Exile, and what leaked out

What finally broke up the Paris group was not Breton’s trials but the German army. When France fell in 1940, the Surrealists, many of them Jewish, foreign, leftist, or all three, were in obvious danger, and they scattered. A rescue operation run out of Marseille by Varian Fry (an American journalist who ran an underground network smuggling thousands of refugees out of Vichy France, the collaborationist regime in the unoccupied south), with money from the American heiress and collector Peggy Guggenheim, helped get endangered artists to safety. Across 1940 and 1941 Breton, Ernst, Masson, Tanguy, the Chilean painter Matta and more reached New York. The capital of the avant-garde had, for the duration of the war, moved across the Atlantic.

The émigrés announced themselves with a 1942 show whose title was a grim immigrant joke, “First Papers of Surrealism,” named for the first documents an immigrant files toward citizenship. Its most memorable feature was not a painting but an installation by Marcel Duchamp, the old Dada provocateur, who webbed the galleries with something like a mile of string strung crisscross through the rooms, so visitors had to peer at the paintings through a literal tangle. It was a fitting welcome: the movement of the irrational, in exile, hanging its dreams behind a maze. And it is worth registering how far Surrealism had already spread: by the mid-1930s organized groups existed in Belgium (Magritte, Paul Delvaux), Britain, Czechoslovakia (a formal Prague group founded in 1934, one of the most active anywhere), and as far as Japan. No other modern movement traveled so wide or lasted so long.

The deepest mark the exiles left on America was not their own pictures but their method. The young New York painters circling them, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell and the rest, latched onto the one idea that traveled best across the language barrier: automatism, making marks straight from the unconscious with the editing mind switched off. They took Masson’s running line and Ernst’s chance procedures and pushed them past any recognizable image at all, into pure gesture. Pollock laying a canvas on the floor and pouring paint across it in long automatic arcs is Breton’s psychic automatism carried to its limit, the hand running free with no plan, only now the line never resolves into a figure. Surrealism’s most forward-looking idea became the engine of the first American movement to lead the world, Abstract Expressionism, taken up in its own read. The center of art moved, for good, to New York.

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de Chirico, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914 · private collection

RightsPublic domain in the United States (first published before 1931).

Breton went home to Paris in 1946 and kept the group going, but its moment as the avant-garde was over. And yet, of all the movements in this era, Surrealism may have won the most completely, because it did not stay in the galleries. It leaked. It leaked into film, where Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou had already proved dream-logic could run on a screen, and where the line runs on through David Lynch and a thousand music videos. It leaked into advertising and fashion, where the surreal juxtaposition, two things that have no business together jammed into one image, became and remains a default grammar of selling. It leaked into magical realism in literature. And it leaked into the language itself: “surreal” is now an everyday word, used a million times a day by people who have never heard of André Breton.

So measure the movement by what it left behind. Surrealism set out to make the dream, the accident and the irrational into real artistic subjects, and it won that argument so completely that its instincts are now the common air. The same movement ran like a church, idolized woman while shutting women out, and tangled with the worst politics of its century. Those are not two stories competing for the verdict; they are the same story, the melting clock and the heresy trial cut from one cloth. Taking the dream seriously turned out to be one of the most consequential ideas in modern art, and the people who had it were as human, as petty, and as flawed as the dreams they painted.