SURREALISM IN ART Page: 7
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Surrealism in Art:
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Dadaism, therefore, replaces the nihilism of aesthetic culture by a new nihilism, which not only questions the value of art but of the whole human situation. For, as it is stated in one of its manifestoes, "measured by the standard of eternity, all human action is futile."
But the Mallarmé tradition by no means comes to an end. The "rhetoricians" André Gide, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, and the later Rilke continue the symbolist trend in spite of their affinity to surrealism. They are the representatives of a difficult and exquisite art, they believe in the "magic of the word," their poetry is based on the spirit of language, of literature and tradition. Joyce Ulysses and T. S. Eliot The Waste Land appear simultaneously, in the year 1922, and strike the two keynotes of the new literature; the one work moves in an expressionistic and surrealistic, the other in a symbolistic and formalistic direction. The intellectualistic approach is common to both, but Eliot's art springs from the "experience of culture," Joyce's from the "experience of pure, prime existence," as defined by Friedrich Gundolf, who introduces these concepts in the preface to his book on Goethe, thereby expressing a typical thought-pattern of the period. In one case historical culture, intellectual tradition and the legacy of ideas and forms is the source of inspiration, in the other the direct facts of life and the problems of human existence. With T. S. Eliot and Paul Valéry the primary foundation is always an idea, a thought, a problem, with Joyce and Kafka an irrational experience, a vision, a metaphysical or mythological image. Gundolf's conceptual distinction is the record of a dichotomy which is being carried through in the whole field of modern art. Cubism and constructivism, on the one side, and expressionism and surrealism, on the other, embody strictly formal and form-destroying tendencies respectively which now appear for the first time side by side in such sharp contradiction. The situation is all the more peculiar as the two opposing styles display the most remarkable hybrid forms and combinations, so that one often acquires more the impression of a split consciousness than that of two competing trends. Picasso, who shifts from one of the different stylistic tendencies to the other most abruptly, is at the same time the most representative artist of the present age. But to call him an eclectic and a "master of pastiche," to maintain that he only wants to show to what an extent he has command of the rules of art against which he is in revolt, to compare him with Stravinsky and to recall how he, too, changes his models and "makes use of" Bach, then Pergolesi, then again Tchaikovsky for the purposes of modern music, is not to tell the whole story. Picasso's eclecticism signifies the deliberate destruction of the unity of the personality; his imitations are protests against the cult of originality; his deformation of reality, which is always clothing itself in new forms, in order the more forcibly to demonstrate their arbitrariness, is intended, above all, to confirm the thesis that "nature and art are two entirely dissimilar phenomena." Picasso turns himself into a conjurer, a juggler, a parodist, out of opposition to the romantic with his "inner voice," his "take it or leave it," his self-esteem and self-worship. And he disavows not only romanticism, but even the Renaissance, which, with its concept of genius and its idea of the unity of work and style, anticipates romanticism to some extent. He represents a complete break with individualism and subjectivism, the absolute denial of art as the expression of an unmistakable personality. His works are notes and commentaries on reality; they make no claim to be regarded as a picture of a world and a totality, as a synthesis and epitome of existence. Picasso compromises the artistic means of expression by his indiscriminate use of the different artistic styles just as thoroughly and wilfully as do the surrealists by their renunciation of traditional forms.
The new century is full of such deep antagonisms, the unity of its outlook on life is so profoundly menaced, that the combination of the furthest extremes, the unification of the greatest contradictions, becomes the main theme, often the only theme, of its art. Surrealism, which, as André Breton remarks, at first revolved entirely round the problem of language, that is, of poetic expression, and which, as we should say with Paulhan, sought to be understood without the means of understanding, developed into an art which made the paradox of all form and the absurdity of all human existence the basis of its outlook. Dadaism still pleaded, out of despair at the inadequacy of cultural forms, for the destruction of art and for a return to chaos, that is to say, for romantic Rousseauism in the most extreme meaning of the term. Surrealism, which supplements the method of dadaism with the "automatic method of writing," thereby already expresses its belief that a new knowledge, a new truth and a new art will arise from chaos, from the unconscious and the irrational, from dreams and the uncontrolled regions of the mind. The surrealists expect the salvation of art, which they forswear as such just as much as the dadaists and are only prepared to accept it at all as a vehicle of irrational knowledge, from a plunging into the unconscious, into the pre-rational and the chaotic, and they take over the psycho-analytical method of free association, that is, the automatic development of ideas and their reproduction without any rational, moral and aesthetic censorship, because they imagine they have discovered therein a recipe for the restoration of the good old romantic type of inspiration. So, after all, they still take their refuge in the rationalization of the irrational and the methodical re-production of the spontaneous, the only difference being that their method is incomparably more pedantic, dogmatic and rigid than the mode of creation in which the irrational and the intuitive are controlled by aesthetic judgement, taste and criticism, and which makes reflection and not indiscrimination its guiding principle. How much more fruitful than the surrealists' recipe was the procedure of Proust, who likewise put himself into a kind of somnambulistic condition and abandoned himself to the stream of memories and associations with the passivity of a hypnotic medium, but who remained at the same time a disciplined thinker and in the highest degree a consciously creative artist. Freud himself seems to have seen through the trick perpetrated by surrealism. He is said to have remarked to Salvador Dali, who visited him in London shortly before his death: "What interests me in your art is not the unconscious, but the conscious." Must he not have meant by that: "I am not interested in your simulated paranoia, but in the method of your simulation."
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