Surrealism (review)

Surrealism is part of the Phaidon "Themes and Movements" series which includes similarly pitched surveys of The Artist's Body, Art & Photography, Land and Environmental Art, Art e Povera, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. Surrealism, then, might seem to fit quite happily into the "movements" side of this rubric, the surrealists having been, for many years, a going collective concern, a movement you could actually join, leave, or be kicked out of. But there has always been a world of difference between "surrealism" (as an attitude or type of activity) and the group of writers and artists that first gave the term its meaning. The legacies of the term, and its thread-bare adjunct "surreal," take in both the obsessive repetition of these early gambits, played out into the long grass of the 1960s and a whole raft of contemporary artistic practices that can be traced back to an original moment in interwar Paris.

In fact, however, what makes it difficult to deal with surrealism in the form of a monolithic survey is less the horse-trading over what and who to include (usually limited to how late to let it run before giving it up as dead), but the more immediate problem that surrealism can never be tied down to any one media or form of expression: it was always as textual as visual and it is often the less imminently visible material that cleaves closest to the aims and principles of the term.

Mary Ann Caws, the volume's editor, is uniquely placed to contend with the visual and textual balancing act required of such an account. Based in the discipline of literature rather than art or art history, she has been a principal translator of surrealist poetry and prose. As an authority on surrealist art her interest and expertise has always been firmly grounded in an appreciation and understanding of the pervasiveness of "poetic" imagery across media and genre. This necessarily dual approach is evident in her important pendant publications for MIT, Surrealist Painters and Poets (2001), which deals with translations of key texts by both, and The Surrealist Look (1997), a collection of Caws's essays on what is described as the "Erotics of Encounter." The implication of the intractable interdependence of text and image in surrealism put forward by these paired volumes is carried through to great effect in the Phaidon book, which, sensibly, devotes almost a third of its pages to translations of surrealist texts. These edited extracts are taken from a wide variety of sources, ranging from André Breton's oft-quoted manifestos and statements to obscure, forgotten essays, poems, and results from surrealist games. Caws has wisely included the broadest possible range of contributors so that even texts leveled against mainstream surrealism such as Georges Bataille's important essay "Primitive Art," (1930) or Theodor Adorno's retrospective "Looking Back on Surrealism" (1956) find a place. What the translations add up to then, is a brilliant device to render what might otherwise be "yet another" survey of surrealism extremely useful. Students wishing to engage with the subject will not be able to avoid the conclusion, however hard they might try, that there is more to surrealism than meets the eye. And what is more, reaching this conclusion will not require, as it has in the past, that they buy separate volumes on surrealist art and writing.

There is another student-friendly aspect of the book in the frequent and well-observed references to secondary texts made throughout the short entries that accompany individual "works." Thus, for example, photographs by Brassai and Man Ray are linked not only to their surrealist site of publication (the journal Minotaure) but to Rosalind Krauss's reading of the images in the landmark exhibition catalogue L'Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism (1986). This judicious tactic works throughout the illustrated central sections of the book, taking the reader from primary visual material to authoritative reference points for further reading, drawn, it should be noted, from both sides of the Atlantic. The result is a survey...