Surrealism. Nathalia Brodskaya

      The next exhibition was that of the Salon Dada which opened on June 6, 1921 on the Champs-Elysees, and lasted until June 18, extending over all the evenings which entered into the Salon Dada programme. In the exhibition hall, a very wide range of objects hung from the ceiling: an opened umbrella, a soft hat, a smoker’s pipe, and a cello wearing a white tie. Since the exhibition was advertised as an international one, invitations were sent out to Arp in Switzerland, Ernst and Baargeld in Germany, Man Ray in America, as well as other artists. Ernst exhibited his Cereal Bicycle with Bells for the first time. One picture by Benjamin Peret showed a nutcracker and a rubber pipe, and it was called The Beautiful Death, while another showed the Venus de Milo with a man’s shaven head. Under a mirror belonging to Philippe Soupault and reflecting the visitor’s own face was the inscription: Portrait of an Unknown Figure. Other works by Soupault were titled The Garden of My Hat, Sympathy with Oxygen, and Bonjour, Monsieur. In addition to all the other absurd inscriptions, a placard hung in the lift-cage which read “Dada is the biggest swindle of the century”. This exhibition already clearly pointed to Surrealism.

      Despite the very serious contradictions between the strong individual personalities in the Dadaist movement, Breton designed one further “big swindle” in 1922. The Dadaists decided to hold their own Paris Congress – “The International Congress for the Determination of Directives and the Defence of the Modern Mind”. Despite almost six months of preparation, a wealth of publications, and a lively correspondence between Tzara, Picabia, Breton and others, this plan experienced a setback. André Breton was forced to admit that the movement was already dead and buried, and that there was no point in trying to resurrect it. However, just at that moment, in the spring of 1922, an event took place heralding the birth of Surrealism from within the Dadaist movement. A new number of Littérature, a journal which had not come out for some time, appeared on March 1, 1922. In it were published Breton’s “Three Tales of Dreams”, and his article entitled “Interview with Professor Freud in Vienna”. In 1921, at the time of his visit to Vienna, Breton failed to get an interview with Freud, but both publications testified to the author’s interest in using psychoanalysis for the expression of the unconscious in art. From the fourth number of the journal onwards, Breton took the entire management of the journal on himself. Appealing to those who remained in his camp, Picabia, Duchamp, Picasso, Aragon and Soupault, Breton wrote: “It cannot be said that Dadaism served any purpose other than to support us in a state of lofty emancipation, which we now reject, being of sound mind and memory, in order to serve a new vocation.”[35] The Dada movement bade farewell to its child. “I have closed Dada’s eyes”, wrote Peret in the fifth number of the journal, “and now I am ready to go, I look to see from where the wind is blowing, unconcerned about what will happen next or where it will take me.”[36]

      Breton’s lead article in the following number was called “The Outlet of the Medium”. The former Dadaists found their means of tapping the subconscious in the enthusiasm for spiritualism and for everything supernatural that was common in Paris after the war: in spiritualist séances, automatic writing and the narration of dreams. They were drawn to word-play, and preoccupied with the mystery of the telepathic link between Duchamp, who was in America, and his young protégé in Paris, the poet Robert Desnos. Later, Breton recalled his first encounter with the mystery of the dream: “In 1919, my attention focussed on the sentences, more or less fragmentary, which, when one is in complete solitude, just before going to sleep, one’s mind is able to pick up without being able to detect any prior purpose behind them. One evening, in particular, before going to sleep, I apprehended, clearly articulated, …a fairly bizarre sentence, which reached me without carrying any trace of the events in which, according to my consciousness, I found myself involved at that moment, a sentence which struck me as insistent, a phrase, I would venture to say, that felt like it was banging at the window-pane… it was something like: “There is a man cut in half by the window.”“[37] At that moment Breton was passionate about the methods of research into the human psyche which Freud had used, and which he himself tried to use in the course of his professional experience with patients during the war. He came to the conclusion that “the speed of thought is no greater than that of words, and that it does not necessarily challenge the tongue, or even the pen moving across the paper.” Breton shared his revelation with Philippe Soupault, and it was actually then that they got down to work on “Magnetic Fields”, putting into practice the method of automatic writing.

      Yves Tanguy, The Hand in the Clouds, 1927.

      Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm.

      Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.

      Oscar Domínguez, The Hunter, 1933.

      Oil on canvas, 61 × 50 cm.

      Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao.

      The young Parisian poet René Crevel turned out to be a medium, and when in a state of hypnotic trance he would utter strange phrases. Crevel had brought out the Dadaist journal Aventure in 1921 along with Francois Baron, Georges Limbourg, Max Moris and Roger Vitraque. He agreed to Breton’s proposal to participate in spiritualist séances. As a result, his gift drew the future Surrealists into the passion for spiritualism. In this way, according to Aragon, by the end of 1922 “an epidemic of sleeping hit the Surrealists… Seven or eight of them came to live only for those instances of forgetfulness when, once the lights were out, they spoke unconsciously, like drowned people in the open air…”[38] After that there arose a fashion for “speaking one’s dreams”, even though for this there was actually no need to sleep. This period in the history of Surrealism was later called “the era of rest”.

      Unable to resign himself to the death of Dada, Tristan Tzara tried in July 1923 to organise a performance at the Michel Théâtre in Paris entitled “Evening of the Bearded Heart”. Although the evening did have the expected impact, it ended with a fight on the stage between Éluard and Tzara, and the involvement of the police. The Dada era was already in the past. Dada had performed its destructive role, and on its ruins a new movement was now in the process of being constructed – Surrealism. Dada had assembled so many outstanding people in Paris from many different countries, that a brigade of construction workers was already on stand-by. Dada had developed numerous new concepts and ideas, which Surrealism was later to use. But the main thing was that through Dada, the major artists of Surrealism became Surrealists.

      However, it seems that too much was destroyed. Dada strove to deprive literature and art of everything in it that was romantic and lyrical, of everything that stirred and roused the impulses of the soul. When the science of psychoanalysis, the spirituality of Symbolism, and the romanticism of all the centuries of the past were all combined together and then added to the anarchism and absurdism of Dada, the result was Surrealism.

      Frida Kahlo, The Love Embrace of the Universe, The Earth (Mexico), I, Diego and Señor Xólotl, 1949.

      Oil

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