This is the opening section of my introduction to the catalogue of the Dulwich Picture Gallery's exhibition, British Surrealism (2020).
Surrealism … is first and foremost a method of investigation and contains in itself a force which has always existed, a faculty as permanent as dreaming. Of course, Surrealism is an historical phenomenon … but its faith is that it always has existed, and always will.
Georges Hugnet, ‘1870 to 1936’, in Surrealism, edited by Herbert Read (1936)[1]
‘Except for André Breton,’ the young English Surrealist poet David Gascoyne wrote in 1935, ‘the Surrealist movement could never have existed, for it is as difficult to imagine it without him as it is to imagine psycho-analysis without Freud.’[2] Born in Normandy in 1896 to a family of modest standing, Breton had just started training for a medical career when the Great War erupted in July 1914. Conscripted into the artillery, he was eventually assigned to the Service de Santé des Armées, working behind the front lines with the casualties of war. In 1916 he had the good fortune to meet the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), one of the leading figures in the Parisian avant-garde. Around the same time he met Jacques Vaché, an eccentric young writer, painter and soldier who had also been hospitalized by his war injuries. Breton was fascinated by Vaché’s love of costume and disguise: ‘He created an atmosphere for himself that was both dramatic and full of spirit,’ Breton recorded, ‘while arming himself with a pack of lies that he would toss out with no compunction.’[3] Vaché could only survive the horrors of the Great War – as gruesomely delineated in Percy Delf Smith’s 1919 etching, Death Awed – by finding humour in it. ‘How funny it all is!’, he wrote to Breton following his return to the Western Front in the summer of 1917.[4] At the height of the conflict, as Breton later recorded, ‘It was everything just to stay alive … Writing or even thinking were no longer sufficient in themselves. It was necessary at all costs to give ourselves the feeling of movement, of noise.’[5]
Later that year Breton was transferred to a psychiatric centre attached to the French Second Army. There, in daily contact with mentally traumatized soldiers, he encountered the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis attempted to penetrate the traumatized unconscious through such techniques as the close examination of dreams, jokes and free-association, and our concealed attitudes to – and fears of – sex, ridicule and death. In a world purporting to be highly civilized, yet descending into the throes of mass-suicide, Freud’s work was deeply influential. Breton started recording the stream-of-consciousness accounts of the patients in what was in effect an early example of Surrealist ‘automatic writing’.[6] And then he discovered the mysterious Isidore Ducasse, better known by his pen name, the Comte de Lautréamont, author of The Songs of Maldaror (1868-9). The last link in this haphazard chain of causation was the art of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, whose curious metaphysical work Breton first saw in Paris.
These were the literary, painterly and experiential foundations of what would grow to become one of the most outrageous and influential cultural movements of the twentieth century. The word ‘surreal,’ now such a commonplace, was first coined by Apollinaire in 1917. The French prefix ‘sur,’ which means ‘above’ or ‘more than’, suggested for Apollinaire a realism pushed or extended beyond itself. But in Breton’s interpretation it was intended to have a much wide range of senses: exaggeration, paradox, surprise, absurdity, the marvellous and the irrational. Apollinaire died of Spanish flu two days before the Armistice of November 1918, whilst Vaché – who ‘objected to being killed in wartime’ – died in Nantes in January 1919 from an overdose of opium that Breton considered deliberate.[7] By this date, Breton had joined a subversive new cultural movement. Conceived by the young Romanian poet Tristan Tzara in neutral Switzerland in 1916, Dada is perhaps best described as a highly provocative, anarchic ‘Art to end Art’. A reaction to the horrors and absurdities of the War, it merged painting, sculpture, music and poetry with performance, its participants congregating at the Cabaret Voltaire, a small bar in Zurich that hosted exhibitions and variety shows. Dada’s participants were young German, French and Romanian exiles and escapees from the war, none of whom, as one member recorded, with ‘much appreciation for the kind of courage it takes to get shot for the idea of a nation which is at best a cartel of pelt merchants and profiteers in leather, at worst a cultural association of psychopaths’.[8]
The Zurich Dadaists were united by their pacifism, their hatred of international politics and their love of culture. In their banners, posters, performances, collages, sculptures, music, songs, poetry and paintings they seemingly collapsed all meaning into the nonsensical babblings of a baby, or the playful ridiculousness of a child’s hobby-horse. ‘Dada was a spectacular form of suicide,’ David Gascoyne recorded in 1935, ‘a manifestation of almost lunatic despair ... the concrete expression of an almost universal state of mind, a state of mind that had existed even before the outbreak of the War.’[9] In 1917 Tzara opened a Dada Gallery in Zurich exhibiting works by an eclectic range of avante-garde continental artists, including Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Amedeo Modigliani.[10] But the movement was open to all – if they had the imagination.[11] Along with fellow French poets Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, and the painter Francis Picabia, Breton eagerly joined the Dadaists, their Parisian group paralleling off-shoots that sprung up in Berlin, Hanover, Cologne and New York.
Dada quickly became the avant-garde movement du jour, heralded (if far from understood) worldwide. In April 1920 a British journalist in Paris wrote that the secret of Dadaism ‘apparently is to say anything ridiculous that comes into your head.[12] Tzara and Breton soon fell out, however, with Breton announcing in 1921 that ‘the only way for Dada to continue is for it to cease to exist.’[13] By that date he was already experimenting with what would become his new movement: he later identified 1920 as the year his explorations in language ‘assumed the name of Surrealism, a word fallen from the lips of Apollinaire, which we diverted from the rather general and much more confusing connotation he had given it.’[14]
Surrealism was officially launched in October 1924, when two rival factions published their respective manifestoes. A brief conflict over authority followed, which Breton and his allies won. But whilst Surrealism promised freedom, Breton strictly controlled its official participants, and members could be expelled if they failed to meet his rigid expectations. He was thus not always liked, and made enemies among those who, whilst admiring Surrealism’s aims, did not wish to be so closely regulated. Rightly or wrongly, in the British Surrealist Desmond Morris’s opinion Breton was ‘a pompous bore, a ruthless dictator, a confirmed sexist, an extreme homophobe and a devious hypocrite.’[15] Yet Morris, like many other Surrealists, drew on the dynamism that sprang from its debates and disagreements, and which seemed to feed the movement, driving it ever onwards.
As a writer rather than an artist, Breton penned the Surrealists’ chief texts, as well as publishing his own surreal poems and novels. His manifesto offered precise definitions of the new movement:
SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought’s dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.
ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of the dream and in the disinterested play of thought. It tends definitely to do away with all other psychic mechanisms and substitute itself tor them in the solution of the principal problems of life.[16]
Surrealism revelled in dreams, juxtapositions, unconscious acts, chance, déjà vu, madness, surprise, disinhibition and the exploration of the subconscious. As Breton declared: ‘I believe in the future resolution of those two states, apparently contradictory, dream and reality, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may say.’[17]
As well as looking to the future, Surrealism also looked backwards – to various progenitors and ‘pre-surrealist’ figures. These included controversial writers such as the Marquis de Sade, whom Apollinaire had once described as ‘the freest spirit who ever existed’.[18] The poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Lautréamont were all also named as precedents of the Surreal in literature, and in 1936 Georges Hugnet published an essay tracing ‘a thread of Surrealism’ leading back at least as far as 1870. As he explained, Surrealism’s faith was ‘that it always has existed, and always will.[19] For as Apollinaire had previously pointed out: ‘When man wished to imitate walking, he created the wheel – which does not resemble a leg. In this way he committed an act of surrealism without knowing it.’[20]
[1] Georges Hugnet, ‘1870 to 1936’, in Herbert Read (ed.), Surrealism (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), pp. 187-8.
[2] David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1935), p. 58.
[3] André Breton, ‘The disdainful confession’ (1924), in André Breton, Jaques Vaché: War Letters, translated and edited by Paul Lenti, The Printed Head, Vol. 3, no. 1 (1993), 17.
[4] Ibid. p. 40.
[5] Ibid. p. 17.
[6] See Clifford Browder, Andre Breton: Arbiter of Surrealism (Geneva: Droz, 1969), pp. 6-8.
[7] André Breton, ‘The disdainful confession’ (1924), p. 20 and p. 49.
[8] Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘En avant Dada: A history of Dadism’ (1920), in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (New York: George Winterborn, 1951), p. 23.
[9] Gascoyne, Short Survey, p. 24.
[10] Ibid, p. 27.
[11] Huelsenbeck, ‘En avant Dada’, pp. 28-9.
[12] ‘Paris week by week,’ The Observer, 4 April 1920.
[13] Quoted in Gascoyne, Short Survey, p. 42.
[14] Andre Breton, ‘Surrealism: Yesterday, To-Day and To-Morrow,’ This Quarter, vol. 5, no. 1, September 1932, p. 14.
[15] Desmond Morris, The Lives of the Surrealists (London: Thames and Hudson, 2018), p. 52.
[16] From André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), quoted in Gascoyne, Short Survey, pp. 61-2.
[17] André Breton, Manifeste du Surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1924), quoted in Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 70.
[18] Neil Cox, ‘Critique of pure desire, or when the Surrealists were right,’ in Jennifer Mundy, Surrealism: Desire Unbound (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), p. 248.
[19] Georges Hugnet, ‘1870 to 1936’, in Herbert Read (ed.), Surrealism (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), pp. 187-8.
[20] Quoted in Willard Bohn, The Rise of Surrealism: Cubism, Dada and the Pursuit of the Marvelous (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 135.
