This Exhibit Asks Whether Surrealism Would Have Been Better Without Its Leading Men

On October 15, 1924, André Breton published a manifesto that was as notable for its belligerence as its egotism. Striving to define one of the most influential artistic movements of the 20th century, his Surrealist Manifesto laid claim to “the actual functioning of thought… exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” Together with eighteen collaborators – predominantly poets and painters – Breton declared “the omnipotence of dream” and provided a scheme for trouncing the “reign of logic” through the practice of “psychic automatism”.

But Breton was not the only one with designs on surrealism. Earlier in the same month, a poet named Yvan Goll published his own Surrealist Manifesto, backed by a completely different group of artistic confederates, standing for a completely different ideal. “Reality is the basis of all great art,” he proclaimed. “Without it there is no life, no substance.”

The terms of disagreement were no mere coincidence. Goll set “the emanation of life” in opposition to the exaltation of “the dream and the random play of thought” that he attributed to “ex-Dadaists” such as Breton. Goll’s vision of Surrealism was situated in “the ground under our feet and the sky over our head”.

Even though Goll was the first to publish a manifesto of Surrealism – and in spite of the care he took to align himself with Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet who coined the term surreal in 1917 – Breton took such a forceful position that he effectively ousted Goll from art history. Breton’s victory can partially be attributed to the relative novelty of his project (which transplanted Freud from the clinic to the gallery), in contrast to Goll’s vaguer claims to radical change. To an even greater extent, Breton’s triumph was achieved with aggressive ambition. (Concurrent with the publication of his manifesto, he and his collaborators established a Bureau for Surrealist Research in Paris. Ostensibly set up to study the “unconscious activity of the mind”, the bureau also issued letters to perceived enemies who called themselves Surrealists without permission, threatening to track them down and beat them to a pulp.)

A century after the publication of Breton’s manifesto, the identification of Surrealism with Breton’s circle is scarcely questioned, even by the select few who know about his rivalry with Goll. Without challenging these historical facts, a major exhibition at the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid beguilingly sets out to explore “Surrealism without Breton”.

It should be stated upfront that 1924. Other Surrealisms is hardly a work of alternative history. The museum does not ask visitors to imagine that Breton had never been born, or to ask what would have happened if Goll had somehow outmaneuvered him. (Consistent with his historical erasure, Goll doesn’t rank a single mention in the Fundación MAPFRE’s 300-page exhibition catalogue.) Instead the exhibition curator emphasizes much of what Breton ignored or squelched within the realm of psychic automatism. In that sense, 1924 continues the efforts art historians have made since at least the 1980s, notably advanced several years ago in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Surrealism Beyond Borders. As scholarship becomes more encyclopedic, Surrealism benefits from greater inclusiveness. Approached as a phenomenon instead of a movement, Surrealism can encompass the work of artists who never enrolled in Breton’s program (such as Joan Miró), those who were “excommunicated” (such as Salvador Dalí), and those who were marginalized (such as Remedios Varo).

There is real merit to this curatorial reconsideration of the artistic activity surrounding André Breton and his Bureau for Surrealist Research. His myopia was at least as deleterious to the liberation of the unconscious mind as his charisma were beneficial. Much is achieved through the simple act of exhibiting the numinous paintings of Varo and those of other women such as Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, who the misogynist Breton counted as muses rather than artists. Their work rewards the eye and mind to a greater extent than many of the more familiar paintings of more famous Surrealist men.

And yet the invitation to explore Surrealism without Breton has the potential to be more generative than curators have heretofore allowed (even without entering into fantasies that his adversaries beat him up and chased him out of town). During the rivalry of 1924, Goll’s ally Paul Dermée justly chastised Breton for “monopoliz[ing] a movement of literary and artistic renewal that dates from well before his time and that in scope goes far beyond his fidgety little person”. The question that naturally arises is this: What might Surrealists have achieved had Surrealism been more inclusive while the Surrealists were alive?

Breton presented Surrealism as pure and restrictive. Whereas Dada had upset the artistic and sociopolitical status quo with a panoply of absurdist antics, Surrealism was approached as a research and development program that would leverage Dadaist gains to complete the societal revolution that Apollinaire and his fellow agitators started. Logic would be supplanted in favor of a deeper truth revealed through Freudian psychology. For Breton, art was operational. Artists were enlisted to plumb surreality and to popularize it. The inherent orthodoxy of his premise excluded all other alternatives to narrow-minded rationalism and its ethical constraints. Goll’s position is far too amorphous to extrapolate what his allies would have attempted (though his inclusion of the arch-Dadaist Tristan Tzara was auspicious).

One reason why Breton’s Surrealism ultimately proved so facile on aesthetic and moral grounds is that his methodology amounted to pseudo-science yet lacked the self-awareness to embrace its own phoniness (in contrast, for instance, to the performative irony of Dadaist pataphysics). Another reason is that it was built on the contradictory impulses to liberate the unconscious and to police those whose psyches were freed. Other Surrealisms that were genuinely different might have enriched Breton’s project. They might have realized the potential he identified in his Manifesto to an even greater degree than the Surrealist works of women who proved better at pursuing his premises than the men he anointed.

When he sought surreality in “the ground under our feet and the sky over our head”, Yvan Goll provided at least one hint about what might be found there. “Everything the artist creates has its point of departure in nature,” he wrote in his Manifesto. The strangeness that nature was already revealing as he wrote – from Einstein’s General Relativity to the first inklings of quantum reality – has proven at least as unsettling as Freud’s ideas about the human mind. The interaction of a Surrealism born out of physical phenomena with one emanating from psychology might have achieved the revolution sought by Breton and by the Dadaists before him.

Otherness is the most potent quality of art as a sociopolitical proposition. Only a fidgety little person would seek to control it.