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 The Imagery of Surrealism
Book by J. H. Matthews; Syracuse University Press, 1977
PREFACE
SURREALISM first found expression as an attempt to expand the capabilities of linguistic communication. Initially in France, where surrealism originated, its practitioners -- Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Paul Eluard, notably -- were young men who a few years earlier, before the outbreak of the 1914-18 war, already had felt drawn to poetry. None of those whose names are cited in the 1924Manifesto of Surrealism as having "given proof of ABSOLUTE SURREALISM" were painters. Yet over the years surrealism has impressed the public at large primarily through painting. In the long run, a spirit of inquiry which originally seemed destined to leave its mark -- if at all -- upon literature, has gained wide recognition less through the work of writers it has impelled to experiment with words than through that of painters who have drawn inspiration from it.
Now it would be dangerous to attach undue importance to the fact that surrealism has become better known to the general public thanks to its painters than its poets. After all, painting comes much closer than the written text to being universally comprehensible. All the same, the surrealist poet Jean Schuster very rightly has stressed that the two best books on surrealist painting, André Breton's Le Surréalisme et la peinture and José Pierre's Le Surréalisme, "complement one another in saying that surrealist painting is contained in surrealism and not the reverse."
Considering those painters whose art, finding at least some impetus in surrealism, has received most acclaim outside the surrealist movement, we notice they are the very ones whose work has been evaluated most consistently in a manner conflicting with Schuster's views. This, apparently, is because critics incline to share a tendency to minimize their favorite painters' debt to surrealism. They often treat participation in surrealism as an accessory activity on the artist's part, something of a péché de jeunesse, even. Quite exceptionally, Patrick Waldberg gives surrealism full credit for imposing on René Magritte's work its distinctive characteristics. 2 Far more typical of critical commentary is Carola Giedion-Welcker's dismissal of Jean Arp's association with surrealism, in flagrant disregard of Arp's own declaration in his Jours effeuillés: "It was during the surrealist period that my poetic writing and my plastic writing came closest together" (p. 446).
We have the distinct impression that art critics who speak with respect of Max Ernst, André Masson, and Joan Miré, for instance, aim to detach these artists from the surrealist movement, as though affirmation of artistic merit as well as of respectability must presuppose severance of all ties with the surrealists. We shall see that the surrealists' negative attitude toward esthetic preoccupations provides critics with apparently good reasons for thinking it necessary to act this way. Even before examining this attitude, however, we can detect one immediate consequence of a widespread critical approach that virtually eliminates surrealism from discussion, as if it were a stigma to be erased by convenient forgetfulness. Some of the most significant effects of surrealism upon the work of a number of painters who have become famous in the twentieth century are either distorted or ignored altogether. Thus Jacques Dupin, a poet who has nothing to do with surrealism, feels it appropriate to refer to Miré's "dream painting" (from 1925 onward) as "the very opposite of the 'painted dreams' into which other [unnamed] Surrealist painters too often, and too complacently, sank" (p. 162). |
The most Dupin is willing to grant, when he cannot avoid admitting that Miré has acted upon occasion in conformity with surrealist directives, is that he has acted like a surrealist: "Like the Surrealists who had systematized inspiration, he tried deliberately to provoke it by staring fixedly at the rough surface of a floor, or the configurations of clouds, and then letting forms be suggested to him" (p. 162). Dupin devotes a whole chapter to Miró's Constellations without quoting from even one of André Breton's proses paralléles which accompanied their first showing and later publication, while James Thrall Soby conceals the very existence of Breton's poetic commentary on Miró's graphics.
Quite a few surrealists have not stopped short of pronouncing evidence of this kind proof of a "conspiracy of silence" (a phrase more than one of them has used), surrounding surrealism and isolating it. This, they say, has denied surrealism the attention it deserves from the critics and the general public. There are a certain number of signs that such a claim is not without its basis in truth: neglect of surrealism in Waldberg's book on Ernst for instance, and also in John Russell's. All the same, the willingness -- not to say the eagerness -- of former surrealists to forget their origins, together with the active collaboration of those whom they have assisted in their critical writings, does not explain matters entirely. To complete the picture we have to listen to other surrealist commentators whose objectivity assists us in identifying the central problem with which surrealism confronts any outsider proposing to evaluate its expression through painting. At times more directly than others, these men and women have suggested that the critics' reluctance to deal with the impact of surrealism on painting usually points significantly in one direction. It demonstrates surrealism's intractability to assessment by traditional evaluative methods, and calls for a radically new approach which cannot be expected of conventional art criticism.
This matter will receive fuller examination below. For the present, it is enough to note one fact of fundamental importance. Studies of serious proportions, focused on the work of major painters who have made a significant contribution to surrealism, do little to advance our understanding of surrealism itself. Meanwhile, surrealist word poems have not been forgotten by any means in critical circles. Even so, the question of quality and of fairness aside, books about surrealism generally fall into two studiously separated categories: those treating surrealism as "art" and those that speak of it as "literature." Here and there, now and again, a brief allusion to painting appears in a study reserved for what is termed "surrealist literature," while, similarly, the author of a book on "surrealist art" will refer in passing to "literary texts." Nevertheless, the prevailing critical assumption, with which available evidence encourages the reading public to agree, is by and large that the value of a surrealist painting, sculpture, or object has really nothing to do with that of a surrealist poem. There is tacit agreement all around that painting and verbal poetry are to be treated as independent, if roughly parallel, ventures. Generally, what we read about surrealism leaves us free to conclude that nothing connects them organically and that there is no reason to search for a fundamental and necessary link between the things one surrealist commits to canvas and those another puts down on the printed page. |
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