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By Lawrence Osborne

Oct. 28, 1999 | Of all the 20th century's art movements, surrealism has most obviously percolated through to mass culture. Disney has recently announced that it will re-use 18 seconds of original animation by Salvador Dalí from the '40s, a time when Dalí himself rather rashly hoped Disney films would internationalize his "paranoiac-critical method." But even the Disney of today poses little danger of domesticating surrealism. Dalí himself wanted surrealism to pass into America's bloodstream like an "infekzious poizun" (as he spelled it), and indeed, with its gallows humor and its cynical aggression, surrealism has become an invisibly dispersed mental habit too ubiquitous to even notice.

All in all, this is what surrealism's founders, André Breton and Louis Aragon, wanted. Theirs was to be a revolution not of works and acts but of the interior life: Their heroes were dandies, recluses, iconoclasts. To them, surrealism was not so much a means of mass-producing art as it was a war zone, played out in the aestheticized and hysterical domain of male friendship. It was a game of liaisons dangereuses among intricate egos -- or among "a bunch of pederasts," as some sneered.

It's appropriate, then, that "Surreal Lives," a group biography by social historian Ruth Brandon, is deliciously gossipy, an informal encyclopedia of surrealism's endless personal intrigues and factional falling-outs. For this coterie of lustrous young men, friendships, infatuations and loves were artistic material -- the volcanic, remorseless stuff of the unconscious. Personal seduction, Brandon makes us aware, was a supreme value for these groomed, snobbish sons of the French bourgeoisie. They may have thought beauty to be a detestable quality in, say, a painting, but it loomed large in the enigmatic charisma of individuals. Of Aragon, who owned 200 ties, Breton sighed, "He is so handsome, you cannot believe." Waiting for the arrival of the 22-year-old Tristan Tzara in Paris, Breton and the salacious Nancy Cunard were in a quasi-sexual ecstasy of apprehension. Tzara himself, the prodigy of Dada, stage-managed his entrance so that his glimmering eyes and delicate hands would be noticed. (Breton, however, was disappointed.)

To say that the surrealists were dandies is to remember the deeper resonances of that word -- the dandy as stylistic and sexual rebel. They loved the occult, the mysterious elegance of coincidences. Indeed, Breton was almost more obsessed by the color green than he was by entering any pantheon: The tint had to be added to all his drinks (except, of course, the occasional Burgundy). Their contempt was directed at all careerists, especially novelists and journalists -- a voluntary austerity much criticized by Dalí's avaricious wife, Gala. Yet Breton exulted in all kinds of people -- his generous admiration ranged over the taurine Picasso, the lordly Francis Picabia, the hilariously gnomic Marcel Duchamp, the elfin Dalí and the poet Robert Desnos, who would fall asleep in restaurants and begin spontaneously uttering from the oracular unconscious.

In Brandon's telling, Breton was especially haunted by one adolescent provocateur, his red-haired wartime comrade Jacques Vaché, who affected an English accent and appeared at the opening night of Apollinaire's avant-garde play "Les Mamelles de Tiresias" armed with a revolver, as if about to empty its chamber into the audience. Breton talked him out of that desperate act, but the strange Vaché continued to supply for Breton "the continually desired dissonance and isolation," as Brandon puts it, that he craved in people. In 1919 Vaché was found dead with another youth in a hotel room after an opium overdose. "Jacques Vaché," Breton later wrote, "is the Surrealist in me." He would also say that the ultimate surrealist act was to walk into the street with a loaded revolver and fire at random: a touch of pure Vaché.

Surrealism's development was marked by a continual clash between the ordered, sensitively rational minds of its French controllers, like Breton and Aragon, and the earthy, anti-rational fanaticism of acolytes who came from "backward" corners of Europe -- first the Romanian Jew Tzara, then what Brandon calls the "Andalucian dogs": Dalí and Luis Buñuel. By concentrating on personal chemistries, Brandon brings this out beautifully, showing how a volatile dialectic bound these two psychic halves of Europe together.

Inside the movement, this powerful clash was played out in personal obsessions. At first, Breton found Dalí enchanting. He couldn't cross the street without being led; when he took a train he would huddle terrified by the engine so that he would "get there quicker." He spoke a bizarre French that nonetheless conveyed ideas of fluid delicacy. For Breton, Dalí's appearance in Paris in 1929 saved surrealism from an encroaching sterility. But Dalí came from a medieval country saturated with violent pathologies, and his surrealism was dangerously total. It is difficult to imagine the fastidious Breton eating his lover's stools, as Dalí did with Gala's, and it is equally difficult to imagine Dalí humbling himself before dreary Marxist orthodoxy, as most of the surrealists were beginning to do. Breaking with Breton, Dalí declared instead that "Marxism is shit, the last of Christian shit." (This quality might have endeared him to it, except that it did not issue from his beloved Gala.)

In a sense, communism was the grave that surrealism buried itself in -- not only because it imposed a philistine realist aesthetic at odds with surrealism's deepest instincts, but because it also destroyed the primacy of the erotic interplays that made surrealism's booming, narcissistic individuals tick. When Dalí unveiled an armchair studded with glass vials containing milk, Aragon dourly declared that there were too many children in the world who needed milk and that the armchair was politically unacceptable. Aragon then took off with Philippe Soupault to the Soviet Kharkov writers' conference in 1931 and signed a declaration previously drawn up by the Communist Party in which he effectively renounced his surrealist past. "Did the Surrealists' support for the Party," Brandon asks, "mean that their own intellectual activity must be abandoned in pursuit of the good of the masses?" The answer, alas, was yes.

Brandon makes the claim that in the end it was Buñuel alone -- because of his isolation, his mid-life career failures, his great skepticism -- who carried surrealism into the post-war years and who made something resembling great work from it. The antics of "Les Mamelles de Tiresias" flowered half a century later into the grandly demented rhythms of Buñuel's "Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie."

But Breton, too, for all his faults, is still a magical figure. His "Union Libre," with its cascades of terrible and gorgeous animal and mineral images, is perhaps the greatest love poem in the French language. Who but a surrealist could have written it? Of this tragic and overlooked figure Brandon concludes, "Along with his hero Freud, he is one of that select group who defined for our century a new way of looking at the world."

If surrealism died because it politicized itself crudely, its force was nonetheless dispersed over new ground. The surrealist expatriation to New York in the '40s helped create the modern American art scene. Brandon gives us the intriguing image of Breton imperiously leading Robert Motherwell around New York junk stores, teaching him which objects were surreal and which were not. An indefinable transference of spirit took place between the surrealists and the New York art world. But the group's best, early works show that the surrealists had qualities rare among their contemporary progeny: erudition, refinement, vast culture, dark wit, an incorrigible style. The surrealists would have strolled into the Whitney Museum with a flame-thrower and torched everything in sight.
salon.com | Oct. 28, 1999

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