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.