Surrealism

• 1. Introduction

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  Surrealism announced itself to the world with a fistfight. In October 1924, two rival groups of artists and writers each published a manifesto claiming ownership of the same word, and when their leaders, André Breton and Yvan Goll, met at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, they came to blows over it. Breton won that scuffle, and with it the right to define an entire movement. But the question his victory raises is still worth sitting with: what exactly was worth fighting for? What made a single word, "surrealism," so charged that grown men threw punches in a theatre lobby? The answer reaches back to the trenches of World War I, to a hospital ward where a young doctor was using dream analysis to treat soldiers shattered by shellfire, and forward to the walls of the Sorbonne in May 1968, where students spray-painted slogans the Surrealists had coined decades earlier. Surrealism was never just an art movement. It was, as Breton insisted to anyone who would listen, first and foremost a revolutionary project, one that aimed to dissolve the boundary between waking life and the unconscious, between politics and poetry, between what the world is and what it could become.

• 2. The Word Before the Movement

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  Guillaume Apollinaire coined the word "surrealism" in March 1917, and it is worth pausing on that fact. The movement it would name did not yet exist. Apollinaire was writing a letter to the poet Paul Dermée and explained that he preferred "surrealism" over "supernaturalism," a term he had already tried. He then used the new word in his program notes for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes production of Parade, which premiered on the 18th of May 1917. Parade featured a scenario by Jean Cocteau and music by Erik Satie; Apollinaire reached for "surrealistic" to describe the new kind of alliance between its scenery and costumes, calling it "the point of departure for a whole series of manifestations of the New Spirit." He used the term again as both subtitle and preface for his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, a work first written in 1903 and performed in 1917. So the word arrived before the philosophy, attached to a ballet and a drama rather than to a manifesto or a painting. The ideas that would fill the word came later, carried in part by the catastrophe of World War I, which had scattered Paris-based writers and artists across Europe. Many of them gravitated toward Dada, convinced that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had produced the war. When they returned to Paris after the armistice, the Dada current kept flowing, and out of it Surrealism would eventually crystallize.

• 3. Breton and the Making of a Manifesto

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  André Breton had trained in medicine and psychiatry, and during the war he worked in a neurological hospital using Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from shell-shock. That clinical grounding never left him. Back in Paris, he joined the Dada activities and co-founded the literary journal Littérature with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, publishing automatic writing and dream accounts alongside work by others. He and Soupault developed automatism further and published The Magnetic Fields in 1920. By October 1924, when the two surrealist factions each issued their manifestos, Breton's group had a specific argument: that automatism, the practice of writing without censoring thought, was a more effective engine of social change than Dada's anti-art provocations. Goll published his Manifeste du surréalisme on the 1st of October 1924; Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme followed on the 15th of October, published by Éditions du Sagittaire. Breton's victory over Goll was, in the end, a matter of what the source describes as "tactical and numerical superiority," but the aftermath was not clean. The history of Surrealism from that moment on, as the source puts it, was marked by "fractures, resignations, and resounding excommunications." Breton's manifesto offered two interlocking definitions. The dictionary entry called Surrealism "pure psychic automatism," dictation of thought without reason, aesthetics, or morality controlling it. The encyclopedia entry described it as belief in "the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought." A key influence on both was a line from poet Pierre Reverdy: that a juxtaposition of two distant realities, the more distant and true, the stronger the resulting image, with greater emotional power and poetic reality.

• 4. Painting the Unconscious

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  Breton initially doubted that the visual arts could serve the Surrealist project, since painting seemed less open to chance and automatism than writing. His skepticism was broken by a series of techniques: frottage, grattage, and decalcomania. André Masson's automatic drawings from 1923 are often cited as the moment Surrealism genuinely accepted visual art, because they showed the unconscious mind at work on a canvas. Giacometti's 1925 Torso marked a shift toward simplified forms drawn from preclassical sculpture. Giorgio de Chirico had already been developing what he called metaphysical art between 1911 and 1917, and his 1913 painting The Red Tower demonstrated the stark colour contrasts and illustrative style that later Surrealist painters would borrow. His 1914 painting The Nostalgia of the Poet placed a figure with its back to the viewer and set a bust with glasses beside a fish as a relief, a juxtaposition that defies conventional explanation. De Chirico would leave the Surrealist group in 1928, but he had already shaped its visual vocabulary. The first Surrealist exhibition, La Peinture Surrealiste, opened at Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925, displaying works by Masson, Man Ray, Paul Klee, Miró, and others. On the 26th of March 1926, Galerie Surréaliste opened with a Man Ray exhibition, and Breton published Surrealism and Painting in 1928, updating it through the 1960s. By 1931, Magritte produced Voice of Space, in which three large spheres representing bells hang above a landscape, and Tanguy produced Promontory Palace with its molten forms. Dalí's The Persistence of Memory made sagging, melting watches his trademark. Dalí had joined the group in 1929 and spent the years 1930-1935 rapidly establishing the visual style.

• 5. Literature, Film, and Theatre

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  Breton named Les Chants de Maldoror as the first Surrealist work, and he traced his own literary debts explicitly: "In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most." The Surrealists revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, who wrote under the name Comte de Lautréamont, particularly for his line about "the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." Examples of Surrealist literary works include Artaud's Le Pèse-Nerfs from 1926, Aragon's Irene's Cunt from 1927, Péret's Death to the Pigs from 1929, Crevel's Mr. Knife Miss Fork from 1931, Hedayat's The Blind Owl from 1937, and Breton's Sur la route de San Romano from 1948. In cinema, early Surrealist films include René Clair's Entr'acte from 1924, Germaine Dulac's The Seashell and the Clergyman from 1928 with a scenario by Artaud, Man Ray's L'Étoile de mer from 1928, and Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou from 1929, followed by L'Âge d'Or in 1930. In the theatre, Roger Vitrac's The Mysteries of Love from 1927 and Victor, or The Children Take Over from 1928 are considered the best examples of Surrealist drama, despite Vitrac's expulsion from the movement in 1926. Both plays were staged at the Theatre Alfred Jarry, which Vitrac co-founded with Artaud. Artaud went on to develop his theory of the Theatre of Cruelty, envisioning a performance that would link the unconscious minds of performers and spectators in a ritual event where emotion was expressed physically rather than through language. Federico García Lorca also experimented with Surrealism in his plays The Public from 1930, When Five Years Pass from 1931, and Play Without a Title from 1935.

• 6. Politics and Expulsions

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  Breton was explicit that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. In the Declaration of the 27th of January 1925, the Bureau of Surrealist Research, including Breton, Aragon, and Artaud, along with some two dozen others, declared affinity for revolutionary politics. In 1925 the Paris Surrealist group joined the extreme left of the French Communist Party in supporting Abd-el-Krim, leader of the Rif uprising against French colonialism in Morocco. Yet the movement's relationship with organized politics was volatile. In 1933, the Surrealists' assertion that a proletarian literature within a capitalist society was impossible led to their expulsion from the Communist Party; Breton, Éluard, and Crevel were all removed. The Manifesto for a Free Revolutionary Art was published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera but was actually co-authored by Breton and Leon Trotsky. Dalí stood apart: he supported capitalism and the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, and Breton and his associates considered him to have betrayed and left Surrealism entirely. Benjamin Péret, Mary Low, Juan Breá, and Eugenio Fernández Granell joined the POUM during the Spanish Civil War. In 1929, Breton asked members to assess their degree of moral competence, and his second manifesto excluded a long list of figures, including Leiris, Limbour, Morise, Baron, Queneau, Prévert, Desnos, Masson, and Boiffard. Those expelled responded with the pamphlet Un Cadavre, which featured a picture of Breton wearing a crown of thorns. By the end of World War II, Breton's group explicitly embraced anarchism; in 1952 Breton wrote, "It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself." He sheltered the anarchist leader Fontenis while he was in hiding during the Algerian war.

• 7. Exile, Legacy, and Reach

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  World War II forced many Surrealist artists out of Europe. Wolfgang Paalen was the first to leave Paris for the New World, departing in 1939 and eventually settling in Mexico, where he founded his art-magazine Dyn. In 1941, Breton went to the United States and co-founded the short-lived magazine VVV with Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and the American artist David Hare. The American poet Charles Henri Ford and his magazine View offered Breton a channel for promoting Surrealism to a wider American audience. The New York art community included artists like Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell, who converged with the Surrealist exiles; Abstract Expressionism grew directly out of that encounter. Gorky and Paalen in particular influenced the American movement, which, as Surrealism did, treated the instantaneous human act as the source of creativity. William S. Burroughs developed the cut-up technique with former Surrealist Brion Gysin, referring to it as the "Surrealist Lark." Allen Ginsberg cited Artaud's essay "Van Gogh - The Man Suicided by Society" as a direct influence on "Howl," alongside Apollinaire's "Zone" and García Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman." In Paris, Ginsberg and Corso met Tristan Tzara, Duchamp, Man Ray, and Péret, and to show their admiration Ginsberg kissed Duchamp's feet and Corso cut off Duchamp's tie. The Orange Alternative, created in 1981 by Waldemar Fydrych at the University of Wrocław, used Surrealist symbolism in large-scale happenings during the Jaruzelski regime in Poland. Fydrych authored a "Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism," arguing that the communist system had itself become so surrealistic it could be seen as an expression of art. The Group of Czech-Slovak Surrealists never disbanded; their journal Analogon now spans almost 100 volumes.