Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (JSA)

The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas: Vol. 12 No. 1 (2021) - Table of Contents

"Introduction, Special Issue on Fashion" by Jennifer R. Cohen, Michael Stone-Richards, pp. 1-5

"Fashion in the Formative Years of Parisian Surrealism: The Dress of Time, the Dress of Space" by Krzysztof Fijalkowski, pp. 6-32

"Surrealist Shop Windows: Marketing Breton’s Surrealism in Wartime New York" by Jennifer R. Cohen, pp. 33-59

"Object Study: Binding Saint Glinglin" by Jenny Harris, pp. 60-77

"‘Always for Pleasure’: Chicago Surrealism and Fashion, An Interview with Penelope Rosemont" by Abigail Susik, pp. 78-92

"Sade for the Brave and Open-Minded: Review of Alyce Mahon, The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde" by Joyce Cheng, pp. 93-99

"Review of Henri Behar, Potlatch, André Breton ou la cérémonie du don" by Pierre Taminiaux, pp. 100-103

While the majority of the scholarship around surrealist relationships with fashion look at the era of the 1930s onwards, this article considers the first period of surrealism during the 1920s, including its prehistory in the mouvement flou as it emerged via Paris Dada and Littérature, asking two related questions: what was the presence and status of the discourse of fashion for surrealism during these formative years; and in what kinds of fashion practices did its members engage? In response to the first of these, an examination of the group’s journals, publications and documents suggests that fashion stands as a significant and abiding area of interest for the group and its members. Writings by André Breton, Louis Aragon, René Crevel and others are correlated with surrealist images and artworks to reflect upon this sustained and informed engagement with men’s and above all women’s fashion, and suggest a particularly keen awareness of the changes in clothing styles over the recent past. The second question has rarely been asked in a systematic way: how did the early Parisian surrealists reflect these interests in their own day-to-day fashion choices and preferences? Given that the majority of the early Parisian surrealist group was male, the focus here is predominantly on men’s fashion, and analysis of memoirs, correspondence and documents such as the photographs taken in the Bureau de recherches surréalistes provides evidence of collective and individual positions. The fashion choices of Simone and André Breton form a particular area of concern, revealing some nuanced developments and unorthodox moments in their day-to-day attitudes.

During his wartime exile in New York City, André Breton responded to the popular entrenchment of Surrealism as a language of shop window merchandising by leading a small group of artists and writers to take the publicity of Surrealism into their own hands. At Breton’s behest, Marcel Duchamp designed three shop windows to advertise texts released by the French publishing arm of the Fifth Avenue bookstore Brentano’s in 1943 and 1945. Although art historians have called attention to the relationship between these designs and the iconography of better-known works by Duchamp, this paper considers them as instantiations of Breton’s evolving thought within the context of a commercial environment already saturated with surrealist imagery. It places them within an iconographic web that includes, among others, Salvador Dalí’s famed fashion displays of the preceding decade, multiple iterations of Duchamp’s “twine,” and works by Kurt Seligmann, Roberto Matta, and Breton himself. The paper argues that, exemplifying the prewar surrealist motif of interior and exterior permeability and bringing it to a breaking point, these obscure windows for French-language texts became an important laboratory for the engaged critique of consumerism that would come to the forefront of the surrealist movement during the postwar period.

Photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller incongruously appeared bathing in Hitler’s bathtub in Vogue in 1945. Part of a series of articles and photographs Miller produced for Vogue during WWII, the photograph has recently been interpreted as Miller’s way to mark the Allied victory over the Nazis, registering her defiance and literal occupation of Hitler’s most personal of spaces. Laurie Monahan argues against such certainty, noting that the power of the images Miller produces from this period lies not in victory or defeat but in the absolutely disturbing contradictions that appear in the encounter. Present at the liberation of Dachau and subsequently lodging in Hitler’s Munich headquarters, Miller is forced to ask whether these traumas can be contained or managed through victory. Can we so easily condemn our enemies while assuring ourselves that we are entirely unlike them? Central to those assurances is the need to convince ourselves of the superiority of our values, our actions, and our ethics in the face of events that reveal death, fear, and the most sinister elements of human behavior – in short, to classify what constitutes the good and the bad. Miller’s images, with their sustained ambiguity, force us to ask these questions anew as we realize that even the terms of victory are not adequate for the purpose.

Mary Low and Juan Breá’s Red Spanish Notebook: The First Six Months of the Revolution and the Civil War (1937) narrates their experiences volunteering alongside Spanish and foreign volunteers in Spain in an effort to suppress the Francoist uprising and to transform the country’s social structures. Although their text has received little critical attention in examinations of Surrealism and international Spanish Civil War involvement, Red Spanish Notebook provides a unique and useful example of surrealist documentary photography. The book contains no actual photographs. However, Low periodically uses ekphrasis to undermine dominant notions of journalistic distance, especially in her discussions of Spain’s nascent women’s movement. By describing photographs of foreign and Spanish women on the front lines and the home front, and offering alternative interpretations of the images, Low illustrates the impossibility of objective reporting. In so doing, she brings political attention away from the war itself, and towards Spanish women’s concurrent struggle for equality. This essay examines Low’s use of ekphrasis to argue that she elevates and legitimizes Spanish feminism by reporting social revolution in the style of war journalism, while simultaneously constructing an ethics ofinternational collaboration and sympathy. Through their commentary on the perpetual slippages inherent in supposedly objective journalism and documentary photography, Low’s writings provide unique insight into surrealist feminism.