The triumph of surrealism

When Max Ernst was asked by an American artist to define surrealism at a New York gathering of exiles in the early 1940s, he pointed across the room at André Breton and said: ‘That is surrealism.’ Even today it can seem as if no other answer is available, so tenacious was his grip. A former student of neurology and psychiatry, with no qualifications other than an instinct for the coming thing (‘an astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms’, as he later described his fellow conspirator Louis Aragon), Breton encountered the early writings of Freud as a medical orderly on a trauma ward, during the first world war, and immediately recognised the significance of his work.

Surrealism was in the first place a delayed response to how ordinary life had been exploded by the carnage of 1914-18. The dadaists prepared the ground with their charge that rationality itself had led the drift to war and was no longer to be trusted, but ridiculed and subverted. Compelled to repeat the trauma, in their performative fashion, dada demanded reparations in the coin of the irrational: the right to transgress in perpetuity. To which surrealism added its constructive twist, and Breton’s almost mystical sense of the group as a vital source of intelligence.

The movement, kickstarted by the Surrealist Manifesto, which was published 100 years ago this month, gave us a new world – literary, visual, photographic, filmic – and a new word, which has been used and abused ever since. ‘Surrealism’ is hard to take stock of because it had to cross so many boundaries to say what it meant: art, philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, politics, ethnology, science, magic…

Breton had a sheepdog-trials zest for rounding people up and telling them where to stand.