Surrealism and Australia: Towards a World History of Surrealism*

Surrealism and Australia: towards a world history of Surrealism* Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson There have been over the past few decades several art shows dedicated to global aspects of well-known art movements. World Impressionism, Feminism and Conceptualism have all had their turn at being anthologised.1 But there has not been to our knowledge a similar exhibition undertaken with regard to Surrealism. We attempt to write here the Australian entry for such an exhibition. However, before doing so, we might speak for a moment about the special place such a project would have because, if Surrealism can now be seen from a global perspective, it also like those other art movements casts a particular light upon this globalism. In some ways, we must try to think the fact that, if today Surrealism can be seen from a global perspective, the very notion of globalism is ‘surrealist’: not only an aspiration of the original movement (as globalism was also implied in Impressionism and Feminism), but itself a ‘surrealist’ idea. Of course, Surrealism is famously – at least at the beginning – a movement strongly identified with a single figure, a single place and a single time: André Breton in Paris in 1924. Breton’s particular genius, we might say, was to take the post-War energies of Dada, which happened variously in Zurich, Hanover, Berlin and New York, and involved artists from many different countries (Belgium, Romania and Holland), and out of this dispersal constitute a coherent, centrally organised art movement. And he was able to keep its fire alight – for Surrealism was a particularly long-lived art movement – for some 30 years. But at the same time Surrealism – we might say due both to Breton’s own personal inclinations and the very nature of the movement – was also expansionist. With an internationalism already built into his Communism, Breton’s expatriatism in New York during the 1940s became crucial to that city’s artists. And equally important at the time was Breton’s engagement with Surrealism in Mexico, which found its ultimate expression in the International Surrealist Exhibition, held in Mexico City in 1940. And equally Breton’s famed collection of the art of the Sepik River in his flat at 42 rue Fontaine in Paris just after the War was also an attempt to take Surrealism around the world, in something like an extension of Picasso’s and others’ ‘primitivism’ some 30 years previously. However, more than Breton’s own actions, the logic of Surrealism is already effectively globalist – and perhaps even more so than those other art movements. It is not *This essay was originally delivered at Dispersed Identities: Sexuality, Surrealism and the Global Avant-Gardes, University of Melbourne, 3-4 February 2012. The authors would like to thank Anthony White for his kind invitation to participate at this conference. We would also like to thank both the reviewer for the Journal of Art Historiography, Darren Jorgensen, for his many useful comments and suggestions and the editor of the Journal, Richard Woodfield, for his care and attention in editing and laying out this essay. 1 See Norma Broude, ed, World Impressionism: The International Movement 1860-1920, New York: Harry Abrams, 1994; Cornelia Butler, ed, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007; and Jane Farver, ed, Global Conceptualism, New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999. Journal of Art Historiography Number 9 December 2013 Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson Surrealism and Australia: towards a world history of Surrealism about an outer landscape (like Impressionism) but about an inner landscape. It is not about a particular social subject (like Feminism) but about a universal unconscious subject. It attempts to put forward an argument not about art (like Conceptualism) but about life. And, more than this, once Surrealism is proposed, it is seen to be everywhere. That is, for all of Breton’s efforts to take Surrealism to Mexico, he found that once there Mexico was already surrealist. Japan too, which Breton never visited, not only had itself its own identified Surrealist movement, but this movement subsequently discovered that Japan was surrealist before Surrealism.2 More particularly, from the perspective we undertake here, following on from (but in a way reversing) the ‘primitivist’ logic of his interest in the art of the Sepik River, Breton discovers that Australian Indigenous art is already surreal, as he acknowledges in his Preface to Czech artist Karel Kupka’s Un art à l’état brut [The Dawn of Art: Painting and Sculpture of Australian Aborigines], a forerunner to Kupka’s later Doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne.3 Thus it was that Paddy Compass Namatbara’s large bark depicting two Maam figures ended up on the wall of Breton’s studio on the Left Bank after the War. (It is also something like this that can be seen in Adelaide-born Stella Bowen’s Le Masque (1930), painted in Paris deep into the failure of her marriage to Ford Maddox Ford, with its extraordinary split image of a white bourgeois woman holding up an African mask, her right hand with white bracelet and ring and her left hand with black bracelet and ring. Here too, if there is a similar ‘regressive’ impulse as in Breton, there is also something like the inevitable search by all avant-garde movements – even Bowen’s relatively mild version of Surrealism – for historical antecedents, the desire to attach themselves to something in the past.) Figure 1 Stella Bowen, Le Masque (1930) oil on wood panel, 35 x 26 cms Courtesy Australian War Memorial, Canberra * * * 2 See on this Majella Munroe, Communicating Vessels: The Surrealist Movement in Japan 1925-70, Cambridge: Enzo Press, 2012. 3 Karel Kupka, Un art à l’état brut, Lausanne: La Guilde du Livre, 1962 (translated as The Dawn of Art: Painting and Sculpture of Australian Aborigines, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1963). Kupka completed his Doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1968 and later wrote his more well-known Aborigènes d’Australie, Paris: Publications de la Société des Oceaniste 24, Musée de l’Homme, 1972. For an excellent account of Kupka and his relationship to Aboriginal art, see Nicholas Rothwell, ‘The Collector’, The Monthly (Melbourne), October 2007, 28-37. 2 Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson Surrealism and Australia: towards a world history of Surrealism We do not immediately leap in this paper to the conclusion that Surrealism is already everywhere, but rather begin by tracing the first historical passage of Surrealism out of Paris. For as much as Surrealism looked inwards and backwards, it also looked outwards and forwards. Despite its leader’s attempts to contain it institutionally (its internal struggles were legendary, its expulsions innumerable), the movement ultimately went beyond Breton. Its popular heroes, Dalí, Magritte, Bataille and Artaud, all worked beyond his official patronage and in one way or another rejected his published manifestoes. And this is seen no more clearly – involving also Surrealism’s shift into another language – than in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, held at the New Burlington Galleries in London, and involving some 400 works by 69 artists from 14 countries. For Breton himself, the show ‘marked the highest point in the graph of the influence of our movement’.4 A high water mark, we might say, but also a shift in the tide, for if the show was the moment of Surrealism’s first outpouring beyond Paris, it was also the beginning of the loss of Breton’s own personal control over the movement. Although he, along with his close colleagues Paul Éluard and Man Ray, was on the French organising committee and gave a lecture at it, the show was in fact driven by the Englishmen Roland Penrose and Herbert Read. Earlier that year, Read had edited Surrealism, the first authoritative account of the movement (which included a reproduction of Christchurch-born Len Lye’s Marks and Spencer in a Japanese Garden (1930)). Indeed, three years before in 1933 he had written his Art Now, which already discussed Surrealism (and which included, at least in its first edition, a reproduction of the work of Sydney-born Roy de Maistre). It is true that no Australians were involved in the original formulation of Surrealism. However, by the time of the International Surrealist Exhibition Read through his English- language popularisations had not only created the conditions for the reception of Surrealism in England but also opened more widely English modernism to the outside. As the art historian and aesthetician Harold Osborne was later to write in his Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Art: ‘The show came upon the backwater of England’s 1930s like a bombshell’.5 For many British artists, indeed, the International Surrealist Exhibition offered the first direct access to Surrealist works. Nonetheless, the show already included the work of the young English Surrealists Graham Sutherland, Cecil Collins, John Minton and the Birmingham group that included Conroy Maddox and John Melville, alongside the more established Giacometti, Arp, Klee, Miró, de Chirico, Dalí, Pierre Roy, Magritte, Ernst and Masson. And this selection demonstrates that by this time Surrealism could not be said to come from only one place and was outside of any single person’s prerogative to adjudicate upon it.6 Remarkably, as well as having a crucial impact on Australian artists living in England, the show was also extensively reviewed and discussed in Australia under such headlines as ‘Painting the Subconscious’ (West Australian) and ‘Surrealism – Exploitation of 4 Breton cited in Roger Horricks, Len Lye: A Biography, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001, 159, endnote 3. 5 Harold Osborne, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981, 530.

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