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| Max Ernst, Quietude (1929) |
The late art critic Robert Hughes (1938-2012) concluded about Surrealism in “The Threshold of Liberty,” episode 5 of his documentary The Shock of the New (1980), “So what remains of Surrealism? Not much. It became exactly it set out not to be. A style, and not a very durable style at that. … Surrealism was completely digested within a matter of 50 years….”
Was Hughes correct?
First, there must be an agreement as to the beginnings of Surrealism. Looking to someone who coined the word then that would have been the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), and his forward-looking approach to the Arts as a progressive human endeavor predates WW1. Even before Apollinaire, and noting an individual the Surrealists liked to reference, was the writer Isidore Ducasse (1846-1870), aka Comte de Lautreamont, and his Songs of Maldoror (1868-1869).
Also, because of his medical treatments of the depressed and the deviant using “the talking cure” of psychotherapy and the investigation of dreams, the surrealists counted Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) as a foundational thinker.
True, there was nothing quite paralleling these ideas except for perhaps the symbolist painting in the 19th century. In any case, as an overall intellectual movement the roots of Surrealism began to develop in the late 19th century in the literary approaches of Ducasse and Apollinaire as well as the work of Freud.
And then came the war to end all wars.
World War I, or as more usually labeled today as WW1, spurred several artists and literati to counter the reality of this disaster through the Dada movement. Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara aka Samuel Rosenstock, Hannah Hoch, Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp…well, you get the idea, many powerful creative minds combined to effect the catastrophe in literary and visual venues. This journey to a reality that is meaningless in terms of naïve realism was one more catalyst to the formation of the surrealists.
Another foundation was the work of the painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and his imagery of haunting angst derived from the work of symbolists Max Klinger and Arnold Bocklin. The odd juxtaposition of people, architecture, and objects led to another vision of the world that Apollinaire called “metaphysical.” That did not straighten out a popular misunderstanding of that philosophical term, but it stuck. Displaying people and architecture and objects even more prominently by their unusual placement gave de Chirico’s work the look of a dream.
Thus, following Dada and merging with it, including writers and artists of that movement, a group began to form in Paris in the 1920s, and the crystallization of that attitude was Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto (1924). Each of those in the group became well known in their fields and among them were Max Ernst (collage), Man Ray (photography), Rene Magritte (painting), Paul Eluard (poetry), Luis Bunuel (film), and of course, Andre Breton himself (literature).
The aspiration was freedom, liberte, in all things. I do not know offhand if those as Breton or Louis Aragon explored the ancient movement of the Cynics, the “dog” philosophy, wherein one eschewed social convention for the convenience of nature. I believe it makes for an intriguing parallel, however.
Following WW2, the Surrealist movement broke up as a unified group but the attitudes remained among each as they continued their work. So, was Hughes right about them? I don’t think he summed up the result in its entirety. When I see abstract expressionism, I see the surrealist automatic writing of Andre Masson; when I view an assemblage or collage, I see the surrealist juxtaposition of materials of Max Ernst; when I see time-shifts or dislocations in movies, I see the film of Luis Bunuel; and when I see use of pop imagery, I see any number of surrealist painters as Rene Magritte.
It is now nearly 150 years later since the seeds of Surrealism fertilized the Art world and I see its growth continue in the various arts. On that score of endurance, I think Hughes was incorrect. And yet Hughes did add to his evaluation that Surrealism as a movement of the mind, if not of visual art, is “a very durable spirit, and it’s hard to exorcise.”
