Surrealism and the Visual Arts: Theory and Reception (review)

Kim Grant's Surrealism and the Visual Arts meticulously situates surrealism within the historical context of contemporary debates about modern art in interwar Paris, carefully allowing to emerge, as they were formulated, the shifting definitions of surrealist art—from automatic drawings to paintings and objects. A useful corollary to Elza Adamowicz's excellent Ceci n'est pas un tableau: les écrits surréalistes sur l'art (L'Age d'Homme, 2004), Grant's study goes beyond a re-evaluation of what the surrealists themselves wrote about art, particularly André Breton, but also Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon, Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, Tristan Tzara, and Salvador Dalí, and focuses more on how Breton's contemporaries responded to surrealist theories about art and the works themselves, by such artists as Ernst, Joan Miró, André Masson, and Man Ray. Grant contextualizes the oft-repeated conviction that surrealist art was always rooted in poetry within broader debates about visual poetry and lyricism in modern art. Specifically she focuses on the ways in which poetic thought for the surrealists was predominantly a mental activity and thus potentially as much a source for images as for words. And she effectively shows how, despite the fact that Breton repeatedly seemed to privilege words over images, he consistently valued the production of all sorts of material forms that were as often visual as they were verbal.

Grant carefully examines the ways in which surrealists like Breton struggled to define artistic production, beginning with the long footnote in the first Manifesto where he admits that had he been a visual artist instead of a poet he might have seen more than heard the initial phrase to enter into his mind automatically: "There is a man cut in two by the window." She continues with a study of Max Morise's "Les Yeux enchantés," his influential essay on automatism as both problematically visual as well as verbal from the first issue of surrealist journal La Révolution surréaliste, situating it within an extended analysis of this inaugural issue. She also devotes much attention to the initial publication of Breton's "Surrealism and Painting" in installments in the same journal, again contextualizing it within the journal itself and within art historical debates of the time. Perhaps Grant's greatest contribution to surrealist criticism resides in the way she also provides a view of the movement from outside of it: through close readings of Christian Zervos and Tériade's rival journal Cahiers d'art, culminating in the moment when, in 1935, Cahiers d'art and its editors eventually adopted a surrealist perspective, evident also in Tériade's lavish art journal Minotaure, launched in 1933.

Grant shows how surrealist theory was constantly evolving and yet always true to Breton's insistence that surrealism was less a style than an active "formulation of imaginative creation itself" (88). Her readings of Breton's essays on automatic inspiration from the 1932 and 1933, "L'Objet fantôme" and "Le Message automatique," published respectively in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution and in Minotaure, are particularly insightful in the ways in which she shows how, for Breton, poetic thought "begins in the concrete world and returns to that world" through images that anchor and orient these texts (299). In both complex and multivalent essays Breton's images—of a "silence envelope" and a scallop shell—are "generated by a comparable search for words" that reunite words and images in order to unlock for the writer the meanings of both because "the significance found in the visual image is latent in its verbal cognate": one illuminates the other (299).

Grant also helps to explain the ways in which surrealism has tended to be defined art historically—not so much through the movement's own voices as through the words of its critics. She concludes with an essay by Tériade from 1936 that effectively institutionalized surrealism in a way that also defined it for decades as a...