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Surrealism’s revolutionary heart
They met in Mexico, 1938. Leon Trotsky, co-leader
of the Russian revolution, André Breton, cofounder of the surrealist
movement, and Diego Rivera, revolutionary Mexican artist/activist.
Together, they formulated the Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary
Art. Trotsky, in exile and hunted by Stalin’s agents, was the main
author, Breton and Diego its signatories. On the 70th
anniversary of the Manifesto, MANNY THAIN looks at the significance of
this collaboration.
THE MANIFESTO WAS a call to arms, pens and brushes
addressed to radical artists and writers. It denounced fascism and
Stalinism, two dictatorships suffocating artistic expression as they
were drowning workers’ opposition in blood. It was also a comment on the
role of art and culture in class society.
But what had brought these people together at this
particular moment? This was a time of extreme turmoil, the world on the
brink of war. The international capitalist economy was in severe crisis.
Fascism had risen to power in Italy, Portugal, Germany and Spain, where
the revolution had been recently defeated. Mass uprisings had taken
place in France, the US, China and around the globe.
Joseph Stalin was consolidating his grip on power in
Russia, show trials dispatching revolutionary socialists and other
militants to labour camps in their hundreds of thousands. The ruling
Stalinist bureaucracy and its ‘Communist International’ were tightening
their control on the so-called ‘communist’ parties around the world. In
Spain that had meant playing a consciously counter-revolutionary role,
betraying the workers and peasants in the socialist, Trotskyist and
anarchist movements.
In 1938, Leon Trotsky launched the Fourth
International – recognition that the Third (Communist) International
would never again play a revolutionary role. This was a time to take
sides. Any activist worthy of the name would have to ask him or herself:
Do I support capitalism, Stalinism, or those fighting against both?
But why should this involve the surrealists? From
today’s perspective, it may seem strange. Although that is only because
the radical political nature of the surrealist movement has been
airbrushed out of mainstream art history. Surrealist art retains great
popularity – in profitable, blockbuster exhibitions, and its prominence
in modern art museums. Its immense influence on art, film, writing and
many other media continues unabated today. It may be mentioned from time
to time that the surrealists were radicals, influenced by anarchist or
socialist ideas. References are made to the splits in the movement,
expulsions and defections, when artists diverged from surrealist ideals.
Usually, however, that is as far as it goes.
That is nowhere near far enough. Surrealism was
revolutionary to its core. It could be said that it was and is only
about revolution, nothing else. The surrealists wanted to smash
establishment control of art and thought. They sought to break
conventional artistic rules. They were experimental, pioneering
revolutionary techniques. Automatic writing, for example, completely
broke with rigid literary structures. Anyone could do it; everyone
should feel empowered to do it. The surrealists understood that the
precondition for freeing up art for all people was radical social
change. That meant a revolution which took power away from the
capitalist ruling class and placed it in the hands of the mass of the
population, the working class.
The birth of surrealism
SURREALISM’S ROOTS WERE in the nihilistic western
Dada art movement of the beginning of the 20th century. The
international mass radicalisation accompanying the latter years of the
first world war – illustrated most spectacularly by the Russian
revolution of 1917 when working-class people, guided by a mass Marxist
party, actually took power – had its impact on artists as it had on all
sections of society.
The surrealists came out of that maelstrom. Made up
of many different individuals and trends, incorporating many different
ideas, using a variety of media, surrealism was an overwhelmingly
radical, left-wing movement.
In 1924, André Breton wrote the Manifeste du
Surréalisme, proclaiming the birth of the surrealist movement, himself
in the leadership alongside Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. One of
its most far-reaching aspirations was to get all people engaging in art,
not as passive onlookers, but as producers of art as well. The
surrealists participated in political activity to bring about the social
and economic change required. There were even formal discussions within
the surrealist movement on whether they should join the communist
parties.
Whereas the ‘official’ history of surrealism tends
to focus on its male leaders, a number of women played significant roles
in its artistic and political life. By the end of the 1920s, for
example, Denise Naville (née Lévy) and her husband, Pierre, both
pioneers of surrealism, devoted themselves to the anti-Stalinist cause.
Denise Naville, a key link between the French surrealists and German
artists, translated Trotsky’s writings into German, along with works by
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and others. (Surrealist Women, edited by
Penelope Rosemont)
Surrealism was also strongly influenced by new,
groundbreaking psychological theories, in particular Freudian
psychoanalysis, and Breton defined it as "pure psychic automatism, by
which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in
any other manner, the true functioning of thought. The dictation of
thought, in the absence of all control by reason, excluding any
aesthetic or moral preoccupation". So, just as society had to be freed
from the restrictions of ruling-class control, thought could also be
liberated.
Surrealism published a number of periodicals,
including La Révolution Surréaliste (1924-30, co-edited by Pierre
Naville) and Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution (1930-33). Those
publications gave the movement a certain cohesion, and helped spread the
ideas outside of France.
A cultural straitjacket
UNDERSTANDABLY, THE SURREALISTS gravitated towards
the parties and groupings which seemed to be leading revolutionary
struggle. In the 1920s and 1930s, that appeared to be the various
communist parties around the world – mass working-class parties backed
by the world’s first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. It would take
time for people to see through the mistakes and betrayals of Stalinism.
Many never did, of course, including Aragon.
The Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia, through its
subordinate parties around the world, forced artists and writers into a
cultural straitjacket. They were expected to unquestioningly glorify
Stalin and his grotesque distortion of socialism. Freedom of expression
was gagged by the doctrines of ‘proletarian literature’ and ‘socialist
realism’.
As Stalin and the privileged, bureaucratic caste
consolidated their grip on power, so the gains and freedoms ushered in
by the 1917 revolution were snuffed out. Eventually, there would be
little left, except the economic basis of a planned, nationalised
economy – twisted out of shape, its socialist foundations barely
recognisable – and the basic social provisions of employment, housing
and welfare.
In the Moscow show trials from 1936, Stalin began
the systematic purging of the genuine revolutionaries from power. The
remaining elements of workers’ democracy were dismantled. The trials
were the catalyst for many in the surrealist movement to openly
challenge Stalinism.
Breaking with Stalin and the communist parties,
however, involved the loss of powerful patronage, as they controlled a
huge apparatus and influence over the intellectual scenes of many
countries. Arguably, the high point of the movement’s influence had been
reached by the time of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London
1936.
The manifesto
TOWARDS A FREE Revolutionary Art was completed on 25
July 1938 and published in the autumn edition of the Partisan Review
over the signatures of Diego Rivera and André Breton. It is reprinted in
the collection of Trotsky’s writings, Art and Revolution. In La Clé des
Champs (Free Rein), published in1953, Breton explains that Trotsky was
the main contributor.
The wide-ranging manifesto – which is a little
shorter than this article – outlined the crisis facing civilisation, not
only the approaching world war but generally. Against this backdrop, the
position of artists and scientists was practically intolerable as they
were shackled to the requirements of the various ruling classes and
elites. The regimes of Adolf Hitler and Stalin received specific
attention.
However, the manifesto opposed the abstract idea
that art could somehow be neutral in a class-based society.
‘Neutrality’, in fact, would mean the continuation of the status quo. In
other words, the retention of capitalism (a class-based society) or
Stalinism (an increasingly unequal and dictatorial system based on a
nationalised, planned economy): "… true art is unable not to be
revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of
society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation
from the chains which bind it, and to allow all mankind to raise itself
to those heights which only isolated geniuses have achieved in the past.
We recognise that only the social revolution can sweep clean the path
for a new culture. If, however, we reject all solidarity with the
bureaucracy now in control of the Soviet Union, it is precisely because,
in our eyes, it represents, not communism, but its most treacherous and
dangerous enemy".
The manifesto explained the role artists could play
in exposing the real nature of these systems. It rejected controls on
artistic expression: "In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination
must escape from all constraint and must under no pretext allow itself
to be placed under bonds… and we repeat our deliberate intentions of
standing by the formula, complete freedom for art".
Many of the themes in the manifesto can be found in
other writings by Trotsky, such as Literature and Revolution (1924), as
well as in his definitive analysis of the nature of the Soviet Union,
The Revolution Betrayed (1937).
In the years immediately after the Russian
revolution, Trotsky was one of the main organisers of the new workers’
state. He consistently defended the need for artistic freedom. Again,
the manifesto touched on the attitude a genuinely democratic workers’
state should take: "If, for the better development of the forces of
material production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with
centralised control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist
regime of individual liberty should from the first be established. No
authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above!"
While the manifesto understood why artists were
drawn to the Stalinist organisations, it explained that their stifling
censorship and servility spelt utter demoralisation to any but the most
cynical careerist.
Artists of the world, unite!
IT WAS NOT, however, simply an analysis of the
situation at the time. This was a manifesto, a call to action. So it
included a section on to how to build this international movement: "We
know very well that thousands on thousands of isolated thinkers and
artists are today scattered throughout the world, their voices drowned
out by the loud choruses of well-disciplined liars. Hundreds of small
local magazines are trying to gather youthful forces about them, seeking
new paths and not subsidies. Every progressive tendency in art is
destroyed by fascism as ‘degenerate’. Every free creation is called
‘fascist’ by the Stalinists. Independent revolutionary art must now
gather its forces for the struggle against reactionary persecution".
The manifesto is a remarkably succinct treatise on
the relationship between art, class society and dictatorship. Although
set in a particular period of acute worldwide crisis, it also serves as
a general Marxist approach to art and culture.
Its publication was followed by the setting up of an
embryonic revolutionary artists’ organisation, the FIARI (Fédération
Internationale de l’Art Révolutionnaire Indépendant). This was an
attempt to build an anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist movement. The
potential was there. The French section of the FIARI published two
issues of the journal, Clé (Key), January and February 1939. Although
short-lived, they showed it had genuine support, for example by printing
articles by the Russian revolutionary, Victor Serge (on why he supported
the FIARI, and on disappearances in the Soviet Union), and the French
surrealist poet, Benjamin Péret (on the situation in Spain). Its first
issue included a statement by the FIARI National Committee on the right
to asylum. (Culture and Revolution in the Thought of Leon Trotsky,
edited by Al Richardson) Simone Kahn, a key figure in the development of
the early surrealist movement, also joined the FIARI in 1939. She had
married Breton in 1921 (they split in 1929) and was instrumental in
convincing him to leave the Dada movement.
In the polarised political situation immediately
preceding the second world war, however, the FIARI was unable to gain
ground in a mass sense.
Breton never gave up his support for revolution,
even after the death of Trotsky – brutally murdered in Mexico on 21
August 1940 by Ramón Mercader, one of Stalin’s agents. After having fled
the Nazi occupation of France, Breton returned in 1946, where he
continued to develop the surrealist movement and engage in political
activity. He died in Paris on 28 September 1966, aged 70.
With the 70th anniversary of the Manifesto: Towards
a Revolutionary Art it is high time that socialists – above all,
Trotskyists – reclaimed the real history of surrealism, its
revolutionary history. It is also a good time to defiantly defend
democratic socialism, the struggle for democratic workers’ states –
epitomised by Trotsky’s life and death – against the slanders of the
capitalist system and the fading shadows of Stalinism. Not by accident
did André Breton find himself side-by-side with Leon Trotsky. The link
is summed up in the final two lines of their manifesto:
The independence of art – for the revolution
The revolution – for the complete liberation of art!
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