From the Origins to Now: Cross-disciplinary Global Approaches to Surrealism

Published in 2021 and 2023, at the dawn of the 2024 centennial of the First Manifesto of Surrealism, Natalya Lusty’s Cambridge Critical Concepts: Surrealism (Cambridge University Press, 423 pages) and Kirsten Strom’s Routledge Companion to Surrealism (Routledge, 410 pages) each provide a good synthesis of recent research and new approaches to Surrealism. Both books ponder Surrealism’s contemporary status and initiate analysis through the lens of new methodologies such as posthumanism, decoloniality, animal theory, new materialism, schizoanalysis, and ecology. Both also demonstrate the continuity, adaptability and vitality of dynamic and protean Surrealist ideas beyond World War II. In addition to the expanded chronology, the two books explore new Surrealist territories, geographical and conceptual. The authors include established Surrealist scholars but also younger specialists, many of whom are members of the ISSS.

The approach of both collections is distinctly cross-disciplinary, in tune with the trend in avant-garde studies, giving an account of the vast Surrealist production in multiple creative fields: literature, painting, photography, film, fashion, and curating (architecture is notably absent.1) Both books highlight Surrealism’s dynamic multilayeredness, its endless negotiation of its own principles and attentiveness to socio-historical evolutions. Navigating the chapters, the reader gets a sense of the historical relevance of the movement as a whole, its acuteness as well as the long-lasting effects of its response to the deep crisis of Western civilization evidenced by the two World Wars. To Surrealists, the response could only be political: the creative act is part of a revolutionary emancipatory project aiming to reconcile individual desire and collective needs, foster protest, and resistance. The authors do not shy away from the inherent paradoxes of Surrealism (dissidence, exclusions) and possibilities for contradictory interpretations (women, colonialism, gender), assuming a critical approach to the “unresolvable“ tensions present in Surrealists’ antiracist and gender rhetoric (Strom, pp. 2–6).

Lusty’s Surrealism is directed mostly towards an audience of academics, advanced students and experts. The volume consists of twenty-one substantive articles structured in three parts. The generous word-count has allowed the authors to plunge into Surrealism’s polysemic complexity and analyze specific works, evolutions, tensions, and antagonisms. Lusty’s introduction gives a helpful overview of the major events that cultivated Surrealism’s “conceptual plasticity” (13), underlining Surrealists’ awareness of the profound revolution in perception of their time, which pushed them towards the project to liberate their contemporaries from the “sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom,” as Walter Benjamin observed already in 1929 (17). She points at the necessity to challenge Eurocentrism, to re-emphasize political driven practices such as decolonialism and ecology, and to reassess Surrealism’s historiography, especially after the Second World War. In this spirit, Effie Rentzou opens the book and part one, “Origins: Ideas/Concepts/Interventions,” reflecting on the geographical imaginary of Surrealism that led to its theoretical and practical internationalization (36). This major shift in perception was also informed by important new scientific theories, as Gavin Parkinson recalls: nature, space, and time were transformed by relativity and quantum physics, confirming the Surrealists’ sense that observation is marked by subjectivity, and acausality is a valid method (81). These ideas are also tied to psychoanalysis, even though, as Klein James affirms, Surrealists employed psychoanalysis less as a medical-scientific tool but as a way to bypass all the obstructions bourgeois culture had put in the way of desire (47), to reveal the deepest mental layers for the sake of emancipation through creative practices such as automatism. As Lusty affirms, dreams express unalienated desire, reveal how enigmatic people are to themselves and to others (96), correcting habitual self-evidence across political and aesthetic domains, provoking new forms of emancipated vision (111). Like dreams, Eros means emancipation; a critique, Alyce Mahon writes, of the repression of desire in Western civilization (112). The Surrealists believe that pleasure is the path to better social relationships; Eros will reestablish the balance briefly broken to the benefit of death: World Wars, colonization, capitalist exploitation (122). Raymond Spiteri develops further on the strong politicization of every Surrealist concept; despite their efforts, he observes, the tension between engagement versus personal freedom, culture versus politics was never resolved, polarizing the movement in antagonistic fractions (68).

The second part, “Developments: Practices/Cultures/Materials/Forms,” is dedicated to materials, media, methods, and objects produced and/or collected by Surrealists. Kate Conley and Christina Rudosky highlight how Surrealism revitalized the human relationship with the material world (175). Conley focusses on André Breton’s collection in Paris and Roland Penrose’s and Lee Miller’s in Essex, where objects’ juxtapositions and rearrangements create new meanings and particular atmospheres based on the energies contained in humans and in objects, triggering a more inclusive way of thinking thanks to the non-Western, namely Oceanian, artefacts (137). Rudosky’s analyses the latent power of objects through Breton’s key text, “Crise de l’objet,” which points how important objects are to the understanding of the crisis of perception, how necessary it is to interrogate a changing world through experience, not noumenal knowledge (169), and to adopt an anti-anthropocentric poetics decentering the relation subject/object (153). The subsequent chapters deal with artistic media. Elza Adamowisz shows how collage reflects the Surrealist conception of a fragmentary self (176); driven by chance and transcending rationality, this medium is an expression of collective revolutionary ideals, and conflates dream and reality. Kristoffer Noheden retraces the Surrealist fascination with cinema from Un chien andalou to post–World War II examples (201)—film captures faithfully reality but transforms it without transcending the everyday, thus highlighting the uncanny (192). David Bates affirms that, among the avant-gardes, Surrealists handle photography in the most sophisticated way (208), exploring the medium’s polysemy and challenging traditional definitions: sight, knowledge and belief are not certainty, reality is informed and transformed by desire, photographs are comparable to Freudian slips (213). Ilya Parkins explains why Surrealist fashion cannot be reduced to its alignment with the market, how it contributed to affirming non-fixed identities and feminine agency, and to the blending of high and low culture (231). Adam Jolles goes on with the non-fixity of public and private in Surrealist exhibitions, which integrated hallmark discourses of the 20th century and marked actual curatorial practices that rejected passive contemplation of autonomous works, igniting interaction through desire (241).

The methodologies deployed in part three, “Applications: Heterodoxies and New Words”(III), are diverse and original, turned towards Surrealism’s contemporary resonances. For Walter Kalaidjian, Surrealism prefigures Animal theory (despite the persistence of anthropomorphic fantasies) through its disruption of speciesism, engendering uncanny hybrids reminiscent of the vestiges of animals in human anatomy (179). Taking a philosophical perspective on Surrealism and nature, Joyce S. Cheng explains how taking nature as material could reinstate the metaphorical homology art/nature as art being the extension of creative phenomena in nature (304). Tyrus Miller’s chapter explores the Surrealist impulse in the Mass Observation project in England, a kind of sociology/heterology that studied the imbrication of subjectivity/objectivity, the influence of mass culture and affects, and which became an unmanageable documentary/artistic archive (312). Surrealism’s socio-political legacy is also palpable in the vivid presence of Surrealist ideas and methodologies in counter-cultural, usually short-lived, publications after World War II, which, as Abigail Susik writes, challenge the prevailing discourse on the alleged demise and depoliticization of post-war Surrealism (381). Paul Giles interrogates Surrealism through the prism of global art history and anthropology; focusing on Oceania, he analyzes the Surrealists’ paradoxical appropriation of indigenous imagery, which they described as impenetrable to rational knowledge, in light of the movement’s resistance to universalizing imperializing practices (331). In this vein, Jonathan P. Eburne ponders the ways in which the Global South drew up, rejected, and reinvented the Surrealist insurrection paradigm in the 1950–60s and—insisting on the dialectical construction of these new centers of knowledge in the margins of colonial modernity—their dynamic, volatile, sometimes violent forms of solidarity and emancipatory politics (344). Gregory Minissale approaches Surrealism from the perspective of “schizoanalysis,” based on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, which thwarts counter-Oedipean-centered psychoanalysis, deploys desire, assumes the splintering of the self as liberating, and dissipates guilt and fear engendered by the absence of wholeness and normative socialization (265). Anna Watz evokes another aspect of post-structuralist thought (20) by demonstrating how Surrealism prefigured écriture feminine, which captures and expresses the other to the rational symbolic phallocentric order; for Surrealists, she argues, the feminine is the apotheosis of desire and irrationality they sought to penetrate and inhabit (368).

The Routledge Companion offers an even larger panoply of themes, with forty-four shorter articles, organized in five unequal parts. Suitable as a reference book for scholars, it is accessible to undergraduate students and non-specialists. The first and longest part (fifteen chapters), entitled “Concepts and Practices,” opens on a series of synthetic articles on key themes. Natalia Lusty recalls the importance of dreams and humor—with a focus on the lesser-known feminist black humor—, which, capable of conflating traditionally opposite notions, conceals a subversive revolutionary potential. Play, too, blurs the opposites and, according to Susan Laxton, is a new, subversive way of life “as regulated as games, as collaborative as the exquisite corpse game and as solitary as the practice of objective chance, as random as automatic writing” (20). Rachael Grew adds occult, magic and alchemy to the mix as similarly transcending the distinction between reality and dreams, generating heterogeneous and anti-normative ways of perceiving and “facilitat[ing] the marvelous” (46). The marvelous, coupled with the uncanny, allows perception to rise to an act of creative imagination grounded in the real world, affirm Andrea Gremels and Kirsten Strom (ch. 3). Two other notions, “nature/animism” and “convulsive beauty/mad love,” are addressed by Kristoffer Noheden and Gavin Parkinson, respectively. A symbol of otherness, nature becomes, for Surrealists, a means of subverting the anthropocentric worldview and triggering the possibility of becoming other (ch. 6). Convulsive beauty and mad love also provoke a decentering of the individual, anchored in the experience and eroticism (ch. 4).

The following three chapters in “Concepts and Practices” engage with notions against which the Surrealists rallied. Michael Richardson recalls Surrealism’s visceral rejection of capitalism and colonialism as competitive modes of existence conceived by Western civilization, inexorably leading to war and exploitation (ch. 7). Krzysztof Fijalkowski emphasizes Surrealism’s strong opposition to nationalism and militarism, seen as unethical, violent, oppressive, and anti-revolutionary, but reminds the reader that the Surrealists supported defensive aggression for the sake of freedom (ch. 8). Finally, Miguel Escribano acknowledges that Surrealism contributed to the secularization of society but sustains that beyond the invectives of priests lurks a desire (Breton’s) for a new morality; additionally, he adds, Surrealism’s protestation against patriarchy failed to offer a coherent plan for actually eradicating this repressive institution (ch. 9). Finally, the last three papers address the variety of creative means and formats Surrealists deployed. The goal of the Surrealist manipulation of language is heuristic, claims Madeleine Chalmers: verbal techniques engage with individual psychic liberation and uncover subjectivity in the service of the revolution (ch. 10). Elliott King explores surrealist visual techniques, “disparate in their methods and manifestations,” whose common goal is “to emancipate thought and expression from accepted, rational order” and “manifest unforeseen poetic images” (98). Elza Adamowicz concludes the section with an analysis of how Un Chien andalou became “a model of, and for, Surrealism” (111), a reference for sexual liberation, revolt against bourgeois oppression, and disruption of social order (ch. 12).

The second part of The Routledge Companion, titled “Lessons from Paris,” retraces in five chapters some key moments of the history and historiography of Surrealism. Reading Paris Dada through the lens of anarcho-individualism, Theresa Papanikolas analyzes Breton’s and Tzara’s common project to “deconstruct the conformist mentality that celebrated the war and upheld bellicose nationalism” (120) and reminds how and why they “broke” at one point (ch. 13). Raymond Spiteri examines the validity of “orthodox” (Breton) and “dissident” (Bataille) Surrealism, recounting the events/publications/misunderstandings that marked their aesthetic and political antagonisms but also their eventual mutual respect (ch. 14). According to Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, the revolutionary perspective of fusing art and lived experience logically turned Surrealism into an ally of communism, yet their relation remained unresolved (ch. 15). The two closing chapters explore how the Surrealist “public interfaces” upend “traditional distinctions of a public/private binary” (146): Rachel Silveri takes the Bureau des recherches surréalistes as a model for a global conversation beyond center and periphery (ch. 16); and Sandra Zalman recounts how Surrealism found its public in the United States, from cultural institutions to the marketplace, from artists to amateurs (ch. 17).

As its title, “Situated Contexts: Adaptations and Translations,” suggests, the third section adopts a global cultural perspective. Here, the texts address the “absorption of Surrealist idea and technique into local practice, instances of imitation and parody, stoppages, misunderstanding, and tangential approaches” through what Gavin Yates (ch. 19) describes as “fragments, references, glimpses, and shadows” (175). Coherently edited despite the heterogeneity, the texts dig in the past and open up the future(s) of Surrealism. Regarding extra-European adaptations, the book sweeps large, from the Arab world–with the Cairo and Aleppo groups and the spiritual link to Sufism, by Riad Kherdeen (ch. 18), to Yates’ consideration of the Surrealist ferment of Australian modernism in the years 1930–1940. South America receives particular attention with three essay: Paulina Caro Troncoso goes back to the transnational encounters of Caribbean Surrealism in Paris in the 1930s, then in Martinique, Cuba, and Haiti later in the 1940s, emphasizing the theoretical issues this study raises due to the specificity of each local context and time period (ch. 21). Melanie Nicholson analyzes the tensions and divides that mark the history of Surrealism in Mexico, “described by Breton as the Surrealist country par excellence,” but which “also existed as a site of resistance toward Surrealism” (261). Nicholson’s chapter is especially valuable for its explanation of why Mexico was a flourishing creative space for women (ch. 29). María Clara Bernal plunges more generally into the debates surrounding the exchange of cultural sensibilities around Surrealism in South America, where intellectuals and creators were “predominantly attuned to the movement’s capacity to ignite revolutionary flares in their own locations” (291). There are also three articles on Surrealism in Asia: Chinghsin Wu recalls the lasting legacy and the multiple definitions of Surrealism in Japan from 1925 to today and the key role the movement played for intellectuals and artists willing to establish their own artistic subjectivity (ch. 28). Surrealism was imported from Japan to China, but, according to Lauren Walden, Breton never formally acknowledged Chinese Surrealism. Still, Walden shows how Surrealism “provided a cathartic outlet of incisive social commentary whilst the Chinese lived under the yoke of consecutively oppressive regimes” (215). Tessel M. Bauduin introduces some “Surrealist moments” in Indonesia in the context of the non-linear formation of Indonesian modernism, focusing on the “heterodox, and heterochronic” (249) Yogyakarta group, active in the 1980s, underscoring the theoretical stakes for the study of the avant-garde in the Global South (ch. 27). Finally, the Chicago Surrealist Penelope Rosemont recalls the genesis and history of her group, the exchanges with post-war Surrealism in Paris, and their keen political activism and artistic activity that continues to the present. (ch. 22).

The extraordinary variety of European Surrealisms is not underestimated either. Pierre Taminiaux recounts the rich history of Belgian Surrealism, from the pioneering work of Leon Spillaeart through René Magritte and the journal Les Lèvres nues, to neo/post-surrealist CoBrA (ch. 20). Maite Barragán explores Surrealism in another neighboring country, Spain, where the avant-garde networks, especially in Madrid, directed the diffusion of Surrealist ideas (ch. 33). Patricia Allmer critically reassesses German Surrealism, complicated by the division of the country after World War II and the non-existence of a formal identified group, despite evidence of Surrealist-driven visual and literary works (ch. 34). Christina Heflin retraces the rhizomatic expansion of English Surrealism: formed in Paris, it forged a strong intrinsic character that incorporated the English Romantic heritage (ch. 25). Moving East, Malynne Sternstein considers the geopolitical circumstances that determine the specific character of Czech Surrealism, forged through dialogue not only with Paris but with prolific local avant-gardes movements (ch. 24). Victoria Ferentinou explains how the “infiltration of Surrealist ideas and practices in Greece, contributing to the emergence of a vibrant movement” (p. 234) that was motivated by the rejection of Greek tradition and by revolutionary momentum (ch. 26). Cosana Eram tells us why Romanian Surrealism remained in the “paradoxical position of existing by not existing” (271), hindered by internal conflicts and harsh historical circumstances (ch. 30). Turning to the North, Kerry Greaves explains how Surrealism unfolded in distinctive ways and at varying paces in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and points at the general tendencies of Scandinavian Surrealism in its formative period before World War II (ch. 31).

The fourth section, “Critical Dialogues,” offers a dialectical and nuanced critical analysis of Surrealism stemming from anthropology, feminism, and queer theories. Maia Nuku (ch. 35) and Marco Polo Juarez Cruz (ch. 36) explore the diversity of interactions with Oceanic and Native American art, acknowledging “Surrealism’s attempt to expand the categories of art and to reflect upon colonialist practices but also their “misinterpreting and co-opting the Native art to their particular agendas” (330). Anna Watz and Abigail Susik stress the Surrealist “potential for disrupting the dominance of masculinist or gender-essentialist narratives” (349, respectively ch. 37 and 38). Mingling strong personal position and academic methodologies, the dialogue between Jonathan P. Eburne and Catriona McCara plunges into the secrets of the muse in Surrealist art and thought, from classical references to the femme fatale and femme-enfant (ch. 39), whereas Jerome Reznik sees the trans bodies as “dismembered muses” that allowed the Surrealists to explore “gender variance only to the extent that it serve[d] as a device to sow ambiguity and confusion” (370) rather than with genuine empathy and solidarity (ch. 40).

Entitled “Further Reaches,” the final and shortest section opens on the impact of Surrealism on contemporary thoughts and practices: Rochelle Spencer establishes links between recent African novels and Surrealism within the framework of Afrosurrealism (ch. 43). Graig Adcock points pell-mell at Surrealist resonances in contemporary art, and Bruce Baugh launches an urging reconsideration on the influence, often unacknowledged, of Surrealism’s deconstruction of binary oppositions on postmodern theory, namely Derrida, Deleuze, and Judith Butler (ch. 41). This last part, and therefore the book, closes with an inquiry among the authors on the hope we still put in Surrealism, reviving the famous enquêtes surréalistes.

Five years after Surrealism: Key Concepts (Routledge, 2016, ed. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson), these two survey books contribute to capturing the effervescent versatility as a growing internationalized conversation surrounding Surrealism, reassessing the historical stakes and topicality of the longest-lived avant-garde movement of the 20th—and now 21st—century.