Harry N.
Abrams, 1994); Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris (Flammarion, 1993);
Dada and Surrealism
Robert Short, ‘Paris Dada and Surrealism,’ Dada: Studies of a
Movement, ed. R. Sheppard (Alpha Academica, 1979); and the essays in
Stephen Foster and Rudolf Kuenzli, Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of
Revolt (Coda, 1979). On Surrealism, see Maurice Nadeau’s pioneering
The History of Surrealism (Penguin, 1973); Gérard Durozoi’s
monumental History of the Surrealist Movement (University of Chicago
Press, 2002); and the relevant sections of Briony Fer, David Batchelor,
and Paul Wood, Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the
Wars (Yale University Press, 1993) and Christopher Green, Cubism and
its Enemies (Yale University Press, 1987).
Chapter 2
Aspects of the first two sections were suggested by Debbie Lewer’s
essay on mapping Zurich Dada in B. Pichon and K. Riha (eds.), Dada
Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York, 1996); Philip
Mann’s Hugo Ball (University of London, 1987); Annabelle Melzer’s
excellent Dada and Surrealist Performance (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976); Lewis Kachur’s Displaying the Marvellous
(MIT Press, 2001) and chs. 6 and 7 of Bruce Altschuler’s The Avant
Garde in Exhibition (Abrams, 1994). On Arthur Cravan see Roger
Conover et al., Four Dada Suicides (Atlas, 1995). For Marcel
Duchamp the standard biography is Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp:
A Biography (Chatto & Windus, 1997) but see also Dawn Ades,
162
Neil Cox, and David Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp (Thames &
Hudson, 1999).
The best monograph on Salvador Dalí is Dawn Ades, Dalí (Thames &
Hudson, 1982). Aspects of the last two sections are indebted to Robin
Walz, Pulp Surrealism (University of California Press, 2000); Sherwin
Simons, ‘Advertising Seizes Control of Life . . . ’, Oxford Art Journal,
22/1 (1999); and Roger Cardinal, ‘Soluble City’, Architectural Design,
2–3 (1978). For Hal Foster on modernity and Surrealism see his
Compulsive Beauty (MIT Press, 1993), ch. 6.
Chapter 3
Clement Greenberg’s Modernist attack on Surrealism is his ‘Surrealist
Painting’, Horizon (Jan. 1945). For poetry see Anna Balakian,
Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (Unwin Books, 1972). Dawn
Ades’s essay on the ‘mouvement flou’ in T. A. R. Neff (ed.), In the Mind’s
Dada (UMI Research Press, 1980) and Alastair Grieve’s essay on early
Arp, ‘Arp in Zurich’ (in Foster and Kuenzli, Dada Spectrum). The
standard survey of photomontage is by Dawn Ades (Thames & Hudson,
1986) but see also Maud Lavin’s excellent Cut with the Kitchen Knife:
The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Yale University Press,
1993). The attacks on Surrealist painting were Max Morise, ‘Les Yeux
enchantés’, La Révolution Surréaliste, 1 (Dec. 1924) and Pierre Naville,
La Révolution Surréaliste, 3 (15 April 1925). There are numerous
monographs on individual Dadaist and Surrealist artists, but see
William Camfield, Francis Picabia (Princeton University Press, 1979)
and Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism (Prestel, 1993);
Hans Hess, George Grosz (Yale University Press, 1985); Jacques Dupin,
Joan Miró (Thames & Hudson, 1962); William Rubin and Carolyn
Lanchner, André Masson (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976);
and David Sylvester, Magritte (South Bank Centre, London, 1992).
For Surrealist photography see Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston,
L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (Abbeville, 1985). For the
Surrealist object and fetishism see Dawn Ades, ‘Fetishism’s Job’, in
163
Further reading
Eye: Dada and Surrealism (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,
1984) is excellent. See also Harriet Watts, Chance: A Perspective on
A. Shelton (ed.), Fetishism: Visualising Power and Desire (South Bank
Centre, London, 1995) and for Meret Oppenheim, see Edward D. Power,
‘These Boots Ain’t Made for Walking’, Art History, 24/3 (June 2001).
On film see A. L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video
(British Film Institute, 1999); Rudolf Kuenzli (ed.), Dada and
Surrealist Film (William Locker & Owens, 1987); and Linda Williams,
Figures of Desire (University of California Press, 1981). For Fredric
Jameson see his Marxism and Form (Princeton University Press, 1971),
pp. 95–106.
Chapter 4
On Dada irrationalism see Richard Sheppard, Modernism, ch. 7. For
Surrealism’s psychoanalytic links see Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques
Lacan and Co: A History of Psycho-Analysis in France 1925–1985
Dada and Surrealism
(Free Association, 1990), part one. On Ernst’s ‘Pietà’ see Malcolm
Gee, Ernst/Pietà or Revolution by Night (Tate Gallery, 1986) and for
psychoanalysis in Surrealist art, David Lomas, The Haunted Self (Yale
University Press, 2000). Dada attitudes to the machine, and Cartesian
dualism, are dealt with in my Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The
Bride Shared (Oxford University Press, 1998), chs. 1 and 2. For Bataille’s
thought see Michael Richardson, Bataille (Routledge, 1994) as well as
Bataille’s own writings as cited above. Richard Sheppard is again
excellent on Dada and mysticism (Modernism, ch. 10) but see also
Timothy O. Benson’s essay ‘Mysticism, Materialism and the Machine in
Berlin Dada’, Art Journal, 46/1 (Spring 1987). Alchemy in Surrealism is
discussed in my Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. For Miró and Lull see
also my ‘Ramon Lull, Miró and Surrealism’, Apollo (Dec. 1993). For the
idea of the Wunderkammer see the final chapter of my Marcel Duchamp
and Max Ernst, and for Joseph Cornell see Diane Waldman, Joseph
Cornell: Master of Dreams (Harry N. Abrams, 2002). Jan Švankmajer’s
text on ‘Fellaceus Oedipus’ appears in Jan Švankmajer: Transmutation
of the Senses (Central Europe Gallery and Publishing House, 1994),
pp. 23–4. Ideas of traumatic mimickry in Berlin Dada are developed
by Brigid Doherty in ‘See: We are All Neurasthenics: Or, the Trauma of
Dada, Montage’, Critical Inquiry, 24 (Autumn 1997). For the effects of
World War 1 on male Surrealist imagery see Amy Lyford: Surrealist
164
Masculinities (forthcoming, University of California Press). On
Surrealist sexuality see Jennifer Mundy (ed.), Surrealism: Desire
Unbound (Tate Publishing, 2001), which includes an excellent essay on
Sade by Neil Cox, and Xavière Gauthier, Surréalisme et Sexualité
(Gallimard, 1971). Recent monographs on Bellmer are by Sue Taylor,
Hans Bellmer: The Anxiety of Influence (MIT, 2000) and Therese
Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer (University
of California, 2001).
Chapter 5
See Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (ed.), Women in Dada (MIT, 1998) and
Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement
(Thames & Hudson, 1995). For Elisabeth Roudinesco see her Jacques
Lacan and Co, and for Krauss’s women-under-construction argument
see Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L’Amour Fou, ch. 2. For Susan
Rubin Suleiman see her Subversive Intent (Harvard University Press,
in Whitney Chadwick (ed.), Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and
Representation (MIT Press, 1998). For the Baroness see the biography
Baroness Elsa, by Irene Gammel (MIT, 2002). For masculinity in
Surrealism see my ‘Male Shots’, Tate: The Art Magazine, 26 (Aug. 2001).
On Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy see Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the
En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge University Press, 1994),
ch. 5, and my ‘Men Before the Mirror: Duchamp, Man Ray and
Masculinity’, Art History, 21/3 (Sept. 1998).
For a general essay on ‘primitivism’, and a more specific one on
Giacometti, see Evan Maurer and Rosalind Krauss in William Rubin
(ed.), Primitivism in 20th Century Art (Museum of Modern Art, New
York, 1984), vol. ii. The best introduction to ethnography and
Surrealism is James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Harvard
University Press, 1988), part two, but see also Denis Hollier, ‘The UseValue of the Impossible’, October, 60 (Spring 1992). On anti-colonialism
see Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, The Refusal of the
Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (Verso, 1996). A useful essay on
Wifredo Lam is Robert Linsley, ‘Wifredo Lam: Painter of Negritude’,
165
Further reading
1991), chs. 1, 7. Recent essays on Claude Cahun and Frida Kahlo appear
Art History, 11/4 (Dec. 1988). For Alejo Carpentier on Surrealism see
the prologue to his novel The Kingdom of the World (André Deutsch,
1991). For Eastern European and Japanese Dada see Gerald Janecek
and Toshiharu Omuka (eds.), The Eastern Dada Orbit (G. K. Hall & Co.,
1998). Dada politics are discussed in Richard Sheppard, Modernism, ch.
12, and the important essays by Christopher Middleton in section 1 of
his Bolshevism in Art (Carcanet New Press, 1978). John Willett’s The
New Sobriety (Thames & Hudson, 1978) is a classic study. In terms of
Surrealism, see Steven Harris: Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s:
Art, Politics and Psyche, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Helena
Lewis, Dada Turns Red (Edinburgh University Press, 1988) is useful,
despite some factual errors, while Michael Richardson and Krzysztof
Fijalkowski, Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations
Dada and Surrealism
(Pluto, 2001) collects a number of important political texts. On Fourier
see André Breton’s Ode to Charles Fourier, tr. K. White (Cape Goliard,
1969) and Raoul Vaneigem’s A Cavalier History of Surrealism,
tr. D. Nicholson Smith (AK Press, 1999).
Chapter 6
For the general take-up of Dada and Surrealism in post-1945 art see
my After Modern Art 1945–2000 (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Theodor Adorno’s essay ‘Looking Back on Surrealism’ is in his Notes to
Literature (Columbia University Press, 1991). For Situationism and
Surrealism see Peter Wollen’s essay in on the passage of a few people
through a certain moment in time (MIT, 1991) and Vaneigem, as in
references.
166
Dada: the main centres – key
individuals and events
Zurich
Hans/Jean Arp (Alsatian,
1887–1966)
Hugo Ball (German,
1896–1927)
Viking Eggeling (Swedish,
1880–1925)
Marcel Janco (Romanian,
1895–1984)
Hans Richter (German,
1888–1976)
Walter Serner (Czech,
1889–1942)
Sophie Taeuber
(Swiss, 1889–1943)
Tristan Tzara (Romanian,
1896–1963)
Feb 1916: Opening of Cabaret
Voltaire
April 1916: The name ‘Dada’
invented
June 1916: First Dada journal,
Cabaret Voltaire
March–May 1917: Galerie
Dada
July 1917: First issue of Dada
journal
1918: Tristan Tzara’s Dada
Manifesto
April 1919: Serner’s Last
Loosening Manifesto
New York
Arthur Cravan (Swiss,
1887–1920)
Marcel Duchamp (French,
1887–1968)
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
(German, 1874–1927)
Francis Picabia (French,
1879–1953)
Man Ray (American,
1890–1976)
June 1915: Duchamp arrives
in New York
January 1917: Picabia’s
journal 391 first published
from Barcelona
April 1917: Duchamp’s
Fountain rejected by
jury of ‘Independents’
exhibition
April 1917: Arthur Cravan
delivers drunken lecture at
‘Independents’
167
Berlin
Johannes Baader (German,
1875–1955)
George Grosz (German,
1893–1959)
Raoul Hausmann (German,
1866–1971)
John Heartfield (German,
1891–1968)
Wieland Herzfelde (German,
1896–1988)
Hannah Höch (German,
1889–1978)
Richard Huelsenbeck (German,
1892–1974)
Walter Mehring (German,
1896–1981)
April 1918: Huelsenbeck
founds Club Dada
February 1919: Jedermann
sein eigner Fussball
published and distributed
1919: First issues of Der
Dada and Die Pleite
June 1920: International
Dada Fair
Cologne
Max Ernst (German,
1891–1976)
Johannes Baargeld (German,
1892–1927)
Heinrich Hoerle (German,
1895–1936)
1919: publication of journals,
Der Ventilator and
Bulletin D
April 1920: Cologne Dada
Fair
Hanover
Kurt Schwitters (German,
1887–1949)
1920: Beginning of ‘Merz’
Paris
Louis Aragon (French,
1897–1982)
André Breton (French,
1896–1966)
Paul Eluard (French,
1895–1952)
1919: Beginning of journal
Littérature
André Breton and Philippe
Soupault publish Les
Champs Magnétiques
168
Paris
1920: Picabia’s Cannibal
Manifesto
May 1921: Mock trial of
Maurice Barrès
1922: Congress of Rome
July 1923: Tzara’s ‘Soirée de
la Cœur à Barbe’ effectively
signals end of Dada
Philippe Soupault (French,
1897–1990)
169
Key Surrealist events
1924 First Surrealist Manifesto
Opening of Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes
Founding of the review La Révolution Surréaliste (runs
until 1929)
1926 Formation of Belgian Surrealist group
1929 Second Surrealist Manifesto
Breton expels several dissident members of Surrealist
group
Founding of Bataille’s journal Documents
Dalí and Buñuel’s film Un Chien Andalou
1930 Under the title ‘Un Cadavre’ dissident Surrealists launch
attack on Breton
Launch of the journal Le Surréalisme au Service de la
Révolution (runs until 1933)
Aragon attends the Second International Congress of
Revolutionary Writers, Kharkov, Russia
1932 Aragon breaks with the Surrealist group
1933 Founding of journal Minotaure (runs until 1939)
1934 Prague Surrealist group established
International Surrealist Exhibition, London
Exhibition of Surrealist Objects, Charles Ratton gallery,
Paris
1938 Breton and Trotsky collaborate on the manifesto ‘Towards
an Independent Revolutionary Art’
‘Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme’ at Galerie
Beaux-Arts, Paris
1941 Breton and other refugees from Europe arrive in New
York
1942 ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ exhibition, New York
1946 Breton returns to France
170
Key figures associated with Surrealism
Writers
Artists
Louis Aragon (French,
1897–1982)
Antonin Artaud (French,
1896–1948)
Georges Bataille (French,
1897–1962)
André Breton (French,
1896–1966)
René Crevel (French,
1900–35)
Robert Desnos (French,
1900–45)
Paul Eluard (French,
1895–1952)
Maurice Heine (French,
1884–1946)
Georges Hugnet (French,
1906–74)
Michel Leiris (French,
1901–90)
Pierre Mabille (French,
1904–52)
Pierre Naville (French,
1903–93)
Paul Nougé (Belgian,
1895–1976)
Benjamin Péret (French,
1899–1959)
Jacques Prévert (French,
1900–77)
Raymond Queneau (French,
1903–76)
Hans Bellmer (German,
1902–75)
Luis Buñuel (Spanish,
1900–83)
Claude Cahun (French,
1894–1954)
Joseph Cornell (American,
1903–72)
Salvador Dalí (Spanish,
1904–89)
Giorgio de Chirico (Italian,
1888–1978)
Max Ernst (German,
1891–1976)
Alberto Giacometti (Swiss,
1901–66)
Frida Kahlo (Mexican,
1907–54)
René Magritte (Belgian,
1898–1967)
Man Ray (American,
1890–1976)
André Masson (French,
1896–1987)
Joan Miró (Spanish,
1893–1983)
Meret Oppenheim (Swiss,
1913–85)
Pablo Picasso (Spanish,
1881–1973)
Yves Tanguy (French,
1900–55)
171
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Index
on curative role of art 8
nature mysticism 109
poetry 66
and Sophie Taeuber 124–5
Artaud, Antonin 20, 93, 102
assemblage 25, 87, 88, 112, 146
Atget, Eugène 50
automatism 24, 67–73
painting 18, 78–80
photography and 85
writing 17, 65
avant-gardism 2, 28, 30, 52–3,
147, 151, 152
A
Abstract Expressionism 24,
148
Adler, Alfred 99
Adorno, Theodor 154
advertising 25, 35, 126
Cubism 53
images of women in 125
political 55–6
and Surrealism 96, 150
aesthetics, Dada/Surrealism
62–96
African art 7
African masks 131–2
Agar, Eileen 23
AIDS 148, 149
alchemy 110–11
anarchy 139, 140, 142
androgynes 106, 111
anti-Catholicism 46–50, 95,
109, 111, 115, 134, 140
anti-colonialism 134
anti-humanism 103–8, 114
Apollinaire, Guillaume 15, 17,
118
Aragon, Louis 14, 16, 22, 33,
36, 99, 117
Communism 142
Paris Peasant 59–60
satire on Freud 101
Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung 12
Arensberg circle 11
Arman 25, 147
Arp, Hans/Jean xiv, 6, 7, 13, 26
automatism 68, 69, 70–1
B
Baader, Johannes 12, 41–2, 139
Baargeld, Johannes 13
Babinski, Joseph 100
Bakunin, Mikhail 139
Ball, Hugo 4, 6, 8, 9, 31–2, 64,
109, 115, 139
Barney, Matthew 148
Barr, Alfred 26, 28
Barrès, Maurice 36
Barry, Robert 147
Barthes, Roland 153
Bataille, Georges 20, 48, 90,
105–8, 111–12, 114, 117–18,
143
Baudelaire, Charles 60
Belgium 11, 22–3
Bellmer, Hans 22, 120–1, 149
Benjamin, Walter 52, 53, 61,
111, 153–4
Bergmann and Co 53
Bergson, Henri 98
Berlin, Neue Sachlichkeit in
26–7
173
Dada and Surrealism
mock trial 36–8
novel by 53, 59, 84, 97, 102
on painting 80–1
photography 84
poetry 65, 66, 67
politics 141, 143
and primitivism 138
on Surrealist painting 77
on symbolically functioning
objects 87
voluntary exile during WWII
24–5, 135, 137, 143
Bride Stripped Bare by her
Bachelors, Even (or Large
Glass), The 9, 46, 69,
103–4, 116, 130–1
Britain 23, 149–50, 151–2
Buñuel, Luis 18, 93–5
Bürger, Peter 2
Berlin Dada 11–12, 33–5, 40,
42, 54, 57, 58, 139–40
anti-humanism 104
irrationalism 99
photomontage 77
religious parody 108–9
Berman, Marshall 1
Berton, Germaine 52
Bicycle Wheel 86–7
biomorphism 24
black humour 101, 114
blasphemy 48, 74, 95, 100, 115
Blast (journal) 33
Blind Man, The (proto-Dada
journal) 44, 45
Boehme, Jacob 109
Boiffard, J.-A. 48, 84, 107
Bolshevism 1, 2, 11, 140
bourgeois 2, 32, 77, 102, 103
Bourgeois, Louise 148
Brackhage, Stan 95
Brandt, Bill 85
Braque, Georges 74
Brassai 85
Brauner, Victor 23
Bravo, Manuel Alvarez 23
Breton, André 14–17, 19, 20–1,
22, 23, 28, 43, 102–3, 151
on aesthetics 62, 66–7
and automatism 17, 67–8
and Bataille 107–8
on collage 76
and Dali 43
and Duchamp myth 46
and the ‘found object’ 90
and Fourier 144–5
and Freud 17, 68, 99–100
and Hegel 105
and homosexuality 117
C
Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich 4–6,
27, 31–2, 124, 132
Cabaret Voltaire (journal) 33
Cage, John 70, 146
Cahun, Claude xvi, 22, 127,
128, 131
capitalism 21, 25, 43, 96, 143,
154
Carpentier, Alejo 138
Carrington, Leonora 22, 124
Cartier-Bresson, Henri 85
castration anxiety 93, 101, 107,
114, 121, 126
Césaire, Aimé 24, 134–5
Cézanne, Paul 3
Chadwick, Whitney 124, 127
chance 69, 70–1, 73, 90–1, 109,
115
174
D
Dada 4, 7, 8, 12, 24–5, 40
afterlife of 146–7, 152, 154–5
anti-humanism 103–5
automatism and 68–9
body and 115–16
cities 57, 58
and Expressionism 26, 27
film 91–2, 95, 96
French 14–16
German 11–14, 33, 40, 42,
64, 76, 99, 105
identity 41–2
international exhibitions 33
internationalism 28, 33, 138
irrationalist doctrine 97–103
journals 45–6
mimicry of mass culture
53–6
mock trial 36–8
mystical thought 109–10
New York 9–11, 12, 27, 41,
110, 127
origin of name 8–9, 53
poetry 64–7
politics 26, 36, 138–41, 144
primitivism 7, 131–2
promotion of 31–5
public personae 40–2
and Surrealism 16, see also
Berlin Dada; Zurich Dada
Dada-and-Surrealism 25–9
Dada-Constructionivist
Congress (Weimar 1922) 13
Dada (Zurich review) 33
Dali, Salvador xiv, xv, xvi, 18,
21, 27, 38, 107–8, 142
assemblage 88, 89, 112
175
index
Charcot, Jean Martin 125
Cheval, Postman 57, 59
Chien Andalou, Un (film) 93–5
childhood sexuality 101
Chirico, Giorgio de 18
Christianity 111
cities 57–61, 151
Clair, René 92
Clifford, James 133
‘Club Dada’ 11, 13
Club de Fauborg 36
COBRA (artistic alliance) 151
Cocteau, Jean 50
collage 3, 7, 14
Arp 69, 70–1
Ernst 73, 74–6, 77, 111
Schwitters 13, 64
collectivism 21
Cologne 13–14, 26–7, 76, 99
Cologne Dada Fair (1920) 14,
33
commercialism 28, 43, 81
Communism 11, 12, 22, 23, 105
French 141–4
Germany 54, 139–41
Congrès de Paris 16, 38
Constructivism 2, 13, 35
Cornell, Joseph 24, 112
Courbet, Gustave 2
craft associations 9
Cravan, Arthur 11, 41, 42
Crépin, Joseph 102
Crevel, René 16, 68
criminality 50–2, 56
critical paranoia 81
Cuba 136
Cubism 1, 3, 9, 15, 52–3, 65,
74
Czechoslovakia 23, 114, 142
Dada and Surrealism
Large Glass 9, 46, 69, 103–4,
116, 130–1
LHOOQ 14, 45–6
masculinity theme 130–1
mechanomorphs 46, 103–4
readymades 86–7, 89–90, 147
Dulac, Germaine 93
critics of 63
dress design 40
early Surrealist paintings of
81–3
film 93–5
flamoyant showmanship
43–4
dance 7, 115–16, 132
dandyism 42, 131
De Chirico, Giorgio 74, 76, 78,
81, 120
De Stijl 2, 13
Debord, Guy 144, 151
Delvaux, Paul 23
Der Dada (journal) 54
Derrida, Jacques 153
Descartes, René 104
desire 22, 124
Desnos, Robert 16, 20, 56,
67–8, 106
Die Pleite (Dada journal) 57,
140
Dix, Otto 35
Documents (1929–30)
( journal) 48, 106–7,
133
Doesburg, Theo van 13
dream painting 77–84, 80
dreams 17–18, 21, 40,
100–2
Ducasse, Isidore 18
Duchamp, Marcel xiv, 11, 24–5,
27, 38, 41, 110
alias of 42
chance and 69–70
cult of 44–6
Fountain readymade
9–10, 44–5, 86, 87,
89–90
E
Eggeling, Viking 6, 91
Einstein, Albert 1
Eisenstein, Serge 92
Eliot, T. S. 1
Eluard, Paul 14, 16, 24, 65, 102,
143
encounter, cult of the 20, 21,
60, 63, 90–1
England 23
Ernst, Max xiv, 13, 16, 18, 19,
24, 26, 28, 33
alter ego 42, 43
collage 73, 74–5, 76, 77, 111
Freudianism 100–1
frottage 73, 74, 112
primitivism 132, 133
procreative theme 129
EROS exhibition (1959) 25
eroticism 22, 117–22
ethnography 133–4
Existentialism 25, 110, 143
Expressionism 3, 7, 12, 35, 99,
110
Abstract 24, 148
and Dada 26, 27
F
Fantômas 56
Fascism xvi, 22, 108, 142–3
176
frottages 73, 74, 112
Futurism 1, 2, 3–4, 6, 7,
64
fashion 40
Fauvism 3
faux naif style 76
feminism 125, 126, 150
fetishism 88–9, 90, 106, 120–1,
122, 126, 130, 134
Feuillade, Louis 56
film 18, 80, 91–6, 149–50
Fini, Leonor 118, 124
First World War 1, 7, 8
Flamel, Nicolas 59
Fluxus movement 147, 152
Foster, Hal 61, 148
Foucault, Michel 108, 153
found objects (objets trouvé)
90–1
Fountain readymade
(Duchamp) 9–10, 44–5,
86, 87, 89–90
Fourier, Charles 144–5
Fraenkel, Théodore 14
France 11, 152–3
Dada 14–16, 64–5, 66
declining birth-rate 119
ethnography 133
Fauvism 3
impressionists 3
and Morocco 21
1950s artists 25
politics 50, 141–3, see also
Paris
Frazer, Sir James 133
free association 17, 68
Fresh Widow 87
Freud, Sigmund 1, 17, 68, 71,
81, 101, 125
Freudianism 93, 98–103, 121
Freytag-Loringhoven,
Baroness Elsa von 11, 127
G
177
index
Galerie des Beaux Arts, Paris
23, 38–40
Gascoyne, David 23
Gauguin, Paul 3
gender identity 22, 42
Dada/Surrealism 124–31
Surrealism 150
German Romanticism 66
Germany:
Dada 11–14, 33, 40, 42,
76, 99, 105
Expressionism 3, 7, 12
Neue Sachlichkeit 26–7
politics 54, 139–41, see also
Berlin Dada
Giacometti, Alberto 21, 88,
90, 132, 133
Gober, Robert 148–9
Gordon, Douglas 149–50
Gorky, Arshile 24, 148
Greenberg, Clement 62,
63
Gross, Otto 99
Grosz, George 11, 12, 27, 33,
35, 110, 116
mechanomorphs 103
pessimistic metropolitan
images 57, 58
photomontage 77
politics 139–40
Grunewald, Alfred (Johannes
Baargeld) 13
Guimard, Hector 43
Dada and Surrealism
H
Hyppolite, Hector 102
hysteria 125–6
Haeckel, Ernst 109
Haiti 135
Hanover 13, 64
Hausmann, Baron 60
Hausmann, Raoul xiv, 11–12,
13, 35, 64, 77
alias of 41
anti-humanism 104
and Hannah Höch 125
nature mysticism 109–10
politics 139
sound poetry 116
Heartfield, John (Helmut)
11, 12, 33, 54–6, 77,
139–40
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich 20, 105
Heine, Maurice 118, 153
Hennings, Emmy 4
Heraclitus 109, 110
Hermeticism 111
Hérold, Jacques 23
Herzfelde, Wieland 11, 55, 57,
77, 103, 139–40
Hesnard, Angelo 100
Hiller, Susan 149
Hitler, Adolf 140
Höch, Hannah 12, 13, 77, 78,
103, 125, 132
Hoerle, Heinrich and Angelika
14
homosexuality 117
Huebler, Douglas 147
Huelsenbeck, Richard 6, 7, 8,
9, 11, 12, 13, 32, 41
humour 77, 101, 114
hypnotic trances 67–8, 111
I
idealism 105–6
identity xvi
false 41–2
gender 22, 42, 124–31, 150
racial 131–8
individualism 21, 22
insanity 102
International Constructivism
movement 13, 92
irrationalism 97–103
Isou, Isidore 151
J
James, Edward 82
Jameson, Frederic 96
Janco, Marcel 4, 5, 31, 132,
138
Janet, Pierre 68
Japan 138
Jarry, Alfred 18
Jedermann ein seigner
Fussball (Dada journal)
54–5, 140
Jennings, Humphrey 23
Johns, Jasper 146, 147
Johnson, Jack 41
Jung, Carl 111
K
Kahlo, Frida 23, 129, 137
Kandinsky, Wassily 69
Keaton, Buster 93
Kertesz, André 85
178
Littérature (Dada journal) 14,
16, 46, 65
Lucas, Sarah xvi–xvii, 150, 153
Lull, Ramon 110
Luxembourg, Rosa 54, 139,
140
Lynch, David 95
Klein, Yves 25, 147
Kraft-Ebbing, Richard von 81
Krauss, Rosalind 85, 126
Kristeva, Julia 153
L
La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de
104
La Révolution Surréaliste
( journal) 44, 46–8, 49,
50–2, 80, 117, 125
Laban, Rudolf von 115
labour 145
Lacan, Jacques 153
Lacerba (journal) 33
L’Âge d’Or (film) 95
Lam, Wifredo xvi, 135–6
Lamba, Jacqueline 124
language 64
Lao Tzu 109
Le Surréalisme au Service de la
Révolution (Surrealist
journal) 48, 81, 83, 88
Lefebvre, Henri 144
Léger, Fernand 53
Leiris, Michel 20, 106, 133
Leonardo da Vinci 73
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 3
lesbianism 89, 127
Lettrism 151
Lévi, Eliphas 111
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 133
LHOOQ (Duchamp) 14, 45–6
Liebknecht, Karl 54, 139,
140
Limbour, Georges 107
Lissitsky, El 13
literature 1, 4, 18, 53, 59–60
M
179
index
magic 27, 111
Magritte, René xv, 23, 27, 42,
56, 63, 81, 82, 121, 150
Maintenant (literary
magazine) 41
mannequins 38, 40, 120, 149
marriage 46, 77, 103–4, 125
Martinique 24, 134, 135
Marxism 111, 143, 144, 154
masculinity 129, 150
Masson, André xiv, 18, 20, 24,
72, 78, 106, 108, 110, 129
masturbation 107, 108
materialism 20, 105, 111
Matisse, Henri 9
Matta, Roberto 24
Mauss, Marcel 133
mechanization 9, 12, 27, 103–5
mechanomorphics 103, 116
Mehring, Walter 11, 140
Ménil, René 135
Merz abstractions 13, 64
Mesens, E. L. T. 23
Mexico 23, 41, 137
Minotaure (Surrealist journal)
43, 46, 48, 120
Miró, Joan xiv, 18, 79, 80, 110
Modernism 62, 148
Moholy, Nagy, László 13
Oedipus Complex 101, 115, 121
Oldenburg, Claes 148
Oppenheim, Meret 21, 88–9,
118, 124
Orwell, George 43–4
Oz (underground magazine)
151–2
Mondrian, Piet 69
montage 92, 154
Moreau, Gustave 59, 78
Morise, Max 80
Morocco 21
mouvement flou 16, 35–6, 67,
74, 111
Mulholland Drive (film) 95
Munich 4
music 7, 27, 71, 91
mythology 22
P
painting:
automatism 72–3
versus collage 73–6
dream 18, 21, 77–8, 80
oil 28, 76
versus photomontage 76–84
revalorization of 27
Surrealist 73–84, 100–1
Papin sisters 50–2, 126
Paris 14–15
Dada 74, 92, 99–100
Dada-and-Surrealism 26, 28
mouvement flou 16, 35–6,
67, 74, 111
Surrealism 16–21, 23, 24, 57,
59–60
Paris Peasant (Aragon) 59, 60
Parker, Cornelia 149
Penrose, Roland 23
Péret, Benjamin 48, 65, 68, 143
Performance Art 147
Phalansteries 145
phonetic poetry 6, 12, 31–2, 64
photo-opportunities 36
photography 18–19, 46–52,
84–5, 118–19, 149
photomontage 3, 12, 14, 34, 35,
54–5, 125
versus painting 76–84
Dada and Surrealism
N
Nadja (Breton) 53, 59, 84, 97,
102
Naville, Pierre 21, 80, 141
Nazism 12, 121
negativism 15–16, 144
négritude movement 24, 134,
135, 137
negro dances 116, 132
Neo-avant-garde 152
New York Dada 9–11, 12, 27,
41, 110, 127
New York Surrealism 24–5, 149
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
64, 98, 99, 108
Nietzschean philosophy 20
nihilism 14, 15, 110, 154
Noske, Gustav 55, 140
Nougé, Paul 22–3
Nouveau Réalisme 147
Nozières, Violette 126
O
object-production 87–8
objective chance 20, 21, 60, 63,
90
180
R
racial identity 131–8
rationalism 18, 28
Ratton, Charles 23
Rauschenberg, Robert 146,
147
Ray, Man 11, 18–19, 42, 48, 50,
85, 87, 92, 118–19, 131
readymades 9–11, 25, 44–5, 86,
89–90, 146, 147
Realism 2, 27
Redon, Odilon 78
Régis, Emmanuel 100
relativism 98
religious iconography 74,
100–1, 134
religious parody 45–50, 95,
108–9, 111, 115, 134, 140
Resistance movement (French)
143
Reverdy, Pierre 65
revolution 135, 137, 139, 142,
143
Ribemont-Dessaignes,
Georges 20
Richter, Hans 6, 13, 14, 91
Rimbaud, Arthur 3, 18, 65,
98
Rivera, Diego 23, 137, 143
Rivière, Paul 133
Romania 23, 138
Romanticism 7, 63, 66, 101
Rosenquist, James 148
Roudinesco, Elizabeth 126
Rousseau, Henri 136–7
Roussel, Raymond 18
Roux, Paul 65
Rubin, William 26
181
index
Picabia, Francis xiv, 9–11, 14,
15–16, 26, 27, 33, 41, 45,
53–4, 92, 104, 110
Picasso, Pablo 3, 15, 18, 33, 74,
81, 86, 131
Pioch, Georges 36
Plateau, Marius 52
poetry 7, 27, 28
anti-colonialist 134–5
automatism 68–9
Dada 64–7
phonetic 6, 12, 31–2, 64
and state of soul 63
Surrealist 17–18, 48, 56, 65–6
politics 138–45
advertising 55–6
and avant-gardism 2–3
Berlin Dada 11–12
and Catholic organizations
50
Dada and Surrealism 26
Paris Dada 15–16, 36
and photomontage 77
Surrealism and 21–2, 23, 26,
141–4
Pollock, Jackson 24, 148
Pop Art 25, 147, 148
populaire (mass culture) 52–6,
150
pornography 22
Prague 23, 114
Precisionism 27
primitivism 7, 131–8
procreation 129–30
proto-Dada 9–11
psychoanalysis 68, 69, 71, 93,
101–2, 114, 125–6
psychology 68, 100, 111
psychosis 102
Soupault, Phillipe 14, 20, 67
Spanish Civil War 143
Spartacists 11, 140
spiritualism 111
Spoerri, Daniel 147
St Paul 115
Stalinism 22, 143
Stieglitz, Alfred 10, 11, 27, 45
Strand, Paul 27
Styrsky, Jindrich 23
Suleiman, Susan Rubin 126,
131
Surrealism 102
afterlife of 147–55
anti-Catholicism 46–50, 95,
109, 111, 115, 134, 140
anti-colonialism 134
automatism 17, 18, 24, 65,
67–73, 78–80, 85
body and 116–22
critics of 63, 138
and Dada 25–9
film 93–6
Freudianism and 100–3
gender 124, 125–31
international exhibitions of
23, 38–40, 44
internationalism 22–5, 28,
38, 138
mass culture 56
mystical thought 110–14
objects 87–8, 89, 90
origins 16–21
painting 73–84, 100–1
photography 84–5
poetry 65–6
and politics 21–2, 23, 26,
141–4
primitivism 132–8
Rubiner, Ludwig 99
Russia 22, 35, 64
Russian Revolution 1, 2, 11
Dada and Surrealism
S
Sade, Marquis de 22, 95,
118–20, 153
sadomasochism 87
Saint-Simon, Henri de 2
Sanouillet, Michel 28
Sartre, Jean-Paul 143
Schamberg, Morton 27
Schiaparelli, Elsa 40
Schwitters, Kurt xiv, 13, 64, 66,
139
sculpture 7, 86, 88
seances 16
Second World War 24, 108,
143
Seiwert, Franz 14
Serner, Walter 6, 14, 110, 139
Seurat, Georges 3
sexuality 99, 101, 102, 104, 117,
118–22, 125, 126, 148–9
Sheeler, Charles 27
shell shock 116
Sheppard, Richard 99, 110
Sherman, Cindy 149
Sima, Josef 23
Situationism 144, 151–2, 154
social interaction 77
Social Realism 22, 142
Socialist (SPD) Party 55
Society of Independent Artists
41
sodomy 95, 118–19
songs 27
Sontag, Susan 84
182
public personae 42–4
publications 46–52
unconsciousness 40
urban mythology 57–61
Švankmajer, Jan 95, 112–14
Symbolism 3, 7, 65, 78
unconscious 1, 17, 18, 21, 24,
67–73, 90–1, 102–3, 105
United States:
Dada 9–11, 12, 27, 41, 110,
127
Surrealism 24–5, 148–9
T
V
Tabard, Maurice 85
Taeuber, Sophie 6, 69, 115–16,
124–5
Tanguy, Yves 18, 80
Tanning, Dorothea 124
Taoism 109
Tatlin, Vladimir 35
taxonomy 112–13
Teige, Karel 23, 142
391 (Dada journal) 45, 48
Toyen (Marie Cernunová) 23,
118
Tropiques (journal) 135
Trotsky, Leon 23, 141, 143
Trotskyism 22, 142
Turner Prize 149
Tzara, Tristan xiv, 4, 6, 13, 15,
26, 38, 71, 97, 98, 132, 138,
139, 143
Vaché, Jacques 15
Van Gogh, Vincent 3
Vaneigem, Raoul 144, 153–4,
155
Variétés (Surrealist magazine)
132–3
Vitrac, Roger 20
W
U
Ubac, Raoul 23
183
index
Warhol, Andy 95, 147
Wigman, Mary 115
Wilde, Oscar 41
Wildenstein, Georges 38
Williams, Linda 93
Wood, Beatrice 45
Wunderkammer (cabinet of
curiosities) 112, 114, 149
yBa (young British artists)
xvi–xvii, 150, 153
Zurich Dada 4–9, 14, 15, 27,
31–3, 64, 91–2, 110, 115,
139
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