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THE HISTORY OF MODERN ART IN 50 WORKS
Marie-Anne Mancio
hotelalphabet@gmail.com www.hotelalphabet.com
VB309/ VB310
5: DADAISM, SURREALISM, REALISM
21. Man Ray The Lovers, 1933
See also:
Man Ray 1890-1976, Cadeau 1921, editioned replica 1972, Iron and nails, 178 x
94 x 126 mm
"The original version, given to the composer Eric Satie, was lost but became well-known
through Man Ray’s photograph of it. Although made at the height of Paris Dada Cadeau,
like Man Ray’s other objects, anticipated the exposure of hidden desires found in
subsequent Surrealist objects.”
Man Ray (1890-1976)
“I photographed as I painted, transforming the subject as a painter would, idealising or
deforming as freely as does a painter.”
"I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from
dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to
paint, the things which already have an existence."
Born Emmanuel Rudnitsky in Philadelphia; family of tailors/seamstresses changes name
for fear of anti-Jewish reprisals. Worked in graphic design and advertising before
painting. Lifelong friend of Duchamp (they met in 1915) with whom he started NY Dada
in 1920
Moved to Paris in 1921. Invented the rayograph. Took part in every Surrealist exhibition
1925-59. His Violon d'Ingres used the model Alice Prin (aka Kiki de Montparnasse) in a
pose reminiscent of Ingres's bathers, Le Bain Turc (Valpinçon Bather). The 2 sound-holes
are drawn on in black lead and Indian ink. Man Ray is playing here with the popular
French expression "to have an Ingres violin" (meaning an all-consuming hobby - Ingres
having been a passionate violinist). He also uses the principle of the unexpected
encounter – seeing another thing in one thing.
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The Lovers, 1933, editioned replica 1973*, comprises a rolled lead sheet with the outline
of lips painted onto it. A loop of rope extends from one end, suggesting a head, while
two other sections of rope, linking the two ends of the lead sheet, complete the
suggestion of a body. The piece has also been known with the additional titles ‘Mon
Rêve/My Dream’.
The original was made after Man Ray’s passionate/ tormented, relationship with
American photographer and model Lee Miller (1907-1977) ended. The lips may reference
the memory of a lipstick imprint of his former lover Kiki on his collar; however they are
Lee’s lips so the implication is both of his desire for her and a hint of suicidal thoughts in
the rope (noose) and lead (death-like).
Disembodied lips were a Man Ray motif. He used them in his painting, A l’Heure de
l’observatoire, les amoureux, 1932-4, of which he wrote in 1935:
It is seven in the morning, before satisfying an imaginary hunger – the sun not yet
decided whether to rise or to set – that your mouth comes to replace all these
indecisions [...] Your mouth itself becomes two bodies, separated by a long, undulating
horizon. Like the earth and the sky, like you and me ... Lips of the sun, you ceaselessly
attract me, and in the instant before I wake up, when I detach myself from my body ... I
meet you in the neutral light and in the void of space, and, sole reality, I kiss you with
everything that is still left in me – my own lips.
(Quoted in Arturo Schwarz, Man Ray: The Rigour of Imagination, London 1977, p.61.)
* The replica was made by Man Ray’s assistant Lucien Treillard, working with Georges
Maréchal, under Man Ray’s direction. They referred to a photograph of the original as a
guide. Man Ray drew the lips; these were engraved into the lead, and then he painted
them.
Man Ray sometimes made objects just in order to photograph them, and then discarded
the originals, or reused them in other ways. He also remade some works in response to
1960s and 1970s commercial interest. Like Duchamp, he agreed to some objects being
produced in editions.
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22. Hans Bellmer The Doll c.1937-8
As a child, Bellmer “developed fear and hatred for his tyrannical father, who totally
dominated his gentle and affectionate mother. He and his younger brother Fritz found
refuge from this oppressive family atmosphere in a secret garden decorated with toys
and souvenirs and visited by young girls who joined in sexual games. In 1923 Bellmer
was sent by his father to study engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, but
he became interested in politics, reading the works of Marx and Lenin and joining in
discussions with artists of the Dada Movement. He was especially close to George Grosz,
who taught him drawing and perspective in 1924 and whose advice to be a savage critic
of society led him to abandon his engineering studies in that year. Having shown artistic
talent at an early age, he began designing advertisements as a commercial artist and
illustrated various Dada novels….
When the Nazis gained power in 1933, with his father among their keenest supporters,
Bellmer announced that he would give up all work that even indirectly could be useful to
the State.
He began his new career as an artist by building a life-size Doll (destroyed) inspired by
nostalgic memories of his secret garden and by a production of Jacques Offenbach’s Les
Contes d’Hoffmann; it was designed to fulfil his need to escape from reality and to
arouse desires associated with the secret sexual encounters of his adolescence. By its
provocative eroticism it would strike a blow against tyranny and authority. This first Doll,
built with the help of his brother from broom handles, metal rods, carved wood and
plaster of Paris, contained a small panorama enabling scenes lit by a torch bulb to be
seen through the navel. Bellmer published ten photographs of this work as Die Puppe
(Karlsruhe, 1934), accompanied by a short introduction in the form of an intricate prose
poem in which he clearly demonstrated how the seemingly innocent games of the young
child had developed into the far from innocent sexual fantasies of the adult.
Bellmer felt artistically isolated and vulnerable in Berlin, where far less provocative works
had been branded degenerate by the Nazis (see Entartete Kunst). Having read about
Surrealism in art magazines, he sent a copy of Die Puppe to André Breton and Paul
Eluard in Paris; the publication of the photographs in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure
in December 1934 caused enormous excitement among members of the group, who
immediately appreciated the Doll as an ideal Surrealist object because of its conjunction
of desire and revolt. Bellmer was acclaimed and adopted by the Surrealists during a
short visit to Paris at Eluard’s invitation in February 1935. In the wake of his visit he
published a French translation of his book (La Poupée, Paris, 1936) and contributed
photographs and drawings to the major group exhibitions of Surrealism in the late
1930s; a street of his elaborate mannequins was featured in the Exposition
Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1938.”
(http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=452)
In 1934, at the Musee Royal in Brussels - the Belgian Surrealists organised Minotaure –
the first large-scale exhibition of Surrealist works from all over Europe. That year, the
German artist Hans Bellmer joined the Surrealist movement with the publication in issue
6 (December 1934) of Minotaure of a double page spread of 18 photos of female
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mannequins titled "Doll: Variations on the Montage of an Articulated Minor." (1933 The
Surrealist review Minotaure (1933-1938) First issue is devoted to Picasso.)
His life-size dolls were constructed of wood, metal, plaster and ball joints that were then
twisted out of shape. Meant as protests against Nazism (his father was pro-Nazi), they
rejected the Ideal Form of the Aryan body. He displayed them under
construction/destruction in his studio or arranged them on a bare mattress or lacy cloth.
Sometimes props accompanied the doll— e.g. a black veil, underwear, a fake rose. In
one, Bellmer posed next to his standing sculpture, deploying the photographic device of
double exposure.
Bellmer wrote of a drive to master 'victims'; he posed all his poupées voyeuristically. He
even designed an internal mechanism for one filled with mini panoramas to 'pluck away
the secret thoughts of the little girls'.
In the summer of 1935:
“Bellmer amended his Doll (now in Paris, Pompidou) with ball-joints to give it increased
mobility; the stomach was represented by a large sphere around which could be
articulated two pelvises, each with its own legs and feet, enabling Bellmer to go far
beyond naturalistic representation . The limitless possibilities of what he termed his
‘experimental poetry’ were demonstrated in a volume of hand-tinted photographs, Les
Jeux de la poupée (Paris, 1949), incorporating poems by Eluard and in other such
photographs presented as independent works (e.g. The Doll, c. 1937–8; London, Tate).
The expressions of suffering and pain in many of these depictions of the violated Doll
resonate with visual references to martyrdoms in Renaissance art and to staircase
scenes in German Expressionist cinema. When Bellmer escaped from Nazi Germany to
Paris in 1938, his Doll was among the few items that he was able to take with him. He
produced further variants of this sculpture throughout his life: notable examples include
the Machine-gun in a State of Grace (1937, remade 1961; New York, MOMA) and Doll
(aluminium, h. 464 mm, 1936, remade 1965; London, Tate).
After World War II Bellmer concentrated on meticulous drawings and prints, many of
which illustrated erotic texts by the Marquis de Sade, Heinrich von Kleist, Charles
Baudelaire, Georges Bataille and the poet Unica Zurn, his companion of 16 years; these
books included A Sade (Paris, 1967) and Madame Edwarda (Paris, 1965), illustrating
Bataille’s text. He also wrote L’Anatomie de l’image (Paris, 1957) in which he explained
the mental processes that determined his work. He enjoyed particular success and
recognition, in terms of exhibitions and books about his work, during the last 20 years of
his life. While his work was sometimes condemned as violently misogynistic, it was also
treated sympathetically by at least one feminist critic, Xavière Gauthier, and by writers
and critics such as Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Butor and Patrick
Waldberg.” Peter Webb, Grove Art Online
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This work was important also because it has influenced several contemporary artists
including photographer Cindy Sherman and the yBas The Chapman Brothers.
23. Salvador Dalí Autumnal Cannibalism 1936
Bernard Ewell Provenance is Everything:
“A well-read student of Sigmund Freud, Salvador Dali – who never used drugs and only
drank alcohol (especially champagne) in moderation – turned to a most unusual way to
access his subconscious. He knew that the hypnologic state between wakefulness and
sleep was possibly the most creative for a brain.
Like Freud and his fellow surrealists, he considered dreams and imagination as central
rather than marginal to human thought. Dali searched for a way to stay in that creative
state as long as possible just as any one of us on a lazy Saturday morning might enjoy
staying in bed in a semi-awake state while we use our imagination to its fullest. He
devised a most interesting technique.
Sitting in the warm sun after a full lunch and feeling somewhat somnolent, Dali would
place a metal mixing bowl in his lap and hold a large spoon loosely in his hands which he
folded over his chest. As he fell asleep and relaxed, the spoon would fall from his grasp
into the bowl and wake him up. He would reset the arrangement continuously and thus
float along-not quite asleep and not quite awake-while his imagination would churn out
the images that we find so fascinating, evocative, and inexplicable when they appear in
his work…”
(Read the full essay at http://dali.parkwestgallery.com/provenance.htm)
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Dali’s Autumnal Cannibalism depicts two interconnected figures (a woman on the left, a
male on the right) who appear to eat one another. Note how he uses his spoon to her
breast whilst her very long arm cuts into her elongated breast! On his head is an apple
(referencing William Tell perhaps, a story that Dali interpreted in Freudian terms as the
castration of a son by his father, a subject he identified with).
They sit on a chest of drawers. The landscape setting is the plain of Empordà, the region
of Catalonia where Dali was born.
Before 1936, Dali had made other paintings with ‘Autumn’ in the title (e.g.
Materialisation of Autumn (… at Seven it’s Already Dark) c.1934; Autumn Puzzle 1935);
the title may be symbolic or may simple refer to when the works were made. (This one
was exhibited for the first time at the Julien Levy Gallery, New York in December 1936).
Does it reflect Dalí’s views on the Spanish Civil War, which had erupted on July
17 1936, following the election of the Popular Front in the 1936 elections and
the refusal of the clergy and the military to recognise the new government?
The war provoked response world-wide: Franco's Nationalists were supported by the
Fascists; the Republicans had support from the Soviet Union; English Surrealists
protested against the British government's lack of intervention.
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In Max Gérard’s book, Dalí de Draeger, 1968, Dalí didn’t mention politics. He said of the
work: “In the foreground of this landscape, the figures devour one another, swallow
each other in order to become totally and completely identified with the loved one,” –
perhaps a reference to his own passionate courtship of Gaia.
His Soft Construction with Boiled Beans – Premonition of Civil War 1936
(Philadelphia Museum of Art) is more violent. Both works feature boiled beans, included,
Dali said, because “one could not imagine swallowing all that unconscious meat without
the presence of some mealy and melancholy vegetable."
Dali claimed to be indifferent to the outcome of the war, following events from London.
Whilst his close friend Federico Garcia Lorca was died by the Nationalists’ firing squad,
Dali’s sister Ana Maria was tortured and imprisoned by Communist soldiers fighting for
the Republic. (Republicans had murdered
nearly every bourgeois citizen in his hometown of Cadaqués).
This neutrality angered Dali’s fellow Surrealists, who had been following the plight of the
Frente Popular since 1931 and were avid supporters of the Republican Left.
Dali: “These Iberian creatures, devouring each other in autumn, symbolise the pathos of
civil war seen as a phenomenon of natural history”
Cf Picasso, ‘who considered it a political phenomenon’
Dali: "the Spanish corpse was soon to let the world know what its guts smelled like."
Paranoiac-critical method: technique invented by Dali which consists of the artist
invoking a paranoid state (fear that the self is being manipulated, targeted or controlled
by others).
The result is a deconstruction of the psychological concept of identity, such that
subjectivity becomes the primary aspect of the artwork.
Dali described it as a
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'Spontaneous method of irrational knowledge, based on the critical-interpretative
association of the phenomena of delirium'
(The Conquest of the Irrational, published in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, New York
1942).
See also:
Salvator Dali, Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937
This was his first painting made wholly with the paranoiac critical method.
It is Dalí's interpretation of the Greek myth of Narcissus (a handsome youth whose
punishment from the gods for his self-absorption and heart-breaking ways was to fall in
love with his own reflection. When he died, pining for the unobtainable, the gods
transformed him into the narcissus flower).
Dalí used a meticulous technique which he described as 'hand-painted colour
photography'
He was trying to depict the hallucinatory effect of Narcissus' transformation from a
kneeling figure to the hand that holds the egg (from which the new Narcissus will be
born?) and flower. His pre-transformation form poses in the background.
When Dali met Sigmund Freud in London (1938), he took this picture with him. He also
brought along a magazine with his article on paranoia. Freud wrote to Stefan Zweig,
who’d introduced them: 'it would be very interesting to explore analytically the growth of
a picture like this'.
24. Picasso, The Three Dancers, 1925
To understand the true impact of The Three Dancers, it is worth looking at Picasso’s
earlier At The Lapin Agile (1905): the canvas was for the café so intended to be visible
in there, hence the bold composition. (Picasso gave the painting to the club and in 1912
the owner Frédé sold it for $20!). The guitarist is the café’s owner, Frédéric (Frédé)
Gérard; the harlequin is most likely Picasso and the woman Germaine Gargallo – who
was blamed for Picasso’s close friend Carlo Casagemas’ suicide in February 1901 at
Montmartre's L’Hippodrome Café. It was that suicide that had been a catalyst for
Picasso’s blue period; Picasso: “When I realized Casagemas was dead, I started to paint
in blue.”
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Born in Malaga, trained in Madrid. 1900: made his first visit to Paris.
Initially a classicist who experimented with several figurative phases – Blue period
[1901-4 – outcasts including beggars and prostitutes], Rose/Harlequin period
[1904-1906 – circus folk, harlequins], ‘primitivist’ period [1907-9]. In 1906 met
Matisse and Derain (post-Fauve exhibition) through Gertrude Stein; also saw the
Cézanne and Ingres retrospectives. He would go on to devise Cubism with Braque.
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Picasso, At The Lapin Agile
In 1917, Picasso designed the set and costumes for Parade in Rome for the Ballets
Russes. Parade (music by Satie; idea by Jean Cocteau) was the first ballet to include
cubist sets and costumes. Some of the latter were made of cardboard!
Cocteau described his friend’s unusual artistic process: “A badly drawn figure of Picasso
is the result of endless well-drawn figures he erases, corrects, covers over, and which
serves him as a foundation. In opposition to all schools he seems to end his work with a
sketch.”
But there was another important consequence of Picasso’s output: he met the ballet
dancer Olga Kokhlova (1891, Nezhin, Russian Empire –1955, Cannes, France) whom he
married in 1918.
By the time he painted Three Dancers, Picasso was no longer in love with his wife. It
was painted in spring 1925 in Paris, after a trip to Monte Carlo with Olga.
Alfred Barr: 'The metamorphic Three Dancers is in fact a turning point in Picasso's art
almost as radical as was the proto-cubist Demoiselles d'Avignon'.
The dancers have been identified as:
on the right, the black figure - Ramon Pichot, (one of Picasso's oldest friends from
Barcelona who died whilst the painting was made);
on the left – Pichot's wife, Germaine Gargallo (from At The Lapin Agile) – they had
married in 1906;
the central dancer is probably Olga – and the whole a satire of Diaghilev’s Ballets
Russes.
Within weeks of completion, The Three Dancers appeared in a journal illustrating
Breton's manifesto Surrealism and Painting so it has been considered Picasso's public
confession of surrealism.
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After taking Françoise Gilot [Picasso’s lover and muse from 1944 to 1953, and the
mother of his children, Claude and Paloma] to visit 'a little old lady, toothless and sick,
lying in bed' in a small house in Montmartre, Picasso explained:
“I want you to learn about life . . . That woman’s name is Germaine Pichot. She's old and
toothless and poor and unfortunate now. But when she was young she was very pretty
and she made a painter friend of mine suffer so much that he committed suicide. She
was a young laundress when I first came to Paris. The first people we looked up, this
friend of mine and I, were this woman and friends of hers with whom she was living. She
turned a lot of heads. Now look at her.”
25. Christian Schad, Self-Portrait, 1927
Christian Schad painted this work in Vienna
“What I found in Vienna for my self-portrait are partly reminisces, partly symbolic
images.”
The shirt Schad wears enables him to be both clothed and nude; it is not modern but
seems to hint at the painter’s smock or, he claimed, a woven shirt found in Antiquity on
the Island of Kos. His lack of connection with the woman (he had seen her in Vienna;
she was running a shooting stall at a fair) suggests he is (or they are) self-concerned.
This is borne out by the narcissus flower which also acts as a phallic symbol here. Their
encounter looks like a casual one (It is not necessarily indicative of his own biography as
he was married at the time of making this work).
The woman’s scar is typical of the type commonly found in Southern Italy where it is
known as a “sfregio” – inflicted by jealous husbands or lovers on women and supposedly
valued by women as a sign of their power to instill such passion. Is Schad using it here
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as a symbol of other passions? His love of art or the pain that German was undergoing in
this period of economic hardship.
The industrial cityscape in the background may also represent Schad’s longing for the
freedom and sophistication of Paris.
Christian Schad stated, “My pictures are never illustrative. If anything they are
symbolic.”
Christian Schad (1894, Miesbach, Upper Bavaria – 1982, Stuttgart)
In 1912: Schad left higher secondary school and opted for painting though he was also
a talented musician. At the Munich Art Academy, he took Becker-Gundahl's class in
drawing from the nude.
Schad faked a heart problem to avoid military service. His early work was shown at the
Munich Secession in spring 1915. He also published a portfolio of ten woodcuts. His
style at this point was inspired by Futurism, Cubism, monochrome painting and, later,
Expressionism. He then went to Zurich where he met Walter Serner.
October 1915: he and Serner published Sirius, a monthly magazine for literature and
art which lasted 7 issues. (Schad did the advertising posters and a full-page woodcut for
each)
November 1916 Schad joined the Dada movement (which he abandoned in 1920).
From 1919: he experimented with what he called Schadographs (photography without
a camera/lenses). He created his first abstract, three-dimensional wood reliefs in
1919/20.
1920: Turned to Realism.
1923: Schad married Roman Marcella Arcangeli; their son Niklaus was born in 1924.
Schad produced his first New Objectivity pictures in his Naples studio in 1923.
He moved to Vienna; he separated from his wife in 1927 and spent most of his time in
Berlin. In the early 1930s Schad had financial difficulties and became isolated.
He took over a Bavarian brewery in 1935 to make ends meet.
Further Reading
New Objectivity
an artistic movement that combined social criticism with a near-photographic realism.
DADA
“Dada is a new tendency in art. […] until now nobody knew anything about it, tomorrow
everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. […] In
French it means "hobby horse". In German it means "good-bye", "Get off my back", "Be
seeing you sometime". In Romanian: "Yes, indeed, you are right, that's it. But of course,
yes, definitely, right” (Dada Manifesto by Hugo Ball)
“One cannot understand Dada. One must experience it." (Huelsenbeck, 1920)
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Paul Valery describes Europe in the 1920s as The Age of Anxiety. The Lost Generation:
writers Ezra Pound, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, and Thomas
Mann. The theologian/philosopher Paul Tillich attributes the rise of Fascism to a desire to
have guidance and control in a world which has lost its spiritual centre. Dada arises out
of the First-World-War as a reaction to this loss.
ZURICH DADA (1916–1918): Hugo Ball, Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Francis
Picabia, Christian Schad, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
Lenin, James Joyce, and Carl Jung are also in residence in neutral Switzerland. German
poet and theatrical producer Hugo Ball (1886-1927) is considered a traitor for quitting
the army because “men have been confused with machines”. He and his wife – poet and
cabaret singer – Emmy Hennings (1885-1916) open Cabaret Voltaire at 1 Spiegelgasse,
Zurich – a venue selling for selling beer, sausages, and rolls in a little street in a
somewhat disreputable neighbourhood (Lenin is living at no.14). Hennings sings while
Ball plays the piano; others recite nonsensical poetry and improvise. Ball recalls hanging
“futuristic posters” for the opening night; one reads: "Please give me a picture, or a
drawing, or an engraving. I should like to put on an exhibition in my night-club." Two
months later it takes the name Dada; no-one agrees on how name was chosen or its
meaning.
“In 1914, when I was thinking over the plan for a new theatre, I was convinced of this: a
theatre which experiments beyond the realm of day to day preoccupations. Europe
paints, composes and writes verse in a new way. A fusion, not merely of all art, but of all
regenerative ideas. The background of colours, words and sounds must be brought out
from the subconscious and given life, so that it engulfs everyday life and all its misery.”
(Hugo Ball)
Compare The Cabaret Voltaire to late 19th century cabarets like Le Chat Noir, and Le
Moulin Rouge. When Ball recites his poem “Caravan” at the Cabaret Voltaire on June
23rd 1916, he wears a costume of bright blue cardboard cylinders so that he’d “look like
an obelisk”, and a cape of gold cardboard lined with scarlet paper that he could flap. He
can’t walk in it so he’s carried to the podium where he reads several phonetic poems —
lautgedichte. Music stands with manuscripts surround him on 3 sides.
Another performance is described so: “Total pandemonium. Tzara is wiggling his behind
like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and
scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is
banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano,
pale as a chalky ghost." (Hans Arp, 1916).
The concept of gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) is key.
Dada Manifesto by Hugo Ball (extract),
read at the first Dada soiree, Zurich, July 14, 1916:
“Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and
also-poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada
Huelsenbeck, dada m'dada, dada m'dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada
Tza. How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become
famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes
crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of
journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised,
enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the
world's best lily-milk soap.”
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Surrealist Manifesto (extract) André Breton (1924)
“With regard to a false interpretation of our enterprise, stupidly circulated among the
public, We declare as follows to the entire braying literary, dramatic, philosophical,
exegetical and even theological body of contemporary criticism:
1.
We have nothing to do with literature; But we are quite capable, when necessary,
of making use of it like anyone else,
2.
Surrealism is not a new means or expression, or an easier one, nor even a
metaphysic of poetry. It is a means of total liberation of the mind and of all that
resembles it.
3.
We are determined to make a Revolution.
4.
We have joined the word surrealism to the word revolution solely to show the
disinterested, detached, and even entirely desperate character of this revolution.
5.
We make no claim to change the mores of mankind, but we intend to show the
fragility of thought, and on what shifting foundations, what caverns we have built our
trembling houses.
6.
We hurl this formal warning to Society; Beware of your deviations and faux-pas,
we shall not miss a single one.
7.
At each turn of its thought, Society will find us waiting.
8.
We are specialists in Revolt. There is no means of action which we are not
capable, when necessary, of employing.
9.
We say in particular to the Western world: surrealism exists. And what is this new
ism that is fastened to us? Surrealism is not a poetic form. It is a cry of the mind turning
back on itself, and it is determined to break apart its fetters, even if it must be by
material hammers!”
“Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express,
either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought.
Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all
aesthetic and moral preoccupation.
Encyclopedia: Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior
reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of
dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other
psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems
of life.”
Bureaus de Recherches Surréalistes, 15, Rue de Grenelle
Signed: Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, Jacques Baron, Joë Bousquet, J.-A. Boiffard,
André Breton, Jean Carrive, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Paul Élaurd, Max Ernst, et al.
(Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1989, pp.24041)
To read more:
http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.htm
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