In 1916 Andre Breton, a medical resident, he worked in the neurological department of a hospital in Nantes. Here he read avidly Freud. He also met and corresponded with a pacifist soldier who had created an unusual work. He had sewn together the uniforms abandoned by the different armies. He wanted to create "a neutral uniform". An already intrinsically surrealist work.
The soldier, who was called Jacques Vaché, took his own life in Nantes a few months after the end of the war.
The history, motivations and rebellious and non-conformist behavior of Vaché, the “deserter from within” as Breton himself defined it, greatly struck the imagination of the young doctor and writer.
It is believed that Vaché was one of the main sources of inspiration for conceiving the Surrealism Manifesto published by Breton on 15 October 1924. A document that could only be born in the chaos of the war and the post-war period.
It was precisely the concepts of reason, logic and realpolitik that had constituted the foundation on which the huge tragedy of the war. Breton's conclusion was that only a revolution of the mind could change experience and remove it from the dominion of reason and power. We had to go beyond reality.
Il Breton Manifesto it was initially a literary idea, but soon became an artistic movement that revolutionized all forms of cultural production and industry.
But the Surrealism it's not just related to art. It also has a, let's say, subversive aspect in its desire to transform the world and spurs it to change its life.
The need for surrealism
Adherence to Surrealism turned out to be a liberating act for all forms of representation of human experience, none excluded. The visual arts and writing were affected in a different but profound way. Not even Breton had imagined the extent of his initiative.
Nor had he imagined the duration dthe long period of Surrealism when the avant-gardes that preceded him had burned out their driving force in the space of a decade.
A century has passed and Surrealism is still with us with a vitality that has even increased its strength.
How can we explain this grip of surrealism on our era too? Each generation seems to want to remake Surrealism in its own image, thus saving it from aging.
Perhaps what determines its permanence in culture, not only Western, is the complexity and disorder of modernity. Is it perhaps that same state of reality that had pushed Breton to hypothesize its escape through irony, imagination, the exception? Is it the emotional state of disconnection with the present that offers the surrealist approach, with its challenge to the existing order, the fuel that powers it?
There is no definitive answer, but the fact is that beyond Breton himself, Surrealism has become a way of thinking, to interpret and represent our time. And our time seems to need Surrealism.
From Paris to the world
As correctly noted Jackie Wullschläger, the art criticism of the “Financial Times”, surrealism, born from the mind and initiative of “European heterosexual men, albeit disconnected from the white male cultural tradition”, has become a universal movement.
Wullschläger further writes that “the importance of women and non-European and non-white artists and thinkers in the evolution of Surrealism is finally starting to be recognized and shown”. And this is also demonstrated by the exhibitions that are being organized all over the world for this centenary, in China, in Australia, in the United States, in Europe. For example, a feminist group headed by artists such as Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Kati Horna worked in Mexico.
Queer and transgender artists have always made use of surrealist games of identity and mask. They range from surprising toAndrogynous self-portraits by Claude Cahun of the 20s to Christina Quarles' paintings depicting shattered, fused, intertwined bodies with tentacle-like limbs. It's difficult to say what identity and gender they have.
Appointment in Brussels
The Center Pompidou in Paris, which has one of the largest collections of surrealist art in the world, organized the largest exhibition: “IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism". It's about a traveling exhibition which opened in Brussels on February 21st and will move to Paris on September 4th. The exhibition will then travel to Hamburg and Madrid, concluding at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2026.
In Brussels there is also the Magritte Museum where 200 works by one of the greatest and most admired masters of Surrealism are exhibited.
In addition to Magritte, the museum also houses a collection of works by other surrealist artists, including Paul Delvaux, René Guiette and Yves Tanguy. Every year 250 thousand people visit the Magritte Museum in Brussels.
There are many other exhibitions, as we said, about to open in Europe, Asia, the United States and Australia.
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The long course of surrealism a century after the manifesto: contribution by Michele Ragno
When André Breton – French poet and essayist, known to most as the theorist of surrealism – returned to his Paris at the end of the Second World War, he found a culturally changed world.
Il surrealism, to which he had given an intellectual form with the First Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, now seemed to have faded and entered the oblivion of the past. One hundred years have passed from that first famous manifesto and now we can perhaps begin to trace the lines of this artistic journey.
A lasting legacy
Breton, who died in 1966, could not see with what suggestive spirit this movement has left an indelible mark throughout the XNUMXst century.
The Pixies – historic American rock group, pioneer of the scene alternative between the late '80s and early '90s – opened their most famous album, Doolittle (1989) with an ode to Un Chien Andalou, short film by Luis Buñuel (with production and interpretation by Buñuel himself and Salvador Dalì), whose screenplay appeared in Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929).
The film is considered by many to be the leading cinematic work of the surrealist movement: the strength of the images, connected to each other in an absurd way, without apparent logical connection, but in any case in such a way as to disturb visually and morally, was what had hit artists like the Pixies (whose musical and lyrical writing style are very reminiscent of surrealist imagery) or even David Bowie, to the point that the latter used the short film as the opening act of his 1976 tour.
The “amazing” surrealism
Moreover, Breton himself, in his First Manifesto, wrote:
“Surrealism does not allow those who have resorted to it to leave it whenever they like. Everything leads one to believe that it acts on the spirit in the same way as narcotics; like these, it creates a certain state of need and can push man into terrible revolts. […] Surrealist images function like those of opium which man no longer evokes, but which are offered to him spontaneously, despotically. He cannot dismiss them; because the will is without strength and no longer controls the faculties"
Surrealism still resists because it is in fact intrinsic by nature a movement of revolt against ordinariness, with its logic, mania for control and programming.
As Breton the man says, “this ultimate dreamer”, is increasingly dissatisfied with his lot: he has learned to manipulate everything, even aspects of his own life. Children are born and grow without restlessness and even the imagination, which previously did not allow any limits, is now the object of exercises, also becoming the object of a form of slavery.
On the other hand, the core of thought of surrealism takes its inspiration from Nietzschean criticismto the prevalence of the Apollonian spirit in modern society. In a passage that almost seems to have been written by the German philosopher, Breton writes:
“[The] realist attitude, which is inspired by positivism, from St. Thomas to Anatole France, seems to me truly adverse to any intellectual and moral impulse. I am horrified by it, because it is made of mediocrity, of hatred, of flat sufficiency."
It is this need to claim the space of maximum freedom - understood as creative power - that pushes surrealism towards the dreamlike: "delirium, hallucinations, illusions, etc., are a non-negligible source of enjoyment".
The Bretonnian sur-reality
A trace of this dream world is still present in the cinema of David Lynch, the last of the surrealists, who for example in Twin Peaks, famous television series of the 90s splits the world into two parts (the common world and the dream world of the two lodges: the "Black Lodge" and the "White Lodge") and the characters (with the use of doppelgänger) to dig into the human psyche.
Surrealism is in fact an undertaking, which heroically aims to overcome limits:
“We still live under the reign of logic: this, of course, is the point I was getting at. But nowadays, logical procedures are no longer applied except to the solution of problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that remains in fashion allows us to consider only facts strictly connected to our experience. Logical ends, however, escape us."
To tear away the veil of Maya we must take inspiration from the great intuitions of Freudian psychoanalysis: the dream - and with it its analysis - becomes a form of investigation, of superior consciousness freed from the limits of mere logic and experience.
This is the Bretonnian Absolute Reality, the Sur-reality in which "the spirit of man [...] is fully satisfied with what happens to him". Surrealism is therefore a precise philosophical answer, so much so that in the Breton manifesto he goes so far as to report a clear definition:
Surrealism is based on the idea of a higher degree of reality connected to certain forms of association hitherto neglected, on the omnipotence of dreams, on the disinterested play of thought. It tends to definitively liquidate all other psychic mechanisms and replace them in solving the main problems of life.
Beyond reality
On the other hand in the dream man frees himself from all constraints and aesthetic-moral controls: Kierkegaardian anguish, linked to the decision, disappears. Possibility ceases to be a limit and becomes a source of joy: accepting life in its naturalness of developments, in its strangeness and wonder.
This is the same wonder that emerges inMagritte's surrealist art – who was struck by Breton to the point of saying “my eyes saw thought for the first time” – when he underlines the distance between true reality and our representation (sensory, verbal, mental) or in Dalì's, more focused on exploring the subconscious.
In both approaches - one certainly more linear and reflective (Magritte's); the other more exuberant and exuberant (Dalì) – the crux of the matter remains focused on questioning and going beyond conventional reality.
Today, traces of surrealism remain due to its transgressive vision, capable of involving all the arts - think also of the important role in contemporary photography by Man Ray or the literary and theatrical contribution of Artaud – and bring a new look at art, society, man, his nature and his possibilities.
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Sources of the introduction
Jackie Wullschläger, Surrealism at 100: does it still have the power to disrupt?, “The Financial Times”, January 27, 2024
Nina Siegal, Surrealism Is 100. The World's Still Surreal, “The New York Times”, February 28, 2024
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Michele Ragno (Foggia, 1997) is a philosophical researcher. His main interests concern twentieth-century thought, in particular that of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, whose results are partly collected in the volume Art that opens up meaning. The philosophy of art of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, published for goWare (2021). For the same publisher he edited Ludwig Wittgenstein's letters to von Ficker (2022). He published for AM Edizioni David Foster Wallace as a philosophical experience (2020), in which he tries to reconstruct the philosophical plot hidden in the works of the American writer.
