The Rise of Surrealism The Rise of Surrealism Cubism, Dada, and the Pursuit of the Marvelous Willard Bohn State University of New York Press PUBLISHED BY S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS A LBANY © 2002 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval sys- tem or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the written permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production and book design, Laurie Searl Marketing, Anne M.Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data LIC TO COME 10987654321 For Anita and Heather, with all my love CONTENTS List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi 1 Introduction 1 2 Probing the Fourth Dimension: Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Weber 7 3 The Demise of the Object: Francis Picabia and Marius de Zayas 29 4 Giorgio de Chirico and the Solitude of the Sign 73 5 From Surrealism to Surrealism: Guillaume Apollinaire and André Breton 121 6 The Surrealist Image in Literature and Art 141 7 An Extraordinary Voyage: J.V. Foix and Joan Miró 171 vii viii THE RISE OF SURREALISM 8 The Hour of the Sphinx: André Breton and Joan Miró 195 9 Coda 211 Notes 215 Bibliography 235 Index 245 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 3.1 Marius de Zayas, Alfred Stieglitz 33 Figure 3.2 Soul-Catcher, Pukapuka (Danger Island) 34 Figure 3.3. Marius de Zayas, Francis Picabia 41 Figure 3.4 Marius de Zayas, Theodore Roosevelt 42 Figure 3.5 Marius de Zayas, Agnes Ernst Meyer 46 Figure 3.6 Marius de Zayas, Paul B. Haviland 47 Figure 3.7 Marius de Zayas, Guillaume Apollinaire 49 Figure 3.8 Marius de Zayas, 291 Throws Back Its Forelock 50 Figure 3.9 Francis Picabia, Mechanical Expression Seen Through Our Own Mechanical Expression 52 Figure 3.10 Francis Picabia, Here, Here is Stieglitz 60 Figure 3.11 Francis Picabia, Here is Haviland 62 Figure 3.12 Francis Picabia, The Saint of Saints 63 Figure 3.13 Francis Picabia, De Zayas! De Zayas! 66 Figure 3.14 Francis Picabia, Portrait of an American Girl in a State of Nudity 67 Figure 4.1 Giorgio de Chirico, The Phantom 77 Figure 4.2 Giorgio de Chirico, The Mathematicians 83 Figure 4.3 Giorgio de Chirico, The Disquieting Muses 84 ix x THE RISE OF SURREALISM Figure 4.4 Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of the Oracle 95 Figure 4.5 Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon 97 Figure 4.6 Giorgio de Chirico, The Child 99 Figure 4.7 Giorgio de Chirico, The Song of Love 102 Figure 4.8 Giorgio de Chirico, Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire 104 Figure 4.9 Giorgio de Chirico, The Torment of the Poet 106 Figure 4.10 Giorgio de Chirico, The Endless Voyage 107 Figure 4.11 Giorgio de Chirico, Autumnal Meditation 111 Figure 4.12 Giorgio de Chirico, The Seer 113 Figure 4.13 Giorgio de Chirico, The Philosopher and the Poet 115 Figure 4.14 Giorgio de Chirico, The Seers 117 Figure 7.1 Joan Miró, The Catalan 184 Figure 7.2 Joan Miró, The Circus 190 Figure 8.1 Joan Miró, Woman and Bird 197 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the late Georgia O’Keeffe, Rodrigo de Zayas, and Yale University for allowing me to examine and publish excerpts from letters in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Thanks go as well to Dorothy Norman, who provided me with a key portion of a (then) unknown manuscript by Marius de Zayas entitled “How,When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York.” I am also grateful to Gabrielle-Buffet Picabia for shar- ing her memories of Francis Picabia and Dada with me. Special thanks go to Professor William A. Camfield, who offered precious advice about Marius de Zayas and Francis Picabia at key junctures in this project. In addition, I am in- debted to James Thrall Soby, with whom I was able to discuss Giorgio de Chirico on several occasions.Thanks are also due to François Chapon and the staff of the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris, who helped me with various problems. Carol Ruyle and the Interlibrary Loan staff at Milner Library, Illinois State University, filled my extravagant requests promptly and efficiently. Joan Winters and the staff in the Circulation Department provided equally conscientious service and were consistently helpful. I am also grateful to the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Mo- derna Museet (Stockholm), the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne (Paris), the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Connecticut), and the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, Connecticut) for permission to reproduce works by Giorgio de Chirico and Joan Miró in their collections. In addition, a gener- ous grant from the College of Arts and Sciences at Illinois State University xi xii THE RISE OF SURREALISM allowed me to include many of the illustrations. Much of the original research was facilitated by three University Research Grants from the same institution. Preliminary versions of several sections appeared in the following publi- cations and are reprinted with their kind permission: “Giorgio de Chirico and the Solitude of the Sign,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, CXVII, 1467 (April 1991), pp. 169–87; “Giorgio de Chirico and the Paradigmatic Method,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, CVI, 1398–99 (July–August 1985), pp. 35–41; “Semiosis and Intertextuality in Breton’s ‘Femme et Oiseau,’” Romanic Re- view, LXXVI, 4 (November 1985), pp. 415–28, copyright by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York;“Picabia’s ‘Mechanical Ex- pression’ and the Demise of the Object,” The Art Bulletin, LXVII, 4 (December 1985), pp. 673–77; “The Abstract Vision of Marius de Zayas,” The Art Bulletin, LXII, 3 (September 1980), pp. 434–52; “Mirroring Miró: J.V. Foix and the Surrealist Adventure,” The Surrealist Adventure in Spain, ed. C. Brian Morris (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1991), pp. 40–61; “At the Cross-Roads of Surrealism: Apollinaire and Breton,” Romance Quarterly XXVII, 1 (1980), pp. 85–96 (Reprinted with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educa- tional Foundation. Published by Heldref Publications, 1319 Eighteenth St. N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036-1802. Copyright © 2000); “From Surreal- ism to Surrealism: Apollinaire and Breton,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXXVI, 2 (Winter 1977), pp. 197–210. 1 INTRODUCTION The present volume represents neither a history nor a theoretical study of Surrealism. It seeks neither to chronicle the successive phases of its evolution nor, for the most part, to analyze the principles that govern its expression. On the contrary, it examines certain developments that prepared the way for the Surrealist movement, considered in its international context, as well as the tri- umph of Surrealism itself. Had the movement been founded a mere twenty years earlier, before the Cubists and the Dadaists left their mark, it would never have assumed the form in which we know it today. As will become ap- parent, the Surrealists benefited both directly and indirectly from their avant-garde predecessors, who served as important models and influenced them in numerous ways. Although the book is concerned with historical schools to some extent, I have preferred to concentrate on some of the artists and writers who played a key role in the elaboration of Surrealism. Each chapter is devoted to one or two persons who deserve to be much better known, both in their own right and in the light of their contributions to modern aesthetics. Although a few of these figures have achieved a certain no- toriety, most of the others have received little or no recognition. For every Marcel Duchamp or Salvador Dalí who has risen to prominence, dozens of equally talented individuals have been consigned to relative obscurity. For better or worse (I hope the former), the study that follows is highly ambitious. Spanning the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, it surveys half a dozen countries situated on three different continents. Among the var- ious movements that receive extended commentary, four are especially 1 2 THE RISE OF SURREALISM prominent: Cubism (both literary and artistic), Metaphysical Art, Dada, and Surrealism. Within the framework constituted by these schools, the work ex- amines a number of distinctive styles, such as machinism and abstraction, and encompasses a series of related topics. Much of the book is concerned with competing artistic models and with different strategies for creating Surrealist and proto-Surrealist works. Much is devoted to the dynamics of the imagery that artists and writers chose to employ and to the new roles it assumed in their compositions. Utilizing examples taken from a number of countries, in- cluding France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and the United States, the volume analyzes their aversion to mimesis and the solutions they devised to replace it. As much as anything, it considers how poets and painters sought to redefine their relationship to the modern world, which was fraught with paradox. For just as the discovery of a new reality demanded to be expressed by a new realism, the creation of a new realism disclosed a brand new reality.1 As the reader will discover, each chapter investigates one or more prob- lems that, in many cases, have puzzled scholars for decades. Following the Introduction, the initial chapter examines Guillaume Apollinaire’s treatment of the fourth dimension, which, like Max Weber’s, has appeared to some ob- servers to be inexplicable.