Surrealism

SUR REAL ISM

strangeness. Thus, the paintings of Dorothea Tanning (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1943) depict small, hirsute Alices in domestic spaces with cracked walls, invaded by monstrous vegetation. Another example: in the film Alice (1988) by the Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer, a loose adaptation of Carroll’s novel, which contains both live action and animation, objects come to life, spaces become confused, violence proliferates. For Toyen too, childhood is linked to disturbing spaces: Asleep (1937) represents a little Alice seen from behind (in a dress but with no body) looking out over an empty landscape, while The Shooting Gallery (1973), a series of lithographs created in 1939–1940 under the Nazi occupation of Prague, reinterprets the world of childhood as a form of nightmare.

The surrealists did not simply rediscover Alice, they reappropriated her and reinvented her in the spirit – and even the contradictions – of the movement. They refashioned her by integrating subversive, magical and erotic qualities. And so, when Breton considers Picasso’s cubist paintings, it is with Alice as his guide: ‘the mind talks stubbornly to us of a future continent [. . . where] everyone has the power to accompany an ever more beautiful Alice into Wonderland.’ 26

Elza Adamowicz ⁘

Professor emerita of French literature and visual culture, Queen Mary University of London

1 André Breton, 'Lewis Carroll, 1832–1898', Anthology of Black Humour, trans. Mark Polizzotti (London; San Francisco; Beirut: Telegram, 2009), 139.

2 See Les Enfants d’Alice. La peinture surréaliste en Angleterre 1930–1960, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Galerie 1900–2000, 1982).

3 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: Macmillan and Co., 1865); Alice Through the LookingGlass (London: Macmillan and Co., 1871).

4 Breton, ‘The LobsterQuadrille’, Anthology of Black Humour, trans. Mark Polizzotti (London; San Francisco; Beirut: Telegram, 2009), 141–44.

5 Jeu de Marseille, reproduced in VVV (1943), no. 2–3: 88.

6 Jacques Brunius, ‘Le Jabberwocky de Lewis Carroll’, Cahiers du Sud (1948), no. 287.

7 See, for example, Aventures d’Alice . . ., illustrated by Salvador Dalí (1969); La Chasse au snark, illustrated by Gisèle Prassinos (1946) and by Max Ernst (1950).

8 Louis Aragon, ‘Lewis Carroll – 1931’, Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution (1931), no. 3: 25.

9 André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 40.

10 See Isabelle Nières-Chevrel, ‘Alice dans la mythologie surréaliste’, in Lewis Carroll et les mythologies de l’enfance, eds. Lawrence Gasquet, Sophie Marret and Pascale Renaud-Grosbras (Rennes: PUR, 2005), 153–65.

11 André Breton, Arcanum 17, trans. Zack Rogow (Copenhagen; Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004), 83.

12 André Breton, ‘Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism’, Free Rein, trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 11.

13 André Breton, ‘What Is Surrealism?’ in What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings of André Breton, ed. Franklin Rosemont, trans. John Ashbery et al. (London: Pluto Press, 1978), 122.

14 See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (London: Continuum, 2004).

15 Max Ernst, Écritures (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 262.

16 André Breton, ‘Marvelous versus Mystery’, in Free Rein, trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 5.

17 The French translation of Alice in Wonderland is Alice au pays des merveilles (Translator’s note.)

18 Benjamin Péret, introduction to L’Anthologie des mythes, légendes et contes populaires d’Amérique (1942) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1960), 15.

19 Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, 1994) 204.

20 Louis Aragon, ‘A Wave of Dreams’, trans. Susan de Muth, Papers of Surrealism no. 1 (winter 2003), 7.

21 Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, 14.

22 André Breton, ‘Max Ernst’, in The Lost Steps, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 60.

23 André Breton, ‘Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism’, in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002), 52.

24 André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 73–74.

25 Georges Bataille, ‘The “Lugubrious Game”’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 28–29.

26 Breton, ‘Surrealism and Painting’, 6.

Remedios Varo

Ciencia inútil o el alquimista 1958

Remedios Varo

Creación de las aves 1957

On good use of myths

In the 1930s, Benjamin Péret was discovering Brazil and Antonin Artaud and Breton were living in Mexico, and this de-centring through exile proved to be of profound and lasting effect. As well as welcoming newcomers from the Caribbean and the equatorial belt, the artists of the first generation discovered non-European cosmogonies – that of the Hopi people, of whom Breton and Max Ernst were enthusiasts, or that of the Jivaros of the Amazon, to whom Péret dedicated the first text in the section ‘Life of the sky’ of his anthology. 14 Whether expressed through the kachina ritual dolls that embody various cosmic powers or their ephemeral sand paintings, the cosmogony of the Hopi people and the Navajos soon won new adherents, now a long way away from the Parisian art market. Breton found in it the principle of universal analogy that seduced him in the cosmology of Charles Fourier, whose work he was rereading at the same time, and the possibility of re-establishing a contact between people and nature that he considered to have been lost. The surrealist artists reappropriated these various alternative cosmologies in a daring syncretism, creating a link between early abstraction and the geometry of Navajo paintings. 15 Produced from several ethnographic museum collections, The Invention of the World aimed to ‘follow the evolution of primitive thought’ 16 – America, Africa and Oceania being mixed indiscriminately, as if to bind together the surrealist cosmogony. This reinterpretation of myth, in which the 1947 Exposition internationale du surréalisme was an important milestone, acted as a kind of firebreak, at a time when the space race between the superpowers was spreading a debased new mythology. ‘Opium is all the more effective the more realistic it is, the little walk around the Moon is already in demand, it seems, by 25,000 to 30,000 fools, who, after all, share my home,’ wrote Gérard Legrand in 1959. ‘If people are wise – or not wise enough? – they will be allowed to visit Mars.’ 17

Émilie Frémond ⁘

Associate Professor in French Literature, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

1 In German: ‘Die Idee vom Mikrokosmus ist die höchste für den Menschen. (Kosmometer sind wir ebenfalls.)’

2 See also Victor Hugo, ‘Promontorium Somnii’, in Victor Hugo’s Intellectual Autobiography, trans. Lorenzo O’Rourke (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1907).

3 Salvador Dalí, ‘Communication’, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 3 (December 1931).

4 ‘La Science triumphante’ was one of the myths listed in Breton’s picture essay ‘On the Survival of Certain Myths and on Some Other Myths in Growth or Formation’ published in the catalogue to First Papers of Surrealism accompanied by a quotation from Alfred Jarry, a photograph of a bat, and a reproduction of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s Physics from the Boston Public Library murals. André Breton, ‘On the Survival of Certain Myths and on Some Other Myths in Growth or Formation’, in First Papers of Surrealism (New York, 1942), unpaginated.

5 André Breton, ‘Protestation’, in ibid , 1029.

6 Dr Pierre Mabille, ‘Préface à l’Éloge des préjugés populaires’, Minotaure, no. 6 (1935), 1.

7 André Masson, Anatomie de mon univers (1943) (Marseille: André Dimanche, 1988).

8 Jacques Dupin, Miró (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), 132.

9 This passage appears in the original catalogue published in 1959 by Pierre Matisse, New York. See also André Breton, ‘Joan Miró: Constellations’, in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002), 257–64.

10 André Breton, ‘Rufino Tamayo’, in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002), 234.

11 André Breton, with the assistance of Gérard Legrand, Magic Art, ed. Robert Shehu-Ansell.

12 P. Mabille, ‘La Conscience lumineuse’ (1938), in Conscience lumineuse, conscience picturale, eds. J. Chénieux-Gendron and Rémy Laville (Paris: José Corti, 1989), 175. A more nuanced first version appeared in Minotaure in 1937.

13 André Breton, ‘Duvillier’s Drag-Net’, in Surrealism and Painting, 340.

14 Benjamin Péret, Anthologie des mythes, légendes et contes populaires d’Amérique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1959).

15 André Breton, ‘Yves Laloy’, in Surrealism and Painting

16 See B. Péret, Œuvres complètes VI (Paris: José Corti, 1992), 283–89.

17 Gérard Legrand, ‘Où tout va s’obscurcir’, Bief, jonction surréaliste, no. 4 (1959).

Surrealists and leading figures associated with the movement, with Germaine Berton in the middle: (Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, Charles Baron, Jacques Baron, Jacques-André Boiffard, André Breton, Jean Carrive, Giorgio de Chirico, René Crevel, Joseph Delteil, Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Sigmund Freud, Francis Gérard, Georges Limbour, Mathias Lübeck, Georges Malkine, André Masson, Max Morise, Pierre Naville, Marcel Noll, Benjamin Péret, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Alberto Savinio, Philippe Soupault, Roger Vitrac), photomontage published in La Révolution surréaliste (Paris), no. 1, 1 December 1924, [p. 17].

A copy of the journal Feuille rouge (Paris) by the Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires, no. 3, 1 May 1933.

‘L’Affaire Aragon’ (The Aragon affair), a collective leaflet relating to the indictment of Louis Aragon for his poem ‘Front rouge’, Paris, January 1932.

‘Appel à la lutte’ (Call to the struggle), a collective leaflet instigated by André Breton in reaction to a demonstration organised by far-right leagues, Paris, 10 February 1934.

‘Rupture inaugurale’ (Inaugural rupture), collective declaration to ‘define one’s prejudicial attitude with regard to all partisan politics’, Paris, Éditions surréalistes, June 1947.

‘Pas de pasteurs pour cette rage!’ (No pastors for this rage!), collective leaflet in support of student revolts during May 1968, Paris, 5 May 1968.

Poster for the surrealist exhibition Princip / Slasti, Národní Galerie, Prague, Dům umění mesta, Brno, and Galéria Mladých, Bratislava, 1968 [poster: Jaroslav Hrstka].

Catalogue of the Salón de Mayo, Pabellon Cuba, Havana, 30 July 1967, in which a surrealist delegation participated [illustration: Wifredo Lam].

SUR REAL ISM