Surrealism: Revolution Through Art
"In this realm as in any other, I believe in the pure Surrealist joy of the man who forewarned that all others before him have failed, who refuses to admit defeat, who sets off from whatever point he chooses, along any other path save a reasonable one, and who arrives wherever he can." [1]

The aftermath of World War I found Europe suffering; millions were dead or wounded. The last peace treaties ratified by 1920 had made clear that what was gained by the winners meant nothing but minor rearrangements of the borderlines. The disparity between the means and the ends revealed the absurdity of the status quo. Communism was proclaimed as the new regime in Russia via the October Revolution in 1917, a fact which had major impact upon the worldview of the Surrealistic movement in the political arena during the 30's.

The very first surrealists such as A. Bréton, P. Soupalt, P. Eluard, G. Apollinaire, L. Aragon and B. Pérret, all war veterans, were deeply influenced by the ravages and terror of war.[2]

They started the quest for their inspirations and the pioneering poetical voices in a frantic manner and they were about to discover them. From Heraclitus to the "fratrasies" of Middle Ages they moved to the 18th century's writers such as Ann Radcliffe and Marquis de Sade, and finally to the 19th century bringing back to light individuals such as Novalis, Poe, Jarry, Rimbaud and Lautréamont. They developed a feeling of solidarity especially for the latter two poets. "From the very beginning, the surrealist attitude has had that in common with Lautréamont and Rimbaud which once and for all binds our lot to theirs, and that is wartime defeatism."[3]

The war and the pandemic expansion of the Spanish Flu, made people want to rediscover Eros, to assert they were still alive. The Surrealists were at the forefront of this 1920s sexual revolution. Eros for the Surrealists, is violently opposing and fighting against the pseudo amorous sentimentality indoctrinated by Christian morality and by every other social constraint, totally unbound from the vulgar aspect of everlasting happiness: rather it stands as the most decisive individual human experience, delirious and corrosive, capable of reinventing one's perception of life.

Freud is also renowned for his redefinitions of sexual desire as the primary motivational energy of human life as well the interpretation of dreams as the sources of insight into unconscious desires. One of the Surrealist's aims was to diminish and ultimately to completely dispose of the appalling contradictions between the world of dreams, of desires and reality, to enrich the latter with "marvelous" (according to Breton) images, objects and words, full of "Freudian slips" in order to unfold and transform the human subconscious, through internalization to re-create memory and experience; to give a new direction in Time, to unbound the human beings from the bondage of the civilization. Any forms of Art were to be conceived as a plastic transformation of poetry targeting this very procedure imposed by the cultural industry for socioeconomic reasons.

The surrealistic movement was about to launch its own counter attack by the end of 1922. Provocative, humorous and enigmatic, it used the Dadaistic know-how through journals to impose its agenda and to disseminate its manifestos across the world. Through techniques directly taken from psychoanalysis in order to reveal the inner levels of desires and passion as an antidote to the conformism of the epoch, and keeping as the common denominator with their predecessors the wish to create "a wave of negation and revolt which for several years would throw disorder into the minds, acts, works of men" as F. Picabia stated. [4]

In its intuitive period (1919-1925), Surrealism, then deeply connected with the Dadaism, was considered to be a movement of Art, and limited mostly to the area of Literature, an aspect which is dominant in the definition of the word [5], given in the First Surrealistic Manifesto. For the public opinion and the press it represented mostly a series of outrageous and quite spontaneous activities. [6]

The year that signified the different course of the movement was 1925. In "The Declaration of 27 January 1925" (Declaration du 27 Janvier 1925) they wrote "We have nothing to do with Literature?We are determined to make a Revolution." and they continued "Surrealism is not a form of poetry. It is a scream of the spirit which is returning to itself, with the desperate decision to break its own chains. And with material hammers if need be." [7]

In April of the same year, whilst the rumors of the forthcoming war appeared, the third issue of the "The Surrealistic Revolution" states "End of the Christian Era" with an open letter to the Pope by A. Artaud. Anticlerical to its very core that letter suggests "The world is the soul's abyss, warped Pope, Pope foreign to the soul. Let us swim in our own bodies, leave our souls within our souls; we have no need of your knife-blade of enlightenment." [8]

It was blasphemous. Their campaign against bourgeois morality is certainly reflected in it. What is underestimated in this case is the fact that at that time, Italy's fascist dictator B.Mussolini ruled his country under the eulogies of the Roman Catholic Church. In this issue they celebrated the oriental values, and the idealism it represented, including a letter to Dalai Lama and an address to Buddha and once more they appealed for the total destruction of the Western civilization (for example, R. Desnos made an appeal to "Attila's archangels"). Europe, since Goethe's days and later on, developed an intellectual love for the East, mainly as an opposing force to the Enlightenment. For Western culture the East stood as the region of mystified existence, a constant communion of human beings with the essence and beauty of life, a powerful adherent to the reign of Logos.

The demolition of the latter was always one of the most fundamental starting points of the movement, if not the sole one and their decision was to infuse dialectic materialism through the cultural channels of the mythologized East right into the heart of Europe.

All what was needed was a sparkle and it was shortly about to be found. France due to a monetary crisis declared a colonial war (on Spain's side) against the Moroccan rebels and their leader Abd-el-Krim, in what was called the Rif War. Up until then there was no coherent political, theological or social nexus for their activities.

The Surrealists among other intellectuals signed a public protest under the title "The Revolution Now and Forever" [9].The latter was undoubtedly rather confused ideologically; it none the less created a precedent that was to determine the new direction of Surrealism. It was the mark of the separation from the whole way of previous thinking. They began to study Marx and Engels (and others) more intensively. Their convictions were close to Anarchism and Communism from the beginning, but at this point they attempted a move towards the Communist Party of France. Prior to these events, their confronting attitude to the FCP can be synopsized into L. Aragon's words "On the ideological level what is October's revolution? An insignificant ministerial crisis, at the most." [10]

Their approach to the proclaimed communist regime was made only with the political and social criteria, magnified under the strict scopes of the movement during the Rif War.

This started, according to Bréton, the reasoning period of Surrealism (1925-1930). From then on there was no revolution of the Spirit. They clearly announced that "we're not utopists: the Revolution is understood only in its social form" [11].Yet, Bréton as all the other surrealists thought they were ready to be motivated by the communism and they were not willing to sacrifice it for no one, including the Marxists, the Stalinists and the Moscow guided French Communist Party.

From the beginning of the movement they constantly refused any labels upon their intentions and their acts in every specter of such categorizations, in terms of art and/or politics. Consequently, the Surrealists never enjoyed the full confidence of the FCP which kept a stance if not suspicious at least skeptical of their commitment. And at times they were openly condemned by the communists for their symbolisms, their "scandalous" art and above all for the blatant sexuality. The expansion of the movement, against every prediction brought to light all its adversaries.

The year of 1925 marked the spread of the Surrealism in Europe. Unofficially (and officially in 1926) in Brussels, the painter and author R. Magritte, among other Belgian artists, started a collaboration and the new branch in another European capital had become a fact. This development must be connected with the first official exhibition held in Paris that year, which displayed works by André Masson, Man Ray, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Hans Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, and Pierre Roy.

This idea was brilliant. Paris since the 19th century was considered the art capital and it had drawn a whole constellation of writers, painters, film directors and artists from all parts of the world, a phenomenon which was intensified after the ending of WW1. Even if, prior to this exhibition sporadically the artists were influenced by the Surrealistic movement, this stood as the starting point of a vast expansion in the world of Art and the perception of its role in the society.

By 1928 Surrealism was established within the consciousness of the society. Yet it is the year that one of its most fundamental works was published - Louis Aragon's "Treatise of Style". Through this paradoxically artificial title Aragon orchestrates one of the most lethal attacks upon the bourgeois society. He starts from the traditional critics of literature, who are seeking for barbarisms and errors, and he proceeds with a slaughterhouse of modern critics, of suicide, of Freud and Einstein, of readers, of celebrated writers, of any poet after Rimbaud and of any institution (political and especially religious). His intentions are to overthrow and demolish every value in order to set the new grounds of the Surrealistic movement, totally unbound from categorizations of any kind that want to diminish it into a movement of Literature. He denounces any form and category of "beauty" and "art" besides the pure surrealistic ones. He also replies to one of the most usual accusations raised by the bourgeois and communist press and reflects the opinions of many readers: why surrealism does not transform its radical words into actions?

At this point he does not only states that the words are not tautologically identified with the writers but he also indicates the social hypocrisy that is beneath such accusations which are guided solely against the radical thinkers, in order to neutralize them but never to those who overwhelmingly agree with the narrow minded mass beliefs and their hysteria of correctness.

Surrealist intervention has always emphasized the active imagination and the realization of poetry in everyday life. Art is dead for the surrealists (a belief taken from the Dadaists) and they denounce every notion of "artist". They've adopted a Lautréamont's belief stating that "poetry should be made by all" and followed it to its extremes.

The Second Surrealistic Manifesto (1929) was written under this scope. The reason of erasing many members of the first Surrealistic group (such as Artaud, Soupault and Desnos) is either because they failed in following the revolutionary road of the surrealism or just because they allowed themselves to become "artists" and "poets".

Bréton, once again states that Surrealism asserts an absolute nonconformism [12] and furthermore he establishes the necessary criteria for the realization of such nonconformism. "We combat, in whatever form they may appear, poetic indifference, the distraction of art, scholarly research, and pure speculation; we want nothing whatever to do with those, either large or small, and who use their minds as they would a savings bank." [13] From this point of view Bréton is appealing to the complete and utter mystification of the movement bringing to light unorthodox parameters such as astrology and alchemy.

As he stated later on "We still live under the reign of logic... But the methods of logic are applied nowadays only to the resolution of problems of secondary interest. [14]

Through this brief retrospective analysis of some of the Surrealistic aspects it becomes clear that Surrealism was fed in its entire course by its own contradictions. As long it was out of any categorizations, it was able to release reconstructive powers upon the "reality" posed by the world. Yet later on many of its prominent members declined into aestheticism and thus became artists. The movement had always a romantic wrath to it, and by denying the society they attempted "a new declaration of the rights of man" aiming for their reformation exactly into the almost demonic energies unleashed from the unconscious through their activities. Though in order to achieve such a change they had to fight with post World War I status quo, the great economical Depression of the late 20's, the rise of fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain, the Stalinism, the vast commercialization of its members and their work, plus they had to fight with the deliberate mass misconceptions of their basic principles. It is crucial to remember that the main surrealist group was never larger than 20-30 individuals in every phase of its course and despite all its schisms.

It certainly was the most romantic attempt to change the things "as they are", their nonconformist attitude was a call for absolute freedom of the mind and of the being, the essence of their attempt was that poetry and life are "elsewhere" and it can be conquered individually with risk and under solidarity "bringing witness to the fact that the chips are not yet down, that everything can still be saved" [15]


P. A. Voglis


[1] "First Surrealistic Manifesto", A.Bréton 1924

[2] With the words of Bréton: "Apart from the incredible stupidity of the arguments which attempted to legitimize our participation in an enterprise such as the war, whose issue left us completely indifferent, this refusal was directed?and having been brought up in such a school, we are not capable of changing so much that is no longer so directed?against the whole series of intellectual, moral and social obligations that continually and from all sides weigh down upon man and crush him." "What is Surrealism", A.Bréton. 1934

[3] In 1870 France was defeated in the Franco-Prussian war. See also "What is Surrealism", A.Bréton. 1934

[4] "The Dada painters and poets: an anthology" ed. R. Motherwell, Cambridge press

[5] As an homage to G.Apollinaire who first thought of the term.

[6] In the funeral of the famous (and Nobel Prize winner) writer Anatole France, they print a libel titled "A Corpse" (Un Cadavre), against the deceased. They consider him as the perfect representative of the disappointing role of the most intellectuals during the war, while L. Aragon sends a funeral wreath with a challenge "Have you ever slapped a dead man?"
"History of Surrealism", M. Nadeau. Harvard University Press 1965.

[7] Ibid.

[8] La Revolution Surréaliste (The Surrealistic Revolution), issue 3 (April 1925)

[9] "History of Surrealism", M. Nadeau. Harvard University Press 1965.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] "Everything must be done, all means must be considered appropriate, in order to destroy the ideas of family, of country and of religion." Second Surrealistic Manifesto, 1929.

[13] Ibid.

[14] "What is Surrealism", A.Bréton. 1934.

[15] Marcel Raymond "From Baudelaire to Surrealism" New York, 1950.

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