Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968 (review)

In the title of her book, Alyce Mahon indicates two of her chief goals. To counteract the notion of a "marginalization" suffered by surrealism after 1945 and indeed the relative dearth of scholarly literature on the period, she devotes well over half of the book to the activities of the movement from the end of the Second World War on. And to correct the tendency in much of the scholarship to treat surrealism narrowly as an artistic or literary movement, she stresses its involvement in politics, especially a politics of the erotic. She argues that far from being on the margins, surrealism in the postwar period operated in the thick of intellectual debates in France and, in its ideals and in the installation of its exhibitions, had a considerable effect on new artistic movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, the collaborative way in which the exhibitions were created continued an emphasis on group activity which had marked the movement from its beginnings in the early 1920s and was itself an expression of collectivist, radical politics.

Mahon embeds these arguments in a broad survey of surrealist activities in France from the "International Surrealist Exhibition," held in Paris in early 1938, to their involvement in artistic manifestations tied to the uprisings in Paris of May 1968. The last major public expressions of the surrealists' politics, these activities took place between the death of their leader André Breton in September 1966 and the official end of the movement in October 1969. In her coverage of the last thirty years of the movement, she parallels Gérard Durozoi's much longer and broader-ranging History of the Surrealist Movement (English edition, 2002), though she dwells in considerably greater detail on the key exhibitions staged by the group and connects them more thoroughly with political issues. Like Lewis Kachur, in his Displaying the Marvelous (2001), she stresses the importance of the installations as artistic expressions in themselves, but she focuses on the postwar trajectory of the movement and its influence in France rather than in the United States as Kachur had. The survey nature of the book, however, impedes Mahon's central arguments in places, where a pell-mell stringing together of facts about the group's general activities and peregrinations detracts from her focus.

How the surrealists' much vaunted revolutionary politics manifested themselves is a key question often not addressed in the literature on the movement. Their explicit political manifestos were evidently one example, but Mahon makes clear that their exhibition installations and attendant performances were, often implicitly, another. From the postwar years she cites the tracts protesting French actions in Indochina and in Algeria, and supporting Hungarian resistance to the Russians and the Cuban revolution, along with their implicit affirmation of the Black Power movement in the United States. Seldom did these world issues register specifically in the art of the surrealists, at least in the account offered here. The creative literary production isn't discussed at all in this regard, thus furthering the emphasis on visual production frequently encountered. Exceptions among artworks are a collage by Jean-Jacques Lebel and a giant collaborative work, a painting over sixteen feet wide, both from 1960, protesting the Algerian War. In addition, Mahon attempts unconvincingly to connect Picasso's Women of Algiers series (1955) to the war.

Mahon presents the erotic and sexual issues in surrealist art as constituting the principal political content, though this could be aimed at governmental politics more generally, especially during the period of the Algerian War (1954–62), when a repressive censorship reigned and the shock effect of sexual imagery could have a broader sting. Her first case for how the erotico-political appeared in surrealist production is the "International Surrealist Exhibition" of 1938. Here the entrance corridor was famously staged as a street lined with female fashion mannequins, each presented dressed, undressed, or bizarrely accessorized by one of the male surrealists. Established feminist analysis of the surrealists' treatment of woman as the...