Surrealism and American Culture: A Study of Surrealism’s Reception in America and its Resonances in the Work of Joseph Cornell and the Poetry of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery Stamatina Dimakopoulou University College, London PhD Thesis submitted to the University of London, 2002 ProQuest Number: U642789 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest U642789 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract Recent studies of Surrealism’s American years focus on Surrealism’s role in the early years of Abstract Expressionism. The interest of the encounter lies in how the Surrealists’ emphasis on the social and psychic aspects of their principles evolved into forms that were meant as both an expression of and a refuge from conflict. This thesis looks at how Surrealism was alternately embraced and resisted on the margins of the development of Abstract Expressionism. Chapter One sketches the embrace and critique of Surrealism through the pages of the periodical View (1940- 47), that hosted Surrealist works and writings during the Surrealists’ stay in America: here I discuss how Surrealist concepts informed critical perspectives on the concept of culture rather than on artistic forms. Alongside View's attempt to open up a Surrealist perspective on American culture, I also consider how cultural politics were synonymous with a critique, within the Surrealism of the period, of the value of the idea itself of culture. This involved a rethinking of the antinomies of Surrealist thought itself, staked as it was on a critique of the promises of modernity, and on a dual intent, totalising and destructive. Chapter Two looks back on Surrealism’s interwar period: my analysis shifts onto Surrealism’s approaches to the categories of subject and object, representation and reference. Surrealist principles are discussed as means that redeem as well as undermine these categories. This forms the basis for reading the role of Surrealism in the work of Joseph Cornell, and the poetry of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery in the postwar period. Chapter Three examines the Surrealist influence on Cornell’s boxes and collages at the level of the relations between forms, objects and their contexts. In my exploration of Cornell’s disruption of subject/object relations, it transpires that, Cornell’s involvement with the object rests on his nostalgia for a substantive relation between the self and the world. In Chapter Four, I discuss how Frank O’Hara also both assimilates and reverses the Surrealist intent. I look at how, in O’Hara’s poems, the subject is subsumed by a culture where everything is reduced to the status of ‘things’. The Surrealist category of the object is a reminder of objects not yet completely separated from subjectivity, objects that still contain a tangible reality. This dialectic is then shown equally to inform Ashbery’s dialogue with Surrealism. Chapter Five looks at Ashbery’s Surrealist affinity in the light of his ambivalent attitude towards language and representation, as well as vision. As in Cornell and O’Hara, Ashbery’s approach to Surrealism rests on his nostalgia for substantive experiences and regret for the text’s distance from reality. Not only criticised on the grounds of its historical and cultural specificity and its ties to the promises of modernity, Surrealism provides the terms for a reading of the paradoxes of postmodern culture against the grain. Not only anticipating the poststructuralist critique of substantive categories, the afterglow of Surrealism highlights postmodernism's difficult relations to subjective experience, aesthetic practice and cultural politics. CONTENTS List of illustrations 3 Acknowledgements 4 List of abbreviations 5 Introduction 6 1 Surrealism and American culture: history, theory and cultural practice 1.1 Art and/or culture? 23 1.2 View's cultural politics: a Surrealist Americanism or an ‘American Surrealism’? 49 1.3 Myth, subjectivity, and the critique of culture 72 2 Surrealism’s critique and the critique of Surrealism 2.1 Redeeming the object, recovering the subject: subjectivity and objects in Surrealism 87 2.2 Violence and pessimism of the object 105 3 Nostalgia for the modern: Surrealism and the Americana of Joseph Cornell 3.1 Mysteries of objects and/or mysteries of forms 124 3.2 Cornell’s paradox: uncritical intent and critical art 135 3.3 Desire for the object and the nostalgia of commodities 144 4 Surrealism and the poetry of Frank O’Hara 4.1 Frank O’Hara’s poems as things: inside and outside Surrealism 158 4.2 The implied critique of Surrealism and the negation of critique 175 5 Surrealism and the poetry of John Ashbery 5.1 Language and experience: cultural complicity and textual dissidence 190 5.2 Nostalgia for the referent: vision and language 209 Conclusion 224 Bibliography 235 Illustrations I-XII Illustrations 1 Joseph Cornell, Story Without a Name-for Max Ernst (1942). Collage, 3 x 3^/4 in to 7^16 X 6^/16 in, private collection. 2 Joseph Cornell, front and back cover of View, Americana Fantastica, II: 4 (January 1943). 3 From Joseph Cornell, The Crystal Cage (Portrait of Berenice), View II: 4 (January 1943), p. 15. 4 Max Ernst, La Femme 100 têtes, plate 81 (1929). Collage. 5 Max Ernst, La Femme 100 têtes, plate 138 (1929). Collage. 6 Max Ernst, La Femme 100 têtes, plate 140 (1929). Collage. 7 Joseph Cornell, L ’Égypte de Mlle Cléo de Mérode cours élémentaire d'Histoire naturelle (1940). Construction, 4"/16 x 10^Vl6 x 7'/4 in, collection Richard L. Feigen, New York. 8 Joseph Cornell, A Pantry Ballet (for Jacques Offenbach) (1942). Construction, IOV2 X 18 X 6 in, collection Richard L. Feigen, New York. 9 Max Emst, Danseur sous le ciel (le noctambule) (c. 1922). Oil on paper, mounted on cardboard; frame painted by Max Emst, 18 x 28 cm. Private Collection. 10 Joseph Cornell, Untitled (c.l930). Collage, 5^8 x 8^Vl6 in. Estate of Joseph Cornell. 11 Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Object) (c.l933). Constmction, 78 x 4V4 in. Estate of Joseph Cornell. 12 Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall) (1945-6). Construction, 20V2 x 16 x 372 in, collection Mr. and Mrs E. A. Bergman, Chicago. Acknowledgements I am grateful to my supervisor, Timothy Mathews, for his critical attentiveness and guidance. I would also like to thank the State Scholarships Foundation of Greece for a generous grant. Last but not least, I owe very much to my family, my partner, and all the friends whose support was unfailing throughout. Abbreviations John Ashbery DDS The Double Dream o f Spring (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1970) RM Rivers and Mountains (New York: Ecco Press, 1977) SP Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1985) ST Some Trees, ed. by W. H. Auden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956) TCO The Tennis Court Oath (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1962) TP Three Poems (New York: Penguin, 1977) VN The Vermont Notebook (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975) André Breton OCI Œuvres Complètes vol. I, ed. by Marguerite Bonnet, Philippe Bernier, Étienne-Alain Hubert and José Pierre (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1988) OCII Œuvres Complètes vol. H, ed. by Marguerite Bonnet, Philippe Bernier, Étienne-Alain Hubert and José Pierre (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1992) Max Emst E Écritures (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) Frank O’Hara CP Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. by Donald Allen (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995) Introduction The purpose of this study is to examine the reception and the resonances of Surrealism in America during and after the Second World War in contexts peripheral to the development of Abstract Expressionism; emphasis will be laid on how Surrealism was suggestive of critical perspectives on culture rather than on artistic forms. On the other hand, Abstract Expressionism’s encounter with Surrealism was not only a matter of formal influence - ‘a collective Surrealist arm extending the automatist brush to an outstretched American arm’, as Martica Sawin has noted - but rather involved ‘the whole system of interconnecting factors [...] the perception and promotion of the artwork as well as its production’.^ Surrealism, and in particular its automatist and biomorphic elements, ‘opened the possibility that a few young Americans might indeed develop a new style that advanced beyond Europe’s last avant-garde’.^ That the rise of Abstract Expressionism was indicative of a wider cultural shift cannot be overstated. Serge Guilbaut has stressed that it can only be understood in relation to the ‘transvaluation of social values’ and the ‘réévaluation of cultural signs’ marking the postwar period.^ The decline of art’s political affiliations, a rapid institutionalisation of the avant-garde and the rise of mass culture largely determined Abstract Expressionism’s coming of age as an internationally dominant style. Clement Greenberg’s criticism, where Abstract Expressionism was most strongly defended, exemplifies the crystallisation of ‘a political apoliticism’ in Serge Guilbaut’s words.Disillusioned with socialist realism and the ideology of the Popular Front, anti-Stalinist intellectuals in the late 1930s and early 1940s set out to defend artistic autonomy and the bourgeois value of culture. Such is the thrust of Greenberg’s famous 1939 essay ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in Partisan Review, where he revised the links between art and society before the growing divide between high * * Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning o f the New York School (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1995), p.