Unit 5: Protest in the Wake of War: Surrealism and the New Objectivity
Fig. 1: Press Release for La Révolution surréaliste, No. 8, 1926
In Unit 5, students will look at two movements that in many ways carried the Dadaist revolt forward. Many of the artists considered here were involved in various international circles of Dada, then continued as Surrealists or members of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). As students know, the Dada groups that sprung up in Berlin, Zurich, and New York did not share a universal style—what they had in common was that they rejected society’s obsession with rationalism and progress. The Surrealists continued that critique with the added influence of psychoanalysis. Neue Sachlichkeit continued this tack, but with a different tone.
1. Surrealism
The endless cycle of “out with the old, in with the new,” Surrealism took its cue from Freud and picked up where Dada left off. The writers, filmmakers, sculptors, and artists shared a belief that the rules of contemporary society were oppressive, and they sought to liberate what Freud called the unconscious from the constraints of rationality. Freud used a number of techniques (dream analysis, word association, inkblots, etc.) in order to allow the subconscious thought to be expressed. Many Surrealist works began with no preconceived notion of the outcome as the intention was to allow the free flow of thought as is experienced in dreams.
1.1 Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou
Fig. 2: Still from Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1928)
The artist Salvador Dalí and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel met in 1910 when they were students in Madrid. Many years later this association produced the silent film An Andalusian Dog (Un Chien Andalou). It was Buñuel’s first film. Initially released in 1929 with exclusive showing at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, it became very popular and ended up running for eight months.
The idea for the film came when Buñuel was working as an assistant director in Paris. Buñuel told Dalí he’d had a dream in which a cloud sliced the moon in half, “like a razor blade slicing through an eye.” Dalí responded that he’d just dreamt about a hand crawling with ants. Buñuel then mused: “And what if we started right there and made a film.” [1]
https://youtu.be/IfyzOxaMKtsClick to watch in new window
Fig. 3: Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1928))
As students watch Un Chien Andalou, keep in mind that its origins are rooted in the filmmaker and the artist’s own dreams. Freud’s ideas were popular with many artists and intellectuals in the years after the First World War. The
disjointed narrative and shocking imagery of the film were inspired by Freudian methods—see On Dreams, assigned in Unit 1.
1.2 André Breton and Max Ernst
Fig. 4: André Breton, René Hilsum, Louis Aragon, and Paul Éluard in Paris around 1920 (Musee National d’Art Moderne)
Dada, as students know, emerged as a critique of the values that triggered world war. After the First World War, many of the same artists who took part in Dada rebooted their criticism as Surrealists. Tristan Tzara decamped to Paris to continue some of the activities that had been going on in Zurich. Meanwhile, André Breton had also decided Dada had run its course; he wished to make a break, and joined in.
Surrealism was really announced to the world in 1924 with the publication of Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism. Breton had first come into contact with Freud’s ideas during the war (Breton was serving as a medic); later the two met, and Freud’s influence on Breton comes through in the manifesto:
We are still living under the reign of logic . . . Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices . . . a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer—and, in my opinion by far the most important part—has been brought back to light. For this we must to give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. [2]
Breton was Surrealism’s guiding force. He organized the Bureau of Surrealist Research in Paris and launched a new journal, La Révolution surréaliste—he defined Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism” expressed in the “disinterested play of thought.” [3] He championed accident and chance association as ways for artists to access the unconscious—and those techniques could, he professed, translate to writing and the visual arts. Breton wrote what he called automatic poems, for example, and the Alsatian (French) artist Jean Arp produced automatic drawings.
Then there was Max Ernst—introduced into Breton’s circle after some difficulty. Tristan Tzara organized an exhibition of works by Ernst, who was based in Cologne. When Tzara dropped out of the enterprise, Breton took over and ended up serving as a promoter of Ernst’s work. Ernst could not get a passport in time to attend the opening in Paris in the spring of 1921, but he later snuck into France using a friend’s identity papers.
Breton’s affinity to Ernst can be explained by the artist’s choice of techniques. He worked in collage(pasting incongruous images together), frottage (pencil rubbings of a hard textured surface), and grattage(applying richly textured materials to the canvas surface and painting over them). The randomness of these techniques circumvented logical practice in representation; they produced fantastical images that seemed to spring from the subconscious’s inexplicable mash-up.
Fig. 5: Max Ernst, Celebes (The Elephant of Celebes) (1921) (Tate Gallery)
Ernst often used found images as his artistic source. In the painting Celebes, for instance, the elephant is derived from an image of a Sudanese corn bin, which Ernst saw in a magazine. Availing himself to Freud-like free association, the elephant is joined by other objects and abstract forms to create an effect that, like some dreams, is fascinating and uncanny.
Fig. 6: Max Ernst, Dans le bassin de Paris, Loplop, le supérieur des oiseaux, apporte aux réverbères la nourriture nocturne, from La Femme 100 Têtes (The Hundred Headless Woman) (1929) (Centre Pompidou)
Breton wrote the foreword to Ernst’s La Femme 100 Têtes (The Hundred Headless Woman), published in 1929. The book is a collage-novel that mined images mostly from 19th-century engravings from popular novels and scientific books. The illogical juxtaposition of the images and the seeming lack of narrative clearly draw upon Freud’s theory of the unconscious. While accident and illogic is the basis of the Surrealist method, it can be no accident that the setting for this absurd scene is one of the courtyards of the Louvre palace (the Carrousel), the location of one of the world’s greatest collections of art. In this image, Breton deploys illogical imagery to undo the underpinnings of the Western artistic tradition.
With the title “Notice to the Reader of The Hundred Headless Woman,” Breton celebrated the seemingly random nature of his appropriation as a reflection of the randomness of the human experience: “The truth specific to each of us,” he said, “is a game of solitaire whose elements we have to seize on the fly, without having seen them before.” [3]
1.3 René Magritte
Fig. 7: René Magritte, The Key to Dreams (1927) (Pinakothek der Moderne)
René Magritte was something of an outlier among the Surrealists. Where many of those artists presented themselves as eccentric, ostentatious rebels (notably Dalí), Magritte lived a quiet, middle-class life in his hometown of Brussels, Belgium. He even dressed the part: the respectable man wearing a plain suit and bowler hat that appears famously in a number of his works is a kind of self-portrait.
Magritte studied in Brussels at the Académie des Beaux-Arts; as a student there, a friend showed him a reproduction of a painting by the early Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico—and it changed the trajectory of Magritte’s life: he helped organize a local Surrealist group, and a little later he took off for Paris. There, Magritte joined Breton’s circle and published articles in La Révolution surréaliste, including an essay titled “Words and Images” that highlights the arbitrary relationship between the two: “An object does not adhere to its name such that one could not find for it another which suits it better.” [4]
Magritte’s The Key to Dreams (Figure 6) was one work in a breakthrough series of paintings that confirmed his reputation as Surrealist. On one level, the work is a linguistic exploration of the arbitrary nature of the relationship between words and images: the purse is paired with the word “sky,” the bottle opener with “bird,” etc. One of his most famous paintings, The Treachery of Images, which shows a pipe with the caption “this is not a pipe,” is a similar linguistic proposition. On another level, with his seemingly random juxtaposition of unrelated objects, Magritte was exploring the metaphysical question of humans’ relationship to reality. Describing seemingly unrelated objects, juxtaposed together as in the painting above, Magritte said, “It is a union that suggests the essential mystery of the world. Art for me is not an end in itself, but a means of evoking that mystery.” [5]
Fig. 8: René Magritte, The Menaced Assassin (1928) (MoMA)
The mysterious and seemingly arbitrary nature of dreams is one of Surrealism’s most central themes. Indeed, many Surrealist paintings evoked an uncomfortable sense of danger or threat—and such is the case in Magritte’s The Menaced Assassin, completed for his first solo exhibition. One source of his imagery was a popular crime series of films called Fantômas (Magritte was very fond of it). Looking at The Menaced Assassin, many questions go unanswered: Who is the man listening to the phonograph? Is he the killer? Why are other men passively witnessing the scene? Will the two men framing the composition trap the possible killer? The puzzle is moot—there is simply no resolution.
2. Neue Sachlichkeit, or The New Objectivity
Like Surrealism, the Neue Sachlichkeit was formed immediately after World War I. The tone of The New Objectivity’s criticism of society, however, was more urgent and serious—a corollary of the grim condition of postwar Germany.
That term, Neue Sachlichkeit, was first used by the art historian Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub. He was the director of the Städtische Kunsthalle in Mannheim in 1923, on the occasion of an exhibition of recent paintings that were grounded, he said, in a merciless depiction of reality. (The exhibit was titled The New Objectivity: German Painting since Expressionism.)
Fig. 9: George Grosz, Germany, a Winter’s Tale (1918) (SCAD Digital Image Database)
The best-known figures of the Neue Sachlichkeit were Otto Dix and George Grosz, who participated in Berlin Dada. Their paintings depicted the brutality of war and the depravity and corruption they observed in its wake in Weimar, Germany. Both dismissed the utopianism of prewar movements such as Die Brücke, the work of which Grosz blasted (in his essay “My New Painting”) as “Expressionist soul-tapestries.” [6]Germany, a Winter’s Tale—shown in the first Berlin Dada exhibition—represented contemporary life as garish and fragmented. The figure at its center is the stalwart German bourgeois, or burgher, whose appetites are not limited to food. The conservative paper that rests on his table is a reminder of the man’s political allegiance to the three “pillars of society” (which Grosz has represented as three figures): the church, the military, and the education system.
Fig. 10: Käthe Kollwitz, The Mothers, from the Portfolio Krieg (1923) (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art)
Grosz served in the war and was transformed by the trauma. Like him, Käthe Kollwitz was also devastated by war. In 1914, her youngest son died in combat; after that, she embraced pacifism and increasingly concentrated on the themes of sacrifice and mourning.
Kollwitz had studied in Berlin. In 1880, when she saw Max Klinger’s prints, she devoted herself largely to printmaking. Her early subject matter was linked to the emerging workers’ movement, but after her son’s death, many of her prints and posters protested the war.
Her prints were predominantly executed in black and white. Her training as a painter, however, exerted, at least initially, considerable influence on her style. She began to concentrate on different ways of representing the human body. A sculptural sensibility began to inform her graphic work: she began to portray figures with a certain sculptural monumentality. In 1904, Kollwitz combined a trip to Paris with a visit to the Académie Julian, where she learned the basic principles of sculpture; a little later, around 1910, she began to work in sculpture itself.
In 1919, Käthe Kollwitz started working on Krieg (War), her response to the tragedies of World War I and its aftermath (see Figure 9). The portfolio’s seven woodcuts focus on the sorrows of those left behind—mothers, widows, and children. Kollwitz radically simplified the compositions, and her stark black-and-white woodcuts feature grieving, fearful women, all alone or with each other. The prints were exhibited in 1924 at the newly founded International Anti-War Museum in Berlin.
What had begun as a protest of World War I and of the bankruptcy of the Western world grew in the 1920s into Surrealism-driven, Freud-inspired exploration of the realms of myth, fantasy, and irrationality—more or less playful and fairly esoteric. The Neue Sachlichkeit artists pulled down the pillars that supported bourgeois culture too, but their criticism stung with bitterness and rang a sense of urgency.
Citations
[1] Gwynne Edwards, A Companion to Luis Buñuel (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2010), 60.
[2] Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory: 1900 – 2000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 448.
[3] André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 26.
[3] Mark Polizzotti and Mary Ann Caws, trans., Break of Day by André Breton (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 47.
[4] “Les Mots et les Images,” in La Révolution surréaliste, December 15, 1929, Reprinted in Écrits Complets, ed. André Blavier (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 60 – 61.
[5] Veerle Pieters, “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary,” May 23, 2013, http://veerle.duoh.com/design/article/magritte_the_mystery_of_the_ordinary.
[6] Harrison and Wood, 273.
“To Do” List
Readings
Please read the following sections in your required texts:
George Grosz, “My New Pictures,” in Harrison and Wood, 272 – 274.
André Breton, from The First Manifesto of Surrealism, in Harrison and Wood, 447 – 453.
Foster et al., 204 – 208, 214 – 219, 226 – 231, 292 – 302.
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