The History of Surrealism
Category: Books,Literature & Fiction,History & Criticism
The History of Surrealism Details
Review Intelligent and exact, [this book] should be studies by everyone who seeks enlightenment about the contemporary mind. (New York Times Book Review)Like it or not, surrealism cannot be ignored in an overview of 20th-century thought. Nadeau's book is still its most intelligent text. (Washington International Arts Letter) Read more Language Notes Text: English, French (translation) Read more
Reviews
Surrealism was the first artistic movement I got into on my own. There was something so immediate to it, a kind of dream state that seemed to throw off all convention for truly bizarre, often stunningly beautiful, imagery. It helped that I was an adolescent and it was the psychedelic late 1960s, but there was something that spoke directly to me and many of my suburban hippy pals. Their work required no preparation, the Surrrealists seemed to throw out all traditional forms, and no one - not even the artists themselves - would say what their individual works meant. As I grew up, I moved on to more regular subjects like economics and history, but I always kept an affection for this raucous bunch, even though I had never read much about what they were thinking, what they were trying to do, their ideological context.This history of their movement is unfortunately too limited in scope. It essentially covers the thought of André Breton, a poet who wrote the Surrealist Manifestos and led the group. Rather than interpretive context and a history of their times and art, I instead found here the evolution of Breton's writing, how the various members squabbled and drifted away, and their relation to the communist movement. It made for pretty pedestrian reading, dry in terms of ideas and often simply a plodding chronology. It is a boring read, given to vague philosophical statements that I could rarely relate to and offering far too little explanation to the ideas that underlay their thinking.The book begins with some very interesting context. The Dadaists emerged after WWI, disillusioned from the horrendous experience in the trenches. They wanted to throw out everything rational, all tradition in society and art, all orthodoxy. They indulged in the absurd, such as Marcel Duchamp submitting a urinal to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, for which the art was to change the concept. It was also very funny. A coat rack became a trap, etc. This threw out the last formal vestiges on art, even exalting industrial goods as on an equal par to Renoir or even da Vinci.Breton participated in this, as did Max Ernst and Duchamp. Soon, Breton wanted to go deeper, to change society and man's concept of existence. They approached this through the work of 2 great intellectuals, Karl Marx and more significantly, Sigmund Freud. Marx supplied the call to a political process of communist revolution, i.e. destroying bourgeois society, but Freud opened the door to changing consciousness, tapping into the unconscious mind to spontaneously produce an art of primal images, be they shapes (e.g. Arp and Miro) or figurative (e.g. Duchamp and Salvador Dali). That is about it for the founding ideological precepts. Unfortunately, Nadeau fails to explain much about Marx and Freud, such as the conditions from which they emerged. As such, this requires the reader to have a certain level of knowledge. The bulk of the book, which gets very dull, is about how Breton tried to balance the political agenda with the psychological one. Some went into hardcore communism, such as Aragon, while others preferred to stick to hallucinatory imagery.What is missing are art criticism, mini-biographies of the principal players, and how the political context influenced them in an ongoing way. I was very disappointed with this. How, for example, did they support themselves financially? Who were these guys and why them? The book also fails to wrap everything up, instead going into a ridiculously abstruse essay at the end. I think Nadeau was trying to say that the Surrealists failed in their attempt to change our minds and society, producing subjective works that verge on obscurantism. But I can't be sure.I was very disappointed with this book. While I got some of the basics of what they wanted to accomplish, I wanted much more depth than Nadeau could deliver. I cannot recommend this book except to students in art history or readers with an extreme interest in the evolution of Breton's thought.