Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (JSA)

Known primarily as a surrealist poet, César Moro also created numerous paintings and collages in a surrealist mode. Born in Peru, Moro made the obligatory sojourn to Paris in 1925 to immerse himself in European avant-garde activities. In 1928 he met André Breton and began to experiment with surrealist technique as a means to push both his painting and his poetry in new directions. Moro was one of the first Latin American artists to take up collage as an autonomous art form, creating images that combine text with photographs from advertisements, scientific journals, and newspapers in bizarrely incongruous ways.
When he returned to Peru, Moro organized the first exhibition of surrealist art in Latin America at the Academía Alcedo in Lima, Peru in 1935. Given the dominance of Indigenism in the visual arts in Peru, this was a bold move on Moro’s part. While the exhibition baffled the public, it introduced new possibilities to young artists working in Peru and challenged the ascendancy of Indigenism. In 1938 Moro left Peru for Mexico where he would remain for the next decade. There he renewed his contact with Breton and the two joined forces, together with the painter Wolfgang Paalen, to organize the Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo at the Galería de Arte Mexicano in 1940.
This essay will trace César Moro’s extensive engagement with surrealism, from his early participation in Breton’s surrealist group in Paris, to the exhibition he organized in Peru, and finally to Mexico. By examining closely Moro’s surrealist collages and paintings, I hope to reveal the depth of his involvement with the movement, as an artist, poet, and organizer on a transnational scale.

This essay analyses the 22:40 minute video Real Estate Astrology (2015) of Maxime Rossi (born in 1980), a contemporary artist's response to the life and work of the German born surrealist Max Ernst. Rossi sets out in this vide, produced in the color filter technique of anaglyph projection, to search for Ernst’s traces in Sedona, Arizona. The surrealist artist lived here in exile together with his wife, the American painter Dorothea Tanning, from 1946 to 1953. Maxime Rossi shows a predilection for historical artists, whose works he uses as a point of departure in his work, in which historical facts and fiction are inextricably overlapping. In Sedona, Rossi goes to the places Max Ernst is said by locals Rossi has met several times to have visited: a hut where the surrealist is said to have spent the night from time to time, a stick that is said to have belonged to him, a cave with prehistoric mural paintings that he is said to have seen. Eventually, Ernst’s horoscope is said to have predestined a particularly fertile time for him in Arizona. But as we will see, all the tracks prove to be intentionally misplaced traces that confront the viewer with a hallucinatory world that mixes the real with the unreal, historical facts with the fictitious. What ultimately results is a hybrid whole that incorporates different sources and materials and oscillates between the banal and the fantastical, and between fiction and reality. And in doing so, he follows surrealist esthetics and strategies of alienation as we find them especially in Ernst’s collage works. A trans-epochal dialogue between the historical conditions of Ernst’s exile on the one hand, and the actual present on the other, runs through Real Estate Astrology, giving us two periods within the unit of the video.

“My world is surreal” says Yuxweluptun (b. 1957). The Coast Salish artist lives in Vancouver and therefore on un-ceded native land, where the ‘rights’ of Native people are, contradictorily, defined by the 1876 Indian Act. Yuxweluptun accounts for the surreal in his paintings as retaliation for a mode that drew on Indigenous sources to define itself. They are part of a capacious, populist discursive history that has long informed production and reception of Northwest Coast Native art. ‘The Colour of My Dreams: the Surrealist Revolution in Art’, at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2011) helped to establish its historical framework.

“Native American Surrealism” may be a contradiction in terms. If “surrealism” is a European creation, then joining it with “Native American” suggests an oxymoron. European surrealism was, however, based in part on Native expression. So “Native American Surrealism” could be used to identify an artistic mode avant la lettre appropriated by non-Natives. And some contemporary art by Native artists could be seen as a complex re-appropriation, a Native American surrealism après la lettre. This paper will examine the conjunction of “Native American” and “surrealism” and its significance by considering the work of five prominent Native artists from the Upper Midwest: Frank Bigbear, Julie Buffalohead, Star Wallowing Bull, Andrea Carlson, and Jim Denomie. To fully engage the issue of surrealism, the paper will also discuss their work in relation to other aspects of contemporary art, including the revival of interest in narrative, post-Pop representational styles, and the current fascination with satire.

An emperor, a writer and an artist. Even though their stories played out in completely different epochs and under completely disparate conditions, they are united by historical analogy. The trans-epochal cross-fading of their biographies visualizes how Napoleon, Victor Hugo and Max Ernst were forced into exile by the caesuras of history and by the new rulers in their native countries. They experienced this as a kind of wilderness, as être d’ailleurs. In the pictorial understanding of the three protagonists, the crossing of the water as well as the wild rock by the sea, mark their dislodgment from, but also their longing for the lost homeland. They are symbols of dislocation respectively identification. At the center of this narrative we find the painting Napoleon in the Wilderness (1941, MoMA, New York) by Max Ernst, in which the painter comes to terms with a long wait, a dramatic passage, his arrival on foreign soil and his love affairs. His statement that he had already begun with the picture before his departure in France and, after his arrival, came to a new solution of the picture by turning it 180°, metaphorically describes not only the artistic new beginning on the other side of the Ocean, but also marks the turning point in his life.

"Max Ernst and the Aesthetic of Commercial Tourism: Max Among His Favorite Dolls" examines Surrealist artist Max Ernst's practice of collecting Hopi and Zuni kachina figurines. Ernst, like some other European Surrealists, was an avid collector of Native Amercian material culture and ceremonial hardware. Surrealists interest in Indigenous material was part of a larger program to destabilize European privileging of the mind and art as rational constructs.

This paper focuses on James Thrall Soby's 1941 photograph of Ernst surrounded by his collection of kachina figurine, which was first published in the April edition of View Magazine. As Soby's portrait of Ernst has been reproduced many times over course of the past six decades, it has become an emblem of the Surrealists general interest in Native Americana.

In contrast to vanguardism with which Ernst and other Surrealist's collecting practices is usually credited, this paper examines Soby portrait of Ernst's within practices of commercial tourism and the souvenir industry in the Southwest. By the mid 1940s, Hopi and Zuni kachina figurine makers had a well-developed commercial kachina figurine industry that targeted the patronage of visitors to the regions. Evidence levied in the development of Ernst's tourist aesthetic includes his mode of collection, display, and stories that surround Max's assemblage of kachina figurines. This paper further differentiates it from the collecting practices of Surrealist counterparts such as André Breton.

While he was living in Arizona between 1946 and 1951, Max Ernst created at least 70 tiny gouache paintings that he called “microbes.” They range in size from a half-inch on one side to over five inches, with most between one and three inches. Many evoke fantastical landscapes while others appear completely abstract. Ernst’s interest in this series of work was sustained: he made these paintings over a period of five years, and they were exhibited regularly during his own lifetime. Today, however, the microbes are virtually unknown. Because of their relative obscurity within Ernst’s oeuvre, this essay outlines their production and early exhibition and reception, with special attention to Sept microbes vus à travers un tempérament (Seven microbes seen through a temperament). This book, comprised of life-size reproductions of 31 microbes and a poem by Ernst, positions the microbes as a distinctly surrealist, subjective interpretation of the American Southwest. The essay then contextualizes the microbes within the wider contemporary American art world and suggests that Ernst made these diminutive paintings in dialogue with the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists as those artists were rising to prominence in the wake of World War II.