The holidays frighten me with the potential for things going awry. This year, however, I have someone in my life who is just too marvelous for words. I finally begin to understand Breton's tenet of "le merveilleux" and how on earth it relates to beauty or love.
To introduce a surrealist ethos without discussing the marvelous is impossible, and yet because Breton develops the idea across his essays and reveals the experience of it in his fictions, a simple summary seems particularly shallow. This may be said of many surrealist conceits but the marvelous is particularly prone to being confused with the fantastic or to sounding like over-intellectualized sentimentality.
There is a history of literature of the fantastic that is different from Breton’s expression the marvelous. The fantastic is usually associated with science fiction and attempts to incorporate the alien into the rational world. The marvelous on the other hand is, as Hal Foster puts it in his work Compulsive Beauty, disruptive. Louis Aragon perhaps explains it best in Paris Peasant by stating "the marvelous is the eruption of contradiction within the real."
“Le merveilleux est toujours beau, n’importe quel merveilleux est beau, il n’y a même que le merveilleux qui soit beau”. This memorable line from the first Manifesto is repeated often and everywhere. The statement is expressive only in the context in which it is presented, otherwise the statement seems like sophomoric over-glorification of either the marvelous or the beautiful. Breton explains in the manifesto how alive the marvelous is. It imbues works with energy and gives them life. Works are marvelous that sustain the moment of surprise and this experience is what is truly beautiful.
The marvelous lives and grows in some Hegelian unfurling. “Le merveilleux n’est pas le même à toutes les époques ; il participe obscurément d’une sorte de révèlation générale dont le détail seul nous parvient: ce sont les ruines romantiques, le mannequin moderne ou tout autre symbole propre à remuer la sensibilité humaine durant un temps” (The marvelous is not the same in all ages; it participates obscurely in a sort of general revelation, in which the details only remain: they are the romantic's ruins, the modern mannequin and all other symbols adequate to shaking human sensibility during a particular time). The marvelous performs in different manners at different times but continues to reveal even if only a few details are captured in the imagination of a culture. Artists present the marvelous through their works and this alters their viewers, rattling the nervous system of one person at a time with the goal of altering the society. The marvelous is progressive both in time and effect on society.
The marvelous in my case is changing the way I think about the holidays, changing the way I think about myself in love, all of which really is just too marvelous for words.
Love in Surrealism
In his 1939 writing on Masson, in Le Surrealisme et la peinture, Breton reiterates his strong sense of the significance of love by believing “que l’art, avant tout, doit être amour plutôt que colère ou pitié”. Art must be love, not in the sense of adoration, but rather as a path towards collectivity. In L’Amour fou, Breton explains how when a man loves, he cannot help but engage with “la sensibilité de tous les hommes” and that in order to do them justice, he must delve into the very depths of their way of being. Love brings man into contact with another and creates an interest in partaking of another worldview.
In the Surrealist Dictionary, the definition for “amour” includes the quote from L’Immaculée Conception that reciprocal love is that which “met en jeu l’inhabitude dans la pratique, l’imagination dans le poncif, la foi dans la doute, la perception de l’objet intérieure dans l’objet extérieure”. Love then creates this charged space where contraries can co-exist. Neither the imagination nor thinking is dominant.
In the Surrealist Dictionary, the definition for “amour” includes the quote from L’Immaculée Conception that reciprocal love is that which “met en jeu l’inhabitude dans la pratique, l’imagination dans le poncif, la foi dans la doute, la perception de l’objet intérieure dans l’objet extérieure”. Love then creates this charged space where contraries can co-exist. Neither the imagination nor thinking is dominant.
Revolutionary Independent Artist-some thoughts on the Manifesto
Breton alienated the communists and revoked the surreality of many artists because of their ties to communism, but believed in the revolution sufficiently to produce the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art in 1938. This document signed by Breton and Diego Rivera, was in fact a collaboration between Breton and Trotsky. In the document they are trying to address how artists can participate in the communist revolution without losing the independence necessary to being artists. Though Breton had alluded to the need for artists to express their own personal, inner vision, this document affirms that freedom while also stating the role artists play in society.
True art–art that does not merely produce variations on ready-made models but strives to express the inner needs of man and of mankind as they are today–cannot be anything other than revolutionary: it must aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society, if only to free intellectual creation from the chains that bind it and to allow all mankind to climb those heights that only isolated geniuses have reached in the past.
The freedom of intellectual creation that they advocate aligns itself with Breton’s stated aims for Surrealism. The artist must produce images that are not bound by the previous language of art but rather uncover, in those image or others, new visions. In order to alter the established landscape, each artist must be free to present an inner truth. The individual artist by expressing a truly personal vision touches on a more general human experience. In 1947, Breton would explain the rapport between the individual and general history in his remarks on Matta by suggesting that there is a connecting light “entre la causalité universelle et la finalité humaine”. The Hegelian influence of the world on the individual is clear but the individual artist remains central to the success of this endeavor to change the global.
Permitting art to be influenced by a political viewpoint or any aesthetic demands limits the possibilities of creation. Breton and Trotsky state that “art cannot, therefore, without demeaning itself, willingly submit to any outside directive and ensconce itself obediently within the limits that some people, with extremely shortsighted pragmatic ends in view, think they can set on its activities”. Despite their own revolutionary hopes, they recognize that art must be permitted to discuss issues beyond the desires of political or cultural ideologues. Art is a means of discovering knowledge and it can not be subsumed to the needs of those in power without being reduced to pre-conceived, formulaic aphorisms.
The revolution, they claimed, must "from the very beginning, when it comes to intellectual creativity, establish an anarchist system based on individual freedom". Of course Breton with Diego Rivera and Trotsky acknowledge that their ideas about the role of art at the moment, to help prepare and advocate for the revolution, must center on ensuring the revolution. The joy in the manifesto is its attempt to maintain an open door on behalf of art, in the belief that “fairly divergent aesthetic, philosophical, and political orientation [can] meet on this ground”. In order for the artist to present a unique vision, the artist must be permitted and recognized as truly independent. Or so they hoped...
Trotsky was murdered. The revolution wound up becoming an ideological dictatorship. Artists, whose freedom was curtailed under the communist regime of Eastern Europse, provided the dissension that helped destroy the communist tyranny. It is the artists today in Eastern Europe who seem to be producing a link between those who did not suffer the economic destruction of communism and those who did.
The artist should be able to respond to the political or social situation from any point of view, not only that which supports it, or that which acknowledges it. Is that independence? The best we can offer because the only one available.
True art–art that does not merely produce variations on ready-made models but strives to express the inner needs of man and of mankind as they are today–cannot be anything other than revolutionary: it must aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society, if only to free intellectual creation from the chains that bind it and to allow all mankind to climb those heights that only isolated geniuses have reached in the past.
The freedom of intellectual creation that they advocate aligns itself with Breton’s stated aims for Surrealism. The artist must produce images that are not bound by the previous language of art but rather uncover, in those image or others, new visions. In order to alter the established landscape, each artist must be free to present an inner truth. The individual artist by expressing a truly personal vision touches on a more general human experience. In 1947, Breton would explain the rapport between the individual and general history in his remarks on Matta by suggesting that there is a connecting light “entre la causalité universelle et la finalité humaine”. The Hegelian influence of the world on the individual is clear but the individual artist remains central to the success of this endeavor to change the global.
Permitting art to be influenced by a political viewpoint or any aesthetic demands limits the possibilities of creation. Breton and Trotsky state that “art cannot, therefore, without demeaning itself, willingly submit to any outside directive and ensconce itself obediently within the limits that some people, with extremely shortsighted pragmatic ends in view, think they can set on its activities”. Despite their own revolutionary hopes, they recognize that art must be permitted to discuss issues beyond the desires of political or cultural ideologues. Art is a means of discovering knowledge and it can not be subsumed to the needs of those in power without being reduced to pre-conceived, formulaic aphorisms.
The revolution, they claimed, must "from the very beginning, when it comes to intellectual creativity, establish an anarchist system based on individual freedom". Of course Breton with Diego Rivera and Trotsky acknowledge that their ideas about the role of art at the moment, to help prepare and advocate for the revolution, must center on ensuring the revolution. The joy in the manifesto is its attempt to maintain an open door on behalf of art, in the belief that “fairly divergent aesthetic, philosophical, and political orientation [can] meet on this ground”. In order for the artist to present a unique vision, the artist must be permitted and recognized as truly independent. Or so they hoped...
Trotsky was murdered. The revolution wound up becoming an ideological dictatorship. Artists, whose freedom was curtailed under the communist regime of Eastern Europse, provided the dissension that helped destroy the communist tyranny. It is the artists today in Eastern Europe who seem to be producing a link between those who did not suffer the economic destruction of communism and those who did.
The artist should be able to respond to the political or social situation from any point of view, not only that which supports it, or that which acknowledges it. Is that independence? The best we can offer because the only one available.
Art in Surrealism
The role of the visual arts in surrealism came under discussion with the publication of La Revolution Surréaliste. Max Morise in the first issue of La Revolution Surréaliste attempted an explanation of the surrealist method in the field of visual art. He recognizes how Breton, in Les Champs Magnetiques, has established automatic writing that through its practice as well as its final product presents a surreal method. Dismissing a stream of thought, or dreams, as insufficiently particular to Surrealism, he compares the surrealist painter’s brush to a cheetah leaping after its prey and lands on the idea of “certain meetings, apparently fortuitous” which is so clearly tied to the ideas of surrealist writing.
His essay, however, inspired a response by Pierre Naville in the third issue of La Revolution Surrealiste which would declare that there is no such thing as surrealist painting. Breton responds with a series of articles over the next five issues (no. 4, July 15, 1925; no. 6, March 1, 1926; no. 7, June 15, 1926; no. 9-10, October 1, 1927) in which he considered how to discuss Surrealism and painting. These essays become the single long essay “Surréalisme et la peinture” which is now published under that title along with many of his other writings on art and artists.
Early in his essay “Surréalisme et la peinture” Breton discusses why he becomes interested in the language of art. Visual images constitute a language that is no less artificial and whose origins are no less problematic than verbal language. Nonetheless, he intends to consider the state of this language as it is currently, just as he has done with poetry.
“Le besoin de fixer les images visuelles, ces images préexistant ou non à leur fixation, s’est extériorisé de tout temps et a abouti à la formation d’un veritable langage qui ne me paraît pas plus artificiel que l’autre et sur l’origine duquel il serait vain que je m’attarde. Tout au plus me dois-je de considérer l’état actuel de ce langage, de même que l’état actuel du langage poétique, et de rappeler s’il est nécessaire à sa raison d’être”.
The goal in this particular case, however, is to address the stagnant language of art and question the established symbols that have been used in painting. The essay presents modern painters who are seeking new images from their own imagination by which to break with convention, thereby permitting the disrupting effect of the marvelous.
His essay, however, inspired a response by Pierre Naville in the third issue of La Revolution Surrealiste which would declare that there is no such thing as surrealist painting. Breton responds with a series of articles over the next five issues (no. 4, July 15, 1925; no. 6, March 1, 1926; no. 7, June 15, 1926; no. 9-10, October 1, 1927) in which he considered how to discuss Surrealism and painting. These essays become the single long essay “Surréalisme et la peinture” which is now published under that title along with many of his other writings on art and artists.
Early in his essay “Surréalisme et la peinture” Breton discusses why he becomes interested in the language of art. Visual images constitute a language that is no less artificial and whose origins are no less problematic than verbal language. Nonetheless, he intends to consider the state of this language as it is currently, just as he has done with poetry.
“Le besoin de fixer les images visuelles, ces images préexistant ou non à leur fixation, s’est extériorisé de tout temps et a abouti à la formation d’un veritable langage qui ne me paraît pas plus artificiel que l’autre et sur l’origine duquel il serait vain que je m’attarde. Tout au plus me dois-je de considérer l’état actuel de ce langage, de même que l’état actuel du langage poétique, et de rappeler s’il est nécessaire à sa raison d’être”.
The goal in this particular case, however, is to address the stagnant language of art and question the established symbols that have been used in painting. The essay presents modern painters who are seeking new images from their own imagination by which to break with convention, thereby permitting the disrupting effect of the marvelous.
Chaos and Classicism
I think the conceit of the show at The Guggenheim is quite interesting but that it was not executed in such a way as to emphasize the tragedy in the conflict these artist's were experiencing in trying to produce work after WWI and cubism. It might have been clearer if the Otto Dix drawings at the beginning were highlighted, or somehow made more poignant, but they were literally put to the side. Some of the works are beautiful but many of them lack a certain spark (a certain sublime element?) precisely it seems to me because of the confusion of the period. The pieces feel muddled and sometimes simply boring. I think this might have been avoided by offering them with a more sympathetic context. The lack of the Chaos (which was odd given its presence in the title) kept the works from having something they were addressing, leaving them too often to seem like merely pretty pictures.
I was additionally surprised by the decision to ignore and make no mention of the chaotic works being produced. In June of 1936, right before the Berlin Olympics, London showed the International Surrealist Exhibit and the Abstract & Concrete show. These were presenting significant and astonishing works to a new audience–most had been being produced on the Continent, although some English artists were rightly incorporated. So why not at least recognize these art movements in the text of the show? Not mentioning it seems wrong to me specifically because it reduces the context of the works and the significance in the rise of classicism.
Chaos can not be organized and so is forever spinning confusion. Classicism embraces the order and discipline of the Ancient Greek world and is a kind of stasis of its own. What is interesting about this compounded idea as a show is the way in which both provide a dead end for art. If Dada is the typical expression of Chaos, we see clearly how it fizzled of its own boredom with the constantly spontaneous. Nothing can be created, generated to last. Classicism envelops everything in so much regulation and history that the work can become a dull, too utile et dulce to provoke the senses. It is the magnetic pull of these two poles, and artists' shifting (sometimes tortured) relationship to them that produces works that make you stop as you pass by to observe, reflect, enjoy, dismiss their presentation.
Kenneth Silver is the curator of the show and known for producing wonderful shows. I understand the talk that he gave offered the show an additional slant and I wish I might have heard him speak. In part, his reputation lead me to expect more of the show but I also wonder if The Guggenheim was not an awkward place to present this show. The idea as I saw it does not allow for such continuous movement, as France, Italy, Germany, each struggled with particular issues. This is one occasion where distinct rooms might have provided the show some structure that the placards at the beginning of each section did not sufficiently offer. By nature of The Guggenheim's design, the cycling pathway, upwards or downwards, keeps you moving, but it would have been nice to want to stop more frequently.
I was additionally surprised by the decision to ignore and make no mention of the chaotic works being produced. In June of 1936, right before the Berlin Olympics, London showed the International Surrealist Exhibit and the Abstract & Concrete show. These were presenting significant and astonishing works to a new audience–most had been being produced on the Continent, although some English artists were rightly incorporated. So why not at least recognize these art movements in the text of the show? Not mentioning it seems wrong to me specifically because it reduces the context of the works and the significance in the rise of classicism.
Chaos can not be organized and so is forever spinning confusion. Classicism embraces the order and discipline of the Ancient Greek world and is a kind of stasis of its own. What is interesting about this compounded idea as a show is the way in which both provide a dead end for art. If Dada is the typical expression of Chaos, we see clearly how it fizzled of its own boredom with the constantly spontaneous. Nothing can be created, generated to last. Classicism envelops everything in so much regulation and history that the work can become a dull, too utile et dulce to provoke the senses. It is the magnetic pull of these two poles, and artists' shifting (sometimes tortured) relationship to them that produces works that make you stop as you pass by to observe, reflect, enjoy, dismiss their presentation.
Kenneth Silver is the curator of the show and known for producing wonderful shows. I understand the talk that he gave offered the show an additional slant and I wish I might have heard him speak. In part, his reputation lead me to expect more of the show but I also wonder if The Guggenheim was not an awkward place to present this show. The idea as I saw it does not allow for such continuous movement, as France, Italy, Germany, each struggled with particular issues. This is one occasion where distinct rooms might have provided the show some structure that the placards at the beginning of each section did not sufficiently offer. By nature of The Guggenheim's design, the cycling pathway, upwards or downwards, keeps you moving, but it would have been nice to want to stop more frequently.
The Academy
One of my closest friends and currently ABD in her Art History PhD program sent me the following blurb about a book. What a miserable reminder of the ludicrous lengths to which academics will go. This is not why either she or I began our respective studies and how horrifying to consider that this is the well-worn way ahead of us. Undoubtedly I should look forward to something similar on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey.
A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-siecle Art
by Alison Syme
A Touch of Blossom considers John Singer Sargent in the context of nineteenth-century botany, gynecology, literature, and visual culture and argues that the artist mobilized ideas of cross-fertilization and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers in his work to "naturalize" sexual inversion. In conceiving of his painting as an act of hand-pollination, Sargent was elaborating both a period poetics of homosexuality and a new sense of subjectivity, anticipating certain aspects of artistic modernism. Assembling evidence from diverse realms-visual culture (cartoons, greeting cards, costume design), medicine and botany (treatises and their illustrations), literature, letters, lexicography, and the visual arts-this book situates the metaphors that structure Sargent's paintings in a broad cultural context. It offers in-depth readings of particular paintings and analyzes related projects undertaken by Sargent's friends in the field of painting and in other disciplines, such as gynecology and literature.
A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-siecle Art
by Alison Syme
A Touch of Blossom considers John Singer Sargent in the context of nineteenth-century botany, gynecology, literature, and visual culture and argues that the artist mobilized ideas of cross-fertilization and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers in his work to "naturalize" sexual inversion. In conceiving of his painting as an act of hand-pollination, Sargent was elaborating both a period poetics of homosexuality and a new sense of subjectivity, anticipating certain aspects of artistic modernism. Assembling evidence from diverse realms-visual culture (cartoons, greeting cards, costume design), medicine and botany (treatises and their illustrations), literature, letters, lexicography, and the visual arts-this book situates the metaphors that structure Sargent's paintings in a broad cultural context. It offers in-depth readings of particular paintings and analyzes related projects undertaken by Sargent's friends in the field of painting and in other disciplines, such as gynecology and literature.
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