on, which he used instead of painting materials to produce abstract compositions. In one of them, a scrap of the word “KomMERZbank” turned up, and he started to call his creative work “Merz”, which was no less absurd a name than Dada itself. The spontaneous method of work on the Merz compositions, together with the results of the method – the abstract “colours without form” – positioned Schwitters in the first rank of those artists from Dada who became the founders of Surrealism.
The international Surrealist movement of the future found one of the most significant of its masters from among Dada’s Germans. Max Ernst lived in Cologne. Drafted into the army for the duration of the war, Ernst returned to his native Westphalia in 1919. Hans Arp came to him in Cologne, bringing with him his experience of the Zürich Dadaists. Ernst and Arp were joined by a Cologne artist and poet who was well-known under the pseudonym of Johannes Theodor Baargeld. The young Cologne intellectuals, like their counterparts in Berlin, were involved in the revolutionary movement of 1918 and 1919. Under the influence of Arp, the Cologne Dadaists preferred to confine their activity entirely within the framework of aesthetics. It is particularly interesting that these three – Ernst, Arp and Baargeld – worked in the field of collage. Ernst used images he had cut out of didactic works. Arp chaotically distributed the configurations that he had arbitrarily cut out over cardboard. Baargeld made extremely varied Dadaist compositions. Together they created anonymous works which, as a joke, they called “Fatagaga” – “Fabrication de tableaux garantis gazometriques”. The three artists called their collective “Centrale W/3”, and a small number of other Dada supporters gathered around them. The culmination of the Dadaist performances in Cologne was a scandal at the back-door of the Wintera beer-cellar in April 1920, when the exhibitors’ defiant behaviour irritated viewers. In the exhibition, objects were shown which the viewers could not understand, and which were painted with a very individual sense of humour. The displays foreshadowed the future works of Surrealism. Breton invited Max Ernst to the Dada exhibition in Paris. However, as a result of political complications, Ernst was unable to travel outside Germany, and he only met Breton, Tzara and Éluard in the summer of 1921 when he visited the Tyrol. A year later, Ernst moved to Paris where all the important figures in the Dadaist movement had come together after the war. The first shoots of Surrealism grew out of their experience.
Salvador Dalí, Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone, 1938.
Oil on canvas, 54 × 65 cm.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Dada in Paris
The beginnings of Surrealism within Dada are connected, in the first instance, to poetry rather than to the visual arts. At the centre, as the symbol that united the Dadaist poets, was Guillaume Apollinaire. After he left the hospital, Apollinaire saw his disciples every Tuesday at gatherings at the Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Earlier on, he had met the young poet André Breton who had visited him in the hospital in 1916, immediately after the trepanation of his skull.
André Breton himself contained all the immense energy which led to the emergence of Surrealism. He was born in 1896 in the little town of Tinchenbray, in Normandy in the north of France. His parents strove to give their only son a good education. In 1913, he began to study medicine in Paris, and was preparing for a future as a psychiatrist. The war got in the way. Breton was drafted into the artillery, but, as a future doctor, he was ordered to serve as a medic. In the Val-de-Grace hospital, he encountered another medical student and poet, Louis Aragon.
Aragon, the illegitimate son of a prefect of police, was born in 1897 in Paris. He was a refined, slim and delicate young man who admired Stendhal and had studied at the Sorbonne. The companions of his youth never doubted that he was going to be a poet. During the war, he twice obtained a deferment, but doctors were needed at the front and Aragon was sent into the rapid training programme for “doctor’s assistants” at Val-de-Grace. After this he went to the front, where he acted heroically. Breton even criticised him for his excessive selflessness and patriotism: “Nothing in him at that moment rose up in revolt. He had been teasing us in some ways with his ambition to overthrow absolutely everything, but when it came down to it, he conscientiously obeyed every military order and fulfilled all his professional (medical) obligations.”[29] His military experience, without a doubt, played a big role in his Dadaist and Surrealist poetry.
Federico Castellon, Untitled (Horse), c. 1938.
Oil on board, 37.2 × 32.4 cm.
Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.
Leonora Carrington, The Inn of the Dawn Horse, 1937–1938.
Private Collection.
It looked as though a medical future also awaited a third poet, a man of the same age, Philippe Soupault. He came from the family of a famous doctor, and studied jurisprudence, but his greatest enthusiasm was poetry. In 1914, while in London, he wrote his first notable poem: “Chanson du mal aimé”. In 1916, he obtained a deferment, but was then drafted into the artillery and sent to officers’ school, though he never actually got to the front. Soupault spent many weeks in hospital after the officers had been given an anti-typhoid serum in an experiment. There he wrote poems which he sent to Apollinaire. In 1917, Apollinaire published a poem of Soupault’s in the journal SIC, and introduced him to Breton and Aragon. None of them was thinking about medicine any more. The three poets planned to found a literary journal.
The journal Littérature came out in February 1919, taking over from SIC and Nord-Sud. Many in the world of letters hailed the birth of the journal, including Marcel Proust. As well as their own poems, the three printed those of Apollinaire, Isidore Ducasse, Rimbaud and the Zürich Dadaist Tzara. An unknown serviceman, Paul Éluard, submitted a poem to the journal. His real name was Eugène Grendel, but he used his maternal grandmother’s surname, Éluard, as a pseudonym. After he left school, he contracted tuberculosis and spent two years in Switzerland in a sanatorium. In Davos, Éluard met a Russian girl, Elena Diakonova, whom he married in 1917. Elena entered the world of the Dadaists, and later, by which time she was known as Gala, “the muse of the Surrealists. “At the front, Éluard was exposed to German poison gas, and, following a period in the hospital, he made his way to Paris.
Later, after he arrived in Paris, Picabia joined the group, followed by Duchamp as well. In the spring of 1919, Littérature published the first chapters of a work by Soupault and Breton entitled “Magnetic Fields”. They wrote these pieces together, and one can only guess at the authorship of the individual poems. Soupault later stated that in the course of his experiments, he had tried using “automatic writing” – a method which makes it possible to become liberated from the weight of criticism and the habits formed at school, and which generates images as opposed to logical calculations:
Trace smell of sulphur
Marsh of public health
Red of criminal lips
Walk twice brine
Whim of monkeys
Clock colour of day.[30]
Breton wrote that the “Magnetic Fields” constituted the first Surrealist, as opposed to Dadaist, work, although Surrealism was destined to appear officially only in 1924. Granted, one can find there much evidence of the influence of the French Symbolists and Lautréamont. Granted, the nihilist character of Dada is still present. However, the poems of Soupault and Breton did not make a complete break, either with logic, romanticism, or reflection on aspects of real life and modern times. A new style
Quoted in Michel Sanouillet,
“Les Sentiments sont gratuits”, André Breton, Philippe Soupault,
