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  • Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968
  • Katharine Conley
Alyce Mahon . Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005. 240 pp.

Alyce Mahon's exuberant reappraisal of the last twenty years of the official surrealist movement wonderfully affirms surrealism's vitality up through the student movements of May 1968, actively supported by the surrealists. She emphatically and persuasively refutes the common notion that surrealism ended with World War II by showing not only the vibrancy of the movement and its participants in their trajectories from Paris to New York and back again but also by studying the influential series of exhibitions put on by the surrealists in 1938, 1942, 1947, 1959, and 1965. She studies the exhibition catalogues which served as platforms for surrealist theories about art and society and the journals that continued to express surrealist ideas about art and politics, showing just how politically engaged the surrealists remained—staunch in their anti-colonialism through their protests against the wars in Indochina and Algeria, and, in May 1968, in their support of [End Page 168] the student protests. She demonstrates how many young artists now recognized as significant in their own right, like Pierre Alechinsky, were involved in surrealism in the post-war years. And finally her presentations of the exhibitions and journals confirm the surrealists's commitment, evident in the 1930s and more obvious after the war, to the inclusion of women artists and writers like Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Mimi Parent, Meret Oppenheim, Maria Martins, and Joyce Mansour.

Mahon effectively argues for post-1938 surrealism as remaining true to its initial engagement with an exploration of the Freudian unconscious, particularly "Freud's connection between dream and repressed desire. . . . Freud recognized that art could make the unconscious conscious, it could liberate repressed instincts and, in the process, it could challenge reason and repression" (14). She shows how the surrealists used eros as a political device, a means for making social commentary at once in their art, their writing, and their sensually lavish, provocatively interactive exhibition spaces. It is Mahon's persuasive contention that "the Surrealists recognized the potential of Eros as one of man's primary means of unsettling and interrogating reality" (15–16). Using Julia Kristeva's version of the Freudian uncanny as abject, a subversive, disruptive force that "disturbs identity, system, order," Mahon confirms how the male surrealists "aligned themselves with the feminine from the outset" in the 1920s, in order to "celebrate the erotic power of the female body and the uncanny power of the feminine in us all" (17–19). She then teases out the continued use of "intra-uterine" spaces within the exhibitions that marked the late 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, which extended the movement's fascination with the feminine as a challenge to Cartesian rationalism. In André Breton's introductory essay to the EROS exhibition of 1959 he claimed that "eroticism was the 'highest common factor' in Surrealist art since the beginning," confirming the continuity of the post-war explorations with surrealism's earliest experiments (169).

At once a history of the movement from 1938 until the announcement of surrealism's demise in Le Monde in 1969 and a critical study focused on the surrealists' on-going fascination with a Freudian understanding of erotic desire within the unconscious as a subversive social force, and the relation of this fascination at once to art production and to politics, Mahon's book celebrates surrealism's persistent [End Page 169] force and influence up through the student protests of May 1968. She reproduces the photograph of policemen breaking up furniture in a classroom at Nanterre published by the surrealists in their journal Archibras in March 1968 in support of student activism at the university and she analyzes the tract they published in support of the students on May 5th, 1968, which stated: "The surrealist movement is at the disposal of students for all practical action destined to create a revolutionary situation in this country" (206–07). She explains the challenge posed to Breton upon his return to Paris from New York by Maurice Nadeau's History of Surrealism, which placed the movement in the past and seemed...

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