Surrealism was the first artistic movement I got into on my own. There was something so immediate to it, a kind of dream state that seemed to throw off all convention for truly bizarre, often stunningly beautiful, imagery. It helped that I was a middle-class adolescent and it was the psychedelic late 1960s, but there was something that spoke directly to me and many of my suburban hippie pals. Their work required no preparation, the Surrrealists seemed to despise the traditional forms, and no one – not even the artists themselves – could say what their individual works meant, yet each work offered a world to enter. As I grew up, I moved on to more conventional subjects like economics and history, but I always kept an affection for this raucous bunch.
This book begins with some very interesting context. The Dadaists emerged after World War I, disillusioned from the horrendous experience in the trenches. They rejected everything rational – all tradition in society and art, all orthodoxy. (What better thing for a rebellious youth?) They indulged in the absurd, such as Marcel Duchamp submitting a urinal to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, for which the art was to change the concept of the object. It was also very funny. A coat rack nailed to the floor became a “trap”, etc. This threw out the last formal vestige of art – a work beautiful or engaging to look at – even exalting industrial goods as on an equal par to Renoir or da Vinci.
André Breton participated in this, as did Max Ernst, Duchamp, and even Picasso. In his Surrealist Manifestos, Breton proposed to go deeper, to change society and man's concept of existence. He approached this through the work of 2 great intellectuals, Karl Marx and more significantly, Sigmund Freud. Marx supplied the call to a political process of communist revolution (i.e., destroying bourgeois society), but Freud opened the door to altering consciousness, tapping into the unconscious mind to spontaneously produce an art of primal images, be they shapes (e.g., Arp and Miro) or figurative (e.g., Duchamp and Salvador Dali).
That is about it for Breton’s founding ideological precepts. Unfortunately, Nadeau fails to explain much about Marx and Freud, such as the conditions and historical context from which they emerged. This requires the reader to bring a certain level of knowledge to the reading. The bulk of the book, which gets very dull, is about how Breton tried to balance the political agenda with the psychological one. Some of the Surrealists went into hardcore communism, such as Aragon, while others preferred to stick to hallucinatory or dream imagery.
What is missing are art criticism, mini-biographies of the principal players, and how the political context influenced them in an ongoing way. I was very disappointed with this. How, for example, did they support themselves financially? Who were these guys and why them? The book also fails to wrap everything up, instead going into a ridiculously abstruse essay at the end: I think Nadeau was trying to say that the Surrealists failed in their attempt to transform our minds and society, in the end producing subjective works that verge on obscurantism. But I can't be sure.
This book essentially covers the thought of André Breton, a poet who wrote the Surrealist Manifestoes and presented himself as “leader” of the group. Rather than interpretive context and a history of their times and art, I instead found here the evolution of Breton's writing, how the various members squabbled and drifted away. It made for pretty pedestrian reading, dry in terms of ideas and often simply a plodding chronology, too limited in scope. It is a boring read, given to vague philosophical statements that I could rarely relate to and offering far too little explanation to the ideas that underlay their thinking.
Related reviews: