CAPÍTULO 2. APROVECHAMIENTO DE LA ENERGÍA EÓLICA
2.8. El caso de México
In the 1920s, the Surrealists’ points of engagements with other cultures and their artefacts were aligned with their very general critique of ‘Western civilization’ and their concomitant attack on Enlightenment values. Retrospectively, Michel Leiris spoke of the formative stages of his own ‘intellectual itinerary’ that led him to anthropology, saying,
In terms of my own experience, I can say quite frankly that it was surrealism, which I was involved with during the first four years (1925 – 1929) and which represented for me the rebellion against the so-called rationalism of Western society and therefore an intellectual curiosity about peoples who represented more or less what Lévy-Bruhl called at the time the mentalité primitive.2
Interviewed in the 1980s, Leiris speaks at a humorous distance from the exploits of early Surrealism. What he has to say about the first years of the movement accords with what many commentators seem to believe were the values it supported for all time. In this interview, Leiris is clear about the fact he did not reject Surrealist ideas, though he chose not to remain loyal to Breton personally, and thus I think we have to be alert to the way Leiris’ intellectual development occurred in terms of its
continuities with Surrealism (indeed the same can be said of all who passed through the Surrealist movement), and the way connected intellectual influences filtered through the movement and the camp of the ‘dissident Surrealists’.3
Asked if he talked about anthropology in the company of the Surrealists in the early days, Leiris says, ‘No, we talked rather about the Orient in the Rimbauldian sense: Orient with a capital O, meaning all that is not part of the Occident…’ He continues, ‘We stood firmly against the West…. What was going on was a rebellion against Western civilization, plain and simple’.4 For the first few years of the movement, this
spectral mythic Orient was a presence. I will argue, however, that it approached a counter-Orientalism from inception.
At first, as Leiris indicated, the Surrealists’ target was very wide: it was ‘rationalism’ or ‘the West’ that came under fire. Some of their early strategies bore traces of the anarchic aggression of Dada, and followed from and developed earlier insurrectory
2 Michel Leiris, as quoted in Jean Jamin and Sally Price, ‘A Conversation with Michel Leiris,’
Current Anthropology 29, no. 1 (Feb 1988), 157.
3
Leiris says, ‘I never really rejected Surrealism as such, like several others I rejected the tutelage of Breton…’ ibid., 159.
108 gestures of Pablo Picasso and Alfred Jarry. The Surrealists’ rhetoric and visual
statements in the Twenties often amounted to a deliberately destabilising parodic re- use of Orientalist tropes (some of which we have seen through David Bate’s analysis referred to in Chapter Three). I will argue in the present chapter that the Surrealists did not perform simple reversals of binaries according to a logic of direct negation (as some detractors have argued, referred to in Chapter Two). The Surrealists’ acts of juxtaposition and displacement were calculated precisely to trouble Western binary thinking, and it is not fitting to attribute a postmodernist bias for pastiche, simple irony or purely parodic mimeticism to their undertakings.
To fix on the beginnings of Surrealism’s interest in non-Western cultures, we can look to its germination prior to 1924. In the 1910s, Picasso’s circle and Alfred Jarry were already expressing criticism of what was happening in the colonies. Jarry expressly pilloried the abuse of colonial power in Ubu Coloniale. In Les demoiselles d’Avignon, of 1907, already Picasso did not reproduce a straightforward primitivism, but a conflation of ideas about alterity and a crisis of Western subjectivity. During the very early years of Surrealism, or proto-Surrealism from 1922, germinal tendencies of their engagement with other cultures were already evident: the key protagonists had a passion for collecting and displaying tribal objects alongside European works; they shared an antipathy towards colonialism, and expressed a jaundiced view of the official spectacles that promoted it.
In the first two decades of the movement, the Surrealists’ main point of contact with other cultures was through the imported objects that had been in vogue in Paris since the turn of the century.5 The founders of Surrealism continued the practice of
collector artists who preceded them. In the 1910s, the young Breton and his friends had been recognised by Guillaume Apollinaire, and in his apartment, Breton, Aragon
5 The only Surrealist to make any significant journey abroad in the early years of the
movement was the French poet Paul Éluard, but his motivation seems to have been personal. In early 1924 Gala Éluard had a serious intimate liaison with the German artist Max Ernst, and Éluard left his wife to travel to the Pacific Islands (the Antilles, Panama, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, New Zealand, Australia, the Celebes, Java, Sumatra, Vietnam, Ceylon) for seven months. Accompanied by Ernst, Gala visited Éluard in Saigon and they reached a reconciliation and they returned to France together. These events are chronicled in Éluard’s letters to his wife: Paul Éluard, Letters to Gala (1924 – 1928), trans. Jesse Browner (Paragon House, New York, 1989), passim. I am indebted to one of my thesis examiners for clarifying these facts. See also Malcolm Haslam, The Real World of the Surrealists
109 and Soupault were exposed to an eclectic collection.6 It included works by the Cubist
painters, paintings by Douanier Rousseau, Marc Chagall and Giorgio de Chirico, along with African and Oceanic artefacts.7
Apollinaire was close to the dealer Paul Guillaume, and wrote essays for his
catalogues on African and Oceanic art. This earlier generation of artist-collectors had a predilection for exotica because they equated it with unreason. In exotic objects they saw an antidote to a classical tradition based in rationality and the rule of reason. Following their predecessors, from the earliest beginnings of the movement many of the key members of Surrealism had a passion for collecting and through their dealings with objects, they began to consider the cosmologies and cultures of the peoples who made them. At a certain point their emphasis on a mythic ‘Orient’ subsided – it had ebbed by about 1929, superseded by a more concrete interest in other cultures.
Figs. 11 & 12. Guillaume Apollinaire’s apartment, and detail, photograph by René-Jacques, 1954.
Like Apollinaire, the principal founding members of the Surrealist movement took to collected tribal artefacts and ‘fetishes’, and they too surrounded themselves with such objects in their domestic spaces, displaying them alongside contemporary artworks
6 Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 – 1918) pseudonym of Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky.
A poet who edited a number of reviews, published satirical and semi-pornographic texts. He was associated with Cubism and Orphism, and coined the term ‘surrealism’.
7
Says Breton, ‘There [in Apollinaire’s apartment] one would thread one’s way between the shelves of books, the rows of African and Oceanic fetishes, the paintings of a kind that was then revolutionary – Picasso, Chirico, Larionov…There was no more intricate path than the one that led to the table at which he sat…’ See Elizabeth Cowling, ‘An Other Culture’, in Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, London, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978 p. 454. Cowling quotes from André Breton, Entretiens 1913 –52 avec André Parinaud (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 23.
110 and bric-a-brac. André Breton reputedly bought his first object from the South Seas before he left school; Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Wolfgang Paalen and Tristan Tzara were also collectors of note.8 (see Figs. 11 – 14, of Apollinaire’s study and Simone
Breton in the rue Fontaine studio).
In the early years of the Surrealist movement, when Breton took up residence in Pigalle, at 42 rue Fontaine, he decorated his studio apartment with a mélange of auratic objects.9 Though he subsisted on limited means, Breton was an avid
collector
.
10His collecting habits relied on a random quality, and it is legendary thathe frequented le marché aux puces at Saint-Ouen. He said ‘The pleasure in making a find is in direct proportion to the difference which exists between the object sought and the object found.’11 Breton’s pronouncement is Freudian in its logic, but in his
collecting habits Freud had a preference for classical antiquities.
Figs. 13 & 14. Breton’s apartment in the 1920s: Simone Breton in the rue Fontaine studio in the early years, S. Sator Archives, Paris; Man Ray, Simone Kahn. c.1925. Gelatin silver photograph, 7.8 x 5.5 cm, Private collection.12
8 Malcolm Haslam writes, ‘Before he left school, Breton had purchased, with the money he
won as a prize, a fetish object from the South Seas, and from 1910 he could have visited the collection of Oceanic art which was put on show that year at the Trocadéro. He may well have read Emile Durkheim’s book, published in 1912, on the mystical owner, mana, of the totems and other religious images of Australia.’ Malcolm Haslam, The Real World of the
Surrealists (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1978), 31.
9 Breton moved into his two-room apartment, in the Northern end of the 9th Arrondissement,
on January 1, 1922. It is a short walk from the elegant studio on the rue de la Rochefoucauld that had been home to the French Symbolist artist Gustave Moreau (1826 – 1898), a painter whose work Breton admired and which formed the subject of an appreciative study in his later anthologised publication, Surrealism and Painting of 1928.
10 See Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1995), 168. The purchase of Les Demoiselles and its significance was previously discussed in Chapter One.
11 Breton quoted in Elizabeth Cowling, ‘An Other Culture’, in Dawn Ades, Dada and
Surrealism Reviewed (London, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), 457.
12
I note that in Rosalind E. Krauss’s ‘No More Play’, The Originality Of The Avant-Garde
And Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 42 – 85, at 81, a
111 In Breton’s own apartment, artworks by close colleagues and other contemporaries hung alongside stuffed birds, minerals, glass bottles, framed butterflies, coins, jewellery and his collection of ‘savage art’, as he called it: African and Oceanic masks and ‘fetishes’.
Figs 15 – 18. Breton’s atelier, c 1960s. Photos by Sabine West.
Except for his years of exile during the war, Breton’s address and the style of décor scarcely changed for the rest of his life. He lived out most of it in the same building (he moved one storey, into a larger apartment). He returned to it after his wartime exile in America with Native American and Eskimo objects, which feature in the two lower images above.13
Unlike Freud’s dwelling, Breton’s was not made into a
Simone Kahn and Breton married in 1921, which makes the fact the photograph is titled ‘Simone Kahn’ is an interesting anomaly.
13Breton’s apartment and collection is documented in a film made by Fabrice Maze, L’oeil à
l’état sauvage: l’atelier d’André Breton, France, 2002, production Aube Breton, Elléoüt,
Seven Doc, Centre Pompidou. Comprehensive descriptions of the atalier’s layout and the arrangement of its objects is provided in an essay: Dagmar Motycka Weston,‘The Situational Space of André Breton’s Atelier and Personal Museum in Paris.’ Conference
112 museum, though now a massing of his objects is part of the collection of the Centre Pompidou. This arrangement gives the visitor an appreciation of the diversity of the objects Breton collected, and the binding nature that his personal aesthetic imposed upon the collection, however it cannot impart the atmosphere of the way Breton constructed his poetic domestic space. In Chapter Six, I develop a discussion of the Surrealists’ innovative exploits in exhibition design, and doubtless their command of transformative spaces must have owed much to their personal experience of having effectively lived within their own ‘installations’ for decades.
Breton’s collecting showed perspicacity as well as desire, and through his knowledge of literature and art his acumen earned him a modest living in the early days. He worked as a curator for the haute-couturier Jacques Doucet,14 a collector of
manuscripts, rare books and art, for whom he purchased Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).15
Doucet was no connoisseur of modern art and was dissatisfied with the acquisition, demanding from Breton a number of written assurances of the worth of the painting. One of these file letters is quite telling, because in it Breton makes it clear that he reads Picasso’s primitivism as a comment on nothing other than Western civilization. In other words, in today’s terms it would seem that Breton sees Picasso’s work as an Orientalism, but of a radical critical order:
Can you have the slightest doubt about my opinion of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon?... Without [the painting], as I’ve told you many times, there would, to my mind, be no means of representing the state of our civilization today from this particular angle. While I generally favor [sic] poetic research, when it comes to determining the sense of an age, I cannot help seeing Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as the most important event at the beginning of the 20th century…16
From early days, their ‘private’ interest in non-Western objects intersected with the public production of the Surrealists.During the interwar period, their appropriations went beyond private display and collection, and in many cases the they loaned objects from their own collections for public exhibitions. In La Révolution surréaliste photographic illustrations of exotic objects were set against images of Surrealist objects and their texts. Similarly, displays of exotic artefacts were exhibited in
paper, The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity International Conference 2007. The sale and acquisition of items from the collection is discussed by Alan Riding, in ‘Surrealism for Sale, Straight from the Source: André Breton’s Collection is Readied for Auction’, New
York Times, 17 December, 2002, <http:/www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/arts/surrealism-for-
sale-straight-source-andre-breton-s-collection-readied-for.htm>.
14 Jacques Doucet (1853 – 1929) French fashion designer and collector of art and literature. 15
Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 146.
113 parallel to contemporary works in commercial gallery exhibitions. The exhibitions of the 1920s comprised juxtaposed displays of Surrealist and exotic objects.
The earliest Surrealist (or proto-Surrealist) response to French colonialism precedes the First Manifesto and was in response to the Exposition Coloniale de Marseilles in 1922, which Breton and Aragon visited together. Antonin Artaud saw it too, and was impressed by a troupe of Cambodian dancers.17 Aragon wrote a short piece,
‘Souvenirs de voyages: L’Exposition Coloniale de Marseilles,’ published in
Littérature, and here we can discern an embryonic form of Surrealist objection to an official colonialist spectacle.18 The stylized exoticism of the publicity materials,
featuring exotic architecture and a harmonious image of a multi-racial Greater France, are pictured below (Figs. 19 & 20). Aragon writes that Breton bought an armadillo from one of the displayed ‘natives’, which he sold on to another man. According to Aragon’s report, Breton responded to the displays by describing them as ‘the saddest zoological gardens he knows of’.19
Figs. 19 & 20. Programme and poster from the Exposition Coloniale de Marseilles, 1922
Aragon’s short passage on this exposition hardly constitutes a political critique: rather, it is a reflective, acerbic piece of description relating specifically to an official spectacle of French colonialism. Breton’s reported response to the display is a caustic-yet-mournful comment on the ‘human zoo’ aspect of it, a feature that was not peculiar to this particular exposition: live human exhibits had been a common feature of previous expositions depicting colonial interests, and were to be a prominent aspect of the Colonial Exposition of 1931. The curious interaction Aragon recounted
17 Haslam, 130. 18
Louis Aragon, ‘Souvenirs de voyages: L’ exposition Coloniale de Marseille’, Littérature, no. 8 (Jan 1923), 3 – 4.
114 between Breton and the human display – the purchase and sale of the armadillo, might point to Breton’s performative side, or opportunism: he may have seized upon a chance encounter and perhaps even the opportunity of a quick profit, or he may have made a performative gesture (fraternising with the human specimens?), but we can only speculate, just as we can only speculate about Breton and Aragon’s reason for visiting the Marseille exposition at all. Aragon’s report seems to be the only direct mention of it: but this slight reference prefigures the Surrealists’ much more strident objections to colonialism.20
In his ‘Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité’ (‘Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality’) of September 1924, Breton pitted ‘the Orient’ as a catalyst and source of inspiration for the Surrealist movement in the face of a corrupt and ailing West.21 He writes,
Latin civilization is over and done for and, as for me, I ask that not a single finger be lifted to save it. At present, it is the last bastion of bad faith, of decrepitude, and of cowardice. Compromise, trickery, promises of peace, vacant mirrors, selfishness, military dictionaries, the resurgence of foppishness, the return to the Church, the eight- hour work day, burials worse than in plague years, sports: one might as well just throw up one’s hands
.
22This diagnosis of Western demise is followed by an appeal to a mythical ‘Orient’: Orient, O victorious Orient, you whose value is only symbolic, I am at your service, Orient of pearls and of rage! Be it in the flow of a phrase or in the mysterious wind of a jazz tune, allow me to recognize your resources in the Revolutions to come. You who are the radiant image of my dispossession, Orient, beautiful bird of prey and innocence, from the depths of the realm of the Shades, I implore you! Inspire me, that I might be someone who no longer has a shadow
.
23In the very first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste, of December 1924, there is mention of a survey that had been conducted by the periodical Les Cahiers du mois, a special issue of which had been entitled, ‘Les Appel de l’Orient’ (‘The call of the East’). Durozoi notes that several of the Surrealists responded. Presumably, their
20 Commenting on Aragon’s piece in Littérature, Jack Spector writes that ‘Neither poet had
any sympathy of insight into the native cultures, nor had they yet acquired the appropriate Marxist anti-colonial rhetoric’. To the contrary, I am arguing that the piece of writing