When Time magazine reviewed the “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism” exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1936, they described André Breton, the “founder” of Surrealism, as someone “who frequently dresses entirely in green, smokes a green pipe, drinks a green liqueur and has a sound of knowledge of Freudian psychology.” (MF)
Although Breton did have a predilection for the colour green – art dealer Julien Levy later recalled that Breton “never removed his green jacket and vest” (MA273) – he had not actually been to the United States by the time of MoMA’s exhibition and Time magazine’s description of him. The founder of Surrealism arrived in the U.S. in the summer of 1941 – one of the later arrivals of a group of European artists aligned to the Surrealist movement who immigrated to the U.S. during World War II. Wolfgang Paalen, Kurt Seligmann, Matta (née Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren) and Yves Tanguy had all arrived two years prior to Breton – in 1939. (Paalen would move from the U.S. to Mexico the same year that he arrived. (WC)) In 1940 Gordon Onslow Ford and Kurt Seligmann arrived. Breton, André Masson, Max Ernst (accompanied by his wife-to-be Peggy Guggenheim) all arrived in 1941. Marcel Duchamp arrived in 1942 (MD).
THE EMERGENCY RESCUE COMMITTEE
Breton and other emigrating artists were helped by the Emergency Rescue Committee (sometimes referred to as the American Rescue Committee) in Marseilles – an organization that had been set up in the U.S. with financial contributions from private individuals in order to rescue cultural and political refugees threatened by Hitler’s advance into Europe. Varian Fry, a Harvard educated Quaker, arrived in Marseilles during the summer of 1940 to oversee their operations in France – the same summer that the German forces occupied the country. (SS116) At the time of the occupation Breton was enlisted in the French Army. On September 16, 1939 he had written a letter of introduction on behalf on Wolfgang Paalen to Leon Trotsky’s secretary in Mexico in which he noted that he (Breton) would soon be in uniform as part of a medical staff attached to a pilot training school near Poitiers. (SS66/7). By August 1940 Breton was in the city of Salon having traveled there after being demobilized in Gironde. On August 10, 1940 he wrote to Kurt Seligmann in New York from Salon suggesting that he (Breton) give a series of lectures in New York in order to obtain an exit visa from France. (SS114/5) He then left Salon and moved south to Montargis temporarily (where he wrote Plein Marge) before making his way to Marseille where he joined Varian Fry and other artists attempting to leave France.
On December 3, 1940 Breton, who had been a member of the French Communist Party from 1927 – 1935, was arrested in Marseilles and held for four days. Vichy premier Henri Philippe Pétain was due to visit the city the next day. The official report on Breton described him as a “dangerous anarchist sought for a long time by the French police.” In February – March 1941 the publication of two works by Breton – the Anthologie de l’Humeur Noir and his poem Fata Morgana were banned by the Vichy government. Breton finally left France, accompanied by his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, and their child on a transatlantic steamer which departed from Marseilles on March 24, 1941. (FR) One of his fellow passengers on the ship was the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Claude Lévi-Strauss:
“The scum, as the gendarmes described us, included among others André Breton… Breton, by no means at his ease in such a situation, would amble up and down the rare empty spaces on deck, looking like a blue bear in his velvety jacket. We were to become firm friends in the course of an exchange of letters which we kept up throughout our interminable journey; their subject was the relation between aesthetic beauty and absolute originality.” (FR)
When the ship reached the port of the Fort-de-France in Martinique after about a month at sea, Breton was sent to a concentration camp in Lazaret by the Vichy authorities in Martinique who had been warned about the “dangerous agitator.” Although he was released a few days later he remained under surveillance during the three weeks he stayed on the island. (FR) On April 30th André Masson arrived at Fort-de-France from Marseilles. (Masson would contribute both text and illustrations to Breton’s book Martinique: Snake Charmer.)
André Masson [from La Mémoire du monde (1974)]:
“One day, while strolling on the island’s Atlantic coast, where the lianas in bloom blended with the foam of the ocean waves, Breton, to my great astonishment, spoke to me of Paradise. Not that of the theologians… No, a true Paradise, here on Earth… Reviewing the paradisiacal utopians, we went from the famous ‘withering away of the state’ to the ‘end of History,’ lingering long over Charles Fourier, whom I have always called the Douanier Rousseau of socialism.” [Breton's Ode à Charles Fourier would be published in c. 1947]. (FR)
Breton and his wife finally left Martinique on May 16, 1941, arriving in New York in June after a brief stop in the Dominican Republic where they visited the Spanish Surrealist Eugenio F. Granell. (FR) On June 24, 1941 Breton’s wife wrote a letter of thanks to Varian Fry for helping them get out of France, describing America as “the Christmas tree of the world.” (SS140) (Unknown to the Bretons at the time was the fact that throughout their stay in the U.S. they were kept under close watch by the F.B.I. (FR))
Breton would live in the United States for about 4 1/2 years, returning to France in about May of 1946. (From December 1945 to March 1946 he visited Haiti, Martinique and the Dominican Republic). (FR) It was a time in New York when, according writer Robert Lebel, “everybody met everybody. The influence was collective and this is how it spread. Each one met someone through another one. The Reises had a party at least once a month; everyone met at Peggy Guggenheim’s parties – Pollock, Baziotes, and Rothko… Later the Americans hid their Surrealist paintings, but when we saw Pollock during the war he was like a little boy in front of Max Ernst.” (SS197)
The “Reises” were New York accountant Bernard Reis and his wife, Becky. Bernard was the accountant and treasurer of VVV, the magazine that Breton produced during his stay in the U.S. (HH477) Reis would later act as a advisor to Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko and also advised Peggy Guggenheim as she went about opening a gallery to house her art collection. Guggenheim and her lover, the Surrealist Max Ernst, arrived in New York about a month after Breton but, unlike Breton, traveled by air on a luxurious Pan Am Clipper plane just two years after its maiden transatlantic voyage. (Guggenheim and Ernst would marry later in the year in Virginia.) In January 1942 Breton contributed an essay on Surrealism to Guggenheim’s catalogue of her collection and came up with the idea of including photographs of the eyes of the artists whose work was included in the collection to accompany their biographies in the catalogue. (MD223) Originally Guggenheim hoped to open a nonprofit museum to house her collection but Bernard Reis suggested that she add a ‘for-profit’ element (a gallery) from which she would be able to deduct expenses. (MD224) She opened her Surrealist art gallery, Art of This Century on October 20, 1942.
TRUTH AND AUTOMATISM
At the Reis’ frequent gatherings Breton would often lead the guests in a game of Truth in which they were expected to answer personal questions (often about sex), with complete honesty. (MD224) The game was treated seriously. Violators of the rules were fined. (MD224) In addition to Breton, artists who attended the Reis’ parties included Kurt Seligmann, Max Ernst, André Masson, Arshile Gorky, David Hare, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Pavel Tchelitchew and Matta. Matta, an on-again off-again follower of Breton, held his own gatherings of artists where Surrealist techniques such as automatism would be explored.
Matta:
“Automatism is a method of reading ‘live’ the actual function of thinking at the same speed as the matter we are thinking about; to read at the speed of events, to grasp unconscious material functioning in our memory with the tools at our disposal, with the language we possess, if possible grasping instantly, all at once, one and once make it. Automatism means that both the irrational and the rational are running parallel and can send sparks into each other and light the common road… Automatism is purposeless on purpose.” (PF6-7)
Artists who gathered at Matta’s studio to explore automatism included Robert Motherwell, and (briefly) Jackson Pollock.
Irving Sandler [art writer]:
“Matta had a perverse love-hate attitude toward André Breton and his coterie. Bob [Robert Motherwell] recalled: ‘Matta wanted to show them up as middle-aged, gray-haired men who weren’t zeroed into contemporary reality.’ … Matta then tried to put together a group of young artists who would be daring in their exploration of automatism… At first he enlisted Esteban Francis, Gordon Onslow-Ford, and Bob. But he wanted more New Yorkers in his group, and he asked Baziotes, whom he recently met, to recommend artists he knew on the Federal Art Project. Baziotes suggested Pollock, de Kooning, Peter Busa, and Gerome Kamrowski. Baziotes and Bob visited them, and Bob ‘taught’ them the theory of automatism, or so he claimed. De Kooning was not interested in the surrealist ‘adventure,’ but Pollock, who drank through the meeting, liked the idea, although he would not join a group. Then Matta capriciously gave the whole thing up. Only Arshile Gorky was accepted into the Surrealist inner circle.” (IS90)
Jackson Pollock, William Baziotes, and Gerome Kamrowski produced several collaborative works around 1940/41 in which they experimented with an ‘automatic’ technique of painting.
From Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School by Martica Sawin:
“One evening in the winter of 1940-41, [William] Baziotes brought Jackson Pollock over to [Gerome] Kamrowski’s studio, and the three artists began experimenting with quick-drying lacquer paint that Baziotes had bought at Arthur Brown’s art supply store. They spread some cheap canvases out on the floor and began brushing and then dripping the paint onto them. In the process of ‘fooling around,’ as Kamrowski called it, they all worked on the same canvases and during the course of the evening produced a number of collaborative spontaneous works. All three artists already had some knowledge of Surrealism and were familiar with the concept of ‘pure psychic automatism,’ and they were trying to find ways in which the new quick-drying paint developed for commercial use could be put to this end. When Kamrowski moved out of that studio… he threw out most of these experimental canvases but kept one as a kind of souvenir, and this three-man canvas [Collaborative Painting] has surfaced in a number of recent exhibitions as a kind of proto-abstract expressionist work. Although each artist made use of dripped paint and a gestural approach in combination with other techniques during the next few years, it wasn’t until 1946 that dripping lacquer began to be the basis for an entire painting and that Pollock reached what Kamrowski referred to as ‘his greater freedoms.’” (SS169)
DADA
The result of automatic painting or drawing was visual images arranged randomly, by chance – a concept which had previously been explored by the Dada movement which Breton had been involved with prior to founding Surrealism. Dadaist Jean (Hans) Arp had produced a series of collages in 1916 whose elements were arranged by chance. (TJ23)
Georges Hugnet [from The Dada Spirit in Painting (1932/34)]:
“… it seems fitting to mention some of Arp’s experiments which were of far-reaching importance because they were in line with activities that were later to play a large part in the theory of prospecting in the land of the unconscious. Each morning, whether inspired or not, Arp repeated the same drawing, and so obtained a series showing variations which indicated the curves of automatism. He also experimented with chance, putting on a piece of cardboard pieces of paper that he had cut out at random and then coloured; he placed the scraps coloured side down and then shook the cardboard; finally he would paste them to the cardboard just as they had fallen.” (RD134)
Arp’s collages were “Untitled” but subtitled “According to the Laws of Chance.” Arp later wrote that the “law of chance which comprises all other laws and surpasses our understanding… can be experienced only in a total surrender to the unconscious.” (LZ37)
Three years before Arp’s collages, Marcel Duchamp had created Three Standard Need Weavings (1913) using a similar random technique.
Georges Hugnet [from The Dada Spirit in Painting (1932/34)]:
“This was the experiment: Duchamp took three threads, each a meter long, and these he let drop successively, from a height of one meter, on three virgin canvases. He then scrupulously preserved the contour of the fallen threads, fixing them with a little varnish; the result was a dessin du hasard, a chance design or drawing… Again and again we encounter Duchamp, both in Paris and New York, and in Picabia and Man Ray, this obsession, in various forms, with the laws of chance…”(RD140)
André Breton, as a writer and poet, experimented with automatism through automatic writing. In May/June 1919 He produced, in collaboration with Philippe Soupault, a text written ‘automatically’ titled Les Champs magnétiques. (WB) In The Dada Spirit in Painting, Hugnet noted the influence of Breton’s use of written automatism on visual automatism when referring to the Surrealist Max Ernst: “The works of Max Ernst, collages or imaginary paintings, based on technical inventions that are a pictorial application of automatic techniques similar to those used by Breton and Soupault in their book, Les Champs magnétiques, bring to Dada painting a new and very personal vision which foreshadows Surrealism.” (RD178) Les Champs magnétiques was first published in Breton’s Littérature magazine, a Dada- friendly journal published from 1919 to1924 in France. (The first issue was February 1919.) (HB/WB)
Litterature
Cover of Littérature, vol. 2 no. 13, Paris 1920
edited by Louis Aragon, André Breton and Philippe Soupault
Georges Hugnet [from The Dada Spirit in Painting (1932/34)]:
“Louis Aragon, André Breton and Philippe Soupault were contributors to various advance guard magazines, among others Sic… In 1919 they founded Littérature… These men, whom we shall call the ‘Littérature group,’ represented a poetic and critical position between Rimbaud and Lautreamont on the one hand and Jarry and Apollinaire on the other; they supported the effort to liberate the mind in progress since the second half of the nineteenth century… they were immediately attracted to the activity proposed by Dada… they saluted Dada, a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the post-war economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste everything in its path. They felt that it would be an offensive weapon of the first order. Thus, through the word Surréalisme, borrowed from Apollinaire and already full of meaning, was regularly used by the Littérature group and their friends, their magazine, for want of an alternative course at the moment, gave itself to Dada, a scarecrow erected at the crossroads of the epoch.” (RD165/167)
TRISTAN TZARA
Although Breton initially embraced Dada and would borrow from it for Surrealism, his relationship with the movement became strained after the arrival in Paris at the end of 1919 of one of Dada’s founders, Tristan Tzara (born Samuel Rosenstock on April 16, 1896 in Moinesti, Romania). Tzara edited his own Dada magazine, simply titled Dada, in Zurich (the first issue was July 1917 (RD34)) and also contributed to Breton’s Littérature magazine beginning with the second issue. One of the first Dada events that Tristan participated in after arriving in Paris was organized by Breton and the Littérature group – the “Premier Vendredi de Littérature” which took place on January 23, 1920 at the Palais des Fêtes. Tzara promised to read a new manifesto at the event but instead read a newspaper article. According to Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes in History of Dada (1931), “when Tzara, after announcing a manifesto, merely read a vulgar article taken out of some newspaper, while the poet Paul Eluard and Theodore Fraenkel, a friend of Breton, hammered on bells, the public began to grow indignant and the matinée ended in an uproar.” (RD109) The uproar included cries of “Back to Zurich!” from the audience. (DC441) During another event, the Dada Festival, which took place on May 26, 1920 at the Salle Gaveau, Tzara couldn’t get his “Vaseline symphonique” to work. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes recalled about the “symphonique” – “though scarcely very musical, it encountered the open hostility of André Breton, who had a horror of music and suffered from being reduced to the role of an interpreter.” (RD111)
The “open hostility” of Breton mentioned by Ribemont-Dessaignes may also have had something to do with an insulting unsigned letter Tzara received prior to the Festival which was suspected to be from Breton or the Littérature group.
Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes [from History of Dada (1931)]:
“It was also at Picabia’s, between the Maison de l’Oeuvre Dada demonstration [March 27, 1920] and the next [the Dada Festival on May 26, 1920], that we experienced the repercussions of a strange event known in the Dada archives as the ‘affair of the Anonymous Letter.’ Tristan Tzara had received a highly insulting unsigned letter, and its terminology led one to suspect that it had been written by either one of the Dadaists or one of their close enemies. Through application of the Hegelian-Dadaist dialectic, we came successively to the conclusion that the letter had been written by one of the members of the Littérature group, by Breton or Aragon, or possibly even by Philippe Soupault, Theodore Fraenkel or Francis Picabia, or, finally, by Tristan Tzara, who perhaps had written the letter to himself in order to foster demoralizing suspicion amid his own group.” (RD111)
The relationship between Tristan Tzara and Breton’s group of Dadaists became strained even further after negative comments made by Tzara during a mock Dada trial organized by Breton in 1921 and Tzara’s failure to endorse a Dada congress which Breton attempted to organize not long after the trial. The “Trial and Sentencing of M. Maurice Barrés by Dada,” took place at the Salle des Societies Savantes in the Rue Danton on Friday evening, May 13, 1921. (RD116) Maurice Barrés was a liberal writer who, during World War 1, became a staunch nationalist. Breton set himself up as judge for the mock trial and published the proceedings in Littérature. (PJ354)
Georges Hugnet [from The Dada Spirit in Painting (1932/34)]:
“The Littérature group put on the most subversive meeting, from the moral point of view, in which Dada had ever been involved. The ‘Barrès trial’ forced Dada to take a position on several concrete questions. On Friday, May 13, [1921] in the Hall of Learned Societies, Maurice Barrès was “indicted and tried by Dada.” André Breton, president of the tribunal, had drawn up a stern and scathing indictment… In announcing the verdict, Breton declared ‘Dada, judging that the time has come to endow its negative spirit with executive powers, and determined above all to exercise these powers against those who threaten its dictatorship, is beginning, as of this date, to take appropriate measures…. Dada accuses Maurice Barrès of offense against the security of the spirit.’ … The tone of the verdict is somewhat different from that of the usual Dada writing… Practically speaking, the result of the new extravaganza was general dismay, expressed, as far as the critics were concerned, in a threat never again to mention Dada in their columns. Once again Dada had been unable to reply categorically: the role of judge did not suit it at all.” (RD184-5)
Although Tzara participated in the trial he used his testimony to attack it, declaring “I have no confidence in justice, even if this justice is made by Dada.” He referred to both the accusers and the accused as “a bunch of bastards… greater or lesser bastards is of no importance.” (PJ354) When Breton attempted to get Tzara’s support for his idea of a Congress of Paris (with Breton as the director), Tzara refused to get involved. (The initial committee for the Congress consisted of seven people – Breton, Georges Auric, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Amédée Ozenfant, Jean Paulhan and Roger Vitrac.) (PJ372fn69)
Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes [from History of Dada, 1931]:
“Breton’s personal reactions led him to conceive of a grandiose undertaking in which he would have played the leading role. This was to be a super-congress of all intellectuals wielding influence on the state of the modern mind, in order to determine what was modern and what was not, in short, a grand congress of the mind… But the Dadas were not in agreement. Tristan Tzara, in particular, supported by Ribemont-Dessaignes, raised numerous objections because of the dogmatic aspect such an undertaking would assume… With him Paul Eluard, Theodore Fraenkel, Ribemont-Dessaignes and Eric Satie withdrew. But the publicity which the Congress of Paris had received prevented Breton from retreating. So he persisted and, despite the defection of the greater part of Dada – it is true that he had the support of Picabia who had become anti-Dada – he continued his work as director of the Congress. But new difficulties arose, and certain members of the committee resigned. To add to all this the poet Roger Vitrac, head of Aventure magazine, on which Breton counted heavily, fell ill. This finally discouraged Breton: he abandoned the undertaking on which he had so set his heart.
The bitterness Breton felt led him to cast the main responsibility for the failure on Tristan Tzara and to indulge in open vengeance. He published in Comoedia several articles in which, scorning Dada amorality, he adopted a bourgeois point of view toward Tzara’s conduct. He specifically accused Tzara of not being the father of Dada and of having defrauded Serner by claiming authorship of the Dadaist Manifesto of 1918… In writing of Tzara, he used pejoratively such terms as ‘arrived from Zurich,’ just as Picabia had called him a ‘Jew’… Finally, he called Tzara a publicity-mad imposter, and concluded with a pathetic appeal in favour of himself who ‘proposed to consecrate his life to ideas.’” (RD119)
Breton’s comments to “the readers of Comoedia” were later published in the “After Dada” section of Breton’s Three Dada Manifestos.
André Breton:
“… I inform the readers of Comoedia that M. Tzara had nothing to do with the invention of the word ‘Dada,’ as is shown by the letters of Schad and Huelsenbeck, his companions in Zurich during the war, which I am prepared to publish, and that he probably had very little to do with the writing of the Dada Manifesto 1918 which was the basis of the reception and credit we accorded him. The paternity of this manifesto is in any case, formally claimed, by Max Serner, doctor of philosophy, who lives in Geneva and whose manifestos written in German before 1918 have not been translated into French. Moreover it is known that the conclusions formulated by Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, even before the war, plus those formulated by Jacques Vaché in 1917, would have been sufficient to guide us without the manifesto. Up to now, it has seemed distasteful to me to denounce the bad faith of M. Tzara and I have allowed him to go on using with impunity the papers of those whom he robbed. But now that he has decided to exploit this last opportunity to be talked about, by wrongfully attacking one of the most disinterested undertakings ever put under way [the Congress], I am not reluctant to silence him.” (RD205)
Tzara later explained the problems he had with the Congress (and the Dada movement in France) in a letter to Christian Zervos dated February 16, 1937. In the letter Tzara complained about a “newspaper release” that referred to him as a “publicity hungry imposter” which “occurred only a few days after the official invitation to participate in the Committee of said Congress” – presumably a reference to Breton’s comments in Comoedia. (RD304). He also made reference to a performance of his play Le Coeur a gaz which took place at the Galerie Montaigne in Paris on June 10, 1921 as part of the Salon Dada Exposition Internationale exhibition which ran from June 6 to June 30, 1921. Although the performance of Tzara’s play was meant to be the high point of the program of Dada performances, the audience walked out soon after it started. (PJ355/356) Tzara asked in his letter to Zervos, “Is it not likely that this demonstration, the hostility of which was directed… against the second part of the program, the performance of my play Le Coeur a gaz, was not the expression of a principle, but of a personal vengeance directed against myself?” (RD305).
THE DEATH OF DADA AND THE BIRTH OF SURREALISM
According to Ribemont-Dessaignes, “the situation [between Tzara and Breton] became so strained that it was decided to liquidate. A meeting took place at the Closerie des Lilas, the old cafe on the Place de L’Observatoire. Breton was summoned to explain his ‘un-Dadalike’ conduct… Far from pacifying tempers, this effort merely brought about a final break, and officially marked the death of Dada.” (RD117-19) The funeral of Dada in France took place on November 30, 1924. An announcement of the funeral appeared in Le Mouvement accéléré: “The friends and acquaintances of Dada, deceased in the prime of life from acute literaturitis, will assemble the 30th of November 1924 at 2:30 around the tomb of their brother in nothingness so as to observe a minute of silence. We will gather together at the entrance gate of the Montparnasse cemetery. – Attendees are asked not to wear any badge of a literary school.” (AI263) About a month before the funeral of Dada, Breton published a manifesto for a new movement – Surrealism. (The term “Surrealist” was first used in print in 1917 when the poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, subtitled his play Les Mamelles de Tiresias as a “Drame Surrealiste.” (MF))
André Breton [from the Manifeste du surréalisme (published October 15, 1924) (AJ)]:
“We are still living under the reign of logic… Under the pretence 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. It was, apparently, by pure chance that 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 give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud… Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of psychic activity… has still today been so grossly neglected…. I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its possession.”
Included as part of the manifesto was Breton’s definition of Surrealism:
“SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.”
Surrealism then, was initially conceived by Breton as “psychic automatism” in its “pure state” – or the application of automatism to the psyche. The “unconscious” or subconscious was more important than the conscious or rational state. The “superior reality” was based not on God or religion but on the “omnipotence of dream,” “previously neglected associations,” and “disinterested play of thought.” God was replaced by Freud and the search for a “new myth.” When Breton contributed “The Legendary Life of Max Ernst” to the April 1942 issue of Charles Henri Ford’s View magazine, he subtitled the article, “preceeded by a brief discussion on the need for a new myth.” (VP33)
Max Ernst issue of View
André Breton [from "The Legendary Life of Max Ernst preceeded by a brief discussion on the need for a new myth," View (April 1942):
"... I have often reflected on the fact that the average man, in France, for example, derived less and less support from secular beliefs and institutions during the last twenty years. No further point can be reached in the process which has separated the symbol from the thing for which it stands. Very well then, making a clean break with all that benefits only from external marks of veneration or respect, I do not fear to say that I have seen engendered - oh! after how many attempts! - the embryo of new signification... The prophets are Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, many others: only yesterday there were more than enough of them to agitate the schools. You cannot deny that some of them handle imperatives powerful enough to deflect the course of a young man's life and to decide the adoption of heroic careers. This much I can assure you of. The obscurity of their language as it reflects their exhortation is not different in kind from that of John or Daniel. Notice, too, that the most active are those who left no portraits: Sade, Lautréamont, or those who have left ambiguous testaments: Sade, Lautréamont, Seurat. You see, I cannot grant you that mythology is only the recital of the acts of the dead..." (VP34)
VVV
Breton had been contributing articles to View magazine before he arrived in the U.S. and continued to contribute after he arrived.View was an American avant-garde magazine edited by Charles Henri Ford which initially focused on Surrealism but became increasingly oriented toward Existentialism during the mid - late 1940s . (View was published from September 1940 to Spring (March) 1947.) When Breton began producing his own magazine in America, VVV, he also explored the concept of myth in the first issue. (The first issue - No. 1 - was the June 1942 issue. The last issue was No. 4 - the February 1944 issue.)
VVV first issue
VVV No. 1 (1942)
The first issue of VVV featured a cover by Max Ernst and contributions from Robert Motherwell, André Masson, Kurt Seligmann, Gordon Onslow Ford and Charles Henri Ford, among others. David Hare was designated the editor of the magazine. Matta had originally suggested that Robert Motherwell be the editor and Motherwell had written to William Carlos Williams suggesting that he become the American literary editor of the magazine. In his letter to Williams, Motherwell noted the importance of automatism to his own work: "Now I have taken a partisan stand, in the creative sense that Surrealist automatism is the basis of my painting." (SS214) By the time the first issue of VVV was published Motherwell had resigned.
Robert Motherwell:
"I'll tell you what I remember - and there's a lot I don't remember. In France before the war I think Skira - but I'm not sure - published an extremely elaborate deluxe art magazine called Minotaure that increasingly became a vehicle for the Surrealists. The Surrealists were proselytisers. Which the other artists weren't at all. They very badly wanted a vehicle here. By hook or by crook slowly some money was raised. The actual editor was André Breton who always was the chief of everything Surrealist. I think Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst if I remember were associate editors. But the Surrealists had a feeling - not really realizing that artists in America are not taken very seriously - that they were politically radical, etcetera, they were aliens, exiles, etcetera, and that ostensibly there should be an American editor. There was also some effort to get some Americans to contribute. William Carlos Williams and so on. And so for a time I accepted the role simply to help them out. Then one day it became clear to me in an angry discussion in French, which I only partly understood, that they had also assumed that I had American connections and could raise some money. Which I didn't have, and couldn't. Then I got furious and resigned. And the compromise was that Lionel Abel and I co-edited. And then what transpired was that Abel, who had no job, no money, no anything, asked for the colossal sum of twenty-five dollars a week simply in order to exist while he was gathering the manuscripts and all the rest of it. And again, they got furious at that and fired him. Then I said, "I resign." Then David Hare who had, I think, an independent income agreed to be the nominal editor. (SR)
Motherwell, who in 1951 would publish an anthology of Dada painters and poets, also provided an explanation of the title of Breton's magazine. VVV was meant to be a new letter of the alphabet.
Robert Motherwell:
"Something very interesting to me... is how the name VVV came about. They wanted to invent a twenty-seventh letter in the alphabet. In French the letter W is double V (VV). And so they hit on the idea of having triple V (VVV) as the twenty-seventh letter. And Breton also didn't know a word of English. And as sort of their American adviser, lieutenant, liaison officer, I pointed out to him that for reasons I didn't understand double V in English is pronounced double U so that it would not translate; in English you would have to call it triple U when nevertheless the sign was three V's and it really wouldn't work. He would not accept that it wouldn't work. And it used to confuse everybody. People didn't know whether to say V-V-V or triple V or triple U or whatever. But if it were literally transcribed into English the proper title would have been triple U. And the fact that they choose V with the way that English-speaking people say V made it not translate. Well, if you said triple U [as] the name of the magazine [then] immediately Americans would have got the point. But it was always called triple V and nobody got the point. It seems senseless.” (SR)
For the first issue of VVV Breton promised a new manifesto but instead provided a “Prolegomena” – in which he railed against Salvador Dalí, Aragon and Paul Éluard and those “who follow either the Bible or Lenin” as well as Surrealist imposters (“Tomorrow it will be Matta’s turn to be imitated.”) He then asked “Can society exist without a social myth?”
André Breton [from "Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism - or else," VVV no. 1 (Spring 1942)]:
“Man is perhaps not the center, not the focus of the universe. One may go as far as to believe that there exists above him on the animal level beings whose behaviour is as alien to him as his own must be to the day fly or the whale. There is nothing that would necessarily prevent such beings from completely escaping his sensory frame of reference since these beings might avail themselves of a type of camouflage, which no matter how you imagine it becomes plausible when you consider the theory of form and what has been discovered about mimetic animals.” (SS215)
The article was accompanied by a drawing by Matta, presumably his interpretation of Breton’s ‘camouflaged’ beings as the new myth, titled The Great Transparents. In 1943 Kurt Seligmann would also take up the concept of invisible myths and paint Melusine and the Great Transparents. The American Surrealist artist, Gerome Kamrowski who attended Matta’s gatherings during the early 1940s, would later refer to the Great Transparents as “a myth that didn’t fly.” (SS217))
MYTH, ROTHKO, GOTTLIEB AND FREUD
Around the same time that Breton and Matta were attempting to create a new myth, the concept of myth was also being explored by some of the New York artists who would later be referred to as Abstract Expressionists, particularly Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. Both artists were classified as Surrealists in Sidney Janis’ book Abstract and Surrealist Art, when it was published in November 1944. (SS351) According to Janis, Rothko had specifically requested to be included in Surrealist section of book.
Sidney Janis:
“My book Abstract and Surrealist Art was finally published in 1944. It included many artists who had not yet reached their image – works that might be termed Pollock before Pollock, Hofmann before Hofmann, Rothko before Rothko. When I visited Rothko at his studio in 1943, I selected a picture for my book that was quite unlike those of his later years. At the end of the evening, Rothko asked me, ‘What section do you think you’ll put me in? I would like to be in the Surrealist section.’” (AD35)
Robert Motherwell later recalled that “Mark [Rothko] was very interested in psychic automatism,” adding that “He was one of the few American painters who really liked Surrealist painting, went to Surrealist shows and understood” what they were doing. According to Motherwell, Rothko told him that “there was always automatic drawing under those larger forms” of Rothko’s paintings. (RO185)
Rothko devoted a considerable amount of space to the subject of myth, including two sections titled “The Myth” and “The Attempted Myth of Today” in a book he worked on during 1939 – 1941. The notebook/folder containing his essays was discovered after his death and published in 2004 as The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art with an introduction by his son, Christopher Rothko. In his introduction to the book, Christopher notes that “the bulk” of Rothko’s “book” was probably written around 1940 – 1941 – the same period that Rothko and Gottlieb were painting mythological subjects. (CRxvii)
artists reality cover
Cover of Mark Rothko’s Artists Reality
Mark Rothko [from "The Attempted Myth of Today" in The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art]
“Ultimately, this attempt to represent the universal rests upon one of a few solutions. The artist must either fall back upon the treatment of a single figure… or they must await the evolvement of a series of anecdotal myths which will give a universal significance to their newly found unity, or they must fall back upon the allegories of the past… In the hope for the heroic, and the knowledge that art must be heroic, we cannot but wish for the communal myth again.” (CR104)
Rothko’s use of the term “communal myth” can be likened to Breton’s search for a new “social” myth. But whereas Breton, Matta and other Surrealists were searching for a new myth, such as the “Great Transparents,” Rothko, as well as Gottlieb, turned to classical mythology for inspiration. The first time that Rothko’s myth paintings were displayed publicly was at the “Contemporary American Paintings” exhibition/sale at Macy’s department store in January 1942 which included Rothko’s Antigone and Oedipus paintings. (RG185) Gottlieb also borrowed from the Oedipus ‘myth’ for two pictographs he painted in 1941 – Oedipus and The Eyes of Oedipus. Two other mythological paintings by Gottlieb and Rothko were included in the third exhibition of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors in June 1943 – Gottlieb’s Rape of Persephone and Rothko’s The Syrian Bull. When Gottlieb was later asked why he and Rothko adopted mythological themes, Gottlieb recalled that he came up with the suggestion. According to Gottlieb he asked Rothko “How about some classical matter like mythological themes?” and “we agreed… Mark chose to do some themes from the plays of Aeschylus, and I played around with the Oedipus myth, which was both a classical theme and a Freudian theme.” (AG35)
Adolph Gottlieb:
Well, I think what happened in the early Forties after the war started was, first of all, a number of Surrealists came to this country and we were able to see them in the flesh, and see that they were just ordinary people such as we are. Then we were also cut off from the periodicals that used to come over like Cahier des Arts. So that we weren’t so continuously immersed in French art. I think there was some kind of sense of crisis so that you had to, at least I felt that I had to, dig into myself, find out what it was I wanted to express, what it was possible for me to express. .. That was when I started doing what I called the pictographs which a lot of people think have something to do with primitive art, my interest in primitive art. Like when you were saying that Surrealists seemed to think it had something to do with some sort of universals. My recollection is that it was Jung who came out with the idea of the collective unconscious. I was interested in reading Jung at the time and the idea interested me. Then it just appeared; I mean it just corroborated my idea that I wasn’t really interested in primitive art, that if I decided to use certain symbols in my painting, for example an egg shape, I did this without extending it to be a symbolic reference. Why couldn’t I come up with the idea of an egg as signifying fertility just as well as some aborigine in Australia? …
I decided to restrict myself to those shapes which I felt had a personal significance to me. And I wanted to do something figurative. Well, I couldn’t visualize a whole man on a canvas. I couldn’t see him in a flat space. I felt that I wanted to make a painting primarily with painterly means. So I flattened out my canvas and made these roughly rectangular divisions, with lines going out in four directions. That is, vertically and horizontally. Running right out to the edge of the canvas. And then I would free associate, putting whatever came to my mind very freely within these different triangles. There might be an oval shape that would be an eye or an egg. Of if it was round it might be a sun or whatever. It could be a wriggly shape and that would be a snake — whatever I felt like doing. Then there would be very little editing or revision…” (AS)
In “playing around” with the Oedipus myth, Gottlieb was looking for new symbols or a new meaning for old symbols or symbols used merely as visual elements without any other meaning. In Artists Reality, Rothko also explores the use of symbols in one of the few references he makes to Surrealism in his book, noting that the Surrealists are “attempting to bridge the impassable darkness between the world of the mind and the world of emotion” through “symbolism and the study of dreams and other atavistic, subconscious repositories of this, at once, new and old demonology, hoping that through ordering the symbols they can reconstruct the expression of this essence.” (CR108) Gottlieb’s pictographs can be seen as an attempt at such an “ordering” of symbols. Gottlieb’s comments about using symbols with a “personal significance” or the use of a symbol “without extending it to be a symbolic reference” are similar to Breton’s comments about “new signification” and the separation of “the symbol from the thing for which it stands” as quoted earlier. The technique used by Gottlieb of painting by free association with “little editing or revision” is also reminiscent of the Surrealist technique of automatic writing or painting – a correlation he draws himself in another interview when discussing his interest in Freud and Jung – an interest also shared by Breton and the Surrealists. Breton visited Freud in Vienna in 1921 in addition to corresponding with him during the 1930s. In 1937 Breton asked Freud to contribute to a planned anthology, Trajectoire du rêve, which Breton published in 1938. (AQ)
Adolph Gottlieb:
“My interest in Freud and Jung started with my interest in Surrealism – because the Surrealists were interested in Freudian theories of dreams. In the early 1940s I was very much influenced by Surrealism and was using a type of free-association which was one of the Surrealist techniques. I was putting images into the compartments of my painting as if I were doing automatic writing… I admired Miro, early [Salvador] Dali, Max Ernst; the automatism of Masson certainly was an influence. At the same time Rothko was also doing some mythological subjects, partly semi-abstract, partly Surrealist in style.” (SS299)
Although Gottlieb and Rothko borrowed from Surrealism during the early 1940s, they were never particularly close to its founder on a social level. Breton spoke hardly any English and tended to socialize with the other European exiled Surrealists. Breton was also primarily a literary figure rather than an artist. Matta, who had arrived in the U.S. a couple of years prior to Breton, socialized more with the New York artists than Breton and, being a visual artist himself, exerted more of an influence on their work. Of the artists already living in New York at the time of the Surrealist invasion it was probably Arshile Gorky who was the closest to Breton on a personal level. Matta would also befriend Gorky but with ultimately tragic consequences.
ANDRÉ BRETON AND ARSHILE GORKY
Arshile Gorky had emigrated to the U.S. in February 1920 after surviving the Armenian Genocide (see April 1915). Barnett Newman would later refer to Gorky as “the white-haired boy of Breton and the Surrealists” (HH557) It was largely through Breton’s efforts that Gorky got his first dealer – Julian Levy – and his first solo show in New York for which Breton wrote the preface to the catalogue. Breton’s preface (“The Eye-Spring: Arshile Gorky”) would also be included in the second edition of Breton’s book Surrealism and Painting published in 1945.
andre breton and gorky
Arshile Gorky (L) and André Breton
Roxbury, Connecticut (March 1945)
(Gorky’s daughter is on his shoulders)
Andre Breton [from "The Eye-Spring: Arshile Gorky"]:
“The eye-spring… Arshile Gorky – for me the first painter to whom the secret has been completely revealed!… One can admire today a canvas signed by Gorky, The Liver is the Cock’s Comb, which should be considered the great open door to the analogy world… Gorky is, of all the Surrealist artists, the only one who maintains direct contact with nature – sits down to paint before her… Here is an art entirely new… a leap beyond the ordinary and the known to indicate, with an impeccable arrow of light, a real feeling of liberty.” (HH478)
Gorky did not actually meet Breton until early 1944. Jeanne Reynal, a friend of Gorky’s wife, wanted to meet Breton herself so she asked Isamu Noguchi to help arrange a dinner that included herself, Gorky, Gorky’s wife Mougouch and Breton. Jeanne and Mougouch could speak French and acted as translators for Breton and Gorky during the dinner. Mougouch later recalled that Gorky “had found a soul mate” in Breton. According to Mougouch, “Breton promised to see Gorky’s work in the next day or so” and “Gorky and I danced all the way home.” (HH450) They invited Breton to Gorky’s Union Square studio for dinner and a chance to look at Gorky’s work.
Mougouch [Arshile Gorky's wife]:
“I had never had a poet to dinner… I walked all over New York getting out dinner. We had artichokes, rice pilaf and a large Brie for dinner… We scrubbed the darkest corners [of their apartment] but it couldn’t have mattered if we had sat in the dust and eaten straw, it was all so emotional and exciting. Breton gave without measure, and this was what Gorky needed; Breton didn’t, as Gorky said, ‘miss the point.’ He understood about all those childhood memories, all the mythology of Gorky’s childhood, he didn’t laugh or look embarrassed but instead made sympathetic noises and had tears in his eyes and was exquisitely polite, and Gorky and I nearly went up to heaven then and there with happiness.” (HH430)
Gorky had, of course, been aware of Surrealism for a considerable period of time prior to meeting Breton. Gorky’s first dealer, Julien Levy, later recalled that when Levy’s book, Surrealism, was published in 1936, “he [Gorky] straightaway read it in the back room of my gallery and soon borrowed it to take home.” (MA284) Initially Levy was reticent to take on Gorky.
Julien Levy:
“Arshile Gorky did not come to my gallery directly to show me his own work. In the winter of 1932 he came urging me to look at the work of a friend of his named John Graham, and it was Graham who generously suggested that I also look at a portfolio of Gorky’s own drawings. ‘My portfolio is already in your back office,’ Gorky reluctantly confessed, and my secretary told me that ‘that man is always leaving his portfolio in the back office. He comes back days later and pretends he has forgotten it.’ ‘Yes,’ said Gorky shamelessly, ‘and I always expect you will have opened it and discovered masterpieces….’ So I sorted through them, and I answered Gorky gently… I listened to the woes of his financial disorder, and I lent him $500. Later, when he couldn’t repay, I bought some of his drawings. But I could not promise him an exhibition.” (MA283)
Levy overcame his initial reticence at showing Gorky’s work after Breton’s endorsement of the artist. Gorky signed with Levy’s gallery in 1944. His first solo show opened on March 6, 1945. (HH474) On New Years Eve in 1944 Breton visited the Gorkys and helped to name the paintings that would be included in the first show. On January 10, 1945 Mougouch wrote to Jeanne Reynal, “Breton came down new years eve and gorky told him something associated with or of each painting and breton with his marvelous incision picked those of g.s. words which made a title. They are very nice I think, they are gorky not surrealism… and andre was very anxious to maintain that you know he did not want to make them surrealist.” (HH465/original grammar retained) Despite Mougouch’s assertion that the titles were “gorky not surrealism” the names of the ten paintings that were included Gorky’s first exhibition at Levy’s gallery do reflect a Surrealist influence: The Leaf of the Artichoke Is an Owl, One Year the Milkweed, Water of the Flowery Mill, The Sun, The Dervish in the Tree, The Horns of the Landscape, They Will Take My Island, The Pirate, Love of a New Gun, and How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life.” (HH467)
The show was, unfortunately, badly hung (according to Breton) and poorly attended. Julien Levy had neglected to mail out the announcements in time for the opening. He also, apparently, didn’t understand the paintings he was exhibiting. Gorky’s wife Mougouch later reported to Jeanne Reynal that at the opening of the show, “Julien was half drunk. He was a heavy drinker and he always smelled of Roquefort cheeze. At the opening Gorky overheard Julien explaining his paintings to someone, and it made him so angry he went into a corner and started to sharpen his pencil. He was just horrified. Then he realized that Julien didn’t really understand his paintings at all and was just backing him because he thought he would take off and he was getting Gorky for nothing.” (HH474-5)
Mougouch [from a letter to Jeanne Reynal in early April]:
“I guess to tell the truth it was sort of disappointment to us because we had both thought of something really good in the way of presentation he had everything paintings and andre’s beautiful preface which he [Levy] badly translated so many things that julien muffed like only printing a couple of hundred catalogues so that now there are no more… Everyone said (except andre who told julien it was badly hung and framed and now thats a new swords point) it looked very beautiful and of course it couldn’t help but… but all this made us very worried about he opening and we got there a bit late and drank a lot of cocktails furnished by an old friend of Gorky’s and very soon gorky had that wild disheveeled look… By that time julien had so tactfully and understandingly told him that the critics who had been there through the afternoon had been stonier and more unresponsive than he had ever known them…” (HH275)
In her letter to Reynal, Mougouch also mentioned going to the Reis’ home for a dinner party. Presumably this was the first time that Gorky and his wife attended one of the Reis’ gatherings. According to Mougouch the party was “full of surrealists” most of whom “were not on speaking terms” with Breton.
Mougouch [from the letter to Jeanne Reynal]:
“… well anyway at our opening pierre matisse asked us to come to dinner on Thursday so we decided to sell my diamond pin and just stay for three days and debauch which we did… [Gorky and Mougouch were living in David Hare's home near Roxbury Connecticut at the time. (HH470)] We had supper with andre [Breton] and elisa [Claro] who is awfully sweet and she just loves gorky… andre gave us his manuscript for the preface and I am sending it to you to read it is so different in french and the they took us to some party in some people named reis house they have many paintings and the party was full of surrealists and most of whom were not on speaking terms with andre… at this party andre had a loud verbal fight with seligman while everyone looked on terrified while they waved their pipes and pranced at each other and gorky just went on talking about maro [their daughter] to the hostess how she said ge ge at the moon… (HH477)
The woman who Mougouch named as accompanying Breton to dinner – “Elisa” – was Elisa Claro (née Binhoff) who would soon become Breton’s third and final wife. Breton’s book, Arcane 17 – written while Claro and Breton were visiting Canada (c. summer – October 1944) was largely inspired by Elisa. (FR/AJ) Jacqueline Lamba, Breton’s current wife, had been having an affair since 1943 with David Hare who worked with Breton on VVV. Breton was aware of the affair. During the summer of 1943 Lamba and Hare stayed with Breton in a rented house in Hampton Bays where he wrote his epic poem Les Etats Genereaux. (AX) Breton divorced Lamba and married Claro in Reno Nevada during the summer of 1945. (PH)
In early January 1945, prior to Breton’s divorce from Lamba, Gorky and Mougouch moved into Hare’s property near Roxbury Connecticut on 148 Good Hill Road where they would live until about September 1945. While staying at Hare’s property they subleased their New York apartment at Union Square West to relatives of Mougouch. In April 1945 Breton visited them at Hare’s house and asked Gorky to do some illustrations for his soon-to-be published book of poems, Young Cherry Trees Secured against Hares. (HH469/481). The same month, Jacqueline Lamba visited the Gorkys with her daughter and was particularly bitter about Breton. After the visit Mougouch wrote to Reynal about Breton and Lamba splitting up, “All I can say is may such a horrible nightmare never happen to us.” (HH482) Three years later, in 1948, an even worse “nightmare” did happen to Mougouch and Gorky after Mougouch fell in love with Matta – the consequences of which would be far more tragic than the split-up between Lamba and Breton.
Breton visited Gorky and Mougouch again at Hare’s property in May 1945 before he and Elisa headed for Reno where he divorced Jacqueline and married Elisa. During his visit with Gorky, Breton encouraged him to move to Paris and also asked if he would contribute some drawings to an American issue that he hoped to publish of a British Surrealist publication titled Message from Nowhere. (HH483) About a week after Breton’s visit, Mougouch wrote to Jeanne Reynal that her and Gorky were planning to move to Paris “in the spring of next year.” (HH485) In addition to going to Reno in 1945, Breton also went to Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona where he visited several Indian reservations including the Pueblo, Hopi and Zuni tribes. (FR)
Breton was still in Reno in July 1945. Marcel Duchamp wrote him there on July 2, 1945 suggesting a front cover for the second edition of Breton’s book, Surrealism and Painting: “Take the bare feet, Magritte’s shoes. Instead of black, make a print in sanguine on pink paper (or just white). This bloodshot reproduction would be imprinted in the middle of the board and also imprinted your name, the title of the book… and Brentano’s below.” (DW) Breton followed Duchamp’s suggestion and used Magritte’s Le Modèle Rouge (or Red Model) for the cover. The image was also used as part of the Brentano’s window display for the book. Swiss artist Isabelle Waldberg, who lived in New York from 1941 – 1946, contributed a mask to the Brentano’s display. On November 10, 1945 she wrote to her husband in Paris “Yesterday morning, we did the window at Brentano’s Surréalisme et la peinture. Marcel [Duchamp] naturally did everything, all design and execution. Here’s a drawing of it.” (DW) As the display took place in November the book probably came out around the same time.
surrealism and painting cover
The front cover of the second edition of
Surrealism and Painting by André Breton (1945)
Breton and his new wife left the United States not long after the publication of the book, leaving on December 4, 1945 to travel first to Haiti, Martinique and the Dominican Republic before returning to Paris. (FR) Prior to Breton’s departure the Gorkys moved (in c. mid-late September) from Hare’s Roxbury house to a farmhouse owned by Jean and Henry Hebbeln in Sherman, Connecticut. An agreement was worked out where Henry Hebbeln would share Gorky’s Union Square studio and Gorky and Mougouch would rent the Hebbeln farmhouse after it was remodeled. (HH487). According to Gorky biographer, Hayden Herrara, “the Hebbelns made bad housemates. Henry was mostly in New York living with a male lover, but he sometimes came to Sherman on weekends. Childless, married to a homosexual, and already deeply descended into alcoholism, Jean Hebbeln needed the Gorkys to share her home.” (HH493) When the Hebbelns were in Sherman on the weekends, Gorky and Mougouch were able to stay at Union Square on their occasional visits to New York. (HH496-98) Presumably they were staying there when they attended a farewell dinner for Breton organized by Matta at the La Parisienne restaurant on Forty-sixth Street in Manhattan. By the time of the dinner, Matta had also divorced his wife, Anne, after she gave births to twins. He hosted the farewell dinner with his new wife, Patricia. (HH498) After dinner, they played the game of Truth.
From Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work by Hayden Herrera:
“After dinner the guests sat around the table and played the Surrealist game of Truth or Consequences or Le jeu de la verité, in which players take turns at being asked embarrassing questions, usually involving love and sex. Those interrogated must answer truthfully or accept the consequences, which could be even more embarrassing – for example, they might be told to kiss someone in the room, preferably someone else’s spouse, or, when these games got out of hand, they might be told to pretend to masturbate in public. Mougouch was asked, ‘What part of a woman’s body do you kiss most attentively when making love to her?’ She blushed and said she didn’t know. Gorky glowered. Sensing trouble, Breton, who always played master of ceremonies at these events, announced, ‘Passons!’ He then patted Mougouch’s hand and the players went on to the next victim. At the end of the evening came another sort of Surrealist game – Matta absconded without paying the bill. As Mougouch wrote to Jeanne, ‘We were all suddenly asked to pay the bill – André was in a rage from start to finish but I began to think they just love to be outraged.’” (HH499)
Breton finally returned to his Paris apartment at 42 rue Fontaine in late May of 1946 and continued to encourage Gorky to come to Paris. (SS387) Jeanne Reynal wrote to Mougouch on October 6, 1946 that Breton had told her that Gorky was “the one artist for whom he would do something in Paris.” (HH528) The same day Mougouch wrote to Breton telling him they hoped to move to Paris and suggested that a small house near the city would be appropriate accommodation. On November 4th Breton wrote back with words of encouragement. He was planning a large Surrealist exhibition to take place the following year and wanted Gorky to participate. (HH531)
EXPOSITION INTERNATIONAL DU SURRÉALISME
The exhibition that Breton was busy organizing was “Le surréalisme en 1947: Exposition international du surréalisme” which opened in early July 1947 at the Galerie Maeght in Paris. It included the work of about 100 artists from 24 countries. Gorky contributed How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life. Other artists associated with Breton’s stay in the U.S. who also showed at the exhibition included David Hare, Gerome Kamrowski, Frederick Keisler (who had designed Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery), Kay Sage (Tanguy’s wife) and Man Ray. The exhibition focused on alchemy, esotericism and myth. The gallery was arranged as though it was a place of initiation. After climbing twenty-one book steps visitors crossed the Hall of Superstitions into a labyrinth, inspired by voodoo rituals, containing alters dedicated to “a being, a category of beings, or an object, real or imaginary, capable of being endowed with a mythical life, such as the Great Invisibles.” (SS395)
A limited edition of the exhibition catalogue was produced which featured a rubber breast on the cover designed by Marcel Duchamp. A copy of the catalogue can be seen at:
http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/89754.html. (If you own one of these catalogues and have noticed breast deterioration the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has published a guide to preserving the breast which asks “How do you dissuade those enquiring fingers from having a feel and why should you?” You will find the V & A guide at:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/res_cons/conservation/treatment/core/ob_story/index.html)
Although meant to be a major exhibition that would reinvigorate the Surrealist movement in France, Breton’s “Exposition international du surréalisme” failed to live up to its promise. Surrealism had lost the ability to shock. In the July 9, 1947 issue of Figaro Albert Palle wrote, “We are no longer moved by it [Surrealism]… the enormous destruction of the world which we lived through during the dark years has emptied Surrealism of its explosive force.” The Paris correspondent for Time magazine agreed: “After the gas chambers, those heaps of bones and teeth and shoes and eyeglasses, what is there left for the poor Surrealists to shock us with?” (SS398) David Hare attended the show (accompanied by Breton’s ex-wife, Jacqueline Lamba) and, on August 8, 1947, wrote a letter to Enrico Donati giving his own impressions of the show. (Donati was also included in the exhibition and had worked with Duchamp on the cover of the catalogue. (SS394))
David Hare [from the letter to Donati (August 8, 1947) - grammar and spelling as per the original]:
“The show finely opened after all the various disagreements that you so well emagin since you remember VVV. However the public didn’t know all that so they are labering under the imprestion the surrealists are one big happy family. Surrealism is accepted as past history. The gallery is crowded with humanity with nothing better to do on an afternoon. There are no discussions, no fights, no real interest and yet it is a suces as a publicety stunt for the gallery. .one would say it was a popular success, but an intellectual failure… a small group of people amusing themselves with ideas which they invented in 1929. (SS398)
Arshile Gorky never made it to the exhibition and would never move to Paris. He committed suicide in 1948 after a series of misfortunes. First he was diagnosed with cancer, then on June 26, 1948 Julien Levy crashed his car into a roadside post while Gorky was his passenger. Gorky suffered a broken collarbone and two fractured vertebrae in his neck. HIs painting arm was paralyzed. Although the paralysis would partially subside the traction device he was required to wear after the accident made movement difficult and painful. In July 1948 Gorky’s wife, Mougouch, told him that she was in love with Matta. (In late June Mougouch and Matta had had a secret romantic rendezvous.) Mougouch told Gorky that although she loved Matta, she loved Gorky more. (MS364) On July 21, 1948 Gorky’s body was found hanging from a noose in a shed on the Connecticut property. A short suicide note was scrawled on a nearby crate. His neighbours Peter Blum and Malcolm Cowley found the body. According to Blum, the suicide note read “Good-by my loves.” According to Cowley it read “Good-by all my loved.” (HH612/613)
After Gorky’s death, Matta telephoned Breton in Paris to defend his behaviour in Surrealist terms. He attributed his affair with Mougouch to the “unrestrained pursuit of desire,” pointing out that the Marquis de Sade had been revered by the Surrealists. Breton called him a murderer and hung up on him. (HH623) On October 25, 1948 Breton’s group of Surrealists issued a statement that expelled Matta. (SS)
Eleven years later Matta was accepted back into the Surrealist fold when he participated in a Jean Benoît Surrealist performance piece titled Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade at the apartment of the poet Joyce Mansour.
Costume for Execution of the Testment of the Marquis de Sade
Costume from Execution of the
Testament of the Marquis de Sade
(http://homepage.mac.com/photomorphose/benoit0.html)
Hayden Herrera [from Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work]:
“Eleven years later, at a kind of happening, entitled the Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade, Matta was reinstated. Some two hundred members of the Parisian haut monde and intelligentsia stood in a semicircle, their mood made suitably solemn by a tape recording of Breton reading from Sade’s Justine against the background sound of an erupting volcano. An artist dressed as a devil came onto the stage dragging a black coffin with an erect penis poking through its lid. A woman undressed him, revealing a body covered in black paint, and the devil then grabbed a red-hot iron and branded the word Sade on his heart. ‘Who is next?’ he asked, and the tipsy Matta, happy to be back in Breton’s company, rushed forward, bared his chest, and branded his left breast.” (HH623)
The performance took place on December 2, 1959 – two weeks prior to the opening of another “Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme” organized by Breton with the help of Duchamp. The exhibition took place at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris from December 15, 1959 to February 14, 1960. Artists included Robert Rauschenberg (RC) and Jasper Johns (Target with Plaster Casts (1955)). In 1965 Breton organized his final exhibition of Surrealism, “L’Écart absolu” at the Galerie L’Oeil. He died the following year on September 28, 1966 in Paris.
From André Breton’s obituary in The New York Times:
“When Mr. Breton returned to France in 1946, the world had changed. If such painters as Matta or Wilfredo Lam had given Surrealist art a new lease on life, existentialism was dominating the literary scene… Nevertheless he continued to write, publishing two magazines, a work on Rimbaud, poems and essays… The last years of his life were spent in a country house in southwestern France and in an apartment at the bottom of Montmartre littered with manuscripts, books and African art. He was suffering from Marcel Proust’s disease, asthma, and recently told a friend that the one writer he envied was Victor Hugo ‘because at his funeral were all the people of Paris.’ (BC)
