A Companion to Dada and Surrealism E-Book
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- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Blackwell Companions to Art History
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This excellent overview of new research on Dada and Surrealism blends expert synthesis of the latest scholarship with completely new research, offering historical coverage as well as in-depth discussion of thematic areas ranging from criminality to gender.
- This book provides an excellent overview of new research on Dada and Surrealism from some of the finest established and up-and-coming scholars in the field
- Offers historical coverage as well as in–depth discussion of thematic areas ranging from criminality to gender
- One of the first studies to produce global coverage of the two movements, it also includes a section dealing with the critical and cultural aftermath of Dada and Surrealism in the later twentieth century
- Dada and Surrealism are arguably the most popular areas of modern art, both in the academic and public spheres
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
List of Figures
Editor
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Historiography
Avant-Garde/Subculture
Recent Research Trends
This Book, its Aims and Structure
References
Further Reading
Part I: Histories/Geographies
1 Dada’s Genesis
Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism
The First “Public” Dada Evening
Collection Dada
Galerie Dada
Dada
“Scandal” at the Eighth Dada Soirée
Dada and Exile
References
Further Reading
2
Neue Jugend
References
Further Reading
3 Dada Migrations
References
4 New York Dada
Constructing New York Dada
Machines
Masculinism, Feminism, Group Formation
Readymades
References
Further Reading
5 Nothing, Ventured
Some Events
Political Poetics
Language
The image, the object
Farewells
Into Surrealism
Surrealism and Painting
References
Further Reading
6 Surrealism and the Question of Politics, 1925–1939
The Surrealist Revolution
The Crisis of 1929
Dissent and Politics
Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution
The Surrealists Break with the PCF
Towards an Independent Revolutionary Art
References
7 “Other” Surrealisms
Acknowledgment
References
Further Reading
8 Dada and Surrealism in Japan
References
Further Reading
9 Dada and Surrealism in Central and Eastern Europe
New Maps of Dada and Surrealism
East of Dada
Reception of Surrealism across Central and Eastern Europe
The Impossible: Serbian Surrealism
A Great Black Silence: Surrealism in Romania
Against the Current: Surrealism in Czechoslovakia
References
10 Surrealism in Latin America
Author’s Note
References
Part II: Themes and Interpretations
11 Dissemination
Introducing and Promoting Dada and Surrealism
Visual Cues: Graphic Design
Dialogue, Debate, and Dispute
The Journal Network
References
Further Reading
12 Artists into Curators
References
13 Dada and Surrealist Poetics
Dada Begins
Dada’s Meaningful Nonsense
The Laws of Chance: Between Dada and Surrealism
L’amour Fou
Coda
References
Further Reading
14 Chance and Automatism
Dehumanization and Hybridity in Dada Chance
Surrealist Automatism and Objective Chance: World War I, Death, Telecommunication
References
Further Reading
15 Crime/Insurrection
References
16 Re-enchantment
Childhood
Toys
Cornell and the Question of Pedophilia
Nostalgia and the Outmoded
The Art of Memory
References
Further Reading
17 Surrealism and Natural History
“A Feeling for Nature”
The Surrealist as Naturalist
The Marvelous
Roger Caillois, Surrealist Hermeneutics, and the “Demon of Analogy”
The Praying Mantis: Entomology and Surrealist Method
References
Further Reading
18 The Surrealist Collection
References
19 The Ethnographic Turn
References
20 Desire Bound
Sade in Chains
Surrealism’s Sade
Desire is a Strange Thing
Visualizing Sadism?
References
Further Reading
21 Equivocal Gender: Dada/Surrealism and Sexual Politics between the Wars
References
22 Feminist Interventions: Revising the Canon
Feminist Revisions of Women in Dada and Surrealism
Gloria Orenstein’s “The Women of Surrealism
Dada, Surrealism, and their Heritage?
Women Artists across Dada and Surrealism
References
Part III: Continuations/Aftermaths
23 The Surrealist Movement since the 1940s
The Reception of Postwar Surrealism
The Untimely
Postwar Surrealist Formations
The Contribution of Postwar Surrealism
Acknowledgments
References
24 Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage? The North American Reception of Dada and Surrealism
A Contested Heritage
Eros and the Eccentric Tradition
Queer Intruders in the Enchanter’s Domain
Dreams that Money Can Buy
Out of Time: Surrealist Anachronism
References
Further Reading
25 Surrealism and Counterculture
CoBrA
Lettrism and the Situationist International
References
Further Reading
26 Assimilation
Spellbound in Wackyland
Material Objects
Materialist Objectives
In Fashion
Conclusions
References
27 Sightings
The Totality Turn, or Surrealism after “Surrealism Without the Unconscious”
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
: A Message about the Melancholy of Geopolitics
Popular Unrest
: A Message about the Melancholy of Biopolitics
Distances Lost: Political Terror, Knowledge Production and the (Syn)Thesis of Awakening
References
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 03
Figure 3.1 Poster advertising Kurt Schwitters and Raoul Hausmann, Anti-Dada performance, Prague, 6 and 7 September, 1921, Hannah Hoech Archive, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin.
Chapter 04
Figure 4.1 Alfred Stieglitz: Photograph of
Fountain
by Marcel Duchamp, 1917. Gelatin silver print. Succession Marcel Duchamp, Villiers-sous-Grez, France.
Chapter 05
Figure 5.1 Francis Picabia:
Portrait de l’auteur par lui-même
, from Francis Picabia:
Unique Eunuque
, Paris, Au Sans Pareil, collection Dada, 1920.
Figure 5.2 Joan Miró,
Le Baiser
(
The Kiss
), 1924, oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm/28 7/10 × 36 1/5 in, 1924. New York, collection José Mugrabi.
Chapter 06
Figure 6.1 Jacques-André Boiffard,
The Humanité Bookshop
, illustration in André Breton,
Nadja
(Paris: Gallimard, 1928), Plate 17, p. 77.
Figure 6.2 Display of African and Oceanic tribal art organized by Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, and Yves Tanguy at The Truth About the Colonies exhibition, Paris, 1931. The caption attributed to Karl Marx reads: “A nation that oppresses other people cannot be free.”
Chapter 08
Figure 8.1 Kitawaki, Noboru. “Kaijō he: Koki” (To The Sea: Curiosity), from the series
Urashima Monogatari (The Legend of Taro Urashima)
. 1937. Oil on canvas. 46 × 55 cm.
Figure 8.2 Maeda, Toshiro.
Karuwazashi (Acrobat)
. c.1930. Linocut on paper. 71.0 × 45.0 cm.
Chapter 09
Figure 9.1
Analogon
, no. 66, 2012. Cover image by Jan Daňhel. Sdruženi Analogonu, Prague.
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 César Moro,
Untitled
(collage–poem) April 1935. César Moro papers, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980029).
Figure 10.2 Cover of
Cero
, no. 7/8, August 1967, Buenos Aires.
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1 Francis Picabia.
Alarm Clock
, 1919. Ink on paper, 318 × 230 mm. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
Figure 14.2 Man Ray,
Waking Dream Séance
, 1924. Surrealist group with Max Morise, Roger Vitrac, Jacques Boiffard, André Breton, Paul Eluard, Pierre Naville, Giorgio de Chirico, Philippe Soupault, Simone Collinet-Breton, Robert Desnos, and Jacques Baron. © Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris, 2015.
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1 Hans Bellmer: Personal Museum, c. 1938–1970. Box, mixed materials. Collection of Bihi-Bellmer, Paris.
Figure 16.2 Max Ernst:
Vox Angelica
. Oil on Canvas, 1943. 60 × 79 in. Private Collection.
Chapter 17
Figure 17.1
Mantis
. Photograph reproduced in the English translation of Caillois’ book
The Necessity of the Mind
. Attributed to Edward S. Ross of the California Academy of Sciences.
Chapter 18
Figure 18.1
André Breton in his studio, 42, rue Fontaine
. June 1965. Sabine Weiss.
Figure 18.2
The Surrealist Map of the World, Variétés
(Brussels), June 1929.
Figure 18.3 André Breton,
Untitled
, January 18, 1937-2, Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection, Art Institute of Chicago‥
Chapter 20
Figure 20.1 Meret Oppenheim.
Ma gouvernante – my nurse – mein Kindermädchen
, 1936, shoes, paper, string, oval platter, 14 × 33 × 21 cm, 1936/1967, Moderna Museet, Stockholm‥
Chapter 21
Figure 21.1 Man Ray,
Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy
, c.1921. copyright holder: Man Ray Trust; collection: Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Figure 21.2 Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore,
Untitled
, c.1921. Richard and Ronay Menschel Collection‥
Chapter 24
Figure 24.1 Henri Glaeser, Installation view of Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme “EROS,” Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris, 1960.
Chapter 25
Figure 25.1 Asger Jorn,
The Avant-Garde Doesn’t Give Up
, 1962. Defiguration. Oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm. Pierre Alechinsky, France.
Guide
Cover
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A Companion to Dada and Surrealism
Edited by
David Hopkins
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hopkins, David, 1955– editor.Title: A Companion to Dada and Surrealism / Edited by David Hopkins.Description: Hoboken : John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015042757 | ISBN 9781118476185 (cloth) | ISBN 9781118476222 (ePub) | ISBN 9781118476239 (Adobe PDF)Subjects: LCSH: Dadaism. | Surrealism.Classification: LCC NX456.5.D3 C66 2016 | DDC 709.04/062–dc23LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042757
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Max Ernst, The Entire City, 1935–6, oil on canvas. Kunsthaus Zürich, © DACS (draft)
List of Figures
3.1
Poster advertising Kurt Schwitters and Raoul Hausmann, Anti-Dada performance, Prague, 6 and 7 September, 1921, Hannah Hoech Archive, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin.
4.1
Alfred Stieglitz: Photograph of
Fountain
by Marcel Duchamp, 1917. Gelatin silver print. Succession Marcel Duchamp, Villiers-sous-Grez, France. Source:
The Blind Man
, no. 2, May 1917, International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries/© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/ DACS, 2015; © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2015.
5.1
Francis Picabia:
Portrait de l’auteur par lui-même
, from Francis Picabia:
Unique Eunuque
, Paris, Au Sans Pareil, collection Dada, 1920. Source: © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2015.
5.2
Joan Miró,
Le Baiser
(
The Kiss
), 1924, oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm/28 7/10 × 36 1/5 in, 1924. New York, collection José Mugrabi. Source: © Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2015.
6.1
Jacques-André Boiffard,
The Humanité Bookshop
, illustration in André Breton,
Nadja
(Paris: Gallimard, 1928), Plate 17, p. 77. Source: © 2015. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence./© Mme. Denise Boiffard.
6.2
Display of African and Oceanic tribal art organized by Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, and Yves Tanguy at The Truth About the Colonies exhibition, Paris, 1931. The caption attributed to Karl Marx reads: “A nation that oppresses other people cannot be free.” Source: © J. Paul Getty Trust.
8.1
Kitawaki, Noboru. “Kaijō he: Koki” (To The Sea: Curiosity), from the series
Urashima Monogatari (The Legend of Taro Urashima)
. 1937. Oil on canvas. 46 × 55 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.
8.2
Maeda, Toshiro.
Karuwazashi (Acrobat)
. c.1930. Linocut on paper. 71.0 × 45.0 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art.
9.1
Analogon
, no. 66, 2012. Cover image by Jan Daňhel. Sdruženi Analogonu, Prague.
10.1
César Moro,
Untitled
(collage–poem) April 1935. César Moro papers, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980029). Source: © J. Paul Getty Trust.
10.2
Cover of
Cero
, no. 7/8 August 1967, Buenos Aires. Source: Giselda Batlle – Archivo Juan Batlle Planas.
14.1
Francis Picabia.
Alarm Clock
, 1919. Ink on paper, 318 × 230 mm. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © Tate, London, 2015.
14.2
Man Ray,
Waking Dream Séance
, 1924. Surrealist group with Max Morise, Roger Vitrac, Jacques Boiffard, André Breton, Paul Eluard, Pierre Naville, Giorgio de Chirico, Philippe Soupault, Simone Collinet-Breton, Robert Desnos, and Jacques Baron. © Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris, 2015. Image: © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP-ARS/ Telimage, 2015.
16.1
Hans Bellmer: Personal Museum, c. 1938–1970. Box, mixed materials. Collection of Bihi-Bellmer, Paris. Source: © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2015/ From Therese Lichtenberg:
Behind Closed Doors, The Art of Hans Bellmer
(University of California Press, 2006), p. 20. Image originally from: Peter Webb & Robert Short: Hans Bellmer (Quartet, 1985).
16.2
Max Ernst:
Vox Angelica
. Oil on Canvas, 1943. 60 × 79 in. Private Collection. Source: akg-images/© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2015.
17.1
Mantis
. Photograph reproduced in the English translation of Caillois’ book
The Necessity of the Mind
. Attributed to Edward S. Ross of the California Academy of Sciences. Source: Photo, Edward S. Ross. Courtesy of the Lapis Press.
18.1
André Breton in his studio, 42, rue Fontaine
. June 1965. Sabine Weiss.
18.2
The Surrealist Map of the World, Variétés
(Brussels), June 1929.
18.3
André Breton,
Untitled
, January 18, 1937-2, Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection, Art Institute of Chicago. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
20.1
Meret Oppenheim.
Ma gouvernante – my nurse – mein Kindermädchen
, 1936, shoes, paper, string, oval platter, 14 × 33 × 21 cm, 1936/1967, Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Source: Photo: Moderna Museet, Stockholm/© DACS 2015.
21.1
Man Ray,
Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy
, c.1921. copyright holder: Man Ray Trust; collection: Philadelphia Museum of Art. Source: © 2015. Photo The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource/ Scala, Florence/© Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2015. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2015.
21.2
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore,
Untitled
, c.1921. Richard and Ronay Menschel Collection. Source: © Estate of Claude Cahun.
24.1
Henri Glaeser, Installation view of Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme “Eros,” Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris, 1960. Source: Association Atelier André Breton,
http://www.andrebreton.fr
/© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2015.
25.1
Asger Jorn,
The Avant-Garde Doesn’t Give Up
, 1962. Defiguration. Oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm. Pierre Alechinsky, France. Source: © André Morain, Paris/© Donation Jorn, Silkeborg/billedkunst.dk/DACS, 2015.
Editor
David Hopkins is Professor of Art History at the University of Glasgow. An acknowledged expert on Dada and Surrealism, he has published widely on these movements, and on artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. His books include Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared (1998) and Dada’s Boys: Masculinity After Duchamp (2007). He is also author of the bestselling short guide to the subject, Dada and Surrealism: A Short Introduction (2004). His latest book is Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood (2021).
Notes on Contributors
Dawn Ades is Professor Emerita of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex, UK, where she taught from 1968 to 2008. Her research concentrates on Surrealism and on Latin American Art, and her books include Photomontage (Thames & Hudson, 1976/1981), Salvador Dalí (1982), André Masson (1994), Siron Franco (Brazil, 1996) Marcel Duchamp (with N. Cox and D. Hopkins, 2000), Selected Writings (2015). She has organized or co-curated many exhibitions in the UK and internationally, and written, edited, or contributed essays to their catalogues, including Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978); Art in Latin America: the Modern Era 1820–1980 (1989); Dalí’s Optical Illusions (2000); Salvador Dalí: the Centenary Exhibition (2004); Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (2006); Close-Up: Proximity and Defamiliarisation in Art, Photography and Film (2008); The Colour of my Dreams: the Surrealist Revolution in Art (2011). She was Associate Curator for Manifesta 9 (2012). In 2013 she was made CBE for services to higher education, is a former trustee of Tate (1995–2005) and of the National Gallery (2000–2005), a Fellow of the British Academy, and Professor of the History of Art at the Royal Academy.
Patricia Allmer is Chancellor’s Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, UK. She has published and lectured widely on Surrealism. Her major publications include Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond (Manchester University Press, 2016), René Magritte: Beyond Painting (Manchester University Press, 2009), and a range of edited and co-edited books and special journal issues such as Intersections: Women Artists/Surrealism/Modernism (Manchester University Press, 2016). She is the curator and catalogue editor of the award-winning Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism (Manchester Art Gallery, 2009; Prestel), and co-curated and co-edited the catalogue for Taking Shots: the Photography of William S. Burroughs (The Photographers’ Gallery, 2014; Prestel).
James Boaden is a Lecturer in History of Art at the University of York, UK. His research focuses on American art in the twentieth century, and in particular the intersection with experimental film. He was a research fellow on the AHRC project Queer Surrealism at the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacies at the University of Manchester. He has published essays on the artists Bruce Conner, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jess in Papers of Surrealism, Art History, and Oxford Art Journal. He has curated film screenings at Tate Modern, the British Film Institute, and Nottingham Contemporary.
Katharine Conley is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the College of William & Mary, USA. She is the author of Surrealist Ghostliness (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life (Nebraska, 2003), and Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism (Nebraska, 1996), as well as a series of recent articles on surrealist collections published in Papers of Surrealism, Symposium, Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, South Central Review, and Yale French Studies.
Neil Cox is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, UK. He is Director of the ARTIST ROOMS Research Partnership, working with Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. He is co-author of Marcel Duchamp (London, 1999) and author of Cubism (London, 2000) and The Picasso Book (London, 2010).
Angela Dimitrakaki is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Working across Marxism and feminism, her books include Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique (2013), Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions (co-edited with Lara Perry, 2013), Economy: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century (co-edited with Kirsten Lloyd, 2015) and, in her native Greek, Art and Globalisation: From the Postmodern Sign to the Biopolitical Arena (2013). She is Corresponding Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory.
Jonathan P. Eburne is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is founding co-editor of ASAP/Journal, the scholarly journal of ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. He is the author of Surrealism and the Art of Crime (Cornell University Press, 2008), and the editor or co-editor of numerous scholarly volumes and journal issues. Eburne is President of the Association for the Study of Dada and Surrealism, and a Past President of ASAP. He is the series editor of the Refiguring Modernism book series at the Pennsylvania State University Press. He is currently completing a book called Outsider Theory.
Krzysztof Fijałkowski is Professor in Fine Art, Norwich University of the Arts, UK. A writer and researcher with particular interests in the international dada and surrealist movements, recent publications have included (with Michael Richardson and Ian Walker) Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia: On the Needles of Days (Ashgate, 2013) and several chapter-length studies of the work of Gherasim Luca. With Michael Richardson he is editor of the forthcoming volume Surrealism: Key Concepts.
Emily Hage is Associate Professor of Art History at Saint Joseph’s University, USA. She has worked at many art museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A specialist in twentieth-century European and American art, Dr. Hage is interested in print media, dialogues between texts and images, and how gender, racial, religious, and national identities inform artistic production. Her scholarship focuses on artists and magazines, from Dada art journals in the early twentieth century to “dadazines” produced by Mail Artists in the 1970s. Her current book project is Dada Magazines: The Publications that Made the Movement.
Steven Harris is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta in Canada, where he teaches modern and contemporary art history. He has published articles on Surrealism, postwar abstraction, Fluxus and most recently on Asger Jorn; his book, Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the Psyche, appeared in 2004. He is currently researching the surrealist movement and like-minded tendencies in postwar Europe.
Adam Jolles is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Florida State University, USA. He has published on Surrealism in France and Soviet modernism under Stalin. He is the author of The Curatorial Avant-Garde: Surrealism and Exhibition Practice in France, 1925–1941 (Penn State University Press, 2014). He co-curated the 2011 exhibition Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941–1945 (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press). His next book will address the curatorial history of photography in the United States.
Julia Kelly is Research Associate in the School of the Arts, Loughborough University, UK. Her published books include Art, Ethnography and the Life of Objects, Paris c.1925–1935(Manchester, 2007); Giacometti: Critical Essays (ed. with Peter Read; Ashgate, 2009); Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art (ed. with Anna Dezeuze; Ashgate, 2013); Travels and Translations: Anglo-Italian Cultural Exchanges (ed. with Alison Yarrington and Stefano Villani; Rodopi, 2013); and The Sculpture of Bill Woodrow (with Jon Wood; Lund Humphries, 2013). She has also published essays on Surrealism and ethnography, Dahomean art in the 1890s, assemblage art, and the artists Henry Moore, Joseph Cornell, Paule Vezelay, and Andre Masson.
Elliott H. King is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, USA. Educated at the University of Essex and the Courtauld Institute of Art, his research focuses on post-war Surrealism with an emphasis on Salvador Dalí’s art and writing. His publications include Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema (Kamera Books, 2007) and Dalí: The Late Work (High Museum of Art with Yale University Press, 2010).
Tirza True Latimer is Associate Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies, California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Her published work reflects on modern and contemporary visual culture from queer feminist perspectives. She is co-editor, with Whitney Chadwick, of the anthology The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris between the Wars (Rutgers University Press, 2003) and the author of Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris (Rutgers University Press, 2005). She is co-author, with Wanda Corn, of Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories (University of California Press, 2011), companion book for an exhibition organized by the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC. Her latest book, Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art, is in production the at University of California Press.
Elizabeth Legge is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto, Canada. She has written Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989); Michael Snow: Wavelength (London: Afterall/MIT, 2009); and has edited a collection of essays with Mark Cheetham and Catherine Soussloff, Editing the Image (University of Toronto Press, 2009). She has written on Dada, Surrealism, and contemporary British and Canadian art and published reviews in journals including Representations, Journal of Canadian Art History, Art History, History of Photography, Border Crossings, Canadian Art, Art Journal, Oxford Art Journal, and Transmission. Her essay on Frenkel, “Analogs of Loss: Vera Frenkel’s Body Missing,” was included in the anthology, Visual Culture and the Holocaust; and her article on Frenkel’s The Institute: Or What We Do for Love was published in the major book Vera Frenkel (Hatje Cantz, 2014).
Ulrich Lehmann is Professor for Interdisciplinary Arts and Design at The New School, New York. He is the author of Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (MIT Press, 2000). His interest lies in the relations between social history and material culture (1890s to today) and the meaning of modern design, especially fashion.
Debbie Lewer is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Glasgow, UK. She has published widely on Dada in Zurich and Berlin, on German Expressionism and on art in the German Democratic Republic. She has also translated numerous texts from German for publication and edited the Blackwell anthology Post-Impressionism to World War II. She is currently working on two book-length studies; on Dada in Zurich and on the cultural politics of the avant-garde in Weimar Germany. In 2009–2010, she held an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Art History Institute at the University of Bonn, Germany.
Majella Munro is the author of Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan (Enzo Arts and Publishing, 2013) and Understanding Shunga: A Guide to Japanese Erotic Art (ER Books, 2008). She is Executive Editor of Modern Art Asia. In 2013–2014 she was Research Fellow at the Tate’s Research Centre: Asia-Pacific.
Michael Richardson is currently Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is author of Otherness in Hollywood Cinema (2010), Surrealism and Cinema (2006), The Experience of Culture (2001), and Georges Bataille (1994). With Krzysztof Fijałkowski and Ian Walker he has also published On The Needles of Days: Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia (2013) and has edited Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations (with Krzysztof Fijałkowski, 2001), Georges Bataille: Essential Writings (1998), Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (1996), Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth (1994), and The Dedalus Book of Surrealism (1993–1994). His forthcoming publications include The Surrealist Reader (with Dawn Ades) and Surrealism: Key Concepts (with Krzysztof Fijałkowski).
Donna Roberts attained a PhD from the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex on the topic of the para-surrealist group, the Grand Jeu. She undertook postdoctoral studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, working on the theme of Surrealism, Freud, and psychobiology, and currently teaches at the University of Helsinki. She has written on Czech Surrealism and curated an exhibition in the UK of the work of the Czech surrealists Jan Švankmajer and Eva Švankmajerová. Her central research interests are the themes of Surrealism and nature, natural history, and evolutionary theory, with particular focus on the writings of Roger Caillois. This research will be published in a forthcoming monograph “A Feeling for Nature”: Surrealism, from Natural History to Ecology.
Eric Robertson is Professor of Modern French Literature and Visual Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he specializes in modern French and European literature and visual arts, the literary and artistic avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, and literary bilingualism. He is the author of Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor (2006, awarded the 2007 R.H. Gapper Book Prize), Writing Between the Lines: René Schickele, “Citoyen franç&c.lhrgbl;ais, deutscher Dichter,” 1883–1940 (1995), and Picturing Modernity: Blaise Cendrars and the Visual Avant-Gardes (forthcoming). He is the co-editor of Yvan Goll–Claire Goll: Texts and Contexts (1997), Robert Desnos: Surrealism in the Twenty-First Century (2006), Dada and Beyond, Vol 1: Dada Discourses (2011) and Dada and Beyond, Vol 2: Dada and its Legacies (2012). Current projects include a new book on Arp and a study of avant-garde art and virtual technologies.
Sherwin Simmons is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Oregon, USA. His research over the past 20 years has been devoted to the impact of mass culture on German art of the early twentieth century, with particular attention given to August Macke, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Ernst Neumann, Berlin Dada, and the development of poster design and satirical journals.
Raymond Spiteri teaches Art History at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. In his research and publications he focuses on the culture and politics of Surrealism. He is the co-editor (with Don LaCoss) of Surrealism, Politics and Culture (2003), and has contributed essays to Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements (2015), Modernist Magazines: A Critical and Cultural History (2013), The Invention of Politics (2006), and Surrealism and Architecture (2005). His current research focuses on Surrealism and modernism circa 1930.
Abigail Susik is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Willamette University, USA. Her research focuses on cultural histories of the European avant-gardes, as well as issues of aesthetics and ethics in contemporary and new media art. She is an Associate Editor of Media-N, journal of the New Media Caucus. Current book projects include the co-edited volume with Elliott H. King, Radical Dreams: Surrealism and Counterculture, as well as the monograph, Dream Kitsch: Aragon, Benjamin and Surrealism.
Michael White is a Professor of History of Art at the University of York, UK and is well known for his research on the interwar European avant-gardes, particularly Dada and Constructivism. His books include De Stijl and Dutch Modernism (Manchester University Press, 2003), The Story of De Stijl (co-authored with Hans Janssen; Ludio Press, Antwerp, 2011), Generation Dada: The Berlin Avant-Garde and the First World War (Yale University Press, 2013), and Virgin Microbe: Essays on Dada (co-edited with David Hopkins; Northwestern University Press, 2014). He was consultant curator of Theo van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde (Tate Modern, 2010) and co-curator of Mondrian and His Studios (Tate Liverpool, 2014).
Acknowledgments
It has been an honor to put together this scholarly reconsideration of the two movements that have been at the center of my research and teaching career in art history. My warmest thanks go to all of the authors who have contributed essays and helped shape the project with me over the last 4 years. A special word of thanks is due to Elizabeth Legge for taking on an additional last-minute burden of writing.
At Wiley-Blackwell, I gratefully acknowledge the foresight of my commissioning editor Jayne Fargnoli and the hard work of Julia Kirk, who was instrumental in guiding the project through a difficult phase. Thanks are due to Jan East for her work on the copyediting. Sakthivel Kandaswamy has been a wonderfully efficient production editor. I am also deeply grateful to the original anonymous reviewers of the project proposal, and to the numerous colleagues who have helped in various ways during the book’s progress, notably Neil Cox, Debbie Lewer, Tom Nichols, and Michael White. I owe a particular debt to my wife, Claudia, who has been a constant source of intellectual and emotional support.
I am particularly proud to have been able to include Dawn Ades as one of the contributors to this volume. Dawn has had a decisive role in shaping Dada and Surrealism studies over the last 40 years, and many of my fellow authors will have benefited from her scholarship. Looking towards the future, I place this book at the service of an upcoming generation of students and researchers. To borrow a phrase from André Breton, “It is the expectation which is magnificent.”
David HopkinsEdinburgh, November 2015
Introduction
David Hopkins
This book makes a timely appearance. 2016 is Dada’s centenary year. Born in Zurich in 1916, Dada has, in its first 100 years, moved from being confined within the four walls of a small cabaret mounted by a group of disaffected, intinerant poets, performers, and artists, to becoming one of the most lionized and influential movements in modern art. Surrealism, which followed on from it in certain respects, having been launched officially in 1924, has arguably become even better known. Such has been its impact that the word “surreal” is a commonly used epithet across the globe, although rarely used with the precision of those who initially coined the term. Aside from having an enormous popular appeal, Dada and Surrealism have become possibly the most intensively studied of all movements in twentieth-century art, with courses featuring widely on university and college curricula. Registering the fascination Dada has generated since the 1960s, the French dada scholar Michel Sanouillet wrote in the mid-1990s: “It will be the incarnation of Dada’s paradox that a short-lived minor movement, whose avowed goal was to be nothing, will have generated more deep-rooted interest in the minds of four generations than most literary or artistic schools in recent centuries.”1 Sanouillet may be overstating the case, but he conveys a sense of how urgently Dada has answered the sensibilities of late-twentieth-century intellectuals. The same could easily be said of Surrealism. Given this state of affairs, it is striking that, as things currently stand, there is no serviceable one-volume compilation of essays that delineates the entire research field for a contemporary academic audience. This volume seeks to remedy this situation.
This book has been designed to function in two ways. First, it provides a comprehensive overview of Dada and Surrealism by a group of the best scholars currently working in the field. The opening section of the book offers an extensive chronological and geographical account of both movements, drawing on recent research findings, which will more than meet the needs of students at both graduate and postgraduate levels. Second, this book decisively builds on existing scholarship, offering a number of summative accounts of the current state of thinking on central topics and providing, especially in the second and third parts of the book, a selection of thematically keyed essays which make new contributions to the study of Dada and Surrealism, significantly expanding and enriching our knowledge of them.
This is an ideas-led study. Attention is given to important poets, writers, artists, filmmakers, and theorists along the way, with certain key figures (such as Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, or André Breton) being accorded considerable space in certain essays, but the overall intention has been to examine the intellectual foundations and cultural contexts of Dada and Surrealism. While a number of essays deal with both movements, Surrealism dominates this collection, reflecting the current intensity of research in this area but also indicating the longer time span and theoretical complexity of the movement (while Dada was contained within the period 1916–1923, Surrealism lasted from 1924 to 1939 and continues up until the present according to some accounts; see Chapters 7 and 23). I will return in due course to a more detailed account of this book’s aims and contents, but it seems appropriate first of all to reflect briefly on past historiography in the field. I should emphasize from the start that my bias is inevitably towards the scholarship in English, as befits a book that is largely oriented to an English-language readership, but I have attempted to give a sense of the breadth of scholarship in its international dimensions. Internationalism, after all, was one of the defining features of both Dada and Surrealism.
Historiography
From a historiographic point of view, both Dada and Surrealism can be characterized, like several other key avant-garde formations of the early twentieth century, by their self-historicization, both in terms of written chronologies and in terms of an enormous body of documentation, whether in the form of manifestoes and statements or of articles in the magazines produced by both movements.2 Dada in particular was memorialized in a series of chronologies, embarked on even before it was over, by the leading lights of the movement, notably Tristan Tzara,3 Hugo Ball,4 Richard Huelsenbeck,5 and Hans Richter.6 In the case of Surrealism, memoirs of this kind are less in evidence – although André Breton’s Entretiens are of particular significance7 – but the movement produced a voluminous literature recording its own evolution, not least in its flagship journals: La Révolution Surréaliste (1924–1929) and Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution (1930–1933).8 It cannot be overstressed that one of the best ways of understanding both movements is via their journals; a perception that underpinned one of the seminal exhibitions (and catalogues) on the topic thus far in English, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed.9
Dada and Surrealism attracted scholarly attention as early as 1923 when the first academic study on dada appeared.10 Dada was subsequently to be considered as a movement in a number of studies by French and German artists and scholars such as Georges Hugnet,11 Michel Sanouillet,12 Willi Verkauf,13 and Marc Dachy14 to mention just a few notable examples. Specialist literature on the various centers of dada activity has been a feature of more recent years. Beginning with Sanouillet’s Dada à Paris of 1965, these include significant studies focused on Zurich, Berlin, Holland, Cologne, Hanover, and New York.15 Arguably the most useful recent studies on Dada in general are the two large catalogues that accompanied exhibitions of Dada in Paris and Washington in 2006 edited by Laurent Le Bon and Leah Dickerman, respectively.16 However, it is in published collections of essays, often deriving from conferences, that some of the best Anglo-American writings on the topic are to be found: these include collections edited by Stephen Foster and Rudolf Kuenzli, Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky, David Hopkins and Michael White, Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson, and Richard Sheppard, with Sheppard’s collection of his own essays of 2000 being a model of detailed scholarship.17 In addition, a multi-volume study of the entire Dada movement was produced between 1996 and 2005 under the general editorship of Stephen Foster, its scale (10 volumes) attesting to the scope of the scholarship as it stood at the end of the twentieth century.18
In the case of Surrealism, the literature is enormous. Key early studies include those of Maurice Nadeau, David Gascoyne, Anna Balakian, Herbert S. Gershman, and Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron,19 but numerous monographic studies have been devoted to the subject, with Gérard Durozoi’s History of the Surrealist Movement20 being possibly the most ambitious recent overview. Some of the most important studies have paid particular attention to André Breton’s thought in the formation of surrealist theory; these include the seminal studies by Michel Carrouges, Marguerite Bonnet, and, more recently, Mark Polizzotti.21 In line with broader developments in art history, scholarship on Surrealism has gradually taken account of its global expansion, first in Europe, then elsewhere in the world. A significant number of studies are dedicated to its various national contexts, in-depth studies existing for Belgium, Britain, Czechoslavakia, the United States, and Latin America.22 Much of the literature concentrates on the importance of painting within Surrealism, but given Surrealism’s wide compass in terms of literature and the arts in general, a number of studies have been devoted to specific areas of disciplinary activity, in which Dada and Surrealism are often brought together: literature,23 film,24 performance/theater,25 and photography.26 The political affiliations of Surrealism have also generated some significant studies.27 It should be noted too that numerous exhibitions on visual Surrealism have been mounted over the years: large shows over the last couple of decades include ones at the Australian National Gallery of Art, Canberra (1993), Pompidou Center Paris (2002), Tate, London (2002), Hayward Gallery, London (2006), and Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2011).28 These give some indication of the current global interest in the topic.
My short historiographic overview has so far looked at Dada and Surrealism as separate entities but, from 1936, with the Museum of Modern Art New York’s seminal exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (curated by Alfred Barr), the movements were brought together for an Anglo-American audience in the way that they are in the current collection of essays.29 Exhibitions and their related publications have been especially significant in terms of cementing the links between them: William Rubin’s Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage (1968) along with his huge monograph Dada and Surrealist Art (1968)30 were followed up a decade later by the Hayward Gallery, London’s Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978). A number of monographic studies also brought the movements into alliance, particular in the 1960s and 1970s. In some of these, Dada was seen in a limited sense as a kind of precursor to Surrealism (as indeed it was in the context of Paris) but an even-handed attempt was made in several studies to give them an equal weighting.31
Given that historians and curators have so frequently linked Dada and Surrealism in the past, combining them in this volume might appear to be a self-evident move. However, the tendency in recent years has been for academics to uncouple them. As I stated in my own brief overview of Dada and Surrealism of 2004, the fact that Dada only evolved into Surrealism in the French context means that joined-up studies run the risk of implying a degree of continuity that does not apply to the German context.32 Also, there has been such a marked increase in research on both movements since the 1980s that to shunt them together could be seen as an overly totalizing tendency in the light of growing concern among scholars with specific and local differences of meaning and inflection. In the case of Surrealism, my short historiographic summary above only hints at the developing literature on the international offshoots of Surrealism. The acceleration of interest in the last decade or so in global variants, however, puts pressure on the idea that it is now possible to encompass Surrealism as a homogeneous topic, let alone give an equal emphasis to Dada.
This said, there are still compelling arguments to bring the two movements together under the same roof, so to speak. In the French context, Dada and Surrealism flowed into one another, and there would be a danger of allowing Dada to simply become conflated with Surrealism if one failed to see it precisely as separate-but-linked, with its own distinct set of international connections (the Rumanian Tristan Tzara, formerly one of the impresarios of Zurich Dada, could, after all, be seen as equally important to the formation of French Dada as was André Breton, who effectively turned it into Surrealism). The German forms of Dada, although they developed quite independently from those in France in the case of Berlin Dada or Kurt Schwitters, actually had close links to Paris in the case of the Cologne dadaist Max Ernst, who eventually moved to Paris and became central to the development of visual surrealism. A similar process occurred with the Alsation-born Hans Arp who moved from Zurich to Paris. These crossovers alone, with dadaists effectively metamorphosing into surrealists, justify, or even demand, the preservation of the Dada–Surrealism conjugation.
Another reason for reviving the Dada-and-Surrealism formulation, however herculean the task might be, is that pinpointing commonalities between the movements continues to make sense for the cultural historian of the avant-garde as much as the historian of European modernist art. A common way of establishing this link is via recourse to the notion of the “irrational,” whereby both movements are seen as equally committed to the irrational in human nature. The looseness of the term does not help us greatly (after all, Expressionism and Futurism could be seen as equally concerned with irrational) but, moving on from it, if one narrows Dada and Surrealism’s commitment down to an emphasis on the workings of the human psyche – with a particular stress on the unconscious – in the wake of World War I, then a real and important affinity does exist, and opens onto a shared, and historically specific, understanding of human nature.33 Surrealism undoubtedly saw itself as building on Dada’s attack on the rhetoric of reason. As the essays in this collection show, it also possessed a similar position on large number of other key issues: the primacy of poetry, the centrality of chance, the questioning of received attitudes towards morality (especially in terms of sexuality), the importance of humor, as well as a number of aesthetic and thematic preoccupations.
Possibly the main point of commonality consists in the way both Dada and Surrealism operated as avant-garde formations; movements, complete with manifestoes, which were in some sense at the forefront of culture, producing new models for social/cultural production and action. Dada frequently revelled in negating such aspirations, but, in negating them, arguably affirmed them. Surrealism presented itself as nothing less than a revolutionary movement, intent on transforming consciousness. In line with this, both movements possessed complex models of group membership, however conflictual these may have been, particularly in the case of Paris Dada. They also saw themselves as fundamentally internationalist in orientation, with Surrealism consolidating and developing a number of Dada’s networks and energetically forging its own. The methodological implications of viewing these movements as diffuse networks rather than as distinct centers of activity have been explored in recent years, and the structure of Laurent Le Bon’s 2006 Dada exhibition in Paris was particularly innovatory in suggesting that, rather than being seen in terms of a number of centers (Zurich, New York, Paris, Berlin, Cologne), Dada should be seen as a network, held together by the travel and correspondence of its adherents, and underpinned by an ethos of disseminaton.34 At the same time, it has become increasingly appropriate to look at Surrealism as a global phenomenon rather than a movement with a “center” in Paris (Chapter 7). More than anything then, Dada and Surrealism can be defined in terms of their internationalism as avant-garde movements.35 It is worth pausing for a moment, then, to consider what avant-gardism involved.
Avant-Garde/Subculture
Dada and Surrealism have regularly been seen as part of what Peter Bürger described as the “historical avant-garde.” Bürger famously defined the central aspiration of this group of early twentieth century art movements as the sublation of art into the praxis of life.36 This is sometimes reduced to a cliché; the idea that Dada and Surrealism were as much concerned with “life” as with “art.”37 This notion of the precedence of lived over aesthetic experience nevertheless finds expression in many dada and surrealist texts. In “Clairement,” a short essay written by André Breton in 1922 reflecting on the literary contribution of Paris Dada, we find the following assertion which many dadaists and surrealists would have subscribed to:
I think that poetry … emanates more from the lives of human beings – whether writers or not – than from what they have written … life, as I see it, is not the sum total of actions that can ultimately be ascribed to an individual … but rather the way in which he seems to have accepted the unacceptable human condition.38
Bürger, however, is more concerned with seeing movements such as Dada and Surrealism as engaged with an attack on the autonomy of art as a bourgeois institution, which can be directly related to their political commitments. In this respect Berlin Dada and Surrealism can be seen as paradigmatic avant-garde formations due to their communist affiliations (however partial or unsatisfactory these may have been). Arguably, only Russian Constructivism shows an equivalent degree of political engagement to Surrealism among the classic avant-gardes. Surprisingly, what often seems to be left out is a sense of their internal structural dynamics. These issues crop up in several of the essays at the start of this volume dealing with various dada networks (Chapters 1–4) or with Surrealism’s internal politics (Chapters 5, 6, and 10) but there is further theoretical work to be done on the inner structural mechanisms of avant-garde groups. A particularly interesting methodological approach is suggested by the art historian Thomas Crow who, drawing on the research of the sociologist Stuart Hall, sets up parallels between avant-garde formations and subcultural groups. Crow quotes Hall on subcultures as follows:
They cluster around particular locations. They develop specific rhythms of interchange, structured relations between members … They explore “focal concerns” central to the inner life of the group: things always “done” or never “done”, a set of social rituals which underpin their collective identity and define them as a “group” instead of a mere collection of individuals. They adopt and adapt material objects … and reorganize them into distinctive “styles” which express the collectivity of their being-as-a-group. … Sometimes the world is marked out, linguistically by names or an argot which classifies the social world exterior to them in terms only meaningful within their group perspective and maintains its boundaries.39
It would not be difficult to apply some of these observations to aspects of Dada. Anecdotally, it is worth mentioning a “readymade” produced by Marcel Duchamp. In 1923, at the end of the New York Dada, he sent his friend Man Ray a pamphlet from a religious seminary with the face of a smiling “too-good-to-be-true” pupil on the cover. Underneath it, Duchamp wryly appended the words “The Non-Dada.”40
Like subcultures, then, Dada and Surrealism could be seen as having their concepts of “membership,” their schisms, their pecking order, their collective styles, their argot, and so on. Of course, the problem here is that, whereas Crow, in his essay on the avant-garde in relation to notions of high/low culture, sees subcultures as recalcitrant lower class social formations, which manage to carve out some space for themselves within an administered culture and whose forms are quickly assimilated by “high culture” in order to re-vitalize itself,41 the constituency of both Dada and Surrealism was fundamentally middle class. Their assimilation did not therefore involve any significant problems or shifts of class identification, and the artists and poets of the movements were effortlessly transported from being (ostensible) social outsiders and critics into purveyors of “high” culture, as shown for instance by the dizzying speed at which Salvador Dali was transformed from an avant-garde provocateur into a fashion designer for Elsa Schiaparelli (Chapters 25 and 26). For many critics and scholars of Dada and Surrealism, this phenomenon continues to complicate the question of Dada and Surrealism’s “radicality.”
Another point worth raising in respect to Dada and Surrealism and the idea of avant-gardes/subcultures is the relative “youthfulness” of the image projected by both movements. With this in mind, it is peculiarly appropriate to look at them from the vantage point of the 1950s onwards, when generational difference became increasingly bound up with definitions of culture.42 At the same time, Dada and Surrealism, and the artists and writers linked to them were seen as peculiarly appropriate jumping-off points for developments in postwar art, especially in the Western world. An important feature of the current book is therefore its last part which serves to focus the historical and thematic issues from the first two parts of the book in relation to both the continuation and reception of the Dada and Surrealist avant-gardes in the postwar period (Chapters 23 and 24) and their relevance in the context of mass/global culture (Chapters 25–27). A question that might arise here is to what extent can we untangle our own cultural investments (in so far as many of us have been brought up in the era of a commercialized “youth culture”) from our construal of the historical significance of the dada and surrealist avant-gardes? This question, incidentally, seems to hover in the background of the more recent literature on Surrealism in particular, which has focused on its French postwar continuation in relation to countercultural discourses and genres of popular culture such as science fiction.43
