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.

“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.

While the earlier affiliation between Salvador Dalí and André Breton had been, for the most part, fruitful and amicable, by the early 1940s when both had relocated to America as exiles from the war in Europe, their relations had become decidedly acrimonious. This animus is graphically revealed in the textual record the two left behind, in the form of treatises, memoirs, popular articles, transcribed lectures and exegeses: documents which map Breton’s efforts to differentiate the Surrealist movement as defined by his own directive, from that of the “popular” variety of Surrealism associated almost exclusively with Dalí in the United States. Likewise, they trace Dalí’s riposte, manifest in an attempt to minimize Breton’s profile in and contribution to Surrealism before an American audience via a program of negation. These “crossed words” document a vicarious “conversation” between Dalí and Breton between 1939 and 1944, when the two increasingly employed various text media to situate themselves and each other in terms of Surrealism in the New World. While not addressing each other directly per se, the “paper trail” in question registers the other’s presence either by direct reference, or conspicuous by its absence, and creates a dialectic that underscores the differences between what the two clearly identified as “orthodox” Surrealism as defined by Breton and his Parisian circle between the wars, and what might be termed “Dalínian” or “commercial” Surrealism – not necessarily endorsed by Dalí, but primarily associated with the artist and his work in North America.

In June 1930, transition, an American literary magazine printed in France between 1927 and 1938 under the direction of Franco-American journalist and poet Eugene Jolas, published “The Simplicity of Disorder”— three chapters from William Carlos Williams’ lesser-known work, A Novelette. Although Jacqueline Saunier-Ollier considers A Novelette “the work by Williams that was most influenced by surrealism,” it has received very little critical attention; in fact, only one article has been devoted to A Novelette so far. There are two main reasons for this critical neglect. First, A Novelette has a hybrid style, in spite of its generic form. It oscillates between novelistic and short story form, and between prose and poetry. Second, this paper will show that the history of the novel’s publication was problematic.

In a paper published in a special issue of the William Carlos Williams Review, which was devoted to Williams’ relationships to surrealism, Dickran Tashjian shows how Williams gives his personal definition of the issues and modalities of automatic writing in his 1936 manifesto “How to Write.” In this manifesto, Williams does not view automatic writing in a Freudian sense as the French surrealists do. On the contrary, he develops a Jungian philosophy inspired by his reading of Jung’s “Psychology and Poetry” in the June 1930 issue of transition – i.e., the same issue in which “The Simplicity of Disorder” is published. Unlike Dickran Tashjian and Jeffrey Peterson, I argue that Williams’ experiments are not “automatic writing” but “spontaneous writing.” Indeed, Williams dismisses outright the psychological work that “automatic writing” entails. For example, in this passage of a letter to James Laughlin, he says: “To hell with them. I’m afraid the Freudian influence has been the trigger to all this. The Surrealists followed him. Everything must be tapped into the subconscious, the unconscious …”

This paper aims to show that six years before “How to Write” was published and even before Williams had read Jung’s article in transition, “The Simplicity of Disorder” posed a critical challenge to French surrealism. Rather than “cutting a trail through the American jungle without the use of a European compass,” Williams uses the compass of French surrealism to follow a different path.

Furthermore, this analysis of A Novelette approaches Williams’ work as a stimulating and seminal response to French surrealism. Although Williams does not show any particular interest in the French surrealists’ signature themes (the city, night time, strolling, mystery, the Woman, chance, etc), he is eager to rethink surrealist writing according to three main axes. The poet develops a “spontaneous writing” which is unlike that of the French avant-garde. Though he characterizes it as less solemn, less conceptual, and less symbolic, he insists that it is uniquely American and more concrete than French surrealist writings. For Williams, writing is not an end in itself, but a way to show urgency. He uses spontaneous writing to express physiological relief, which is often sexual or excremental. The conclusion of this paper will show that transition plays a crucial role in generating a specific American literary surrealist current years before the official American Surrealist movement was created in 1966 in Chicago, and before Breton’s exile to the U.S. during World War 2.

This paper works to characterize the relationship between Surrealism’s art, its critical reception and its popularity in American culture, a relationship often mediated by Salvador Dalí’s public embodiment of the movement. Alfred Barr’s 1936 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art introduced a broad view of Surrealism to a receptive American audience. While Surrealism’s investigation into the irrationality of everyday life resonated with the American public, it was Dalí who ensured that the movement stayed in the spotlight, designing among other things, department store windows, magazine covers, and several series of advertisements; by 1939, when Dalí and his dealer Julien Levy promoted a Surrealist Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, it made sense that the pavilion was located not in the Fine Arts section of the Fair, but in the Amusements Arena. The same year, despite, or perhaps, because of Dalí’s flamboyant articulation of the infiltration of market forces and mass media, he was also recognized as dramatizing the constraints of the circumscribed art world which had just begun to feel the influences of formalism. This paper argues that Dalí posed a challenge that placed Surrealism’s mediation between art and life at the center of the making of an American artistic culture.