By EDILSON CREAM*
A retrospective on the occasion of the centenary of the First Manifesto of Surrealism
“It is not the unconscious itself that appears in the ruined world of the surrealists. If we were to measure their symbols according to their connection with the unconscious, they would prove to be too rationalistic.”
(Theodor Adorno).
July 1914. The outbreak of war caused the dissolution of all artistic movements that were developing in Europe. The elites and the economic and social system itself, which had produced the carnage, were discredited and under strong challenge. The chaos of daily life, the reports of atrocities and the disclosure of the inhumane conditions of soldiers in the trenches, who killed themselves by the millions without knowing why, revolted the most sensitive and critical spirits of the insanity that was taking place. From a cultural point of view, this situation led to the emergence, in the midst of the catastrophe, of an internationalist, protesting, intentionally chaotic and anarchist artistic movement.
As a neutral territory, Switzerland welcomed refugees from all over Europe. In Zurich, artists of various nationalities discovered each other by chance. The German Hugo Ball, who had fled military service, founded an “artistic” cabaret in February 1916, not only to “enjoy his independence, but also to prove it”. The opening, according to Hugo Ball, featured performances by “Mme. Hennings and Mme. Leconte, singing in French and Danish, Mr. Tristan Tzara read Romanian poetry and a balalaika orchestra played Russian folk songs and dances.”[I]
The group also included the Frenchman Arp, the Germans Huelsenbeck and Richter, the Romanian Janko and several other expatriates from the beginning. As a counterpoint to the war between their peoples, they decided to promote internationalist cabaret shows, presenting artistic acts from the countries that were fighting in the trenches, in a kind of union for art, in a cry against all borders and for harmonious coexistence between human beings.
These performances were a huge success, immediately gained international attention and attracted new artists and a large audience to the aesthetic innovations that appeared almost daily in the cabaret, which came to be called C. According to Huelsenbeck, one of its main members, and whom we will follow on this initial journey, even the name of the group was chosen at random: “The word Dada was discovered accidentally by Hugo Ball and I in a German-French dictionary, while we were looking for a name for Madame le Roy, the singer in our cabaret.”[ii]
As is well known, the meanings of the word “dada” are “wooden horse”, in children’s language, or “favorite theme”, “mania”, “fixed idea”. Although these meanings have generated countless interpretations, apparently what interested the group most was the sound of the word. Shortly after the beginning of the presentations, a magazine was launched called C to disseminate the movement's ideas. Its first issue, in June 1916, featured the participation of Apollinaire, Arp, Picasso, Marinetti, Modigliani and Kandinsky, indicating the strength and diversity that the initiative had acquired.
No one could explain better than Huelsenbeck himself the influences and aims of Dadaism at that crucial moment: “The Cabaret Voltaire group was composed of artists in the sense that they were all acutely aware of the new artistic possibilities that were just emerging. Hugo Ball and I had been extremely active in helping to spread Expressionism in Germany; Ball was a close friend of Kandinsky, in collaboration with whom he had tried to found an Expressionist theater in Munich. In Paris, Arp had been in close contact with Picasso and Braque, the leaders of the Cubist movement, and was completely convinced of the need to combat the naturalist conception in all its forms. Tristan Tzara, that romantic internationalist, to whose propagandist zeal we must thank for the enormous growth of Dadaism, brought with him from Romania an unlimited literary facility. At that period, while we danced, sang and recited night after night at the Cabaret Voltaire, abstract art was for us the supreme moment of absolute dignity. Naturalism was a psychological invasion of the motives of the bourgeoisie, our mortal enemy. (…) Dada should serve as a convergence of abstract energies and should be a permanent, vigorous impulse for the great international artistic movements”.[iii]
Thus, the Dadaist movement attempted to amalgamate, without prejudice and without any program, characteristics of various aesthetic tendencies of its time. As if it were a collage of radicalisms of all kinds. Huelsenbeck says that they incorporated in their own way the concept of simultaneity from Marinetti's futurism and, in their presentations, they recited different poems at the same time, as well as “assuming without suspecting their philosophy” the principles of The art of rumors, by Russolo, playing “bruitiste” music frantically. And he confesses that “the Dadaists of the Cabaret Voltaire really had no idea what they wanted – the remnants of ‘modern art’ that at some time or another clung to the minds of these individuals were gathered together and called ‘Dada’.”[iv] Which resulted in a seemingly chaotic presentation, very much in keeping with life in those dark times.
After its success in Switzerland, the Dada movement spread throughout Europe and the world, even to countries still at war with its members. Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, Basel, Barcelona and Paris saw the emergence of groups. Soon after the war, major Dada exhibitions were held and the Paris group, led by Tzara, gained the participation of Breton, Paul Éluard and Aragon, who would be fundamental to the future of the movement. And to its overcoming.
Furthermore, the disastrous human toll of the war and the enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution pushed some Dadaists towards political radicalization, making it a movement of strong social protest. This was especially true in Germany, where Dadaism “lost its character as art for art’s sake, (…) in direct contrast to abstract art (…) and consciously adopted a political position,” as Huelsenbeck states. He and Hausmann even wrote a Manifesto of the German Dadaist Revolutionary Central Council, whose first demands were: “The international revolutionary union of all creative and intellectual men and women on the basis of radical Communism (…) and the immediate expropriation of property (socialization) and the communal feeding of all.”[v]
Other, less radical groups, mostly anarchists, adopt Bakunin's thesis that destruction is also construction. However, in this case, the destruction they sought was that of the traditional conception of art and artistic language, not only to shock the bourgeoisie responsible for the state of affairs, but mainly to pave the way for a complete emancipation of the visual imagination. Thus, their works could be composed of garbage, a urinal would become a Greek fountain and even the Mona Lisa gained a mustache.
Dadaism thus walked on the edge of an essential contradiction: how to express oneself by completely destroying all conventional means of expression, all artistic clichés, blowing up the bridges over which an artist would have to cross in order to express his ideas? It is interesting to note that a similar proposal was carried out by the Symbolists at the end of the 19th century, when they also tried to raise barriers between their works and the reading public.
Mostly children of the Bloody Week that led to the massacre of the Paris Commune, radical anarchists who followed the theses of Mikhail Bakunin, the young symbolists not only welcomed the bomb attacks in Paris between 1892 and 1894, but even published the chemical composition of dynamite. The poet Tailhade’s verses about the bomb explosions crudely expose the intensification of the political struggle during that period: “Anarchy! Oh torchbearer! Drive out the night! Crush the worm!” Or, then, the aestheticization of violence when commenting on the deaths of innocents caused by the attacks: “What does it matter if some vague individualities disappear, if the gesture is beautiful!” [vi]
A subtle observation of the emergence of symbolism and its rapprochement with anarchism was presented, in a surprising way, by the unsuspected and amusing report of a cultivated police commissioner who was leading investigations at the time: “Symbolism takes advantage of the disorder created in people’s minds by the venality of public powers (…) which makes people feel the need for a change of scenery. Many people expect nothing more than a general change! (…) This is why we see the collusion of aesthetes and anarchist comrades. The two take turns in public meetings to present their program to the assembly, which retains only one point from these speeches: that it is a question of demolishing something. (…) In the assemblies, through the cloud of cigarette smoke, we see Rachilde and Sébastien Faure, Paule Minck and Paul Adam, Séverine and Roinard, Ibels and comrade Martinet taking turns on the platform. The Academy and the Patronage are simultaneously struck down. Protests are being held against the shooting of the Fourmies demonstrators on May Day and against the ban on Lohengrin at the Opera. And the assembly disperses with alternating shouts of 'Long live free verse' and 'Long live anarchy'.”[vii]
However, despite their bombastic demonstrations, poets and writers were merely the propaganda arm of anarchism at that time, armed only with a pen and lots of ink, and apparently never took direct action. The bombs they dropped on the literature-consuming bourgeoisie were extremely complex and obscure texts, full of erudite images, to belittle and intellectually humiliate this reading public that supported the regime and its atrocities. This attitude is well represented by Wyzewa's opinion: “The aesthetic value of a work is always in inverse proportion to the number of minds that can understand it.”[viii] The aesthetic project was, therefore, also closely linked to a political project.
Thus, despite the historical and aesthetic differences, we see that there is something in common between the young symbolists and the dadaists, in addition to their sympathy for anarchism, a hostility towards the bourgeois public that was bombarded with works that carried the explicit desire not to be understood. However, after the war, with the new social and political conditions, dadaism began its decline, mainly due to the exhaustion of its own project. But not only.
From the beginning of the Dadaist movement, there were enormous internal disagreements, fueled by political differences and vanity, which also corroded the movement and paved the way for another aesthetic conception that germinated within it. Huelsenbeck had returned to Berlin where he had founded a much more politicized Dadaist group. The main divergence, however, occurred after Tzara arrived in Paris in 1920 and joined André Breton, Aragon and Éluard. Much paper has been covered in ink in the attempt to understand this period and the definitive rupture of the group. But an essential fact in this process, and one that has been overlooked, is the different intellectual formation of the French group, strongly influenced by psychoanalysis and political action.
It is true that Freud's discoveries had been infiltrating artistic and cultural production for several years, often subtly. In painting, for example, the first manifestations, albeit unintentional, were carried out by Chirico and Chagall. Each in his own way appealed to illogical, fantastic and passionate figures that could be interpreted as dream images taken directly from the unconscious. Both had been nourished by the Cubist technique, but without completely adhering to the style. Chagall took it upon himself to show us his distance from previous styles: "I try to fill the canvas with vibrant and passionate forms that must create a supplementary dimension that neither the pure geometry of Cubist lines nor the touch of impressionist color.”[ix]
It would not be an exaggeration to say that what Chagal and Chirico were seeking was, for the first time, and perhaps without realizing it, to make painting consciously penetrate the realm of the unconscious, to represent dream images without the filter of reason.[X] And, to do so, they could not be totally cubist, abandoning the essential elements of the motif, the natural forms, as they constitute the dream language.
This same kind of “surrealism”, a term coined by Apollinaire in 1917 to define one of his own pieces, was used by André Breton and Philippe Soupault as the basis for the method of poetic creation that they developed in 1919. André Breton had a background in medicine, studied psychoanalysis and even practiced it in a neuropsychiatry center in 1916. This contact with neurologically affected patients was decisive for his aesthetic formation, as he realized that the psychoanalytic technique could also be a source of creation.
Or rather, André Breton intuited that the symbolic images released by dreams would be a significant aesthetic source. However, these images would only be pure in meaning and reveal the depths of the soul if they were obtained through an automatic process of free association, bypassing the censorship of the conscious mind, without the scrutiny of reason. Thus, Breton had the idea of writing poems with a spontaneous and automatic writing style, writing down on paper the sentences that occurred to him randomly, without worrying about grammar, spelling or style, as if the process of self-analysis were possible. And, in order to make this process more reliable, he asked his friend Soupault to do exactly the same thing so that they could compare the results.
This attempt at experimental “proof” is curious, as a scientist obeying the rules and rigor of the scientific method. In fact, it was Freud himself who put forward this idea in the text The Dreams, written in 1900 and published in 1901, when suggesting a method for a possible self-analysis of dreams: “In the self-application of this procedure [involuntary, spontaneous association], the best help is to immediately write down the occurrences themselves, which are in principle incomprehensible.”[xi]
Breton and Soupault's literary-scientific experiments were published in 1919 in the magazine Literature founded by them, and, as is known, they gave this method of writing the name surrealism, “in honor of Guillaume Apollinaire”. It is worth noting the title that the authors chose for this literary experiment: The Magnetic Fields,[xii] showing that the concepts of Physics populated the imagination of the time and even served as inspiration for artists. Although the First Manifesto of Surrealism, by André Breton, was only published in October 1924,[xiii] The Magnetic Fields is considered by many to be the birth certificate of the movement.
However, there are differences of opinion on this. For Walter Benjamin, for example, the Season in Hell, by Rimbaud, from 1873, “is in fact the original text of the movement”. And he also considers that Rêves Wave, by Louis Aragon, published in 1924, a few months before the The Manifest, “showed in what imperceptible and remote substance the dialectical nucleus that later matured in surrealism was embedded. (…) To be more rigorous, we can select from Dostoevsky's complete works (…) 'Stavrogin's Confession', from Devils, published only in 1915. This chapter (…) contains a justification of Evil that expresses certain motifs of surrealism more forcefully than its current proponents have ever managed. For Stavrogin is a surrealist before la lettre. "[xiv]
J-François Fourny shares Walter Benjamin's appreciation of the importance of Louis Aragon's work, but points out that Picabia was also carrying out these experiments in 1915. Thus, although André Breton's automatic writing technique was published in 1919, Louis Aragon is seen by some as the precursor of the movement.[xv]
The relationship between Dadaism and Surrealism is still the subject of much debate. For example, Sanouillet states that Surrealism was always contained, in embryo, in the Dada movement, and that The Magnetic Fields is far from being purely surrealist. On the contrary, it represents only the swan song of Symbolism. And this author goes further: “Surrealism is not the recovery of Dada, nor a movement parallel to Dada (…) It is simply one of its multiple incarnations, the most brilliant, without any doubt. (…) Surrealism was the French form of Dada.”[xvi]
In an opposite line of interpretation, we find, for example, Arnauld and Prigioni who assure that surrealism was an entirely new phenomenon and irreducible to Dada: “This Dada, which would have contained Surrealism in germ, even in full maturity and in all its aspects, as soon as we examine it in its manifestations outside Paris, outside the presence and participation of André Breton, we do not perceive in it the slightest symptom of Surrealism.”[xvii] Furthermore, the authors add, Dada was a destructive and nihilistic movement, the universal negation, while Surrealism would vigorously reintroduce some positivities such as that of art, love or social revolution. And, we could add, it would be founded on the scientific experiences of psychoanalysis. All this would make it impossible to reduce it completely to Dada.
We see, therefore, that this was a complex process, the resolution of which may lie somewhere between the two interpretations outlined above. According to the testimony of his contemporaries, André Breton was aware that he was living in a historical moment of growing obscurantism that required a collective effort by intellectuals to develop a more constructive response than Dadaist nihilism. In other words, a modernist project.
In the words of the poet Hugnet, who followed this entire process of aesthetic and political transformation from within, being the first scholar of Dadaism, as well as a member of Surrealism: “For Dada, the adjective ‘modern’ was pejorative. Dada had always fought against the modern spirit. As for Breton, his intention was clear. Amidst the rising tide of obscurity, he wanted to create light. He wanted to investigate the maneuvers of Dada. Dada was at the end of its evolution. It had sunk like a ship in distress. A reorientation was necessary.”[xviii]
It is true that André Breton sought the theoretical assumptions for this reorientation in psychoanalysis, as Read emphasizes. But not only that, as we shall see. In fact, what directly interested surrealism was not Freud's interpretations of dreams and their complex theory, but mainly the technique of free association through speech that managed to enter the unconscious universe, rich in images and symbols. For André Breton, the possibility of accessing this unknown universe, even while awake, constituted the primary source of artistic creation.
He himself explains to us the lofty pretensions of surrealism: “Since at that time I was still very busy reading Freud, and familiar with his methods of examination, which I had had occasion to practice a little on patients during the war, I decided to obtain from myself what one tries to obtain from them, that is, a monologue that flows as quickly as possible, in which the subject’s critical mind makes no judgment, which is not constrained by any reticence, and which is as exactly as possible the spoken thought. It seemed to me, and still seems to me, (…) that the speed of thought is not superior to that of speech, and that it does not necessarily challenge the tongue, nor even the pen that slides. It was with these dispositions that Philippe Soupault, to whom I had revealed these first conclusions, and I set about blackening the paper, with a commendable disregard for what might come of it in literature.”[xx] (Let us remember in passing that Maria Pappenheim, fifteen years earlier, in a surrealist before la lettre, used the same artistic creation technique to write the opera's libretto Expectation, by Schoenberg.[xx])
Finally, in addition to the very didactic explanation cited above, and given that there were many discussions about what surrealism would be, André Breton, with his peculiar irony, clearly defined it in The Manifest, “once and for all”, in the form of a dictionary entry: “SURRÉALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism by means of which it is proposed to express, either verbally, in writing, or in any other way, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of any control exercised by reason, beyond any aesthetic or moral concern.
ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism rests on the belief in a higher reality of certain forms of associations hitherto neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin definitively all other psychic mechanisms and to replace them in solving the main problems of life.”[xxx]
It was, in essence, a search for the absolute freedom of the writer. It was, in fact, a revolutionary proposal, because, as Walter Benjamin said, it fought against all the criteria of bourgeois literature, and “exploded from within” the dominance of this literature: “Since Mikhail Bakunin, there has been no radical concept of freedom in Europe. The Surrealists have this concept. They were the first to liquidate the fossilized ideal of freedom of the moralists and humanists (…).” However, Walter Benjamin then asks: “But can they [the Surrealists] merge this experience with the other revolutionary experience, which we are obliged to recognize, because it was also ours: the constructive, dictatorial experience of the revolution? In short: associate revolt with revolution?”[xxiii]
As is well known, Walter Benjamin wrote this essay in the heat of the moment, in 1929, a year after the publication of the book La Révolution et les intellectuels, by Pierre Naville, which was fundamental to the later evolution of surrealism. In this well-known book, written between 1925 and 1926, after the bloody intervention of France in support of Spain in Morocco, Pierre Naville discusses precisely the question of political action and calls on his comrades to reconcile the strength of their libertarian determination with the rigor required by the revolution. In other words, to move from, let's say, anarchist action to political engagement subject to Marxist and revolutionary discipline. This proposal, evidently, provoked enormous discussions within the group. And many ruptures.
If the psychoanalytic method had encouraged the first “intuitive” steps of the movement, Pierre Naville’s reflections and, above all, the sociopolitical situation of the period brought about a surprising change of direction. André Breton himself, in a lecture in 1934, distinguished two moments of surrealism: “I believe that there is reason to distinguish in the evolution of the surrealist movement two periods of roughly equal duration: from its origins (1919, the year of the publication of Magnetic Fields) to this day [1934]: a purely intuitive and a time Racional. The first can be summarily characterized by the belief expressed in it in the omnipotence of thought, considered capable of emancipating and liberating itself by its own means. This belief reflects a dominant feeling that I see today as very regrettable, which is the feeling of the primacy of thought over matter. (…) However, no coherent social or political determination manifested itself in it until 1925, that is to say (it is important to emphasize this) until the outbreak of war in Morocco which, reviving in us the particular hostility towards the fate of men provoked by armed conflicts, suddenly places us before the need for a public protest. This protest, which, under the title of Revolution First and Always, brought together, in October 1925, the names of around thirty intellectuals, in addition to the names of the surrealists themselves, was perhaps ideologically quite confusing; however, it marked a break with an entire way of thinking; nevertheless, it created a characteristic precedent that would decide the entire subsequent conduct of the movement.”[xxiii]
If this profound politicization of surrealism occurred because the war in Morocco had “revived” in its members a “hostility” toward “armed conflicts,” it was because the roots of the movement were embedded in the historical soil of the First World War, and its horizon was the expectation of a new war that was being prepared. André Breton recognized this historical determination in a lecture to students at Yale University in 1942: “From one war to another, it can be said that it is the passionate search for freedom that has been the constant motive of surrealist action. (…) I insist on the fact that surrealism can only be understood historically in relation to war, that is to say—from 1919 to 1939—in relation, at the same time, to the war from which it emanates and to the war into which it extends.”[xxv]
Since the movement’s inception, there has been a conviction that a new catastrophe was approaching. The “slide towards the abyss,” in André Breton’s terms, was the prevailing sentiment at the time. Still in the Yale conference, the author recalls that, fourteen years in advance, he predicted exactly when Europe would once again fall into the trap that the “war machines” were setting. As proof, Breton quotes this phrase of his, which can be found in the Letters to Voyantes, from 1925, which was added to the 1929 reissue of Manifesto of Surrealism: “There are people who pretend that the war has taught them something; they are all less fortunate than I, who know what the year 1939 has in store for me.”[xxiv]
From this perspective, what Theodor Adorno said about Franz Kafka’s novels would apply to surrealism, namely, that we are faced with an “anticipated response to a constitution of a world in which every contemplative attitude has become an outrageous sarcasm, since the permanent threat of catastrophe no longer allows anyone to be a neutral spectator.” Therefore, Adorno writes, Kafka “shocks the reader in order to demolish his contemplative comfort,” showing that “the all-powerful reality can only be changed concretely, and not transfigured in the image.”[xxv] This is what the surrealists understood when they formulated their “public protest”, under the title Revolution First and Always.
In a 1925 article in Surrealist Revolution, commenting on Leon Trotsky's biography of Lenin, André Breton refutes the current criticism that the Surrealists had “a rather unfavorable judgment of the Russian Revolution and the men who led it.” However, he somehow confesses that he had just discovered the real Revolution and its leaders.[xxviii] In January 1927, the poet joined the Communist Party, with which he would maintain a short and extremely tense relationship due not only to the prejudice of French Communists towards surrealist theses,[xxviii] but above all the Stalinist policy of “socialism in one country”, the abandonment of Lenin’s theses and the persecution of opponents.
A defining moment for the magazine Surrealist Revolution was the expulsion of Leon Trotsky from the USSR, in January 1929, as Desnos, Naville, Mésententes and others abandoned the magazine, which saw its last issue appear in December.[xxix] However, this sad outcome of the final edition brought with it a rebirth: the publication of Second Manifesto of Surrealism. And, at the same time, the need to renew the movement by launching, in July 1930, a new periodical entitled Surrealism in the service of the Revolution, with the participation of Breton, Aragon, Salvador Dali, Louis Buñuel, Éluard, Ernst, Tzara and several other intellectuals and artists.[xxx]
Here, then, was a major contradiction for the Surrealists in this radical change of direction: the dichotomy between “intuitive” artistic work and the rigor of political action. More precisely, as Breton confessed in his 1934 lecture, it was the difficult task of aligning the Surrealist method with “dialectical materialism”: “In reality, two problems arise for us: one is the problem of knowledge, which, in effect, at the beginning of the twentieth century, puts on the agenda the relations between the conscious and the unconscious. This is how this problem presented itself to us electively: we happened to be the first to apply to its resolution a particular method that has never ceased to seem to us the best adapted and that we consider perfectible. We have no reason to renounce it. The other problem that arises for us is that of the social action to be carried out, an action that, in our view, has its own method in dialectical materialism, an action in which we cannot disregard ourselves, all the more so because we consider the liberation of man as condition sine qua non of the liberation of the spirit, and that this liberation of man can only be achieved with the proletarian Revolution.”[xxxii] It was then very clear to the surrealists the complex underlying problem that would permeate the 20th century: how to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism?
In his 1929 essay on Surrealism, Walt Benjamin comments on Pierre Naville's book, which had put on the agenda the “Organization of Pessimism” against “Optimism,” which is the “treasure trove of images of these social-democratic poets.” Just images, totally abstract. Benjamin states: “Naville launches a ultimatum: (…) where are the prerequisites for revolution? In the transformation of opinions or in the transformation of external relations? (…) The surrealists are getting closer and closer to a communist answer to this question. Which means: complete pessimism. Without exception. Distrust about the fate of literature, distrust about the fate of freedom, distrust about the fate of European humanity and, above all, distrust, distrust and distrust regarding any form of mutual understanding: between classes, between peoples, between individuals.” [xxxi]
It is, so to speak, this essential negativity of surrealism that allows us to elucidate the conclusion of Walter Benjamin's essay: “At the moment, the surrealists are the only ones who have managed to understand the slogans that the Communist Manifesto transmits to us today.”[xxxii]
André Breton “sensed” this radical negativity in Hegel from the beginning of his intellectual career. At first, it was a question of bringing Hegel and Freud closer together. It is worth noting this account by Elizabeth Roudinesco: “‘Freud is Hegelian in me,’ Breton once said. In his view, therefore, communication [between surrealism and psychoanalysis] seems possible. To achieve this, it is enough to add to Freudian doctrine a kind of Hegelian philosophy that would make the imaginary and reality meet. The writer maintains a privileged relationship with the character of Hegel. (…) André Breton ‘sensed’ Hegel in his philosophy classes. He compulsively immersed himself in his texts, in the manner of a hysteric. “Any specialist,” declared André Breton in 1952, “would admonish me in matters of exegesis regarding him, but it is no less true that, ever since I met Hegel, or rather, ever since I sensed him through the sarcasm with which my philosophy teacher, a positivist, André Cresson, pursued him around 1912, I have been imbued with his views and, for me, his method has covered all others in poverty. Where Hegelian dialectics does not work, for me there is no thought, there is no hope of truth.” [xxxv]
In effect, in Second Manifest, published in December 1929, André Breton makes it clear that Hegelian dialectics is the theoretical premise that will serve as a bridge for surrealism to attempt to merge psychoanalysis and Marxism. It is this that allows the overcoming of the “factitious character of the old antinomies hypocritically intended to prevent all unusual agitation of man”.[xxxiv] It is this, adds André Breton, that allows us to glimpse “a certain point of the spirit from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, cease to be perceived as contradictory.”
This “thought definitely malleable to negation, and to negation and from negation”, from which Marxism emanates, could not be limited to the domains of economics: “How can we admit that the dialectical method can only be validly applied to the solution of social problems? The whole ambition of surrealism is to provide it with possibilities of application that are in no way competing in the conscious and more immediate domain.”[xxxiv]
Although the Second Manifest also use the Philosophy of law of Hegel, is above all in the “voluntary act” seen in Phenomenology of Spirit that André Breton sets another anchor for surrealism. Against the “hypocrisy” of those who believe that “man will be defeated by the regime in any case,” Breton’s Hegelian voluntarism calls for action: “we cannot help but ask ourselves in the most burning way the question of the social regime under which we live, I mean the acceptance or non-acceptance of this regime.”[xxxviii] What this Second Manifest is announcing, as Roudinesco observes, is the strong turn of the movement: “André Breton’s plunge into an active Hegelianism is contemporary with a political change within the surrealist movement. (…) Thus, Breton’s Hegelianism becomes the weapon par excellence of a transformation of the surrealist revolt into a social revolution.”[xxxviii]
This peculiar “active Hegelianism” that André Breton mobilized to put “surrealism at the service of the revolution” would have been a somersault if it had not been cushioned by an extensive network whose plot was being woven on French cultural soil. And André Breton was one of the first to begin to weave it. In this sense, Second Manifest ended up anticipating, in some way, the perspective of the philosophy of action of Alexandre Kojève, whose courses on Phenomenology of Spirit, between 1933-1936, fostered a vigorous Hegel revival in France in the 1930s.[xxxix]
In Alexandre Kojève's view, as we know, Hegelianism paradoxically becomes a radical philosophical activism. And, far from being an idealism, it is read as pure realism: “It is often said that Hegel's system is 'idealist'. Now, in fact, Hegelian absolute idealism has nothing to do with what is commonly called 'idealism'. If we use the terms in their usual sense, it must be said that Hegel's system is 'realist'. (…) To say that philosophy must be 'realist' is to say in the final analysis that it must take History into account. (…) There is no truly philosophical 'realism' except where philosophy takes action into account, that is, history, that is, time.”[xl]
At the basis of Kojève’s Hegel is the immanent link between freedom and negativity: “For Hegel, man is not only what he is, but what he can be, negating what he is.” It is thus through negativity that “the idea of freedom penetrates philosophy.”[xi] Negativity, freedom, history, action, time: the way is paved for André Breton's Hegel to lead surrealism towards social revolution. The next step will be the rapprochement with Trotsky.
Throughout the 1930s, the Surrealists did indeed attempt to radicalize their proposal for the artist's complete freedom in the service of the revolution. After the Moscow Trials scandal, André Breton harshly criticized Stalinist policies and sought to get closer to Leon Trotsky through Pierre Naville, who had broken with the group and founded the Trotskyist movement in France. André Breton met with Trotsky in Mexico in 1938 and they wrote the famous founding Manifesto of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (FIARI).
As Michael Löwy points out, during the discussions, “Trotsky, although he respected the courage and lucidity of the poet – one of the few French left-wing intellectuals to oppose Stalinism – had some difficulty understanding surrealism”, to which he contrasted Zola’s realism. Regarding the theme dear to the surrealists, the freedom of the artist, it was Trotsky who wrote the most radical passages of this Manifesto, proposing that, in a revolutionary society, artists should have “unlimited freedom”, an “anarchist regime”. What’s more, he rejected a passage proposed by André Breton that would limit such freedom if it threatened the proletarian revolution.[xliii]
Two retrospective analyses of surrealism carried out in the 1950s are worth mentioning, those of Arnold Hauser and Theodor Adorno. To the purely intuitive artistic procedure of the surrealists, to which Trotsky had contrasted Zola's realism, Hauser contrasted the Proustian process developed a few years earlier: "Thus, after all, [the surrealists] still take refuge in the rationalization of the irrational and the methodical reproduction of the spontaneous, with the sole difference that their method is incomparably more pedantic, dogmatic and rigid than the mode of creation in which the irrational and the intuitive are controlled by aesthetic judgment, taste and self-criticism, and which makes reflection, and not indiscriminateness, its guiding principle. More fruitful than the surrealists’ recipe was Proust’s process, which similarly placed himself in a kind of somnambulistic state and abandoned himself to the flow of memories with the passivity of a medium in hypnosis, but at the same time remained a disciplined thinker and a creative artist, conscientious to the highest degree. Freud himself seems to have discerned the trick perpetrated by surrealism. He is said to have said to Salvador Dali, who visited him in London shortly before his death: ‘What interests me in your art is not the unconscious, it is the conscious.’”[xiii]
In his important “retrospective study” of surrealism, Theodor Adorno, while acknowledging the “abundant richness of surrealism” and the “power that emanated from its ideas,” follows Freud’s line regarding the scope of the surrealist method: “The creations of the surrealists are but pale analogues of dreams, insofar as they invalidate the usual logic and the rules of the game of empirical existence, while respecting isolated, exploded things, and even bringing all their content, and particularly their human content, closer to the form of things. (…) However, the surrealists themselves ended up realizing that they do not associate in the same way in the analytical situation and in their poetry. In fact, the freedom of psychoanalytic associations has nothing free about it. (…) It is not the in-itself of the unconscious that appears in the ruined world of the surrealists. If we were to measure their symbols according to their connection with the unconscious, they would reveal themselves to be too rationalist. (…) In fact, this is how Freud reacted to Dalí. (…) If we then want to embrace surrealism in a concept, it is not to psychology that we must return, but to its artistic approach. Undoubtedly, it is the montages that constitute its scheme. We can easily show that truly surrealist painting itself operates with its reasons, and that the discontinuous juxtaposition of images in surrealist poetry has the nature of a montage. (…) The dialectical images of surrealism are those of a dialectic of the freedom of the subject in a state of non-freedom of the object.”[xiv]
We will see that the examination of two specific canvases by the controversial Salvador Dali confirms the extent to which these interpretations by Theodor Adorno, as well as those by Hauser, exposed the sensitive nerve of the surrealist method.
Surrealist painting?
Soon after the publication of First Manifesto, a doubt arose among the members of the movement: would it be possible to apply psychic automatism to the visual arts? Would a surrealist painting be possible? The The Manifest by André Breton raises the question. We have seen that in his definition of surrealism, “pure psychic automatism” should be applied to written expression as well as to all other forms of expression. And the end of The Manifest suggests that “surrealist means would need to be broadened”, and that “the pasted papers of Picasso and Braque” are valid for obtaining “the desired speed of certain associations”. However, André Breton concludes in a surprising way: “I hasten to add that future surrealist techniques do not interest me.”[xlv]
This reluctance regarding the visual arts was shared by other members of the group. Already in the first issue of Surrealist Revolution, in December 1924, Max Morise states that the long procedure of creating a painting “leaves great scope for arbitrariness, for taste, and tends to divert the dictation of thought.”[xlv] He analyzes de Chirico’s painting and states that the painter’s conscious effort to interpret and represent the strange dreamlike images present in his memory necessarily transforms his work into a mere description of a dream. And Morise concludes: “The images are surrealist, but their expressions are not. (…) Today we cannot imagine what a surrealist painting would be.”[xlv] Four months later, in the third issue of the magazine, Pierre Naville declared: “No one is unaware that there is no surrealist painting.”[xlviii]
We must remember that the The Manifest of 1924 was published as a kind of theoretical introduction to the set of thirty-two poetic “short stories” by Breton, called Poisson Soluble.[xlix] His primary concern was therefore surrealist writing. However, the great impact of the text and the profound discussions within the group forced Breton to deepen his analysis of the visual arts in a surrealist context.
Thus, in July 1925, in the fourth issue, he took over the direction of the Surrealist Revolution and begins to publish a series of articles symptomatically titled: The surrealism and the hairstyle. Why this separation? Why didn't he simply call his articles Surrealist Painting? It was, however, the beginning of a long journey along which André Breton broadened the definition of surrealism to encompass the visual arts.
The central pillar of the surrealist method, “psychic automatism,” was too restrictive and would, in fact, prevent its application in the visual arts. But the process, let’s say, of attenuating this condition occurred behind the scenes and we can see this evolution mainly in the comments on the painters that André Breton tries to associate with surrealism. First, in the article that started the series Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, dedicated to “vehemently claiming Picasso as one of our own”, he refers only to “the mind totally abstracted from everything and in love with its own life”, and no longer identifies surrealism and “pure psychic automatism”, as in the definition of First Manifesto.[l]
However, later, the poet says that Miró has “the desire to simply abandon himself to painting”, in a kind of “pure automatism”, such that he “can pass himself off as the most 'surrealist' of us all”.[li] Also analyzing the screen The maze, by Masson, Breton states: “André Masson, at the very beginning of his journey, encountered automatism. The painter’s hand truly flies with him: it is no longer the one that traces the shapes of objects, but rather the one that, in love with its own movement, and only with it, describes the involuntary figures in which experience shows that these forms are called to reincorporate themselves.”[liiii] André Breton had finally welcomed the visual arts into the universe of surrealism without reservations. For the poet, this meant that this erratic flight of the passionate hand would be guided by the artist's unconscious, in a state between sleep and wakefulness.
It is worth noting that in 1938, in the wording of item 7 of the Founding Manifesto of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art, the expression “inner world” was used, identified with the unconscious, probably at the suggestion of André Breton, and not of Trotsky. It is enough to remember that in the very first article of the series Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, in 1925, the poet states that the “external world is of a suspicious nature” and that the plastic arts should refer to a “purely interior model".[iii] André Breton rarely mentions the term unconscious, focusing on the concepts of “external model” and “internal model”. According to him, surrealist painters freed themselves from the prison of “external perception”, which had dominated painting for a long time, and were able to guide themselves by an “internal reference”, the imagination.[book]
This nomenclature reveals the important role of expressionism in the formation of most Dadaists and Surrealists. As is known, in his work Of the Spiritual in Art, from 1912, Kandinsky is based on the idea that a certain “inner knowledge” must guide the hand of the expressionist artist.[lv] It is in this field of the “inner world” that both expressionism and surrealism, each in its own way, seek to nourish themselves. Furthermore, as we saw in Huelsenbeck’s testimony, many Dadaists brought a strong expressionist heritage. However, curiously, Kandinsky and expressionism are not explicitly mentioned in the Manifestos by André Breton, despite the evident similarity of the sources of inspiration of the two movements.
On the other hand, the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, which also strongly influenced the Dadaists (canvases by both painters decorated the walls of the Cabaret Voltaire and even Cubist costumes were used), is a constant reference for Breton in First Manifesto and in his later publications, which, in fact, try to associate it with surrealist characteristics. In truth, as we will see below, it was all the cubist currents that surreptitiously infiltrated the pictorial production of surrealism.
Let us quickly recall a decisive moment among the Cubists so that we can understand some key works of Surrealism.
Painting in four dimensions?
The Theory of Relativity and non-Euclidean geometry played a crucial role in the evolution of Cubism. For the simple reason that they completely altered the intuitive notion of space. Geometry is the grammar of the visual arts, in the words of Apollinaire.
Abandoning the founders Picasso and Braque, the self-styled Puteaux Group was formed, whose center of attraction was the passion of all its members for Einstein's theories, mathematics and, above all, geometry. From 1911 onwards, the Duchamps welcomed the group into their home in the Parisian neighborhood of Puteaux, among which were Léger, Picabia, Gleizes, Kupka, Metzinger, Peret, Salmon, Apollinaire, Juan Gris and, above all, the mathematician Maurice Princet. In his discussions on geometry with his comrades, Princet based himself essentially on a work that a lieutenant colonel in the French artillery, Esprit Jouffret, had published in 1903 to promote the works of Henry Poincaré, whose title is very suggestive: Elementary treatise on four-dimensional geometry and introduction to one-dimensional geometry.
It is interesting to note the similarity of some later cubist works with the illustrative figures in this book, such as the fundamental octahedrons and hyperpolyhedrons and their projections onto a plane.[lv] Ultimately, the group's goal was to deepen the abstraction of painting as much as the abstraction of the physical world had been unveiled by science and geometry. In other words, to overcome what they called the primitive cubism of Picasso and Braque, which they considered to be excessively dependent on nature, or worse, a common-sense conception of nature that disregarded the new discoveries of science. In short, the group sought an art that was as abstract as it was, in fact, the new scientific description of nature.
No one is better than Apollinaire to describe this artistic-scientific process, since he lived through every moment of this rapprochement between art and science. He was not just a spectator, but an active and decisive actor in the artistic and intellectual environment of that turbulent historical period. Furthermore, Apollinaire wrote in the heat of the moment, between 1911 and 1912, in the manner of a highly critical reporter and intellectual who tells us how the transformations were taking place: “Until now, the three dimensions of Euclidean geometry satisfied the restlessness that the feeling of infinity deposits in the souls of great artists. The new painters, no more than the older ones, did not set out to be geometers. But it can be said that geometry is to the visual arts what grammar is to the art of writing. Now, today, scientists no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclidean geometry. Painters were led quite naturally and, so to speak, by intuition, to concern themselves with the new possible measures of extension, which in the language of modern studios were all together and briefly designated by the term fourth dimension. As it offers itself to the mind, from a plastic point of view, the fourth dimension would be engendered by the three known measures: it represents the immensity of space eternalizing itself in all directions at a given moment. It is space itself, the dimension of infinity; it is this that gives plasticity to objects. (…) Let us add that this imagination, the fourth dimension, was only the manifestation of the aspirations, the concerns, of a large number of young artists observing Egyptian, black and oceanic sculptures, meditating on scientific works, awaiting a sublime art (…).”[lviii]
We see that artists were aware that, in addition to spatial dimensions, time should be a new dimension of painting, that the “precise moment” somehow needed to be incorporated into the work. Furthermore, “sublime art” would also come from the study of “scientific works”. This interest in the real physical composition of space would continue even after the Cubist period was overcome. Let us take, for example, one of the most popular surrealist works, almost synonymous with surrealism for the general public, The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dali, 1931.
The caricature of the painter sleeping, grotesque with his tongue hanging out and dreaming of the extravagant images represented on the canvas; the landscape above, which brings back memories of his childhood in Cadaquès; the centuries-old olive tree, now dry; the ants he hated devouring the pocket watch on the table; and the clocks (time) melting, all of this would rightly justify the countless psychoanalytic interpretations of these images apparently produced by dreams. What's more, the different time indications on the clocks suggest that dream time is different from waking time, quite in line with Freud.
Furthermore, the painting was painted shortly after Dali published the article. The Rotten Donkey, in the first issue of the magazine Surrealism at the service of the Revolution, in 1930, proposing the paranoid-critical method of painting: “I believe that the time is near when, through a process of a paranoid and active character of thought, it will be possible (simultaneously with automatism and other passive states) to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality. The new simulacra that paranoid thought can suddenly bring to light will not only have their origin in the unconscious, but also the force of paranoid power will be placed at its service.”[lviii] This paranoid thinking would thus be a spontaneous and “irrational” method of knowledge, a critical interpretation of “delusional associations.” Everything shown on the screen would have, in one way or another, sprung from the unconscious. And “discredited” and “ruined” reality.
However, as we know, it was Dali himself who later took it upon himself to explain the conscious origin of the images pasted on the canvas. According to his statements, after a dinner with cheese Camembert, he began to “reflect” on the problems posed by that cheese which, despite its rigid external appearance, ran like a fluid when cut. When he arrived at the studio, there was an unfinished painting on the easel with only a landscape of Port Lligat at dusk and a dry olive tree, lacking some idea. Then he had the genius to complete the canvas by gluing on some “soft” clocks like melting camembert, because those images in the painting referred to the idea of time, to the destructibility of everything. Thus, one of the symbolic paintings of surrealism was the result of very conscious reflections; there is almost nothing unconscious, psychic or paranoid about it.
However, what interests us most closely, following Freud, is precisely what is conscious in this work, is to understand what were Dali's "reflections" that could have led him to these images. There is no doubt that, behind this collage of dreamlike images, we can infer some results of the Theory of Relativity, as has been said at length. The variable time, the fourth dimension, represented by the clock glued to the spatial variables, was added to the spatial three-dimensionality of the table, following their movements and forming the indissoluble unity of the space-time set. In other words, the passage of time is intimately linked to space.
Let us recall the text by Apollinaire cited above, written two decades earlier, and which Dali certainly knew: “the fourth dimension is space itself, it is this that gives plasticity to objects”. Were not his surreal clocks an attempt to represent this plasticity provided by the fourth dimension? It was Dali who later confessed in his Unconfessable Confessions the claim that their flexible clocks would represent the space-time relationship even more faithfully than the most sophisticated mathematical definitions.
Furthermore, and also very interestingly, we see that the three clocks are in different places, indicating different times. Now, one of the most important results of the Theory of Relativity, as its name suggests, is the non-simultaneity of clocks that are located in different positions. This result is a direct consequence of the finite speed of light. For example, in a movie theater, the film ends first for the viewer closest to the screen. The last scene will only reach the viewer sitting at the back of the room after the time interval that the light takes to reach him.
So, for all the clocks to be synchronized, their readings must be corrected by their positions in the room. And that’s not all. We know that, in fact, the passage of time is not absolute. Clocks moving at different speeds will indicate different intervals of time. Therefore, there may be a contraction of time or a dilation of space measured by different observers. Did Dali want to represent all these “exotic” results of the Theory of Relativity with his malleable clocks? Did he know about these results in 1931?
From 1921 onwards, while he was studying in Madrid, Dali and his companions Garcia Lorca and Luiz Buñuel lived in the famous Student Residence, whose main objective was to create an intellectual environment that would encourage students to broadly develop their artistic and scientific skills. During that period, the Residence hosted lectures by Albert Einstein, Paul Valéry, Marie Curie, Igor Stravinsky, John M. Keynes, Alexander Calder, Walter Gropius, Henri Bergson, Le Corbusier and many others. It is said that Einstein received 3.000 pesetas for the lecture, the equivalent of a year's salary for the professors.[lix]
The exotic results of the Theory of Relativity, the curious radioactive disintegration discovered by Marie Curie and the discussions between Henri Bergson[lx] and Albert Einstein on time in the Theory of Relativity consumed the heated discussions. Thus, we can consider that Dali knew the main results of Einstein's theory that we identify in his painting. In addition, of course, to the basic psychoanalytic concepts.
According to the testimony of José Moreno Villa, a painter and colleague who also lived in the Residence, Dalí was constantly reading his inseparable book, The Interpretation of Dreams.[lxi] Therefore, it would not be too much to assume that he tried to represent in Persistence of Memory a collage of all these “exotic” results, using apparently dreamlike and no less exotic images. In fact, in another context, Dali said that “Physics must form the new geometry of thought”.[lxii]
As is well known, references to science will accompany all of Dali's work. The main reason is that the development of Quantum Mechanics, Nuclear Physics and Biology produced results so far removed from common sense, so disconcerting, that they provided images that far surpassed the most extravagant dream images. Wave-particle duality, the Uncertainty Principle, quantization of energy and of almost everything, cosmic rays, "gelatinous" neutrinos, nuclear bombs, antiparticles, antimatter, the DNA molecule... In 1958, it was Dali who revealed to us, in the famous Anti-Matter Manifesto, what was his new source of imagery inspiration: “In the surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the inner world and the wonderful world of my father Freud… Today, the outer world and the world of physics have transcended the world of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg.”[lxiii]
Furthermore, the explosions of the atomic bombs had a strong impact on him, as he told André Parinaud: “The atomic explosion of August 6, 1945 shook me seismically. From that moment on, the atom was my favorite theme of meditation. Many of the landscapes painted during that period express the great fear provoked in me by the announcement of that explosion.”[lxiv] Master in the art of sensationalism and causing scandals[lxv], the titles of Dali's works were always extravagant: Melancholic atomic and uranic idyll (1945); Intraatomic balance of a swan feather (1947); The dematerialization of Nerón's nose (1947); Atomic leda (1947-1949); Corpus hypercubicus o Crucifixion (1954); Santa Surrounded by Three Pi Mesons (1956); GALACIDALACIDESOXIRIBUBUCLEICACID (Hommage to Crick and Watson); among many others.
Among these works, there is one that demonstrates how much Dali followed scientific research: The Disintegration of Memory Persistence, from 1954. That's right, the painter “disintegrates” his most famous work. Or rather, he updates the scientific “knowledge” that it represented.
The results of the theories of the “fathers” Freud and Einstein are now supplemented by some ideas from “father Heisenberg”, as well as pacifist messages. The continuous world of the previous screen, which is predicted by the equations of the Theory of Relativity, is now joined by the “quantized” world of Quantum Mechanics. Solid objects are now composed of separate units, arranged as atoms are in fact inside solids, without “touching” each other mechanically, keeping the structure rigid by means of forces that act at a distance. Furthermore, curiously, a wave has invaded nature, submerging almost all the objects and “particles” that compose it. Could this be a reference to the wave-particle quantum duality? As is known, quantumly, photons, electrons, protons, atoms, in short, all objects suffer from a kind of schizophrenia, a duality in their behavior. Depending on the situation, they sometimes behave like particles, sometimes like waves, in an intrinsic duality.
On the other hand, we also notice in this 1954 painting that the clocks maintain the flexible shape of the original canvas, indicating the persistence of the relativistic notion of time. If this is the case, at least in the painting there would have been the “unification”, so dreamed of by scientists, of the Theory of Relativity with Quantum Mechanics, these two theories in principle conflicting with regard to the continuous or quantized description of nature.[lxvi]
We also see in the collages of The Disintegration of Memory Persistence that the painter continues to dream and that his watch has been damaged, or rather, his “own time” has been disturbed, perhaps by the “seismic shock” that the explosion of the atomic bomb caused in Dali. Another indication of this “shock” is the replacement of the destructive ants by the countless rifle projectiles, even more destructive, that invaded the landscape sacrificing the fish, possibly representing the extermination of living beings.
And what’s more: curiously, the frame of the central clock is formed by these projectiles, in addition to others that surround it, as if to imprison it, indicating that our time is dominated by weapons. However, it is important to note that the painter has metamorphosed himself, not into a “giant and disgusting insect”, but into an equally monstrous being that resembles the fish next to him, as he is also submerged and even the lateral colors of his tails are identical. Perhaps this is a reference to the dehumanization caused by wars. Or, as Theodor Adorno said of “Kafka’s parables”, the subject confessing his own impotence before the “absolute power of the world of things”, that is, “negative epics” that “testify to a state in which the individual liquidates himself.” [lxv]
Where did this quick examination of two specific paintings by Dali lead us? First, to the proof that, in the painter’s iconography, Physics and the war-torn “outside world” actually surpassed the “world of psychology” in the production of extravagant images. Which brings us to the main point: from an artistic point of view, the sciences, and Physics in particular, only served as “theme for reflection” and an inexhaustible source of “surreal” and sensationalist images that speak closely to Dali’s purpose.
If these images seem unreal and dreamlike, it is simply because the new relativistic-quantum world also seems to be so, when, of course, compared to the world of our everyday lives governed by Galileo, Newton and Maxwell. In this way, Dali's “surrealist” paintings are the very negation of the original idea of the movement. There is nothing of “psychic automatism” or unconscious in them. Fruits of much rational work and scientific “studies”, his works seek to represent society and nature as it was unveiled by Modern Physics, by the “fathers” Einstein and Heisenberg, according, of course, to the painter's interpretation.
In this sense, they could be considered a realism of the new times, as they attempt to represent the concrete reality hidden from our deceptive senses, that is, the world that is here beside us, but far from the reach of our naive eyes.
Finally, it is worth highlighting that this relationship, let's say, of the exteriority of physics with Dali's surrealism is very far from the intrinsic connection, which we tried to make explicit in previous chapters, that the sciences, and the scientific method in particular, wove with some important currents of music, literature and painting throughout the 19th century. As Émile Zola said in his Experimental novel: “The return to nature, the naturalistic evolution that has carried the century, gradually pushes all manifestations of human intelligence along the same scientific path.”[lxviii]
In the specific case of painting, we have shown, for example, that in the “scientific impressionism” of Seurat and Signac, science was never taken as an “object” displayed on the canvases, unlike in Dali’s paintings. However, the deep structure and execution of the “pointillist” works were based on scientific knowledge about colors.[lxix] We have also seen that the research into colors and execution undertaken by the Impressionists began with a continuous representation of nature and its evolution led to a “quantized” representation of the same, in a notable anticipation of the evolution of the scientific description of the world itself. Everything happened as if the Zeitgeist had raised questions common to disciplines as diverse as Physics and painting. It is important to emphasize that this “quantization” in “pointillism” had a purely aesthetic function, it was the essence of the division technique, it did not intend to simulate an atomized world, as was Dali’s attempt in The Disintegration of Memory Persistence.
To summarize. The analysis of some aspects of Dalinian painting has shown that, at least in the case of the painter most popularly associated with surrealism, his work is very far from Breton's original definition based on an “artistic execution free from the action of reason”. This particular case, however, exposes the contradiction that has affected the entire surrealist movement since its beginning: the mismatch between the intention and the result of the work. Aiming to be revolutionary with a supposed unconscious origin of the images and in an attempt at artistic expression through a psychic automatism without a rational filter, what surrealism ended up revolutionizing was artistic language itself.
As Theodor Adorno rightly noted, the radical nature of surrealism was the destruction of traditional artistic language, through the collage of apparently dreamlike images, which were in fact obtained through great intellectual effort. There is very little, if anything, of the unconscious in their works. As Freud said, there is much more of the unconscious in the ancient painters than in the surrealists. However, it was this great illusion of the original surrealist project that, paradoxically, revolutionized 20th century art.
*Edilson Crema is a full professor at the Department of Nuclear Physics at the University of São Paulo (USP).
Notes
[I] Hugo Ball, “Lorsque je fondis le Cabaret Voltaire…” (facsimile from Cabaret Voltaire), Zurich, May 1916.
[ii] Richard Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism, p. 24, Paul Steegemann, Verlag, Hannover, 1920. (Translated into English by Ralph Manheim)
[iii] Idem, ibidem, p. 24.
[iv] Ibid., p. 26
[v] Ibid., p. 41
[vi] Laurent Tailhade, in John Rewald, Post-impressionism, vol. I, p. 154, Albin Michel, Paris, 1961
[vii] Ernest Raynaud, in Pierre Aubery, L'Anarchisme des littérateurs au temps du symbolisme, The Social Movement, No. 69, pp. 21-22, Éditions l'Atelier, Paris, 1969
[viii] Teodor de Wyzewa, cit. in John Rewald, Post-impressionism, vol. I, p. 151, op. cit.
[ix] Marc Chagall, in Herbert Read, History of Modern Peinture, p. 161, Éditions Aimery-Somogy, Paris, 1960.
[X] This was, in fact, Breton's initial opinion of Chirico, although he later came to criticize him harshly.
[xi] Sigmund Freud, Dreams, Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, I, p. 723, Biblioteca Nueva, Madrid, 1973.
However, in 1937, towards the end of his life, Freud justified in the following terms his refusal to participate, at Breton's invitation, in the publication of an anthology entitled Dream Trajectory: “An anthology of dreams without the associations that accompany them, and without knowledge of the circumstances in which the dream took place, such an anthology means nothing to me, and I can hardly imagine what it could mean to others.” (Sigmund Freud, cit. in Elizabeth Roudinesco, History of Psychoanalysis in France, vol. 2, p. 48, Zahar Publishers, Rio de Janeiro, 1988)
[xii] André Breton and Phillippe Soupault, The Magnetic Fields, Littérature, nº 8, 9 and 10, Paris, 1919.
[xiii] However, it is important to specify that another Manifesto of Surrealism was published two weeks before Breton's, in the magazine Surrealism, with the participation of Yvan Goll, Picabia, Tzara, Reverdy, Delaunay and others.
[xiv] Walter Benjamin, Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of European Intelligence, in Selected Works, p. 22, Brasiliense, 1987.
[xv] See J-François Fourny, De Dada au Surréalisme, Revue D'Histoire Littéraire de la France, 5, p. 865, 1986.
[xvi] Michel Sanouillet, Given to Paris, Pauvert, Paris, 1965.
[xvii] Noël Arnaud et Pierre Prigioni, Dada et Surréalisme in Surrealism, p. 354, Paris, Mouton, 1965.
[xviii] Georges Hugnet, cit. in Herbert Read, History of Modern Peinture, op. cit., p. 164.
[xx] Andre Breton, Manifeste du Surréalisme- Manuscript, pp. 9-10, 1924, Bibliothèque National de France, Département de Manuscrits (NAF29034). However, the discovery in 1982 and publication of facsimiles of the original manuscripts of The Magnetic Fields, in 1998, show that there was indeed a concern with style and writing, as surprising erasures, different wordings, additions and displacements were found. (André Breton et Phillippe Soupault, Les Champs Magnétiques, Le original facsimile manuscript and transcription, Lachenal et Ritter, Paris, 1998.)
[xx] The previous chapter of this book discussed how the evolution of music throughout the 19th century culminated in the radical transformations at the turn of the century.
[xxx] Andre Breton, Manifeste du Surréalisme- Manuscript, op. cit., p. 11
[xxiii] Walter Benjamin, Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of European Intelligence, op. cit., p. 32
[xxiii] Andre Breton, What is surrealism? pp. 231-232, Brussels, 1934
[xxv] André Breton, The Situation of Surrealism Between the Two Wars, Yale French Studies, No. 2, p. 74, 1948.
[xxiv] Ibid., pp. 74-75
[xxv] Theodor Adorno, Notes on literature, pp. 42-43, Flammarion, Paris, 1984.
[xxviii] André Breton, Léon Trotsky: Lenin, La Révolution Surréaliste, nº 5, p. 29, Gallimard, Paris, 1925.
[xxviii] Breton reveals that, during an admission interrogation into the party, “Michel Marty shouted at one of us: ‘If you are a Marxist, you don’t have to be a surrealist.’ (…) What misery!” (André Breton, Second Manifeste Surréaliste, La Révolution Surréaliste, No. 12, p. 6, December 1929)
[xxix] See about Marie-Claire Bancquart, 1924-1929: Une Année Mentale, La Révolution Surréaliste, nº 12, pp. VII-X, Gallimard, Paris, 1929.
[xxx] Surrealism at the service of the Revolution, José Corti, Paris, 1930.
[xxxii] Andre Breton, What is surrealism? op. cit., p. 246 (emphasis added).
[xxxi] Walter Benjamin, Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of European Intelligence, op. cit., pp. 33-34
[xxxii] Ibid., p. 35
[xxxv] Elizabeth Roudinesco, History of Psychoanalysis in France, vol. 2, op. cit. p. 47. In this regard, see also Surrealism as a revolutionary movement, by Michael Löwy, which highlights Breton's “insistence” on the “decisive importance” of Hegel for surrealism, in the earth is round, November 02, 2024.
[xxxiv] André Breton, Second Manifeste du Surréalisme, La Révolution Surréaliste, No. 12, p. 1, December 1929.
[xxxiv] Ibid., p. 5
[xxxviii] Ibid., p. 5
[xxxviii] Elizabeth Roudinesco, History of Psychoanalysis in France, vol. 2, op. cit., p. 47
[xxxix] It is this revival of Hegelianism in French culture in the 1930s, and the impact of the systematic reading of Phenomenology of Spirit in the courses taught by Kojève, which Theodor Adorno completely ignored when he wrote in his 1956 essay on Surrealism: “It is hardly likely that any of the Surrealists knew the Phenomenology of Spirit of Hegel.” (Theodor Adorno, Le surréalisme: Une Étude Rétrospective, Notes on literature, op. cit., p. 68). Adorno would be unaware of the Second Manifest? Furthermore, it is worth remembering that Breton was one of the attendees of these courses by Kojève, which were collected and published in 1947 by Raymond Queneau, whose links with surrealism are well known.
[xl] Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to Hegel's Lecture, pp. 427-433, Gallimard, Paris, 1947.
[xi] Ibid., p. 63
[xliii] Cf. Michael Löwy, Leon Trotsky and Revolutionary Art, in the earth is round, 09 of August of 2020.
[xiii] Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Literature and Art, p. 1125, Master Jou, São Paulo, 1972.
It is worth remembering here what Benjamin had said about Proust, in another essay from 1929: “Every synthetic interpretation of Proust must necessarily start from the dream. (…) Proust never tired of emptying the mannequin, the Ego, with a single gesture, in order to evoke again and again the third element: the image, which satisfied his curiosity, or his nostalgia. Proust lay in bed overwhelmed by nostalgia, nostalgia for a world deformed by similarity, in which the true face of existence bursts into the light of day: the surrealist. Everything that happens to Proust belongs to this world… (…) A lthe search for lost time is the endless attempt to galvanize an entire human life with maximum consciousness. Proust's procedure is not reflection, but consciousness. (Walter Benjamin, The Image of Proust, in Selected Works, pp. 39-46, Brasiliense, 1987.)
[xiv] Theodor Adorno, Notes on Literature, pp. 66-68, Flammarion, Paris, 1984
[xlv] Andre Breton, Manifeste du Surréalisme- Manuscript, op. cit., pp. 14-16
[xlv] Max Morise, Les yeux enchantés, The Surrealist Revolution, No. 1, p. 26, Paris, 1924.
[xlv] Ibid., pp. 26-27
[xlviii] Pierre Naville, Beaux-Arts, The Surrealist Revolution, No. 3, p. 17, Paris, 1925.
[xlix] Andre Breton, Manifeste du Surrealism, Poisson Soluble, Editions du Sagittaire, Paris, 1924.
[l] André Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture, La Révolution Surréaliste, nº 4, pp. 26-30, Gallimard, Paris, 1925.
[li] Andre Breton, The surrealism and the hairstyle, p. 61, Paris, Gallimard, 1965.
[liiii] Ibid., pp. 91-92
[iii] André Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture, La Révolution Surréaliste, nº 4, op. cit., pp. 27-28.
[book] Andre Breton, The surrealism and the hairstyle, pp. 75-76, Paris, Gallimard, 1965.
[lv] kandinsky, From Spirit to Art, pp. 24-25, Éditions de Beaune, Paris, 1963
The emergence and development of expressionism are discussed in a previous chapter of this book.
[lv] Jouffret Spirit, Traité Élémentaire de Géométrie a Quatre Dimensions et Introduction à la Géométrie à n Dimensions, p. 192, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1903
[lviii] Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, pp. 20-22, Éditeurs Eugène Figuière et Cie, Paris, 1913
[lviii] Salvador Dali, The Fallen Angel, Surrealism at the service of the Revolution, p. 9, José Corti, Paris, 1930.
It is interesting to remember that, shortly after the publication of this article, Dali was approached by Lacan, who was preparing his thesis on paranoia. The discussions between them were important for Lacan's work, the publication of which was welcomed by the painter as a “scientific endorsement” of his “paranoid-critical” method. (Cf. Elizabeth Roudinesco, History of Psychoanalysis in France, vol. 2, op. cit., pp. 127-128). With Freud, however, the conversation was different. Let us recall Freud's last comment on surrealism, in a letter to Stefan Zweig, dated July 20, 1938, shortly after receiving Dali, who had just painted his portrait: "It seems that until then, I had been tempted to consider the surrealists, who apparently chose me as their patron saint, as completely crazy (let us say, ninety-five percent, like absolute alcohol). The young Spaniard, with his naive fanatic eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, prompted me to reconsider my opinion. It would indeed be very interesting to study analytically the genesis of a painting of this kind. From a critical point of view, however, one could always say that the notion of art refuses to be extended when the quantitative relationship between the unconscious material and the preconscious elaboration does not remain within determined limits. These are, in any case, serious psychological problems.” (S. Freud, cit. in E. Roudinesco, op. cit., pp. 48-49).
[lix] https://www.residencia.csic.es
[lx] Cf. Henry Bergson, Duration and simultaneity, Presse Universitaire de France, Paris, 1998.
[lxi] Centro Carme Ruiz de Estudios Dalinianos, Fundación Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, Spain
[lxii] Same, same.
[lxiii] Salvador Dali, cit. in Salvador Dalí and science, more than just a simple curiosity, Centro Carme Ruiz de Estudios Dalinianos, Fundación Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, Spain
[lxiv] Salvador Dali, in The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, p. 216, William Morrow and Co., New York, 1976
[lxv] Including the abominable scandal of his adherence to Francoism, which led to his definitive expulsion from the surrealist movement in 1939. Until the end of his life, Dali humiliated himself to meet with Franco and to receive benefits from the regime. (See, for example, Josep Massot, The day Dalí dressed as an admiral to receive Franco, El País, June 27, 2020). At the Yale conference in 1942, Breton, referring to Dali as Avida Dollars, states: “(…) Avida Dollars, gilding with obsequious academicism the portrait of the Spanish ambassador, that is, of Franco's representative, that monster to whom the author of the portrait owes precisely the oppression of his country, not to mention the death of the best friend of his youth, the great poet Garcia Lorca.” (Breton, The Situation of Surrealism Between The Two Wars, Yale French Studies, No. 2, p. 74, 1948)
[lxvi] The complex relationships between the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are analyzed in a chapter of this book. Another chapter attempts to unravel the internal connection underlying the temporal coincidence between the emergence of the fundamental concepts of atomism and those of psychoanalysis. Although atomism was formulated by Democritus and Leucippus in the 4th century BC, it is known that the beginning of the understanding of the functioning of atoms only occurred in 1900, with Planck's thesis, the embryo of Quantum Mechanics. On the other hand, as is also not unknown, the understanding of the hysterical phenomenon, described and named by Hippocrates in the 4th century BC, was only achieved from the 1880s with Charcot, and later concluded by Freud, also in 1900, in Dream Interpretation. Could this coincidence be merely temporary? No, far from it. These two revolutions occurred precisely during a period of radical transformations in music, painting and literature, as if the spirit of the times were demanding innovative creative leaps, as if all these revolutions stimulated each other reciprocally. Furthermore, in that environment of, so to speak, revolutionary fervor, Psychoanalysis and Quantum Mechanics were both forced to deal with opposites, antagonistic behaviors of their objects of study, whose elusive natures forced scholars to sharpen their sensibilities in order to understand truncated and indirect information, whose interpretations required theoretical leaps that were until then incompatible with the traditional scientific spirit. How can the self and the non-self, the being with its opposite, the wave and the particle, the conscious and the unconscious, be compatible and included in a scientific theory? How can the uncertainty inherent in nature and in men be rigorously dealt with? These common challenges faced by these two theories, which are so disparate and which defined the scientific and cultural aspect of the 20th century, are exposed in this book.
[lxv] Theodor Adorno, Notes on literature, pp. 42-43, Flammarion, Paris, 1984.
[lxviii] Emile Zola, The experimental novel, p.1, G. Charpentier, Paris, 1881
[lxix] See in particular Paul Signac, D'Eugène Delacroix in neo-impressionism, Editions de la Revue Blanche, Paris, 1899
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
