100 years of Surrealism: ‘A total revolution of the mind’

One hundred years ago, André Breton sat down at his desk in the modest apartment he inhabited on Rue Fontaine in Paris’s 9th arrondissement. What resulted was a 21-page manuscript that would go down as one of the most important texts in modern art: Manifeste du surréalisme.

Known in English as the Surrealist Manifesto, it set out the radical ideas of a new cultural movement. Breton defined Surrealism as ‘pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express — verbally, in writing, or in any other manner — the true function of thought, in the absence of control exerted by reason, and exempt from all aesthetic or moral concern’.

In other words, people should reject rational thinking and respond instead to the unbridled messages of their subconscious and dreams. Rational thinking, after all, on the part of world leaders, had led to millions of deaths on the battlefields of the First World War. Breton, a one-time medical student, had spent much of the conflict working in the neurological ward of a military hospital.

The manifesto was published in October 1924, spawning a movement through which André Masson, René Magritte, Leonora Carrington and countless others made their names. The centenary of its publication is being marked this year in a host of ways. Among them is a major touring exhibition, which started out at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels (under the title IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism) and recently opened at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (under the title Surréalisme). It will visit venues in Madrid, Hamburg and Philadelphia in 2025.

For its part, Christie’s in Paris is hosting a selling exhibition, Images du Labyrinthe. L’Atelier surréaliste — Carte blanche à Audrey Guttman (until 21 October 2024). Curated by the multidisciplinary visual artist and poet Audrey Guttman, the exhibition showcases leading figures of the movement alongside a first edition of the manifesto.

Art-historically speaking, Surrealism emerged out of Dada, an anarchic movement that had been born in Zurich in 1916 in reaction to the First World War. Dada soon spread to other European cities, plus New York, its practitioners arguing that all existing values should be rejected — not just political and economic ones, but cultural ones too. Anything could be considered art, and anyone could make it.

By the early 1920s, many Dadaists — the likes of Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia — had settled in Paris, and Breton now became a key figure among them. He admired Dada’s iconoclasm, but found the movement lacking in focus. He wanted to create something more programmatic, and duly looked to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theories relating to unconscious drives.

When Breton claimed in 1924 that Dada was ‘no more’, and that ‘its funeral [had] caused no rioting’, this was in the context of a new movement which he hoped would supersede it.

‘Everyone knows there is no surrealist painting’

Breton’s original manuscript of the Manifeste du surréalisme is currently on view at the Pompidou, and it’s worth dwelling on a few words in it already quoted: ‘verbally, in writing, or in any other manner’. The point to make is that, at the start, Surrealism was a literary movement. Like most of his circle, Breton was a writer, not a painter, and the first Surrealist work of significance was actually a book — The Magnetic Fields, co-written by him and Philippe Soupault, via a process known as ‘automatic writing’. This involved penning sentences at the dictation of the unconscious mind — sentences such as ‘the warm blood of bees is preserved in bottles of mineral water’.

As per the manifesto, it was supposed that Surrealists would express themselves chiefly through the spoken or written word. Painting was not singled out for special attention, and formed part of a broad secondary class of expression (‘any other manner’). One of the early members of Breton’s circle, the writer Pierre Naville, went so far as to claim that ‘everyone knows there is no surrealist painting’.

His belief was that applying oil to canvas to create a picture was a drawn-out process, which lacked the spontaneity of writing or speech, and which involved some level of rational decision-making. Breton, however, swiftly came to see painting as integral to spreading the Surrealist mantra, in part because it transcended linguistic barriers.

Surrealist techniques — from hypnosis to fumage

The first exhibition of Surrealist art took place in November 1925 at Paris’s Galerie Pierre. It included work by Masson, Joan Miró and Ernst, among others. Masson was a pivotal early figure: his ‘automatic drawings’ can be considered a visual equivalent to The Magnetic Fields, produced without a preconceived subject or composition in mind. The artist let his pen travel rapidly across the paper without conscious control.

At this point in his career, Miró started painting in a similar vein — a well-known example being The Birth of the World (1925), today part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. ‘Rather than setting out to paint something,’ the artist said of his method, ‘I begin painting, and as I [do so], the picture begins to… suggest itself under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work.’

In Surrealism’s early days, Breton also liked bringing his associates together for hypnosis sessions, with a view to seeing the creative consequences. The poet Robert Desnos created his first ever painting in one of these sessions, but was reportedly responsible for their termination, too, when he chased fellow hypnotee Paul Eluard around Breton’s apartment with a carving knife.

Thankfully, most Surrealists were able to function in normal working conditions. In a bid to tap into their unconscious, they did introduce an array of techniques to art’s repertoire, however. Ernst, for example, invented grattage, which involved preparing a canvas with a layer of oil paint, laying it on top of a textured surface, then scraping paint off to create images of unpredictable marks and shapes.

The Austrian Wolfgang Paalen came up with a technique called fumage, where the smoke from a lit candle or oil lamp made impressions in a ground of wet paint. Man Ray, in turn, began producing ‘rayographs’: types of photogram (photographic images made without a camera), for which he placed objects and body parts on light-sensitive paper in irrational arrangements.

Less an art movement than ‘a way of thinking, a way of life’

A few weeks after Breton’s manifesto appeared, the first of 12 issues of the magazine La Révolution surréaliste were published. This served as a vehicle for Surrealist thought between 1924 and 1929, with reproductions of artworks sharing space with articles discussing topics such as sex, censorship and suicide.

Surrealism was — in the words of the late critic and authority on the subject Patrick Waldberg, in his 1965 book Surrealism — less an art movement than ‘a way of thinking, a way of life’. Which is why it had no single, clearly recognisable style in the way that, say, Cubism or Impressionism did.

Two broad tendencies can be discerned, however. The first, already touched upon above, was abstract, free-form and improvisational. Sometimes called the ‘automatic’ tendency, it is associated with artists such as Miró and Masson.

Developed slightly later, the second tendency was figurative, illusionistic and partially indebted to the Pittura Metafisica of Italy’s Giorgio de Chirico. It consists of dreamlike scenarios which, though depicted in a naturalistic manner, are actually incongruous. Magritte, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dalí were renowned for such scenarios. Examples include Magritte’s painting of a train emerging from a fireplace, Time Transfixed, and Dalí’s Lobster Telephone sculptures, which are composed of a Bakelite telephone with a lobster (made from plaster) as the receiver.

That all said, one shouldn’t regard the two tendencies as dichotomous: many an artist successfully adopted elements of both.

As for Breton, so sustained was his power within the movement that he acquired the nickname ‘the Pope of Surrealism’. Not that everything always went his way. In the early 1920s, he travelled from Paris to Vienna to meet his inspiration, Sigmund Freud, turning up unannounced at his doorstep. The Frenchman was received none too cordially, and still bore the grudge years later, when he described the founder of psychoanalysis as an ‘old man without elegance’ who worked in a ‘shabby office worthy of the neighbourhood GP’.

According to a traditional view of the movement, Surrealism extended no further than Breton and his immediate circle. Nowadays, however, things are seen differently — certainly if the current exhibition at the Pompidou is anything to go by. Likewise Surrealism Beyond Borders, which was held at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s Tate Modern in 2021-22. The curators of these shows have stressed that Surrealism was taken up by artists across the globe, from Colombia to Japan, via the Art and Liberty collective in Egypt. (Many of the artists in question were also female — the likes of Remedios Varo, Kay Sage, Leonor Fini, Meret Oppenheim and Toyen — in contrast to Breton’s markedly male circle in Paris.)

Over the years, Surrealism went on to touch every aspect of visual culture: not just painting, sculpture and photography, but also film, fashion and advertising. It even reached into other, less likely areas, such as comedy (Monty Python’s Flying Circus) and music (Francis Poulenc, John Cage).

Surrealism’s legacy isn’t our concern here, however. Suffice it to say that the movement has long since entered the cultural mainstream. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a time — a century ago — when Breton could label Surrealism ‘a total revolution of the mind’.

The selling exhibition Images du Labyrinthe. L’Atelier surréaliste — Carte blanche à Audrey Guttman is on show at Christie’s in Paris until 21 October 2024. The Avant-Garde(s) Including Thinking Italian sale at Christie’s in Paris takes place on 18 October 2024, with the 20/21 Century Art — Day Sale following on 19 October

Explore Christie’s 20th/21st Century autumn sale season in London and Paris, until 22 October