Surrealism’s journey into obscurity after Le Surréalisme en 1947 was confirmed and accelerated by the increasing dominance then triumph of modernist, formalist criticism and art history in America and Europe in the 1950s. In attempting to collate, revive, revisit and revise Surrealist readings of the painting that followed Impressionism, the purpose of this book has been to reveal not only alternative interpretations by Surrealism to the formalist ones of the canonical artists of the fin de siècle, but also the means by which its focus on the allusive, metaphorical, mythic, poetic or magic resonance of art can intervene and provide a critical perspective within that canon.
Most books on Surrealism give a special place to André Breton’s writings (not to mention his personality) and that is the case for mine, too. That will be criticized, no doubt, by those who currently see the texts of Georges Bataille as a more credible guide to Surrealism and to twentieth-century art as a whole, even as the positivist détournement Bataille’s writings undergo to make them amenable to rationalist art history converts them into something far tamer than Breton’s theory of art-as-divination. However, Breton’s writings over a period of half a century have been encountered here in many different ways and put to many different purposes. They have been in no way presented as the sole means by which modernism is tested against Surrealism, even if a ‘future continent’ or enchanted ground was what he demanded Surrealism seek in the visual arts as opposed to ‘logical structure’, ‘formal design’ or whatever.
As I said in my first chapter, Breton was the one who temporarily bucked the general trend in Surrealism to discard Cézanne by discerning a mediumistic tendency in his practice. Here and in my second chapter, the young Breton was oddly indulgent of Impressionism and Renoir in his earliest writing on art until Surrealism settled on a set of theoretical positions that complicated its relationship with modernism and entailed their revocation. Elsewhere, here, Breton was more of an interlocutor, attempting and failing to comprehend the turn taken by Magritte’s style in the 1940s towards Impressionism. It was important to lay some necessary contextual groundwork in the Second World War and occupation of Belgium for Magritte’s adoption of a free version of Renoir’s style, on which I offered my own interpretation in the absence of any specialized scholarship on those paintings. I demonstrated how far Magritte strayed from Surrealism and how true Breton stayed to the implications of his 1930s writings in the frequently disparaged later phase in which Surrealism engaged fully with magic and the occult. I also wanted to place Breton’s hopeful vision of a political art in the earlier period in contrast with postmodernism’s pessimistic departure from the modernist project and show how Magritte’s Renoir style fits into neither, hence its lack of commentary till now.
It was in my third chapter on the reception of Seurat in France that Breton comes across most markedly as an important figure. This is observable not just in his, at once, unfashionable and counter-intuitive commitment to that artist from the 1920s, but also in his remarkable dialectical re-reading of Seurat in the 1940s, which opens out onto a rethinking of the entire ‘project’ of modern art itself. Breton broke a path onto the appreciation of Seurat within Surrealism that allowed the inclusion of the artist’s drawings in Minotaure in the late 1930s. In my fourth chapter, those become the means by which I looked at what I understand to be the overriding tonal theme of that magazine, quite beyond any essential identity that can be ascribed to Seurat’s drawings (as nocturnes, for instance). This was carried out more with reference to the text of Pierre Mabille and through comparison with the photography of Brassaï, which gave Minotaure its house style, but can be read as a kind of ‘Bretonism’ in the absence of Breton himself.
The emphasis in my fifth chapter on Gauguin was shared between Breton and other writers, too. I showed that René Huyghe and Charles Estienne both had contact with Surrealism from the 1930s to the 1950s and played significant roles in attuning Gauguin’s aims and paintings to Surrealism at the midpoint of the twentieth century by taking up questions of epistemology and pedagogy respectively. My sixth chapter, also on Gauguin, returned to episodes that took place in Brittany and were recorded by Breton in Mad Love, and were alluded to in my first chapter on Cézanne. Like that chapter, this final one took the liberty of proposing a Surrealist reading of Gauguin that the Surrealists never got around to articulating fully themselves. However, it was hinted at by Breton, and my interpretation took the Celtic Brittany as that has been understood inside and outside the movement as its point of departure. Breton had plenty to say about Gauguin from about 1950. But, at the most, those chapters were shaped by his wider ‘influence’ as a curator, example, mediator, interlocutor, enemy and so on, set against the imposing and even intimidating shadow of historical Surrealism.
His hard-to-define presence extends well outside of Breton’s own writings specifically and I only began to comprehend its expanse in the writing of this book, without grasping it, obviously. I am trying unsuccessfully to name the scarcity of what we can understand historically of an artist or writer merely through their ‘complete works’ or biography, the elusiveness of the channels through which their stereotypes, metaphors, theories, thoughts or opinions circulate in their own time and after. For that reason, I felt able to close my book with an epilogue that examined the interpretation of van Gogh by former Surrealist Antonin Artaud, made at a time Surrealism was exhibiting its new occultist paradigm in Paris in 1947 and Artaud was rejecting it in (sometimes imagined) dialogue with Breton.
Without having it as my main aim, I also set out in this last part of my book the origins of how Surrealism as an avant-garde (which is how it has been understood by many), as well as Breton’s writing as the conduit by which we might understand it, came to be challenged in academic writing by those proposing Artaud and Bataille as the most relevant of his contemporaries in France and even as more valuable in the interpretation of twentieth-century art. Given the way such readings have ‘gone viral’, as they say, in university courses in cultural studies, literary theory and particularly in my own discipline, art history, much of this book can be seen as a kind of proposed corrective attempting to re-establish ‘Breton’ as an array of means for evaluating art and criticism (inseparable, admittedly, from ‘Surrealism’), and also to restore André Breton as a considerable writer on modern art and a critic of modernism.