Review of Aber hier leben? Nein danke. Surrealismus + Antifaschismus

Near the entrance to the exhibition “But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism and Anti-fascism” is an excerpt from the film L’Âge d’Or, showing a group of bandits played by members of the Paris Surrealist group. One bandit enters the hideout to warn them of the arrival of the Majorcans. The leader (Max Ernst) responds: “Vite! Aux armes!” One bandit (Pierre Prévert) says he is done for, and in a semi-conscious state utters: “Mais vous avez des accordéons, des hippopotames, des clefs, et des chèvres grimpants et des . . . et des pinceaux.” “Quelles couillonnades! Viens bien, partons,” responds the leader. Whatever the intent, this scene captures the tension between creative endeavor and political action that animated Surrealism, suspending it beyond art yet before politics—a point Walter Benjamin made in 1929, when he described Surrealism’s politics as “a praxis oscillating between fitness exercises and celebration in advance.”1

This sequence encapsulates the challenge of this exhibition: how to capture the relationship between art and politics that animated Surrealism. In contrast to Socialist Realism, Surrealism’s political position was rarely manifested directly in visual art or poetry; rather, the clearest evidence of Surrealism’s politics is found in its tracts and declarations. If Surrealist artworks have a political valence beyond the bland statements of revolutionary intent common to many avant-garde movements, it is located in the contingent relations between specific artworks, associated statements, and particular events. This degree of detail rarely survives the moment; hence Surrealism’s politics often appears fugitive, appearing momentarily to vanish suddenly in the flash of an eye. This is not to downplay the commitment of many Surrealists; rather, it is more a testament to their resolute affirmation of an ethic of absolute freedom, uncompromised by immediate political expediency.

“But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism and Anti-fascism” ably meets this challenge.2 Curated by Stephanie Weber, Adrian Djukić, and Karin Althaus, the exhibition has a focused theme of Surrealism and anti-fascism, particularly against German National Socialism—a decision that certainly makes sense for a Munich museum, given the city’s role in the rise of National Socialism. Located in the Lenbachhaus Kunstbau, a long rectangular room built as an annex over the Königsplatz U-Bann station, the exhibition is organized as twelve thematic sections (fig. 1). The left-hand wall traces the development of Surrealism in France in six overlapping themes, ranging from its establishment in the 1920s to the German Occupation of France in the 1940s, while the facing wall covers developments outside of France in Prague, Germany, Egypt, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the United States. This structure responds to historical events to develop a network of correspondences across time and space.

The first section (Paris: Révolution surrealist?) charts the establishment of Surrealism in Paris and its engagement with politics. This history is largely told through documents: tracts like “L’Affaire de ‘L’Âge d’Or’” and “Ne visitez pas l’Exposition Coloniale” establish principal threads of opposition to fascism and colonialism, while reviews such as La Révolution surréaliste, Légitime défense, and Commune represent the constellation of ideological positions that intersect with Surrealism. The curators use facsimiles of documents, highlighting sections to draw attention to key passages and ideas, which helps the viewer navigate the exhibition. These pedagogic displays are accompanied by artworks (paintings, drawings, photographs and objects) and vitrines containing original publications and documents.

The balance between the display of artworks and their historical context is evident in the section on the Spanish Civil War (fig. 2). The centrepiece is a model of the Spanish Pavilion designed for the 1937 Exposition Universelle in Paris, with its murals by Picasso (Guernica) and Miró (The Reaper). The model is surrounded by works by Wifredo Lam (Cabaïma, 1945), Picasso (Tête de femme, 1939, and the prints La femme qui pleure, IV, 1937, and Sueño y mentira de Franco I and III, 1937), Max Ernst (L’ange du foyer, 1937), and Miró (Nature morte au vieux soulier, 1937, and the pochoir Aidez l’Espagne, 1936–37). But what ties the section together is the use of films to provide historical context: Pere Portabella’s Aidez l’Espagne (1969) and Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens’s Guernica (1950). Originally made to accompany a 1969 Miró exhibition, Aidez l’Espagne focuses on The Reaper, utilizing newsreels from the Spanish Civil War to bring its historical context to life. The film Guernica stands in for the painting (a work that would be nearly impossible to borrow); while the film is an adequate substitute, its scenario by Paul Éluard and focus on the impoverished characters of Picasso’s Blue Period aligns it more closely with the postwar cultural policy of the PCF than Surrealism.3 A reproduction of Guernica also reappears later in the “Art et Liberté” section, underlining its significance as a Surrealist-inflected anti-fascist statement.4

Surrealism never took root in Germany during the Weimar Republic, and once Hitler came to power in 1933, Surrealism was condemned as Entartete Kunst. The curators have used the virtual absence of Surrealism in German culture during the 1930s—what they call the “German Void”—as a central organizational feature of the exhibition. Artists were forced into exile: some (Hans Bellmer, Wolfgang Paalen) would join the Surrealist group in Paris, while others (Wols, Erwin Blumenfeld, and Kati Horna) simply expressed their opposition to fascism in their work. The ambiguity of the relation between anti-fascism and Surrealism is exemplified by a display of John Heartfield’s AIZ photomontages. Should these be considered Surrealist works? While the use of juxtaposition overlaps with Surrealist poetics, the didactic quality of the images, heightened by their captions, neutralizes the quality of dépaysement typically associated with Surrealism. Aragon wrote the essay “John Heartfield et la beauté révolutionnaire” to accompany a 1935 exhibition of Heartfield’s photomontages in Paris.5 This is three years after Aragon’s break with Surrealism, when he had assumed a key role advancing the PCF’s cultural policy. And 1935 would mark the Paris Surrealists’ final break with the PCF, first over the Congrès international pour la défense de la culture, and then their unequivocal denunciation of the Moscow Show Trials in Du Temps que les surréalistes avaient raison.6 The theme of anti-fascism at times obscures the complex relation between Surrealism and Communism; while they shared a common opposition to fascism, Surrealism refused to compromise the principle of absolute freedom in the face of short-term political expediency, such as the Franco-Soviet Mutual Assistance Pact of 1935, or the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.

The German void is framed by Lee Miller’s photographs, which trace her itinerary from Art et Liberté in Egypt in the late-1930s to London during the Battle of Britain, then follow the Allied advance through Germany to the horrors of liberated concentration camps. Miller’s photographs convey historical context, while also capitalizing on her eye for telling yet uncanny details. Also included are issues of Vogue, which first published many of Miller’s wartime photographs. David Edward Scherman’s photo of Miller in the bathtub of Hitler’s Munich apartment, washing away the horror of Buchenwald and Dachau, would be a reference point for a postwar German group in Berlin around the Badewanne (Bathtub) nightclub, an early effort to rekindle avant-garde culture after the Nazi period.

World War II and the German Occupation of France sent prominent Surrealists into exile, while others were forced to deal with the Occupation. German nationals in France were initially interned as enemy aliens, including many intellectuals who had fled Nazi Germany; Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer, and Wols were held at a former tile factory in Les Milles, near Aix-en-Provence. The ubiquitous brick architecture of the Camp des Milles reappears in Bellmer’s drawings, with the rectangular pattern of bricks assuming anthropomorphic forms as its geometry succumbs to the force of erotic desire. On the island of Jersey, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, whose involvement with Surrealism was closely tied to their opposition to fascism, undertook their campaign of “paper bullets,” anti-fascist propaganda distributed among the German troops. Such activities were not without risk: Cahun and Moore were arrested and sentenced to death, a fate they narrowly escaped by the Allied liberation of the Channel Islands in 1944. In Paris, the remaining Surrealists regrouped as La Main à plume. The exhibition includes works by Victor Brauner, Óscar Domínguez, Jacques Hérold, and Raoul Ubac, but the principal currency of La Main à plume was clandestine poetry publications. La Main à plume assumed a heterodox membership, the common opposition to fascism forging new alliances. Paul Éluard, for instance, who broke with Surrealism in favour of the PCF in 1938, published “Libérté” as part of the collection Poésie et verité in 1942.

The rubric of “Exiles” covers the Americas, starting with Surrealism in Mexico: a selection of photographs by Manuel Alvares Bravo and Kati Horn, paintings by Remedios Varo and Eugenio Granell, and the review Dyn. The New York exile is represented by paintings by Masson (La Résistance, 1944) and Roberto Matta (L’année 1944, 1942). Yet perhaps the most telling comment on this period of exile is Leonora Carrington’s Caballos: in the foreground of a landscape populated by horses, a stallion mounts a mare, while a landscape filled with active volcanos appears in the distance, separated by a span of water. It is difficult not to read Caballos in light of Carrington’s recent experience: first, her mental breakdown following Ernst’s internment, then her arrival in New York to find Ernst now married Peggy Guggenheim, contrasting the trauma of wartime Europe to the frivolity of New York.

A recurring theme in the exhibition is a link between anti-fascism and anti-colonialism. Surrealism’s opposition to colonialism did not pass unnoticed by a group of Black Caribbean students who borrowed the title of Breton’s 1926 pamphlet for the review Légime défense, launched in 1932. This initiative would be followed by the review Tropiques in Martinique (1941–45). The key artist here is Wifredo Lam, whose paintings, drawings and book illustrations share the walls with texts by Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, and Suzanne Césaire. The Caribbean also intersects the Surrealist’s period of exile in the United States. Fleeing Marseille in 1942, Breton and company stopped in Martinique, where they discovered the Tropiques group; Breton and Péret would help publish editions of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, with illustrations by Lam in 1943 and 1947.

The exhibition also includes the Grand tableau antifasciste collectif, the collaborative painting by Jean-Jacques Lebel, Enrico Baj, Roberi Crippa, Giovanni Dova, Erró, and Antonio Recalcati, completed in 1960 and exhibited at the third Anti-Procès exhibition in Milan in 1961 before being seized by the Italian police.7 This painting was a response to the anticolonial French-Algerian War, referencing Djamila Boupacha, a young Algerian woman who was raped and tortured by the French military, and whose case was taken up by Simone de Beauvoir.8 While the inclusion of this painting is entirely warranted, the exhibition could have explored anti-fascism in France in greater depth, particularly in light of Charles de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, considered a proto-fascist coup by the Surrealists. Significant here is the short-lived review Le 14 Juillet, edited by Dionys Mascolo and Jean Schuster, who would also draft the Déclaration sur le droit d’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie in 1960.

A final section on Ted Joans weaves together the theme of anti-racism, the activities of the Chicago Surrealist Group, and Joans’ peripatetic life in Europe, Africa, and the US. Like the Tropiques group in Martinique, Joans’ discovery of Surrealism provides an avenue for cultural emancipation, questioning a “civilization” that may have vanquished the Nazis yet still upheld the racism central to the fascist worldview—a point succinctly made by inserting Jimi Hendrix among the burghers of Rembrandt’s The Nightwatch, one of a series of collages that add Black figures to canonical artworks. Also notable is a short excerpt from William Klein’s film of the 1969 “Festival panafricain d’Alger,” depicting Joans reciting “Jazz is my religion” while Archie Shepp and a group of Tuareg musicians improvise. In contrast to the toxic stew of religious fundamentalism and superpower intrigue that imperils parts of Africa today, this performance demonstrates how imaginative endeavor can bridge cultural, ethnic and political differences.

In a fitting coda, the curators commissioned Jakob and Jonathan Penca to produce videos based on unpublished texts from China Mieville’s The Last Days of New Paris. Mieville’s counter-historical novel describes a Paris still occupied by the Nazis in the 1950s, where the remnants of La Main à plume clash with Nazi forces; in the aftermath of a Surrealist bomb, exquisite corpses come to life as anarchic Manifs, disrupting the fascist control of the city. Like the Manifs, who resist domestication, this exhibition reveals a face of Surrealism that does not fit into the typical art historical or political categories, accentuating a refusal to accept the dismal limits of the real world or the compromise of political expediency as an essential aspect of Surrealism.