Vol. 46 No.

11 · 6 June 2024

Big toes are gross

Why Surrealism Matters

A
lthough​André Breton wasn’t the first to use the term ‘surrealism’, he made it his
own with his first Manifesto in 1924. There he defined the fledgling movement as a
‘quest’ to discover ‘the marvellous’ in the mundane and to work towards the ‘future
resolution’ of dreaming and waking. While this lofty goal was new enough, the means
applied to it, such as playful operations of chance and sudden collisions of disparate words or
images, were prepared by Dada. And Breton did start out, along with fellow poets Louis
Aragon and Paul Éluard, in the Dadaist camp, won over by its charismatic leaders, Tristan
Tzara and Francis Picabia, who had converged on Paris as soon as possible after the First
World War. Despite the internationalism of the moment, Breton gave the Surrealist
movement a national cast in the Manifesto. From the Marquis de Sade through Baudelaire and
Rimbaud to Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel, most of the antecedents he named were
French, and he credited the ur-method of Surrealism to two compatriots, Isidore Ducasse
(aka Lautréamont), whose line about ‘the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an
umbrella on an operating table’ was already talismanic, and Pierre Reverdy, who turned this
line into a directive that images be born from ‘a juxtaposition of two more or less distant
realities’. Abrupt encounters – between texts, pictures, things, places and people – became
the staple of Surrealist production, including its greatest novels, Nadja and Le Paysan de Paris.

Dada was one essential prompt for Surrealism; the other was psychoanalysis. In his initial
definition in the Manifesto, Breton took the idea of psychic automatism directly from Pierre
Janet: ‘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 ... in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or
moral concern.’ The Surrealists also borrowed freely from Charcot and Freud, unconcerned
about the methodological divide between Charcot’s visual theatrics and Freud’s talking cure.
Charcot inspired the Surrealists to investigate hypnosis, which they practised in group
sessions, as well as hysteria, which they celebrated in 1928, on the fiftieth anniversary of its
‘discovery’, with photographs of the ‘passionate attitudes’ that Charcot had elicited from his
young female patients. The debt to Freud ran deeper still: without free association there was
no automatic writing, which Breton explored with Philippe Soupault as early as 1920 in Les
Champs magnétiques, and both the interpretation of dreams and the analysis of parapraxes were
central to Surrealist discussions and surveys in the journal La Révolution surréaliste. It was
around these activities, Breton later remarked, that the ‘true collectivisation’ of the
movement occurred.

Breton visited Freud early, in Vienna in 1921, and Salvador Dalí met him late, in London in
1938, but Freud, a conservative in aesthetic matters, was sceptical from start to finish. ‘I was
inclined to look upon the Surrealists,’ he wrote to Stefan Zweig, ‘as absolute (let us say 95 per
cent, like alcohol) cranks.’ One difficulty, perhaps the difficulty, is already apparent in the
definition of Surrealist creation as produced ‘in the absence of any control exercised by
reason’. If the primary aim was somehow to express the unconscious, how could one do so in
such studied forms as poetry, painting and sculpture? (This question was especially vexed in
visual art, which became more prominent as the movement attracted more members.) Along
with chance operations, collaborative experiments – writing, drawing, wandering and
demonstrating together – helped, but only so much. In the end a lot of Surrealism suffers
from the scripting of manifest content with latent meaning: the artist encodes, the viewer
decodes, and the old machinery of symbolic interpretation turns over, only now with a
homemade version of psychoanalysis, rather than the Bible or the classics, as the
iconographic key.

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Left to right, André Breton, Robert Desnos, Joseph Delteil, Simone Breton, Paul and Gala Éluard,
Max Morise and Max Ernst, Paris (c.1924).

The Surrealists knew early texts by Freud, such as The Interpretation of Dreams, The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, but because of
delays in translation not later ones like ‘The Uncanny’ and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. As
celebrants of eros, they might have stayed clear of this thanatotic side of psychoanalysis in
any case, yet such concepts as the compulsion to repeat and the death drive are very pertinent
to Surrealism. Certainly a current of trauma courses through the movement. A one-time
medical student, Breton tended to shell-shocked soldiers during the First World War, and a
recurring trope in his writing is a ‘man cut in two by the window’, the very figure of a divided
subject. Max Ernst, the most traumatophilic of Surrealists, read Freud in the original German
and related the layering of his early collages to the working over of primal fantasies and other
traumatic scenes. These images, which astonished the Surrealists-to-be when they were first
shown in Paris in May 1921, provided the basic template for the Surrealist picture, even for
painters as visually different as René Magritte. While Surrealist images were sometimes
patterned on screen memories, Surrealist objects were often modelled on sexual fetishes,
which, in the Freudian account, are also traumatic in origin, keyed to the unwelcome
discovery of gender difference. This connection is most charged in the ‘disagreeable objects’
of Alberto Giacometti from the early 1930s; his Suspended Ball, a cleft globe hung by a string
just above a phallic wedge, retains its ambivalent force to this day.

Surrealism had an equally complicated relation to politics. For Breton, subjective liberation
was the necessary complement to social revolution: ‘“Transform the world,” Marx said;
“Change life,” Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are but one for us.’ In a review of
Trotsky’s Lenin from 1925, Breton presented communism in Surrealist terms as ‘the most
marvellous agent ever for the substitution of one world for another’, and in 1929, in his Second
Manifesto of Surrealism, he framed the movement in communist terms as devoted to ‘the total
elimination of the claims of a class to which we belong in spite of ourselves’. The French
Communist Party saw matters differently. ‘If you’re a Marxist,’ Breton overheard one party
official bawl at an applicant, ‘you have no need to be a Surrealist.’ It was also in 1929 that
Benjamin characterised the Surrealists as anarchists who, however much they might disquiet
the bourgeoisie (‘to which we belong’), retained ‘a liberal-moral-humanistic concept of
freedom’ that required the discipline of the Party. This was an injunction that Breton couldn’t
abide, all the more so after Zhdanov and Gorky declared the supremacy of Socialist Realism
in 1934 and the Moscow Trials began in 1936, and it led to his estrangement from Aragon and
Éluard, who remained in the Party despite difficulties of their own with its demands. It also
led Breton, in a further affront to the Stalinists, to travel to Mexico City in 1938 to meet with
Trotsky. There Breton stayed with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and worked with Trotsky on
a manifesto titled ‘For an Independent Revolutionary Art’, which Rivera also signed. It
finished with a flourish that recalled the prior conjoining of Marx and Rimbaud: ‘Our aims:
The independence of art – for the revolution; The revolution – for the complete liberation of
art.’ At least rhetorically, at least momentarily, aesthetic autonomy and political commitment
were held together. After the next world war, they would diverge again, with the celebrated
debate between Adorno and Sartre only one indication of the gap.

The internal politics of Surrealism were also fraught. Although purges are as common in
artistic movements as in political ones, in this case they were excessive. Breton relished the
role of excommunicating pope. The decisive split, which came relatively early, featured
dissidents led by Georges Bataille and grouped around the journal Documents, and it cut to the
philosophical heart of Surrealism. In the Second Manifesto Breton recommitted the movement
to the reconciliation of opposed states:

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life
and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the
incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one
may, one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than
the hope of finding and fixing this point.

Breton understood this dialectical resolution in explicitly Hegelian terms: the sur in
Surrealism was dedicated to the above and the beyond, to a transcendence of the real which
was also, for him, the desired effect of imagistic collage and film montage. Adamantly
opposed to such idealism, Bataille argued for the sub in his Surrealism, which he framed as a
subversion of the real from below: hence his concept of a ‘base materialism’ that undercuts
traditional delusions about human nobility (all big toes are gross, even beautiful mouths are
connected to awful anuses and so on). The conflict was in full force at the time of the Second
Manifesto, in which Breton championed ‘sublimation’ and pinned ‘regression’ on Bataille. Yet
Bataille was happy to take up the banner of desublimation: ‘I challenge any art lover,’ he
wrote in 1930, ‘to love a painting as much as a fetishist loves a shoe.’ From our vantage point
each man seems right about the other. With its ‘quest’ for mystical beloveds and magical
objects there was a semi-risible courtliness in Bretonian Surrealism, while Bataille was often,
as Breton remarked, an ‘excrement philosopher’.

In Why Surrealism Matters, Mark Polizzotti, a biographer of Breton and translator of many
Surrealist texts, makes a good case for the varied influence of the movement, especially
regarding sexual politics and anticolonial struggles. He also points to its many complicities.
While communists shunned Surrealism, capitalists exploited it, and several artists met them
halfway. Advertising looked to Surrealism for techniques of subliminal persuasion (Magritte
had a small publicity firm; Man Ray was a renowned fashion photographer), and the movies
tapped Surrealism for ideas about fanciful décor (Dalí advised Hitchcock as well as Disney).
With Pop this surreal aspect of commercial culture was cycled back into art – think of the lush
bits of cited advertisements in paintings by Richard Hamilton or James Rosenquist – and the
two-way traffic has continued ever since. Then, too, there is the notion of the artist as
showman. Art-world impresarios existed before Surrealism – Marinetti qualifies, as does
Tzara, not to mention, say, Courbet – but Dalí took the role of artist-as-provocateur to a new
level, one on which Jeff Koons, Maurizio Cattelan and others perform to this day. Breton
sensed the danger here; though he first embraced Dalí as new blood for the movement, he
later dubbed him, anagrammatically, ‘Avida Dolars’ (Dalí also praised Hitler in a pseudo-
scandalous way that amused no one). But then Breton was hardly innocent of the market
either; he bought and sold art for the couturier Jacques Doucet (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was
one purchase) and traded on his own superb collection of tribal art as well.

Influence comes through dissemination, which is sometimes assisted rather than impeded by
the harshest of historical realities. The Surrealists sought dépaysement, only to suffer it literally
in the Second World War. While some, like Aragon and Éluard, joined the Resistance, others
including Breton left for the United States or Mexico. Although Breton never penetrated the
New York art world as fully as Duchamp (his English remained scant), his presence made it
the effective capital of Surrealism during the war years (he also launched a journal there, with
Duchamp, Ernst and David Hare, called VVV). And though Bretonian Surrealism was opposed
to abstraction, it helped American artists like Jackson Pollock develop an automatist
gesturalism that was more expressive of the unconscious than any Surrealist dreamscape.
Such was also its effect on postwar artists in Europe like the Cobra painters, who were
influenced by Surrealism even as they resisted it, especially after the paternalistic Breton
returned in 1946.

The Situationists, some of whom, like Asger Jorn and Constant, came out of Cobra, chafed
even more under what was now the old guard. ‘There was the father we hated, Surrealism,’
Michèle Bernstein stated simply. ‘And there was the father we loved, Dada.’ Her partner, Guy
Debord, gave this triangulation a dialectical flourish in The Society of the Spectacle: ‘Dadaism
sought to abolish art without realising it; Surrealism sought to realise art without abolishing
it. The critical position since developed by the Situationists demonstrates that the abolition
and the realisation of art are inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art.’ In this
move to leapfrog Surrealism, however, Situationism depended on both its camps. The
Situationist practices of détournement and dérive drew from Bretonian Surrealism – from its
reinscription of found images and objects, and its resistance to a Paris given over to
commercial homogeneity and bureaucratic routine. Meanwhile, the Situationist search for a
relation to the object-world not dominated by the commodity form drew on Bataillean
Surrealism – on its elaboration of ideas about the gift and the potlatch that it had developed
in turn from Marcel Mauss. Finally, the concern with the everyday and the vécu, which
pervaded French thinking in the 1950s, was also indebted to Surrealism, even if the key
theorist of the quotidien, Henri Lefebvre, had no love for Breton either.

As Polizzotti notes, Surrealists had a role in anticolonial politics too. In 1931, when a colonial
exhibition was staged in Paris with great fanfare, they mounted a small counter-show called
The Truth about the Colonies, and in collective tracts they railed against the French occupation of
Vietnam and Algeria throughout the 1940s and 1950s. On a personal level Breton was close to
the Afro-Cuban-Chinese artist Wifredo Lam in Paris, and on his way to New York in 1941 he
spent several weeks in Martinique, where he met with Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, key figures
in the négritude movement (Aimé had published his great Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in
1939). Yet sometimes there was a primitivist dimension to these relationships. Lam once
remarked that he felt like an ‘exotic creature’ among the Surrealists, and the very enthusiasm
for Oceanic, Mexican and Indigenous American arts promoted by Breton, Ernst and others
was also a way not to attend to contemporary racisms. In the end ‘ethnographic Surrealism’
(to borrow a term from James Clifford) aimed to estrange the self rather than to understand
the other; in L’Afrique fantôme, for example, we learn far more about its author, Michel Leiris,
than we do about Africa. Contemporary exhibitions such as Surrealism beyond Borders at Tate
Modern and Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940 at the Modern Art
Museum of Fort Worth, Texas suggest that the movement does have a part to play in the
current project to decolonise art history, however.*

Breton died in 1966 at the age of seventy, and his appointed successor, Jean Schuster,
disbanded the group in 1969; as one late recruit remarked after the events of May 1968, the
Surrealists had been ‘passed on the left’. Yet Surrealism lived on beyond its heyday in a
number of ways. Breton once referred to Marx and Freud as ‘communicating vessels’, and
Surrealism does count as an early Freudo-Marxism, a synthesis sought by many others,
including Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, some well into the 1960s. By
that time, however, structuralism was dominant in France and, despite the friendship Lévi-
Strauss and Breton forged in New York, it was no ally to Surrealism. Poststructuralism was
even less so. Yet Surrealist traces persist even there. Although Lacan reread Freud through
structural linguistics, he was formed in the milieu of Surrealism (he completed his doctoral
thesis on one of its favourite subjects, paranoia, in 1932), and some of his signature ideas –
desire is founded in lack, language ‘insists’ in the unconscious, the gaze holds a threat of
castration – have a Surrealist orientation. Even Foucault and Deleuze alluded to the
movement. In the late 1960s they looked back on Surrealism as the moment when ‘the
simulacrum’ – an image that is neither representational nor abstract but which retains a
resemblance to the world even as it affirms no reality at all – was released into the culture.
They did so in the context of Pop (they refer explicitly to Warhol), which is even more
simulacral than Surrealism, and so carries on Surrealism in its own way too.

F
or many other​artists and critics, though, Surrealism was a bad object. According to
strict advocates of abstract painting such as Clement Greenberg, it was too illusionistic
and literary, not formally rigorous or specific enough, to count as properly modernist.
And this anti-Surrealist posture, which was also anti-subjective, was carried forward by
Minimalists and Conceptualists, who otherwise broke with the formalist model of
modernism. Soon cracks appeared in this front. The ‘eccentric abstraction’ of artists such as
Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois recalled the fetishistic dimension of the Bretonian object
even as it reshaped it to feminist ends, and the base materialism advocated by Bataille made a
partial comeback in the ‘abject art’ of the 1990s. Today, with modernist proscriptions long
proscribed in turn, Surrealism can be seen everywhere in art – imagistic, subjective and erotic
as it so often is. This is not to suggest that the sexual politics of Surrealism are now resolved.
As Polizzotti reminds us, there were more women in this movement than in most others, but
they featured as objects more than subjects, muses more than makers. At the same time, if
there were any hysterics in Surrealism, they were the men of the movement, and this ‘male
trouble’ has had a paradoxical benefit. The fascination with ‘convulsive beauty’ (Breton), the
drive to disturb ‘the principle of identity’ (Ernst), might be the most important legacy of
Surrealism for feminist art and theory, which took up the question of ‘sexuality in the field of
vision’ in the 1980s (as Jacqueline Rose referred to it then). In any case, today the women of
Surrealism are esteemed as much as the men, if not more. Meret Oppenheim received a major
retrospective last year, and women Surrealists featured prominently in the 2022 Venice
Biennale, whose title, ‘The Milk of Dreams’, was borrowed from Leonora Carrington.

Surrealism also persisted in literature, clearly in magical realism and less obviously in other
forms. The French celebration of écriture in the 1960s recalled, in its assertion that language is
its own motive force, the Surrealist experiment with automatic writing, whether the
association was desired or not. And in the Anglophone world a connection might be made
between the ‘paranoid-critical method’ of Dalí, defined as the ‘systematic objectification of
delirious associations and interpretations’, and the crazy-enough-to-be-true projections of
Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (who wrote incisively
about Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York
School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others: ‘We all “grew up Surrealist”,’ Ashbery once
remarked, ‘without even being aware of it.’ Surrealist directives – to suspend rational control
as much as possible, to let language dictate, to hold to the first thought as the best thought –
often guided these poets. Yet the juxtapositions of an Ashbery poem are not produced to
shock; often the affect is more fluid or flat than charged. It is a Surrealism without the
unconscious (if that still qualifies), or perhaps an unconscious that is now seen to be loose in
the world (which is the way Ballard conceived his version of Surrealism).

Certainly surreal juxtapositions are everywhere around us today; our urban environments are
immersive panoramas of habituated collisions. Breton ended his first Manifesto with
fragments of newspaper headlines offered up as marvellous found poetry: ‘A burst of
laughter/of sapphire in the island of Ceylon’. When I asked a friend about the Surrealist
dimension in contemporary poetry, he texted me a photo of a sign in an elevator he happened
to be in: ‘When fire hat is lit, return cab to lobby.’ Today the fire hat is always lit, the cab
simply rumbles on, and almost no one notices. It is normal.

This points to the greatest difference between Surrealism then and now. In its first decade
‘transgression’ was the watchword: Breton advocated it, at least in principle, and Bataille
both practised and theorised it. There was a residual bourgeois order with more or less clear
lines to violate. Luis Buñuel transgressed them in his great Surrealist films of the late 1920s,
Un Chien Andalou and L’Âge d’Or, both made with Dalí: images such as the eyeball sliced by a
razor blade in Un Chien Andalou can’t be unseen. Yet the conditions of law and transgression
changed after the Second World War, the years of reconstruction in Europe. In an interview
from the early 1950s, Breton put it like this: ‘The spirit was then [in the 1920s] threatened by
congealing whereas today it is threatened by dissolution.’ Buñuel also viewed the situation
differently by the 1960s. In The Exterminating Angel he has his bourgeois protagonists dine
together but fail to depart, and in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie things only get worse: they
attempt to dine together but fail each time. ‘Buñuel himself is not outside the world he
criticises, he is part of it, and so are his friends and family,’ Michael Wood wrote in the LRB of
7 September 2000 (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n17/michael-wood/that-wooden-leg) : ‘Social
arrangements are foolish and apparently fragile, because they are arbitrary and groundless.
Everything about them could be different, and is different in other times and places ... And
yet it is because these arrangements are arbitrary and groundless that we have so little
purchase on them, and they seem so strangely unchangeable.’ In effect, the bourgeoisie failed
to exit the historical stage, or to be given the hook by another class strong enough to displace
it. And in this state, both stalled and chaotic, the bourgeoisie (or whatever counts as the
bourgeoisie) carries on to this day, now bolstered by a disruptive economy of finance capital.
In short, law and order are hardly what they were when Surrealism was summoned into
being, and neither is transgression. In fact, in our nihilistic phase of neoliberalism,
transgression is the domain of the King Ubus of the world, like Donald Trump. Surrealism
has been passed on the right.
Footnotes
* Hal Foster reviewed Surrealism beyond Borders in the LRB of 26 May 2022.