Surrealism
jeudi 13 mars 2008
10:42
The Origins of Surrealist Art
The Surrealist group was formed in the spirit of revolt which characterised the European avant-garde
of the 1920s. Just like the Dada movement, in which some of them had participated, these poets and
artists denounced the rationalist arrogance of the late 19th century which had been halted in its
tracks by the First World War. However, perceiving Dadaism's incapacity to build new positive
values, the Surrealists broke away from it to proclaim the official existence of their own movement
in 1924.
Dominated by the personality of André Breton, Surrealism was at first essentially a literary
movement. Its field of inquiry was experimentation with language free from conscious control. Then
this way of thinking was soon extended to the plastic arts, photography and cinema, not just by
virtue of Breton's inclinations, though he himself was a collector and art lover, but also through the
involvement of artists from all over Europe and the United States who had moved to Paris, which
was then the world capital of the arts.
The surrealist artists introduced the theory of the liberation of desire through the invention of
techniques that aimed to reproduce the mechanisms of dreams. Taking their inspiration from the
work of Giorgio De Chirico, who was unanimously acknowledged as the founder of the surrealist
aesthetic, they strove to reduce the role of consciousness and the intervention of the will. The
techniques of frottage and collage used by Max Ernst, the automatic drawings made by André
Masson and Man Ray's rayographs are the first examples of this. Shortly after, Miró, Magritte and
Dalí produced oneiric images by bringing about a juxtaposition of disparate elements.
Their first group exhibition was held in Paris in 1925. The movement subsequently spread abroad to
achieve international renown with the 1936 exhibitions in London and New York, then in Tokyo in
1937 and in Paris in 1938. This fame was enhanced by most of the group's wartime departure for the
United States. Thus Surrealism profoundly inspired American art: for example, the practice of
automatism is one basis for Jackson Pollock's work and for Action Painting, while the Surrealists'
interest in objects prefigures Pop Art.
Surrealism was a movement that developed over more than 40 years, from the historic avant-gardes
of the early century to the emergence of new currents in the 1960s. Besides American painting and
Pop Art, surrealist art lay behind the appearance of a second avant-garde wave in Europe in the
1960s, its foremost representative being New Realism.
Glossary of Surrealism
Exquisite corpse
Exquisite corpse is the most famous of the surrealist games. It began to be played in 1925 and
consists in the composition of poems or drawings by a number of pe is then folded so ople, each of
them in turn putting down a word or graphic element on a piece of paper, which that the other
participants do not see. The outcomes of these procedures offer unexpected juxtapositions, like the
sentence "the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine", to which the game owes its name.
Collage
Within Surrealism, the procedure of collage was employed chiefly by Max Ernst. From 1919, Ernst
assembled images from a range of varied sources, with the aim of bringing about unexpected
juxtapositions. From 1929, he produced collage-novels, series of images constructed from late-19thcentury prints or illustrated catalogues and connected together through the simple repetition of
visual motifs.
Unlike Cubist collage, whose scope was exclusively that of plastic experimentation, or the highly
political photomontages of German Dadaism, surrealist collage suggests new visual, poetic and
oneiric associations.
Decalcomania
This technique was first used in an artistic context by Oscar Dominguez in 1936. The artist presses a
sheet of white paper over another sheet covered in black poster paint, then repeats the operation,
so that the paint stains are transferred several times over. The final image allows the artist to free
his or her imagination by interpreting the resulting shapes at will. After Oscar Dominguez, Max Ernst
applied the principle of decalcomania to oil painting.
Automatic writing
Inspired by psychoanalysis, and in particular by the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and Lautréamont,
automatic writing consists in writing so fast that rational and preconceived ideas do not have the
time to exert any control. The first text produced by this method, Les Champs Magnétiques, in 1919,
was composed alternately by André Breton and Philippe Soupault.
Frottage
The pictorial equivalent of automatic writing, the procedure of frottage was discovered by Max Ernst
in 1925 in the course of a specific incident. When he was adjusting the rickety floor at an inn where
he was staying in Brittany, he decided to take an impression of the wood by rubbing black lead over
a piece of paper laid on the floorboards. He then extended this procedure to other textures and
published his first collection of frottages, Histoire naturelle, in 1926. He continued these experiments
with oil painting.
Fumage
In 1937, the Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen invented the procedure of fumage: he made drawings
outlined by moving a candle flame over a sheet of paper. Later, he applied this technique to oil
painting. Thus he prefigured the fire paintings of Yves Klein.
Grattage
Invented by Max Ernst in 1927 as an extension of frottage, grattage was chiefly taken up by Esteban
Francès, a painter of Spanish origin, and brought into Surrealism in 1937. This technique consists in
scratching superimposed layers of paint in different colours with a razor blade so that shapes
emerge that are to varying degrees mottled and transparent.
Surrealist object
After Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, in the mid 1920s André Breton proposed the construction of
"some of those objects we only glimpse in dreams", and "whose fate seems infinitely problematic
and disturbing". As with Duchamp, this meant bringing together already existing objects of little
value. But unlike him, the Surrealists expected the new object to provoke an emotional reaction,
even "a specific sexual feeling" in the words of Salvador Dalí.
The most famous surrealist objects were produced by Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró,
André Breton, Oscar Dominguez and Man Ray.
Paranoia-criticism
Developed by Salvador Dalí in 1929, the paranoia-criticism method consists in a delirious state of
interpretation, applied not just to art, but also to reality. Its aim is to go beyond the impoverishment
of habitual perceptions, and thereby achieve a distilled grasp of reality.
Rayograph
The rayograph procedure was invented by Man Ray in 1922. It involves producing photographs
without a camera, by placing objects on a light-sensitive plate which is then exposed.
Chronology
1922
André Breton breaks with the Dada movement by publishing critical texts in his magazine Littérature,
grouping around him a number of poets such as Robert Desnos, René Crevel and Benjamin Peret.
They continue the experimentation which Breton and Philippe Soupault had embarked upon in Les
Champs magnétiques, a text written by the method of automatic writing and published in 1919. The
group called itself the "mouvement flou" (vague or flux movement) until it officially became
Surrealism in 1924.
1924
The movement became official in Paris with the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto, a text that
André Breton had initially envisaged as the preface to a collection of automatic poems, Poisson
soluble (Soluble Fish). It defines Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism whereby one's intention is
to express, either verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the real functioning of thought". With
this Breton draws out the artistic consequences of psychoanalytic theory, primarily from Freud's
interpretation of dreams.
La Révolution surréaliste replaces Littérature and a "Bureau of Surrealist Research" is opened: "its
initial aim is to gather together all possible communications relating to the forms which the
unconscious activity of the mind is liable to assume".
The painters André Masson and Joan Miró join the movement.
1925
The first exhibition of surrealist painting is opened at the Galerie Pierre in Paris, at midnight on 13
November. It brings together works by Giorgio De Chirico, Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Man Ray,
André Masson, Joan Miró, Picasso and Pierre Roy.
Max Ernst engages on his first frottages.
The first experiments are made with "exquisite corpse", an expression of poly-vocal thinking.
Louis Aragon publishes Le Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant).
In Brussels, a group formed by the writers Paul Nougé and E.L.T. Mesens, around the magazine
Correspondance, aligns itself with the French surrealists. The Belgian painter René Magritte produces
his first surrealist works and becomes the leader of this Belgian Surrealism.
1926
André Masson produces his first pictures "made almost exclusively of pasted sand" which emphasise
matter and chance.
In Paris in March, Jacques Trual and André Breton open the Surrealist Gallery with the exhibition
Pictures by Man Ray and Objects from the Islands (of Oceania) which for the first time establishes a
link between surrealist creativity and primitive works of art. The newspapers are scadalised by what
they regard as the indecency of an Oceanian statue chosen by Man Ray for display in the gallery
window and the cover of the catalogue.
1927
In January, André Breton joins the Communist Party.
In June, the first solo exhibition of the painter Yves Tanguy is organised at the Surrealist Gallery. His
paintings, which are indebted to the universe of Giorgio De Chirico, show a world which seems to
float between the underwater and earthly domains.
André Breton writes Nadja, the portrait of a young woman with whom he was in love, and who sank
into madness. The work ends with the now famous statement: "Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or it
shall not be".
1928
In February, Surrealism and Painting is published, a collection of articles by André Breton on Picasso,
Giorgio De Chirico, Max Ernst, Man Ray, André Masson...
Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel make the film Un chien andalou, thanks to the patronage of MarieLaure and Charles de Noailles, who during the same period also finance another now famous
surrealist film, Jean Cocteau's Le Sang d'un poète.
1929
n February, André Breton sends out a letter to individuals involved inSurrealism asking them to
assess "their degree of moral competence", which puts him at odds with Bataille, Leiris and Masson.
This initiative culminates in the theoretical refinements which give shape to the Second Manifesto of
Surrealism, published in December.
Max Ernst produces his first collage-novel: Perturbation, ma soeur, la femme 100 têtes. By using old
engravings from popular imagery, Max Ernst shows a dream world at the whim of the unconscious.
Salvador Dalí's first Paris exhibition is held at the Galerie Goemans from 20 November to 5
December. His work extends an invitation to practice paranoia-criticism, a method for grasping
reality while doubting the unequivocal nature of its meanings.
1930
As a retort to the Second Manifesto, in January Georges Bataille publishes a tract titled Un cadavre,
in which he denounces what he regards as André Breton's moralising principles. The principal cosignatories of the tract are Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos, Raymond Queneau and Jacques Prévert.
The first issue of Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution (Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution)
appears in July, replacing La Révolution surréaliste - its new title suggested by Louis Aragon.
In December, Dalí and Buñuel's second film, L'Âge d'or, is screened at the Montmartre cinema,
Studio 28. Members of the League of Patriots and the Anti-Jewish League wreck the cinema.
1931
The surrealist artists are exhibited for the first time in the US, at Hartford (Connecticut). This event
brings together works by Salvador Dalí, Giorgio De Chirico, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró,
Picasso and Pierre Roy.
Alberto Giacometti produces his first sculpture-objects, "mobile and mute objects" made of organic
forms that can be set in motion.
1932
In November, André Breton publishes Les Vases communicants (The Communicating Vessels), a work
that aims to establish the existence of close connections between dreams and the waking state. In it
he critiques Salvador Dalí's "symbolically functioning objects" which he considers to be over
reductive of desire. He sends a copy to Freud.
1933
Albert Skira publishes the surrealist review Minotaure (1933-1938) whose first issue is devoted to
Picasso.
1934
At the Musee Royal in Brussels, the Belgian Surrealists organise the first large-scale exhibition of
surrealist works from all over Europe. This too has the title Minotaure.
The German artist Hans Bellmer joins the Surrealist movement with the publication in issue 6 of the
review Minotaure (December 1934) of photographs showing one of his surrealist objects, The Doll.
1935
Alberto Giacometti is excluded from the group. He impugns his surrealist work and announces his
wish to go back to working "from life".
In November, the first Paris exhibition of the artist Victor Brauner is organised at the Galerie Pierre.
1936
In Paris, in May, an exhibition of surrealist objects at the Galerie Charles Ratton brings together for
the first time natural objects, found objects and objects constructed by surrealist artists.
The International Surrealist Exhibition is organised in London by the art historian Herbert Read, with
an introduction by André Breton.
In December, MOMA in New York shows the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism.
1937
André Breton becomes editor-in-chief of the review Minotaure.
He publishes L'Amour fou.
1938
A new International Surrealist Exhibition is held at the Beaux-arts Gallery, Paris, with the
involvement of Marcel Duchamp as its designer. This exhibition brings together more than 60 artists
from different countries, showing around 300 paintings, objects, collages, photographs and
installations.
1939
Salvador Dalí is excluded from the group.
The war scatters the Surrealists, of whom a large number seek exile in the United States; the model
they represent will be decisive for the nascent artistic movements and those to come, such as
Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dadaism and Pop Art;
André Breton, What is Surrealism?
At the beginning of the war of 1870 (he was to die four months later,aged twenty-four), the author
of the Chants de Maldororand of Poésies, Isidore Ducasse, better known bythe name of Comte de
Lautréamont, whose thought has been of thevery greatest help and encouragement to myself and
my friendsthroughout the fifteen years during which we have succeeded in carryinga common
activity, made the following remark, among many others whichwere to electrify us fifty years later:
``At the hour in which I write,new tremors are running through the intellectual atmosphere; it isonly
a matter of having the courage to face them.'' 1868-75: it isimpossible, looking back upon the past,
to perceive an epoch sopoetically rich, so victorious, so revolutionary and so chargedwith distant
meaning as that which stretches from the separatepublication of the Premier Chant de Maldoror to
theinsertion in a letter to Ernest Delahaye of Rimbauld's last poem,Rêve, which has not so far been
included in hisComplete Works. It is not an idle hope to wish to see theworks of Lautréamont and
Rimbaud restored to their correcthistorical background: the coming and the immediate results of
the warof 1870. Other and analogous cataclysms could not have failed to riseout of that military and
social cataclysm whose final episode was tobe the atrocious crushing of the Paris Commune; the last
in datecaught many of us at the very age when Lautréamont and Rimbaudfound themselves thrown
into the preceding one, and by way of revengehas had as its consequence - and this is the new and
important fact -the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution.
I should say that to people socially and politically uneducated as wethen were - we who, on one
hand, came for the most part from thepetite-bourgeoisie, and on the other, were all by vocation
possessedwith the desire to intervene upon the artistic plane - the days ofOctober, which only the
passing of the years and the subsequentappearance of a large number of works within the reach of
all werefully to illumine, could not there and then have appeared to turn sodecisive a page in
history. We were, I repeat, ill-prepared andill-informed. Above all, we were exclusively preoccupied
with acampaign of systematic refusal, exasperated by the conditions underwhich, in such an age, we
were forced to live. But our refusal did notstop there; it was insatiable and knew no bounds. Apart
from theincredible stupidity of the arguments which attempted to legitimize ourparticipation in an
enterprise such as the war, whose issue left uscompletely indifferent, this refusal was directed - and
having beenbrought up in such a school, we are not capable of changing somuch that is no longer so
directed - against the whole series ofintellectual, moral and social obligations that continually and
fromall sides weigh down upon man and crush him. Intellectually, it wasvulgar rationalism and chop
logic that more than anything else formedthe causes of our horror and our destructive impulse;
morally, it wasall duties: religious, civic and of the family; socially, it was work(did not Rimbaud say:
``Jamais je ne travaillerai, ô flots defeu!'' and also: ``La main à plume vaut la main à charrue.Quel
siècle à mains! Je n'aurai jamais ma main!''). Themore I think about it, the more certain I become
that nothing was toour minds worth saving, unless it was... unless it was, at last``l'amour la poésie,''
to take the bright and trembling title ofone of Paul Eluard's books, ``l'amour la poésie,'' considered
asinseparable in their essence and as the sole good. Between thenegation of this good, a negation
brought to its climax by the war,and its full and total affirmation (``Poetry should be made by all,
notone''), the field was not, to our minds, open to anything but aRevolution truly extended into all
domains, improbably radical, to thehighest degree impractical and tragically destroying within itself
thewhole time the feeling that it brought with it both of desirabilityand of absurdity. Many of you,
no doubt, would put this down to acertain youthful exaltation and to the general savagery of the
time; Imust, however, insist on this attitude, common to particular men andmanifesting itself at
periods nearly half a century distant from oneanother. I should affirm that in ignorance of this
attitude one canform no idea of what surrealism really stands for. This attitude alonecan account,
and very sufficiently at that, for all the excesses thatmay be attributed to us but which cannot be
deplored unless onegratuitously supposes that we could have started from any otherpoint. The illsounding remarks, that are imputed to us, theso-called inconsiderate attacks, the insults, the
quarrels, thescandals - all things that we are so much reproached with - turned upon the same road
as the surrealist poems. From the very beginning, thesurrealist attitude has had that in common
with Lautréamont andRimbaud which once and for all binds our lot to theirs, and that iswartime
defeatism.
I am not afraid to say that this defeatism seems to be morerelevant than ever. ``New tremors are
running through the intellectualatmosphere; it is only a matter of having the courage to face
them.''They are, in fact, always running through the intellectualatmosphere: the problem of their
propagation and interpretationremains the same and, as far as we are concerned, remains to
besolved. But, paraphrasing Lautréamont, I cannot refrain fromadding that at the hour in which I
speak, old and mortal shivers aretrying to substitute themselves for those which are the very
shiversof knowledge and of life. They come to announce a frightful disease, adisease followed by the
deprivation of all rights; it is only a matterof having the courage to face them also. This disease is
called fascism.
Let us be careful today not to underestimate the peril: the shadow hasgreatly advanced over Europe
recently. Hitler, Dolfuss and Mussolinihave either drowned in blood or subjected to corporal
humiliationeverything that formed the effort of generations straining towards amore tolerable and
more worthy form of existence. In capitalistsociety, hypocrisy and cynicism have now lost all sense
of proportionand are becoming more outrageous every day. Without making exaggeratedsacrifices
to humanitarianism, which always involves impossiblereconciliations and truces to the advantage of
the stronger, i shouldsay that in this atmosphere, thought cannot consider the exteriorworld without
an immediate shudder. Everything we know about fascismshows that it is precisely the
homologation of this state of affairs,aggravated to its furthest point by the lasting resignation that
itseeks to obtain from those who suffer. Is not the evident role offascism to re-establish for the time
being the tottering supremacy offinance-capital? Such a role is of itself sufficient to make it worthyof
all our hatred; we continue to consider this feigned resignation asone of the greatest evils that can
possibly be inflicted upon beingsof our kind, and those who would inflict it deserve, in our opinion,to
be beaten like dogs. Yet it is impossible to conceal the fact thatthis immense danger is there, lurking
at our doors, that it has madeits appearance within our walls, and that it would be pure
byzantinismto dispute too long, as in Germany, over the choice of the barrier tobe set up against it,
when all the while, under severalaspects, it is creeping nearer and nearer to us. During the courseof
taking various steps with a view to contributing, in so far as I amcapable, to the organization in Paris
of the anti-fascist struggle, Ihave noticed that already a certain doubt has crept into theintellectual
circles of the left as to the possibility of successfullycombating fascism, a doubt which has
unfortunately infected even thoseelements whom one might have thought it possible to rely on and
whohad come to the fore in this struggle. Some of them have even begun tomake excuses for the
loss of the battle already. Such dispositionsseem to me to be so dismaying that i should not care to
be speakinghere without first having made clear my position in relation to them,or without
anticipating a whole series of remarks that are to follow,affirming that today, more than ever before,
the liberation of themind, demands as primary condition, in the opinion of thesurrealists, the express
aim of surrealism, the liberation ofman, which implies that we must struggle with our fetters with
allthe energy of despair; that today more than ever before thesurrealists entirely rely for the
bringing about of the liberation ofman upon the proletarian Revolution.
I now feel free to turn to the object of this pamphlet, which is toattempt to explain what surrealism
is. A certain immediate ambiguitycontained in the word surrealism, is, in fact, capable of leading
oneto suppose that it designates I know not what transcendental attitude,while, on the contrary it
expresses - and always has expressed for us- a desire to deepen the foundations of the real, to bring
about aneven clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousnessof the world
perceived by the senses. The whole evolution ofsurrealism, from its origins to the present day, which
i am about toretrace, shows that our unceasing wish, growing more and more urgentfrom day to
day, has been at all costs to avoid considering a systemof thought as a refuge, to pursue our
investigations with eyes wideopen to their outside consequences, and to assure ourselves that
theresults of these investigations would be capable of facing thebreath of the street. At the limits,
for many years past - ormore exactly, since the conclusion of what one may term the purelyintuitive
epoch of surrealism (1919-25) - at the limits, I say,we have attempted to present interior reality and
exterior reality astwo elements in process of unification, or finally becomingone. This final
unification is the supreme aim of surrealism:interior reality and exterior reality being, in the present
form ofsociety, in contradiction (and in this contradiction we seethe verycause of man's
unhappiness, but also the source of his movement), wehave assigned to ourselves the task of
confronting these two realitieswith one another on every possible occasion, of refusing to allow
thepreeminence of the one over the other, yet not of acting on the oneand on the other both at
once, for that would be to supposethat they are less apart from one another than they are (and I
believethat those who pretend that they are acting on both simultaneously areeither deceiving us or
are a prey to a disquieting illusion); ofacting on these two realities not both at once, then, but one
afterthe other, in a systematic manner, allowing us to observe theirreciprocal attraction and
interpenetration and to give to thisinterplay of forces all the extension necessary for the trend of
thesetwo adjoining realities to become one and the same thing.
As I have just mentioned in passing, I consider that one candistinguish two epochs in the surrealist
movement, of equal duration,from its origins (1919, year of the publication of ChampsMagnétiques)
until today; a purely intuitiveepoch, and a reasoning epoch. The first can summarily becharacterized
by the belief expressed during this time in theall-powerfulness of thought, considered capable of
freeing itself bymeans of its own resources. This belief witnesses to a prevailing viewthat I look upon
today as being extremely mistaken, the view thatthought is supreme over matter. The definition of
surrealismthat has passed into the dictionary, a definition taken from theManifesto of 1924, takes
account only of this entirelyidealist disposition and (for voluntary reasons of simplification
andamplification destined to influence in my mind the future of thisdefinition) does so in terms that
suggest that I deceived myself at thetime in advocating the use of an automatic thought not only
removedfrom all control exercised by the reason but also disengaged from``all aesthetic or moral
preoccupations.'' It should atleast have been said: conscious aesthetic or moralpreoccupations.
During the period under review, in the absence, ofcourse, of all seriously discouraging exterior
events, surrealistactivity remained strictly confined to its first theoretical premise,continuing all the
while to be the vehicle of that total``non-conformism'' which, as we have seen, was the binding
feature inthe coming together of those who took part in it, and the cause,during the first few years
after the war, of an uninterrupted seriesof adhesions. No coherent political or social attitude,
however, madeits appearance until 1925, that is to say (and it is important tostress this), until the
outbreak of the Moroccan war, which,re-arousing in us our particular hostility to the way armed
conflictsaffect man, abruptly placed before us the necessity of making a publicprotest. This protest,
which, under the title LaRévolution d'Abord et Toujours (October 1925), joinedthe name of the
surrealists proper to those of thirty otherintellectuals, was undoubtedly rather confused
ideologically; it nonethe less marked the breaking away from a whole way of thinking; itnone the
less created a precedent that was to determine the wholefuture direction of the movement.
Surrealist activity, faced with abrutal, revolting, unthinkable fact, was forced to ask itselfwhat were
its proper resources and to determine their limits;it was forced to adopt a precise attitude, exterior
to itself, inorder to continue to face whatever exceeded these limits. Surrealistactivity at this
moment entered into its reasoning phase. Itsuddenly experienced the necessity of crossing over the
gap thatseparates absolute idealism from dialectical materialism. Thisnecessity made its appearance
in so urgent a manner that we had toconsider the problem in the clearest possible light, with the
resultthat for some months we devoted our entire attention to the means ofbringing about this
change of front once and for all. If I do nottoday feel any retrospective embarrassment in explaining
this change,that is because it seems to me quite natural that surrealist thought,before coming to
rest in dialectical materialism and insisting, astoday, on the supremacy of matter over mind, should
have beencondemned to pass, in a few years, through the whole historicdevelopment of modern
thought. It came normally to Marx throughHegel, just as it came normally to Hegel through Berkeley
andHume. These latter influences offer a certain particularity in that,contrary to certain poetic
influences undergone in the same way, andaccommodated to those of the French materialists of the
eighteenthcentury, they yielded a residuum of practical action. To tryand hide these influences
would be contrary to my desire to show thatsurrealism has not been drawn up as an abstract
system, that is tosay, safeguarded against all contradictions. It is also my desire toshow how
surrealist activity, driven, as I have said, to ask itselfwhat were its proper resources, had in some way
or another toreflect upon itself its realization, in 1925, of its relativeinsufficiency; how surrealist
activity had to cease being content withthe results (automatic texts, the recital of dreams,
improvisedspeeches, spontaneous poems, drawings and actions) which it hadoriginally planned; and
how it came to consider these first results asbeing simply so much material, starting from which the
problemof knowledge inevitably arose again under quite a new form.
As a living movement, that is to say a movement undergoing aconstant process of becoming and,
what is more, solidly relying onconcrete facts, surrealism has brought together and is still
bringingtogether diverse temperaments individually obeying or resisting avariety of bents. The
determinant of their enduring or short-livedadherence is not to be considered as a blind concession
to an inertstock of ideas held in common, but as a continuous sequence of actswhich, propelling the
doer to more or less distant points, forces himfor each fresh start to return to the same starting-line.
Theseexercises not being without peril, one man may break a limb or - forwhich there is no
precedent - his head, another may peaceably submergehimself in a quagmire or report himself dying
of fatigue. Unable asyet to treat itself to an ambulance, surrealism simply leaves theseindividuals by
the wayside. Those who continue in the ranks are awareof course of the casualties left behind them.
But what of it? Theessential is always to look ahead, to remain sure that one has notforfeited the
burning desire for beauty, truth and justice, toilinglyto go onwards towards the discovery, one by
one, of freshlandscapes, and to continue doing so indefinitely and withoutcoercion to the end, that
others may afterwards travel the samespiritual road, unhindered and in all security. Penetration,
tobe sure, has not been as deep as one would have wished. Poeticallyspeaking, a few wild, or shall
we say charming, beasts whose criesfill the air and bar access to a domain as yet only surmised,
arestill far from being exorcized. But for all that, the piercing of thethicket would have proceeded
less tortuously, and those who are doingthe pioneering would have acquitted themselves with
unabating tenacityin the service of the cause, if, between the beginning and the end ofthe spectacle
which they provide for themselves and would be glad toprovide for others, a change had not taken
place.
In 193(6), more than ever before, surrealism owes it to itself todefend the postulate of the necessity
of change. It is amusing,indeed, to see how the more spiteful and silly of our adversariesaffect to
triumph whenever they stumble on some old statement we mayhave made and which now sounds
more or less discordantly in the midstof others intended to render comprehensible our present
conduct. Thisinsidious manoeuvre, which is calculated to cast a doubt on our goodfaith, or at least
on the genuineness of our principles, can easily bedefeated. The development of surrealism
throughout the decade of itsexistence is, we take it, a function of the unrolling of historicalrealities
as these may be speeded up between the period of reliefwhich follows the conclusion of a peace
and the fresh outbreak of war.It is also a function of the process of seeking after new values inorder
to confirm or invalidate existing ones. The fact that certain ofthe first participants in surrealist
activity have thrown in thesponge and have been discarded has brought about the retiring
fromcirculation of some ways of thinking and the putting into circulationof others in which there
were implicit certain general dissents on theone hand and certain general assents on the other.
Hence it is thatthis activity has been fashioned by the events. At the present moment,contrary to
current biased rumour according to which surrealism itselfis supposed, in its cruelty of disposition,
to have sacrificed nearlyall the blood first vivifying it, it is heartening to be able to pointout that it
has never ceased to avail itself of the perfect teamworkof René Crevel, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst,
Benjamin Péret,Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, and the present writer, all of whom can attestthat from the
inception of the movement - which is also the date ofour enlistment in it - until now, the initial
principle of theircovenant has never been violated. If there have occurred differenceson some
points, it was essentially within the rhythmic scope of theintegral whole, in itself a least disputable
element of objectivevalue. The others, they whom we no longer meet, can they say as much?They
cannot, for the simple reason that since they separated from usthey have been incapable of
achieving a single concerted action thathad any definite form of its own, and they have confined
themselves,instead, to a reaction against surrealism with the greatest wastage tothemselves - a fate
always overtaking those who go back on their past.The history of their apostasy and denials will
ultimately be read intothe great limbo of human failings, without profit to any observer -ideal
yesterday, but real today - who, called upon to make apronouncement, will decide whether they or
ourselves have brought themore appreciable efforts to bear upon a rational solution of the
manyproblems surrealism has propounded.
Although there can be no question here of going through the history ofthe surrealist movement - its
history has been told many a time andsometimes told fairly well; moreover, I prefer to pass on as
quicklyas possible to the exposition of its present attitude - I think Iought briefly to recall, for the
benefit of those of you who wereunaware of the fact, that there is no doubt that before the
surrealistmovement properly so called, there existed among the promoters of themovement and
others who later rallied round it, very active, notmerely dissenting but also antagonistic dispositions
which, between1915 and 1920, were willing to align themselves under the signboard ofDada. Postwar disorder, a state of mind essentially anarchicthat guided that cycle's many manifestations, a
deliberate refusal tojudge - for lack, it was said, of criteria - the actual qualificationsof individuals,
and, perhaps, in the last analysis, a certain spiritof negation which was making itself conspicuous,
had brought about adissolution of the group as yet inchoate, one might say, by reason ofits
dispersed and heterogeneous character, a group whose germinatingforce has nevertheless been
decisive and, by the general consent ofpresent-day critics, has greatly influenced the course of ideas.
Itmay be proper before passing rapidly - as I must - over this period, toapportion by far the
handsomest share to Marcel Duchamp (canvases andglass objects still to be seen in New York), to
Francis Picabia(reviews ``291'' and ``391''), Jacques Vaché (Lettres deGuerre) and Tristan Tzara
(Twenty-five Poems, DadaManifesto 1918).
Strangely enough, it was round a discovery of language that there wasseeking to organize itself in
1920 what - as yet on a basis ofconfidential exchange - assumed the name of surrealism, a
wordfallen from the lips of Apollinaire, which we had diverted from therather general and very
confusing connotation he had given it. Whatwas at first no more than a new method of poetic
writing broke awayafter several years from the much too general theses which had come tobe
expounded in the Surrealist Manifesto - Soluble Fish,1924, the Second Manifesto adding others to
them, wherebythe whole was raised to a vaster ideological plane; and so there hadto be revision.
In an article, ``Enter the Mediums,'' published inLittérature, 1922, reprinted in Les PasPerdus, 1924,
and subsequently in the SurrealistManifesto, I explained the circumstance that had originally putus,
my friends and myself, on the track of the surrealist activity westill follow and for which we are
hopeful of gaining ever morenumerous new adherents in order to extend it further than we have
sofar succeeded in doing. It reads:
It was in 1919, in complete solitude and at the approachof sleep, that my attention was
arrested by sentences more or lesscomplete, which became perceptible to my mind without
my being able todiscover (even by very meticulous analysis) any possible previousvolitional
effort. One evening in particular, as I was about to fallasleep, I became aware of a sentence
articulated clearly to a pointexcluding all possibility of alteration and stripped of all quality
ofvocal sound; a curious sort of sentence which came to me bearing - insober truth - not a
trace of any relation whatever to any incidents Imay at that time have been involved in; an
insistent sentence, itseemed to me, a sentence I might say, that knocked at thewindow. I was
prepared to pay no further attention to it when theorganic character of the sentence detained
me. I was reallybewildered. Unfortunately, I am unable to remember the exact sentenceat this
distance, but it ran approximately like this: ``A man is cutin half by the window.'' What made it
plainer was the fact that it wasaccompanied by a feeble visual representation of a man in the
processof walking, but cloven, at half his height, by a window perpendicularto the axis of his
body. Definitely, there was the form, re-erectedagainst space, of a man leaning out of a
window. But the windowfollowing the man's locomotion, I understood that I was dealing
withan image of great rarity. Instantly the idea came to me to use it asmaterial for poetic
construction. I had no sooner invested it withthat quality, than it had given place to a
succession of all butintermittent sentences which left me no less astonished, but in astate, I
would say, of extreme detachment.
Preoccupied as I still was at that time with Freud, and familiar withhis methods of investigation,
which I had practised occasionally uponthe sick during the War, I resolved to obtain from myself
what oneseeks to obtain from patients, namely a monologue poured out asrapidly as possible, over
which the subject's critical faculty has nocontrol - the subject himself throwing reticence to the
winds - andwhich as much as possible represents spoken thought. It seemedand still seems to me
that the speed of thought is no greater thanthat of words, and hence does not exceed the flow of
either tongue orpen. It was in such circumstances that, together with PhilippeSoupault, whom I had
told about my first ideas on the subject, I beganto cover sheets of paper with writing, feeling a
praiseworthy contemptfor whatever the literary result might be. Ease of achievement broughtabout
the rest. By the end of the first day of the experiment we wereable to read to one another about
fifty pages obtained in this mannerand to compare the results we had achieved. The likeness was on
thewhole striking. There were similar faults of construction, the samehesitant manner, and also, in
both cases, an illusion of extraordinaryverve, much emotion, a considerable assortment of images of
a qualitysuch as we should never have been able to obtain in the normal way ofwriting, a very
special sense of the picturesque, and, here and there,a few pieces of out and out buffoonery. The
only differences which ourtwo texts presented appeared to me to be due essentially to
ourrespective temperaments, Soupault's being less static than mine, and,if he will allow me to make
this slight criticism, to his havingscattered about at the top of certain pages - doubtlessly in a spiritof
mystification - various words under the guise of titles. I mustgive him credit, on the other hand, for
having always forcibly opposedthe least correction of any passage that did not seem to me to
bequite the thing. In that he was most certainly right.
It is of course difficult in these cases to appreciate at their justvalue the various elements in the
result obtained; one may even saythat it is entirely impossible to appreciate them at a first
reading.To you who may be writing them, these elements are, in appearance,as strange as to
anyone else, and you are yourself naturallydistrustful of them. Poetically speaking, they are
distinguishedchiefly by a very high degree of immediate absurdity, thepeculiar quality of that
absurdity being, on close examination, theiryielding to whatever is most admissible and legitimate in
the world:divulgation of a given number of facts and properties on the whole notless objectionable
than the others.
The word "surrealism" having thereupon become descriptive of thegeneralizable undertaking to
which we had devoted ourselves, I thoughtit indispensable, in 1924, to define this word once and for
all:
SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it isintended to express, verbally, in
writing, or by other means, the realprocess of thought. Thought's dictation, in the absence of
all controlexercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moralpreoccupations.
ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism rests in the belief in the superiorreality of certain forms of
association neglected heretofore; in theomnipotence of the dream and in the disinterested
play of thought. Ittends definitely to do away with all other psychic mechanisms and
tosubstitute itself for them in the solution of the principal problemsof life. Have professed
absolute surrealism: Messrs. Aragon,Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, Desnos,
Eluard,Gérard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Péret,Picon, Soupault, Vitrac.
These till now appear to be the only ones.... Were one to considertheir output only
superficially, a goodly number of poets might wellhave passed for surrealists, beginning with
Dante and Shakespeare athis best. In the course of many attempts I have made towards
ananalysis of what, under false pretences, is called genius, I havefound nothing that could in
the end be attributed to any other processthan this.
There followed an enumeration that will gain, I think, by beingclearly set out thus:
. . . Heraclitus is surrealist in dialectic. . . .
Swift is surrealist in malice.
Sade is surrealist in sadism. . . .
Baudelaire is surrealist in morals.
Rimbaud is surrealist in life and elsewhere. . . .
Carroll is surrealist in nonsense. . . .
Picasso is surrealist in cubism. . . .
Etc.
They were not always surrealists - on this I insist - in the sensethat one can disentangle in each of
them a number of preconceivednotions to which - very naïvely! - they clung. And they clung tothem
so because they had not heard the surrealist voice, thevoice that exhorts on the eve of death and in
the roaring storm, andbecause they were unwilling to dedicate themselves to the task of nomore
than orchestrating the score replete with marvellous things. Theywere proud instruments; hence the
sounds they produced were not alwaysharmonious sounds.
We, on the contrary, who have not given ourselves to processes offiltering, who through the
medium of our work have been content to bethe silent receptacles of so many echoes, modest
registering machines that are not hypnotized by the pattern that they trace,we are perhaps serving a
yet much nobler cause. So we honestly giveback the talent lent to us. You may talk of the ``talent'' of
thisyard of platinum, of this mirror, of this door and of this sky, if you wish.
We have no talent. . . .
The Manifesto also contained a certain number ofpractical recipes, entitled: ``Secrets of the Magic
Surrealist Art,''such as the following:
Written Surrealist Composition or First and Last Draft.
Having settled down in some spot most conducive to the mind'sconcentration upon itself,
order writing material to be brought toyou. Let your state of mind be as passive and receptive
as possible.Forget your genius, talents, as well as the genius and talents ofothers. Repeat to
yourself that literature is pretty well the sorriestroad that leads to everywhere. Write quickly
without any previouslychosen subject, quickly enough not to dwell on, and not to be
temptedto read over, what you have written. The first sentence will come ofitself; and this is
self-evidently true, because there is never amoment but some sentence alien to our conscious
thought clamours foroutward expression. It is rather difficult to speak of the sentence
tofollow, since it doubtless comes in for a share of our consciousactivity and so the other
sentences, if it is conceded that thewriting of the first sentence must have involved even a
minimum ofconsciousness. But that should in the long run matter little, becausetherein
precisely lies the greatest interest in the surrealistexercise. Punctuation of course necessarily
hinders the stream ofabsolute continuity which preoccupies us. But you should
particularlydistrust the prompting whisper. If through a fault ever so triflingthere is a
forewarning of silence to come, a fault let us say, ofinattention, break off unhesitatingly the
line that has become toolucid. After the word whose origin seems suspect you should place
aletter, any letter, l for example, always the letter l,and restore the arbitrary flux by making
that letter the initial ofthe word to follow.
I believe that the real interest of that book - there was no lack ofpeople who were good enough to
concede interest, for which noparticular credit is due to me because I have no more than
givenexpression to sentiments shared with friends, present and former -rests only subordinately on
the formula above given. It is ratherconfirmatory of a turn of thought which, for good or ill,
ispeculiarly distinctive of our time. The defence originally attemptedof that turn of thought still
seems valid to me in what follows:
We still live under the reign of logic, but the methods oflogic are applied nowadays only to the
resolution of problems ofsecondary in terest. The absolute rationalism which is still thefashion
does not permit consideration of any facts but those strictlyrelevant to our experience. Logical
ends, on the other hand, escapeus. Needless to say that even experience has had limits
assigned toit. It revolves in a cage from which it becomes more and moredifficult to release it.
Even experience is dependent on immediateutility, and common sense is its keeper. Under
colour of civilization,under pretext of progress, all that rightly or wrongly may be regardedas
fantasy or superstition has been banished from the mind, alluncustomary searching after truth
has been proscribed. It is only bywhat must seem sheer luck that there has recently been
brought tolight an aspect of mental life - to my belief by far the mostimportant - with which it
was supposed that we no longer had anyconcern. All credit for these discoveries must go to
Freud. Based onthese discoveries a current of opinion is forming that will enable theexplorer
of the human mind to continue his investigations, justifiedas he will be in taking into account
more than mere summary realities.The imagination is perhaps on the point of reclaiming its
rights. Ifthe depths of our minds harbour strange forces capable of increasingthose on the
surface, or of successfully contending with them, then itis all in our interest to canalize them,
to canalize them first inorder to submit them later, if necessary, to the control of thereason.
The analysts themselves have nothing to lose by such aproceeding. But it should be observed
that there are no means designeda priori for the bringing about of such an enterprise, that
until thecoming of the new order it might just as well be considered the affairof poets and
scientists, and that its success will not depend on themore or less capricious means that will be
employed. . . .
Interesting in a different way from the future of surrealisttechnics (theatrical, philosophical,
scientific, critical)appears to me the application of surrealism to action. Whateverreservations
I might be inclined to make with regard to responsibilityin general, I should quite particularly
like to know how the firstmisdemeanours whose surrealist character is indubitable will
bejudged. When surrealist methods extend from writing to action,there will certainly arise the
need of a new morality to take theplace of the current one, the cause of all our woes.
The Manifesto of Surrealism has improved on the Rimbaudprinciple that the poet must turn
seer. Man in general is goingto be summoned to manifest through life those new sentiments
which thegift of vision will so suddenly have placed within his reach. . . .
Surrealism then was securing expression in all its purity and force.The freedom it possesses is a
perfect freedom in the sense that itrecognizes no limitations exterior to itself. As it was said on
thecover of the first issue of La RévolutionSurréaliste, ``it will be necessary to draw up a
newdeclaration of the Rights of Man.'' The concept of surreality,concerning which quarrels have
been sought with us repeatedly andwhich it was attempted to turn into a metaphysical or mystic
rope tobe placed afterwards round our necks, lends itself no longer tomisconstruction, nowhere
does it declare itself opposed to the need oftransforming the world which henceforth will more and
more definitelyyield to it.
As I said in the Manifesto:
I believe in the future transmutation of those twoseemingly contradictory states, dream and
reality, into a sort ofabsolute reality, of surreality, so to speak. I am looking forward toits
consummation, certain that I shall never share in it, but deathwould matter little to me could I
but taste the joy it will yieldultimately.
After years of endeavour and perplexities, when a variety of opinionshad disputed amongst
themselves the direction of the craft in which anumber of persons of unequal ability and varying
powers of resistancehad originally embarked together, the surrealist idea recovered in theSecond
Manifesto all the brilliancy of which events hadvainly conspired to despoil it. It should be
emphasized that theFirst Manifesto of 1924 did no more than sum up theconclusions we had drawn
during what one may call the heroicepoch of surrealism, which stretches from 1919 to 1923.
Theconcerted elaboration of the first automatic texts and our excitedreading of them, the first
results obtained by Max Ernst in the domainof ``collage'' and of painting, the practice of
surrealist``speaking'' during the hypnotic experiments introduced among us byRené Crevel and
repeated every evening for over a year,uncontrovertibly mark the decisive stages of surrealist
explorationduring this first phase. After that, up till the taking into accountof the social aspect of the
problem round about 1925 (though notformally sanctioned until 1930), surrealism began to find
itself aprey to characteristic wranglings. These wranglings account veryclearly for the expulsion
orders and tickets-of-leave which, as wewent along, we had to deal out to certain of our companions
of thefirst and second hour. Some people have quite gratuitously concludedfrom this that we are apt
to overestimate personal questions.During the last ten years, surrealism has almost unceasingly
beenobliged to defend itself against deviations to the right and to theleft. On the one hand we have
had to struggle against the will ofthose who would maintain surrealism on a purely speculative level
andtreasonably transfer it on to an artistic and literary plane (Artaud,Desnos, Ribemont-Dessaignes,
Vitrac) at the cost of all the hope forsubversion we have placed in it; on the other, against the will
ofthose who would place it on a purely practical basis, available at anymoment to be sacrificed to an
ill-conceived political militancy(Naville, Aragon) - at the cost, this time, of what constitutes
theoriginality and reality of its researches, at the cost of theautonomous risk that it has to run.
Agitated though it was, the epochthat separates the two Manifestos was none the less a richone,
since it saw the publication of so many works in which the vitalprinciples of surrealism were amply
accounted for. . . .
It should be pointed out that in a number of declarations in LaRévolution et les Intellectuels. Que
peuvent faire lessurréalistes? ( 1926), [Pierre Naville] demonstrated theutter vanity of intellectual
bickerings in the face of the humanexploitation which results from the wage-earning system.
Thesedeclarations gave rise amongst us to considerable anxiety and, attempting for the first time to
justify surrealism's socialimplications, I desired to put an end to it in LégitimeDéfense. This pamphlet
set out to demonstrate thatthere is no fundamental antinomy in the basis of surrealist thought.In
reality, we are faced with two problems, one of which is theproblem raised, at the beginning of the
twentieth century, by thediscovery of the relations between the conscious and the unconscious.That
was how the problem chose to present itself to us. We were thefirst to apply to its resolution a
particular method, which we havenot ceased to consider both the most suitable and the most likely
tobe brought to perfection; there is no reason why we should renounceit. The other problem we are
faced with is that of the social actionwe should pursue. We consider that this action has its own
method indialectical materialism, and we can all the less afford to ignore thisaction since, I repeat,
we hold the liberation of man to be thesine qua non condition of the liberation of the mind,and we
can expect this liberation of man to result only from theproletarian Revolution. These two problems
are essentially distinctand we deplore their becoming confused by not remaining so. There isgood
reason, then, to take up a stand against all attempts to weldthem together and, more especially,
against the urge to abandon allsuch researches as ours in order to devote ourselves to the poetry
andart of propaganda. Surrealism, which has been the object of brutal andrepeated summonses in
this respect, now feels the need of making somekind of counter-attack. Let me recall the fact that its
verydefinition holds that it must escape, in its written manifestations,or any others, from all control
exercised by the reason. Apart fromthe puerility of wishing to bring a supposedly Marxist control to
bearon the immediate aspect of such manifestations, this control cannot beenvisaged in principle.
And how ill-boding does this distrustseem, coming as it does from men who declare themselves
Marxists, thatis to say possessed not only of a strict line in revolutionarymatters, but also of a
marvellously open mind and an insatiablecuriosity!
This brings us to the eve of the Second Manifesto. Theseobjections had to be put an end to, and for
that purpose it wasindispensable that we should proceed to liquidate certainindividualist elements
amongst us, more or less openly hostile to oneanother, whose intentions did not, in the final
analysis, appear asirreproachable, nor their motives as disinterested, as might have beendesired. An
important part of the work was devoted to a statement ofthe reasons which moved surrealism to
dispense for the future withcertain collaborators. It was attempted, on the same occasion,
tocomplete the specific method of creation proposed six years earlier,and thoroughly to tidy up
surrealist ideas. . . .
From 1930 until today the history of surrealism is that of successfulefforts to restore to it its proper
becoming by graduallyremoving from it every trace both of political opportunism and ofartistic
opportunism. The review La RévolutionSurréaliste, (12 issues) has been succeeded by another,Le
Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution(6 issues). Owing particularly to influences brought to bear by
newelements, surrealist experimenting. which had for too long beenerratic, has been unreservedly
resumed; its perspectives and its aimshave been made perfectly clear; I may say that it has not
ceased to becarried on in a continuous and enthusiastic manner. This experimentinghas regained
momentum under the master-impulse given to it by SalvadorDali, whose exceptional interior
``boiling'' has been for surrealism,during the whole of this period, an invaluable ferment. As Guy
Mangeothas very rightly pointed out in his History of Surrealism. . . Dali has endowed surrealism
with an instrument of primaryimportance, in particular the paranoiac-critical method, which
hasimmediately shown itself capable of being applied with equal successto painting, poetry, the
cinema, to the construction of typicalsurrealist objects, to fashions, to sculpture and even, if
necessary,to all manner of exegesis.
He first announced his convictions to us in La FemmeVisible (1930):
I believe the moment is at hand when, by a paranoiac andactive advance of the mind, it will be
possible (simultaneously withautomatism and other passive states) to systematize confusion
and thusto help to discredit completely the world of reality.
In order to cut short all possible misunderstandings, it shouldperhaps be said: ``immediate'' reality.
Paranoia uses the external world in order to assert itsdominating idea and has the disturbing
characteristic of making othersaccept this idea's reality. The reality of the external world is
usedfor illustration and proof, and so comes to serve the reality of ourmind.
Surrealism, starting fifteen years ago with a discovery that seemedonly to involve poetic language,
has spread like wildfire, on pursuingits course, not only in art but in life. It has provoked new states
ofconsciousness and overthrown the walls beyond which it wasimmemorially supposed to be
impossible to see; it has - as is beingmore and more generally recognized - modified the sensibility,
andtaken a decisive step towards the unification of the personality,which it found threatened by an
ever more profound dissociation.Without attempting to judge what direction it will ultimately
take,for the lands it fertilizes as it flows are those of surprise itself,I should like to draw your
attention to the fact that its most recentadvance is producing a fundamental crisis of the ``object.''
Itis essentially upon the object that surrealism has thrown most lightin recent years. Only the very
close examination of the many recentspeculations to which the object has publicly given rise
(theoneiric object, the object functioning symbolically, the real andvirtual object, the moving but
silent object, the phantom object, thediscovered object, etc.), can give one a proper grasp of
theexperiments that surrealism is engaged in now. In order to continue tounderstand the
movement, it is indispensable to focus one's attentionon this point.
I must crave your indulgence for speaking so technically, from theinside. But there could be no
question of concealing any aspect ofthe persuasions to which surrealism has been and is still
exposed. Isay that there exists a lyrical element that conditions for onepart the psychological and
moral structure of human society, thathas conditioned it at all times and that will continue to
conditionit. This lyrical element has until now, even though in spite of them,remained the fact and
the sole fact of specialists. In thestate of extreme tension to which class antagonisms have led
thesociety to which we belong and which we tend with all our strength toreject, it is natural and it is
fated that this solicitationshould continue, that it should assume for us a thousand faces,imploring,
tempting and eager by turns. It is not within our power, itwould be unworthy of our historic role to
give way to thissolicitation. By surrealism we intend to account for nothing less thanthe manner in
which it is possible today to make use of themagnificent and overwhelming spiritual legacy that has
beenhanded down to us. We have accepted this legacy from the past, andsurrealism can well say
that the use to which it has been put has beento turn it to the routing of capitalist society. I consider
that forthat purpose it was and is still necessary for us to stand where weare, to beware against
breaking the thread of our researches and tocontinue these researches, not as literary men and
artists, certainly,but rather as chemists and the various other kinds of technicians. Topass on to the
poetry and art called (doubtless in anticipation)proletarian: No. The forces we have been able to
bring togetherand which for fifteen years we have never found lacking, have arrivedat a particular
point of application: the question is not to knowwhether this point of application is the best, but
simply to point outthat the application of our forces at this point has given us up to anactivity that
has proved itself valuable and fruitful on the plane onwhich it was undertaken and has also been of a
kind to engage us moreand more on the revolutionary plane. What it is essential to realizeis that no
other activity could have produced such rich results, norcould any other similar activity have been so
effective in combatingthe present form of society. On that point we have history on ourside.
A comrade, Claude Cahun, in a striking pamphlet published recently:Les Paris Sont Ouverts, a
pamphlet that attempts topredict the future of poetry by taking account both of its own lawsand of
the social bases of its existence, takes Aragon to task for thelack of rigour in his present position (I do
not think anyone cancontest the fact that Aragon's poetry has perceptibly weakened sincehe
abandoned surrealism and undertook to place him selfdirectly at the service of the proletarian
cause, which leadsone to suppose that such an undertaking has defeated him and isproportionately
more or less unfavourable to the Revolution).... It isof particular interest that the author of Les Paris
SontOuverts has taken the opportunity of expressing himself fromthe ``historic'' point of view. His
appreciation is as follows:
The most revolutionary experiment in poetry under thecapitalist regime having been
incontestably, for France and perhapsfor Europe the Dadaist-surrealist experiment, in that it
has tended todestroy all the myths about art that for centuries have permitted theideologic as
well as economic exploitation of painting, sculpture,literature, etc. (e.g. the frottages of Max
Ernst, which, amongother things, have been able to upset the scale of values ofart-critics and
experts, values based chiefly on technical perfection,personal touch and the lastingness of the
materials employed), thisexperiment can and should serve the cause of the liberation of
theproletariat. It is only when the proletariat has become aware of themyths on which
capitalist culture depends, when they have become awareof what these myths and this culture
mean for them and have destroyedthem, that they will be able to pass on to their own
properdevelopment. The positive lesson of this negating experiment, that isto say its
transfusion among the proletariat, constitutes the onlyvalid revolutionary poetic propaganda.
Surrealism could not ask for anything better. Once the cause of themovement is understood, there is
perhaps some hope that, on the planeof revolutionary militantism proper, our turbulence, our
smallcapacity for adaptation, until now, to the necessary rules of a party(which certain people have
thought proper to call our ``blanquism''),may be excused us. It is only too certain that an activity
such asours, owing to its particularization, cannot be pursued within thelimits of any one of the
existing revolutionary organizations: itwould be forced to come to a halt on the very threshold of
thatorganization. If we are agreed that such an activity has above alltended to detach the
intellectual creator from the illusions withwhich bourgeois society has sought to surround him, I for
my part canonly see in that tendency a further reason for continuing ouractivity.
None the less, the right that we demand and our desire to make use ofit depend, as I said at the
beginning, on our remaining able tocontinue our investigations without having to reckon, as for the
lastfew months we have had to do, with a sudden attack from the forces ofcriminal imbecility. Let it
be clearly understood that for us,surrealists, the interests of thought can not cease to go hand in
handwith the interests of the working class, and that all attacks onliberty, all fetters on the
emancipation of the working class and allarmed attacks on it cannot fail to be considered by us as
attacks onthought likewise. I repeat, the danger is far from having beenremoved. The surrealists
cannot be accused of having been slow torecognize the fact, since, on the very next day after the
firstfascist coup in France, it was they amongst the intellectual circleswho had the honour of taking
the initiative in sending out an Appel à la lutte,, which appeared on February 10th,1934, furnished
with twenty-four signatures. You may rest assured,comrades, that they will not confine themselves,
that already theyhave not confined themselves, to this single act.
Pasted from <http://www.surrealist.com/what_is_surrealism.aspx>
samedi 5 avril 2008
14:40
Sur - re - al - ism (n.) -(often l.c.) a style of art and literature developed principally in the 20th
century, stressing the subconscious or nonrational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism
or the exploitation of chance effects, unexpected juxtapositions, etc.
Surrealism was developed by the 20th-century literary and artistic movement. The surrealist
movement of visual art and literature, flourished in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism
grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of
anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism emphasis was not on negation but on
positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the
destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past
and had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the
movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published "The Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924,
Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely,
that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute
reality, a surreality." Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the
unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this
normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike. This
movement continues to flourish at all ends of the earth. Continued thought processes and
investigations into the mind produce today some of the best art ever seen.
Stephen D. King, A history of surrealism.
In the Beginning the Literary Revolution
Immediately after World War I (1914-18), the cultural sensibility of Europe was in a lively state.
Young people who were left after the high-minded propaganda were brought to a state of heart felt
protest, it was feared that the best people were killed in the war and that the discoveries and
innovations before the war would be lost. Although Europe was certainly not without genius, the
war had brought a rift in the European art community. Dada was making its mark, and the anti-art
manifestations of Marcel Duchamp were building up until 1916, when an uproar was organized and
promoted by Tristan Tzara. Ironically Dadaism was directed against art, particularly academic art, but
also against the political society as a whole. The pamphlet Der Dada proclaimed the death of art and
that Dada was politics.
There were 20,000 copies printed of Der Ventilator, founded by Max Ernest and Hans Arp with
Baargeld. They organized an exhibition of art which brought the police to the little restaurant where
it was held. The means used by this agitation passed at the time for anti-art, but they very soon
became - to some extent Surrealism - an integrated part of the renewal of artistic activity. A number
of technical resources and creative approaches applied by Surrealists were invented by the Dada
movement. Most Surrealists took part in Dada meetings and the first text published Les Champs
Magnetiques was not classified as surrealist at first but much later on it was. It was written in the
sprit of Dadist, but it also proves by the power of the imagination and certain experimental
seriousness, that Breton in spite of all the dada fuss never lost hold of thread of his poetry and
symbolism.
Francis Picabia arrived in Paris at the same time as Tzara. He came from America by way of
Barcelona, where the journal 291 became 391 in 1917. This review-pamphlet reached nineteen
issues by 1924. on arriving in Paris he shocked Salon d' Automne of which he was a member by
exhibiting the products of his mechanist period. During the same period, Marcel Duchamp was in
New York working on his large paintings on glass, "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even"
Which he abandoned unfinished in 1923 in order to devote himself to chess. After his success in the
Armory Show, a major exhibition of modern art in New York 1913 - among which Duchamp showed
his "Nude Descending a Staircase"
When Dada split into mini-groups, a single, compact Surrealist group formed. In June 1924 the last
issue of "Literature" appeared. The headquarters of Surrealism, the Centrale Surrealiste, were
established and from here was published on December 1, 1924 the "most shocking review in the
world', La revolution Surrealiste. And Breton published the first Manifesto. Surrealism had arrived.
The Surrealist Revolution
The vagaries of history have obscured many people and events yet the lasting products of the
movement are brought into sharp relief; the written painted works, the tracts, manifestos and
reviews - the liveliest expressions of the group's collective life. The reviews themselves are
remarkable signs of the ideological development of Surrealism. The first two used the word
‘revolution’, then the term disappeared.
Directed at first by Poerre Naville and Benjamin Peret, then from issue No. 4 (1924) by Andre Breton,
Twelve numbers of La Revolution Surrealiste appeared between December 1924 and December
1929, the year of Dali’s arrival, but also and most importantly the year of the Second Manifesto
which Breton used for a fierce purification of his group. Aragon, Breton, Eluard, Peret, and Unik were
all members of the communist party since 1926. They were expelled in 1933, the year of the last
issue of La Surrealisme au service de la revolution (l.s.a.s.d.l.r.), six numbers of which were produced
between July 1930 and May 1933.
La Revolution Surrealiste deliberately practiced intellectual violence. The first issue published a
photograph of Germaine Berton, who had just killed Marius Plateau, a member of the extreme rightwing Action Francaise; the portrait appeared surrounded by photographs of all the members of the
group. It also raised the question "Is suicide a solution?" and containing a number of dream reports
and ‘automatic’ texts. We must remember that suicide was never a solution for a Surrealist. The
second issue featured the test of ‘Open the prisons, disband the army!’. The issue also contained
open letters such as Breton to Deltiel, or of Desnos to Pierre Mille, and address to the ‘warped
pope’.
A committee for action against the war in Morocco issued a manifesto, the Surrealists immediately
associated themselves with it and signed a violently anti-nationalist text published in La Revolution
Surrealist. Violence and black humor did not put a stop to the poetic and ethical experimentation:
issue no. 9-10 were devoted to ‘automatic writing’ and the last issue posted question "What hope do
you place in love?" The illustrations in this review were intentionally austere in appearance, were
much less politicized that the content. A majority of surrealists let others speak out while they
secretly thought that they would be the vehicles of a real revolution in sensibility.
That revolution took place through the medium of automatic writing; especially Eluard’s poems like
Capitale de la douleur and novels such as Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris both written in 1926. Breton
knew what Surrealism owed to painters and in La Revolution Surrealiste had begun a series of
articles on painting which were collected in 1928 at the first edition of his now famous book Le
Surrealisme et la peinture.
When the last issue of La Surrealisme au service de la revolution (l.s.a.s.d.l.r.) appeared, the Second
Manifesto had made ravages in the ranks of the Surrealists, those expelled answered Breton with a
caustic pamphlet, UnCadavre. Breton had supported Trotsky who had been refused political asylum
in France. The following year, Aragon attended the Kharkov Congress and discovered Soviet reality in
the arms of Elsa Triolet. The Aragon who now became so enamoured of the Stalinist Communism
had previously written of the October Revolution: ‘On the ideological level, it is at most a vague
ministerial crisis’ and had lumped together the ‘tapir Maurras’. Aragon, leaving his friends in 1931,
turned violently against the dreams of his youth as Chirico. In spite of crisis, 1930 was a vintage year
for Surrealism: in addition to the new review, L’Immaculee Conception, an attempt at pathological
simulation by Breton and Eluard. Giacometti also produced his first ‘dumb mobile object’, The Time
of the Trace. Henceforth and allowed himself the luxury of a dispute with Freud. Dali was breaking
out, and together with Bunuel produced his second film. ‘transform the world, said Marx; change
life, said Rimbaud; these two instructions are one as far as we are concerned’, Breton wrote in 1934.
The political stalemet of Surrealism arouse from its inability to overcome this contradiction, that was
perhaps one that never could be over come. Zhdanov imposed on the Soviet Union in 1934 the
notion that art was a political weapon, and laid down the tenets of ‘Socialist realism’. The Stalin era
had begun. It was time to pull back. ‘Traduced’ by a revolution which they had said they ‘saw only on
a social level’ the surrealist with drew into the labyrinth of a myth. The review Minotaure was about
to be launched.
Surrealist Reviews and the End
In 1933, for the first time in ten years, Surrealism had no review of its own. It was entering a phase
of world-wide expansion. The exhibitions, such as the one in New York in 1932 and the on in the
Pierre Colle gallery in Paris. Breton was lecturing and interviewing, the founding of groups in Great
Britain to Japan. This showed the inward mobility of the movement and the need for it in a world
soon to be on the fridge of full-blown Fascist regimes. Industrial civilization hardly overcame the
crisis of capitalism, and art was typified by the rise of geometrical abstraction and what Dali was to
call ‘our masochistic architecture’. Dali himself had just proved a great success in New York. A
brilliant eccentric, he had become associated with surrealist in 1929 and had suggest a new means
of achieving a fusion of the imaginary and the real ‘paranoiac-critical method’. His painting, for
instance The Enigma of William Tell, had abandoned automatism for a more dream like record.
The review Minotaure, beautifully produced by Skira, appeared for the first time in 1933. The
Surrealist co-operated and in 1935 published International Bulletin of Surrealism. Breton and Bataille
took part in an anti-Fascist group counter attack. By the tenth issue of Minotaure surrealist had
taken complete control of the magazine. Newcomers swelled the ranks of the painters and object
makers who with Picasso illustrated the review. Surrealism was making itself a considerable success
at the international exhibitions in Paris and London, and Breton was running the Gradiva gallery in
Paris. In the Minotaure era Surrealism came into it’s own, both theoretically and politically. The
international exhibitions in Paris in 1938 were deeply innovatory and conceptionable. Instead of
exhibiting works the Surrealist transformed a office building into a quasi-magical location, decorated
with suggestive models. The whole enterprise was a complete success without the scandals of the
first stage of Surrealism. Breton and Eluard were already generally respected poets and Dali, Ernst,
Miro, Tanguy and Magritte later, were acknowledged as first-rank painters, Hans Arp had developed
half-way between Abstraction and Surrealism a form of sculpture that won acclaim. In short, The
Surrealism was in the process of becoming a school.
Just as WWII broke out , in 1939 Dali, Tanguy, and Matta went to the United States. Paalen moved to
Mexico, where Breton and the painter Rivera published the bulletin Cle. An international Surrealist
exhibition was held in Mexico in 1940, in that same period France experienced mass exodus and
collapse. Eluard, Picasso, Brauner, Domingues, Herold, and Bellmer remained in France, and
Magritte stayed in Belgium. Their Diverse fate had two main consequences: the Surrealist exile gave
new strength to the \American artistic group; and on the other the return of the exiled did not
provide a opportunity for regrouping of the Surrealists after France was liberated. In the United
States Breton broadcasted on the radio. In 1941, he took his bearings in Genese et perspective
artistiques du Surrealisme. The word ‘artistic’ in the title shows how far he was from the anti-art
concerns of early Surrealism. The Minotaure era had not quite come to an end yet. Breton met
Motherwell and member of the New York school following Picasso. Breton Published Prolegomenes
a un troisieme manifeste du surrealisme ou non, which recalled the principles of the movement.
David Hare published the review VVV, edited by Breton, Duchamp, and Ernst. Three issues came out
from June 1942 to February 1944.
It is important to note the lack of café life in the US, and the way in which the painters were
dispersed, some in Arizona, some in California, and some in Connecticut or elsewhere. This
dispersion did not allow the re-establishment of the European pre-way system. This dispersion was
complicated by disputes and differences. Masson parted company with Breton, Paalen left
Surrealism in order to start his own movement, Guggenheim’s art gallery in New York exhibited
Surrealists but Abstract Expressionism was already making itself felt. In the same period Surrealist in
Europe had gone to nothing. Miro went to Montroig, In Catalonian, Bellmer hid in the Toulouse area,
Brauner went to the Alps and started painting in wax, for want of better materials. In Paris, the
young poets were supported by Picasso and published two pamphlets. Antonin Artaud was in a
psychiatric clinic and Desnos died in a concentration camp(1944). When Breton returned to Paris in
1945 the era of retrospectives had already begun with a Max Ernest exhibition. Maurice Nadeau
published his Histoire du surrealisme in which he seemed to set it in a buried past.
Frida Kahlo 1907-1954
jeudi 10 avril 2008
17:07
Frida Kahlo (1907– 1954) was a Mexican painter, who has achieved great international popularity.
She painted in a style that was influenced by indigenous cultures of Mexico as well as by European
influences that include Realism, Symbolism, and Surrealism. Many of her works are self-portraits
that express her own pain symbolically.
We can not talk about Surrealism without talikng about Frida Kahlo.
She was sick, she had pollyomellit, and she was lame, and after the accident when she was 18, she
began to paint when she had to stay in bed motionless
, local painting, which is realistic representation. She was very strong- tempered, and she was
everytime telling that she was born in 1910 with Mexican revolution.
She was terribly wounded in the accident, but she was lying in some cases, and this can help us to
analyze her personality. Why did she do it?
Another point connected with the accident is that she didn't have children, and she was explaining
that she couldn't have children, but in fact she was dong several abortions.
The pain was intense and often left her confined to a hospital or bedridden for months at a time.
She underwent as many as thirty-five operations as a result of the accident, mainly on her back and
her right leg and foot.
The marriage was very difficult. Diego Rivera was very close to her, but at the same time they
couldn't be together, she was having a love affair with her younger sister Christina while she was at
the hospital and they divorced, but one year later they remarried but this time allowing each other
to have relations with other people. It was another strange way to organize the life.
Once she went to paris, welcomed by Andre breton, but to her opinion they were doing nothing
,and to proud of themselves. The only person she liked was Marcel Duchamp, and it is not surprising
knowing his personality.
She had a love affair with Trozky, and rivera was very angry with this, and Trozky had to leave the
house, at that time, when trozky was staying at their house, they met Breton.
There were 4 daughters in the family, her younger sister was born just one year after Frida, and
their mother couldn't feed Christina, and this idea is presented in one of Frida Kahlo's paintings.
When she was 19 the family took a picture, Frida decided to put on the suit of the man, in order to
hide her way of walking.
She loved pre-Colombian Art, and it is sometimes present in his works.
Her father was german, and actually his famil is from east europe, hungaria, and then they moved to
germany, so his father William moved to Mexico when he was 20 years old,because he couldn't
accept his father's second marriage. His family was Jewish. Frida's mother was from Spain, whose
family moved to Spain. And actually Frida's grandfather was Indian.
1936 My grandparents, my parents and I
There is a kind of surrealistic painting.
She is representing the parents of her father with hungarian-german roots, and in the background
you can see Atlantic Ocean, which is obstruction between Mexica and europe, and he is
representing herself as a baby.the ribbon is representing the family tree, and it's interesting because
she is alone, she is not putting her sisters on the painting. Here it looks like she is controlling, as if
she is holding the stripes of the horse, when riding.
In the center thre is a small house, which had been built by her fathr, which is called "Blue House"
where she lived and died, and now it is a museum.
She is as well representing herself as being an embrion, which is very strange, and we alse have the
representation of sperm.
This is an aspect of Frida Kahlo, who is presenting herself in three notions.
It goes beyond reality, but which are not crazy neither, she is proposing the things which can be
explained.
The painting she considered as the most important one is my nurse and I 1937
There arre wto striking features, the mask of pre-columbian civilization, which was supposed to be
put on the face of a dead person, the second point is the baby has the body of the body, and the
face has the features of an adult, features of her own face;
The nurse is feeding the baby, and the breast look vey anatomically, while the second one is normal
one with the drops of milk; and the background we can see the rain, with the drops looking like milk
drops, which is carrying the idea of nature being the second mother and feeding the earth.
There is a plant, called datura, which is the toxic plant and is supposed to be very dangerous, while it
has very beautiful flowers. It can cause hallucinations.
There is an expression in spanish which means turn the leaf, which means to change the way, to
turn the page.in the context she is giving us information, but the keys are hidden.
There is anither thing - we can see the insect, hidden just like in nature, because these nsects are
able to follow the colour and the angles of the trees, leaves;
This is interesting, because it looks like a vegetable and as a plant as well, there is possibility to
reproduce itself within one sex;
It means that the small insect can come to the worls exatly from the egg, and Kahlo is identifying
herself with this insect.Perhaps:)
There is a caterpillar as well.
1932 Self portrait ;.
It was at the year they spent in detroit, she is showing here the opposition between Mexico and Us.
She is in the center, being the main subject of the painting and she is opposing the twi situations of
Mexico and America. She is holding the mexican flag, she is on piedestal, but we can see that he is
looking at her home land, presented on the left side. She is standing like a statue betweent the
ancient building of Mexico and on the right side there is a technology, with is the representation of
US.
We have the sun and the moon symbolizing the pe-columbian civilization, moon is representing the
gods, this equals to the american flag, and we can see that it is dissappearing in the smog. On the
left there is a aztec temple, and on the right there is a plant, just as if the power of factories and
skyscrapers were equal to the ancient temples, which is to her opinion is nt working like this of
course.
This is kind of irony, it is a mock onthe capitalism. We have the presence of pre-columbian
sculptures, and on the other hand pipes which are looking like people.
Again in the bottom on the left side we have flowers, and on the right side there are things conected
to industry.
The painting is a very small.
Henry Ford hospital 1932
She is presenting herself lying in out scale bed in a desert land, which gives us the impression of
loneliness, and hopelessness, and onthe background we can seee the industrial city, and the bed
seems to be floating in the air. She is representing herself with a lot of blood, connected to an
embriion, but at the same time there is nothing happened by chance; She had a misgiving, and here
we can see a medical maschine's part, which is supposed to help to breathe.
And she is holding these "ribbons"
There is reality, but another level of a reality, there is not at all an absurd, it is not disconnected
frpm reality, but the reality we are not used to.
Self portraits
Dorothy Hail , who was an actress, her husband died, and she tried to earn living by acting, but she
considered too old to be an actress, and finally she decided to commit suicide.
Frida Kahlo knew her.
Dorothy's friend commissioned Frida to commemorate Dorothy in the portrait. And the painting was
very violent in realism of the representation of the event.
Kahlo connected the woman with the suicide, whch was not so striking idea for Kahlo herself, who
actually would commit suicide. To understand the painting we should know the mythology. On the
background we can see the front wall of the building, and we can see the body just living the
window, the second is in the fall and the dead bleeding. When Dorothy's mother saw it, she wanted
to destroy the paintings, but eventually she kept it.
The way she is bleeding- the blood going down till the frame of the painting, in oredr to insist on the
dramatic aspect.
There is a text, and some part is missing" in te city of NY on the 21 october at 6in the morning
Dorothy killed herself jumpig from the high building of Empire state building, painting made by Frida
kahlo" the piece missing is hiding the name of Clara Bott, who had commissioned the paintig, who
didn't want to see her name connected to the tragedy.
The brooch on thhe dress of dorothy is the way to connect a dead woman with Frida Kahlo herself.
One of the most painting is What i saw in water 1938
It is akind of synthesis of her life, there are a lot of elements, for example the portrait the portrait
the father and the mother, american skyscraper, symbolizing USA, Frida Kahlo herself as someone
floating in the water, and she is in danger, she is on the verge to drawn herself and there is robe of
Frida Kahlo's neck, which is in the hands of the figure with a pre-columbian mask, which is
surprising. This figure is the God of water and at the same time of the death (Chac Mool). Which is
for ancient civilizations it was respected without any fear. Chac Mool is controllin her life here; there
is a representation of her within the representation of her.
There are aso boats with the sails, which is as well the idea of hiding soehing, there is a
methapohoric.here is another way to give information, but not being precise, therefore the idea of
death is present here.and the title is only helping us to understand thi notion.
Here are two women, which is the representation of her lesbian relations with the astress Dolores
Delario, and this image is taken from another painting.
There is a bird as well which is called the vermilion fly catcher,which is supposed to be connected to
the notion of death somehow; and we have a dress whch is a precise reference to the kind of dress
worn in one of the regions of Mexico.
The shell is abalon is a symbol of a feminine sexuality, the spider, insects they represent something,
because there is something in this for sure.it is a kind of mirror of herself, as well as the reflection of
her feet in the water.
The broken Column 1944
Column architecture and the the column of the spine, it is a self-portrait done at that time when she
had to wear a corset, and the column, architectual one , which is at the samr time her spine,
There is a bleak landscape, and it is the representation of the pain of the artist, she wants to show
that her fate is to suffer
We can see the tears on the face, but the face expresses nothing, as if she was accepting pain,
without showing anything, beind stoic.
At this time she is taking a lot of drugs and alcohol, and she is more and more talking about suicide.
She becomes more and more by Hinduism. The nails are representing physical pain , but maybe the
moral pain as well; there is a word clavado,which means a nail, to be nailed and at the same time to
be cheated on, because she was suffering to know that her husband had a lot of relations with other
people.
The wounded deer or I am a poor deer 1946
It is in relation with idea of suicide, we havethe head of frida Kahlo, and the body of a deer and the
arrows, she is fatally wounded by the arrows, which is dissapointment, caused by failures of
numerous operations made on her spine, alcohol and drugs were absolutely necessesary for her.
At that time she had a deer, which served as a model for this painting; There are 9 arrows, the cut
brunch, the leaves are still green, which is the only thing representing the life here, and on the
background there is a representation of the water, the sea. There is a mythology story of Enee, whi
was the prince of Troy: Dido loved Enee and she asked the gods to protect her love and to tell about
her love, and the gods sent stones, they had to hide in the cave, where they had the relations, but
Jupiter was not appreating this relations, because Enee had a mission to create Rome, and the this
god asked Enee to abandon Didi, and she escaped like a deer, and than she made a fire and kill
herself, and also used a knife for this reason, he brunch is in the relation with Enee wh had to cut
the brunch to meet Dido.
Carma its necessesary to end the cycle of life in order to reappear in the world, the idea of suffering
physically, her relations with her husband;
She was expressing what she was feeling, she was transforming her reality in the works of art. she
was telling that what she was diong is was her reality.
My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree)
Self-Portrait on the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States. 1932.
The Suicide of Dorothy Hale 1939
The Little Deer. 1946.
Lots of people have defined Frida' s mania for self-portaits (about 1/3 of her works) as a sort of therapy to
survive, an alienation of suffering and phisical pain from herself, a kind of repression of the ravaging action
inflicted by external events on her body (bus accident, abortions, surgery operations and "weird" medical
treatments of her age).
The body surely was for Frida the centre of any kind of thought, both about her internal self (as women and
artist) and about her external environment (cultural, political and social aspects of her time).
Certainly her body, wounded, pierced, distorted by technology (bus) and by the medical treatments of her
age, was the ideal place for eliminating all self/world barriers:
when the external (s)wor(l)d pierces you from the stomach to the pelvis your body becomes a privileged
place of understanding, passage and metabolization of any event.
Representing oneself becomes representing the world.
Anyway this representation must not be interpreted as an idolatry of the self. In spite of Frida's fondness of
religious Mexican idols, often depicted in her paintings - above all in her diary - and of "retablos", Frida does
not idolize her self: she does not depict herself as a divine image, there is no trace of mystical tension in her
works, neither as exaltation of her personality nor as vision of an hypothetical ideal self.
Starting from Mario Perniola's definition of the fetish that "is not the symbol, neither the sign nor the figure
of something else, but is valid only for itself, in its splendid indipendence and autonomy" we can formulate
the hypothesis that Frida was moved to represent (depict) herself and her body by a deeply fetishistic
attitude: in this way her body ceases to be an object fixed and identical in the subject's perception - a
determined shape - to become a sort of "thing" that acquires an "overflowing" abstract universality.
Through this interpretation it is possible to understand one of Kahlo's paradoxes: even if perforated and
tormented by the external world and by the desease, Frida has always held a great energy, a surprising
dynamism. Maybe this attitude was possible thanks to the fetishism that "does not adore the world, does
not have any illusions about it, nevertheless declares itself without reserve and with the greatest energy in
favour of a part, of a detail..."; indeed, Frida made several details of her body become fetishes, through a
real disintegration of her self/body scattered in her paintings and drawings.
This fragmentation method was mainly put into practice in Frida's diary. The pages of the diary are full of
bodies and parts of bodies, placed in an accidental way, sometimes sketched, simply outlined or created
through spots, sometimes inserted in net structures where hands, foot, genitals and faces mix together.
This style has often been interpreted as close to surrealistic writing, according to the technique of
"automatism" and words freedom. Frida herself denied this connection - "They thought I was a Surrealist
but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality" - driving us to a different reading, where the
nearly maniacal concentration on herself becomes "turning into a thing", through the elimination of body
inside/outside barrier (see "Two Fridas", "The broken column", "My nurse and I"), the fusion with nature
sometimes as an animal ("The wounded deer") sometimes as a plant ("Roots"), the depiction of herself as a
thing among other things ("Portrait on the borderline between Mexico and The United States" where Frida,
dressed in pink, rises as a statue in the middle of the painting between things representing the Mexican
tradition on one side and the technological landscape of North-America on the other one).
All the latest imagery trends make use of human body: performers, visual artists, cyberartists, creatives,
everybody uncovers bodies, opens bodies, ties bodies, cuts bodies, paints bodies, tatoos bodies.
Fragments of bodies are spread everywhere: mere brains in magazines and tech ads, heads in S/W logos,
hearts in Benetton's ads...
Frida Kahlo made a little bit of all this 60 years ago, showing in her paintings
bloody births and deaths
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fetuses
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corpses
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disembodied organs
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Other distinctive features of Frida's works reveal her as a forerunner of modern (or even better
postmodern) extreme cultural tendencies, that explore the same ground Frida went over with a good deal of
courage and anticonformism for her time:
Referring to this last point the following quotation from Jacques Derrida really stroke me when I
read it. Derrida's words seem perfectly correspond to one of the most recurrent aspects of Frida's
art: to let the outside show the inside eliminating phisical barriers such as skin, to exhibit outside
the inside of her life.
"... from the invisible inside, where I could neither see nor want the very thing that I have always
been scared to have revealed on the scanner, by analysis - radiology, echography, endocrinology,
hematology - a crural vein expelled my blood outside that I thought beautiful once stored in that
bottle under a label that I doubted could avoid confusion or misappropriation of the vintage,
leaving me nothing more to do, the inside of my life exhibiting itself outside, expressing itself
before my eyes, absolved without a gesture, dare I say of writing if I compare the pen to a syringe,
and I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe, a suction point rather than that very hard
weapon with which one must inscribe, incise, choose, calculate, take ink before filtering the
inscribable, playing the keyboard on the screen, whereas here, once the vein has been found, no
more toil, no responsibility, no risk of bad taste or violence, the blood delivers itself all alone, the
inside gives itself up and you can do as you like with it, it's me but I'm no longer there, for nothing,
for nobody, diagnose the worst..."
taken from Decostruction on the Net
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the vacillating limit between visible and invisible
the strong attraction for transmutation, transformation, mutations of several kinds
invasion of body by external objects
the breaking of traditional separations such as body/mind, outside/inside.
Occasionally, men would leap over the walls into their backyard and sometimes her mother would
prepare a meal for the hungry revolutionaries.
Kahlo contracted poliomyelitis at age six, which left her right leg thinner than the left, which Kahlo
disguised by wearing long skirts. As a girl, she participated in boxing and other sports.
After the accident, Frida Kahlo turned her attention away from the study of medicine to begin a fulltime painting career. The accident left her in a great deal of pain while she recovered in a full body
cast; she painted to occupy her time during her temporary state of immobilization. Her self-portraits
became a dominant part of her life when she was immobile for three months after her accident. She
once said, "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best".
Drawing on personal experiences, including her marriage, her miscarriages, and her numerous
operations, Kahlo's works often are characterized by their stark portrayals of pain. Of her 143
paintings, 55 are self-portraits which often incorporate symbolic portrayals of physical and
psychological wounds. She insisted, "I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality".
Kahlo was deeply influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, which is apparent in her use of bright
colors and dramatic symbolism. She frequently included the mythology.
They were married in 1929
Their marriage often was tumultuous. The openly bisexual Kahlo had affairs with both men and
women (including Leon Trotsky); The couple eventually divorced, but remarried in 1940. Their
second marriage was as turbulent as the first. Their living quarters often were separate, although
sometimes adjacent.
Active communist sympathizers, Kahlo and Rivera befriended Leon Trotsky Initially, Trotsky lived
with Rivera and then at Kahlo's home, where they reportedly had an affair.
She had been very ill throughout the previous year and her right leg had been amputated at the
knee, owing to gangerene.
The 100th anniversary of the birth of Frida Kahlo honored her with the largest exhibit ever held of
her paintings at the Museum of the Fine Arts Palace, Kahlo's first comprehensive exhibit in
Mexico.[11] Works were on loan from Detroit, Minneapolis, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and
Nagoya, Japan. The exhibit included one-third of her artistic production, as well as manuscripts and
letters that had not been displayed previously.[11] The exhibit was open 13 June through 12 August
2007 and broke all attendance records at the museum.[12] Some of her work was on exhibit in
Nuevo León, and moved in September 2007 to museums in the United States.
The first major Frida Kahlo exhibition in the United States in nearly fifteen years, presents over forty
of her most important self-portraits, still lifes, and portraits from the beginning of her career in 1926
until her death in 1954.
Exhibition Itinerary
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis • October 27–January 20, 2008
Philadelphia Museum of Art • February 20–May 18, 2008
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art • June 16–September 28, 2008
Previously, the most recent international exhibition of Kahlo's work had been in 2005 in London,
which brought together eighty-seven of her works.
[edit] La Casa Azul
Frida's Casa Azul (Blue House) where she lived and worked in Mexico City is now a museum housing
artifacts of her life. Photographs may be taken only outside the house and in the courtyard area.
[edit] In popular culture
In 2002, Julie Taymor directed a biographical film about Kahlo, Frida starring Salma Hayek, which
grossed US$58 million worldwide.[13]
In 2006, Kahlo's 1943 painting "Roots" set a US$5.6 million auction record for a Latin American
work.[14]
Latino comic artist Gilbert Hernandez, of Love and Rockets fame, wrote and illustrated a pictorial
history of Kahlo's life which used some of the themes of her art within the style of Beto's brief
biographical story.
Aditionally, English band Coldplay's fourth studio album's name is based on Kahlo's Viva la Vida
painting, but fully entitled Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends.