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.

The Chippewa modernist George Morrison (1919-2000) was the first Native American artist to be engaged by surrealist principles and strategies, including automatic writing, collage, and the use of found objects. After training at the Art Students League in New York City (1943-‘46) and studying and exhibiting in Paris and the south of France (1952-‘53), Morrison participated in the Abstract Expressionist milieu in Manhattan, where he was befriended by the painter Franz Kline. After more than twenty-five years as a conflicted expatriate, Morrison returned to his Native roots in Minnesota in 1970 and began to use Surrealism and its interest in dreams to forge an identity as an indigenous modernist. Because of his unwavering commitment to a surrealist process that he practiced for almost sixty years, authenticity and integrity are the twin characteristics that unify Morrison’s diverse creations.

In the late 1940s, a handful of Native artists studying and working at the University of Oklahoma began to experiment with modernist styles such as Cubism, Expressionism, and most notably Surrealism. Chief Terry Saul, Richard “Dick” West, and Oscar Howe used their Master’s theses to depart from established, accepted styles of Native painting in order to explore the possibilities of Native expression. They were encouraged not only by their instructors, who dabbled with various Surrealist tendencies, but also by notable examples in the museum collection from William Baziotes, Byron Browne, Charles Howard, and Adolph Gottlieb. For the Native artists, Surrealism in its various forms provided a strategy for producing work identifiably Native yet visibly modernist by contemporary definitions. Surrealist fascination with myth and magic provided an accessible framework for them to explore the visionary and mythical within their respective tribal cultures while creating work marketable as both modern and Surrealist.

Twenty years ago, Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham described idea of “opposites” from a child’s point of view. For him, the normative take on opposites is laughably irrelevant to his childhood self, who conceived of “birds as the opposite of snakes.” His witty anecdote moves the terms of understanding away from conventional opposition, by stepping outside mainstream assumptions. Without opposites, for example, iconic images may be more fluid and simultaneous, dream-like and less fixed to singular pre-determined interpretation. So, too, the prose poems of Lautréamont and the visual and literary works of the Surrealist avant –garde employed startling juxtapositions that defied rational understanding and challenged conventional assumptions. “Outsider” status was preferable to “insider” here thanks to the power of idiosyncratic symbols and the appeal to a richer hermeneutic. Durham’s “search for virginity” in terms that reject the notion that authenticity and dishonesty are polar oppositions reprises the artistic practice of many Surrealists.