Surrealism

Timeline

1924: Breton published Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, in collaboration with poets Philippe

Soupault and Paul Éluard. Max Ernst, André Masson, and Joan Miró joined the group later.
1925: Paul Rivet, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Marcel Mauss established the Paris Institut
d’Ethnologie. France is at war with anticolonial movements in Morocco.
1927: Breton, Louis Aragon, Éluard, and others joined the communist party, because of their
support to anticolonial movements in Morocco.
1929: The surrealists ceased the publication of La Révolution surréaliste (1924-9) substituting it
with Le Surrélisme au service de la revolution (1930-33). Georges Bataille, Artaud, Michel
Leiris, and others left Breton’s group. Bataille edited the journal Documents (1929-30) which
worked as a forum for dissident views and had an ethnographic bent, and where Carl Einstein,
Mauss, Rivet, and Georges-Henri Rivière published.
1930: Breton publishes the second manifesto of surrealism. The movement went from non-
alignment with political ideology, to embracing Marxism. The communist party, however,
preferred social realism that surrealism. Influenced by Mauss, Bataille published a text on
Precolumbian art in a collection in which Rivet and Alfred Métraux also collaborated.
1931: The French communist party and the surrealist worked in the exhibition L’exposition anti-
impérialiste: la vérité sur les colonies, while the French government’s International Colonial
Exhibition was taking place. The show displayed didactic material against colonialism,
proselytism of the USSR, and indigenous art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas alongside
Western artifacts. It was housed in the former Soviet Pavilion.
1931: Leiris joined the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, France’s first major field work expedition.
Breton and Éluard held a joint auction of their “tribal” holdings at Charles Ratton Gallery.
1933: After Aragon renounced surrealism (1932) and aligned with the party’s doctrines, Breton
was expelled.
1933-38: The surrealist journal Minotaure was published.
1934: Stalin established social realism as the party´s artistic trend. Rivière completed his
renovations of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, where many shows on African,
American, and Oceanic “tribal” art would take place. Manuel Álvarez Bravo met Henri Cartier-
Bresson, and produced the image of the “striking worker assassinated.”
1935: Poet Georges Henein discussed surrealist ideas in Un Effort. Cartier-Bresson, Álvarez
Bravo, and Walker Evans showed work at an exhibition in New York.
1936: The Exposition surréaliste d’objets was held at the Galerie Charles Ratton. It included
surrealist works, cubist constructions, Duchamp’s ready-mades, “tribal” objects, and animal and
mineral specimens. Álvarez Bravo’s photograph of the “worker assassinated” was used in a
photomontage in the cover of Frente a Frente.
1937: Henein gave a speech on surrealism at Les Essayistes. Bataille, Leiris, Roger Caillois, and
other avant-garde intellectuals formed the College de Sociologie, which lasted until 1939.
1938: The Musée de l'Homme was housed on the site of the recently demolished Trocadéro,
using its ethnographic collections. Through Diego Rivera, Breton met Trotsky and Álvarez
Bravo in Mexico. Breton and Trostky wrote Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendant, signed by
Breton and Rivera. Henein, and painter and filmmaker Kamel el-Telmisany (the painter Ramses
Youname joined them later) founded Art and Liberty.

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1939: Breton published the “worker assassinated” photograph in Minotaure. The image was also
shown at a Mexican art exhibition in Paris (Galerie Renou et Colle), where Breton showed
Álvarez Bravo’s photographs, Frida Kahlo’s paintings, Precolumbian objects and folk art.
1940: The 4th International Surrealist Exhibition took place in Mexico. A photograph by Álvarez
Bravo was the cover of the catalogue. Art and Liberty’s first show took place in Cairo.
1945: The fifth and last show of Art and Liberty took place. Octavio Paz moved to Paris and
started his friendship with Breton.

Sam Bardaouil, “Art and Liberty and the reworking of Surrealism,” in Bardaouil,
Surrealism in Egypt. Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group (Tauris & Co., 2016).

Thesis: Art and Liberty conceived itself as a chapter that belonged to surrealism’s international
network. At the same time, they aimed at renovating the Breton’s group ideas and practices. Sam
Bardaouil aims to prove Art and Liberty’s relevance within the official history of surrealism.

Art and Liberty

- Art and Liberty’s goal was the emancipation of the individual. They rejected both the
notion of “art for art’s sake,” and the use of art as political propaganda.
- Three aspects characterized Art and Liberty’s version of surrealism: (a) they responded to
the “crisis” of French surrealism in the 1930s; (b) they promoted a “hegelian” (linked to
“concrete objects”) surrealism; (c) it was theorized as “subjective realism” and “free art.”
- The fact that Fouad Kamel or Inji Efflatoun did not replicate an imaginary that resembled
Magritte’s bizarre juxtapositions or Ernst’s otherworldly creatures did not make them
“less surrealists.” Art and Liberty developed a “free” style.
- In several letters written to Breton (1936-48), Georges Henein offered the French poet the
possibility of using local journals Les Essayistes and Un Effort for spreading surrealist
ideas. Breton was dismissive and patronizing about the Cairo-based group, and displayed
inability to envision a version of surrealism outside of his circle.

Georges Henein
- He returned from Paris to Cairo in 1933, and established his place as “enfant terrible” in
local periodicals. His references to “scatology and pornography” were attacks towards the
bourgeois conservatism. Since October 1935 (in an article dedicated to René Crevel and
published in Un Effort), he associated his pursuit with surrealist techniques such as
automatic writing
- His 1937 lecture (which discussed French Surrealism) on Les Essayistes (Cairo) was the
result of years of debates between him and several would-be-members of Art and Liberty
in local artistic, literary, and cultural circles since 1935.
- Kamel el-Telmisany criticized the disconnection between artists (in their “tall aristocratic
tower”) and the social sphere. He also questioned political discourses that emphasized
nationality and ethnicity.

Against politics
- Since 1927, the French surrealist group tried to establish strong connections with the
communist party. Eventually, the contradictions between social art and surrealism led

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Breton to leave the party in 1935. Similarly, for Art and Liberty surrealist “free art”
should be unfettered by the demands from a specific political party.
- In a 1935 essay, Henein conceived national traditions as a “suckle of the human spirit,”
and the nation as a “concentration camp.” In this idea, he followed Breton’s criticism of
French nationalism. In 1945, Jo Farna produce his “monument in honor of those who are
not dead,” a ready-made with a skull, in an Art and Liberty’s show.
- In a 1940 essay about the sculptor Moukhtar, El-Telmisany criticized what he called
“Pharaonic art,” which he described as restricted by “land and regionalism.” Furthermore,
he praised the idea of the “universal work of art” and used Henry Moore as an example of
a universal artist.

“Subjective realism” and “free art”

- Ramses Youname’s idea of “subjective realism” was exposed in “The aim of the
contemporary painter” (1938). He identified three trends of surrealism: (i) one that
gathers “all things contradictory and strange” but has “more of the conscious mind’s
ingenuity than the desires of the subconscious;” (ii) one of “automatic drawing” that
“contains excitement” but “no remedy or treatment” of repressed desires; (iii) a
“subjective realism” that combines the artist’s subjectivity with objective principles of
composition. As a paradigmatic artist, Youname mentioned Moore.
- Kamel el-Telmisany’s notion of “free art” was exposed in “Towards a free art” (1949).
For him, free art: (i) would allow the individual to express the three dimensions of his
existence (spiritual, psychological, and physical); (ii) would broad the understanding of
human nature (“his private life, what he suffers”); (iii) would transcend a “self-centered
wish” and would be “accessible and edifying” for others, thus having a social and moral
dimension.

Study Group Notes

On Surrealism
- Breton’s originating definition of Surrealism (taken from Art Since 1900, quoting the
Surrealist Manifesto published in the first issue of La révolution surréaliste in 1924): a
disruptive “juxtaposition of two more or less disparate realities,” a “psychic automatism
in its pure state…dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason,
exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”
- Two modes for capturing products of automatism: 1. Automatic writing (automatic
strand) 2. Irrational narratives provided by dreams (oneiric strand)
- Influence of psychoanalysis: attempt to reflect subconscious/dream-states in images and
writing; automatism; fascination with any peoples who were considered to reflect pre-
Oedipal states (according to Freud: tribal peoples, “the mad,” and children)
- Importance of photo to surrealism: Breton emphasized the importance of capturing
disturbances on surface reality that might reflect the nature of what lies below (like
automatic writing or dream pictures, photo was considered a gateway to separate reality)
- Surrealist crisis of 1929: split between those who followed Breton and La révolution
surréaliste (what Hal Foster terms “official surrealism”) and those who followed Bataille
and Documents (what Foster terms “dissident surrealism”)

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- Major journals and dates of publication: La Révolution surréaliste (1924-29, Breton);

Documents (1929-30, Bataille); Le Surrélisme au service de la revolution (1930-33,
Breton), Minotaure (1933-39, named by Bataille, ed. by Breton)
- Exhibitions: L’exposition anti-impérialiste: la vérité sur les colonies (1931, former
Soviet pavilion), Exposition surréaliste d’objets (1936, Galerie Charles Ratton);
Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (1938, Galérie Beaux-Arts)

On the readings
- The readings navigate territory between surrealisms and Surrealism. As we try to distance
the story of surrealisms from the French center and Breton circle, the texts seem to
rehearse the same story by connecting international circles to Breton. Constant within all
articles: surrealism (whether sensibility or movement) is defined as Parisian surrealism.
Clifford is best at creating a new structure of thinking about surrealism
- Queering surrealism, which is an already queered way of looking at the world. All four
articles show that “decontextualization” is part of surrealist practice.
- Two types of “others” come up: (1) artists such Art and Liberty (Bardaouil), and Alvarez
Bravo (Walker); (2) objects: ethnographic objects and how they were displayed in Paris
(Milleaf and Clifford)
- Two-pronged question: what is Surrealism’s (Paris) relationship to its others (tribal
objects, practices, peoples); and others’ (artists in non-Western countries—Mexico and
Egypt) relationship to Surrealism (Paris)
- The readings are not about visual analysis. They are about how artists or groups
conceived themselves. Who is a surrealist?

Possible questions:
- Surrealist art is articulated around the dialectic of self and other. Discuss.
- Where does surrealism take place? Where are its geographic boundaries? Could answer
with expanded field: Ethnographic surrealism (Clifford); Subjective realism and “free
art” (Bardaouil); Synthetic realism and surrealist documentary (Walker); Surrealist
political praxis (Milleaf)
- Clifford as starting point against which to relate other texts—intro on Clifford and then
relate other texts to how he discusses the moment of surrealism and ethnography.
- Surrealism as a sensibility: How this attitude was diagnosed onto Alvarez Bravo. It was
explored by Art and Liberty—both extending and redressing French sensibility. It was a
political praxis in Milleaf’s essay.

James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism” in Comparitive Studies in Society and History
Vol 23, 1981

- Thesis: There was a crucial modern orientation toward cultural order shared by
ethnography and surrealism between the world wars. He describes a moment/situation
when there was a shared sensibility between the ethnography and art, which he defines as
an impulse to question the present and the local, to challenge reality and existing systems
of classification. The sensibility is achieved through a process of defamiliarization
through fragmentation and recombination/juxtaposition—a semiotic technique shared by
surrealists and ethnography.

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- Both ethnography and surrealism as attitudes characterized by cultural relativism, even

nihilism, since they take a detached, distanced view of culture and its norms, seeing them
as artificial constructs. Both see the “other” as a subject of modern research—for every
local truth, there is an exotic alternative.
- Clifford is an US American anthropologist whose interdisciplinary work often crosses
into realm of art history, professor in the history of consciousness program at UCSC.
Clifford is the only author who does not cite Breton as center of surrealism—rather
looking at ethnographic surrealism of Bataille

Janine Milleaf, “Body to Politics: Surrealist Exhibition of the Tribal and the Modern at the Anti-
Imperialist Exhibition and the Galerie Charles Ratton,” Res (2001).

- Thesis: The Exposition surréaliste d’objets (1936, Galerie Charles Ratton) came closest
to expressing the surrealist conception of political praxis because it was meant to jar and
unnerve viewers through its juxtapositions, shaking them out of their bourgeois
complacency and elicit a waking dream state
- Milleaf: US American art historian and director of Arts Club of Chicago; book on the
notion of tactility in dada and surrealism.

- The Ratton exhibition included surrealist artworks, cubist constructions, Duchamp

readymades, animal and mineral specimens, mathematical models, tribal objects, and
other natural and artificial curiosities. The installation was like a cabinet of curiosities,
arranged with no hierarchy or taxonomy (no didactic texts or political message). It relied
on the erotic rather than rhetoric, in the embodied rather than intellectual.
- The Ratton exhibition contrasted this with the overtly didactic and propagandistic
L’exposition anti-impérialiste: la vérité sur les colonies (1931, former Soviet pavilion,
organized with Communist Part of France). La vérité sur les colonies aimed to criticize
the official International Colonial Exhibition and sought to disseminate Socialist doctrine.
It included 3 sections: general orientation; cultural problems; and section on USSR. The
exhibition included maps, statistics, political commentary, audio broadcast, notebooks for
visitor comments, Lenin quotes. The section of “cultural problems” included tribal art.
Surrealist artists organized this section, but no surrealist artworks were included. It aimed
at instructing viewers about the evils of colonialism with photos of Christian missionaries
destroying African art.
- Between two shows, Breton and Eluard sold their tribal art collections—feeding same
cultural appetite they sought to critique. Milleaf explains that an colonial exoticism
underlies the surrealist attitude towards the tribal, yet their focus on the estrangement of
tribal art differentiates it from the dominant colonial narratives

Ian Walker, “Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Surrealism and Documentary Photography,” in Journal of
Surrealism and the Americas 8:1 (2014)

- Thesis: Manuel Alvarez-Bravo’s photographs cannot be called “surrealist,” but it is

generative to think about the relationship between his photos, surrealism, and
documentary photography, especially given his encounters and friendships with Andre

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Breton and Henri Cartier Bresson, who both visited Mexico and spent time with Alvarez
Bravo.
- The author is a British art historian that does not write on Mexican or Latin American art,
nor did he bother even visiting Mexico in order to write this article (makes his position
clear in introduction). He focused on notions of an authentic, local Mexican identity and
insider/outsider status (he is an outsider writer). From the outset, he admits that he is
dealing with Mexico as a discursive formation.

- For Walker, Alvarez Bravo is able to take his photos of Mexican land and people because
he was born there (local aura inaccessible to outsiders). At the same time, Alvarez Bravo
was an “international artist” that exhibited at New York.
- He provides no biography or context on Alvarez Bravo, so it is hard to understand what
his position is with regards to his Mexican identity and Mexican nationalism.
- Walker argues that Breton’s relationship to Mexico was not as simple as many have
suggested (as the not the colonial/colonized power dynamic). Rather, he argues, it was
similar to Breton’s fascination with Prague as “magic.”
- Walker argues that Cartier Bresson and Alvarez Bravo, neither of whom conceived
themselves as surrealists, shared a visual preoccupation with veiling, covering, and
exposing.
- Breton described Alvarez Bravo’s photographs as “synthetic realism”—dialectic process
of bringing together two opposed objects, gestures etc. to create a synthesis that points to
something beyond the original two objects. This process that is central to, but not
exclusive to, surrealism.

Sam Bardaouil, “Art and Liberty and the reworking of Surrealism,” in Bardaouil, Surrealism in
Egypt. Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group (Tauris & Co., 2016).

- Thesis: Art and Liberty conceived itself as a chapter that belonged to surrealism’s
international network. At the same time, they aimed at renovating the Breton’s group
ideas and practices.
- Sam Bardaouil is an art historian and curator, co-founders of Art Reoriented. Their
exhibition Art et Liberté: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938-48) was shown at
the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2016-7) and the Reina Sofía in Madrid (2017).
- Bardaouil’s post-colonial methodology isn’t about center/periphery. He believes that the
narrative should extend beyond a story of Art and Liberty as peripheral to French
surrealists. Indeed, Art and Liberty seemed ascribed to an universalist project. The
problem is that although Art and Liberty may have felt they were in dialogue with French
surrealism, it does not seem like it is a two-way conversation.
- However, if we follow Clifford’s idea that surrealism is more of a sensibility than an
official movement, Art and Liberty did share in sensibility, and thus it doesn’t matter if
the relationship was one- or two-way conversation.