André Breton, Edward James and Others in the Jungle
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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 surrealism 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 Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, 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 415 416 Surrealism on American Soil: André Breton, Edward James and Others in the Jungle 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.