Surrealism
Circa 1921 – 1940
"Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella
on a dissection table.“
- Lautréamont
Les chants de Maldoror
20-minute quiz essay question to write in class
next week after Blake Stimson’s lecture in
Mariposa 1000
• Using at least four photographs from tonight’s
lecture (fully identified) present the thesis and
the most important “conditions” of Surrealism
that Rosalind Krauss represents in her essay,
“The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.”
Surrealist magazine, La Révolution Surréaliste [The Surrealist Revolution, 12 issues,
1924-1929] was modeled on the conservative scientific magazine, La Nature. In a mock
scientific manner, specimens of automatic writing and records of dreams were illustrated
with photographs, mostly by the “machine-poet” Man Ray (American,1890-1976). The
review succeeded in shocking everyone.
The Surrealist Revolution
(left) Photomontage for La Révolution Surréaliste, nº 12, 1929 by
René Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967), Enquête sur l'amour’ (Inquiry on Love)
(right) Surrealist group, Paris, 1930, L-R: Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, André Breton, Hans
Arp, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, René Crevel, Man Ray
(left) The World in the Time of the Surrealists, Brussels, 1929
"We are determined to make a Revolution."
"We have joined the word surrealism to the word revolution solely to show the
disinterested, detached and even entirely desperate character of this revolution."
- André Breton
(right) Ceremonial dance paddle, Easter Island, Polynesia,
from André Breton’s collection of Oceanic art,
representing a highly stylized male figure with Janusface head and phallic finial showing retracted foreskin.
19th Century Symbolism and Romanticism – the subconscious as the subject of art.
(left) Max Klinger, episode from print series, The Story of the Glove, 1881
(right) Francisco Goya, Saturn c. 1821-1823, Oil on plaster remounted on canvas
Precursors to Surrealism
Giorgio de Chirico, Metaphysical School (Italian, b. Greece1888-1978)
(left) The Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914, oil on canvas, 34 x 28”
(right) The Great Metaphysician, 1917, oil on canvas, 41 x 27”
Influence on De Chirico of 19th C. painters, Arnold Böcklin (center)
Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the
Dead, 1880
Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931, oil on canvas, 9 x 13”
“The transcription of reveries.”
Academic methods used to create hand-painted dream photographs.
AUTOMATISM and biomorphic Surrealism
André Masson (French, 1896-1987) (left) Quare de vulva exuxiste me (Why dids’t thou
bring me forth from the womb?), 1923, pen & ink on paper
(right) Masson, Battle of Fishes, 1926, sand, gesso, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas
Surrealist “exquisite corpse” drawings (left) by Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Max Morise, Joan
Miró, c. 1926; (right) “exquisite corpse” by Victor Brauner, André Breton, Jacques Hérold
and Yves Tanguy, 1935.
19th century Spirit photography is a kind of proto-Surrealist photography:
The camera represents what is not “real” but “sur” real = a higher, irrational reality
Unknown Photographer, The Ghost of Milton, 3 1/2 x 7 in.,
Albumen silver stereograph, c. 1860
Since for André Breton, “It is not a question of drawing, it is simply a question of tracing,”
photography assumed a privileged place over surrealist painting because it is an
actual trace (imprint) of the phenomenological, optical reality, but framed and
deranged by the subconscious.
Eugène Atget (French 1857 – 1927), Corsets, Boulevard de Strasbourg, 1912
From 1898 until his death, Atget made perhaps as many as 10,000 negatives in the city.
He documented its historic core - buildings and monuments, ancient streets and civic
spaces, public parks and gardens – everything except middle-class life, in single images
and also in sequences of views, creating a cumulative portrait of a disappearing Paris.
Atget did not call himself a Surrealist.
He was appropriated as a “found” Surrealist
Eugène Atget, Shop, Avenue des Gobelins, 1925
Brassaï (b. Gyula Hlász, Romanian 1898-1984) Illustration for L’Amour fou by André
Breton, 1937: “A Paris La Tour Saint-Jacques….”
”. . . and when will all the books
that are worth anything stop
being illustrated with drawings
and appear only with
photographs?”
– André Breton, 1925
How are the photographs in Breton’s
books oneiric (relating to,
experienced in, or similar to a dream
or dreams)?
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004), Andalusia, 1933
Giorgio de Chirico, The Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914, oil on
canvas
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Madrid, 1933. Surrealist theory. “The flickering grace of the
children is perfectly foiled by the deliberate progress of a portly, middle-aged pedestrian.
The formal logic cannot be dissociated from the psychological perception of the
narrative.”
– Mark Haworth-Booth
“The split second that he called the decisive moment is not the height of action, but rather
that instant when the formal spatial relationships of the subjects reveal their essential
meaning.”
- Robert Hirsh
“the simultaneous recognition, in fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as
well as a precise organization of forms which gave that event its proper expression.”
- Cartier-Bresson
Cartier-Bresson, The Gestapo Informer, Dessau, Germany, 1945
“Cartier-Bresson created a shallow stage for his subjects to reveal themselves within.
This construct made it simpler to forecast and follow action, removed subjects from their
normal environment, and transformed them into portable collage material for surrealistic
theater.”
- Hirsch
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) Laughing Mannequins, 1930
“found” disjunction between the “real” and the uncanny
When Tina Modotti was deported from Mexico in 1930 for political reasons, she turned
her camera and her job Mexican Folkways over to Alvarez Bravo.
Alvarez Bravo, Wooden Horse, n.d.
Brassaï, Involuntary Sculpture, 1933
“masturbatory” bits of detritus like gum and bus tickets
photographed by Brassaï for Salvador Dali
The cropping, the frame, signifies representation rather than “nature.”
The frame “is a signifier of signification” itself.
Brassaï, Involuntary Sculpture, 1933
Convulsive beauty – the found object that “informs the
recipient of his own desire. The found-object is a sign
of that desire.”
Man Ray, Minotaur, 1933, for the Surrealist magazine, Minotaur. Collapses human and
animal into a single (border) “impossible” category: bull-human, like the Greek mythical
monster.
Man Ray, Minotaur, 1933
Surrealist “formlessness”:
erasing categories of sexuality
Brassai, Nudes, 1933
Phallus-female torso
Brancusi, Torso, 1924 & 1926
(left) Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977), Nude Bent Forward, Paris, 1931
(right) Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997), Le Pere Ubu, 1936
Surrealist defamiliarization becomes “Formless (Informe)” of the subconscious
and the dream
“The frame announces the
camera’s ability to find and
isolate what we could call
the world’s constant writing
of erotic symbols,
its ceaseless automatism.”
Man Ray, Anatomies, c. 1930
phallus-neck (double entendre)
(left) Florence Henri (US, 1893-1982), Self-Portrait, 1928. Henri studied at the Bauhaus
under Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.
(right) Man Ray, Monument to Sade, 1933. Published in Le Surréalisme au service de la
révolution, May, 1933. The Surrealists celebrated the writings of the Marquis de Sade
(1740-1814), who was imprisoned for much of his life because of his deviant writings
about sexual cruelty.
“…the Henri and the Man Ray share the same recourse to the definition of a
photographic subject through the act of framing it, even as they share the same
enframing shape.” (Krauss) In both photographs the frame has a sexual import.
Man Ray, (left) La Marquise Casatti, 1922; (right) Untitled, 1922.
SURREALIST DOUBLING:
“Repetition is…the indicator that the “wild sounds” of babbling have been made
deliberate, intentional: and that what they intend is meaning. Doubling is in this sense
the “signifier of signification.”
– Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism”
Man Ray, Rayon X, 1922, Rayogram
Surrealist “doubling” (hands over faces), ghosts, and automatism
Claude Cahun (French, born Lucie Schwob, 1894-1954) and Marcel Moore (French,
born Suzanne Malherbe,1892-1972)
(left) What Do You Want From Me? 1928
(right) Double Exposure in a Rock Pool, 1928
Surrealist Doubling
Dali’s “Paranoic” vision is a form of
“doubling”: a “photographic condition
of Surrealism.
Salvador Dali, The Phenomenon of Ecstasy,
1933, photomontage
Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali, frames from Un Chien Andalou (France) An Andalusian
Dog, a Surrealist film, 1928.
Eyes, insects, metamorphosis, erotics, madness of the dream & subconscious
(left) Man Ray, Rayon X, 1922, Rayogram. Surrealism
(right) Hannah Höch, Cut With the Kitchen Knife, photomontage, 1919, Berlin Dada
•
•
How did German Dada photomontage artists like Hannah Hoch use juxtaposition or
(disrupted) syntax in their works?
How does spacing in a Dada photomontage destroy the “simultaneous present”
characteristic of a photograph? Compare these works.
André Kertész (Hungary,1894 -1987), Bathing, Dunaharaszti, Hungary, 1919
The double
Freudian psychoanalytic fetish: the woman’s body objectified as robotic “Other”
to presumed heterosexual male viewer’s identity and desire
Man Ray, Veiled Erotic, c.1930
(Meret Oppenheim)
Joan Miro, Spanish Surrealist
Mannequin for the 1938 Surrealist
exhibition in Paris, 1938
Manuel Alvarez Bravo, El Sistema Nerviso del Gran Simpatico, 1929
Contrast between male and female representation in advertisement and
“irrational” science” of the surrealist synthesis
Alvarez Bravo, Good Reputation Sleeping (La buena fama durmiendo),1939,
commissioned by André Breton for the cover of the International Surrealist Exhibition
(1940). Spiked cactus, feet and hips bandaged, pubic hair exposed. Censored and not
published.
(left) Brassaï, Odalisque, 1934/5, cliché-verre, Plate III from Transmutations album:
“I compelled myself here to reveal the hidden figure which lay in each mental picture. . . .
The dislocated parts of the photographs reorganized themselves into new combinations. .
. . I cut their flesh as one carves a block to break loose the figure which it conceals. . . .
At times some debris has survived: a piece of quivering breast, a foreshortened face, a
leg, an arm. Enshrined in graphism this debris gives to our obsessions, to our dreams the
flash of the instant, the breath of reality.”
-Brassai
Man Ray, Le Violon d'Ingres,
1924
Hans Bellmer (German 1902-1975) Doll (La Poupee), 1935 and (right) 1936
The Surrealists were fascinated by automata. They were avant-garde (anti-tradition) but
traditional in their use of the female body to represent suppressed sexual desire and
psychological, political anxieties.
Bellmer, The Doll (La Poupee), both 1935
André Kertész (1894 -1987), Distortions series, 1930s; manipulations with mirrors
Raoul Ubac (Belgian,1910-1985) from the series, Battle of Pentheseua/Amazons, 193839, brûlage (applying heat to melt the emulsion). Collage created from created from
photographs of a single woman, collaged, re-photographed
J.A. Boiffard, Illustration for Georges Bataille, Le Gros Orteil, Documents, no. 6,
1929. Bataille’s surrealist theory focuses on the “informe” and is preoccupied with
the “low” or “base.”