Review of Why Surrealism Matters

At the 2008 opening of the “Duchamp Man Ray Picabia” show at the Tate Modern, I had the pleasure of meeting the artist Richard Hamilton. When I asked him about his experience making a replica of Duchamp’s Large Glass in 1966, Hamilton replied, “Well I think it should be policy to remake it every fifty years.” He implied that both he and Duchamp thought this should be done to return the work to its origins, using only Duchamp’s notes in The Green Box and carefully traced drawings as a guide. That would, in turn, return to the “First Principles” of the work itself, from which accurate new interpretations might then arise. A century after André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, Breton’s biographer Mark Polizzotti has performed a similar operation: carefully revisiting and fitting together the original elements of Surrealism to remind us anew of Why Surrealism Matters.

Some books are “tales”—written to offer clear conclusions to a scholar’s new thesis or question, but to me, Polizzotti has provided a book that is instead a valuable “tool.” He has offered us the clear outlines of the original tenets of Surrealism. We can then each overlay these “descriptor templates” onto successive generations of visual art, literature, performance, or political activities and judge for ourselves if the distinctive profiles of surrealist thought are evident and if Surrealism’s vital DNA is still thriving in art and culture a century later.

Polizzotti is saddled by the “Why . . . . Matters” title template of Yale’s book series, which would more likely promise a “tale” told with proofs of contemporary examples. But, because the author believes Surrealism is “less an aesthetic movement than a state of mind . . . it stems from an impulse that is more existential than aesthetic”1 a better title for this book/tool might be “What Makes Surrealist Thought Timeless?” However, no matter what the title, Polizzotti’s book is a valuable piece of “conceptual recognition software”—a key resource for the twenty-first century that should be on every scholar’s bookshelf.

Throughout the book, Polizzotti acknowledges the importance and influence of the movement’s predecessors and diverse sources of inspiration. Not surprisingly, André Breton is first among equals of those quoted. Polizzotti highlights Surrealism’s adoption of Dada’s innovative use of publicity. It created an international identity through networks of like-minded spirits across Europe and even New York. Beyond Dada’s relentless, but exhausting rage against bourgeois society Polizzotti posits that Surrealism took up a greater challenge: to discover what existed within a person’s mind or beyond a person’s conscious imagination. As Breton stated, “We want and will have the ‘beyond’ in our own time.”2

In the chapter, “Transformation: the Search for Marvels,” Polizzotti discusses the surrealist desire to have elevated moments of experience—encounters with the marvelous. They cultivated the trouvaille—the chance encounter that gave rise to new, fresh associations or an unexpected synergy of imagery, and they welcomed “objective chance,” defined by surrealist painter and writer Penelope Rosemont as “desire precipitating reality.”3

Central to surrealist practice was automatic writing. Polizzotti discusses this practice, along with its origins and value, as well as its limits and its detractors. The author even suggests that this practice can no longer be genuinely experienced, because, quoting Jacqueline Cheniéux-Gendron, “handwriting is disappearing as is the rote memorization-based education that formed the basis of the Surrealists’ verbal inspiration”4 The impact and the peril of the trance sessions of René Crevel and Robert Desnos were celebrated by the Surrealists, while hypnotism and séances to contact lost spirits were eschewed. The related function of Dalí’s paranoiac-critical “double-envisioning” is touched upon and reflected in examples as far back as Arcimboldo and forward to examples by Wittgenstein, Freud and Jung.

The author also deftly links the literary to the visual, tangible realm of Surrealist objects, “poems in which certain directly perceivable objects meld into words”5 as described by Breton. It may be a frustration to readers that Why Surrealism Matters includes no photos or illustrations. However, as broadly and deeply as Polizzotti covers Surrealism, favoring any specific images from any one era or locale would undercut the author’s contention that Surrealism is more than an art movement. The author succeeds in verbally conjuring iconic references stretching from Duchamp’s Why Not Sneeze, Rose Selavy? and Man Ray’s The Gift (both 1921), to Oppenheim’s Luncheon in Fur and Dalí’s Lobster Telephone (both 1936) to Cornell boxes. Polizzotti connects these works to Robert Rauschenberg6 and Jasper Johns’ assemblages and sculptures and beyond, into his next chapter, “Appropriation: Love and Theft.”

Polizzotti extends the notion of appropriation from the inspiration and imagery the Surrealists drew from their collections of African, Oceanic and Native American artifacts to Richard Prince’s Pictures Generation co-opting of the Marlboro Man. He discusses Breton’s support of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire of the Négritude Movement in Martinique and his vow that “Surrealism is allied with people of color,”7 but then blunts the nobility of these sentiments by also citing Breton’s disparaging remark that “he would sleep with any non-white woman as long as she wasn’t a Negress.”8 Polizzotti goes on to cite the work of poet/performer Ted Joans, who drew relationships among the works of the French poets, W.E. B. Du Bois, jazz artists Cecil Taylor and Charlie Parker, and even Black activists Malcolm X and Patrice Lumumba. He expands the pantheon to include people like Toni Morrison, Jordan Peele, D. Scot Miller, Kara Walker, Kool Keith, Samuel R. Delany, Kehinde Wiley, Yinka Shonbare, Ishmael Reed, Romare Bearden, Wangechi Mutu, Sun Ra and even Marvel Comics hero the Black Panther.

The author establishes meaningful links between the advertising industry’s use of seduction along with the generation of desire and fulfillment and Surrealism’s adeptly crafted program of promotional texts, editions, research center, and magazine—all to establish and expand the Surrealist “brand.” This tendency to “expand and brand” has since been profitably adopted by Andy Warhol and super-sized to entrepreneurial-industrial proportions by artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

Polizzotti’s chapter “Subversion: Identity Paradigms” touches upon Breton’s ever-shifting demands for orthodox loyalty in behavior and his imperious exclusions of members from the group that precipitated needless schisms and recriminations—Surrealism’s own form of cancel culture. In opposition to the status quo, the group adopted a strong anti-clerical stance while embracing the writings of the then scandalous Marquis de Sade that advocated personal liberty in life and love, even if that liberty was often at the expense of others. Polizzotti then points out that humor, “the mortal enemy of sentimentality,”9 was taken up as a Surrealist weapon with which to oppose propriety. He names numerous Surrealism-inspired fellow travelers of subsequent generations ranging from Kurt Vonnegut to Monty Python to Bugs Bunny. The author then segues from humor to play to discuss Surrealists’ invention of communal games such as the “Exquisite Corpse” drawing game or verbal “If—Then,” One Inside Another” and “Truth or Consequences” to spark free-associations and creative revelations. Breton even inspired the Surrealists to design a “Marseilles Deck” of Tarot cards with the four suits Love, Dream, Revolution, and Knowledge.

Combining love and revolution to challenge the strictures of their society’s staid code of morality is one subject of the chapter, “Transgression: Free Unions.” This chapter might aptly be subtitled “eros c’est la vie—or not?” Polizzotti credits the Surrealists for their exultation of Eros and advocacy of untrammeled sexuality as a path to liberty and inspiration in theory, while pointing out that most Surrealists were married, or at most, practiced serial monogamous heterosexual relationships. Many of the members had deep internal conflicts between their strict, hardwired Catholic upbringing and their philosophic advocacy of free, sublime, “mad love.” The author turns to Breton who admitted that “the majority of quarrels that cropped up in Surrealism [were a result of] an irreducible disagreement over sexual matters.”10

The other major topic of this chapter that continues to be a major topic of Surrealism is “The problem of woman,” as admitted by Breton. “the most wonderful and disturbing problem there is in the world.”11 Polizzotti points out that male Surrealists idealized, idolized and objectified “woman” as their subject but more often than not distorted, dissected, dismembered, or portrayed their idol/ideal in half-animal guises. As judicious and even-handed as he has been throughout this book, the author notes that with a short list of over twenty women in their initial ranks, Surrealism was far more inclusive than other movements to date. He also devotes ample space for women artists to offer their views of the surrealist milieu. Leonora Carrington bluntly characterized it as “another bullshit role for women”12 while Eileen Agar pointed out that “Surreal men expected to be very free sexually but when Lee Miller had the same attitude while with Man Ray the hypocritical upset was tremendous.”13 Leonor Fini was acknowledged but distanced from the group because she seldom lived with less than two full time lovers. However, Meret Oppenheim pointed out that “the dominance of men was the same as everywhere else” but “for us women, Surrealism represented a world in which we could rebel against the conventions of our upbringing . . . [it was a world] in which imagination was a key to a more liberated life . . . an opportunity to more fully realize the anxieties and experiences pertaining to womanhood . . . [and] to expand representations of sex that are more inclusive to a variety of erotic and emotive expressions.”14 This expansion “of sex more inclusive to a variety of erotic and emotive expressions” is certainly a strong legacy element among the many female and trans artists at work today.

From these most intimate concerns, Polizzotti shifts to a global review of Surrealism’s impact on world events in “Disruption: Free Radicals.” The chapter could be summarized by Jonathan P. Eburne’s observation that “Surrealism’s political involvement was remarkable for its comprehensiveness.”15 The author recognizes that whether entranced by the Russian Revolution, the 1968 Paris protests, or echoed decades later in the Black Lives Matter movement, Breton’s assertion that through “a primacy of passion—a certain state of fury . . . [we] are most likely to achieve . . . Surrealist illumination.”16 This a direct and complete Breton quote, which, like many Surrealist pronouncements, is forceful and emphatic yet ambiguous and open-ended—crafted to inspire a broad spectrum of unforeseeable future activities.

To conclude his briskly paced but exhaustive inventory of Surrealism’s enduring traits Polizzotti cites Michael Richardson, who writes that “Surrealism’s vitality over such a long period is no doubt due to the fact that it did not embrace the modernist cult of innovation, but instead engaged with a set of complex philosophical and anthropological issues, which gave artists leeway to approach it in multiple ways relevant to their particular circumstances without being bound by what had come before.”17

Polizzotti has indeed made a convincing case for Surrealism’s original and continued relevance by showing how it succeeded in transcending any definition or identity tied to a specific individual, medium, nationality, timeframe, or activity. Surrealism has made itself timeless by embracing elements of chance, coincidence, dreams, the erotic, and the creation and fulfillment of desires for rebellion and liberty—qualities universally experienced or sought after not just by one generation, but by every generation. Surrealism, in the words of Man Ray, sought to be a kaleidoscopic “merging of all the arts, as all things merge in real life, since the object of all art is not to rival life, but to surpass it.”18