International Journal of Arts & Sciences, CD-ROM. ISSN: 1944-6934 :: 10(02):415–420 (2017)

SURREALISM ON AMERICAN SOIL: ANDRÉ BRETON, EDWARD JAMES AND OTHERS IN THE JUNGLE

Galina Bakhtiarova

Western Connecticut State University , USA

When the theorist and founder of André Breton first visited Mexico in 1938 he was struck by everything that he saw and soon proclaimed that Mexican reality was completely surrealist. Ancient ruins with skeletons engraved on them, sugar skulls eaten as treats, night-long vigils at cemeteries and general disdain and laughter at death-related subjects impressed him as much as tragic expression on multiple faces of the artist Frida Kahlo. An English aristocrat, Edward James first befriended struggling artists by buying their works and later spent twenty years of his life creating his masterpiece in the Mexican jungle: an unfinished and never-ending sculpture consisting of bridges and stairways that lead nowhere. This essay explores the impact of Mexican culture on major figures of European surrealism.

Keywords: Surrealism, André Breton, Edward James, Mexican culture.

Introduction

Conceived in Paris, Surrealism has been duly associated with the European continent. The movement grew in the aftermath of the Great War that afflicted and changed the cultural and social landscape of the Old World. Yet towards the mid- twentieth century, when many asserted that surrealism had outlived itself, “the exquisite cadaver” continued its life on American soil. Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz and Argentinian Ernesto Sabato experimented with surrealist images and techniques in their writings. In the 1940s, a group of authors and artists who escaped from fascism found inspiration in Mexico, their new adoptive land. Many were driven by the horrors of the war, some, as Edward James, a scion of a wealthy English family, came out of curiosity. André Breton (1896-1966), the theorist and founder of surrealism, first visited Mexico in 1938 and was seemingly deeply struck by everything that he saw and experienced: ancient ruins with skeletons engraved on them, sugar skulls eaten as treats, night-long vigils at cemeteries for the national celebration of the Day of the Dead and general disdain and laughter at death-related subjects. Like many others, he could not help falling under the spell of Frida Kahlo, an artist whose sole subject was her own emotional world and who made art mostly out of one genre: self-portrait. This essay explores the fascination with Mexico manifested in the works of European artists who associated themselves with surrealism. For Breton, Mexican reality was completely surrealist. He was not the only one impressed by Mexico and Latin America. Among many Europeans who were most prolific in Mexico were artists , , Wolfgang Paalen and many more who found refuge in the Mexican capital during the turbulent 1930s and 1940s. Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo came to the Americas from turbulent private and public experiences in their respective countries, Britain and Spain, torn apart by war. Living somewhat parallel lives in Mexico City in the 1940s, they supported and

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nurtured each other’s creativity. In this group, an English aristocrat, Edward James stood aside in a dual capacity. A scion of a rich and aristocratic family, he first befriended struggling artists by buying their works and later spent the last twenty years of his life creating his own masterpiece in the Mexican jungle: an unfinished and never-ending sculpture consisting of bridges and stairways that lead nowhere. Born in Europe in the aftermath of the Great War, surrealism was, as Melanie Nicholson argues, “originally conceived not as a literary or artistic school, much less a set of techniques or a mere style. It was rather a mode of thought that was meant to subvert all conventional modes of thought and even to change the nature of thought itself” (Nicholson 16). Advocating for psychic automatism in the creative process, the surrealists proposed a “total revolt against reason and rational discourse, which they saw largely responsible for the bankrupt state of the Western world” (Nicholson 18). Le merveilleux , the marvelous, became a mode of seeing things in a new, surrealist way. For Breton, the marvelous is not only dream imagery, but multiple forms of revelation that include unusual ways of perceiving everyday reality. The New World, and Mexico in particular, became for Breton a revelation that he could not find in the Old World. Upon return from Mexico Breton organized several exhibits and published an essay entitled “Souvenir de Mexique.” A rebel in his own right, Breton started his essay by praising the Mexican revolution of 1810 when Mexico shed the three-hundred-year colonial domination from Spain. He went on to admire its rebellious spirit and its Revolution of the twentieth century, which he compared to that of the USSR and called it “the most mysterious, the most lively ( vivace ) that allows it to always flourish again ( refleurir ) on the ruins of its own ancient civilization” (32). It should be noted that the Mexican revolution that took place between 1910 and 1917 brought about more cultural than economic or social gains. While the indigenous population, the peasantry and the working class did not enjoy any significant changes in their situation as the result of the seven-year-long bloody conflict, the monumental propaganda program designed by writer, philosopher and politician José Vasconcelos, also known as “cultural caudillo,” brought to life an unprecedented artistic endeavor by artists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and many more. For his essay, Breton chose eleven photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902-2002), an artist justly considered today the most important figure in 20th-century Latin American photography. The first three images were an image of cacti and flowers, a blood-stained picture of a dead male body entitled “After Death” and an image of a young woman photographed from her back against the background of a brick painted design. A striking characteristic of Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s photography is that he consistently rejected the picturesque. Instead he concentrated on the subtle, the sublime, the everyday through a very caring and attentive lens. This subtle approach was recognized as surrealist by Breton who embarked on organizing Álvarez Bravo’s first exhibit in Paris upon his return home. Unlike his friend and contemporary Tina Modotti, Álvarez Bravo was not involved or interested in political photography. Breton, belligerently political during many stages of his career, appreciated Álvarez Bravo for the subtle nuances of his apolitical and artistic images. “La buena fama durmiendo” (Good reputation sleeping) is known now as one of Álvarez Bravo’s most famous and most controversial images. Breton wanted to place it on the cover of the catalogue of his Mexico exhibition, yet he could not do it even in Paris. It was also rejected by the Mexican censorship for “obscene nudity.” Incidentally, Álvarez Bravo continued shooting nudes practically until his death at the venerable age of one hundred and is quoted as joking that “It wasn’t the sort of work one could complain about” (Kandel 2002). Breton continued his “Souvenir de Mexique” with Álvarez Bravo’s picture that shows an open door, a stack of several child-size caskets, a ladder and a gramophone placed in another casket. It is known now as Escala de escalas ( Scale of scales ) and was shot in La Lagunilla in 1931. It seems that this image responds like no other to what the surrealists had made their credo, a famous quote from the nineteenth- century Uruguayan-born French poet Isidore Ducasse, known under his pen name Count Lautréamont, who described the young male protagonist of his poetic novel Les Chants de Maldoror as being “as beautiful as the fortuitous encounter upon a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” (Nicholson 22). This quote famously comes up in writings by major figures of surrealism, such as Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, Luis Buñuel and others. Galina Bakhtiarova 417

Breton’s sojourn in Mexico certainly had a variety of outcomes. Upon returning to Paris he organized an exhibit of Mexican artists that included Álvarez Bravo and Frida Kahlo, who had a complex relationship with surrealism and its proponents. Having entertained Breton and his wife in Mexico, Kahlo accepted his invitation to come to Paris and be part of the exhibition that he was curating, yet things did not go as well as anticipated. Penniless for most of his life, Breton was not a very successful impresario and Frida was outraged at the difficulties that preceded the opening of the exhibition. In a letter from Paris to her sometime lover and confidant, a successful portrait photographer Nickolas Muray she did not hide her indignation with Breton: “In first place the question of the exhibition is all a damn mess. …Now Breton wants to exhibit together with my paintings 14 portraits of the XIX century (Mexicans), about 32 photographs of Álvarez Bravo, and lots of popular objects which he bought on the markets of Mexico— all this junk, can you beat that?” (Grimberg 20). Incidentally, Breton’s collection of objects that he brought from all over the world sold at exorbitant prices at an auction of his estate in 2003. Frida goes on complaining that she had to lend Breton 200 “bucks” so that he could restore the XIX century paintings to prepare the exhibit. Further on, she mentions that Breton had informed her that only two of her paintings would be exhibited as all others were considered by the gallerist Pierre Colle too shocking for the Parisian public. “I could of kill that guy and eat it afterwards, but I am so sick and tired of the whole affair that I decided to send everything to hell, and scram from the rotten Paris before I get nuts myself. You have no idea the kind of bitches these people are. They make me vomit. They are so damn ‘intellectual’ and rotten that I can’t stand them any more. It is really too much for my character – I rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas than to have any thing (sic) to do with those ‘artistic’ bitches of Paris” (Grimberg 21). Yet she not only accepted Breton’s offer, but even more interestingly, in the following year 1940 she created one of her most iconic works Las dos Fridas for an international exhibition of surrealism (Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo) in Mexico city organized by Peruvian poet César Moro and Austrian-born artist Wolfgang Paalen. This was an event of historic proportions. Cultural critic Luis Castañeda suggests that this iconic piece, actually one of her most famous ones, “translated the Bretonian notion of communicating vessels—the dialectical points of resolution between dream and waking, imagination and reality—as the bloody conduit that linked the two images of her unfolded self” (15). It has been noted that neither Diego Rivera nor Frida Kahlo were interested in being part of surrealism, yet it was particularly important to Breton to harness them to his movement. It seems that at the time it was very difficult to separate the artistic from the political. The well-known now relationship between Rivera, Breton, Trotsky and Kahlo perhaps speak about the virtual impossibility of separating politics and art in the first half of the twentieth century. Edward James (1907-1984) was born to one of the most privileged and wealthy families that had links to both the Old and the New World. His father had inherited one of the vastest North-American fortunes, while his mother, a Scottish socialite whose family estate bordered with Balmoral Castle, the favorite retreat of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, was known to be one of the great hostesses of the period. She often entertained the Prince of Wales and other notables, including the King of Spain, as guests at hunting and other parties. Educated at Eton and Oxford, James inherited vast fortunes at an early age and defied his family’s expectations by refusing to run for Parliament. Instead, he ran to Paris as many privileged and artistically-inclined did at the time. An international circle of poets, artists and ballet dancers became his milieu and soon he was paying for modernist ballet productions and was buying paintings in bulk from starving artists. An encounter with Salvador Dalí led to a famous collaboration on a sofa in the form of lips of May West and a now iconic phone with a lobster as a handset. As Dalí wrote in his autobiography, “Edward James, humming-bird poet, ordered aphrodisiac lobster-telephones, bought the best dalis (sic), and was naturally the richest” (In Kusunoki 206). James had amassed the largest collection of surrealist paintings in the world, which was famously sold by Christie’s two years after his death in 1986. Later in life, he would say, “If I am a surrealist it is not because I got linked to the movement, but because I was born one” ( The Secret Life of Edward James , 1975, 7.57). The art curator of his major estate in Britain, Sharon-Michu Kusunoki believes that his life was guided by a tension between the rational and the irrational: “While exposed to art at a very young age, he stood apart from the 418 Surrealism on American Soil: André Breton, Edward James and Others in the Jungle

mainstream, seeing inconsistency in the orthodox and seeking instead to incorporate disparities in a harmonious celebration of the object” (205). His approach to the marvelous manifested itself in interior design and decorations of his numerous houses where he padded walls with leather and wove the footprints of his onetime wife ballerina and his favorite pets into the rugs and carpets. As Kusunoki notes, “Unlike the surrealists surrounding André Breton, Dalí and James did not seek to build a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious. Instead they sought to open ‘reality’ to the imagination by exposing the eye to environments so constructed as to generate hallucinatory paranoia. Simultaneously actors and spectators on a Surrealist stage, James and Dalí viewed the physical world as malleable material with the ability to undergo constant physical transformation” (208). James’s magnum opus was his “Garden of Eden” that he chose to build in the Mexican jungle. Having lived in Los Angeles in the 1940s, James came to Mexico in search of calm and beauty. He was long fascinated with exotic fauna and flora. His life-long passion, some call it obsession, were butterflies and orchids. Both abound in the Mexican sierras. On one fine day in 1948, James and his companions came across an area with multiple pools of water and gorgeous waterfalls. He purchased the land and called it Las Pozas, the pools. During the first decade or so of owning this lush land, James approached it as a canvas on which to create what he called his “Garden of Eden.” He brought in more than 20 000 orchids, deer, ocelots, parrots and other birds. In 1962 he started building concrete structures of diverse forms and shapes that simultaneously complemented and stood out in this paradisiacal landscape. Given his unlimited supply of money and his exuberant imagination, the project occupied the last twenty two years of his life. There are thirty-six structures spread out over eighty acres of the jungle in this Garden of Imagination, as he himself called it. When he started, his constructions resembled the classical architectural forms of European civilizations: canopied entrances and Doric-like columns were an homage to the Old-World civilization and art. Yet as the project grew and James “matured” in the words of Kusunoki, he became more and more conscious of his environment and responded to it in new spontaneous ways creating a surreal landscape of his own. There are three-story stairs that lead nowhere and end abruptly. There are platforms high in the sky that have no railings, rooms without walls, houses shaped like sea animals and brightly colored concrete skeletons. In recent decades this exuberant fantasy of one eccentric Englishman has progressed from one man’s personal obsession to a cultural artifact and a tourist attraction. It has also been embraced by Mexicans as an intrinsic part of their XX-century culture through multiple publications, documentaries and the like.

Conclusion

Latin American reality, its nature, history and spirituality gave birth to a plethora of artistic expressions associated with Surrealism. From André Breton’s fascination with Mexican cultures and traditions, such as The Day of the Dead and Frida Kahlo’s oeuvre, sensual photos by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, works by the artists who called themselves the Dyn Circle, enigmatic paintings by Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo to James’s extravagant stairways that lead nowhere, Surrealism evolved and transformed Latin American and European art in the twentieth century.

References

1. Breton, André. “Souvenir de Mexique,” N°12-13, 1939. 2. Castañeda, Luis M. “Surrealism and National Identity in Mexico Changing Perceptions, 1940-1968,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 3: 1-2 (2009), 9-29. 3. Grimberg, Salomon. I Will Never Forget You. Frida Kahlo and Nicholas Muray: Unpublished Photographs and Letters . San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006. Galina Bakhtiarova 419

4. Kandel, Jonathan. “Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Photographer, Dies at 100,’’ New York Times , Oct 21, 2002, Accessed on Nov 25, 2017. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/21/arts/manuel-alvarez-bravo-photographer-dies-at-.html 5. Kusunoki, Sharon-Michi. “Edward James Architect of Surrealism.” Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design . Ed. By Ghislaine Wood. V&A Publications: Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 2007. 205-13. 6. Melly, George. The Secret Life of Edward James . Documentary, 1975. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oosdgHLTGY 7. Nicholson, Melanie . Surrealism in Latin American Literature: Searching for Breton’s Ghost . Palgrave Macmillan: 2013.