Surrealism. Nathalia Brodskaya
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“I have closed Dada’s eyes”, wrote Peret in the fifth number of the journal, “and now I am ready to go, I look to see from where the wind is blowing, unconcerned about what will happen next or where it will take me.”[36]
Breton’s lead article in the following number was called “The Outlet of the Medium”. The former Dadaists found their means of tapping the subconscious in the enthusiasm for spiritualism and for everything supernatural that was common in Paris after the war: in spiritualist séances, automatic writing and the narration of dreams. They were drawn to word-play, and preoccupied with the mystery of the telepathic link between Duchamp, who was in America, and his young protégé in Paris, the poet Robert Desnos. Later, Breton recalled his first encounter with the mystery of the dream: “In 1919, my attention focussed on the sentences, more or less fragmentary, which, when one is in complete solitude, just before going to sleep, one’s mind is able to pick up without being able to detect any prior purpose behind them. One evening, in particular, before going to sleep, I apprehended, clearly articulated, …a fairly bizarre sentence, which reached me without carrying any trace of the events in which, according to my consciousness, I found myself involved at that moment, a sentence which struck me as insistent, a phrase, I would venture to say, that felt like it was banging at the window-pane… it was something like: “There is a man cut in half by the window.”“[37] At that moment Breton was passionate about the methods of research into the human psyche which Freud had used, and which he himself tried to use in the course of his professional experience with patients during the war. He came to the conclusion that “the speed of thought is no greater than that of words, and that it does not necessarily challenge the tongue, or even the pen moving across the paper.” Breton shared his revelation with Philippe Soupault, and it was actually then that they got down to work on “Magnetic Fields”, putting into practice the method of automatic writing.
Yves Tanguy, The Hand in the Clouds, 1927.
Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm.
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.
Oscar Domínguez, The Hunter, 1933.
Oil on canvas, 61 × 50 cm.
Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao.
The young Parisian poet René Crevel turned out to be a medium, and when in a state of hypnotic trance he would utter strange phrases. Crevel had brought out the Dadaist journal Aventure in 1921 along with Francois Baron, Georges Limbourg, Max Moris and Roger Vitraque. He agreed to Breton’s proposal to participate in spiritualist séances. As a result, his gift drew the future Surrealists into the passion for spiritualism. In this way, according to Aragon, by the end of 1922 “an epidemic of sleeping hit the Surrealists… Seven or eight of them came to live only for those instances of forgetfulness when, once the lights were out, they spoke unconsciously, like drowned people in the open air…”[38] After that there arose a fashion for “speaking one’s dreams”, even though for this there was actually no need to sleep. This period in the history of Surrealism was later called “the era of rest”.
Unable to resign himself to the death of Dada, Tristan Tzara tried in July 1923 to organise a performance at the Michel Théâtre in Paris entitled “Evening of the Bearded Heart”. Although the evening did have the expected impact, it ended with a fight on the stage between Éluard and Tzara, and the involvement of the police. The Dada era was already in the past. Dada had performed its destructive role, and on its ruins a new movement was now in the process of being constructed – Surrealism. Dada had assembled so many outstanding people in Paris from many different countries, that a brigade of construction workers was already on stand-by. Dada had developed numerous new concepts and ideas, which Surrealism was later to use. But the main thing was that through Dada, the major artists of Surrealism became Surrealists.
However, it seems that too much was destroyed. Dada strove to deprive literature and art of everything in it that was romantic and lyrical, of everything that stirred and roused the impulses of the soul. When the science of psychoanalysis, the spirituality of Symbolism, and the romanticism of all the centuries of the past were all combined together and then added to the anarchism and absurdism of Dada, the result was Surrealism.
Frida Kahlo, The Love Embrace of the Universe, The Earth (Mexico), I, Diego and Señor Xólotl, 1949.
Oil on canvas, 70 × 60.5 cm.
Private Collection, Mexico.
Charles Rain, The Green Enchanter, 1946.
Oil on masonite, 20.3 × 20.3 cm.
Phillip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection.
The Baptism of Surrealism
Surrealism found its name almost as spontaneously as had Dada, the only difference being that unlike “Dada”, the term “Surrealism” possessed an exact meaning. The word “Surrealism” means “above realism”, “higher than realism”. Not only as a term, but also as a concept, Surrealism arose far earlier than the artistic tendency that sprang up over Dadaist foundations. The inventor of the term was Guillaume Apollinaire, idol of the avant-garde, author of “Alcools”, and, according to Louis Aragon, “the only man still capable of sprinkling with precious alcohol a France which had been dried up by the war.”[39] The premier of his play, “The Breasts of Tiresias”, was held in the Théâtre René-Maubel in Montmartre on June 24, 1917, but according to Apollinaire it was written much earlier, in 1903. The subtitle read: “A surrealist drama in two acts with a prologue”. In the preface to the play Apollinaire stated that he had written it for the French in the way that Aristophanes had written comedies for the Athenians. Although the theme – the problem of procreation – is very important, he did not want to write a play in a moralising tone, and summoned his fantasy to his aid. “I warned them (the French – N. B.) of the serious danger, recognisable to all, which a nation laying claim to prosperity and power would undergo if it was fast losing the desire to bring children into the world, and I showed them how to deal with the crisis and what ought to be done to that end.”[40] In his article in the newspaper Le Pays the critic Victor Bach wrote: “M. Guillaume Apollinaire’s play is a surrealist drama, that is, in plain French, a symbolist drama.”[41] Apollinaire wrote in the preface to the play: “For the definition of my drama I made use of a neologism, which is something for which I ought to be forgiven, as that sort of thing rarely happens with me, and I thought up the adjective ‘surrealist’ – it does not conceal any symbolic meaning… but fairly exactly defines a tendency in art which, although it is not new, like everything under the sun, has in any case never up to now served to formulate any kind of credo, any kind of artistic or literary hypothesis.”[42] Apollinaire said that he was aiming to be above the blind replication of nature; he did not want to imitate nature in the manner of photographers. In his search for a term, he strove to be as exact as possible. “All things considered”, he wrote in one of his letters, “I really think that it would be better to adopt surrealism rather than ‘supernaturalism’, which is what I used first. Surrealism does not yet exist in the dictionaries, and it will be more convenient to use than the word ‘supernaturalism’ that is already in use.”[43]
Apollinaire’s term showed itself capable of being widely employed. It was applied both to theatre and literature, and also to every branch of the visual arts. It could relate to new art and to the work of artists of the past; it was of sufficiently wide scope to be able to accommodate the ambition of many generations of creative artists to go outside the framework of the visible, real world. Surely poets and painters have striven throughout the ages to
Quoted in Maurice Nadeau,
Aragon, “Une vague de reves”, Nadeau,
Quoted in Michel Sanouillet,
“Apollinaire”, St. Petersburg, 1999, p. 440
Maurice Nadeau,