The Minotaur’s Revolution: On Animals and Politics

MINOTAURE, THE LAVISH ART, LITERATURE, and culture magazine published by Albert Skira with Tériade as its initial director, appeared in 1933 and produced its last issue, numbered 12–13, in 1939. While Minotaure did not start as a Surrealist publication, it was soon taken over by the Surrealist group. Precisely because it was not an exclusive Surrealist organ, the movement’s overt political views and positions seemed to remain outside its pages, following the explicit desire of Skira.¹ In this respect, Minotaure was diametrically opposed to the movement’s magazine that immediately preceded it, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution,² which, in a very austere presentation that left little place for illustrations and the visual arts, deployed in its six issues from 1930 to 1933 a political position subordinated to the French Communist Party and the directives of the Third International.³ This magazine, along with La Révolution surréaliste (1924–1929), framed the first ten years of the movement’s existence within a rhetoric of revolution, announced in the titles and recalled in every issue. This rhetoric seemed to be abruptly discontinued when the Surrealists opted to coalesce behind a magazine whose title invoked a mythical Greek monster, halfbull and half-man. Is it, however, plausible to accept that during a period marked by heightened political activity—albeit outside the realm of the Communist Party—the Surrealists abandoned all political aspiration within the magazine that they espoused? Is their disappointment over the Communist party and ensuing estrangement from it a sufficient explanation for their turn to an ‘apolitical’ forum, in which benign references to zoomorphic myths replaced the hope for a universal and generalized political revolution? In other words, within a movement that was remarkably consistent and continuous for all its diversity, is there a link between the revolutions announced in the 1920s and the hybrid animal-man of the 1930s?

From the first issue of Minotaure the editors made clear that the new magazine aspired to play an important role in the world of art and culture:

Minotaure publiera, le premier, la production d’artistes dont l’œuvre est d’intérêt universel. […] C’est-à-dire que Minotaure affirmera sa volonté de retrouver, de réunir et de résumer des éléments qui ont constitué l’esprit du mouvement moderne pour en étendre le rayonnement, et il s’attachera, grâce à un essai de mise au point de caractère encyclopédique, à désencombrer le terrain artistique pour redonner à l’art en mouvement son essor universel.⁴

The magazine hoped to establish a universal sphere for artists and their work, a recurring theme in the magazine. This universal claim was repeated in the editorial of issue number five of 1934, in which the universal, the entire world, and the countries in which Minotaure circulated were conflated:

Les journaux, les revues du monde entier consacrèrent des articles importants à l’activité de Minotaure et qui prouvent l’intérêt suscité par la revue auprès de l’élite de tous les pays où elle a pu déjà pénétrer. Ces encouragements nous confirment aujourd’hui dans notre volonté de créer un organe universel, vraiment moderne pour traiter sérieusement et aussi avec cohésion toutes les questions culturelles présentes.⁵

It was by making the world only as large as their own reach, and thus ensuring that they cover it all, that they effectively, if perversely, asserted the realization of the magazine’s aspirations. Furthermore, to be truly modern is also to be genuinely universal; both qualities, modernity and universality, were, according to the editors, what made the magazine relevant.

These two qualities were also embodied in the title of the magazine, along with a certain degree of violence. “La revue à tête de bête,” as it was described in the editorial “Éternité de Minotaure,” “se distingue de toute autre publication à tête de membre de l’Institut ou de conservateur de musée.”⁶ Minotaure set itself apart from other publications by decapitating the intellectual, the academic or the museum...