In the years 1868 and 1869 a dark and darkly comic prose poem called Les Chants de Maldoror was published in Paris under the name of the enigmatic Comte de Lautréamont. The hero – an anti-hero indeed – of this collage of sadistic torture and misanthropy is the deranged Maldoror, who rails against God and utterly despises all social convention. Towards the end of the book, this hideous force of twisted nature, lusting after a 16-year-old flaxen-haired innocent, lasciviously compares his beauty to ‘the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table’.
‘Lautréamont’ was in fact the pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse, an obscure French writer, who died in 1870, aged just 24, during the Siege of Paris which hastened the end of the Franco-Prussian war. Largely forgotten for nearly half a century, Ducasse was fortuitously rediscovered by a group of artists and writers who, in the shadow of a far greater conflict in Europe, were attracted both by his utter repudiation of Western society and culture and by his startling and unsettling use of language. Above all, they admired the violence with which he rejected the ordinary notions of rationality and reality that were foisted on an unthinking public by force of habit and convention.
Beyond Dada In 1918 a copy of Ducasse’s book fell into the hands of the French poet and critic André Breton, who was impressed, among other things, with the way the author had juxtaposed strange and apparently unrelated images. Soon-to-be founder and leading theorist of Surrealism, Breton was at this time linked with its principal forerunner, Parisian Dada. The Dadaists, too, were motivated by revulsion against the rationalism which they felt had dragged Europe into the horrors of the First World War; and they too were fascinated by the bizarre and the irrational, wishing to shake and shock society out of its complacency. But while Dada was ultimately subversive and nihilistic – ‘essentially anarchic’ and marked by a ‘certain spirit of negation’, as Breton would later say – Surrealism was more positive in its ambitions and aimed to transform society through revolution. (Many Surrealists, including Breton, joined the Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s, although the association was always strained and did not last.)
From around 1920 a group led by Breton, disillusioned with Dada’s essential negativity, began to break away. Already by this date Breton had begun to experiment with ‘automatism’, a method of writing (later extended to drawing) which attempted to remove movement of the hand from conscious control, so freeing the unconscious mind to take over. The first product of this technique – Les Champs magnétiques (Magnetic Fields), co-written with his friend Philippe Soupault – was published in 1920. Automatism remained a fundamental concern for the Surrealists, and it is central to the definition of Surrealism that Breton gives in the first Surrealist Manifesto, which was published in 1924 and is usually considered to mark the official start of the movement. (It is also at this point that Breton lays claim to the name ‘Surrealism’, which had originally been coined by his friend, the recently dead poet Guillaume Apollinaire.) Surrealism, Breton tells us in the Manifesto, is:
‘Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which it is intended to express, either verbally, or in writing, or in any other way, the true functioning of thought. Thought expressed in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and outside all moral and aesthetic considerations. Surrealism rests on belief in the higher reality of specific forms of association, previously neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams, and in the disinterested play of thought.’
The influence of Freudian psychology, in which supreme significance is accorded to the power of the unconscious, is felt throughout the Manifesto. The ultimate goal of Surrealism, in Breton’s view, is to transform and merge ‘those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality’. It is precisely the purpose of techniques such as automatism to break down the boundaries between dream and reality, reason and madness, objective and subjective experience. As he wrote later, in Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (1928), the ‘fundamental discovery of Surrealism’ is that ‘without any preconceived intention, the pen which hastens to write, or the pencil which hastens to draw, produces an infinitely precious substance all of which … seems to bear with it everything emotional that the poet harbours within him’.
Automatic painters Initially Surrealism was concerned predominantly with literary activity and had a somewhat awkward relationship with the visual arts (Breton endorsed painting as a Surrealist activity while also describing it as a ‘lamentable expedient’). By the mid-1920s, however, several artists, mainly former members of Dada, were attempting to adapt the techniques of automatic writing to produce works that flowed spontaneously from the subconscious. And like the Surrealist poets (and the Dadaists before them), they were fascinated by the role of chance in the creative process.
‘The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly …’
André Breton, 1930
In 1925 Max Ernst, earlier an important figure in German Dada, pioneered various techniques that allowed an initial, partial image to be produced by chance, which could then be developed further, either by the artist or in the mind of the spectator. ‘Frottage’ involved rubbing graphite over grained surfaces such as floor boards, ‘upon which a thousand scrubbings had deepened the grooves’. In ‘grattage’, Ernst would scrape away the upper layers of paint to reveal unexpected patterns in the layers beneath.
Breton described the Spanish artist Joan Miró as ‘probably the most Surrealistic of us all’, but in fact he never officially joined the group and always clung to his highly distinctive personal vision. Harlequin’s Carnival (1924–5) was inspired by the author’s ‘hallucinations brought on by hunger’. The teeming canvas presents a joyous gathering of fantastic creatures resembling bees, cats and shrimps, which make music and frolic playfully around a scattering of abstract and semi-abstract shapes and signs that have surfaced from the artist’s subconscious imagination.
Snapshots of the impossible By 1930 many Surrealist artists, feeling the limitations of automatism as a means of exploring the subconscious, had turned to other techniques. An important influence was the Italian Giorgio de Chirico, who, in the decade before the release of the first Surrealist Manifesto, had painted stark and depopulated piazzas into which trains, tailor’s dummies and other incongruous elements had been eerily introduced. The Belgian artist René Magritte started to paint his distinctive ‘snapshots of the impossible’: meticulously detailed and apparently naturalistic scenes in which the banal and the bizarre are startlingly and disturbingly juxtaposed.
the condensed idea
The omnipotence of dreams