Museo Histórico Nacional

[W]e must not let the paths of desire become overgrown.— André Breton¹⁴³

140David Lomas, “The Omnipotence of Desire: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis and Hysteria,” in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, ed. Jennifer Mundy, Vincent Gille, and Dawn Ades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 63.

141Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists, 35.

142Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists, 35.

143Breton, Mad Love, 25. Emphasis in original.

Breton’s vision of the ‘free and adored woman’ didn’t always prove a practical help for women, especially painters. — Ithell Colquhoun¹⁴⁴

At the end of the autobiographical novel Nadja, Breton introduced the idea of convulsive beauty, and in L’Amour fou, he listed three conditions necessary for it to come into being. First was the necessity for it to be “érotique-voilée,” creating for the spectator a sensation akin to erotic pleasure. Second, it must be “explosante-fixe,” expressing both action and rest. Third, it must be

“magique-circonstancielle,” bringing about a solution that could not come into being by ordinary logic. In short, “Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.”¹⁴⁵

Closely related to convulsive beauty was the idea of amour fou (mad love), an overmastering emotional connection. Surrealist mad love was, of course, a form of romantic love. With romantic love, sexuality became a vehicle for deep and complex emotion and thus for reflection and self-understanding. This increasingly psychologized personal sexuality took on a greater significance in the overall scheme of human life.¹⁴⁶ Thus, when Breton cited Engels and Freud in defence of monogamy, he was not praising bourgeois or socio-economically based marriage:

Engels, in The Origin of the Family, does not hesitate to make of individual sexual love, born of this superior form of sexual relations that monogamy is, the greatest moral progress accomplished by humans in modern times. ...Once private property has been abolished, ‘we can reasonably affirm,’ declares Engels,

‘that far from disappearing, monogamy will be realized for the first time.’ ...This view about what might be thought the most exciting topic related to human becoming is nowhere more clearly corroborated than by the view of Freud, for whom sexual love, even such as it is already presented, breaks the collective links

144Quoted in Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists, 66.

145Breton, Mad Love, 8–19.

146Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago:

University of University, 2000), 234–35.

created by race, rises above national differences and social hierarchies, and, in so doing, contributes in large measure to the progress of culture.¹⁴⁷

Breton’s belief in longterm monogamous devotion grew out of belief in love and sexuality as means of expanding human development and understanding. He saw monogamous

“mad love” as “the surest means of liberating desire and imagination” because he regarded female intuition and access to states of non-ordinary consciousness as a conduit for the use of the male creator. Indeed, by the publication of L’Amour fou, Breton had largely given up political revolution in favor of love as a means of transforming the world, and his interest in the irrational had become an “exaltation of the intuitive feminine” in opposition to masculine “reason,” which he deemed responsible for the world’s ills.¹⁴⁸ The surrealists’ emphasis on the power of love and desire was a trouble spot in their relations with the Communist Party, which considered love and sexuality to be distractions from the struggle for social equality.¹⁴⁹

But mad love was largely Breton’s concept, and his stress on monogamy was not shared by most other surrealists, male or female. Though surrealism as a whole sought to transform human consciousness via desire, Paul Eluard, Benjamin Péret, and others stressed desire, not monogamy.¹⁵⁰ Simone de Beauvoir, while granting that for Breton “woman has no vocation other than love; this does not make her inferior, since man’s vocation is also love,” went on to say “But one would like to know if for her also love is key to the world and revelation of beauty.”¹⁵¹ Leonora Carrington responded by saying, “In l’amour-passion, it is the loved one,

147Breton, Mad Love, 77. Emphasis in original.

148Clifford Browder, André Breton: Arbiter of Surrealism (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1967), 114–15.

149Dawn Ades, “Surrealism, Male-Female,” in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, ed. Jennifer Mundy, Vincent Gille, and Dawn Ades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 172.

150Chadwick points out that Surrealist defense of Charlie Chaplin’s sexual practices, the celebration of hysteria’s fiftieth anniversary, and the publication of the surrealist sex inquiries were all signs of the movement’s increasing interest in desire as a means to transform human consciousness. (Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists, 36)

151Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1974), 268.

the other who gives the key. Now the question is: Who can the loved one be? It can be a man or a horse or another woman.”¹⁵² This emphasis on desire over monogamy was shared by Czech surrealists Štyrský, Toyen, Teige, and Nezval. Desire was not, perhaps, as important to other members of the Prague group as were the unconscious or the dream. Desire was not a topic to stress when lecturing to other leftists, as Nezval made clear in his 1934 Levá fronta talk on surrealism, which discussed the dream and the unconscious in relation to dialectics and revolution but made no mention of desire.¹⁵³