= oo = al i = oe a SS PS -=Inrropuction I ‘Like two waves overtaking one anotherin turn’ ‘SuRREALISM AND DADA 2 “Surrealism, n., pure psychic automatism’ ‘SURREALIST AUTOMATIC IMAGERY ‘Images of concrete irrationality ‘Surrtatist DREAM IMAGERY 4 ‘Je ne vois pas ia femme’ Women IN SURREALISM ° ‘What then is this Surrealist activity or Surrealism?’ ‘SURREALISM IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA 6 ‘A collision exacted on the eyes’ ‘SURREALIST PERFORMANCE, THEATRE AND CINEMA A Lecacy oF SURREALISM Select Bibliography Index 2 20 2 46 54 66 2 781 MaxErnst Atthe Rendezvous of ‘the Fiends 1922 Gilon canvas 129.5 x 193 (51 x76) Museum wi, Cologne INTRODUCTION ‘The word Sucrealism was coined in Patis in 1917 by the writer Guillaume Apollinaite, He used it to describe two instances of artistic innovation. The frst of these was Jean Cocteau’s ballet Parade, which had ascore by Eric Satie and a curtain and costumes by Pablo Picasso. In the programme notes. Apollinaite wrote that the artistic truth resulting from the evening's combination of elements was a truth beyond realism ~‘akind of sur-realism’, The second instance was Apollinaire's own play, Les Mamelles de Tirésos ( The Breast of Tiresias), which he subsitled ‘a Surcealisr drama’. Neither of these artistic events could be described as ‘Surrealist’ in the sense in which we now understand it, but in 1924, in the Manifest de surréalione which launched the Surrealist movement, the writer Andvé Breton and his friend Philippe Soupault adopted che word, and ‘baptised by the name of Surrealism the new mode of expression which we had at our disposal and which we wished to pass on to our friends’. Breton adopted che word Surrealism to describe the literary and artistic practice of himself and his friends’. As we understand che term today, it describes a collective adventure centred on the charismatic figure of Brecon, which began in Paris in the 19208 and which evencually encompassed poetry, painting, prose, sculprure, phovography. film-making and interventionist activity. Although Surrealist artists and writers shared common aims and explored commen themes and subject matter, Surrealism was never a style as such, and Sarvealist art took many different forms. In 1924, the actor and writer Anconin Artaud, on behalf of the ‘bureau of Surrealist reseatch’,published the aph turning back on itself”, Breton’s friends were primarily fellow writers, and Surteali m ‘Sureealism is not a style. Ieis the cry of a mind 1 was initially a literary endeavour. No agenda was set for Surrealist visual artists until Breton wrote Surrealism and Painting if 1925, and no specifically Sartealist ibition space existed until the Galerie surréaliste opened in 1926. Sursealiin and Painting begins with a section in praise of the visual image: “The eye exists in its savage state. The Marvels of the earth a hundred feet high, the Mazvels of the sea a hundred feet deep, have as their sole witness the wild eye that traces all its colour back co the rainbow ... The need to fix ral images, whether or not these images pre-exist, the act of fixing on them, has exceriotised itself from time rmmemorial and has led to the formation of a veritable language which does not seem co me any more actificial than spoken language’. However. in the Manifested surrialisme of 1924 Breton had made oniy passing reference to painting, using’ Surrealism’ to describe around 1919, Brecon met Soupault in 1917 at Apollinaize’s apartmentat 125 Boulevard Se Germain in Paris. He met Louis Aragon, the othee ‘prime mever' of eatly Surrealism, ar the bookshop ‘la maison des amis des livees’, Encounters such as these were of vital significance for Breton, and others are colourfully recounted in his novel Nadja of 1923" rospectively, only his own and other writers’ activity fromThe day of the frst performance of Apollinaire’s Couleur du tps [in 1918] at the Conservatoire Renée Maubel, a young man approaches me, scammers a fow words, and finally manages to explain that he had mistaken me for one of his friends supposedly killed i the wat, Naturally, nothing more was said. A few days Laer shrough a mucsal friend, Lbegia costesponding with Pasl Ehud. whom I did not know by sight. On leave, he comes to see me: [am im che presence of the same person as at Conleer dic emp In 1919, Breton, Soupaul and Aragon rogether started the review Literature (Literature) which became a focus for the new, young avant-garde in Paris and, as such, a testing ground for che weiters whom we now know as Surrealists Brecon was cwenty-three, Soupaule and Aragon twenty-two —all three ‘at thar age when life is strongest’ (Brecon, Entretins, ps1), Literature attracted like: n:again in Nadja, he describes how he came co meet the writer Benjamin Péret in 1920: minded writers co Breton and Surreal Scill in my hocel, Place du Panthéon, one evening, L I T $s late. Someane knocks. In comes a woman whose approximate age and featutes I cannot now recall In mourning, I chink, She asks me for a number of the review Littranurr which has not yet appeared and which someone has made her promise co rake to Nantes the next day. She insists, reluctant chough Lam,uponhavingit. Bucher chief reason for coming, itseems,ist© _FranelsPleabla ‘recommend’ the person who has sent her and who will soon be hiving in Paris. (I still remember the exprestion ‘would like ¢o launch hi licorature’ which, subsequently, knows whom it referred, seemed so cur Bur who was I being waged in chis more than later, Benjamin Pévet was there " Cover of Literature elf in 0.7, December 1922 1g £0 4S, sO moving.) Breton’ curiosity at Pérer’s reported enthusiasm for literature is understandable in the light of the deliberate irony and ambiguity of Littérature, The title of the review, suggested by the writer, Pau! | Valéry, comes from the last line of Verlaine’s Art postiguet ‘And all the rest is literature’. Ie was intended tobe ironic: ‘As faras we were concerned, if we adopted that word asa title, it was though tony and ina spt of derision in which Verlaine no longer bad y part’ (Breton, Entrevie ). The review became a vehicle for the kind of experimentation which developed, in 1924, into Surrealism proper, The origins of Surtealism’s riches lie in Litératurz. From 1919, the peviodial carried extracts of Les Champs magnétiques(The Magnetic Fields), writen collaboratively by Breron and Soupault. Later, Breton referred to chis text as the first Suttealist work: it was writeen ‘automatically’, the two authors writing down sentences as they occurred to them at random, In order to do his’, Breton wrote [[’Enirée des médinms] ‘all chat was necessary was to disregard the context of the external world’, Structate was atbittarily imposed: ‘the only reason for ending each chapter was the coming to an end of the day when is writing had been undertaker’. ayLes Chanips magnétigues contains a section whose title — La Glace sans tain (The Unsilvered Glass) — provides an image for the state of mind in which Surrealise work was, from che outset, both produced and experienced. A glass or mirror without silvering becomes a doot or a window, a threshold onto a new world. In che case of the Surrealists, this new world was that of the unconscious mind; whar they called che ‘merveilleusx’, the marvellous, Surrealism sought communication with the itrational and the illogical, deliberately disorientating and teorientating che conscious by means of the unconscious. This aim is evident chroughout Les Champs magnétigues and, though achieved in different ways, is common to Sutrealism in all its subsequent manifestations. Surtealise writers approached the marvellous inivially via stream-of- consciousness or ‘atttomatic’ writing, Painters tried auvomatic methods of production and also looked for other routes. The marvellous was thought co occur naturally, in spaces where the curse of reason had yet to penetrate: in childhood, madness, sleeplessness and drug-induced hallucination; in so- called ‘primitive’ societies whose members were thought to be closer to their instincts than co the learned sophistication of ‘civilisation’; and, crucially, in dreams, the condicions of which che painters attempted co reproduce. ‘The first visual artists came to Breton somewhat later then the first poets. ‘The German artist Max Ernst’ first Patis exhibition was in 1921, and was the result of an invitation from Breton, who wrote a preface for the exhibition catalogue. Ernst already knew of Breton frou reading Littéranure in Germany. In Februacy 1924, Breton bought a painting by André Masson at an exhibition and met him a few months later. Masson was living and working on the tue Blomet and introduced Breton to his neighbour, Joan Mir6, The two painters had adjacent studios and talked to each other through a hole in the partition wall. Masson recounts an early conversation with Miré;'JM: Should one go and see Picabia or Breton? AM: Picabia, he's already the past. Breton, he's the future’ (Will-Levaillane, André Masson, lerebelle du survéaisme), Miré made, according to Breton, a ‘tumultuous entrance’ into Surrealism with his firse Paris exhibition in June 1025. Throughout the 19205, Suttealism was a riot of encounters, inaugurations, publications and exhibitions, As well as the publication of the Manifesto, October 1924 also saw the establishment of the ‘bureau des recherches surcéalisces’, a bureau for Surrealist research which gave members of the group a base other than the café and which was responsible for distributing Ieaflees and princed Su around he steeets of Paris. In December the same year the group launched La Révoluton surréaliste( The Surrealist Revolution), the periodical which replaced Littézature and became the organ of the mature Surrealist movement. Its stress on the visttal as well as the literary atts was expressed in its setialisation of Brecon’ Sirvealin and Painting and in its illustration of paintings, photography and sculpture ~-a great rarity in Littérature. The arrival of new members of the group was often heralded by publication of their work in La Révolution surréaliste issue 7, in June 1926, included a painting by Yves Tanguy. In 1927 he had an exhibition at the Galérie surréaliste, the catalogue preface written by Breton, alist aphorisms (‘tell your children your dreams’)The work of Salvador Dali and René Magritte appeared for the first time in the last issue of La Révolution surréaliste, in December 1929, Magritte had come to Paris in 1927. having previously been active in the Belgian Surrealist group. Dali had been introdaced to the Parisian group by his Spanish compatriot Miré in 1928 Members of the group had visited Dali ar his home in Cadaqués, Catalonia, over the summer of 1929, and judged him an exciting addition to Surtealism at a time when the movement had in face begun to experience factional differences. The work reproduced in the periodical was Disnal Sport. In the same month, a schematic drawing of the painting appeared in Doctuments, a review founded by Georges Bataille, a writer and theorist who gathered around him various members of the Surrealist group (inchiding André Masson} and conducted abitter ideological battle with the charismatic but ultimately domineering Breton. Bataille had thought Dalla possible recruit for his alternative group, but, after some deliberation, Dali did not want to compromise his new relationship with Bretonian Surrealism by allowing his work to be published in Docuinents. He withdrew his permission, and Bataille had to make do with a diagram. Breton met the challenge represented by Bataille with a call to renewed activity, In 1930 he launched a new periodical to replace La Révolision surréaliste, LeSurréalisme au service de la révolution (Surrealism at the Service of the Revolution’), and wrote a second Manafeste du surréalisme, The thirties saw the development of the ‘Surrealist object’, and, in 1933, a third publication, the glossy Minofaure. It was also the decade of expansion: in 1936 Surrealism came to Britain with the first International Surrealist Exhibition held at the New Burlingcon Galleries in London. In hts second Surrealist manifesto, Breton testifies to the difficulties experienced by his movement, the ‘ship which a few of us had constructed with our own hands in order to move against the curtene’ from which some members had jamped or been pushed. He insiscs on his understanding ofa Salvador Dali Dismat Sport1929 Oitandeaiage on canes Boel (12416) Private Calection Sucteatism asa way intoa meatal world of endless possibility, ‘a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the teal and the imagined, past and facture, the communicable and che incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions’. The second manifesto repeats the firs’s obsession with the irrational, the spontaneous and the unconscious: ‘the simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull che trigger, into the crowd’ The second manifesto is a teiteration of Surrealism’s aims, and reads less urgenely than the first, which drew much of its material from the situation in which Breton and his friends found themselves as young men in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Breton, Soupault, Aragon, Fluard and Pésec had all been conscripted, although Breton and Aragon, being medical scudents, spent the war working in hospitals. All witnessed the havoc wreaked by the products of Western ‘reason’, and experienced the wilfil desteuction which characterised the world’s first mechanised war The internal logic of the war revolted them: Ehuard later realised that he must have spent most of his war battling against his farexe friend, che German Max Ernst, for the same kilometre of no-man’s land. In bis autobiography, Ernst recorded his impressions of the wat: "Max Ernst died ont August sgt. Hew. aspiting to become a magician and to find the myths of his time.’ Using the third person, as chough talking about someone else, Ernst documented the war-time suspension ot temporary ‘death’ of his artistic persona La Glace sais tain opens with a passage of similarly war-inspired sterility: esuscitated on 11 November 1938, a8 a young man Prisoners of drops of water, we ate but everlascing animals. We run about the noiseless towns and the enchanced animals no longer touch us. What's the good of these great fragile fits of enthusiasm. these jaded jumps of joy? We know nothing any more bur the dead stars: we gaze at theér faces; and we gasp with pleasure. Our mouths ave dry as the lost beaches, and our eyes turn aimlessly and ‘without hope. Now al chat remain ave the cafés where we meet to drink these cool drinks, chese diluted spirits, and the cables ate stickier than the tables where the shadows of the day before hve fallen. The rest of Les Champs magnétiques, and the frst manifesto, propose Surrealism asan alternative co this state of hopelessness, as a ‘great fragile fit of enthusiasm’ to rekindle the stars. aa Francis Picabla Ponratofa Young Arpoican Bxtina State of Nuiy 29 005.5/6. July/August 1915 ‘Like two waves overtaking one another in turn’ SuRREALISM AND DADA Acthe end of the war, Max Exnst felt reborn as an aztist. The movement into which he first channelled his creative energy was Dada, che randomly christened expression of revolt which exploded into simultaneous life in ditich, Cologne and New York, Dada is often considered the precursor of ‘artealism. In fact, Breton’s description of the situation is more accurate: the other in turn’ (Breton, Eniretins), Dada predated Surrealism, and Surrealism survived Dada, bue two movements were ‘like two waves overtaking one for a while the two movements co-existed in a continum of shared ene: and excitement s Dada, like Surrealism, ridiculed Western confidence in reason, and Francts Meabia denounced the division and categorisation by which the complexities of re teat 1822 modern life were neutralised and made safe. Dada artists declared everything “uehaltoam to be ina constant and creative state of flax. They were interested more ina 200% 160(78%x635 mental attitude th Tate Gallery new concept of © might produce. Dada began in Ziicich when the writer Hugo Ball opened che Cabaret Voltaire in the Meierei café in March 1916. Cabaret and music hall were hugely d ran aecistic movement: in a bid to determine a radically ativity, activity was.as important fo them as anything it popttlar in European cities at this period, and Ball thought thae the theatre was a form of total expression perfectly suited to the eransmission of radical ideas. He wanted co use ‘the ideals of culture and of art as a programme for a variety show, thacis our kind of Candide against the times’. The cabaret became a magnet foractistic revolutionaries: Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco,ua FEUILLE VIGNE Jean Arp and Richard Huelsenbeck were among the writers and artists who gathered to read their poetry aloud and to discuss the possibilities fora new, non-rational basis for act, After only three weeks, ‘everyone was seized by an indefinable intoxication. The lictle cabaret was about to come apart at the seams and was becoming the playground for crazy emotions’ (Flugo Ball, Die Flucbt aus der Zeit, Muanich 1927, translated as A Flight out of Tine: A Dada Diary, New York 1974). The cabaret staged performances and arc exhibitions designed to revolt and disgust an audience, to shock them out of their preconceptions as to the nature of ‘art’. In Apzil, members decided to start a periodical called Dada: Dada is “yes, yes” in Rumanian, “rocking horse” in French, For Getmans, it isa sign of foolish naive, joy in procreation and preoccupation with the baby baggy’ (Ball). The periodical was a vehicle through which the ‘crazy emotions’ of the cabaret could be spread abroad: Dada was bot Meanwhile, the Dada spitit, if nor the name, was flourishing in New York. Te was centred on Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 publication and gallery, and on the activity of the French artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia (who both arrived from Paris in 1925) and the American, Man Ray. Stieglitz’s 297 was ‘dedicated co the most modern att and satite’ and the artists, like those in |, sought to overturn all accepted aesthetic and artistic preconceptions rchies. In 291, and later in his own magazine 391, Picabia published a seties of ‘machine drawings’, simple adaptations of mechanical diagrams and photographs, subversively captioned by the artist. A spark plug is identified as the ‘portrait of a young American woman in astate of nudity’, while a light bulb becomes simply L’Américaine, the American, woman, The tension between word and image in these works is one of simultaneous creation and negation and is recognisably Dada. Picabia stresses the transformative power of art while ache same time zidiculing some of its pretensions. His Fig-Leaf of 1922 works ina similar way, fig leaf of the title initially seems merely to play a traditional role ina vaguely traditional-looking picture: it covers the modesty of the nude figure, a copy after Ingres's celebrated Oxdipus and the Sphinse in the Louvre. In face, however, the fig leaf (in French a vine leaf) is ceneral to the whole of the picture's meaning. On close inspection it can be seen that the entire painting, 134 presented as i is in praise of ‘le dessin frangais’ (French drawing, as epitomised by Ingres) isa ‘fig leaf” executed over the top of a ‘machine painting’ similar to Picabia's earlier drawings. Two of his machine paintings had been rejected from the supposedly avant-garde Autumn Salon in Paris in 1922, in which Th Fig-Leaf was uleimacely exhibited. Duchamp’s ‘teadymades' played even mote extreme games with the relationship becween arc and reality. The readymades were everyday objects — urinal, a bortle drainer, a stoot and bicycle wheel —which Duchamp selected and declared to be works of art. The artist rately did much to che objects, stating that his selection and his signature of them (often under an assumed name) was enough to guarantee their elevated status as art, The readymades ridictiled the self-importance of art and che art world as Duchamp perceived them, exposing and exploiting a conundcum still cutrent today. Art galleries contain art objects made by artists, Does that mean that anything placed in an artgallery by an artist is art? Duchamp’s most famous readymade was the urinal he tarned on its back, titled Fountain and signed ‘R. Mutt’. Fountain needed the arrogance of the art world context in order to be read as att, bur its readability as art sought ro debunk che arrogance on which ie thrived. Between 1915 and 1923, when he declared ic ‘definitively unfinished’, Duchamp made The Bride Stripped Bare by ber Barhelors, Even, the work known as The Large Glass. This is an immensely complicated combination of artistic sctategy and chance procedure which results in an impossible machine, a celebration of the end of reason, The glass is divided into two halves, che upper being ‘the bride's domain’, the lower containing ‘the bachelor apparatus’. In 1934, Duchamp published The Green Box—nores, deawings and photographs made during the construction of the work. In these notes, Duchamp identifies the The Large Glassas a kind of ‘love machine’, an ironic image of human love-making as a mechanical, ultimately frustrated and frustrating process. The bride is an assembly of mechanical elements who signals to her bachelors, also called ‘malic moulds’, with the chree flag-like forms contained within her ‘blossoming’, the visible cloud of her sexstal desire. The bachelozs respond by pumping ‘illuminating gas’ along ‘capillary cubes’ ro the suspended ‘sieves’. The process ends here, the figurative and narrative potential of the work's formal elements diverted inco the anecdotal details of the procedures by which they were determined. The ‘gas’ in the sieves is actually dust which was allowed to setele on the glass. Duchamp intended it to pass up from the ‘sieves’ through the ‘oculist witnesses’, che silvered patterns taken from an optician’s eye testing chart which allow the viewer, seeing themselves reflected, ro enter the closed world of the artist’s machine, bue this pact of the work was never completed. He dic, however, show where the gas ended up, near the bride. ls landing position is marked by the ‘shots’, holes whose position was determined by firing paint-tipped matches at the glass from a8 ‘Marcel Duchamp Fountain 1917/1964 (thie version) Porcelain 135.614), Iniana Univesity art Musou Partial Giftof Mes Wiliam Conroy 7 Marcel Duchamp The Bade Stripped Bare byher Bachelors, Even (he barge Glass) 1915-23, replies 1965-6 Oi, iead. dust and varnish on glass 2775x1759) (1094 69% “ote Catlery toy cannon, The Lary Glass, like mach Dada work, was intended to provoke and frustrate. Like the petformances and exhibitions in the Cabaret Voltaive. itmocks the audience which it nevertheless needs in order to function as an alternacive, radical art forma Dada in New York had some contact with Dada in Zitrich: Stieglitz was ie touch with Tristan Tzara who gradually assumed mote and more responsibility for the publication Dada. Picabia's 391 was published between January 1917 and October 1924 from wherever Picabia happened to be (Barcelona, New York, Zétrich and, eventually, Pavis). Epitomising the16 inteenationalist, anti-war and anti-imperialist stance of both che Dada and the Sutrealist movements, 391 published the work of Duchamp and Man Ray alongside European-based Dada and, later, Surrealist artists, Back in Europe, Dada spread by word of mouth and by the movemencof artists ftom Zitich 10 Berlin, Cologne and Paris. As Tzara took direction of the petiodical Dada, ie began more and moe to express, through its typography and graphic design as much as through the material it published, che inspired form of ‘organised chaos’ which the movement had become. Every contribution — text, advertisement, poem and notice — was set in a differenc type. The design itself was a call ro action: ‘each page a resturzection ... each phrase an automobile horn’ (Tzara, Ziirich Chronicle December 1918). Dada had its most political manifestation in Berlin, centred on the activity of Richard Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann, Johannes Baader and George Grosz. Huelsenbeck had participated in the Cabaret Voltaite, performing simultaneous poems with Tzara and Janco. He read the first Dada manifesto in Berlin in r918, emphasising thar Dada isa stare of being, that the proper stage for 8 a Dadaist is life, but chac the props Dadeohone sded to pect hiscthe Caer o aa. needed to perform on this stage Gaver o} ad remain art and poetry. Among the strongest of Berlin Dada's vistial : images were those of Hausmann, Raoul Hausmann who used collage to attack both the reac cite 1919-20 complacency of the news and critical Uthogepnone media and the hitherto sanctified mongrepncesigson integrity of the arc image. In his B18 25.42% 10) The Art Critic, for example, the collaged _%##62le figure of an arc critic is stuck ontoa poem-poster of nonsense words ‘The critic, assembled from the dismembered fragments of his own methods of discerning and disseminating opinion of arcistic ‘value’ (he is made from parts of bbbed in the back of the neck by a banknote newspapers and magazines, speaks only gibberish. In Cologne, the Dada spirit moved through Max Ernst, Alfred Geiimewald (known as Johannes Baargeld) and Jean Arp, who came to the city from Ziirich, Ernst and Baargeld collaborated on Der Vintilator (The Ventilator), ical periodical of which they distributed five issues at factory gates it was banned by the British Army of Occupation. Bullen Dand a bef Die Schamnade with Dada exhibitions, the second of which, in April 1920, was one of the most infimous Dada events. Entrance to the exhibition was through a gentlemen's lavatory. The exhibits included a young girl in a communion dress reciting obscene verse, and visitors were challenged ¢o destroy what they did not like an invented, composite title) were produced to coincide18 Dada art in Cologne was, as elsewhere, concerned with fragmentation, transformation and frustracion of expectation. fewas also collaborative: Ernst and Arp together made FATAGAGAS,, described by Ernst as “FAbrications de TAbleaux GAzométriques GArantis’. These were captioned collages signed by them both, Etnse made the collages, Arp wrote the captions. The first of the series was Physionythologisekes Diluvialbild (Plysiomytholegical Dilvvian Picture), [ts fracturing and fragmentation of form, together with the confusion and displacement of its imagery, look forward 10 ‘Max Emnst and Hans Arp Pysionythologicat Dituyan Bete 1920 Cottage with rogments ofasnatograph. govache, pencil, ‘enandink an paper laiéon card 112 10 (6¥4) Sprengel Museum, Hanover to much of Ernst’ later, Survealise work. One figure is half human, half bird while the other seems to act involuntarily, in a dream-like, automated stare, Insg24, Ernst had his first Patisian exhibition, and in 1922 he left Cologne to live in the French capital. He and Arp already had contacts there: Cologne Dada was increasingly oriented towards Patis and Lirature which, while proto-Surrealist, was also the focus of all recognisably Dada activity in the city, Breton, Soupaudt and Aragon had started Litfrature in March soto, just after the appearance in Paris of Dada 3. This contained Tzara’s 1918 Dads Manifesto which, according to Breton, ‘lit the touch paper. Tzara's 1918 Dada“Manifesto was violently explosive. It proclaimed the rupture beeween art and logic, the necessity of a great negative task to accomplish; it praised spontaneity to the skies’ (Enretins). Tzata himself came from Ziitich to Paris isin in January 1920, where, with the help of Picabia (who returned to Pa November 1919), he organised two series of Dada ‘manifestations’ or ‘Dada seasons’. Breton and his friends ac frst responded enthusiastically: in May so2o the thirteenth issue of Littéature was dedicated entively to Dada manifestos written by Breton, Soupaulcand Aragon as well as by Tzara and Picabia. Several were read out, collaboratively, at a ‘manifestation’, including this from Aragon: No mote painters. no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculprors, no move seligions, no more royalists, no more republicans, no mse imperialists. no more anarchis¢s, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more prolecarians, no more democtats, no more armies, no more police. no more nations, 90 more of these idiocies, no more. NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING. Atthe end of the 1921 Dada season, however, the Liténative group of writers and artists were growing dissatisfied with the limitations they perceived in Daca’s determined negativicy: ‘The 1918 Dada Manifesto scemed to open wide the doors, but we discovered that they opened onto a corridor which was leading nowhere’ (Breton, Eniretions), Breton organised a mock trial of the writer and patriot Maurice Barrés, a symbol of the establishment against which both Dada and the Littéature group were striving. A wooden mannequin was ttied by Breton in the role of President of the Tribunal, Teara, giving ‘evidence’, chose to sabotage what he took to be a ridiculously solemn oceasion:'T have no confidence in justice, even if that justice is done by Dada. You will agree with me, Mr President, that we are all shits, and that therefore liecle differences, greater shits or lesser shits, have no importance’. Following chis, Brecon split with Tzata and with Dada, although he maintained contact with Picabia and, crucially, with the artists Dada had brought him for Surrealism — Arp and Ernst. He launched a new series of Lintéature and cook the group of writers and artists who surrounded him and the periodical into che seties of experiments known as che ‘saison des sommeils’ or ‘season of sleeps’. time of intense investigation into the potential of the unconscious out of which, essentially, Surrealism was born. ‘The group explored the possibilities of trance, of dyeam-like states of mind. in which they could produce imagery directly from their unconsciows, The emphasis was on experimentation, on a systematic exploration of creativity which might offer an alternative to the exciting but ultimacely destructive anarchism of Dada. In 1922 Eenst painted At the Rendecwous ofthe Friends, Te shows the Litérature group after their break with Tzara, united in determined yet unexplained activity. [e has been suggested that the strange poses in the painting refer to some of the experimentation conducted daring the ‘season of sleeps’. 1920 ‘Surrealism, n., pure psychic automatism’ SuRREALIST AUTOMATIC IMAGERY The period 1922 to 1924 saw the members of the Littérature group in determined quest of the marvellous. They met in cafés and at each other's houses and studios, to write and speak froma stare of trance. Aragon chronicled che experiments in his Une Vague des réves(A Wave of Dreams) of 19242 Firse of all, each of us regarded himself as the object of a special disturbance, struggled against this diseurbance. Soon its natue was revealed, Execything occurtedas if the mind, having reached this crest of rite unconscious, had lost the power to recognise its position, In iesubsisted images that assumed form, tn becat substance of ceality. They expressed themselves according to this Mscé Masson relation, asa perceptible force. They thus assumed the characteristics of viscal, —pinguesune 1928 nuditive, cactile hallucinations. We experienced the full strength of these images. 53s yiaeonpaner We subjects. In bed, just all he machinery of terror, we held out our hand to phantoms... We saw. for example, a wriceen image which first presented jeself with the characteristic each our senses, lose its verbal aspect to iad always believed had lost the power to manipuslace them. Wehad become their domain, theit —parguruigi. before falling asleep, in the streer, with eyes wide open wich 124) Te Museum otlodern ‘tN York of the fortuitous, che arbitrary. assume those fixed phenomenological realities which we mpossible ro provoke. The written images which emerged unbidden from these trances were the building blocks of Surtealisc ‘automatism’ or automatic writing. In fact Breton and Soupaul felt they had already achieved a form of aucomatic writing in the spontaneous, collaborative imagery of Les Champs magnétiques. In 192.4, in che Manifeste du surréalisme and in La Révolution surréaliste,Breton identified automatism as the principal Surrealist artistic practice, the primary route into the marvellous: Sorvealism, n,, Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express — verbally. by means of che writeen word, orin any other manner ~ the actual functioning of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reasor exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern, Breron's definition stresses theabsolute nature of Surrealist attcomatism poetzy, prose and presumably painting must be generated by steinging together the first words or images which come to mind, For the writers, chis meant placing their trust in the creative potential of language itself. In Le Point cardinal (Cardinal Point), Leitis writes: Inmy mouth, mine of words and kisses, thought and desires become confused. reduced to the nique expression of the ueterance. For visual artists. attempting to find a place within a movement whose development since before 1919 had been entirely in the realm of spoken and written language, automatism meant placing their trust in the creative power of a purely visual language. Their medium was the mark rather than the word, and so they began with automatic drawing, André Masson, in particular. was very successful. He found thac he was able to draw, or doodle, tn ax abstracted state of mind, His pencil called marks from out of his unconscious and onto the paper. Only then did he allow his conscious mind to shape forms out of the marks. His drawings were published in La Revolution surréaliste, often alongside automatic poems. Automatic painting, however, proved more difficult, The paraphernalia of paincing in oil, the laborious nacure of the process, tended to work against the spontaneity of the impulse. Masson’ look like translations into oil of hs automatic drawings and seem the product of conscious. deliberate hard work, Surrealist painters had to seek another route into the matvellous. They did this by recurningto the first principles of Brecon’ excitement cerning automatism: thar it was a way to catch the unconscious mind tsnawares and to capeute the images of the anbeidled imagination. They sought methods of shorc-citcuiting the mind’s rational apparatus, making visual images which, like those of automatic writing and drawing, were initiated somehow ‘automatic’ paintings cor a22 outside or beyond the artisc’s will. One way of doing this was to allow chance or collaborative procedures ¢o generate che image. The artist was then not making a consetous choice about how the picture would look, or what it would be about, until ie was well under way. A second method was to pursue the analogy between painting and poetry and to force visual language to work mote like language as itis spoken or written. Sand painting was a successful technique discovered and practised by Masson. He would drip or smear glue onto a piece of paper or canvas at random, sprinkle sand over che glue, and then use the resulting sand patches as pre-pictorial inspiration. Like che initial marks in an automatic drawing, the glue and sand gave hima starting point thae was unaffected by either his rational mind or his artistic will. Miro has been recorded as wotkingin a similar way, but from an even mote arbitrary starting point: he is said to have once made a painting around che traces of a fallen blob of jam. Max Ernst developed a more or less attromatic method of drawing which was translatable inco oil paint, He would create a surface pattern by rubbing 2 [Andre Masson Nudes ana Architecture 1924 Bil on canvas. 73.1 %92.3 (29289) Collection Mrandirs Nesu'i Estegin, New York a André Masson Bato of Fishes 1926 Send, g6ss0 ol, pene ‘2nd charcoal on canvas 36.2% 73/144 28H) Tne Museum of Modern Art New York 44 right Max Ernst Forest and Dove 1927 ilo canvas, 100% 81.3 (39H%32) Tate Galleywith pencil or charcoal on a piece of paper laid over a rough or inceresting surface. This technique, similar to that of brass rubbing, he called ‘frottage’ Tecould be adapted for painting by laying a thickly painted canvas over a similar surface while che painewas still wet, and scraping off layers of paint. Paint clung to che indentations of the marerial undetneath so that, again, a pattern was created, This Ernst called ‘gratcage’, Both frottage and grattage provided Ernst wich involunearily produced marks our of which he could develop finished works. He called the process of calling forth images from out of these textures ‘seeing into’, and was inspired to do ic by the childhood memoty of an imitation mahogany panel see before me a panel crudely painted with large black strokes ona red background imicating the grain of mahogany and producing associations of organic forms —a threatening cye, a long nose, the enormous beak of a bird, with thick black hair and so forch (Exnst, Beyond Painting). The images Exnst obtained by means of frottage and grattage depended on an imaginative transformation of the raw material provided from the initial rubbing. In Forest and Dove, for example, Exnse used planks of wood and fish bones to provide a background texture, He then let his imagination play over the patteras the oil paint had found in the wood and bones until they suggested a forest. In the finished painting, the planks have been turned back into trees = the automatic technique which produced the image has suggested to the painter (and now suggests to the viewer) a reversal of the conversion of the natural into the man-made. Frottage can be related toa mutch older tradition of painting The ides of ‘seeing’ images hidden in non-artistie marks may be raced back to Leonardo da Vinci In his Treatise o wrote: 1 Painting Leonardo Iris nor ro be despised sn my opinion if, gazing fixedly aca spor on the wall, coals in the grate clouds, a flowing stream one remembers some of thei aspects; and if you look ar them carefully you will discover some quite admitable inventions. Of these the genitts of the painter may take full advantage, to compose battles of men and animals, landscapes or monsters. devils and ocher fantastic things Froctage, gractage, sand painting and automatic drawing are all cechniques which seek to deny, or atleast to defer until a acer stage, 2324 the individual creativity of their practitioners, ‘In striving more and more to restrain my own active participation in the unfolding of the picture and, finally, by widening in this way the active part of the mind's hallucinatory faculties [came to assist as a spectator at che bitth of all my works’ (Ernse, Beyond Painting). Decalcomania was another widely wsed technique for acheeving stich decachment, Itinvolved spreading gouache, ink or oil painconto a smooth, non-absorbent surface such as glass. Paper or canvas was then pressed onto the coated surface and, when peeled away, retained the colour of the paint in fantastically textured surfaces which could then be worked over. The surfaces themselves, like those of frottage, would suggest a direction for the finished work to cake. Collaboration was a further way to produce images which defied the rational apparatus of the artist's individual, conscious mind. Dada artists had already experimented with working collaboratively — witness Atp and Ernst’s ‘FATAGAGAS!. Surrealism, however, was a movement fot which collaboration and collectivicy were ccucially important, The naine of the movement itself had been coined 6 during two separate instances of artistic Cee comse collaboration (a ballerand a play), and Pon antnpeel and its members included artises with bryonea anes widely varying methods of practi ‘reve tose Collaboration was acthe heartof Les Champs An Rew tom miagnétigues and the period of rrances. The Survealists invented the ‘cadlavre 16 exquis' orexquisite corpse, a collaborative Joan ms verbal and visual game the results of which lovessa6 were regularly published in La Révolution One as) surréliste. Games were used by the group to iisseum wd catch out the conscious mind and ro draw . BD) Cologne direczly on the unfettered imagination. ° This patticular game hac similarities to the game of ‘consequences’, and resulted in a sentence or a drawing of a figure being completed on a piece of paper passed around the group. Each player contributed an elemene(a noun or a head. for example), folded the paper down and passed icon, The game derived its name from one particular written result: ‘the exquisite corpse will drink che new wine’ The ‘exquisite corpse’ game is an example of the continuous interchange between the poetic and the pictorial which is one of the principal characteristics of early Surrealism. While experimenting with some of the techniques ouclined above, Masson and Mité also pursued this interchange as away of making Surrealist images which might unlock the secrets of the unconscious. Masson identified in his automatic drawings a physical similarity between drawing and writing. His aucomatic drawing is much more linear than his pre-Surrealist work, which had mote of an affinity with the tightly seeuctured stefaces of Cubism, His Surrealist drawings are free-Aowing, and he himself compared the marks he made to those ofhandwriting, pacticularly automatic handwriting where the pen ot pencil is moving very fast. Masson felt that he was producing macks influenced by the appearance and experience of auromacte writing, rather than its content, and he extended this idea by dropping threads at random onto paper and drawing the resulting, handwriting-like coils and curves. Automatic writing frees words from ordinary usage. As in word association games ic is the sight and sound of one word as much as its meaning which influences the choice of another, Surrealist visual artists used this characteristic of automatic writing and speaking to enable them to make images automatically, freeing the mack from its ordinary descripeive or denotational uses, From 1925, Miré made a series of works which fused the products of verbal and visual automatism as compatible types of non-rational communication. He treated words as objects, enjoying their shape as much as their meaning, and using theit shape as well as their meaning to suggest other vistial marks and other words, In Low, fox example, Miré constructs an image of love our of a combination of verbal and visual marks. One figure is reptesented by a simple stick person, Dangling from either the lef arm or the left breast of this figure isa second figure, the literal embodiment of her love. Its body forms the lecter A of ‘amour’, the French word for love, while che other letters cascade below in a tiot of shape as well as meaning. The picture is really a ‘pictuze poemn’,a picture which tveats words, word fragments and letters as drawn shapes to be looked at, as well as coded messages to be looked through to che meanings they convey. The later A Star Caresses the Breast of a Negress ses lang- age to lead the viewer around the image. The word star (éoile) is in the upper part of the picture where a star might be expected to be. The word neg (dgresse) helps che viewer read the large form next to itas.a female figure. The painted handwriting draws attention to the visual beauty of words, while at the same time the repeating's’ and ‘e’ sounds stress theit aural elegance Miro’s Painting of t927 hasa somewhat different relationship to poetry. Like Low, it consists of a broad field of colour, animated by enigmatic marks or signs, but this rime chere are no words. The shapes, however, are ambiguous, They could refer to several chings at once and they seem to 25mething (denorational ‘code’ marks rather like 1us combinations of lines. It has been suggested Mamuelles de function both as signals of words), andas simple, s chat one source for the painting may have been Apollinaire’s Le Tirésias, the play which gave Surrealism its name. In the play, a chatacter called Thérése announces thar she is tired of being a woman and, rather than have and have a job. She senses physical changes: ‘My beatd is growing, my bosom is coming away’. She utters a loud cry and opens her blouse, fom which her breasts foat out in the form of red and blue balloons. Eventually, Thérase becomes Tirésias, a man-woman, who say's he will produce babies on his own. On che right of Mir6's picture isa breast-like eit. Below the nipple is a brown parch which babies, wants to be a a, which has a balloon b may be readable as a beard. There are several balls and balloons in the picture Titésias throws balls into the audience to represent his/her abandonment of his/her breasts. The play does not explain che picture, and the picture does uv oan Mins AStarCoresses the Breast ofa Negress (Painting Poem) 1938 Oilon canvas 129.5% 1943 (51x 76%) Fate Gallery 18 Joan Mies Poining 1927 Temperaandot on canvas 972x130 (851% Tate Gallery not illusee ate che action of the play, but the two co-exist in an imaginative, fertile relationship. Such ambiguity and possibility of meaning is the hallmark of Surzealist poetic and automatic word and picture asso. Mitd’s eq which a picture may be constructed, has similarities with collage. Collage was i by the Italian Futurists and y Max Etnst, ation, jon of words and images, his use of words as objects from an important Dada technique, and had been us. Parisian Ci that. Iewas brought into Surrealism b specifically by his firse Paris exhibition in toa bists bef. d I well remember the time when Tzara. Aragon, Soupault and [first discovere Max Ernse’ collages. We were all at Picabia’s house when they arrived from to experience again. The uscomed surroundings. Its separate Cologne. They moved us in a way that we were ne external ob d from its ac rts had liberated themselves from the obje them to enter completely new relations with other elements (Breton in Hans Richter, Dada: Art and A sf), pject had been ive context in a way that enabledFor East, collage was akin to frortage in that ic involved ‘the magistetial eruption of the irrational in all domains of art’ (Ennse, Beyond Painting) Collages, like frotcages, had their starting point outside the individual artistic imagination: One rainy day in tgrg Las seruck by the obsession which held under my :strated catalogue showing objects designed for anthropologic the pages of an il mictoscopie, psychologic, mineralog There I found brought ragether elements of figuration so remote that the sheet absurdity of the collection provoked a sudden inter: sn of the visionary faculties in me and brought foreh an illusivesuccession of contradictory imag double. reiple and multiple images, piling up on each other with the persistence and rapidity which ate peculiar to love memories and visions of half-sleep (Ernst. Booud Paineing 1nd paleontologic demonstration, Exnst began to draw directly onto such catalogues, and chen to cut them up. He took images from them and also from old nature and science journals, id drawing both formal and » he created. placing objects rogethe caphorical inspiration ftom rhe unexpected juxcapositio Brecon wrote the preface for Etnst's 192 Patis exhibition, Ie was his first system of texton art, and in it he tried co find room for the visual in the ne was to become Surtealism, He did this by equating poetry ed objects as similar units whose thought whic! , by treating words and dep might reveal Unconscious scetets ancl desites Fle compared netaphor—the comparison of like with unlike to culty of and coll combination collage to the poetic inspiration and understanding, ‘Ie is the marvellous: achiev attaining two widely separate realities without departing from the realm 27of our experience; of bringing chem together and drawing a spark from their contacr’. This, although it was written in 1921 and in the context of Dada and not yer of Survealism, comes close to a definition of the Sucrealist marvellous and to the theory of the Surrealist image which was formulated in the 1924 manifesto and which sustained and inspited Suerealist artists and poets for several years, The cheory owes something to the older poet Paul Reverdy (whom Breton admired at chis point), who obsecved chat ‘the image is a pure cretion ofthe spi it. Ie cannot be born of comparion but only of the coming together of two or more distant realities’ (Reverdy, ‘L'lmage’, Nord-Sud 13). Brecon’s understanding of the creativity thae results from the coming together of unexpected pairs also owes much to Isidore Ducasse, the self-styled Comte de Lauteéamont, a nineteenth-century poet whose work Breton rescued from obscurity by copying out the only surviving text of his Baésies in che National Library in Patis so thac it could be reprinted for a contemporary audience. In his most celebrated work, Les Chants de Maldoror. Lautréamont wrote the phrase that was adopted as che paradigmatic Suctealist image, the flag which flies over all the mysterious visual and verbal combinations of Surecalist art: ‘beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting cable’ Max Exnst achieved this kind of Surrealist ‘beauty’ in p: s collage. From 1921 he made paintings which resemble painted collages and Marémat have become known as ‘collage paintings’. These are paintings which we think —caeoes1821 of as classically ‘Surtealist’ they combine in bizarre and inexplicable contexts otoncanae well as cing avariety of objects, each painted wich a dead-pan, unremarkable, cut-ouc lonvan clariey. In Celebes, a huge ‘clephane’ confronts a beckoning, headless. nude Tate Galley female mannequin. The elephant has a horned head, but behind him is a set of tusks which suggests a second, or alternative head, True co the nature of collage, clues in the picture hinder rather than help the viewer's quest for understanding: che elephant is on solid ground, yet fish swim in the sky. The elephancis derived from two sources —one visual and one verbal. He diel not originate in Ernst’s mind, but already existed in the outside world and could, once ‘recognised’ by Ernst as a potentially fruitful image. be appropriated and elaborated upon by the arcist’s imagination. His shape is taken from a photograph of a Sudanese corn bin Emst found in a magazine, His name comes from a smutty schoolboy thyme: Der Eilephane von Celebes Theclep ani frows Celebes Har hinten erwas gelebes Der Elephant von Sumatra Der Vogel seine Grossmama Der Elephane von Indien fas sticky yollow The elephant fron Sura n grease ahays fucks his grandsnanne. The elephant from India eh Der Kann das Loch nicht findien. can never fird the In 1g23 Erase painced Pieté or Revolution by Night. The accise was again indebted to external sources, not least for his title and for the picture's composition. The painting borrows, and parodies, ctaditional ‘pieca’ imagery. The word means ‘pity’ in Icalian, and refers to images of the dead Christ in his30 20 Max Ernst Piet or Revolution by ig 1923, Dilon canes, 1162889 (45x38) ate Caliry mourning mother’s arms, Ernst transforms his source with one radical substitution: the figure of ‘Christ’ is suppocted by his father rather than his mother. The father looks a lice like Ernst’s own father. ‘Christ’ is recognisably the artist himself. He is ina stiff, crance-Iike pose, is barefoot, and wears simple cloches. Irhas been suggested chat in chis represencation of himself Ernst is referring back to a childhood escapade in which he ran away from home in his nightshirt, He encountered a group of pilgrims who compared che angelic, blond litele boy to che Christ child. On his return home, Ernst’ facher commemorated the episode by painting a picture of the child Jesus with his sons face. In Pie or Revolution by Night Ernst is once again that child, and the picture, as well a being a combination of various sources, may also pethaps be incerpreved as some kind of memory, or waking dream, of that incident, Icis possible co link this painting to the writings of Sigmund Freud. Ernstis known to have read Freud’ The Interpretation of Dreams and Jokes and their Relation tothe Uncenscious while in Germany, and Freud's writings were imporcane to the Surrealists’ explocations of the unconscious. The painting makes an oblique reference co the Freudian Oedipus complex: the desire of the developing individual co replace his father in his mother’s affections and his corresponding fear of his father's (potentially castrating) anger. Ernst may be deliberately painting a version of the Oedipus complex transposed as if in adream: Freud's theory of dreams insists that when a recognisable petson appears in a dream chey ate usually a substicute for someone else.Ernst father, in the position of the Virgin Mary, may therefore be standing in for his desired (and symbolically virgin’) mother, Evnse’s own appearance as an adule in his father’s arms may be a combination of his grown-up self with the situation of che small boy he returns co in his dreams, Freud was an important factor in Breron’s development of a theory of linguistic auromacism. Daring the Firse World Wat. Breton was stationed in ahospital which treated soldiers suffering from shell shock. The doctors in the hospital used various methods of treatment, including Freudian word- association, in which patients wete encouraged to respond co words suggested by the doctor, replying as quickly as possible, with the first word that came into their head. This eechnique influenced Breton’s post-war experimental writing, such as Les Champs magnétiques: Completely occupied as I srll was wich Freud at chat time, and familiar as I was with his methods of examination which I had some slight occasion to use o7 some patients during the war; Lesolved to obtain from myself what we were trying co obrain from chem, namely, a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without ang intervention on the part of the critical faculties, a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken thonght. chad seemed ro me, and still does .,. that the speed of thought is no greater than the speed of speech and that choughe does not necessarily defy language, nor even the fast-moving pen. Ie was in this frame of mind that Philippe Soupaule... and f decided to blacken some paper, with a praiseworthy disdain for what might reste from a literary point of view (Breton, Manifste du surréalisn) Freud's writing provided Breton and Surrealism with a context and a vocabulary in which to pursue investigations into automatic speaking, writing and image-making. His work on dreams and the psycho-sexual development of the individual supported the Surrealist’s quest for an art connected ro the unconscious. Fread identified the dream asa means of studying the drives and desires which make up the inner life of an individual. He formed the notion of a correspondence between that inner life and che external world of language and of objects, Surrealise automatic writing and speaking mimicked the methods Freud used fo gera patient to tell him thei dreams. He would ask fora spoken account of a dream —a ‘dream text’ — in which the dream’ significance for the patient’s mental stare would be hidden. Freud identified che steategies thac a speaker might use involuntarily to disguise from themselves and ftom Freud the important pacts of a dream, These unconscious straregies were consciously adopted by the Surrealists as a further way of painting the unconscious into their pictures, of finding a pictorial equivalent to auromatic poetry. at32 ry ‘Salvador Dali Metamorphosis of Narossus 1937 Olloncamvas, SL1x78.1 (20x30) Tate Galery ‘Images of concrete irrationality’ SurREALIST DREAM IMAGERY The Surrealist painter most popularly associated with Sigmund Freud is Salvador Dali, Dali wentto meet Freud in 1939, when Freud was living in exile in London. Dalt showed the psychoanalyst and writer his Metamorphosts of Narcissus. Freud's ess the artificiality of the Surrealist attempe ro recapture and recreate artistically the conditions of the unconscious mind, ‘It is nor che unconscious I seek in your pictures but the conscious’, Froud said. He made it clear that Surtealist paintings could not be ased to psychoanalysetheit painters. Instead, the artists were merely using methods and motifs drawn from psychoanalysis to give their pictures a look of the unconscious Dali’s move from Spain to Paris in the summer of 1929 had coincided wich a shife in Surrealist interescand enquiry. Although itis not possible to divide Surrealism inco two stages without over-simplifying the historical situation, itis generally true thar by 1929 the quest for pictorial automatism which preoccupied Surrealist painters in the 19203 had almost run its course ed in the United realist group were beginning to turn ponse co the picture was tos interest in this form of mark-making nevertheless rec Seates in the 19408). Members of the Su more and more to the dream as the locus of mental activity corresponding most closely to the Surrealist marvellows. This resulted in ‘dream paintings’, : paintings which refer to or ‘oneiric paintings’, as they are somecimes knowr or reduplicate the condition of dreaming. Dal’ arvival in Paris gave great impetus to this style of painting, He described his work as ‘instantaneous and hand done colour photography of the super-fine, extravagant, extra-plastic,extra-pictorial, unexploted, super-pictorial, super-plastic, deceptive, hyper notmal and sickly images of concrete irrationality’ In automatic painting, the unexpected juxtapositions of the image were supposed to arrive naturally and spontaneously on the canvas. In dream painting, the image was consciously decided upon and realistically painted. In order to photograph images of ‘concrete iationalty suggestive of the dream state, the painters most closely associated with this phase of Surrealism = Dali, Magritte, Tanguy and Ernst — used a very minucely detailed painting technique. Dream paintings owe much to collage and collage painting. Some of Ernst’s collage paintings in fact have much co do with che dream, and can be seeu both as precursors to other dream paintings of the 1930s, and as dream paintings in their own right. Dream paintings on juxtaposition for cheir effects, so the objects they feature tend to be painted with hallucinatory illusionism, or at least immediate recognisability. On seeing the Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Freud had also commented on Dali's ‘undeniable technical mastery’, a comment that points up Dali’s painstaking method of making paintings which bore litule resemblance to the exuberant, asnconscious mark-making of Surrealist automatic imagery in the 19208. The work of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chitico was very influential on Surrealist painting, If Freud provided the Surtealists with the subjece matter of the dream, and a hintas to its importance in an investigation of the workings of che imagination, then the metaphysical qualities of de Chirico’s paintings between 110 and 1920 provided a clue as to how a dream might irrealist 3lived in Patis and, in a hu sped.a way co use che traditional world of diseuption its members were familiar tion in period out in the di such paintings is, like that of dreams, at once familiat and unfamiliar Familiar beca ’smin tyle which allows2 Giorgio de Chitico The Uncertainty ofthe Poet 1913 lloncamas 108%94 (214x537) Tate Galery the viewer to recognise objects, unfamiliar because of the strange, dream-like contexts into which he paints them, The objects in de Chirico’s paistings exist in an uneasy juxtaposition; the space in which they are placed is one of quiere, forbidding uncercainy. Oneitic paincings refer in several different ways to the nature of dreaming, Some are records of a dream actually experienced by the artist—a kind of pictorial dream work, where the painting of the picture functions like the recounting of adream. One early example of this is Exnst’s Pita or Revolution by Nigitof 1023, [his painting's combination of a kind of automatism with a concern for the dream helps to disrupt che idea of aneat division of Surtealise art inco two halves detertnined by the decade in which it belongs. As well as memories of a childhood escapade, the painting may also have details of a particular dream deliberately embedded within it. Phe vision of the mahogany panel which inspired frottage is part of the account of a dream or ‘fever vision’ which Ernst experienced: A fever vision: I see before me a panel cradely painted with laxge black strokes on ared background imieating the grain of mahogany and provoking associations of organic forms ~a chrearening eye. a long nose, the enormous head of a bird with thick black hair, and so forth, In front of the panel a shiny black man makes slow comic, and, according ¢o che memories of a time long past, joyously obscene gestures, This odd fellow wears my father's moustaches. Afeer several leaps in slow motion which revolt me, legs spread, knees folded, corso bent. he siniles and takes from his pocket a big crayon made from some soft material which [cannot more precisely describe. He sets to work. Breathing loudly he hastily traces black lines on the imication mahogany. Quickly he gives it new, suxptising and despicable forms. He exaggerates the resemblance to ferocious and vicious animals to such an extent thar they become alive, inspiring me with horror and anguish. Satisfied wich his art, che man seizes and gathers his creations into a kind of vase which, for this purpose, he paints in the ait. He whirls the contents of the vase by moving his crayon faster and faster. The vase ends up by spinning and becomes a top. The crayon becomes a whip. Now I realise that this strange paincer is my fathes. Wath all his might he wields the whip and accompanies his movements with terrible gasps of breath, blasts from an enormous and enraged locomotive. With a passion thar is frantic, he makes the top jump and spin round my bed. Etnst’s dteam seems, among ocher possible interpretations, to be about his father, and about painting, His father was an amareur painter, who disapproved of his son’s Dada and Suctealist ways of working, Piet or Revolution by Night contains several references to the processes of making art: parts are drawn, parts are monochrome, and only some areas ate completely painted The paintings of Dali and Magritte make use of a rescricted range of motifs which reappear again and again in each artist’s work, almost like recurring dreams or nightmares. Magritte’s The Annunciation brings together three of his favourive motifs — a curtain of iron with bell-like shapes on it,a sheet of paper cut out likea child's paper snow!lake, and enlarged balusters or “pilboquets' (Magriete's word) which urn up again and again in his pictures, plunging the viewer and the other motifs in the paintings into an Alice-in- Wonderland world of enlargement and miniaturisation, 35The action of Dali’s Autumnal middle of the plain of Ampurdin, near Dali’s home in Catalonia. On this cable, ewo almost human creatures eat cach other, surrounded by typically Dalinian objects. The beans, crutch, apple, pieces of meat, bread and cluscering anes may all be found in other paintings. In a familiar secting, from familiar objects, Dali concocts a decidedly unfamiliar drama With this drama, Dali is trying to simulace the conditions of the dream Racher than painting any particular dream, he investigaces what dreaming is like: whar ivis suddenly co find yourself in the middle of a world governed by the nonsensical rules of che dveam. The paincing sets up a scene of lism takes place om arable setin the hallucination. The plain of Ampurdan is continuous with the table che creatures are resting ons it changes scale and shape. The rable also seems to merge nightmarishly wich the creatures themselves. One cutlery drawer emerges from the chest of che right-hand figure, As well as xeduplicaring che strange metamorphoses which occur in deeams. this may also refer to another Freudian phenomenon. Believing as he did thac the actual words used by a patient to recount cream held che key co the dream’s significance, Freud laid gzeat imporcance on figures of speech. Dali painted Ausuonnal Cannibalism in 1936, the year of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. Conroy Maddox, a British Surrealise pamcer, remembers Dali being fascinated by the evocative power of certain English expressions: chimney breast, chest of23 René Maghitte Tre nnunciavon 1930 ‘Aiton canvas 113.7% 145.9 (enxs7H) “ate Galley 24 Salvador Dali Auturnnal 1938 Gitoncamvas 65.1x65.1 (254254) Tate Gallery balm zawers. In this painting he imagines the hallucinatory hortors that such a phrase mighr conceal. Magritte's Man witha Newspaper sets up the kind of inexplicable narvative into which dreams translate the actions and activities of every-day lives. Icis presented sequentially, as four frames of a porential story. What the story may be, however, is radically uncertain, and Magritte offe The source for the picture is in face not a deeatn n Magrieee sno clue: ican illusera found ina book, The Natural Method of Healing, a popular ‘new and complere guide to health’, published in 1898. The focus of the illustration was the stove, which in Magticte's adaptation takes on amore and more sinister aspect as the eye moves across and down the canvas and the mind ponders the sudden, disappearance or invisibility of the newspaper-reading man, Magritee's Rerklss Sleeper expresses a confidence in the symbolism of the team, in its ability to express the richness of the toner world of che imma ination. The picture signals an acceptance of the Freudian notion that every-day objects are transformed in dreaming into significant signs and focus points of desire and distress. Magritte paints a man asleep in a coffin- like box. Below him, ser ina cloudy sky, is grey form into which are pressed several ordinary, even banal objects, The grey form looks a littie like a head, or perhaps a headstone. The suggestions that the objec shave some significance for the man, that they perhaps sum him up in some way. The painting is38 ambiguous, as are dreams. lemay be about death, in which case the objects function as hiecoglyphic symbols ona tombstone, recaptaring for posterity the details of the man’ life and idencity, The citle tells us chat itis about sleep —unquiet sleep —and thus the objects become dream objects, symbols of the reckless sleeper’ innermost desires. Although some of the abjects in The Reckless Sleeper have Freudian connotations (the candle and che bowler hat are classic Ereudian symbols for male and female sexual parts), che picture s too ambiguous simply to be ‘about’ one aspect of Exeud's thought. Dali's Metamorphosis of Nartisus, however, is intended to be directly Freudian, Its the painting which the artist showed co Freud, and it depicts the classical myth which Freud used to explain che stage in the psycho-sexual development of an individteal which comes before the infamous Oedipus complex, The scory the painting recells is that of the youth Narcissus, turned by the gods into anarcissus flower as punishment for his self- os obsession and inability co love René Magritte anyone ocher than his own Man witha Newspaper reflection in alake. Freudian ine . ; on canvas narcissism is anearly stageinthe her formation of an individual's ego. (482) The subject begins ro be aware of "*eSelley their sextial drives and desites and seeksalove object. The first love 28 René Mognte object they choose is their own Ine Recto Sleever body. In a normal individual, 1928 narcissism should be only a passing olancsnvas phase, but the youth of Greek souls mythology was, according tothe {eae Freudian system, saffering from arrested development and could not stop staring at his own beauty looking back at him from the surface of the lake. Dali chose to paint che moment of Narcissus’ transformation into. Aower, On the left of the pictuze kneels youth, looking at his reflection. As che viewer looks at this image, sorting ovr its racher complicated configuration of knees and elbows, it becomes obvious that itis exactly matched by an image of an enormous stone hand holding an egg from which bursts a narcissus flower. Once the eye has been drawn over the surface of the picture to examine this new shape, itis difficule ¢o return co Narcissus without involuntarily seeing the hand and the egg superimposed on top of him. This is his fare, His punishment occurs as the viewer looks at the picture. The viewer is responsible for the metamorphosis of Narcissus. ‘The similarity beeween the figure of Narcissus and the image of the stone hand and egg makes them fuse together into a kind of double image. This was one of Dali's gifts to Surrealism, and was the resule of his famous’ paranoiac~critical method’. This was essentially a method for the creative misteading of the visual world. {¢ was related to contemporary research by Freud and Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst and theorist who was in direct contact with Dali and the Surrealist group in the early 1930s, Both Freud and = Lacan were interested in the clinical condition of paranoia, a mental illness which causes the sufferer to interpret visual information wrongly — to start ‘seeing things’. In 1930, Dali decided that he would simulate paranoia, and deliberately misinterpret what he saw, in order to use the resulting misinformation as a basis for painting, Paranoiacs are often convinced that 3940 7 Salvador Dali ‘Mountain Lake 1938 Siloncanvas 28 below Reng Magritte The Treachery af mages 28-9 Oitoncaras 64.5194 (254%37) Los ingots county saoseum ot Puchased with nds briided oy the rand sits Wom Preston HamsanColecton 29 night Alberto Giacomett Suspended Ball 1930-1 Plasterand metal H.60(294) Paste Collectionhey see the same thing over and over again in dlfferene places. as they project theit own mental images onto the world around shem, Dal’s simulated paranoia, his paranofac-critical method, allowed him, like a paranoiac, to re- order the world according to his interior obsessions. The boundary between the teal and the imagined became ambiguous, and his pictures came to represent the space of the dream or the marvellous, a space where everything you see is potentially something else. Dali brought this about by introducing double images into his paintings. taneously. In his Mos images which represent two or more objects sin Take, a telephone is suspended on two crutches in front of a lake. Reflections of the rocks behind ripple and texture the lake's surface. One of chem, the ,isveflected smallest rock, on the right of the pictur inthe lake as an intense red gash. Visual concenteation on this gash reveals that the lake is also the image of afish Iying on a able, The reflected tack, in this interpretation, becomes the gills of the fish. while ahitherto insignificant splash of ‘water’ stands in for a tail. With a little imagination, the same reflected rock can turn the fish into a penis or phallus while the gash is readable as a vagina. As in Metamorphosis of Narcissus, the image undergoes a huge change of scale from lake to fish to phallus. The multiple image relies on Dali's minutely detailed and ‘realistic’ technique, whereby an element overlooked in one reading of che painting — the ‘lake’ — the reflection of the rock in the surfac is the pivotal point of its paranoid transformation Surrealist paintings tend co be object based. In order to discredit and destabilise perceived normality, Surrealist artists manipulated recognisable abjects. blucring the boundary between the real and the imaginaty. Thus, Magricte’s The Treachery of Images confronts the viewer with an illusionistic pipe. Atthe same time, the picture's caption denies that it isa pipe. A brief moment of disorientation enstes until the contradiction is resolved ic is not a pipe. but rather a painting of a pipe. Neither the image nor the caption is lying to the viewer The painting does, however, act out the warning implied by ies ttle: the image is so illusionistic that its treacherous, making us ‘sce’ something (a real pipe) that isnot really there, Perhaps even real pipes are treacherous. The painting makes us doubt that we can rely on our perception of things A notion of objects as untrustworthy is of course central to Surrealism: the marvellous, che dream and the unconscious mind are all places of incipient metamorphosis where objects, symbols of irrational desires, are dden mutation, Dali’s double images are supremely expressive of iinked to his second major contribution to Surrealisin — his subject 60 5 this and ar formulation of a theory of the Surrealist object. Surzealise objeces were, like the double images of Dali’s paranoiac-critical method, the resule of the projection onto the outside world of the innerme sc thoughts and desires of30 Salvador Dali LonsterTelgstone 1936 Plastic, painted plaster ‘and mixed mecha 17833178 (713x7) Tate Galley the artist, As early as 1924, in his Lntroduction ae discon sr le pv de ralté (Introduction to the Discourse on the Paswity of Reality) Breton described objects invented whilst dreaming Recently, while I was asleep, I came actoss a rather curious book in an open-air ket near Saint-Malo. The back of the book was formed by a wooden gnome whose white beatd clipped in che Assysian manner, reached to his feet. The book was of ordinary thickness, but didnt prevene me from turning the pages, which swore of heavy black cloth. Iwas anwious to buy irand, upon waking, was sorry not to find it near me. Ic is comparatively easy to recall it, Lwould like 60 pu i cixculacion certain objects of this kind, which appear eminently problematical and ineriguing. pande By 1935, the ambition Breton had for such objects had e I pursued was no less than the objectification of the activity of dreaming, its passage into reality’ (Breton, La Crise de bjt). Although the Surrealise object as such was ‘invented! and formalised by fyeameredeup,saveer Dal, its history really begins with Giacometti, the Swiss sculpeor associated andspeon 4 oe 7.3% 23.7 (39K) Te Museumef¥ecem sculpture was a projection of desire rather than the resuleof any formal or arNew or aesthetic manipulation of material. He said of his Sucrealist work that ‘the sculpttes presented themselves eo my mind entirely accomplished’. Like the object in Bretor’s dream, Giacomerti’s sculptures came to him from his unconscious, rather than his conscious mind and, as in the Surrealists’early periments wich pictorial aucomatisin, he used chance as a way to tap into his unconscious, In L'Amour fou (Mad Love), Breton recalls how Giacometti once found amask ina lea market. The mask solved a problem Giacometti was ‘The goal a1 Meret Oppetoin abject Fur Betsy 936 with the Surrealist movement between 1930 and 1935. Giacomet#i insisted thathaving with the head of his seuiiprure of a woman called Invisible Objet. Te appeared to him as exactly che ‘right’ form to wse to complete che sculpture. Brecon fele that Giacometti was projecting his desire to solve his sculptural problem onto the objects on the market stall. The mask’s appearance was an example of ‘hasard objectif’ or objective chance —a coincidence manipulated by the unconscious mind. In 1930 Giacomerci made Suspended Ball. A ball with a slit init, suspended over a wedge shape, it isa sculpture which calls out for the participation of the viewer. The ball begs to be swung over and along the wedge, trailing ambiguous sexual metaphors as it goes. The sculpture seems to be about desire and che frastracion of desire: che viewer cannot push the ball, and che ball does nor anyway quite fit over the wedge. In December 193t, Breton published Suspended Ballin issue theee of Le Surréalisie ay service dela révohution, as part of Giacomettis essay ‘Objects mobiles et muets' (moveable and silent abjects). This was immediately preceded by Dali's ‘Objets surtéalistes’ (Suarreafist objects) in which he offered a catalogue of the Surrealist object directly inspired by Suspended Ball. In his article, Dali, in deliberately impenetrable, ‘Dalinian’ language, identifies six categories of the Surtcalist object: the object of symbolic functioning (auromatic origin); eransubstantiated objects (affective origin); objects to project (oneitic origin); weapped objects (diurnal fantasies); machine objects (experimental fantasies and moulded objects (bypnagogic otigin), Dali only discusses his first category, in which he places Suspended Ball ‘a ball of wood marked by a female groove suspended by a violin string above a crescent whose sharp edge skims the cavity. The spectator instinctively wishes to slide the ball along the ridge, which the length of the string only partially permaies’, He also discusses several other objects made by members of the Surrealist group (himself, Brecon, his wife Gala and Valentine Hugo) as similarly ‘based on the phantasms and representations susceptible of being provoked by the realisation of unconscious acts’. 43,44 Dali’s categorisation and classification of the Surrealist object unleashed arorvenc of creativity, culminating in an exhibition at che Galerie Charles Raton in 1936, Surrealist objects tended to rely on assembly more than craftsmanship and, being easily made, were a creative endeavour which united the group and artracred new collaborators, At their best, the objects combined che wit of Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ (see p.cq) with the enexpecred and sometimes unsettling insight of exquisite corpse gure drawings. Dali's own Lobster Tellphonr of 1936 plays on the untrustworthiness of objects incroduced in Mageitce’s The Treaobery of Images. Noticing cevtain similarities between a telephone recenver and a lobster— they are the same shape, have a similar texture, and make the same squealing noise when roused (or cooked) — Dali substituted the second for the first, The resulting object; while amsing, suggests that we pray be foolish to take for granted the inanimate innocence of our telephone The telephone hints at a narrative. Its effect comes froma tealisation of wha it would be like to pick ap the ‘receiver’. The most famous of afi Surrealist objects has a similarly time-based and narrative implication: Meret Oppenheitn’s Fer Breabfastis 2 beautiful, eactile thing which hegins to mobilise ambiguities of desite and d using it, raising the cup co cheit lip crust when the viewer imagines Oppenheim reinvents a mundane, familiar object as an erotic fantasy of oral and vaginal sexual pleasure. In cladding a teacup and saucer with fur, she makes a fetish objec A fetish is cither an object believed to possess a magical power, or an object which has caken on an exceptional etoric significance fora particular individual. Fetishism thus encompasses both cultural and psycho-s observation and speculation, and Europe in che early pact of the century. The Surrealists knew of it through their interest in the art and society of ‘primitive peoples’ as well as through theit reading of Freud. Breton used the term tarely but he did use icin the context of the Surrealist object, which Dali also described in ferishiscie terms, as being a device which enabled people to touch and manipulate their ‘phobias, manias, feelings and desires’. A complex and ambiguous concept, the fetish occupies place on the boundary between dream and reality. imagination and experience. In cultural terms, itis link between the European and the primitive or other’. The 19208 and 1930s saw colonial expeditions into African territories which brought back artefacts exhibited in Paris as objects mid-way between sculptures and curios. Many of these were fetishes in a purely cultural sense, thats objects of worship or of magical power for their original owners, but they also operated as pseudo psychoanalytic fetishes: objects onto which could be projected a European romanticisation of the cultures from which they came. The exuial much discussed in2 ‘Hans Bellmer Tra ol!1936/65 Painted aluminium on brassbase 95.4%26% 22.9 (2B: 103} Tate Galley Surrealists in general disapproved of colonial activity (the group published a tract entitled Ne visites pas lxpesition eoloniale De not Visit he Coloral Exbibition) ony che occasion of the Great Parisian Colonial Exhibition of 1951. They were, however, fascinated by non-European cultures and the objects they produced as potential sources for the marvellous — objects produced without the curse of Western sophistication and rationalicy. Although it was Bataille who, ia his teview Documents, published the most thoughtful and insightful ethnographic articles, Breton and his fellows were great collectors and investigators of African and Oceanic objects An awareness of the psychoanalytic implications of the fetish came to Surrealism through the work of the nineteenth-century psychologist Alfred Binet as well as from Sigmund Fread, Binet fele chat ‘every fetishist in love’, and discussed the fetish as che physical embodiment of a mental obsession or desite. This becomes abnormal, or pathological, when, frusceated in (or even unaware of)a sexual desire, an individual diverts this desire onto an inanimate object, item of clothing or part of the body, most usually hands, fee, hair or eyes. In the Freudian system, a fetishist suffers from a perversion or diversion of the sexual drive. A traumatic early realisation of sexuality (brought about, Freud claimed, by the shock of the discovery of the absent marernal penis) causes the fetishist to become fxared on amatetial substitute fora secretly desited individual. Iris che fetish, therefore, that supports both the ‘alien’ and the sexual narire of the Surrealist object. Into the spaces of waking reality, che abyect inserts material evidence of the dream as unknown territory. fraught with psycho- sexual possibility. Surzealist objects are odd, disorientating and often vaguely (or specifically) sexually disturbing. Playing with che fetish as a realisation ot manifestation of desive, Surrealist artists sometimes pushed this one stage further co literalise che implications of fetishism itself, For example, the fetishist may become fixated on a fragment of the desired individeal’s anatomy. Fragmentation is close to dismemberment, and several Surrealist objects feature severed arins ot hands, wrenched from the body in a violenely imagined past narrative. Hans Bellmer (who was a member of the Surzealise g7oup from 1933 but who did not come to Paris ¢o work until 1938) developed both che fragmentation and the substicution or displacement embedded within the fetish and he Dalinian Surrealise object. He made for himself an artificial adolescene gitl ‘I shall construct an artificial girl whose anatomy will, make it possible to recreate physically the dizzy heights of passion and do so to the extent of inventing new desires’. A work derived from his Doll was shown at the exhibition of Surrealist objects at the galérie Charles Ratton in 16%6 as Jointure de boulrs, Ie consisted of a pair of wooden doil’s arms, ball- joinced at the elbows and wrists, and joined at the shoulder so as to suggest a pair of legs. In chis joint, where a valva might be expected, was.a glass eye. Bellmer’s Doll was a woman both reduplicated and dismembered, reassembled as a manifestation of Bellmer’s deliberately perverted desire. body is more ot less 4546 a3 René magi The Hidden Woman Reproduction surrounded by photogrepts ofthe Surealists, 3 ‘Secon sunaliste 10.12, December 1928 Je ne vois pas la femme’ Women IN SURREALISM Tn December 1929, the last issue of La Révolution suréalist illustrated, in che middle of an enquiry into ‘what kind of trast do you place in love”, a photomonrage combining Magritte’ painting La Femine cachée( The Fd Woman) with mugshots of the male Parisian Surrealists, The canvas is inscribed along the top ‘Je ne vois pas la’ and along the bottom ‘cachée dans le forée’ (Ido not see the... hidden in the forest). In between there is a standing female nude. The artists all have their eyes closed: they do not see the woman, who is hidden in the title of the painting but clearly visible co the reader of 4g che magazine who is invited to fill in the gap in the inscription. The fact that jiberto cacomett the men all have their eyes closed suggests that they are in a state of trance or ang Women dream, that they are in communication with their mcerior selves rather than 8523/1888 can making concact with the reader. The woman looks away, and a series of howe oppositions is set up between herand the men: they are many, she is one; they 1438%276x378 are clothed, she is naked; they are recognisable individuals, she is goxita5 undifferentiated, a generic ‘woman’ This image forms a companion to one from che first issue of La Révelution te which combines a photograph of Germaine Berton with similarly scaled portrait shots of the members of the Surtealist group, Berton was an anarchist who assassinated Maurice Plateau, a leader of the Catholic Action “francaise group. The Surrealists celebrated her as a disruptive force, and captioned her image with a quoration from the nineteenth-century poet Charles Baudelaire: Woman is the being who projects the greatest shadow or the greatest light into our dreams’ survéIn both these images, woman is presented as being in closer touch than man with the desired irrationalicy of the dream. The implication of the later image is that the men are searching for the woman, following h ‘forest’ of the marvellous, The men are all writers and artists and so the woman, concealed as she is within a verbal ax muse who might lead the men towards artistic creativity. In French, a gendered language, she is present. if camouflaged, in the inscription alone ='lacachée’ implies a hidden femininity, The Surrealist muse has several incarnations, Women were welcomed into the movemnent: as lovers, friends, as she earns away into the creative {visual gaine, Functions asa participants in games and collaborative image-making sessions and, from the 19308, asartists. However, the founder and best- known members of the group were men and, artistically, their attention tended to be focused on ‘woman’ rather than women. Women joined the movement — Eileen Agar, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Valentine Hugo, Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Meret Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, Toyen and Remedios Varo were all associated with the movement from the later 1930s — but from the beginning Surrealism looked to exploit as well as support thera, One of the most viswally striking manifestations of this is the ‘ty of the mannequin, an image which came into Surrealism through the work of de Chirico and was widely painted and sculpted as a figuration of woman as muse, Headless (and therefore ‘matvellously’ creative, free from the constraints of rationality, ‘out of her head’, even), often armless and ultimately manipulable, the presence of the mannequin in Surrealist imagery evidences the artists’ Pygmalion-like obsession with woman as a perfect being who co desires. Giacomerti’s Hidking Homan is a bronze cast of a plaster sculpture called Mannequin which originally had two outstretched arms — one ending ina bunch of feathers, che other in a flower-like hand —and ahead made from the scroll of acello, Giacometti removed the sculpture’s arms just before showing it in London in 1936. The woman is walking, again leading both her creator and the viewer towards the desired marvellous ~a state beyond or outside che cyranny of the rational mind, popul 4 bring them closer to thei hearts’ 47In 1938; visitors co the International Surrealist Exbibition LA REVOLUTION in Paris were ushered into the presence of the 48 SURREALISTE, Settalstimagination by a long ine of shop “ mannequins, each dressed and distorted by a different fe artist. The Surrealist mannequin is closely related to ‘ the doll — the dolls of Bellmer’s nasrily imagined ideal’ adolescent femininity, ferish dolls and children’s coys. The Surrealist muse was herself something of a doll: Brecon’ ideal of femininity was the femme- enfant’ or child-woman. Combining two beings with privileged access to the marvellous, the femme-enfant, young, naive and in touch with her own unconscious, was a role which could be adapted by, or thrust upon, real as well as imagined women. In 1927 a femme-cnfant appeared on the cover of La Revolution surréaliste. In a school uniform, aca child’s desk, she takes dictation from her own of someone else's imagination, The following year, 35 Brecon mec Nadja Cost ttn . sunelste nas 9-1 Nadja was the archetypal femme-enfant. A real young woman whom Sure Breron pursued and loved, she was the subject of his book Nadja, a novel which is ostensibly about their brief relationship (which ended with Nadja being institutionalised for mental iliness). In reality, however, che book is Neyer about Brecor's quest for self-knowledge and creative freedom through his \aleanscuns liaison with Nadja. A muse. in helping a writer unleash his creativity, also helps him find 37 gt himself Nadja had clairvoyant powers; Sanat according to Brecon she had ‘passed through ty Mate to the other side of the mirror’, and he wanted become aps Dre to join her there. The book is much more eras of Cun, about him than it is about her: narrared by eon Brecon in the fist person it begins ‘Who am I? Oionwed and ends with a photograph of the author. 6159 (24x 20% Pinte cae Although Nadja actually existed, the reader her onlyas an arcificia, cextual reconstruction of herself. She is a catalyst, a pretext for writing, amuse, As ‘her’ story unfolds, the reader knows less and less of Nadja, and by the end she seems only to have been the figment of the imagination she has been instrumental in unlocking. Rather than reality, she inhabits only the marvellous, A Freadian addition co the Surrealist understanding of woman as amuse with a duty of revelacion caine from Freud's published analysis of the German shoct story Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy by Wilhelm Jensen. In the story, Gradiva is a girl pictured ona Greek stone relief with which Norbert Hanold, a young archaeologist, is obsessed. Hanold becomes fixated on Gradiva’s gaicas itis tepresenced on the relief, and he calls her the git] ‘splendid in walking’. Hanold cieasns that Gradiva was buried alive in the know:wreckage of Pompeii, and he travels there co see if he can find any traces of her, Once in Pompeii, he mects a girl, also ‘splendid in walking, who he is convinced is Gradiva or her reincarnation, She is in facta long-abandoned childhood sweetheart, Zoé Bertgang. Once Hanold realises this, he is cured of his obsession with the Greek religf and is free ro live normal life with Zoé. Fread points our thac Bertgang in German means ‘splendid in walking’. He concludes that Hanold has been obsessed with Zoi all along, and that meecing her has released his repressed desire Zo’-Gradiva isa femme enfant, She combines elements from womanhood and child- hood, and her role is to help Hanold solve the mysteries of his unconscious, She is a site of exchange between dream and reality and, as such, was venerated by the Surtealists. In 1937 Breton opened the Gradiva gallery, with a pamphlet dedicated to che ideal of Surrealist child- womanhood: From the book of childzen’ images to the book of poetic images GRADIVA On che bridge which links dreaming to reality « GRADIVA On the borders of utopia and cruth—culy alive G R A D 1 Vv A like Giséle. Rosine, Allice. Dora, Mies, Violette. Alice In Surrealist verminology, Geadiva became ‘she who advances’ because of Hanold!s obsession wich the way she walked, and because the Sutrealists saw heras a woman who leads Hanold forward towards self-discovery. Her gaze was strong enough ro pierce che walls which. in the story are symbols (Hanold is, after all, an archaeologist) for the defences the adult builds against the repressed wishes and desites of childhood. Salvador Dali had his own Gradiva, his wife Gala: ‘Gala is erinity: She is Gradiva, she who adyances. She is, according to Paul Eluard, the woman whose gaze pierces walls’. Dali met Gala when she was still marvied to the poet Paul Eluard, in the summer of 1929 when the couple visited him in38 Ithelt Colquhoun Soyo 1938 Oilonboard 91.461 (36% 24) Tate Gallery 39 Elleen Agar Angel of Anarchy 1936-40, Textiles over plasterand ied media 22x31,7 33.6 (208% 128% 13%) Tate Gatery Spain. Like Hanold, Dali claimed that he ‘recognised! in Gala a reincarnation of a childhood friend: ‘Gala, Eluard’s wife, It was she! I had just recognised herby her bare back’ Gala became Dal’s wile and his muse, He painted her obsessively, absorbing her into his world of dream imagery and testing our his ‘paranoiac’ ideas on her well-known and well-loved form. Her bare back, in patticulau, becamea vehicle for experimentation. Ia roqs he painted My Wif, Nad, Watching fer own Body hconse Steps, Three Vertebrae of a Colne, Sky and Architecture. Much like Breton’s Nadja, Gala also became an instrument chrough which Dali might gain self-knowledge, belonging so completely to his iconography that her appearance in 2 painting is as much a symbol of him as a representation of her. In the poem which Dali wrote to accompany Metamorpbosisof Narcissus he identifies Gala as himself: When that head slits when chat head splits when that head bursts ‘will be the flowe: the new Narcissus, Gala— my Narcissus. Gala was not herself an artist, A strong, intelligent woman, she was, however, fally complicit in Dali's manipulation of her image. She participated in his Surrealist games and flamboyant excess, and she managed his finances. She has even been blamed for Dal’s etansformation into ‘Avida Dollars’, Breton’s anagrammiatic name for the artist's post-war, money-grabbing; American persona. The kind of metamorphoses practised by Dali on Gala's body were, however; ripe for reclamation by other: female, artists. In 1938, for example, Ithell Colquhoun painted Sey Like Metamorphosis of Narcissus, the painting refers toa Greek myth. Seylla was a nymph who lured sailors towards dangerous, clashing rocks on the Italian side of the Straits of Messina, The painting shows the rocks with a boat coming towards them. Bue Scylla is a double image, and the artist wrore that it ‘was suggested by what I could see of myself in a bath’. This demands change of scale and narrative implication: the twin rocks become knees, ready to clash together at the approach of the chrearening, phallic boat and the painting becomes a powerful reassertion of a woman’ tight to het own bod Although we only see part of the body in Saya, this is because of the artist's own physical view of herself and not as a result of any fetishistic or idealistic displacement of male desire. Between 1934 and 1936 Eileen Agar, another British artist, made Angel of Anardhy. Jes ost, s0 she made a second and different version (fg39)- This assemblage re-works, fom a female perspective, the paradigm of woman as 5152 muse with privileged access to both her own and her manipulator’ unconscious. Agar’s angel is blinded, a traditional ‘scer’, seeing only the images of the imagination. Its gorgeously dressed in richly textured materials bur, crucially, is not female, The head was case in plaster from a clay porteait bust of Joseph Bard, che Hungarian poet Agar later married. The object’ title refers co Herbert Read, the critic partly responsible for bringing Surrealism co Brivain, Agar wrore chat the title was suggested by the fact that Herbert Read was known to the Surtealists as a benign anarchist’ The women actively involved in Surrealism were introduced to the movement through personal contact with its existing members, and through exposure ro theie increasingly visible art. Throughout the 1930s several women came to Paris to live and work, contributing to the daily life, conography and ideology of Surtealism, and also, by teturning home oF moving on, to the movement's expansionist ambitions. The Spanish artist Remedios Varo, for example, met the poet Benjamin Perec in Barcelona, wheve she had moved in search of the artistic avant garde. She moved with Peret co Paris and, with the outbreak of the Second World Wat, to Mexico where che couple were at the centre of a group of exiled Surrealist artists. The Czechoslovakian artist ‘Toyen came to Paris for three years in 1925, Returning to Prague, her work came closer to Surrealism, her paintings floating strange, often sexually provocative motifs against seemingly automatic, abstracted backgrounds. With the painter Styrskf, she founded a Czech Surrealist group in Prague, before being forced by the German occupying forces to flee back to Paris in 1947. Leonora Carrington, an English painter and writer, was given Herbert 40 Leonora Carrington SelfPorrait 1938 faiton canvas 50.2% 267 (39% 10%) YalinYoung archive collection a Loonora Camington Pontantof Max Emst 01839 non canvas, 50.2267 9108) Browster Arts LidRead's book Surrealism in 1936. Captivated by Exnst’s paintings veproduced in the book, she met him at the opening of his exhibition at the Mayor gallery in London in 1937 and moved with him co France. They stayed together until the outbreak of the Second World War, and Carrington began to paint and wrice in a Surrealist manner. She produced cwo paintings which express both her relationship with Ernst and her personal re-working of the possibilities of the Surrealist imagination: Sef Portraitand ortait of Max Evust. To Self Portrait, Cactington paints herself ina room full of che izvationally creative potential of the marvellous. The Victorian chair on which she sits has aman hands and feee ae the end of ies ‘aus’ and ‘legs'. She is approached by amulti-breasced hyena, magically conjured froma puff of smoke Behind her floats a demarerialised rocking horse. matched by the horse who gallops away from the open window. Animace and inanimate merge in this painting, and the space it depicts is mid-way between deeam and reality, Recognisably Surrealist, i¢is also a space of self-exploration, a space on the boundary berween adult knowledge and childish quest. Asa child, Carrington enjoyed an imaginary friendship with a roy rocking horse and in her story The House of Fear, written in 1937, che horse appears as her alter-ogo, a friendly spiritual guide, leading the heroine of the story into a world of mystery and transformation governed by che figure of Fear. Fear is eventually banished by the birdman Loplop, the alter-ego of ‘Max Ernse, Ernst wrore an introduction to Carrington’s story, and made collages with which to illustvate it, Carringcon's Portrait of Max Ernst vecre: the male artist as a mystical figure of transformation and rescue. Bird-like and also fish-like, Ernst is a vivid splash off colour, capable of liberating and reviving both the frozen horse behind him and the one trapped in the glass of the lantern he catries. If the bird and the horse may be read as totemic substitutions for Carrington and Brnst, che picture perhaps reverses conventional Surrealist mnale/ female behaviour: Carrington may be claiming Ernscas her ‘muse’ 53‘What then is this Surrealist activity or Surrealism?’ SURREALISM IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA In 1932, Edward W. Titus, the editor of the English periodical This Quarter, attempted to answer this question, posed by himself in response to the overwhelming enthusiasm for Surtealism expessed among Parisian college students and reported in the French daily newspaper L'Iutransigeant( The Intransigent). Titus invited André Breton to edit a special edition of his periodical so thae the ‘English speaking world’ — Britain and the United States — could judge the movement for itself. Titus attempted an sists of the cultivation and practice nition: Surrealism cc introductory cof communicating the unconscious by writing, painting, seulprure and other means’, Breton began the issue with his own ‘Surrealism Yesterday, To-day and To-morrow’, in which he summarises che Surrealist intellectual revolution from its origins in Dada before the writing of the 192.4 manifesto. His essay intended to ‘Arche time of this writing new shivers are running through the starts with a quotation from Laucréamone which is clea! inspite: mtellectual atm here: ic only needs courage to face them’. Breton es Surrealism an English heritage, claiming Lewis Carroll, Swift, Synge and the Gothic novelists as Surrealist before the fact, much as he Lautréamont and the poet Rimbaud in France. Quoting his own Manifest, ctuctions for the practice of automatic writing: ad done with Breton issties English in Having settled down in some spot most conducive to the minds concentzation upon itself, order writing matetial to be brought you. Lec your state of mind bea Roland Penrose The Last Voyage of Captain Cook 1935/87 Painted wood, plaster andsteal 69.2% 6682.5 (275.x26%325) Tate Gallery as passive and eeceptive as possible, Forget your genius, ralents, as well as the genius and talents of others, Repeat to yourself thar literature is pretty well the sostiest road that leads to everywhere. Write quickly without any previously chosen subject, quickly enough not to dwell on, and nor to be tempted to read over, what you have wricten, Breron's stummary of the history of Surtealism includes its more turbulent moments. His article makes reference to the schisms of 1928 and 1929, when the unity of che movement was threatened by Georges Bataille and the rival group he gathered around the publication Dacumenis [Surrealism | did noc shrink from disqualifying and severing relations with, all those who wanted to be content with thae minimum of common activity which could be innoctously practised in liceracute and art’. Brecon’ Seconde manifested surréalisme detailed somae of the circimstances of these disqualibications, In it, Breton disassociated the movement from the work of Bataille, Antonin Artaud, Masson (who later came back into favour) and Soupaale. In ‘Surrealism Yesterday, To-Day and To-Morrow’, Brecon also mentions the political crisis within Survealism precipitated by Aragon’s poem Front Rotige (Red Fron!). Surrealism had always had an uneasy relationship with the French Communist Party. Although itself revolutionary, Surrealism was concerned swith che spiricwal and emotional rather than the macerial, and Breton, although briefly a member of che Commanise Party, found it difficult to reconcile che two. In the early t9 30s, Surrealism began to be pursued along two different paths —one of political commitment and activity and one of the continued exploration of the unconsciotis. The split came to ahead and56 oucin the open when Aragon, attending the Second Incernational Congress of Revolutionary Writers in Karkhov, failed to defend the “Surrealist line’ as set out by Breton. Aragon inscead participated in a general denunciation of idealism and Surrealism and committed himself to a ‘general’ or Marxist Tine. Back in Paris, he published the poem Front Rougeas proof of his tevolutionat credentials. He was accused of anti-governmental and Breton came publicly to his defence. Bue Breton disliked ed Aragon’ motives for writing it. Eventually, Aragon renounced Surrealism in order to become a ‘proper’ communist. This Quavter could only offer Breton the guest editorship of their periodical ‘so long as he eschewed politics and other copies as might not be in accord with Anglo-American censorship usages’, and so he glassed over much of the detail of Suirrealism’s political and revolutionary position, complaining that the English had given him the opportunity to make himself heard ‘oaly in undertones’. However, he appealed for a resurgence of Surrealist resistance to such small-mindedness: activity che poem, and mist In the meantime. it does not at all appear fo us impractical ro organise in che four corners of the earth a fairly extensive scheme of resistance and experiment. This plan. as vegards fes modes of application. cannot be settled until there has been an sof the live youth of all countries, and an be tinleashed when it shall be applied our disposal, this plan can only sevealism is restored to ies ere interchange of the innermost dh estimate of the suby. ac one given point. Ow sive forces which » to insufficient sp be barely hinted ar. Buc bewa e! Enough if perspective, and we shall nor despaie of seein, within this cea-cup, ome day a storm rising from To encourage this. Breton included in his issue of This Quarter enough material to provide the English speaking world with a kind of manual of Survealism. Dali’s Thr Stinking dss explains the paraniac-critical method and the double image. Exnst's Inspiarion 10 Order ineroduces the reader to collage, frottage. the exquisite corpse and the Surrealist object, and is supported by Dal’s Tle Object as Revealed in Surrealist Experiment, Pyose and poetry by Breton, Péter, Eluard and Crevel complemene drawings by de Chirico, Man Ray and Ernst, The success of the Surrealist issue of This Quarter was followed in 1936 by the first International Surrealist Exsibirion. held in June and July ac the New43 Roland Penrose Powvait 1999 Giton canvas 16.2%€3.7(30%25) Tate Gallery “4 Blleen Agar Morine Object 1939 Mined media 42x34%23 (28> 134%9) Tate Galley Burlington Galleries in London, The exhibition was seen by 25,000 people. Arche opening, traffic in cencral London was brought to a standstill, Although de Chitico, Eense and Dali bad all already had solo exhibitions in London, this was the first time that British arcists and the general public were able to experience the full visual inspact of Surtealisin. The exhibition was made possible by a series of links established between French and English artists. Roland Penrose moved to Paris from Bricain in the early tozos, and there developed a fully Survealisc way of working, His Portrait of 1939 owes much to Miré in its combination of marks whic’ are both representations of and akind of shorthand for objects. The portrait is baile primarily from words, hand-written so that they catch a viewer's eye as painterly as well as licerary gestures, Straight, parallel lines establish space and place —‘his land Norfolk’ ~, denoting furrows ina ploughed field. On this freld sits the man, ‘his thighs windmills his sex lex’. Rhymes force the viewer to look at and liscen to the form of the words and delay a search for their conventional meaning, {in 1935, Benzose recurned to England. The same year, David Gascoyne announced («mnilaterally) che formation of an English Surrealise group in an article in the French Cabiss d'art and published his book, A Sbert Surey of Surrealism. Gascoyne and Penrose hac met in Paris and together formed the iden of bringing an exhibition of Surcealist art co London. The International Surrealist Exbibition was the frst of a series, and part of che French Surrealists’ plans for expansion. The exhibitions all followed a similar pattern: representatives of che French group would, iv the company of iocal sympathisets, contact artists in the area of the planned exhibition. A selection would be made which combined local work with wor imported from France and other counties. At the New Butlington Galleries. there were three hundred paintings, sculpeures, objects and drawings made by artists from fourteen countries, On the organising committee were Roland Bentose, Herbert Read (whose book Suorealis was published the same vear), Henry Moore, Pac! Nash and, in an advisory capacity, the anglophile Belgian ELT. Mesens, who in 1938 moved to London to start the London Gallery, Paris was represented by Breton, Eluard, Man Ray and Georges Hugner. here had been no Dada in England, and although some artists, such as ‘Wyndham Lewis, had had a lot of contact with Dada and Surrealism abtoad, several of the artists who exhibited in che International Surrealist Exhybitien became ‘Surrealists 87overnight’ as the organising commitree detected hitherto unimagined Surrealist influences in their work, Conroy Maddox, now one of the best- known British Surrealist artists, refused to take part. Maddox had discovered Suetealism in a book in the Birmingham City Library in 1935. He began to experiment wich automatism, and ravenced 'écrémage’, a new, semi-automatic 45 Paul Nash Harbourand Room 1932-6 olloncanvas 91.4 71.1 (38%28) | Tatesollery technique involving skimming paper over water in which oil painthad been floated, He found kindred spirits in John and Robert Melville, a painter and writer respectively, They introduced Maddox to Zwemmer’s bookshop in London where he was able to buy Surrealist literatu: y stood firm with hin against che seduce Exhibition: ind chi ¢ fraud’ of che first International Sw 46 Sovacor Dai pictured inacwngsuitatthe 1036. Seatesnett0 himare Diana ara Rupert drinton Lee, ane 1 font, Paul Evard, Nush Eland ELT. MesensInvited to exhibicin the Bnternational Surrealist Exhibition in London, I refused, and with Robert and John Melville, wrote a lecter in which we dzew attention to the fact thae the British participation in this show was mainly made up of artists, who in their day-to-day aries, professional habits andl ethics could be called anti- Suerealists ... The effect of their concribucion was ro dilute rather than affirm Surrealist principles, and they were led by Herbert Read who saw the movement as merely a continuation of the English romantic tradition. 10 Surrealist Nevertheless, the exhibition included some convincingly nglish works of art. Henry Moore exhibited sculptutes which dismembered and reassembled the human figure, as if ftom found objects. His forms looked vulnerable ro incipient metamorphosis, and full of a possibility which might, fora few years in the lacet 1930s and eatly 1940s, be termed Surrealist. Eileen Agar exhibiced her Angel of Anavahy and, having been selected for the exhibition, began to experiment wich attcomaric rechniques and found marerials. Her Ma an example of the working of ‘hasard objectit" or objective tr Objet is chance: elements found in the natural world are used to solve formal and emotional sculptural problems and to make an enigmatic and intriguing object. Paul Nash was one of che most successfully Surrealist of the English artists. He showed several works including the paintings Harbour and Room and Voyages of th Moon. and the collages Landscape at Large and Swanage. His paintings owe much to the disconnected narratives and spaces created by de Chirico — Harbour and Ri example combining insid wa mn, for with outside, the house, che safety and prediccability of which is ehreatened by uncontrollable external forces, Nash impressed Benjamin Péret, who wrote in an introduction to the catalogue for an exhibition in Cambridge in 1937, "This standard which the creatures of Eileen Agar brandish in their desperate course also floats at the entrance of Harbouiraitd Room by Paul Nash where, zo Roland Pentose, ends The Last Voyage of Captain Cook’, Persrose’s object of this ticle was also shown at the International Surrealist Exbibition. Icis made from a plaster model bought in Paris, painted with strata to resemble the earch, encased in a meral globe made by a bicycle repairer in London and mounted on a base cut in diagonal section to stiggest movement. Next to the mod familiar with the impossible, Nash places the viewer inside a accordin I rests a saw handle. The whole is an object which hints at a frustrated and ambiguous violence: the female model has no arms, legs or head, but she60 is decorated rather than disfigured by che strata which have clearly been applied to, rather than gouged our of her body. The saw has no blade and is outside the protective (or restrictive) sphere of the metal cage The English Surtealists enjoyed the full support of the Erench Suerealise apparatus. A lecture series was organised alongside the exhibition, Breton Eluard and Dal all spoke. Dalt’s lecture was on "Fantémes paranoiaques authentiques’ (Authentic Paranoiac Phantoms) but he delivered it inaudibly, from inside an old-fashioned diving suit. He provided the London public with a memorably Surrealist event, nearly suffocating inside the glass helmet of the suit and having co be rescued with a hastily procured spanner. A week after Dali’s lecture, the Surrealist Geoup in England was formed, In September, this gtotip issued the fourth number of The International Surrealist Bulletin, and English Surrealism came off age. Those artists who had no real affinity with Surrealise ideals dropped out, and azcises such as Maddox joined. The group operated along lines as ecompromising as Brecon’s Parisian movemenc:in 1947 they issued a Déclaration dn groupe surréaliste om Angleterre (Declacation of the Surrealise Group in England) in the catalogue of che fnternational Survealist Exhibition at che Galerie Maeght in Paris, In ic chey announced the expedsion from che group of Henry Moore. ‘for making sacerdocal ornaments’ Herbert Read for eclecticism, Humphrey Jennings for accepting the OBE and Davie Gascoyne ‘for nystification’ The International Surrealist Bullen was another example of the Surtealis expansionist ambitions. Three eatlier numbers had been issued a year before che English number, by Surrealist groups ser up in Prague, the Canary Islands and Brussels, In 1037 the hifernational Surrealist Extibition took place in Tokyo and in 1938 the hugely suiceessful third exhibition in the series, which was held in che Galleries des Beaux Arts in Paris, included the work of seventy-five actists from fifteen nations, A smaller version of the exhibition roured t0 Amsterdam, The same year, Breton made his first trip t Mesico, a councry ‘where the world’s heart opens out’, wich which he was immediacely impressed. He spent rime with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, finding rhe paintings of Kahlo in particular ‘intuitively Surreatistar Frida Kahlo Whacthe Water Gare ise 1938 Giton canvas, 96.5% 76.2 (38 30} ColecionafTomas Fernandez Mara Mexico City 48 Salvador Dali Tre Persistence ofMemory'931 Oiler canvas 24,133 98% 13) The Museum of Modern Bot NewYork My sueprise and joy was unbounded when I discovered, on my arrival in Mexico, thar her work has blossomed forth. in her larest paintings. dlespice the face that it had been conceived without any prior knowledge whatsoever of the ideas morivacing the:activities of my friends and mysel€ ...1 of the earth, aspontancous outpouring oF our own questioning spirit: what irrational laws do we obey. whar subjective signals allow ats to establish the right direction at ant, which symbols and myths predominate ina particular conjunction of objects ot wels of happenings nto pure surrealicy, was witnessing here, at the other be ascribed cc what meanings car visionary pow we eye's capacity fo pass from visual power to pacity CO p P (Breton, Le Surréalisme ea printer) Kahlo never joineda S realist group, buc Breton remained sympathetic to her work, writing an introduction to the catalogue for her exhibi tion at che Julien Levy Gallery in New York in the hope that it might travel to Patis. In 1940, Breton organised the fourth International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico Cicy That year also brought the occupation of France by the Germans. Many artists fed Europe. Surzealism, which had already spread to America, set up ies new headquarters there. Breton, Masson (who by this time was back in the Breronian fold), Ernst, Tanguy and Man Ray together with Roberto Matta Echaurten, a Chilean painter who had settled in Paris and shown in the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition, established a new forum for Surrealist chought and practice. They published first in View, an avant-garde literacy magazine sympatheric to Surtealist ideals, and, from June 1942, in theit own VVV,a periodical dedicated to Suttealism in exile. 662 Surrealism had first come to New York in 1932, with the exhibition uerveatism at the Julien Levy Gallery. This exhibition both introduced the ts onto the American public to Surrealist art and launched Surrealist art American art scene, Dalf in particular was a great success. His The Persistence of Mrinory, his famous ‘soft watches’, was shown in this exhibition for the first time, and in 1933 and 1934 he had solo shows with the same gallery: He became a sear, To celebrate his artival in New York in November 1934 he published New York Salutes Me, a tract in which he identifies himself as. an ambassador for Surrealism The Surrealists are involuntary mediums for an unknown world, As a Surrealist painter myself, Lnever have the slightest idea what my picture means. I merely transcribe my thoughts, and (ry co make concrete the most exasperating and fagicive visions, fantasies, whatever is mysterious. incomprehensible, personal 3 rare, that may pass through my head Increasingly, however, Dali became an ambassador for himself. He lectured ac the Museum of Modern Art, was on the cover of Time magazine, and persuaded the cream of New York society into Dalinian costume for an ‘oneiric ball’ given in his honour by Caresse Crosby. He was much in demand asa portraitist, painting rich and influential American patrons in Surrealist guise, performing feats of metamorphosis upon their distinctive profiles or chaining them to painted cliffs with their jewellery, Although throughout most of the 1930s Dali remained close to Breton’s vision of Sutrealism, by 1940 Breton had become impatient with what he perceived to be Dali's cheapening of Surrealism into portraiture, fashion and fascist politics, Dali was fascinated by Hitler. His Mountain Lake of 1938 is part of a series of paintings inspiced by Chamberlain's phone calls to Hitler which culminated inthe Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938. Towards the end of the decade and into the 19408, Dali, ‘Avida Dollars’, became more and more alienated from the Surzealist group. Breton was never really happy in America. He zefused to learn English,49 Matta (Roberto Matta Echaurren) Black Vitve 1943, lion canvas, 76.5% 182.8 (30% 72) Tate Galley 50 Arshile Gorky Waterton 1943 ‘itn car 153.7 143 (604% 24%) Tate Gallery believing char thought and language are so interdependent that to speak another language imperfectly would endanger the pure creativity of his unconscious mind. This left him relatively isolated. He sought consolation in the members of the Parisian Surrealist group who had fled Europe with him, ina tenewed friendship with Maccel Duchamp, and in the Act of this Century gallery opened by Peggy Guggenheim to show Surrealist and other avant-garde art. In June 1942, VVV published Breton’ ‘Prolegoménes Aun troisiéme manifeste du surréalisme ow non’ (Prologomena to a Third Surtealise Manifesto or Not), and Breton gave a lecture to French students at Yale University, ‘La Situation dit surréalisme entre les deux guertes’ 6364 (The Situation of Surrealism beeween the Two Wats). In his lecture he denied the ofi-reported death of his movement and re-established Surrealism asa force for the 1940s: Tknow: even during these last months at Yale you probably heard ir said thar Surrealism is dead. When I was still in France, Thad promised myselt co display in public one day everything | had been able ro collect in che way of newspaper articles built on this theme: ‘Surtealism is done for!’ It would have been rather piquant ro show chac they have followed on one another almost monthly since the date of its foundation! Breton insisted that Surrealism could only in face die if another movement was ready to take its place: With all due respect to some impatient gravediggers, I think I understand a little beeter than they do what che demise of Surrealism would mean. fe would mean the birth of a new movement with an even greater power of [iberation. Moreover, because of thar very dynamic force which we continue to place above all, my best fiends and { would make ita point of honout co rally around such a movement imumediarely The most influential of Breton's ‘best friends’ in America were Tanguy, Masson and the recently recruited Matta. The three were important to young American artists, for whom they represented a type of internationalism chrough which to escape che narrow emphasis on national art currently prevalenc in the United Seates, American artists tended nor to join the Surrealist movement; an exception is Arshile Gorky, for whom Breton wroce the preface to his 1945 exhibition at the Julien Levy gallery which was incorporated into later editions of Le Surréaismect la peimture, Buc the influence of Surrealism was most keenly in evidence in the emerging generation of American Abstract Expressionist painters, Although Surrealism was not in itself a force for abstraction, several of the young American painters experimented with automatic techniques, and were impressed with the Surrealist clision of conscious and unconscious imagery. Jackson Pollock had his first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century gallery. He was close to Matta, and was inspired, by the spatial tensions evident in Mactas Surrealist work as well as by an interest in Mird, co develop the technique for which he is best known. Paintings suck as Nuwnber23 were made by laying.a canvas lat on che floor and dripping ceails of paint onto it. As with Masson's auitomatic drawings and paintings of the 1920s, che technique links the imagery produced with the gestare used to produce it: Pollock's marks are calligraphic, they link his hand to his mind and retain lingering suggestions of fantastic, unconscious forms. Breton recurned to Paris in May 1946. In July 1947, with Marcel Duchamp, he organised an International Surrealist Exibition at the Galerie Maeght. The exhibition re-established the focus of Surrealism after the war, welcomed new members and associates, and celebrated the by now truly international status of the movement. The same yeat, Breton founded Cause, akind of ‘action bureau’ charged with the co-ordination of the various different national Surrealist groups. Breton himself remained at che centze of the movernent,st Jackson Pollock umber 23 1948 {Enamel on gessoon eper 875. 78.4 (22K%31) ate calery and che artists he had championed — Mird, Masson, Ernst, Magricte, Dali — stayed in touch co greater or lesser degrees as they began to be feted as masters of modern art, Breton continued to exercise strict control. He guarded the integrity of Surcealism co the end and, wich Benjamin Péter, the only original member of the group who was at no time expelled ftom it, was careful ¢o allow new elements to enter the movement while resisting its acceptance into che norms and conventions of art history. With Brecon’s death in 1966 Surrealism finally lose its coherence as.a movement. Its diffuse nature became apparent, and it dispersed inco a network of influence and inspiration, constantly to be rediscovered in new places and by new generations.66 ‘A collision exacted on the eyes’ SURREALIST PERFORMANCE, THEATRE AND CINEMA Surrealism was christened in the theatre, and in many ways theatre seems the ideal Surrealist art form, 8 medium of shared exper for the transmission of the inner life of the playwright to the minds of the audience, A writer who inhabits the marvellous needs only a few actors to eransport the audience there with chem, From the beginning, Surrealism as amovement had an innate sense of the theatrical. Like Dada before it Surrealism staged its interaction with the public, turning exhibitions into dramatic narratives and theatrical events. Atriving at the 1938 Jnternational Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, for example, the ior was met by Dal’s Rainy Taxi, Two mannequins, one with the head of a shark, sac inside the taxi, which was continuously drenched with water. The mong vegetation, on which fed enormous burgundy snails, nee, ic is amechanism mannequins sat From the taxi, the visitor passed down a passage of welcoming Surrealist mannequins into a great central hall, arranged by Marcel Duchamp into an integrated experience, cableau-vivant of Surrealism. Duchamp transformed the hall into a grotto, with twelve hundred sacks of coal suspended from the roof. The floor of the zoom was covered in a carpet of leaves, Visitors’ reactions to the exhibition were manipulated by Duchamp like a theatre direct with which to find their way around in the semi-darkness. In searching for the works on display, they were forced to participate in the exhibition, to become complicit in its Surrealist endeavour. Despite this innate cheatricality, however, Surrealism had only a minor ches r shaping the experience of an audience. Visitors were given t 52 André Masson Mannequin with Birecage 1938. photographed by Man Ray,interest in che theatee as an art form in its own right. One of the most celebrated, seemingly ‘Surrealist’ plays of the 1p20s, Jean Cocteau's Orphe (Orpheus), was in fact a satire on the movement. Failing properly to engage with the theatre, the Surcealists found themselves mocked by it. It was Cocteau’sballe Brae at which Apollioaite coined the name Suselism, and initially Cocteau moved in at least proto-Surrealistcitcles. In 1929 he was friendly with Aragon and was part of th col. lected around Tristan Tzara when he first brought Dada to Paris. Cocteau argued violently with Breton and Soupault, however, and never became a member of the Surrealist group. By «926, he was familiar enough, and disillusioned enough, with Surrealism to produce a savagely accurate parody: Otpbéclays bare the aims and aspirations of Breton and his friends. The play opens with Orphée, the hero, taking poetic dictation from a pantomime horse which stamps out letters with its foot. Orphée's ‘poetic method’ ridicules Bretonian automatism and the Surrealist attempt to record the secrets of an undirected unconscious. The horse is referred to.as Orphée’s ‘dada’, his hobbyhorse. leis a visual pun on Dada and therefore S which was ac that time stll synonymous with the vit [ Dada movement in the minds of the public. i PI There is pechaps also an inference that the t Sostealists, in moving away from Dada filed, like Orphée with his horse and presumably unlike Cocteau himself, to understand what Dada was trying to say. The horse spells out MER.DE. (SHIT), from which Oxphée struggles to achieve inspirational coherence. Orphie plays with the thetoric of discovery which characterises the Surrealist idea of the marvellous, Enchanted with the horse's ‘poet Orphée exclaims, Twould give up my entice group of artists and writers who surrealism, poetic works for one of those little phrases in which I hear myself like you hear the sea in a seashell’, The play's central image is one of a penetrable mittor; Orphée passes throuigh co the other side of amicror in search of his lose wife Eurydice. The Surrealists present ac the play recognised themselves as parodied by Cocteau, and even applauded his wit. Close parody was a weapon they used themselves. In October 1926 the poet Max Jacob wrote ¢o Cocteau, a close friend, that someone had assimilated his writing style in order to attack both himself and Cocteau ina magazine: ‘the writers imitate perfectly my poetic voice and style. There is in icaliterary finesse which smells of Surrealism’. Aragon, Roger Vitracand Antonin Artaud did write Surrealist plays. Artaud in particular, although he was part of the movement for only a short time between 1924 and 1926, attempted a theory of Surrealist theatre and tried ro sec up a theatre company dedicated to the production of Surrealist 67work. The company was called the Alfred Jarry theatte in memory of he playwright whose Un Roi ( Ubu the King), frst performed in 1896, had a revolutionary impact on avant-garde theatre, Jarry was troubled by che necessity of living and functioning in a world he perceived co be both meaningless and absurd. To help him cope, he invented ‘pataphysics’, a quasi 5a Joa. Mies Portait of Mime B. 1924 ilar charcoal oncamas 129%95.3 okx37%) Beryl Galles, New York philosophy, and Pére Ubu, an omnipotent alter-ego. Jarry asserted that there coutd be no distinction between the worlds of objective and subjective fact, between life and fantasy. He placed the stage at che intersection between the two, and played upon it with enormously influential invention, Ubu Rot begins with one triumphant, scatofogically invented nonsense-word, ‘Merdre!”‘The Suctealises were in sympathy with Jarry’s project. The comical, rotund ice of Ubu finds his way into several Surrealist paintings, and the members of the group saw an obvious parallel between Jorry’s and their own exploration of the space on the boundary between the objective and the subjective. They did not, however, echo Jarry’s conviction that the stage was the literalisation of that space. Breton isin fact known to have mistrusted the theatre as bourgeois and profit-orientated, and he did not give Artaud his unqualified support. The Alfred Jarry theatre ran for four seasons between 1927 and 1929 before collapsing into bankruptcy. Artaud insisted that it had ibeen created ‘to help itself to che theatre, and not to serve the theatre’, chat it looked to ‘carry behind ic all the fatality of life and the mysterious meetings of dreams’, but he could not make its hallucinator success. Artaud, influential on subsequent theatre though he was, had an extremely stormy relationship with Surrealism, He was fora time the director of the Bureau for Surrealist Reseatch, and edited an issue of La Révolution surréaliste, but he quarrelled violently with Breton who despised him for, among other things, making his living through commercial films, Artaud was a film and theatre actor as well as a writer. He appeated in several artistically and critically dubious films, as well as in two of the period’s most successful: Abel Gance’s Napolion and Carl Theodore Dreyer's Lat Passion de Jeanne d’Are (The Passion of Joan of Are). There ave no Surrealist elements in either of these flms, but Artaud himself wrote the script for one of the three greatest examples of Surrealist cinema —La Copuile te clergyman (The Seasell and the Clergyman). Artaud neither acted in nor directed it, and he afterwards claimed that tt was ruined by its director Germaine Dislac. Ie was first shown at the Cinéma des Ursulines in Paris in Februaty 1928. The Surrealists attended, although Artaud had written the script while isolaced ftom the movement. and chey supported Artaud in his protests against the mis-direction of the film, Artaud was interested in the visceral possibilities offered by cinema, Rather than simply writing a film based on the dream, a canslation of the events of a particular dream, he attempted an exhaustive cinematic investigation into the nature of dreaming, He thought that cinema could reduplicate the mechanisms of the dzeam, and re-consticute the sense of volatility and lack of control experienced by a dreamer, La Caguille ct le clergyman was rejected when it appeaed before the British Board of Film Censors: ‘this film is so cryptic as to be meaningless. If there is a meaning itis doubtless objectis manipulation of the human body, both that of the actors and the audience, and in how the physicality of thar manipulation could be transformed into emotion and understanding, He said he was searching ‘for a film with purely visual sensations in which the force would come from a collision exacted on the eyes’ ‘The importance Artaud placed on the eye as the locus of the transmission of meaning from writer to audience is echoed in the most famous sequence of Surrealist cinema: the opening of Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog): by Dali and Lats Bufiuel: confrontational playsa able’. Artaud himself sited the film's ‘meaning’ in itsPROLOGUE ONCE UPON A TIME. A Baleany inthe dark Indoors, aman is whetting his razor. He looks wp through the window at the sky and sees .. A fleecy cloud drawing near to the full moon Then a young gir!’ head with staring eyes. A razor-blade approaches one of the eyes Now the fleecy cloud passes over the moon. ‘And the razor-blade passes through the gir!'seye ngit in two, The eye is a consiscent Suerealist icon, Ie appears and reappears throughout Surrealist imagery, both visual and poetic, as a site of confrontation, conjunction and communication. The eye links inner and outer, subjective and objective. Iris 2 glace sans tain’, a micror without silvering through which the Surrealist matvellous may be glimpsed and perhaps attained. Ie presicles over the opening of Un Chien Andalow, a powerfal metaphor for the originality, and surreality, of the film’s vision Un Chien Arndalon was first screened at Studio 28 in Paris in October 1928. Irs script, written by Dali and Bufitel together, was published in La Révolution Os nem up surréalisi, prefaced by a profession of faith from the Spanish film maker.a Quen andlovor 528 newcomer to Surrealism: ‘the publication of this script expresses my unreserved and complete adherence to Surrealist thought and activity: Un gg Chien Andalou would not have existed without Sucrealism’, The film is almosta sutton un chien manifesto for Surrealist cinema. Its plots disconnected and dream-like; its Andeto(SahedorDai technique hallucinatory and dependent on displacement and montage. ortvenan Although Artaud recognised some of his own ideas in it, Dali and Bufiuel claimed it was ‘without precedent in the history of the cinema’. Unlike 8 contemporary avant-garde films, Un Chien Andalou relied on the subversionof — JyWogyy the real world rather than flight feom is, Where other films were abstract, interested primarily in photographic effects and the manipulation of light and shadow, Buittel and Dali’ film dissolved one easily recognisable image inco another athigh speed. Atone point in the film, the camera focuses on the hand of one of the main characters, In the palm of his hand ants swarm out of ablack hole. In quick succession, the image then dissolves into one of the armpit hair of a girl lying on a beach, the spines of a sca-urchin, and the head of another gitl. In another sequence, the man caresses a girl's breasts, which turn into her thighs while he is torcching them. In cinematographic montage, Dali and Buituel found a time-based equivalent both for the Dalinian paranoiac-cticical method and for Bretonian automatism. As Buituel wrote: The plotis the result of a conscious psychic automatism, and. to that extent, does not attemp® to recount a dream, although it profits by a mechanism analogous to that of decams. The sources from which the fim draws inspiration are those of poctty, froed from the ballast of zeason and teadition. Ies aun isto provoke in the spectator instinctive reactions of attraction and repulsion. Bufiuel and Dali both appear in the film, Bufiuel is the man with the razorz, and Dali is one of two clerics who pass across the screen. The script describes‘furst,a cork, chen amelon, then two teachers from a church school, and finally two magnificent grand pianos The pianos are filled with the carcasses of donkeys, theit legs, rails, hind-quarters and exctement sticking out of the piano-cases’. Dali's L’Ane Pourri( The Stinking Ass), his explanation of the paranoiac-critical method, was published in 1930: I believe the moment is athand when, by a paranoiac and active advance of the mind, it will be possible (simultaneously with automatism and other passive states) to systematise confusion and thus to help to discredie completely the world of reality’. 930 was also the year of Buviuel’s second and final collaboration with Dali, L’Age d’Or{ The Golden Age). Dali had less to do with this film, working with Buitel on the script, bue uninvolved in che actual filming. The film is more narrative chan Un Ch Andilow, less dependent on individually poetic images. Ibis extremely anti-bourgeois and anti- Catholic, culminating in an orgy straight out of the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. The leader of the orgy is Jesus Christ. When the film was firse screened at Studio 28 it caused a riot and had to be shut down. The cinema was stormed by members of the League of Patriots and the Anti- Jewish League. They chrew violec ink ache screen, shouting ‘we'll see if theve are any Christians left in France!” They intecrupred the screening at a pointin the flim where a monstrance (a chutch vessel holding the Host, the consecrated body of Christ) is chrown into a stream, and proceeded ¢o let off smoke and stink bombs into the audience, attack the Surrealist 172 paintings and books on display in the foyex, cut the phone lines and cause 80,000 francs worth of damage to the cinema, Although right-wing newspapers later claimed that che damage had been caused by the film's bolshevist’ audience, the spectators stayed until the end of the film, and signed a petition against the demonstrators on theit way out. Aged Orand Un Chien Andaiow ate the high points of Surrealist cinema, Enormously influential, they redirected the course of avant-garde cinema while at che same cime providing new energy and new audiences for Surrealism, Inevitably, their techniques found their way co America and into more mainstream cinema. In 1945, Alfred Hitchcock invived Dali to collaborare on a dream sequence for his film Spellbound: When we artived at the dream sequences, I wanted absolutely to break with the tradition of cinema dreams which are ustally miscy and confused, with a shaking sereen etc... [wanted Dali because of che sharpness of his architecture — Chirico is very similar— the long shadows, the infinite distances, che lines chat converge in perspective ... the formless faces Dali's dreant sequence was announced in the film by the dissolving of a real eye into an eye painted on a curtain, Hollywood had passed through to the other side of the Surrealist mirror 7 SavadorDallontheset of ted Fitencocks Spelibouna.A LeGacy oF SURREALISM Surrealism was a movement you could join, and one from which you could also be expelled. Centred in Pais, it was dominated and controlled by André Breton. Ir functioned most coherently between the two World Wars and effectively died with Breton in 1966. Bur Surrealism emphasised the importance of living the Surrealist life, and was as much a state of mind asa historical episode. Surcealist activity continues today — in the French group Actual, and around Arsenal, the Chicago-based English language journal of international Surrealism, Suctealist texts ave translated and anthologised, and the impact of the Susrealist revolution still reverberates. Surrealism has been enormously influential on successive generations of artists. Its empha on the breaking down of the distinction beeween private and public, artist and viewer has filtered into other ways of making art co surface in, for example, Situationism and Fluxus. Its interestin collage has perpetuated the collage mediuimas a viable way of making art, and its development of language, its in oker imagery as elements of a common, primary mental material has long affected text-based work. Surrealist aspirations to automatism, the link they posiced becween thought and gesture, were formative in the work of the young Abstract Expressionists, artists who themselves were profoundly influential on subsequent art Surrealism is. however, difficult to pin down as one of that series of ‘isins’ into which modern art has traditionally been categorised. The facts of the movement's development cannot contain the pervasiveness of its influence on collectwit! |. written and visual istence ons“a and the emphasis placed by Breton on spirit rather than style makes its influence difficult to track. In one sense, any art which takes as its subject che workings of the mind, or which prioritises subjectivity, may be said to have Surrealist ‘influence’. In addition, the word has passed into che language, so that any work of art, literature or film which is disjointed, hallucinatory or disconnected is likely to be classed as ‘surreal’, Surrealism was an international movement, spreading its influence through the migrations of its members and the publication of their ideas, Its network of influence is potentially /¢/ / enormous. One measure of Surtealisin’s success and |, pepularity is the extent to which ithas been taken up by the worlds of fashion and of advertising. The precedent for this was set by the Surrealists themselves: Dali created window displays for Bonwit-Teller’s store on Fifth Avenue in New York and collaborated with Elsa Schiaparelli on dress fabrics and on a‘Shoe-Hat’. 58 isa Schiaparll Dressand Headscart 21937 Sikerepe Philadephia Museum af Bt. Given bybime Elsa Dali did advertising work, and Sehlapareli Magritte's oetvre has been ‘s plundered by che advertisers. jf 5 The raining bowler-hatted men of René Magritte Golconda his Cokonda, for example, have been Goose 88 replaced by cigarertes. Ciena ay The dilution of Surrealism into the ‘Menil Collection, diversity of contemporary life would Houston pethaps not entirely have displeased Breton. Surrealism was a movement which 80 right oP advertising concerned itself with dissemination. Members of the group were fascinated with the possibilities for communication offered by the modern city, and with the potential for the marvellous embedded within those possibilities, Hence Aragon’ Le Paysam de Pavis( Paris Peasant), an inaugural Surcealist text which presents café, bar and city life as a series of Surrealist acts and object campaign forBencon andHedges, 1983. Here, Surrealism resumes all its rights. They give you a glass inkwell with a champagne cork for a stopper, and you are away! Images flurter down like confetti. Images, images everywhere. On the ceiling, In the armchairs’ wickeework. In the glasses’ drinking straws. In the telephone switchboasd. [n the sparkling ait. In che tron lanterns which light the room. Snow down, images, itis Christmas. Snow clown upon the bartels and upon credulous hearts. Snow on to people's hair and on to their hands,ayy Pan 4 i" a : i) i :: ) ee ee tials ai ! iti al i 4 i re ' i! | i i A tated m4 | \ ji igi qi (a1 i his if toh pporge 4 itt td6 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Ades, Dawn, Dall, London 982, Alexandrian Sacane, Sri ‘Art rans! Gordan Cloagh, London 1979. 108. Aragon. Lowit, Pare Prsnt Paris 1926. ransl. Simon Wacson Taylor, London 197, 987, Breton. Andee meri. Paris 2952, tran Breton, Andes, Srvatim and Painiig Paris 1928, 2965, eansl Sion Watson Taylor London i973 Breton, Andeé, Nadji Pars roa8. transl Richard Howard, New York 196s, Breton, Andeé and Soupaue Philpe. Tee Magne Felt Paris ig eral, David Gascayne, Landon 9851964. Brecon. André, Manto of Sern. tral, Richards Seaverand Helen R. Lane Michigan 3969. 197: Canfield, William A. Max Erne Dodo and she Dawing Surly, Munich and Hovston 99% Caves. MaryAnn (oe), Sarai and Tmen, Michigan 99H Cas, Mary Apa, Kuen Reval E, and Raabere, Gown (64s), Suresh ad Cambridge (Mass.)and London i99t Chadivck, Whitney: Miner Arts te Serreslit Movement London 1085 Dali Salvador, Dio af Gove London 1966 Dali, Salvador, There Ley Su dor Dal, London 142, nse Max, Byond Pig. nd Onker ein he Aro oni Fronds New York 938 Fer, Bryony, Btchelor, Dai and Wood. Pas, Ram, Ratonlisn, Seven: Art Bansien he ita, New Haven ‘99% Freud. Sigmund, Artand Liter oe’ Gad, Leonards de Vine and Othe ork transl James Strachey. Penguin roa Library volag, London 68,1990 Freud, Sigmund, The Iraergrcttion of Drea, rans Janes Strachey, Penguin Freud Library vol. London 1976, 1998 Gabi 1970 Su, Magrite, London Gascoyne, Davis 4 Short History of Suro. London 193519361970. Goong, Mel, (ed Sarma Gans, Lendlon 1991 Green, Christopher. Cabins canis Boome Adorn Meera sad Resins Fen Ao 1916-1928, New Haven and London 198. Hale, Terry (ea), Th: Auton Mr: Sueealir Novas ly Robot Discs, Mitel Lacs, Grongss ins want Wohite. London 1964 Legge. lvzaboth, Max Enna be Prybsanle Sse. Mochagan and London 98. Levy, Silvano (ed), Corey Maddox: SurialEnygmr, Kecle 109% Magriee. René, Called Hangs London ro. Marcin, Richard. Fetiom and Survalinn, London 1988. Nadeau, Maurice, Th Hey of Suan Pasis tog 2h Richard Howad. London 1968, 1987, Penrose, Roland, Mind, “Landon i970. Read, Herbert (ed). 5 London 1936 Richardson, Michael (o4.). Te ‘Dials Book of Surat a The dn Bigs Cambridge. 1993 Richardson, Michal ed), The Dds Bok of Seren x Thy Mytaf te Wirt Cambridge 1994 Rosemont, Feanklin, Ande? Bory and shy Fas Principle Sirelinn, Landon t078, Rosemont, Franklin ed). Aun Bre Was Sera Sele Wr London Rubin, Willian, Dads nd Sorel Art, London 1960 Short, Robeve, Dadeand Surreal, Lonuion igo. Spies, Werner, Mas: Erni ple the i's Order Sof London r98s. Spies, Werner, Mex Last Collages Te bof he Surnalur Uinere. London 199 Sylvester. David, Lookingat Giaou, London 1995 Waldberg, Pacvich, Sioa, London 1965, Wilgom Suman, Sienalit Puining. Oaford 18761082, Webb Peter and Short, Robert, Hi Baller, London ois Exnemion CataLocues Dads and Sarwan Reviewed Arts Counall, Londen «978, Salvador Dal Tate Gallery, London r98o. Salsader Dali Retrospective 19201980, Masée national darcmederne. Pats. Centre George Pompidion 1979. Saluades Dal The Bary Year. Acts Coun, London :994 Mase Erna A Revs, London, Tare Gallery «991 Fantesne dn, Dada and Surraion Maseurm of Modeen art, New York 136 Maysite,Sourh Bank Cones, Londen igo joan Mind, Museum of Modetn Arc, New York 1995, Suresh on fgland, 1936 nd afr an shin wales he _sotbanniversery af th First rua Sure ssibon ws Lond esfae 1936, Heeoere Read Gallery ancerburyCO ne Oa ea This series introduces the most important movements in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. Each book is illustrated chiefly in colour with VLR Ket UME Chere WAC PeRE MINT mee cellent Kou gentle M eter Moon on Sos nectar aed ene Wan noma cane) century. A collective adventure begun by a small group of intellectuals in Paris in the early eens Su asa nee og een CRS TC Me a eee n T= Vie oe alae nea Va eec oa OCR Sun This introduction offers new insights into the complexities of the Surrealist imagination. It documents how the artists met, the relationship of Surrealism to Dada, and the influences that formed the movement, particularly the work of Sigmund Freud. ster eno oR EET) cle ce Oe en Rene a and Surrealism in the cinema and theatre are all examined. There is close analysis of individual works, many of them from the Tate Gallery collection. peaelsice ata onetime Meeker pa MeeooR With 60 illustrations. CAMBRIDGE UNTVERSITY PRI eels cod MINIMALISM David Batchelor inl 0-521-62756-7 MODERNISM Charles Harrison (Ill ] I | | REALISM James Malpas Wt | General Editor: Simon Wilson, a curator at the Tate Gallery 9°78052 2756