Roger Scruton on Andre Breton and surrealist painting
The aim of Surrealism, according to its most articulate apologist, Andre Breton, was " to prevent the domination of the symbol by the thing signified." It was Breton's belief that modern man had found himself in a world of ill-defined and oppressive objects, objects dehumanised in the service of commonplace ideas and materialistic appetites. Art, he supposed, could rescue roan from this state of alienation not by ' imitation ' (the reproduction of already existing things) but by transformation. Objects must be changed from their habitual forms and remade as symbols; for in order to become visible the world must first become subjective. The accumulated debris of utilitarian matter must be dissolved and held in solution in the consciousness of men.
These ideas—in which a traditional romantic view of the imagination is tinged by the conceptions of Freud and Marx — represent what was serious in Surrealism. Breton was reacting not only against philistine values but also against what he thought of as the swooning defeatism of fin-dc-siècle poetry and painting, which, with its taste for mere impressions, had allowed material things to dominate the world. For Breton Surrealism presented a direct and serious challenge to materialistic thought. It was a poetry of affirmation and acceptance, whose vision —unlike that of the Symbolists — was directed to the future, not the past.
The present collection* consists of a translation of Le Surrealisme et la peinture (1928), one of Breton's most famous writings on art, together with all the pieces of art criticism that Breton wished to preserve at the time (1965) when the French edition of this book went to press. It is now well translated (by Simon Watson Taylor) and beautifully illustrated, with reproductions of almost every painting referred to in the text. For fifteen pounds one has the right to expect quality and it is arguable that, while the plates are exceptionally well done, the binding is a' little too weak for a volume of so many heavy pages. However, the only serious criticism is that the book is far too long. It is precisely in reading Breton's criticism at such length that its weaknesses — and the weaknesses of Surrealism as a whole — are most apparent. Although Breton writes brilliantly, with an astonishing gift for paradox, one soon begins to wish for something more substantial, some real indication of why the work of his friends is so wonderful and the work of everyone else so bad. His strange descriptions are often delightful, but it is doubtful that one can be helped to appreciate the paintings of Victor Brauner (surely one of the most banal of all Surrealists) bY Breton's eulogy:
Everything expands, settles again, grows larger. This is the marvellous moment in time wherl the geometer, his eyes almost closed, walks along the ramparts of Troy and, without either of them knowing it, crosses Helen's path. In the hollow of one's hand, the stars have reS. cued their courses from the sky. Flame and leaf refashion the form of the heart, the long sought-for quadratix caresses the curves of a lilac blossom.
One would be able to takt four hundred pages of this poeticising if there were anY indication that its author was a man of judgement. But a critic who can bestow the same order of praise on Picasso and Dali, on Joan Miro and on Marcel DuchamP, must inevitably awake some suspicion. One looks for reasons to support these strange evaluations, but Breton is disdainful of reasons. He prefers wittY paradoxes to genuine ideas. For him originality and surprise have become qualities of such value that the ability W apply standards—and hence the ability to think consistently — has been finally put aside. Surrealism presents itself as sorra' thing altogether new, but it is unable to say in what its newness consists. Selfconsciousness exists here untempered bY the consciousness of tradition, and as a result it is impossible to be convinced that the artists and the works which Breton describes really have the impnr" tance he attributes to them.
In fairness it must be said that Breton attempts to create an impression °f standards. Surrealism and Painting, for example, contains a long diatribe against de Chirico, who was rejected by the, Surrealist school as soon as he turnen, away from the ' metaphysical ' painting oi his early years. But one has the impression
— from the violence of the denunciation, and the purely abstract terms in which it is couched — that the choice of victim Is more or less arbitrary, motivated by external interests. This, not surprisingly, is de Chirico's view. "All great men are anxious for justice," he writes, "and 1 more so than all of them." Fortunately most great men are not so naïve as to suppose that justice is achieved through writing memoirs. One can admire the courage with which de Chirico adheres to his amiable and old-fashioned opinions, but despite his many assertions to the contrary one comes away from this book* With a sense of the author's smallness of Spirit. Breton may have been less consistent than de Chirico, and he was certainly less serious, but he had the sophistication necessary to avoid any Merely personal paranoia. His need for enemies was given an objective and rhetorical satisfaction in the founding of a school.
Still, one may wonder how far Breton Was successful in this. As a poet and an essayist he is certainly to be respected, but While the poetry of Surrealism represented something genuine, and indeed something More or less traditional, the painting can only strike us now as fatuous and insincere. The poetry of paradox was familiar in France long before Breton's Manifestoes: But it . is doubtful that Paradox can be translated into painting With the same success — certainly not by bah, Tanguy or Marcel Duchamp. To represent a thing is to represent it as Possible: there is no logical absurdity in the fluid watch, or in the table with the head of an angry dog. The supposed contradictory" parts of the Surrealist effigy are in fact no more than commonplace entities existing happily in a single space. They remain inactive, sterile, Unable to lend to one another the vitality and meaning which they separately lack. In this sense the Surrealists achieved rio visual equivalent of metaphor; only a Concatenation of unrelated fragments. On the other hand there is genuine absurdity possible in the use of words. When Breton (in The White-haired Revolver) describes the seasons as lumineuses comme linterieur d'une pomme dont on a detache un quartier, he presents an image that could not be painted (although it could of course be illustrated). This is genuine Metaphor, and to the extent that it is so. ccessful it manages to create something vital from the juxtaposition of incompatible ideas. The real equivalent in Painting of this startling use of metaphor is not the work of Dali or Duchamp but rather the Cubism that Breton so much deplored. In Cubism we find the attempt to overthrow normal spatial categories, and thereby bring into a visual relation things !hat in reality must remain apart — the race and the profile of a single head, a .._vase and its own interior. It is absurd for dreton to assume that Dali and Picasso ere engaged in a similar enterprise. leasso's vision was something finer and More profound than anything that could be captured by the grotesque juxtapositions
of Surrealism. In itself Surrealism was visually sterile ,as this collection admirably demonstrates. Its products were without visual beauty and relied for their effect on a literary paraphrase, a symbol, or a funny idea (Max Ernst's 'Garden Aeroplane Traps,' Brauner's 'Woman into Cat '), Perhaps the most striking example of this is Duchamp's picture 'Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even ': Breton's witty commentary (included in the present collection) is indeed a masterpiece of controlled absurdity, beside which the painting appears as a mindless doodle with no visual character at all. The ideas belong to what is said, and not to what is seen.
Even in literature it is doubtful whether Surrealism can lay claim to the novelty that is sometimes attributed to it. True, the images of the Surrealists are more surprising than those of Baudelaire or Verlaine, but from what does this quality of surprise proceed? From the point of view of logic, Baudelaire's lines Vois sur ces canaux Dormir les vaisseaux Dont l'humeur est vagabonde . . .
offend as much as most of Apollinaire or Reverdy. If they strike us as wholly natural it is surely because the image is precise. The overwhelming effect of `L'Invitation au voyage' is an effect of language, and where Baudelaire is concise and original, Breton (in a similar poem) merely extemporises, to far less effect:
On me dit que labas des plages sont noires De la lave allee A la mer Et se deroulent au pied d'un immense plc fumant de neige Sous un soleil de serins sauvages . . .
The passage is beautiful, certainly, but surely it is impossible to read it as the work of a man who had broken entirely with the Symbolist tradition. The diction gives the lie to Breton's fanatical futurism. The fact is that the great works of modern French literature had already been written — though not by Lautreamont as the Surrealists fondly imagined — and at its best Surrealist poetry was a refreshing and exuberant return to the urbanity of a previous age.
Previous page
