10.

The Surrealist Manifesto

Cocteau’s Le Train bleu (The Blue Train), the first ‘beach ballet’, is performed by the Ballets Russes, with sets by Picasso and costumes by Chanel. Cocteau experiences a surrealist episode (in the lift going up to Picasso’s apartment). Breton’s group become fully established surrealists by publishing a surrealist newspaper with illustrations by Ernst, Picasso and de Chirico (still protesting he is not a surrealist). Man Ray and Duchamp appear in Man Ray’s new film, playing chess together on a rooftop.

Nobody knew where Éluard had gone. Gala and Ernst were left alone together in Eaubonne, the Grindels’ new property in the forest of Montmorency. Ernst was making birds. That year he made a small installation, Cage et oiseaux (Cage and Birds, 1924), consisting of a black lacquered frame with a touch of scarlet at each top corner. The frame is stringed like an instrument but it also resembles a theatre set, since the strings make a curtain, parted – as it were – just far enough to reveal a little box painted with two caged birds mounted on a wooden panel set behind the curtain. The whole piece has a delicate beauty as well as an obvious theatricality, and a toy-like quality, almost as if it were made for a child. In another 1924 piece, In Praise of Folly, painted on a panel, two birds, one large, one small, are behind bars. They have no wings, feathers or even beaks; the eye of the larger one is a red-ringed blue circle. The paint is thick impasto, dragged horizontally and vertically across the board in orange, yellow, black and red, as if the birds are hemmed in by the paint itself. (The technique of dragging impasto anticipates new discoveries Ernst would make the following year when he began scratching the paint into place.) The atmosphere of both pieces is arresting: in the first, the birds are at play; in the second, they are trapped. For Ernst, birds increasingly became an emblem of surrealism, charged with Freudian associations – bird as phallic symbol, bird as entry into the realms of spiritual power and as a sign of spiritual longing for change.

Shortly after Éluard vanished, Breton, Aragon and two other friends gathered to read his poems, perhaps as a kind of talisman, before setting off on an expedition. For their voyage magique they went to Sologne, in central France, setting both of the Vampire films and of the enchanted walk taken by the narrator of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. Breton and friends walked to Blois, a destination picked at random, then south-east to the village of Cour-Cheverny, arriving back where they started on 14 May, having covered some three hundred and eighty kilometres. The idea had been to wander into the unknown, with the aim of investigating the effects on the mind of sustained disorientation – perhaps a kind of cross-country version of Aragon’s urban wandering among the arcades, both lived metaphors for the explorations being embarked on into the unknown territory of the psyche. In the two school exercise books he took with him Breton wrote five hundred jottings, two of which he developed into a single text, Poisson soluble (Soluble Fish), which would be published in October that year, alongside the as yet unwritten Surrealist Manifesto. Aragon published his own imaginative record of the trip, Une Vague de rêves (A Wave of Dreams), shortly after their return, explicitly announcing in it that their trip had been surreal: ‘There’s a surreal light: the one which falls on a counter of salmon-coloured stockings, as cities start to glow.’

They were all unaware that just before they left for their walk, Éluard’s father had received a telegram from his son, sent from Nice and dated 24 March.

Dear Father, I’ve had enough. I’m going travelling. Take back the business you’ve set up for me. But I’m taking the money I’ve got, namely 17,000 F. Don’t call the cops, state or private. I’ll see to the first one I spot. And that won’t do your reputation any good. Here’s what to say: tell everyone the same thing; I had a haemorrhage when I got to Paris, that now I’m in hospital and then say I’ve gone to a clinic in Switzerland. Take great care of Gala and Cécile.

Somehow, within three days, Breton’s wife, Simone, was in possession of the facts, including the precise sum of money Éluard had picked up from the bank before, rather than taking it home, as arranged, absconding with it. Still no one knew where he was, or why he had left, or anything about his intentions. Shortly afterwards Gala ran into Breton in the street, after which Simone had a new story to spread. ‘Gala’s left with 400 Fr, the little girl, and an impossible situation on account of Max Ernst. Her parents-in-law will only look after her if he leaves. And he’s all she’s got. André saw her today, calm. She’s looking for work.’

Now Gala showed her mettle. Mme Grindel wanted to forgive her son and beg him to come home. M. Grindel would not hear of it. He wanted his money back; he also wanted Ernst out of his house. By the end of May the new rumour was that Éluard had gone to Tahiti and was asking Gala to join him there, then in Singapore. In fact, setting sail from Marseilles on 15 April, after six weeks at sea he had disembarked in French Polynesia, where he settled down to wait for Gala. She decided she would not only pay her own passage but also reimburse the money Éluard had taken from his father. By now both Ernst and Gala presumably knew where Éluard was, since they were both in touch with him by telegram. He urged Gala to sell their art collection and join him as soon as she could. She should visit an art dealer in Berlin who knew about tribal masks; he sent her a procuration authorizing her to sell their African objects, as well as various books and paintings. ‘You alone are precious,’ he told her. ‘I love only you, I have never loved anyone but you. I can love nothing else.’

Back in Paris, Cocteau had once again joined forces with Diaghilev. They were preparing the Ballets Russes’ next show, Les Biches (The Young Ones), a piece of ‘lifestyle modernism’ with music by Poulenc and sets and costumes by Marie Laurencin. The ballet tinkered with elements of transgression, androgyny and homosexuality; in its ‘open exploration of [so-called] sexual perversity’ Les Biches went further than any work Diaghilev ever produced. But it did so with such lightness, the tone set by Laurencin’s airy pastel-coloured sets, that audiences found it entirely acceptable, recognizing none of the overt provocation they had been faced with in Le Sacre du printemps or, in 1912, L’Après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun). Meanwhile, continually dogged by financial worries, Diaghilev was dependent on sponsors and dealing increasingly with competitors, of which Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois company was merely one.

On 16 June Mercure, Étienne de Beaumont’s first production, opened at the Théâtre la Cigale in Montmartre, described as poses plastiques in three scenes. Sets were by Picasso, who had produced drawings for thirteen successive tableaux, most of them less than a minute long; Satie provided suitable musique d’ameublement. Satie had scored the work as if for a film rather than the theatre, the music to fit the choreography rather than the other way around, providing a sonic backdrop to Picasso’s poses. He also, mischievously, took some liberties with the music to send up the actions of the title character, Mercure, played by Cocteau. The score included the kind of syncopation and jerky rhythms that normally accompanied slapstick, so that exits looked like pratfalls; it also referenced American musical idioms to pastiche the jazz Cocteau loved. The sets and set pieces were no less provocative. In a memorable sixth tableau – a bathing scene featuring the Three Graces, played by men in drag – the Graces enter from the waist up through a large hole in part of the backcloth, designed to represent a bathtub. In the following scenes, Mercure breaks in and steals the girls’ pearls and the Graces are turned into basketwork puppets. The final tableau is a party thrown by Bacchus, danced to the music of Vincent Youmans’ popular song ‘Tea for Two’; in it Satie and Picasso had managed to include gentle send-ups of Diaghilev, Poiret and even de Beaumont. The show ended with dancers in multicoloured tights – a dig at the surrealists, or perhaps the Futurists (Gino Severini, leading member of the movement, regularly in Paris from November 1906 onwards, had a reputation for wearing brightly coloured odd socks, one raspberry red, one green). Whatever the intended references, they were lost on the audience. Nevertheless, the show provided yet another opportunity for Breton and friends to cause disruption – this time, carelessly implicating Picasso. Increasingly establishing an ever more nuanced surrealist agenda, exploring the mysteries and marvels of the mind, in their public activities Breton’s group were still, even now, taking their cue from the antics of the Dadaists.

On the first night the Breton bande announced its presence. Though their real target was the extravagantly bourgeois Étienne de Beaumont, as instructed by Breton, Aragon and others rose up and began yelling, ‘Bravo, Picasso, down with Satie!’, at the box where Picasso and Olga were seated. The police were called; Aragon jumped onstage and continued his onslaught … the usual antics, relatively meaningless by this time, especially since Aragon in fact admired the show. He reviewed it in the June issue of Le Journal littéraire: ‘Mercure caught me unawares. Nothing stronger has ever been brought to the stage … It is also the revelation of an entirely new style for Picasso, one that owes nothing to either cubism or realism, and which transcends cubism just as cubism transcended realism.’ This may have been tactical, since Breton had realized all too late that Picasso and Satie had been working in collaboration. In a hasty, sycophantic letter to the Paris-Journal printed on 20 June he attempted to repair any damage. Beneath an announcement for the show, ‘Les Soirées de Paris, Création de Mercure d’Erik Satie et Picasso’, appeared a chaotic-looking illustration (lots of naked breasts, figures bursting through holes, a pantomime horse), beneath which was a report of the violent incidents that had interrupted the performance. Paris-Journal, ran the announcement, had received from various friends and collaborators (actually, Breton) the following communication, which was quoted verbatim. ‘It is … our duty to put on record our deep and wholehearted admiration for Picasso … Once again, in Mercure, he has shown a full measure of his daring and his genius, and has met with a total lack of understanding. This event … proves that Picasso … is today the eternal personification of youth and the absolute master of the situation.’ As Satie remarked, the letter seemed ‘assez curieux et un peu “con” ’ (‘rather odd, and a bit silly’). As for Picasso, to whom it was really addressed, he seems to have been duly placated – or perhaps he was just (by now) indifferent.

Also on 20 June Diaghilev opened his own quintessentially modern ballet, Le Train bleu, again written by Cocteau, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The score was by Milhaud; Chanel, still keen to be associated with the artistic avant-garde, designed the bulky knitted sportifs costumes, which had had to be remade when they proved impossible to dance in; Picasso provided a backcloth scaled up from his painting Deux Femmes courant sur la plage (Two Women Running on the Beach, or The Race), of two chunky female figures running with abandon along the seashore. This was hugely admired; Picasso signed the corner for Diaghilev, who used it as the company’s official curtain for many years. The ballet, despite its flimsy plot (Diaghilev called it an operette dansée), became ‘the first of the beach ballets’, hugely appealing to the It crowd, since le train bleu was the popular name for the wagon-lit painted in eye-catching blue that took stylish young Parisians to the Côte d’Azur – though, as Cocteau took pains to explain, the ballet does not actually feature a blue train; since this is the modern age of speed, the train has already reached its destination and the passengers have already disembarked. Instead they are seen ‘on a beach which does not exist, in front of a casino which exists still less. Overhead passes an aeroplane which you do not see. And the plot represents nothing.’

The methods of production were as (intentionally) misleading as the story. Danced by the Ballets Russes, it had nothing to do with Russian ballet. It was invented for Anton Dolin, a classical dancer who does no classical dancing. The scenery was painted by a sculptor and the costumes were by ‘a great arbiter of fashion who has never made a costume’ (actually she had, for Cocteau’s Antigone – but never mind). Nevertheless, art as advertisement had arrived. Soon anyone who was anyone was taking the blue train to Deauville to practise the newly fashionable balletic exercises on the beach. The public showed far more enthusiasm for Le Train bleu than did its creators. It was Picasso’s last collaboration with the Ballets Russes; he was becoming disillusioned with the high-class world of princesses and bourgeois who could not, as Stravinsky himself put it, distinguish between Emmanuel Chabrier’s Une Éducation manquée (a light opera set in the eighteenth century, composed in 1878–9) and Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps. As for Cocteau, despite the popular success of Le Train bleu, he now thought it ‘silly, slight, and without novelty’. He spent the summer smoking opium and drawing his own face in the mirror.

In reality, Cocteau was (temporarily) burnt out. He said he had played Mercure in a state of such exhaustion that he had welcomed the opportunity to die, if only publicly onstage for ten performances. He was tired out by grief, opium and the gruelling attempt to distract himself from both. Mercure had been ‘a blinding nightmare’. In the dressing room, waiting to be called onstage, he had wept with exhaustion and had to be pushed from the wings by his fellow actors, ‘like a dumb animal’. He had carried on, hoping death would take him, feeling as if he had been turned into an insect. ‘Had I been cut in two like a wasp, I would have gone on living, moving my painted ruff and my legs.’ But he was tough, he had to be – so much so that Breton and his bande appeared to have had no impact on him at all. Perhaps they hadn’t. Asked how he felt about them, Cocteau responded that such things were only to be expected since they were, after all, one big, happy family. Nevertheless, his addiction was taking its toll. Before leaving to spend summer in the south of France he accepted an invitation from Picasso to lunch at his home in the rue la Boétie. Going up in the antique, hand-operated lift, he experienced a vivid hallucination. He imagined he was growing larger, alongside ‘something terrible – I don’t know what’. A voice called to him, ‘My name is on the plate!’ He came to with a jolt and read the words on the metal door plate: Ascenseurs Heurtebise. For the next few months he felt possessed by an evil angel, the Angel Heurtebise, who seemed to take up residence in his body, torturing him until, eventually, he exorcized the angel in a poem describing his own torture and rape; he later claimed the poem was as important a turning point in his artistic development as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon had been in Picasso’s. During lunch with Picasso and Olga he told them about his extraordinary experience in the lift. But ‘everything is a miracle’, said Picasso. ‘It’s a miracle not to melt in the bathtub like a lump of sugar.’

The final issue of Littérature (no. 13, June 1924) included a photograph by Man Ray which remains one of his best-known works, Le Violon d’Ingres, a view of Kiki’s back bearing the two curlicue ‘f’ holes of a violin or violoncello, perhaps inspired, since Man Ray was familiar with the artist’s work, by Ingres’ La Baigneuse, dite Baigneuse Valpinçon (The Valpinçon Bather), in which the figure is similarly posed, and/or a nod to Ingres’ habit of insisting that visitors to his studio attend to his (inferior) violin playing rather than his paintings – or perhaps simply Man Ray’s modern take on the old symbol of woman as a musical instrument. Also that year Man Ray photographed Gala, her two staring eyes reminiscent of the six staring eyes of the photograph of the Marchesa Casati, though not this time the result of distortion in the development process. Gala gazes straight into the camera lens as if in a state of shock, mouth closed, hair untidy, the white collar of her blouse standing up so stiffly it almost appears to be holding her in place.

On 7 July the Éluards’ art collection went on sale at the Hôtel Drouot auction house, including works by Picasso, de Chirico, Braque, Gris, Derain and Picabia, and one by Marie Laurencin, and three oil paintings added by Ernst. Also included were African masks, a Peruvian terra cotta piece, a Persian helmet and several antiquités kitsch. As soon as the sale was over Gala reimbursed her father-in-law his seventeen hundred francs, settled her other debts, put her daughter in the care of Mme Grindel and bought a ticket for her voyage to join Éluard. Meanwhile, Ernst had been asking Robert Desnos (who was now receiving messages that Éluard was at sea) for advice about obtaining a false passport. He needed to go to Germany to sell some of the works he had painted in Paris to a buyer in Düsseldorf, since he needed to raise enough to fund a trip to Indochina. Ernst was going too.

Ten days later Gala and Ernst boarded the SS Paul Lecat in Marseilles, bound for Singapore. On 12 August Éluard sent a telegram to his father from the Hotel Casino, Saigon. ‘Gala here looking forward to coming home and to properties you were not the reason reply by telegram have always loved you.’ He signed it Grindel; there was no mention of Ernst. One of the real mysteries of the surrealist years is the story of Éluard’s visit to Saigon, and this telegram is one of the few pieces of evidence. What was he doing there for three months? Probably not a lot, other than running away from an unbearable situation at home. Ernst, after he arrived with Gala, painted Éluard as an Indochinese wearing a saucer-shaped hat and eating a plate of noodles with outsized chopsticks. If Éluard produced any art during his time in the east, it does not survive. Before she left France, Gala had been asked by M. Grindel to tell Paul he was prepared to forgive his son’s behaviour; Grindel made no mention of Ernst either. The three of them now faced the problem of how to finance their return. For the time being, they were grounded together in the Hotel Casino while they tackled the problem, but from this point on it seems to have become tacitly (or overtly) clear that the days of the ménage à trois were numbered. Éluard and Gala returned to Paris as a couple; Ernst stayed behind in Saigon for a few weeks, perhaps waiting for them to send funds to cover his return home. On 28 August Éluard sent a telegram to his parents. ‘We should have left by now. Life very expensive. Send quickly a cheque for at least ten thousand with instructions to the Banque Indochine.’

Late that August or in early September Éluard and Gala left Saigon and boarded a connecting steamer from Saigon to Singapore. What Ernst did in Saigon for the next few weeks is another mystery. According to those who asked him about it later, he went on one or two traditional excursions in Indochina, possibly visiting the river landscape of Angkor Wat and perhaps also the Khmer ruins. In the fragments which he later provided for his biographer, Ernst covered this period more or less cryptically. ‘Max Ernst travels around, visits Khmer ruins, explores Moi country, takes against the monsoon rains in the jungle.’ (The jungle may have influenced his later paintings of forest landscapes – looming, mysterious forms, some of the central works of surrealism – though not necessarily; there were other influences, including his childhood experiences.) When he returned to Paris he rented a room in Montmartre, high up on the hill in the rue Tourlaque. Now barely able to scrape a living, he went on painting in solitude. Éluard supported him by buying his work.

On 1 October Éluard walked round to Breton’s apartment with a hand-written note inviting him to meet him at Café Cyrano, another of the group’s regular haunts. At first Breton was pleased Éluard was back; then he realized he was angry with him. On the 3rd Simone Breton began a letter to her cousin. ‘First: Éluard is back. No comment.’ His return seemed to throw everyone into a state of emotional confusion. Simone told her cousin she would never forgive Gala – not for her lies so much as for the underhand method of her departure. What they really could not forgive was Gala’s exasperating silence; she was a sorceress, someone grumbled, who cast her spells to cause disruption within the group – which hardly seems to have been her intention.

One who welcomed Éluard’s return was Aragon, who enthusiastically passed on the great news. He had in September published the last of his four instalments of Le Paysan de Paris, in which he turned up further marvels among the subterranean world of the arcades of Montmartre, including the Librairie Eugène Ray, one of the four or five places in Paris where it was possible to leaf through books and magazines without buying them, and where he found young people engrossed in their reading. He discovered concierges crouched in their basement lairs, holed up for years, ‘ineluctably moulded to the shape of this absurd place’, watching skirts and trouser legs make their way upstairs. In the window of the old stamp dealer’s (now empty) there were two notices pasted up: ‘Closed on account of owner’s sickness’ and, beneath it, ‘Closed on account of owner’s death.’ The defunct champagne merchant’s in the Galerie du Baromètre (supplier of wines ‘By Appointment to Son altesse Royale Monseigneur le Duc d’Orléans’) had been bought out four years earlier for two hundred thousand francs, of which the sum of eighty thousand francs remained unpaid.

The impact of these findings on the narrator of Le Paysan de Paris is chronically stunning; he is forced to pause in his monologue to deal with his reactions, which become increasingly visceral in this narrative of gathering emotional momentum. The collapse of the author’s authority as he falls prey to the effects of what he is describing heightens the piece’s impact as a quintessentially surrealist encounter with reality. ‘A screw thread behind my forehead is unwinding blindly to readjust the focus: the smallest object I look at appears to be of enormous proportions, a water jug and an inkwell remind me of Notre Dame and the Morgue.’ Words themselves seem to be unravelling fast. The narrator (as reliable witness or ultimate authority) seems to be spiralling out of control. Sustained contemplation of such moral devastation becomes almost hallucinatory. Disintegrating himself, along with the places and things he is looking at, Aragon’s narrator views them through a kind of prism of surrealism. Everything seems to be unravelling before his eyes, until it is unclear whether he is seeing things or merely conjuring them in his memory. He reflects on hairdressers’ salons, those female-only domains into which he has often looked and seen ‘heads of hair uncoiling in their grottoes’, here described as if hair had its own sinister inclinations, separately from its place on the female head (again, here, anticipating the surrealists’ later preoccupation with mannequins, bald or bewigged). Were there, the narrator ponders, any hairdressers who worked only with brunettes, or only with blondes? ‘My palette of blondnesses would include the elegance of motorcars, the scent of sainfoin, the silence of mornings, the perplexities of waiting … How blond is the sound of the rain, how blond the song of mirrors! From the perfume of gloves to the cry of the owl, from the beating of the murderer’s heart to the flower-flames of the laburnum.’ The old public baths had taken on the look of some sinister laboratory … So it goes on … until he reaches the about-to-be-demolished Café Certa, the old headquarters of his group, with its coat-and-hat stand, its barrels for tables, its sofa upholstered in imitation leather, its rows of seats lined up against the wall, its moveable gas radiator, potted plants, bottle racks – all waiting for the bulldozer. ‘Beautiful, good, right, true, real … so many other abstract words are crumbling into dust …’

Breton, too, in his way, was in the business of juggling and spinning words. By the time he published the Surrealist Manifesto in late October (he had been writing it since the spring) the word ‘surrealist’ had already entered the vernacular. Breton had used it in his article ‘À Dada’, in which he both referred back to Apollinaire’s coinage (in his 1917 preface to Parade) and extended its meaning to encompass the realm of the unconscious. It had also been used by Aragon more than once in the pages of Le Paysan de Paris, by Kiki de Montparnasse to describe Man Ray’s social set, and by others. Breton had now not only redefined Apollinaire’s usage of the word but also implicitly claimed the word as his own (he used it again in an article of 1924, ‘Entrée des médiums’ (‘The Mediums Enter’)). Others, including devotees of Apollinaire (nothing to do with Breton’s group), objected to his use of the word they considered their exclusive inheritance. He, however, was ready to claim the definition of surrealism, with emphases on automatism, marvellous chance encounters and the significance of the unconscious. Four days before the publication of the manifesto, on Friday, 10 October 1924, the grandly named Bureau Central de Recherches Surréalistes (Bureau for Surrealist Research) opened in premises at 15, rue de Grenelle, where, in an empty room a female shop-window dummy hung from the ceiling for anyone to examine at his or her leisure. Aragon reported that ‘worried men come there every day [to look at it], bearers of weighty secrets’.

Ostensibly consolidating what for Breton constituted surrealism, in its wide-ranging, free-associative exploration of what surrealism is, the Surrealist Manifesto stretched the definition in various new, inventive directions which ran counter to its mock-authoritative, pseudo-scientific tone. Adrienne Monnier once remarked that she had always assumed the manifesto was satirical. Whether or not that was true (Breton was not known for being much of a satirist), it was impassioned, declamatory and didactic; it was also poetic, reminiscent in tone of Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, especially in the opening lines, in which Breton explores the troubling relationship between man and inanimate objects – a connection enduringly central to surrealist art.

Breton also addressed in the manifesto an issue he felt very passionate about – the notion that the working life destroyed a man’s right to freedom. By imposing ‘the laws of an arbitrary utility’, employment subdued the natural freedom of the imagination; it was an example of the way the social order was based on a kind of rational thinking that took no account of the actual reality of human experience. ‘We are still living under the reign of logic,’ Breton wrote; but that was surely about to change. He attributed to Freud the uncovering of the imagination; his explorations into the mental world had plumbed the depths of ‘that dark night’ of sleep and dream. ‘Had I lived in 1820,’ Breton wrote – like the German Romantics – ‘I would have revelled in the enormous metaphors.’ Now there was no need for empty metaphors, since Freud had uncovered the dark side of human nature (already depicted in the writings of Lautréamont and the art of Moreau) in all of us. With the discoveries of surrealism, metaphor was metamorphosed into everyday lived experience as acted out in the here and now by Breton and his friends and associates. He himself, Breton went on, lived in a marvellous castle with his friends: Aragon, Soupault, ‘Paul Éluard, our great Éluard, who [at the time of writing] has not yet come home’; and ‘Marcel Duchamp whom we had not hitherto known. Picasso goes hunting in the neighbourhood. The spirit of demoralization has elected domicile in the castle … but the doors are always open.’ The implication was that life could become marvellous, a castle in the air made manifest, since freedom was a club anyone could join. The fundamental message of the manifesto was that surrealism ‘asserts our complete non-conformism’.

Breton made other, subsidiary claims. After Apollinaire died, the manifesto continues, he and Soupault had ‘baptized the new mode of pure expression which we had at our disposal … SURREALISM’. He supplies a lengthy spoof dictionary definition. ‘SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought … ENCYCLOPÆDIA. Philosophy.’ Surrealism, the definition continues, is based on the reality of previously neglected associations, on the omnipotence of dreams, on the disinterested play of thoughts. Surrealism alone, of all ‘psychic mechanisms’, can solve ‘all the principal problems of life’, especially for those who recognize the significance of dreams, for whom waking experience will be intensified. ‘I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.’ Lapsing into the idiom of the séances sommeils, Breton alludes to the ‘secrets of the magical surrealist art’: ‘Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand.’ And in what is surely a moving allusion to the losses of the war, ‘ “You are no longer trembling, carcass.” This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass, the earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression on me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live which are the imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.’ It was time to choose how – even whether – to live.

Breton’s manifesto, despite its veneer of objectivity, was thus fundamentally a poetic, even Romantic call to arms (or rather, permanent disarmament) which took its cue from Lautréamont as much as from Freud or Marx. The surrealist castle – even the manifesto itself – is at one level a marvellous fantasy, just a precursor to the fabulous images of surrealism in writing, painting and other art forms. The manifesto was merely a start, and Breton was still looking for converts to join him in the ‘castle’. Picasso, for one, continued to refuse to align himself with the surrealists, denying any definitively surrealist elements in his work until the summer of 1933. Although during the year following the appearance of the manifesto he introduced surrealist elements into La Danse (the theatrical painting he had begun in 1923), he did so for reasons of his own, which had yet to emerge. Not until 1933, when she looked at Picasso’s drawings of that year, did Gertrude Stein come up with her own inimitable definition of surrealism, in which she implicitly acknowledged Breton’s Romanticism: ‘The Surrealists still see things as everyone sees them, they complicate them in a different way but the vision is that of everyone else, in short the complication is the complication of the twentieth century but the vision is that of the nineteenth century.’ Even then she continued to distinguish Picasso from the surrealists. ‘Picasso only sees something else, another reality. Complications are always easy but another vision than that of all the world is very rare … Picasso saw something else, not another complication but another thing.’ As for Duchamp, it more or less went without saying that his inclusion in the surrealist castle was nothing to do with him.

For the time being, both the Surrealist Manifesto and to some extent the Bureau Central de Recherches Surréalistes (the latter less than Breton had hoped) attracted a degree of interest in the activities of Breton’s group (of which the core still consisted of Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Éluard – and trance masters such as Desnos) and new recruits to what was by now a formal organization. These included painters André Masson and Joan Miró, who by 1924 were working in adjoining studios in an alley adjoining the rue Blomet. Breton approved of both Masson (yet another admirer of Lautréamont, and with the added credential of an interesting history of nervous breakdowns) and Miró, whose work Breton preferred to that of Masson. On 21 October visitors to the Bureau Central de Recherches Surréalistes included Max Ernst, who turned up within hours of his return to Paris to offer his services. Another visitor was de Chirico, in the city again that November. He and Breton met on a number of occasions, one evening in a café in the place Pigalle, de Chirico usefully identifying its ghosts. He also witnessed some of Desnos’s recitations, until he began to find the surrealist group activities unintentionally comic; he also found Breton’s interminable readings from Lautréamont less and less endurable. When Breton took him to meet Doucet, de Chirico treated the couturier/collector with hauteur. At the end of the month the artist left Paris and headed back to Rome – but this was far from the last of his (reluctant) involvement with, or appropriation by, the surrealists.

By the close of the year Breton was fully occupied with preparations to publish the new magazine he had begun working on, La Révolution surréaliste, with illustrations (reproductions of paintings and photographs) by both Picasso and Man Ray; the latter, though unwilling to become a bona fide member of the surrealist group, was happy to publish his work in the magazine. Strictly speaking, he told Breton, he was a pre-surrealist, having invented surrealist photography before Breton had even thought of it. He also warned Breton that he, for one, would be unable to give up work, since he had to earn a living. In January 1924 his work had appeared in French Vogue, retrospectively covering an exhibition of contemporary art, including Man Ray’s, in the 1923 Salon d’Automne. Vogue published his portraits of Kiki de Montparnasse and Duchamp, both painted to look like photographs, and after this he received commissions for fashion images from both Vogue and Vanity Fair. After the editor of British Vogue, Dorothy Todd, sat for her portrait, he received a steady flow of commissions for fashion and portrait photographs for Vogue on both sides of the Atlantic, all of which, being Man Ray, he effortlessly and uncontroversially combined with his rising reputation as the central photographic chronicler of surrealism.

La Révolution surréaliste was a substantial undertaking. Unlike the early Dadaist magazines, the publication that first appeared on 1 December 1924 (it ran for twelve issues, until December 1927) was produced as a conventional newspaper and contained a large amount of text. There was nothing amateur or ad hoc about its production; on the contrary, it gave the appearance of providing serious coverage of a range of events and opinions. Its strongly surrealist mood and flavour and the general tone of uncanny iconoclasm were most strikingly established by the images which were set within or alongside columns of conventional-looking type. Included in the first issue was a full-page advertisement for the Bureau Central de Recherches Surréalistes, illustrated with a drawing of a fish, with the words ‘Nous sommes à la veille d’une RÉVOLUTION. Vous pouvez y prendre part’ (‘We are on the eve of a REVOLUTION. You may come and take part’). The columns of text included reports of dreams by Breton and de Chirico; textes surréalistes by various lesser-known recruits; an unsigned poem entitled ‘Paul Éluard’; and a photograph of a woman’s breasts, double exposed so that there were four.

A reproduction of one of Picasso’s constructions, a guitar folded open to reveal another guitar, looked more surrealist than cubist among the columns of surrealist text. Poet Pierre Reverdy also contributed a piece. In place of the usual column of births, marriages and deaths there was a column simply headed ‘Suicides’. A column of ‘Press Extracts’ included quotations which contained references to surrealism. ‘Le surréalisme … c’est la foutaise’ (‘Surrealism … is bullshit’; Francis Carco, in Le Journal littéraire); ‘Voici le surréalisme et tout le monde cherche à en faire partie’ (‘Now that Surrealism is here, everyone wants to join in’; Tzara, in Les Nouvelles Littéraires). A tiny sketch by Ernst showed a man fallen to the ground being attacked by a flock of birds; also included was Man Ray’s Catherine Barometer, with which he had baffled the customs officer on arrival in Paris). Here, in newspaper format, was surrealism laid out for all to see, ingeniously presented and selected, succinctly and brilliantly illustrated, at first glance entirely intelligible; on greater scrutiny, progressively irrational.

In December 1924 Man Ray was approached by Rolf de Maré to make a film called Entr’acte, to be shown (as had been the custom in the early days of cinema) in the intermission of a new ballet with music by Satie and sets by Picabia; the film was to be directed by René Clair. The title of the ballet was Relâche, the word normally posted on kiosks or the doors of a closed theatre to mean ‘no performance’, or ‘closed’. Soon posters appeared all over Paris, advertising the ‘no-performance’. In the run-up to the show members of the company and their wives moved into the Hôtel Istria, at the corner of the rue Campagne-Première, where anyone glancing in at the windows got a glimpse of women in their underwear bent over tables, cutting out cloth for their dresses for the opening night. Word spread; le tout Paris was soon fighting for tickets. Life imitated art – the date of the premiere, set for 17 November, was postponed until 27 November, then put back a further two days; meanwhile, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where the show was to take place, was still in (actual) relâche. On 29 November audiences arrived to find the doors locked and a notice pasted up which read ‘Relâche’. They waited in vain until 11 p.m. for the show to open; the choreographer, who was also playing two of the parts, a corpse and a ballerina, had a high fever and was unable to perform. After a hurried dress rehearsal on 4 December, the first performance took place on the 7th of that month.

Relâche was quintessentially surrealist. At curtain up a movie screen was lowered into place on to which were projected images of Satie and Picabia leaping around in slow motion on the roof of the theatre the audience were sitting in, apparently admiring a huge field gun. After some deliberation they fired it – at the audience, who were then almost blinded by lights the size of car headlamps being shone into the auditorium from the stage. Onstage, a fireman continually poured water from one bucket into another while a ballerina danced, but only when the music stopped; when it started up again she stood still. The audience was shocked by the gun and did not much like the car headlights, but they loved Entr’acte, which took up twenty-two minutes of the thirty-minute show. Now, still on screen, a dancer in white tights and a tutu appeared, filmed from below through a pane of glass, followed by random glimpses of traffic at night. Cut to Man Ray and Duchamp seated on a ledge above the rooftops of Paris playing chess, until their game is brought to an abrupt end when a powerful jet of water hits the board. Various apparently unrelated shots followed (the dancer again, now with a beard; a shooting-gallery sequence), until the finale – a funeral-procession set piece which has gone down in surrealist history. In a jerky sequence, mourners in a dishevelled-looking line meander untidily through the streets of Paris, the men in top hats, the women in hobble skirts, following a hearse pulled by a camel. As the hearse gathers speed the mourners take long, leaping strides to keep up, breaking into a run as it leaves the road, hurtles on to the track of a roller coaster, and finally comes to a halt in an open field, whereupon the casket falls to the ground. The corpse leaps up and taps the mourners on the shoulder, and they all disappear.

Timeless in its wondrous, comically absurd effects, Relâche remains one of surrealist art’s finest – and weirdest – achievements. On the evening of the final run in 1924 audiences were treated to an additional divertissement, Ciné-Sketch performed live by Duchamp and a young Swedish model. Miming the exaggerated, sputtering gestures of the early movies, they enacted an absurd farce featuring a thief, a wife, her lover, his wife, a policeman, a maid, a ballerina and – apparently unrelated – Adam and Eve as they appear in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s celebrated painting of 1526. The young Swedish model was a sylph-like and mock-bashful nude; Duchamp played Adam bearded and nude but for a rose in place of Cranach’s fig leaf. The audience loved it, the show got a rousing ovation; Satie and Picabia took their curtain calls in a Citroën 5VC.