The Metamorphosis of Surrealism: The Re-Fashioning of Surrealism by Critical

Writings

“I have no tastes except distaste. Masters, master-crooks, smear your canvases.

Everyone knows there is no Surrealist painting. Neither the marks of a pencil

abandoned to the accidents of gesture, nor the image retracing the forms of a dream...” 1

With these comments, Pierre Naville, a member of the original circle of Surrealists,

writing in La Revolution Surrealiste during an interlude when he was editor of the

journal, signals what would be a persistent conflict in regard to interpreting the art of the

Surrealist movement. The first writing about Surrealist art was concurrent with the early

artistic activities of the group, in fact, writers were the original founders of the

movement, and self-promotion and grappling with the parameters of the movement was

the content of much of the early writing.

Andre Breton, the guiding force behind the Surrealist movement, responded to Naville’s

comments by taking over the reins of La Revolution Surrealiste, and began writing a

series of rebuttals directed at Naville’s refusal of the visual aesthetic of Surrealism.

These articles would later appear in book form under the title of Surrealism and

Painting.

In defense of a Surrealist art Breton champions numerous artists affiliated with the

Surrealist group, such as Max Ernst, Joan Miro, and Andre Masson. In a passage

1 Rosalind Krauss, L’Amour Fou (New York, Abbeville Press, 1985) p.19
devoted to Miro’s depiction of the Catalan landscape, The Tilled Field, Breton captures

the essence of a surrealist painterly vision in his description of the reductive forms used

in the Miro’s painting:

“...to see a feathered animal, in terms of its feathers, a furred animal in terms of its

hairs, to form an opinion of France or Spain solely in terms of their contour on the map

and the special image suggested by the sinuosity of the outline, to demand nothing from

reality but the super-expressive, the expressive in its most childlike sense, and to devise

nothing beyond the limits of this expressiveness. A word for an eye, a tooth for a word.” 2

Even though not directly affiliated with the group, Pablo Picasso is praised by Breton as

the first Surrealist, and Breton singles out two of Picasso’s cubist works as being

paintings that perfectly embody Surrealism. Writing about Picasso’s Man With a

Clarinet in the 1925 issue of La Revolution Surrealiste, Breton writes:

“Tangible proof of our unwavering proposition that the mind talks stubbornly to us of a

future continent, and that everyone has the power to accompany an ever more beautiful

Alice in wonderland.”3

Breton writes further concerning Picasso’s 1913 painting Woman in the Armchair: “From

the laboratory open to the sky there will continue to escape at nightfall divinely strange

beings, dancers dragging fragments of marble mantelpieces behind them, adorably

laden tables beside which your table-turning counts for nothing, and all that remains

hanging from the immemorial newspaper ‘Le Jour’... it has been said that there could be

2 Andre Bretin, Surrealism and Painting (Boston, MFA Publications, 2002) p.38
3 Ibid, p.6
no such thing as Surrealist painting. Painting, literature- what are they to us, O Picasso,

you who have carried the spirit, no longer of contradiction, but of evasion to its farthest

point.”4

Breton explains in Surrealism and Painting that he sees the picture frame as a window,

and states that “my first concern is then to know what it looks out on.” 5 He also

privileges the visual over all the other senses. He speaks about the “savage eye” 6, that

is the eye untainted by logic, or reason, the eye as a pure instrument of perception.

Moreover, he goes on to say “Auditive images, in fact, are inferior to visual images not

only in clarity but also in strictness, and with all due respect to a few melomaniacs, they

are destined to strengthen the idea of human greatness. So may night continue to

descend on the orchestra, and may I...be left with open eyes, or with closed eyes in

broad daylight, to my silent contemplation.” 7

Already at the beginnings of Surrealism a series of conflicting points of view are

established regarding painting, and Breton confirmed his firm stance in favor of the

visual, but also adds a twist of ambiguity to his position when he wrote about “that

lamentable expedient which is painting.” 8

Breton’s writings about art were never critical in the conventional sense, but were

always a poetic championing of artists who met his favor, and he never described the

artwork in formalistic terms. Surrealism and Painting contains numerous articles written

by Breton about favored artists from Kandinsky to Kahlo, as well as articles on the core

Surrealist artists like Ernst, Masson, Tanguy, Miro, and Dali, as well as lesser known

4 Ibid, p.6
5 Ibid, p.2
6 Ibid, p.1
7 Ibid, p.1
8 Ibid, p.6
Surrealists from the Thirties and the Forties. His passionate defense of painting, and its

place in Surrealism would continue into the Forties and on up to his death in 1966.

“....the Surrealist sensibility is beyond rehabilitation, as silly, quaint and as hapless

before the actual facts of the times as, say a pre-Raphaelite sensibility. To re-habilitate

Surrealism today means to make a case for it as art.” 9

In 1968, Philip Leider thus characterized the Surrealist impulse in his review of the

largest retrospective of Surrealist art in American history. The 1968 Dada and Surrealist

exhibition at MOMA signaled a reevaluation and reappraisal of Surrealism. The

exhibition, curated by William Rubin, occasioned a flurry of critical writings re-assessing

Surrealism’s role in modern art. Such writers as Lucy Lippard, Max Kozloff, and Annette

Michelson, as well as the somewhat earlier writings by Robert Goldwater, not to

mention Rubin’s own articles, and his massive tome Dada and Surrealist Art, set the

foundation for a new view of the Surrealist legacy, redefined Surrealism for the post-

1968 generations, and set the stage for all future critical reactions against the paradigm

which he established. Such important voices as Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and

Christopher Green would apply more sophisticated semiotic and psychoanalytic tools in

the wake of Rubin’s reframing of Surrealism.

Prior to 1968, aside from a handful of dissident and more nuanced views, notably

Robert Goldwater’s, Surrealism had been relegated to the dust bin of modernism, in

large part due to the critical position staked out by Clement Greenberg. Hal Foster’s

comments in the opening pages of his book Compulsive Beauty summarized the

9 Art Forum, May 1968, p.22

prevailing attitude towards Surrealism from mid-century on up to the 1970s. “In Anglo-

American formalism, Surrealism was considered a deviant art movement: improperly

visual and impertinently literary, relatively inattentive to imperatives of form and mostly

indifferent to the laws of genre, a paradoxical avant-garde concerned with infantile

states and outmoded forms, not properly modernist at all.” 10

Much of this post WWII view of Surrealism was the product of what seemed to be an

inevitable geographic shift of the mainstream of the art world away from Europe towards

New York City. This crystalized during WWII with the exile of an assortment of

European intellectuals, and artists, notably a contingent of Surrealists who de-camped

to New York in order to escape the inundation of Europe by fascism. A critical and

catalyzing role was played by these artists in germinating the seeds of a new American

art. Yet in the wake of the Surrealist influence in New York, a negative reaction set in, a

critical distancing, and a denigration of Surrealism by some of the leading lights in this

new American art movement, which led to a devaluation of the Surrealist impulse.

Additionally, various journalistic outlets cast the Surrealists in a highly derogatory light,

most explicitly, writing in the American Mercury, Klauss Mann (the son of German writer

Thomas Mann) called the Surrealists “Nazoid.” 11

In concert with the critical commentary of Clement Greenberg, a handful of painters

distanced themselves form the surrealist legacy, notably Barnett Newman. The sense is

that post-war American painters felt that Surrealism’s modes of artistic inquiry were no

longer relevant in the newly configured world, especially after the trauma of WWII, the

holocaust, atomic bombs, and America’s new dominance in the wake of the war. 12

10 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty: (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993) p. xii

11 Stephanie Barron, Exiles and Emigres
12 Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloch, Art Since 1900 (New York, Thames and Hudson, 2004) p.326
Less inflammatory than Mann’s comments, but no less critical, was the art historical

analysis provided by Clement Greenberg who wrote in such left wing journals as The

Partisan Review and The Nation.

In large part, Greenberg was responsible for critically fashioning the direction of post-

war American art from the Abstract Expressionist period on up to the Color Field

painters of the early 1960s. His incisive and highly influential writings in the early 1940s

framed Surrealism in a less than favorable light. Yet even before the advent of WWII,

critical voices had articulated divergent positions vis-a-vis Surrealism, and though

retrospectively historians discern the fading of the Surrealist impulse by the mid 1930s,

other more nuanced voices worked to establish Surrealism as the prominent artistic

impulse during the inter-war period, a view articulated in the writings of Alfred E. Barr Jr.

and Walter Benjamin.

Alfred Barr Jr. as the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York had an

important early influence on the reception of surrealism in the United States. Barr’s

famous flow chart of modern art situated Surrealism as part of a historical lineage that

flowed out of Dada, and fell under the aegis of non-geometrical abstract art. In 1936,

Barr mounted an exhibition titled Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism and included the

principal Surrealists juxtaposed with art by Hieronymous Bosch, Archimboldo, Fussili,

Blake, and Goya, as well as anamorphic pictures, and other oddities including the work

of the insane. Barr’s hope was to frame Surrealism within a historical context, finding

precedence for Surrealism in past art; and perhaps helping to explain Surrealism to an

American audience.
Barr’s view was that Surrealism had superseded cubism and was now the most

important inter-war art movement. Comparing cubism with Surrealism, Barr remarked

“The shape of the square confronts the silhouette of the amoeba.” 13

Barr regarded the biomorphic forms of the Surrealists, seen prominently in the work of

Miro and Arp, as in the ascendent mode, replacing the purely geometric art derived from

the cubists.

Clement Greenberg’s critique of Surrealism was outlined in his writing on non-objective

art in a 1940 essay entitled Towards a Newer Laocoon. In this essay Greenberg

described painting as following a teleology/evolution, one that has painting

progressively evolving towards an increasingly flat picture plane, thereby relegating the

mode of painting that employs the picture frame as window looking into an illusionistic

space as obsolete and undesirable. In an 1945 essay, Surrealist Painting, he split the

Surrealist painters into two camps. The first group uses automatism as a primary

technique, and included such artists as Miro, Masson and Picasso. The other artists

used automatism only secondarily, and are merely illusionists, painting images of

dreamscapes. This second group included the bulk of Surrealist painters such as Ernst,

Tanguy, Magritte, and Dali. Following from this interpretation the majority of Surrealists

are characterized as literary painters, academics, antiquarians or worse. In the 1945

essay, he described the Surrealist painters of dream images as producers of kitsch, and

for Greenberg this was the most detestable sort of characterization.

13 Alfred Barr Jr., Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred Barr Jr. (New York, Abrams, 1986)
p.26
“For the sake of hallucinatory vividness the Surrealists have copied the effects of

calendar reproduction, postal card chromotype and magazine illustration. In general

they prize the qualities of the popular reproduction because of its incongruously prosaic

associations and because the reproduction heightens illusionistic effect by erasing paint

texture and brushstroke.”14

These illusionistic techniques and devices employed by the Surrealists are exactly

counter to Greenberg’s directive to the art world to emphasize the picture plane, and the

material quality of the painted surface, as painting itself and not as a window viewing

some illusionistic space, however bizarre or unusual it maybe. Moreover, he viewed

these Surrealists as contributing nothing original to the history of painting, and

compared them to the Pre-Raphaelite movement. In fact, he saw the Surrealist direction

as a dangerous impulse, an impulse that threatened the mainline impulse of modern art,

and the most original developments of modern art history, most of which had developed

in Paris since Manet’s breakthrough: The drive towards increasing abstraction and the

emphasis on the flat picture plane.

However, Greenberg broke out one of the Surrealists from the pack. He wrote about

Joan Miro as one of the most significant and original painters of the century, and even

described him as psuedo-Surrealist in order to distinguish and elevate him from the rest

of the Surrealist milieu. This is ironic considering that Andre Breton regarded Miro as

“the most Surrealist of us all.”15

14 Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume I (Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1986) p.229
15 Andre Breton, Surrealism and Painting (Boston, MFA Publications, 2002) p.38
In a book devoted to Miro written in the late 1940s 16, after his earlier essays, Greenberg

emphasized the formal aspects of Miro’s paintings, to the exclusion of all other qualities,

as well as the progressive evolution of Miro’s painting toward a more reductive and flat

style. Greenberg also outlines Miro’s debt to analytic cubism, Picasso, and the

distinctive line of Art Nouveau, particularly its Catalan manifestation. The following

passage comments on the painter’s groundbreaking painting from 1923-24: The Tilled

Field, here Greenberg describes the primary quality which elevates Miro’s work above

the other Surrealists.

“What is most radical, however, is the treatment of pictorial space which is given a flat

and undifferentiated backdrop tending to become one with the picture’s physical surface

itself; into this space, which disregards scale and perspective, shapes are inserted like

paper silhouettes, their fancifulness seeming as much the result of the compression of

two dimensional space as of the artists invention.” 17

Miro is emblematic of Greenberg’s vision of painting as a purely 2-dimensional medium

following some internal impulse within painting itself to flatten and compress the picture

plane. Greenberg foregrounds the employment of formalistic devices above the

imaginative inventiveness of the artist.

Greenberg sees Miro’s work, particularly during the decisive and fertile 20s, as a

gradual and deliberate evolution towards these qualities of two-dimensionality. Miro is

progressively engaged in a “process of rarefication” 18 of the formal elements of painting.

Greenberg traces this formalistic evolution from Miro’s early tentative work, when he

16 Clement Greenberg, Joan Miro (New York, Quadrangle Press, 1948)

17 Ibid, p.20
18 Ibid, p.23
first arrived in Paris, through the twenties with references to specific works like The

Farm, The Tilled Field, Catalan Landscape, and the Dutch Interior.

However, in the wake of the main thrust of Greenberg’s critical view of Surrealism, and

the subsequent development of Abstract Expressionism, and later developments during

the 1950s, the legacy of Surrealism is occluded, particularly in the United States. 19

During the mid-Sixties the ghost of Surrealism starts to rise again in the consciousness

of the art world. Writing in the mid 1960s, following a series of exhibits on the theme of

dream space, Robert Goldwater, a professor at NYU and chairman of the Museum of

Primitive Art in New York, offers a poetic archaeology of the personal iconography of

the Surrealists that stands in stark contrast to Greenberg’s formal analysis.

Like Greenberg, Goldwater also singles out Miro as being distinct from the other

Surrealists but in the sense of his poetic or imaginative constitution.

“Miro began without the prejudices and handicaps of Cartesian logic and Euclidean

vision, and so for him there was really no problem of that ‘resolution of dream and

reality’ to which his intellectual friends had to give so much thought and energy.” 20

Goldwater sees Miro as a creative being of the sort who uses the creation of space to

invoke the dream. Further to buttress his framing of Miro as a poet of the abstract,

Goldwater cites a passage from Miro’s own writings that underscore Miro’s own poetic

perspective of the world.

“I’m overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent moon and the sun.

There are, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty space. Empty spaces, empty

horizons, empty plains-everything which is bare has always impressed me...Immobility

19 Foster, Krauss, Bois, Buchloh, Art since 1900 (New York, Thames and Hudson, 2004) p. 326
20 Robert Goldwater, Space and Dream (New York, Walker and Company, 1967) p.14
strikes me... A pebble which is a finite and motionless object suggests to me not only

movements, but movements without end...What I am seeking, in fact, is a motionless

movement, something equivalent to the eloquence of silence.” 21

This meditative, even Zen-like view expressed by Miro is far from the formalist teleology

presented by Greenberg.

In 1966, continuing this incremental re-framing of Surrealism, Art Forum runs a special

issue devoted entirely to Surrealism with numerous articles expressing both negative

and positive view of the movement. This critical refashioning is a prelude to William

Rubin’s blockbuster exhibition at MOMA in 1968. Part of the re-visiting and

reassessment of Surrealism is due to a new direction that contemporary art takes during

the Sixties. Many of the most innovative artists of the Sixties start to employ Surrealist

techniques and adopt a Surrealist attitude that is consonant with many aspects of the

contemporary zeitgeist.

“Surrealism is in fact housebroken Dada, post-graduate Dada, northern fantasy

subjected to French lucidity, chaos tamed into order.” 22

Writing in Art Forum Lucy Lippard underscores the importance, and the point of origin

for Surrealism, of the Dada movement, and particularly the personage of “Dada” Max

Ernst. All the main threads of Surrealism emerge in nascent form in the work of Ernst

during his Cologne years.

Commenting on an exhibition of Ernst’s collages in May of 1921, “These small works

executed from 1919 to 1921, constituted the immediate source of visual Surrealism, and

21 Ibid, p.15
22 Lucy Lippard, Art Forum, September 1966, p.10
Ernst’s development during this period is a microcosm of Dada into Surrealism.” 23

Lippard points out that prior to the war, as early as 1912, well before the other

Surrealists, Ernst studied philosophy, and abnormal psychology at the University of

Bonn. It is from this point that his interest in the unconscious, Freud, and the insane

begin, and feed into his artistic practice. Immediately after the war, in the tight knit Dada

Cologne group, Lippard suggest that Ernst was the prime mover, and his development

of photo-collage techniques were the central breakthrough.

Lippard indicated that Ernst’s technique of photo-collage was distinct from and superior

to the papier-colle of the Cubists, and the photo-montages of the Berlin Dadaist. In fact,

Ernst is shown to be more innovative in this medium than even subsequent

practitioners, and he creates with his collages “a coherence alien to Dada and a

consistently fantastic image alien to earlier movements”. 24

Furthermore, Lippard explains that Ernst’s innovations provided the primary visual mode

employed by the Surrealists in the decade to follow:

“In 1921, dissimilar objects began to be connected by association so that the result was

no longer a single new image but a new situation or drama comprised of recognizable

images integrated into a novel context, closer to the now standard idea of dream

pictures, the unity of the carefully constructed oneiric realism, unmistakably narrative in

intent, was assured by such smooth passage between images; these collages seem like

one frame from a film or comic strip, a dislocated part of some strange tale.” 25

23 Ibid, p.10
24 Ibid, p.15
25 Ibid, p.15
Preceding the landmark exhibit in 1968 on Dada and Surrealist art, William Rubin, the

chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art, writes several essays in the 1966 Art

Forum. The first essay implicitly derives from Alfred Barr’s earlier pre-war promotion of

Surrealism, and asserts the seminal influence of Giorgio deChirico. The second essay is

devoted entirely to an exploration of the work of deChirico and his influence on the

Surrealists, illustrated with numerous reproductions of deChirico’s work. The three

essays are entitled: Notes on Surrealism and Fantasy Art, Giorgio deChirico, and A

Post-Cubist Morphology: Preliminary Remarks. The last essay is illustrated with both

Surrealist art and Surrealist inspired early works by American Abstract Expressionists

like William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, and Clifford Still. He writes all the essays under

the heading of “Toward a Critical Framework,” 26 and proposes what he says is the first

definition ever of Surrealist painting. Rubin describes the stylistic heterogeneity of

Surrealism and attempts to find common characteristics, iconographically and

thematically, and arrive at a working definition. Similar to Greenberg’s breakdown of the

Surrealists into two camps, Rubin also separates the Surrealists: “The two poles of

Surrealist painting, the automatist-abstract and the academic illusionist, correspond

roughly to the Freudian twin props of Surrealist theory, automatism (free association)

and dreams.”27

Rubin situates all the Surrealists along a continuum between peintures, like Miro and

imagiers, like Dali and Magritte. Max Ernst is views as independently moving up and

down this continuum. Furthermore using the French expression, Rubin describes all

Surrealist painters as “peinture-poesie”, as opposed to the “peinture-peinture”. Rubin

26 William Rubin, Art Forum, September 1966.

27 Ibid, p.36
highlights the poetic essence of Surrealist painting as well as its metaphoric quality and

describes the Surrealist modus operandi in the following passage.

“...all Surrealist painters (eschewing perceptual motifs) proceed toward an interior,

imaginative image. The image, or subject- which reveals unconscious experience

assumed heretofore inaccessible and now attainable by means of automatism and

dream recall...but however ‘abstract’ its iconography, the Surrealist picture will contain

those will contain those ‘irrational’ juxtapositions of image elements common to free

association and dreaming.”28

In the third essay, A Post-Cubist Morphology: Preliminary Remarks, Rubin outlines the

common threads that bind together the Surrealist painters. Aside form their obvious

debt to the Dada movement he sees the two main sources of Surrealism as “the

biomorphism of Arp and the poetic illusionism of deChricio.” 29 Rubin goes on to explain

that biomorphism constitutes the single common stylistic denominator of Surrealist

painting. Rubin also describes how both Masson and Miro realized their mature and

original works by breaking with the Cubist inheritance, and adopting a more organic

formal vocabulary. Part of this is seen as an almost generational change, a rejection of

the older style.

However, finding the origins of Surrealism in an even older stylistic era, Rubin traces the

biomorphic theme back to the Art Nouveau movement. For Rubin the first post-Art

Nouveau re-manifestation of the biomorphic is couched as a counter-cubist reaction,

seen in Duchamp’s Passage of the Virgin to the Bride, painted in 1912.

28 Ibid, p.46
29 Ibid, p.46
But among the Surrealist painters, Rubin sees this anti-cubist tendency primarily as a

reaction against the rigidity of the cubist structure. Miro would famously comment about

wanting to break the Cubist guitar. Moreover moving toward the organic, and the

biomorphic is viewed by Rubin as the Surrealists embracing a new humanism.

In his 1968 publication Dada, Surrealism, and their Heritage, Rubin explores individual

Surrealist artists in more depth. He sees in Miro’s 1923 painting, The Tilled Field the

first signs of the biomorphic, as well as formal elements that indicate Miro’s debt to

synthetic cubism, and also describes Miro’s automatist techniques in such paintings as

Birth of the World. Drawing from Miro’s own comments, 30 Rubin describes how the

automatist activity is just the first phase of the painting, followed by more conscious

procedures. Rubin feels that pure automatism is not conducive to interesting art.

Describing his superb use of color, Rubin indicates that Miro absorbed important

lessons from Matisse. Additionally, Rubin describes how the paint was applied with a

smooth texture so as not to draw attention to the picture plane, but instead emphasize

the ephemeral “optical” nature of color. Here Rubin’s analysis of Miro’s use of color

seems to reveal a difference with Greenberg’s notions regarding the picture plane.

Whereas Greenberg was an advocate of the flatness of the picture plane, and of pure

abstraction, Rubin points out that the Surrealists, Miro included, never went all the way

into pure non-figurative painting.

In contrast to Greenberg, with his purely formal preoccupations, Rubin was engaged in

an effort to re-fashion a picture of Surrealism more consonant with the ideas that Andre

Breton articulated in his promotion of Surrealism in the twenties. Part of Rubin’s interest

in this project was driven by trends in contemporary art in the 1960s, manifestations of

30 William Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1968) p.68
contemporary art that exhibit kinship to Surrealism conceptually, or stylistically. Such

artists as Claes Oldenberg with his soft sculptures evoke Dali, or the work of Jasper

Johns or Robert Rauschenberg with their use of found objects and juxtapositions re-

inject in subtle ways the impulses of Surrealism into the American art scene.

Rubin was no doubt aware of these influences, as well as interested in illuminating the

connection between surrealism and the abstract expressionists. It is also worth noting

that in his massive tome, Dada and Surrealist Art published to coincide with the 1968

MOMA exhibit, Rubin included almost no surrealist photography. This absence would

later be exploited by Rosalind Krauss in her 1985 exhibition L’Amour Fou.

Krauss’ groundbreaking exhibition opened the doors to another re-evaluation of

Surrealism. Krauss looked at numerous photographers who were active in the Surreal

movement, not just the well known Man Ray but more obscure photographers like

Jacques-Andre Boiffard, Maurice Trabbard, Dora Maar, Raoul Ubac, Hans Bellmer, and

other better known, like Brassai who were not necessarily considered surrealist

photographers but were still exposed in the journals of the movement. Krauss also re-

introduces Georges Bataille into the discourse on Surrealism 31, and expounds on the

notion of the informe32 and how the informe is used as a concept for unlocking the

meaning of Surrealism.

Krauss also points out that Surrealism has integrated photography into its activities from

an early date. The first issues of La Revolution Surrealist featured abundant

photography, and the earlier editor of the journal, Pierre Naville, actually favored

31 In 1929 Andre Breton excommunicates Bataille from the movement.

32 Informe is a French word roughly translated as formlessness or the formless. For Bataille a good
example of the informe is something like a gob of spit on the pavement.
photography above other mediums. And Breton’s own novel L’Amour Fou and Nadja

were illustrated with photographs by Man Ray and Brassai.

Krauss in fact sees photography as the exemplary medium of Surrealism, regarding the

surreal photograph as being superior to the “labored paintings and drawings that came

increasingly to establish the identity of Breton’s concept of the Surrealism and

painting.”33

With Krauss’ examination, a submerged continent of Surrealism is dredged up and

exhibited to the light of day. One aspect of photography she highlights is its indexical

quality, a trace of the real, and she argues that in the way images are captured there is

a certain kind of automatism inherent in the process, a quality extolled by Breton.

She compares the fluid melting quality of Raoul Ubac’s solarized images, as similar to

the liquification seen in Miro’s paintings. She sites Ubac’s desire to release

“photography from the ‘rationalist arrogance’ that powered its discovery and identifying it

with ‘the poetic movement of liberation through a process identical with automatism.” 34

Krauss also looks at a self-portrait photo-collage executed by Breton in 1938, entitled

Automatic Writing, and analyzes the collage from a semiotic standpoint.

In Breton’s self-portrait he is shown standing by a microscope. Krauss interprets the

microscope as an icon for the visual and a stand-in for the camera lens. The presence

of the microscope references the automatist nature of the camera lens, and this visual

element is also there to remind the viewer that the pasted photo-collage elements

actually constitute the physical make up of the self-portrait. In Krauss’ argument this

creates a series of visual rhymes which are further accentuated by the title of the work

33 Rosalind Krauss, L’Amour Fou (New York, Abbeville Press, 1985)

34 Ibid, p.24
written in handwriting at the bottom of the picture. This sets up a juxtaposition between

the visual and the written. The opposition is resolved dialectically: collage is a form of

writing.

Krauss distinguishes the Surreal photo-collage from the photo-montage work of Berlin

Dadaist like Heartfield and Haussman. In Dada’s approach to photo-montage there are

gaps on the surface of the picture between the pasted photographic or typographic

elements, these gaps are indications of the syntactical nature of photo-montage. With

the Surrealists, in contrast, these gaps are closed. For the Surrealists, photographic

montage, or even collage, is rejected, and instead the Surrealists favor the use of

double printing within the frame or other techniques like negative printing, multiple

exposures and solarization.

The Surrealist wanted to maintain the integrity of the photo-image, yet create an internal

split. Instead of the syntactic gap between elements of the photo-montage, the

Surrealist photographer wanted to visually split the sign, as if an act of fission occurs

between the signifier and the signified. The double printing accomplishes this and

according to Krauss suggests the uncanny, a Freudian concept the Surrealists were

intrigued by.

Several years after the L’Amour Fou exhibition, Krauss writes an article on Joan Miro

entitled Michel, Bataille et moi, named after Miro’s 1927 painting Musique:

Michel,Bataille et moi. The title refers to Miro’s friends Michel Leiris and the writer

Georges Bataille. In this article Krauss explores the relationship between Miro and

Bataille and how Miro came under the influence of Bataille and his circle.
Krauss describes how this encounter is neglected by art historians because it doesn’t fit

into the preferred narrative of Miro. Krauss offers an interpretation of Miro’s art that is

more consonant with Bataille’s sensibilities rather than Breton’s. Bataille provides

Krauss with a more basely material reading of Miro’s paintings, one that emphasizes the

overtly sexual character of much of the imagery and an interpretation that explores the

notion of the informe.

Krauss includes passages from the writing by Michel Leiris that describes Miro’s

handling of paint as a dirtying, or a staining of the canvas, and she compares Miro’s

handwriting on the canvas to graffiti. Leiris writes about Miro’s paintings in the following

passage.

“...troubling like destroyed building, tantalizing like faded walls on which generations of

poster-hangers, allied over centuries of drizzle, have inscribed mysterious poems, long

smears taking louche shapes...”35

Writing in the late 1990s, Christopher Green, working at the Courtauld Institute in

London, offers a more refined and multivalent re-assessment of Surrealism that brings

together a sophisticated semiotic analysis, both structural and post-structural, along with

a socio-historical analysis of Surrealism’s conter-cultural stance in the bourgeois social

milieu of Third Republic France.

In his book Art in France 1900-1940, Green describes how turn of the century France

offered a unique social milieu, more so than any other country in Europe. He describes

an environment fertile for the avant-garde intellectuals and artists, an environment that

imbued the avant-garde with a sense of confidence and agency:

35 October 68, Spring 1994.

“The confidence that came with that moment-the confidence in writing and any other

artistic activity as a dissident force for change- was still there in the magisterial tone

adopted by a Breton and an Aragon as they lived their dissidence and proclaimed their

anathemas..”36

It was in, and against, this social milieu of Belle Epoque France that the Surrealists

launched their revolutionary social critique of bourgeois society. Green fames the

Surrealist impulse as part of a counter cultural reaction to the staid conventions of

mainstream society using the imagination allied with the word and the object to

subversively undercut societal norms of family, church and state. In stark contrast to

Rubin’s positioning Surrealism as inherently anti-Cubist, Green emphasizes the

continuity of Cubism and Surrealism, foregrounding the seminal importance of collage

techniques in shaping the direction of Surrealism.

Green links the breakthroughs of Picasso and Braque during the analytic and synthetic

phases of Cubism, and particularly the papier-colle period, as being integral to the path

the Surrealists would pursue, and he explicitly links the Cubists with the first wave of

Surrealist painters like Masson and Miro, and sketches out their debt to PIcasso and

Braque. Specifically, Green feels that Picasso and Braques’s decoupling of the signifier

from the signified, and their other attacks against the reigning symbolic order opened up

the path allowing the Surrealists to question the nature of reality more explicitly than

heretofore.

36 Christopher Green, Art in France: 1900-1945 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000) p.36
“It was above ll the realization of the potential released by the uncoupling of signs from

any fixed relation to referents that made Picasso’s and Braque’s discoveries of 1912-14

so seminal in France.”37

This crack in the pictorial order opens up a fluid space for the viewer to re-interpret the

previously fixed relationship between the sign and the referent, allowing the observer to

take a more integral role in the experience of the artwork.

Green, as well as Breton in the mid-twenties, considers Picasso, in particular, as the

primary force in this shifting of the symbolic order. Citing Breton’s interest in Picasso’s

1913 synthetic Cubist work Woman in an Armchair, Green remarks:

“...it was Picasso working with the metamorphic potential of his signs in the clearly

delineated terms of his papiiers-colle and constructions who most compellingly

anticipated the image making of the first Surrealist painters, a fact never more apparent

than when sex became a factor.”38

Looking at Miro’s 1923-24 painting Catalan Landscape, Green sees a direct link back to

Picasso, relating the spare forms to Picasso’s papier-colles. Green reads the

iconography of the painting as a fluid metamorphosis of rhyming visual forms. This

visual rhyming is something Green observes in the early work of Masson as well and he

underscores how this technique accentuates the instability and fluidity of meaning within

the semiotic order.

For Green, the theme of semiotic metamorphosis is one of the keys to understanding

the art of the Surrealists. He uses this approach to unlock the mysteries of Surrealist art

starting from the early twenties with Masson, Miro, and Ernst, on up to the late twenties,

37 Ibid, p.14
38 Ibid, p.116
and thirties with Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali. The fluidity of meaning, the inability to

settle on one specific meaning, opens up the interpretation of art, allowing the viewer to

help complete the art work with his or her on interpretative activity. With the exception of

Dali, Green regards all the Surrealists as gradually opening up the interpretive function

to the viewer. Green brings up the example of various Parisian monuments from the

turn of the century which relied heavily on allegory for imparting a fixed meaning to the

observer. The use by the Surrealists, and by Picasso in particular, of mythological

themes in the 1930s, can be seen from this perspective as an opening up of

interpretation, generating ambiguity, demanding more of the viewer’s input, and in each

specific instance of viewing a new subjectivity is called into play. Green speaks of

Picasso’s 1936 etching Minotauromachy, as being particularly emblematic of this

tendency. “Picasso too uses a totally convincing realism to create a mythic world where

metamorphosis is always possible and everything is metaphor.” 39 And speaking about

Guernica, which used similar visual motifs as the Minotauromacy, Picasso himself

underscores this interest in ambiguity: “There are some animals. That is all, so far as I

am concerned. It’s up to the public to see what it wants to see.” 40

Green interpets the Surrealist revolution as being an effort to re-order the nature of

consciousness, not a mundane revolution taken to the streets. Instead of looking at the

Surrealist artworks as objects to be analyzed, he suggest that they are traces of

experimental states, and residue left behind from activities of free imagination. For

Green, this prioritzing of the imagination is emblematic of Surrealism’s impulse to free

itself from the dominant bourgeois culture and its values. He connects the Surrealist

39 Ibid, p.127
40 Ibid, p. 128
insistence on the freedom of the imagination, one characteristic that caused Breton so

many problems with the Communist party, as being a non-negotiable principle in the

Surrealist revolution. This insistence on the primacy of the imagination and the

individual in the context of the revolution, Green regards as an influence coming from

the anarchists of the 19th century.

In 1990, Sidra Stitch, chief curator of the University Art Museum in Berkeley organized

and exhibit of Surrealist art called Anxious Visions. In the book of the same name, Stitch

describes a view of Surrealism that is more historically determined than Christopher

Green’s views. Stitich sees the impact of the horrors of WWI as being decisive in

shaping the Surrealist consciousness. Her book pairs Surrealist paintings and objects

with historical photographs from the period showing trench warfare, machine gunners

wearing gas masks, dead bodies on the battlefield, and ruined villages in Eastern

France. She refers to the massive scale of destruction and death incurred during the

war, and the sense of betrayal and disgust the Surrealist felt with the institutions of

power in Europe. The result of these catastrophic events is an unmooring from

established values and the erosion of perceived beliefs. Stitch sees in Miro’s 1925

painting Birth of the World an almost apocalyptic vision of the afternath “Total possibility,

and total obliteration coexist and disorientation prevails.” 41

Paintings such as Ernst’s Barbarians from 1937 are demonstrative of the barely

submerged savageness of the human condition. The landscapes of Yves Tanguy, with

their infinite horizons, are suggestive of a vague unease, or a strange foreboding, even

an otherworldliness, that does not auger well for the future. Stitch suggests these

images have their roots in the battlefield wastelands of the WWI. Salvador Dali’s Soft

41 Sidra Stitch, Anxious Visions (New York, Abbeville Press, 1990) p. 80

Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War is a pictorial expression of the

monstrousness and madness of humans at war. In Miro’s work from the late 1930s with

their attenuated human forms,as well as works from Andre Masson’s Spanish period,

Stitch finds more signs of the cruelty humans inflict on other humans.

Stitch sees the events of WWI, and the interwar period, as a laying bare, the stripping

away of the veneer of propriety that ruled before 1915, and with this the barbarity of

European civilization is exposed to the Surrealistic eye. The flaws of modern culture are

exposed to the Surrealists and the artwork is a product of this experience. In contra-

distinction to Green’s emphasis on the metaphoric basis of Surrealist art, Stitch views

Surrealist art as an allegory for the madness of humanity unleashed during the

calamitous decades of the 20th century.

In the last paragraph of her book Stitch indicates that during the interwar period a

special confluence of events and impulses, centered on the city of Paris, creating a

unique environment for Surrealism. This unique situation, geographical as well as

psychological, was to dissipate with the events of WWII, never to be re-created or

duplicated, and Surrealism was never quite the same. In some ways this echoes

comments made by Walter Benjamin in 1928 in his essay Surrealism: The Last

Snapshot of the Intelligentsia. For Benjamin, in spirit a Surrealist, the city of Paris itself

was the ultimate Surreal object.