After the bonfire
Dada, the anarchic anti-art movement that came just before, had burned art down, and a fire that consumes everything eventually runs out of things to consume. By 1923 the Paris wing was tearing itself apart over what came next. The Romanian poet Tristan Tzara wanted to keep Dada a pure machine for nonsense with no destination. A young French poet named André Breton wanted to point all that energy somewhere. Breton was a man of imperious certainty, the kind who states a definition as if it were a command and dares you to disagree, and he won the Paris circle. What matters here is the handoff: Surrealism is Dada’s serious wing. It kept the chance, the collage and the appetite for scandal, and it pointed them at a target Dada never had, the unconscious mind.
A word about that word, because the story usually gets it wrong. Breton did not invent the term “surréalisme.” The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) coined it back in 1917, using it in the program note for a ballet and as the subtitle of one of his own plays. Breton took the existing word, gave it his own definition, and tipped his hat to Apollinaire while doing it. The name is seven years older than the movement it would label.
The rulebook nobody asked for
On 15 October 1924 Breton published the Manifesto of Surrealism (a manifesto being a public declaration of what a movement stands for, here how it intends to make art), through a small press. Most movements get a manifesto after they already exist, to defend work already on walls. Surrealism is the rare case where the document came first and named the thing into being. The heart of it is a joke that is also dead serious: Breton wrote a mock-dictionary entry, complete with the abbreviation for a masculine noun, defining the new word. “SURREALISM, n. m.,” it reads, “Pure psychic automatism by means of which one intends to express ... the actual functioning of thought ... in the absence of any control exercised by reason, free of any aesthetic or moral concern.”
Unpack the key phrase, because the whole program lives in it. Automatism, in Breton’s sense, means making art with the conscious, rational, editing mind switched off, so thought flows out unsupervised. He called his version psychic automatism; “psychic” here just means “of the mind” (from the Greek psyche), nothing supernatural. The model was sitting in the consulting rooms of the day.
The foundation, who called them cranks
That model was Sigmund Freud, the Viennese doctor whose psychoanalysis (his method of treating the mind by digging up what it has buried) had spread across Europe in exactly these decades. Two of his ideas became Surrealism’s bedrock. The first is the unconscious: the part of the mind you do not control or even know about, where buried desires and fears keep running. The second is free association, Freud’s technique of having a patient say whatever floats up, no filter, no shame, on the theory that the unfiltered flow leads to the buried material. Breton had seen it work: in the First World War he served as a medical orderly and used Freud-derived methods on shell-shocked soldiers. He took free association off the couch and made it a studio technique: do not compose, do not plan, do not edit, just let it come.
One caveat, because the movement liked to claim more than it invented. Automatic writing was not new in 1924; nineteenth-century spiritualist mediums had scrawled it, and Freud’s free association is the direct model. Breton’s real contribution was making psychic automatism the defining method of an organized movement, with a manifesto, a headquarters and a membership list. It got all three fast, and the headquarters actually came first: on 11 October 1924, four days before the manifesto, the group opened the Bureau of Surrealist Research in Paris, put under the direction of the poet and actor Antonin Artaud. In December they launched a journal. Within weeks Surrealism had a manifesto, an HQ, a magazine and a man at the center deciding who belonged. Breton would be called the “Pope of Surrealism” before long. From his one idea now grew two streams that run through the next two chapters: the automatists, who let chance compose (Chapter 2), and the dream-image painters, who rendered the impossible with photographic precision (Chapter 3). One idea, two methods.