THIS IS NOT A WIKI

A SURREALIST CATALOGUE

This is not a wiki, an encyclopedia, or a collective of verifiable information in the traditional sense. This is a stream of consciousness derailing over and over again in a cavalcade of images, code, and sparse functionality that could only really appeal to a halved auditorium, at best. More accurately, this is a personal project dedicated to cataloging the lives, works, and desires of Surrealist artists from the 20th century onward.

WW2 and Dadaism

The Dada movement, which began with the opening of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, Switzerland, on February 5, 1916, was a remarkable manifestation of the disillusioned mood of its time, as World War I, which had begun in 1914, spiraled out of control and settled into a stalemate during which the latest technologies for killing were piling up human casualties of unprecedented proportions. Witnessing how thoughtlessly life was discarded in the trenches, Dada mocked the senselessness of rational thought and even the foundations of modern society. ^[1] The movement’s genesis is largely attributed to Hugo Ball, who started the cabaret and subsequently wrote the Dada Manifesto, detailing his belief in the absurd and illogical. He drew in many like-minded artists and performers whose disgust for the world was surpassed only by their unbridled creativity.

Founding of Surrealism

Regarded as the intellectual successor to Dada, Surrealism was properly founded by French writer and poet André Breton, who “sought to free human behavior from the constrictions of reason and bourgeois morality.” ^[1] In 1924, he published the first Manifesto of Surrealism, drawing upon the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, which stated that the human mind is a battleground between conscious and unconscious desires and impulses, and that the usage of art to confront and showcase these struggles would elevate us from our reality of signs and symbols to a “surreality,” a more intense, magical plane of existence and understanding. Breton and his numerous followers would accomplish this via a series of new techniques, including dream analysis, free association, automatic writing, word games, and hypnotic trances.

"Degenerate Artists"

Out of the rise of the Nazi Party in 1930s Germany, a serious political reaction against avant-garde art was born, and with it a concerted effort to suppress it. While one of the earliest attempts involved attacks levied at the Bauhaus - not the band - the art and design school founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius, the school narrowly avoided closure due to forced relocation [first to Dessau, then to Berlin]. After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, much more directed efforts were taken to suppress the creation and housing of modern art. The Bauhaus was forced to close in 1933 under his direction, with most of the faculty fleeing to the United States. The works of Modernist artists [who often depicted the stark reality of Germany’s loss in WWI] were deemed unpatriotic, and those of expressionists [who would employ the exaggeration of human forms and facial features] were deemed offensive; artists in these spheres would be forbidden to showcase their work in museums or purchase supplies.

The most prolific attack on Modern art on behalf of Nazi Germany was in 1937 - the “Degenerate Art” exhibition. Housing thousands of confiscated paintings from Modernist painters, Nazi leadership sought to present these artworks as specimens of human pathology, hoping to eradicate Modernist influence on the “artistic life of the nation.” ^[1] By the time WW2 had broken out, many of the pieces had been subject to public burnings, and targeted artists had fled to neighboring countries and the United States to escape persecution and continue creating.

Paris Surrealists, Socialism, and Anti-colonialism

For transparency, I’ll immediately concede that this section is a bit biased, maybe even too lengthy, given that I wrote a paper in undergrad relating to this topic. Sorry!

To quote… myself:

[The] common ground between [surrealism and anti-colonialism] is much shorter than one would immediately expect. Between the desire to abandon the “logical and rational” that precedes surrealism and the desire to upend the structures of the colonial state that precedes anti-colonialism is a common ideological base: Marxist communism.”

The Paris Surrealists [under Breton’s tutelage] were avid Socialists in support of leftist causes, notably the end of French occupation of African & Caribbean nations. Breton makes his own distaste for the capitalist state explicitly clear, both in his own work and in the Manifestoes of Surrealism:

In one such text, “On The Time When The Surrealists Were Right”, a group of surrealist writers made their distaste for the capitalist state extremely clear, stating that they are interested “only in the development of [artistic] culture, and this very development necessitates above all the transformation of society through proletarian Revolution,” in which the spheres of creativity and community expressed are held above that of profit. [...] To be a surrealist meant acting outside of the “logical” systems that made it normal and necessary to be a part of the capitalist system – it meant pushing against the idea that one has to be profitable to be worth anything, an ideal shared in spades by the communist parties at the time [...]

Conversely, the native writers, artists and political activists within these occupied territories developed their own artistic styles and traditions utilizing the same techniques found in Surrealist art. One of the most prominent anticolonial activists and surrealist poets, Aime Cesaire, coined the term “Negritude” to describe [an] ongoing movement by black literary creatives to affirm their own identities in a world splintered and fractured by colonialism.

As Cesaire points out in his Discourse on Colonialism, the societies that suffered under colonial rule lived lives that were antithetical to the exploitative ethos of capitalism, as they were “communal societies, never societies of the many for the few [...] democratic societies, [...] cooperative societies, fraternal societies,” and their ability to thrive and grow as unified societies were ripped from them by imperialist rule [...] While communist writings often criticize class structures in an amorphous sense that capitalism has created, “a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue, [as] it is not just the concept of the pre-capitalist society, so effectively studied by Marx, which needs to be reexamined here,” but the fight and liberation of the colonized people that inherently embodies the communist framework.

While anticolonial activists were decidedly more proactive in their efforts to end colonial rule than French surrealists, the latter showed unabashed support for the former’s endeavors, particularly their artistic pursuits:

The endorsement and collaboration of the literary magazine Tropiques by European surrealists helped establish Caribbean surrealists as legitimate political and artistic voices. In the mid-1940s, while the pair worked as teachers at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, Aime and Suzanne Césaire founded the magazine, showcasing works by Martinican poets and authors. [...] The work circulated primarily amongst colonized people through Caribbean publishing networks, but it came into the hands of Andre Breton through his time in Martinique, as he sailed to the island to escape the destruction of WWII; while it took some time for the two writers to engage with one another on an [personal] level, it had turned out that Breton discovered his work through a copy of Tropiques that he stumbled upon in a haberdashery shop, in a serendipitous series of events that put Césaire on his radar.

In short:

Whereas the surrealists desired to create a world in which the capitalist hegemony would no longer stifle the creation of art, anti-colonialists wanted to destroy the class system that sought to justify the suffering and dehumanization of colonized people through capitalism. It is because of this overlap in ideology that surrealist and anti-colonial art shared a common thread of critiquing and deconstructing the faults in capitalist societies, with the main difference being that anti-colonial work could use the techniques developed in surrealist writing to rally the colonized people together as a collective.

Marginalized Artists

Bouncing off the previous section, there have been a plethora of mini-sects branching off of the surrealist movement since its inception, each focusing not only on their own brand of artistry, but on the lived experience of the artists.

Women Surrealists

For one, women surrealists have their own classification within artistic spheres; the public perception of surrealist art is very male-centric, with people only capable of naming a few women involved in the scene, like Frida Kahlo. In fact, a great number of women were involved with the surrealist sphere, none of the least of which include Gertrude Abercrombie, Leonora Carrington, Jane Graverol, Kay Sage, Dorothea Tanning, and Remidios Varo.

Afro-Surrealism

Taking into account the aspect of race, the advent of Afro-Surrealism was properly described in the 1970s, referring to Henry Dumas’ writing, which took massive inspiration from the jazz and blues scenes of the 1960s, as well as Black spiritualism across the globe. The term aptly describes artpieces arising from the African diaspora to highlight the innate surreality of our lived experiences as black people; this was appended by a familiar-sounding Afrosurreal Manifesto, written by D.Scot Miller in 2009 and outlining the writer's belief in afrosurrealist art as "seeking clarity in a post-racial world." These works often play on the dreamlike [if not nightmarish] feelings of living in a world both wrought with celebration and joy for black culture and the looming threat of assimilation and destruction via white supremacy. While most notable practicioners in this category are writers like Dumas, Miller, Aime & Suzanne Cesaire, and René Ménil [a fellow Martinican writer], the field is also home to many painters, visual, and performance artists like Kara Walker, whose sculptures embody the Afro-surrealist ethos in an effortless way, or Sun Ra, who [while not specifically classified as an Afro-surrealist], utilized visions of a mystical and technologically-advanced black future very becoming of surrealist work.

Playing with Mediums

You might’ve noticed the “MEDIUMS” tab on the top left part of the page! Naturally, not every surrealist artist was a painter or poet; the surrealist ethos has been applied to a number of artistic mediums and works, including music and theatre productions. Most notable are surrealist films [often categorized under the experimental label as well due to their usage of unconventional techniques in storytelling and framing], like those of Dali, Bunuel, Duchamp, or the ever-beloved [and regrettably late] David Lynch! While you can scroll back up, you could also use this handy-dandy guide to look for specific artists by medium:

Modern Art

Given the variety of the surrealist sphere, it shares a space with its many predecessors and siblings, which I implore you [as this site’s visitor] to explore at your leisure:

Bibliography

Stokstad, Marilyn, and Michael Watt Cothren. Art : A Brief History.
Seventh edition, Pearson, 2020.

Breton, André, 1896-1966. Manifestoes of Surrealism.
Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press, 1972.

Césaire, Aime. Discourse on Colonialism.
Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Fanon, Frantz, 1925-1961. The Wretched of the Earth.
New York, Grove Press, 1968.

Britton, Celia. How to Be Primitive: Tropiques, Surrealism, and Ethnography.
Paragraph, vol. 32, no. 2, 2009, pp. 168–81. JSTOR.