Photography and surrealism Francis Picabia is approvingly noted as resisting the trap of money, refusing to be constrained by a commodied style

of work, but whose total incomprehension of surrealism remains an obstacle for Breton to praise him. Moving on to Max Ernst and his collages of reassembled disparate objects according to an order, which, while differing from their normal order, did not seem on the whole to do them any violence.70 Ernsts work is cited as having an exemplary surreality: to assert by means of the image other relationships than those generally or, indeed, provisionally established between human beings on the one hand and, on the other, things considered as accepted facts.7 For Breton, this is Ernsts dream of mediation; his work points to images which revolutionize the relationship of objects; their substance and shadows are all a jigsaw puzzle of creation. Early collages (like absurd emblems), then paintings of (propainterly) dream or virtual reality scenes and various frottages, showed for Breton the dynamic propensity for Ernsts positive reection and will for constant change. Then Man Ray, praised as a painter and one who strips photography of its positive nature, of forcing it to abandon its arrogant air and pretentious claims.72 Breton regards it
as fruitless to attempt to divide Man Rays artistic production into photographic portraits, photographs inappropriately called abstract, and pictorial works properly so called. I know only too well that these three kinds of expression, signed with his name and fullling the same spiritual mission are all bordered at their outer limits by the same conspicuous or inconspicuous halo.73

76

Ibid., p. . Ibid. Ibid., p. . Ibid.

Abandoned to the delectation and justice of the shadows, the objects in Man Rays photographs live and die from the same trembling. Breton quips, How can we distinguish the wax hand from the real hand? thus highlighting the ambiguous status of the photograph in relation to its referent. Moving on to Andr Masson, Joan Mir (perhaps the most surrealist of us all), Yves Tanguy and Jean Arp, Breton legitimates the artists as positive evidence of surrealist activity in painting and