The pope and the excommunications

Surrealism was the most organized of the avant-gardes (the experimental artists out ahead of the mainstream), and the price of that organization was a single man deciding who counted. André Breton did not just write the manifesto and edit the journal; he policed the membership, and he was ruthless about it. The nickname he earned, half in awe and half in mockery, was “the Pope of Surrealism,” and the joke had teeth. He convened meetings that functioned as doctrinal courts, and when a member strayed, in art, in politics or in private life, Breton excommunicated him the way a church casts out a heretic.

The expulsions started early and never really stopped. Antonin Artaud, the visionary actor and theorist who had directed the movement’s own Bureau of Surrealist Research, was expelled in 1926. His case stings the most: he was too extreme even for a movement of extremes, a man who wanted theater to be cruelty and convulsion and who pushed the irrational past where even Breton would follow, and so the man who had run Surrealism’s headquarters was read out of it. The bloodiest purge came with the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930), in which Breton settled scores in print and read a long list of members out of the movement, often staging the reckonings as collective “trials” where the accused answered before the assembled faithful and the verdict was rarely in question.

One episode deserves to be named plainly, because it is documented in the movement’s own pages. Beginning in January 1928 and continuing through 1932, the group held a series of recorded discussions about sex, the Recherches sur la sexualité (Researches on Sexuality), and published them in their journal. Across the sessions Breton repeatedly and aggressively denounced male homosexuality, shutting down the topic and the men who raised it. A movement that prided itself on liberating desire from bourgeois rules turned out to have firm rules of its own about which desires were acceptable, and Breton’s homophobia is there in black and white in the group’s own pages.

The purges were never only about art, because Surrealism was always also political, and its politics were the real fault line. Breton joined the French Communist Party (the French branch of the international Communist movement, taking its line from Moscow) in 1927, convinced a revolution of the mind needed a revolution of the state. It did not go well: the Party wanted art subordinated to its program, and Breton would not bend, so he was expelled in 1933. He turned hard against Stalin, the Soviet dictator, and in 1938 traveled to Mexico to meet the exiled Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s great rival, then living under Diego Rivera’s roof. There the two drafted a manifesto, Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendant (Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, 1938), arguing that art must be utterly free of state control; Rivera signed as co-author so Trotsky’s name would not sink it. This is the real political story of Surrealism: not a movement that simply was Communist, but one caught between Stalinism and anti-fascism, whose Marxism turned out to be fiercely anti-Stalinist.

The most famous expulsion was Dalí’s, and it turned on exactly that politics. The Surrealists took it as given that an artist of conscience stood against fascism as Mussolini, Hitler and Franco rose across Europe. Dalí would not. He refused to condemn Hitler and was openly fascinated by him, a fascination he kept painting (his The Enigma of Hitler, 1939, broods over a photograph of the dictator), and after the Spanish Civil War he supported Franco, the general turned dictator who had just crushed his own country. To his Marxist peers this was unforgivable, compounded by Dalí’s gleeful commercialism, a lesser second charge. Breton drove him out, the break formalized by around 1939, and as a parting shot coined an anagram of “Salvador Dalí” that rearranges into “Avida Dollars,” which reads in French as avide à dollars, greedy for dollars. Dalí, never one to lose the last word, said the nickname had “a certain magical value” and answered the group with his motto, “Le surréalisme, c’est moi” (Surrealism, it’s me). Both lines are Dalí’s own self-mythology, not neutral history.

One more thing belongs in the account. Like many European artists of their generation, the Surrealists avidly collected non-Western art, masks and carvings from Africa, Oceania and Native America, prizing them as windows onto “the marvelous.” The admiration was real, but filtered through the colonial assumptions of the time, treating whole living cultures as a quarry of exotic raw material for European dreams, with little interest in what the objects meant to the people who made them. The living example of the tension was the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, of African, Chinese and Spanish descent, who moved inside the circle, embraced and exoticized in nearly the same gesture, prized for the very “primitive” otherness the group projected onto him. Lam turned the Surrealist vocabulary the other way, against the colonial gaze: his great canvas The Jungle (1943) claims the marvelous for the colonized rather than borrowing it from them.

For all the in-fighting, the movement was reaching a real public. The International Surrealist Exhibition opened in London in June 1936 and drew some 23,000 visitors in six weeks; two years later the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris (January 1938) turned the gallery into theater, Marcel Duchamp suspending 1,200 coal sacks from the ceiling over a brazier so visitors moved through a dim, sooty cavern. Hold the two halves together. Surrealism produced genuinely liberating art, and filled galleries doing it, and it also ran like a sect, with a pope, heresy trials, recorded prejudice, and a tangle with the worst politics of its century. The second does not cancel the first.