SURREALISM Page: 7
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Surrealism:
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 PAUL DELVAUX The Hands. 1941
We find this involuntary aestheticism not only in the work of Max Ernst and Schwitters, but more obviously in that of Hans Arp. In 1916 he was making collages or constructions with such titles as Squares arranged according to the law of chance, Objects arranged according to the law of chance. One can only suppose that the law of chance is identical with the law of beauty, for from the beginning these works show a great degree of plastic sensibility. In an endeavour to explain the contradiction Breton has suggested that there is an inherent connexion between chance, or what he prefers to call automatism, and rhythmic unity. 'Recent psychological researches, we know, have drawn a comparison between the construction of a bird's nest and the beginning of a melody tending towards a certain characteristic conclusion. . . . I maintain that Automatism in writing and drawing. . . . is the only mode of expression which gives entire satisfaction to both eye and ear by achieving a rhythmic unity, just as recognisable in a drawing or in an automatic text as in a melody or a bird's nest.'
Arp has continued throughout his career to make twodimensional constructions, presumably still 'according to the law of chance', but he was gradually drawn towards the threedimensional art of sculpture, in which he has created forms which seem to illustrate the essential modes of growth and organic function. Perhaps of all the Surrealist artists Arp most deserves the name of Surrealist, for his work reveals those essential modulations of matter due to secret action of natural forces: as water smooths a stone, or the wind moulds the snow-drift, as the pear swells to one kind of perfection and the crystal to another, so Arp has carved and modelled his faultless creations: art, as he has himself said, is a fruit born of man. Breton might add: born of man's unconscious.
The characteristic fruit of Surrealism, however, was not born to Arp, but rather to Max Ernst and to André Masson (b. 1896), to whom Breton attributes the invention of automatism. But once the manifesto of Surrealism had been proclaimed in 1924, it became difficult to award priorities to all those artists who came forward with their personal contributions to a doctrine so allembracing. Joan Miró emerged from his Spanish farm-yard in 1924; Yves Tanguy from Brittany in 1925; René Magritte (b. 1898) from Brussels about the same time; and finally, in Breton's words, ' Dali insinuated himself into the Surrealist movement in 1929.' Breton's acid account of Dali's contribution to the movement must be quoted in full: 'On the theoretical plane he proceeded thereafter by a series of borrowings and juxtapositions. The most striking example of this was the strange amalgam of two diverse elements to which he gave the name of "Paranoiac-critical activity"; on the one hand the lesson of Cosimo and Da Vinci to become absorbed in the contemplation of a blob of spittle or an old wall until there appeared before the eye a second revelation which painting was no less capable of revealing) and on the other various practices--on [sic] the order of frottage--already advocated by Max Ernst to "intensify the irritability of the mental faculties". In spite of an undeniable ingenuity in staging, Dali's work, hampered by an ultro-retrograde technique (return to Meissonier) and discredited by a cynical indifference to the means he used to put himself forward, has for a long time showed signs of panic, and has only been able to give the appearance of weathering the storm temporarily through a process of systematic vulgarization. It is sinking into Academicism--an Academicism which calls itself Classicism on its own authority alone--and since 1936 has had no interest whatsoever for Surrealism.'
Since these words were written ( 1942) Salvador Dali's work has sunk lower still, cynically exploiting a sentimental and sensational religiosity (his Last Supper, loaned to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is there stage-set for the superstitious). The theatricality, which was always a characteristic of his behaviour, is now at the service of those reactionary forces in Spain whose triumph has been the greatest affront to the humanism which, in spite of all its extravagance, has been the consistent concern of the Surrealist movement. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that Dali, largely due to the success of his exhibitionism, has become identified in the public mind with Surrealism, and indeed his 'paranoiac-critical activity' has been sufficiently ingenious, and sufficiently shocking, to excuse this mistaken identification.
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