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What Is Surrealism: Selected Writings

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Well, what a shock. A totally human, big, fat tome on an art form that I've never enjoyed. Makes understandable and useful for one's own life the surrealists' aim of dissolving the alienating barriers between thought and action, dream and consciousness, art and life. Their appreciation of Freud; their collaboration with communists, with Leon Trotsky; their rejection of fatherland, religion, family - all flowing from their determination to be part of the birth of a new world in which there would be no poets because all would make poetry. Fascinating section of documents including a brief homage to Hopi art, denunciation of Salvador Dali for being pro-fascist, support to the Algerian independence fight. Still don't enjoy the surrealists' work. But do enjoy them now.

This book will give you a good understanding of the surrealist movement. You will read the artists' writings not only on this subject, but also their views on the important political questions of the day which they understood were tied to cultural questions. A photo display in the book gives you a sampling of surrealist works. There is also an excellent glossary of names that reveals the evolution of the surrealists in later years. You gain an appreciation for the international breadth of the movement. 'What is Surrealism?' is not just for art history students. Anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between art and politics will be fascinated by collection of articles in this book.

This book is about the intersection between art and revolutionary politics.In the 1930s the leading figures of the surrealist movement and a few other artists and writers tried to cut out some political space for artists who supported a revolutionary overturn of the system that birthed fascism and world war - capitalism .The same "globalized" capitalism that exists today, and which is marching toward fascism and world war all over again. In the 1930s, there was another challenge for would-be revolutionary artists : the obstacle of the mass
"Communist" parties which betrayed them and workers and farmers around the world in the interests of the "Soviet" bureaucrats headed by Stalin, which same bureaucracy stifled and suffocated all art and creativity inside the USSR.The struggle of those artists, led by Andre Breton and Diego Rivera, and their direct collaboration with the Russian revolutionary leader in exile Leon Trotsky, has rich lessons for those artists of all kinds who are already beginning to reject and revolt against the "globalized" capitalism of today. As well as those who will do so tommorow.

Today most artists seem to be on a short leash. I have friends who paint and sculpt and they don't even think about the fact that their art rarely reaches even middle class people let alone the working and farming majority. When something stirs them and they want to take action, they get afraid about their grants, their patrons, that artist in resident spot at a university, or that artist on a cruise, or on a rich person's art club trip to France or Egypt. They get scared to make a phone call or even write a letter because art in the US in particular is on strings to the rich.......................................................

Once it was different. Read this. I don't say follow surrealism, because it was just one school, born of another time, trying to surmount problems that only a socialist revolution and retransformation of society can solve. As a revolutionist as well as an artist--I have a MFA in Creative Writing and write fictional and poetry--what is remarkable about Breton is not his narrow precepts or methods, but about the militancy to which he tried to find truth and resonance and joy without surrendering to acceptance of bourgeois society..................................
The remarkable writings of Andre Breton, as gifted as a writer, as he was a painter, and more gifted as a thinker than he was either. After World War II US imperialism went to work to try to stifle the courage and outrageousness of people like Breton to channel art into the lack of statement of abstract expressionism. Surrealism is no more revolutionary than any other form of art. The most famous surrealist to most people today is Dali, who didn't mind Franco at all and tried to turn himself into an NY advertizing money maker. What is important about Breton, besides what he says about surrealism and art--and on those things I am no big judge--he was trying to find a way to fight for a free, fighting, critical, irreverant art, faced with the nauseating conservatism of formalism and the smothering idiocy of socialist realism? What was important about Breton is that in these writings and in the manifestos here signed by non surrealists like Leon Trotsky and Diego Rivera, Breton was fighting for more than his art? The quest to upturn (boulverser is better but not English) speak out of turn, penetrate, and speak openly that he developed in his art, in the 1930s and 1940s when most of this work was done, was connected with the struggle of artists to link up with the revolutionary struggle against imperialism, and at the same time, with the fight within the workers movement to free it self of the syphilis of Stalinism.
Buy this book. Read this book. Use this book to try to say what life really is.