Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (JSA)

This article discusses the 1940 "International Surrealist Exhibition," a paradigmatic event in the history of Surrealism's transition between Old and New Worlds. Breton’s brainchild, the show claimed a large part of Mexico's national art canon as part of the transnational Surrealist cause. Proving controversial in a heavily nationalist art scene, the show continues to occupy a conflicted position in the historiography of Mexican art. Many describe it as the pivotal event that drove art in Mexico away from nationalism, while others trivialize its impact. In the 1969 book El Surrealismo y el Arte Fantástico de México, the most ambitious response to the 1940 show ever produced, art historian Ida Rodríguez-Prampolini takes the latter position. Much of what Breton and his circle viewed as surrealist in Mexican art, Rodríguez argues, was instead part of the country’s own “fantastic” tradition, in place long before Surrealism arrived. A chauvinist treatise on Mexican identity at first glance, this essay argues that the book instead is emblematic of a long history of anxious relationships between definitions of national identity and the practice of art history in post-revolutionary Mexico.

This essay explores Guatemalan-born painter Carlos Merida's involvement in the surrealist movement. It examines both Merida's contribution to the surrealist understanding of Mexico in the 1940s as well as his adoption and promotion of surrealist ideas as part of his attempt to create a uniquely American avant-garde. These two sides of Merida's engagement with surrealism are studied through the lens of the artist's work as the director of the Galeria de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in the late 1920s and early 1930s, where he showed the work of painters sympathetic to surrealism, his own surrealist-inspired paintings, and his contributions to Wolfgang Paalen's journal "Dyn," published in Mexico City from 1942-1944.

Lautréamont became the preeminent forebear of Surrealism through his inclusion in the movement’s first political agenda, the Orient. His overseas origin predisposed the Surrealists to re-read his works from the perspective of their own anti-occidental thinking. This was possible only through the near-complete absence of biographical data that would have contradicted the figure they desired to see. This made the imagined Lautréamont extremely malleable, easily aligned with other desires after the short agenda of the Orient ceased.

The Surrealists appropriated Lautréamont with increasing vehemence, fashioning him into a quasi-demigod, the utopian Surrealist fighting in their ranks. Again, no biographical data could contradict such a claim. Initially, the Surrealists united to fend off any outside claims on their idol, thus tightening the coherence of the tentatively emerging group. Then, when the movement had stabilized after opting for an affiliation with the political arms of dialectic materialism, Lautréamont was also used against members who had become undesirable. Renegades were denied any right to the model Surrealist and separated from the ideal of surreality that Lautréamont represented.

In addition to the obsessive imagination at work in the making of their Lautréamont, it is worth noting three internal contradictions in the Surrealists’ practice in relation to their idol. First, there is the problematic racially-motivated drive to appropriate Lautréamont because of his place of origin, even if its purpose is to attack a whole system of racial imperialism. Second, the classification of acceptable and unacceptable historic authors that led to the cult of a single genius closely resembles the bourgeois cultural practice to which the Surrealists opposed their narrowing anti-canon of predecessors. Third, the irrational and apodictic seriousness compressed in the symbolic act with which group exclusions were delivered in the name of Lautréamont have elements of those merciless displays of power one would find in medieval ecclesiastic practice or in 20th century totalitarian justice, both designated archenemies of Surrealism.

The appropriation of Lautréamont by the Surrealists in the mid-1920s remains an interesting early case study of entangled history. Particularly in the first half of the 20th century, critics in both France and Uruguay tended to claim Lautréamont as a national hero, sometimes forcefully against the other nation. Those claims proved easy to advance since fundamental biographical data was missing up until the 1970s. The Surrealists’ appropriation arose from the same lack of data and desirous projections, but developed in the opposite direction than most of their compatriots. They did not claim Lautréamont for France, but against France, and his South American origin were not read as a sign of his belonging to Uruguay, but paved the way for his entry into Surrealism.

The creative works of artist and poet Juan Batlle Planas (1911-1966)—a figure relatively unknown outside of Argentina—have long been understood as enigmatic and solitary experiments in surrealism. This essay, through a combination of formal analysis and cultural history, examines his collage series and paintings made in the 1930s and 1940s—especially his Paranoid X-ray series—to argue that these works are representative of a broader set of urban cultural responses in Argentina to the struggles of economic recession, political uncertainty brought by military rule of the 1930s, and tidal waves of (mis)information spread by mass mediated news sources. In particular, my analysis expands on Beatriz Sarlo’s theory of the “knowledge of the poor,” a term she uses to indicate the prominence of professional science, pop psychology, and crackpot inventions in Buenos Aires’s working class and middle class cultures of the 1920s and 1930s. By placing Batlle Planas’ work in this historical context, this essay reveals how Batlle Planas’ eclectic interests in Freudian psychology, Tibetan Buddhism, crystallized minerals, and the bizarre healing theories of Wilhelm Reich correlate with the growing technological imagination inspired by Argentina’s mass media, which in the early decades of the 20th Century circulated a surrealistic jumble of cultural information across Latin America.

In 1937, the Catalogue of the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition in the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), edited by Alfred H. Barr Jr, with an essay by Georges Hugnet, appears the image of a painting by David Alfaro Siqueiros: Collective Suicide,1936, under subject 13 of the exhibition Guide, as part of a group of works selected under the title "Creation of Evocative Chaos," together with other works by Klee, Dominguez, Tanguy, Cheval and Schwitters. The photo of the painting is inscribed in a chapter called "Artists independent of the Dada-Surrealist movements." Arranged alphabetically it includes works by Blume, Calder, Castellón, Disney, Dove, Evans, Merrild, Feitelson, Gonzales, Lewis, O'Keeffe, Roy, Putnam, Smith, Goldberg, Thurber, Tonny and Beall.* *A group of paintings and sculptures by American artists as varied and different as can be. Today at the Tate Modern Museum in London, the permanent exhibition of Surrealism includes another work by Siqueiros under the title "Cosmos and Disaster." Both paintings by Siqueiros are apocalyptic visions of the approaching Civil War in Spain and of the Second World War. Although Siqueiros is better known as one of the three greatest realist Mexican muralists of the 20th Century, it is strange, although indicative, that two works of his are recognized in both different moments of the history of modern art, as surrealist expressions, in the 1930s and in the first decade of the new Century. Indicative, as one can not forget the fundamental involvement of historical Surrealism with Communism during that period, as well as with the concept of art as a revolutionary endeavor in itself. To be a militant of the Communist Party during the thirties was quite a different thing than before or after. Siqueiros´ militancy at the time, had to do with the idea that the world can be changed, but also, that art is a testimony of horrors and a therapy of self esteem in the midst of it. Siqueiros founded the "Siqueiros Experimental Workshop" at # 5 of Fourteenth Street, New York, at the beginning of 1936, after the International Conference of Artists, organized by artists members of the USA Communist Party, as part of the International policy of the Communist Party’s "Open Popular Front" against fascism and war. And before Siqueiros became himself a soldier in Spain. In this workshop Siqueiros directed a group of young American and Latin American artists that came together in order to participate with the party in its antifascist, antiwar propaganda. The International Communist Front allowed non communists to participate with them united by their antifascist positions. The center of their creative work became Siqueiros´ concept of art seen not only as a revolutionary weapon against Franco, Hitler, Mussolini and others like Hearst and other European, Mexican and American tycoons, but as a revolutionary activity in itself. It is well known that among the young members of this workshop was young Jackson Pollock. The style of the two paintings I am referring to can be defined with the same type of language then used by Surrealism, and specifically by the curators of this exhibit. Both works are almost abstract, they were made with experimental materials, generated strange forms, and developed new techniques. Collective Suicide is integrated with pieces of wood, like in a collage and the many tiny, not more than one inch sized figures that are depicted in it were added with stencils. Both works are Siqueiros own version of automatism, which he named “Controlled Accidents.” He started painting them on the floor, throwing into the canvas new industrial color –explosive pyroxiline- directly from the cans, on to which he also added different kinds of foreign materials like nails, fragments of wood and sand, creating a thick texture and a mysterious space. They both give the impression of an explosive Cosmos, a sensation of chaos. Collective Suicide is almost abstract, yet an absolutely representative testimony of the Spanish Civil War, in which many citizens were ready to die fighting for their democratic rights. Like in many other occasions’ of World history one or all four Horses of Apocalypse mark the Time of individuals. It is the same nightmare, which inspired one year later Picasso's Guernica. In Siqueiros picture many men and women, as well as their children and grandchildren, take the horrible decision to commit massive suicide because their life becomes an impossible existence. To take their own lives for the cause of Liberty, Fraternity and equal Rights. The decision to fight against authoritarianism, misery, sickness, and lack of freedom. Always a fight for life in a world lead by diverse utopical visions and ideals of humankind. The sacred engagement with life, understood as dedication, path and sense. Siqueiros is at that moment a militant and partisan, but also –while he prepares for warfare- he is dedicated to express this spirit artistically, with an open mind, appropriating all what Western art traditions offer, and assuming as well, all what the universe of science and technology was discovering, especially in America. In 1936 Siqueiros continued the explorations of his first stay in the United States in Los Angeles 1932, through an experimental research of new significants and devises to express this ideals, not only convincing the audience by arguments, but by moving their sensitive and emotional side, competing with very powerful new mass media, as cinema. The painting at the Tate Collection is practically abstract, only a little flame in the middle of the dark canvas remains after the great explosion. A few lines of force center the flame in the composition. The darkness of the painted full space, reminds the blackness surrounding the ones in Van Dyke portraits. But it is constructed over the floor, juxtaposing layers of paint that combine over the canvas, making strange, unexpected forms. Maybe with the same spirit of Ernst’s frottage (Maybe that is why the painting hangs at the side of Max Ernst’s Dadaville, 1924). Cosmos and Disaster is the subject of the picture, painted at the same year of another of his impressive apocalyptic paintings: The End of the World, in which there is only one human survival left among the buildings on fire. Siqueiros paintings of 1936 are a reminder of the mystery of human horror. In my text I plan to work more on Siqueiros' concept of the accidental, or the unconscious, in his art and on his Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, with the information taken from diverse recorded and written materials researched at the Smithsonian archive in New York, at the Pollock/Krasner house and Study Center, other documents recommended by Ellen Landau and the Siqueiros Archives in Mexico, and at the Getty Research Institute in LA, which I published as part of my book Siqueiros. Del Paraíso a la Utopía , 2004.