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.
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