Surrealists on Art [Breton and Eluard]
Brandon J. Freels
but strives to express the inner needs of man and of mankind as they are
today-cannot be anything other than revolutionary: it must aspire to a
complete and radical reconstruction of society, if only to free intellectual
creation from the chains that bind it and to allow all mankind to climb
those heights that only isolated geniuses have reached in the past" (Breton,
"Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art," in Free Rein, p. 30).
"When they first hear about surrealism, many people want to know what is the
criterion by which to decide whether or not a visual work can be regarded as
surrealist. Is it necessary to repeat that this criterion is not an
aesthetic one? Very roughly, we can say that surrealism in art is limited by
'realism' on the one hand, by 'abstractionism' on the other. Nonsurrealist
(and in our view regressive in this day and age) is any work that focuses on
the daily spectacle of beings and things, that is, everything that inheres
immediately in the animal, vegetable, mineral fixtures of our environment
even if it should be made visually unrecognizable by means of 'distortion.'
The surrealist work of art resolutely excludes anything that results from
simple perception, whatever intellectual speculation may be grafted onto it
in order to alter its appearance . . . Nonsurrealist also (and, despite its
modernistic pretensions, implying, as we see it, a profound abdication of
human desire on account of its arbitrary reduction to certain needs of
exclusively spatial and 'musical' nature) is any work dubbed nonobjective
and nonrepresentational, that is to say, at odds as well with prior physical
perception as with prior mental representation (which surrealism, while
emphasizing the latter, is precisely trying to reconcile)" (Breton,
"Surrealist Comet," in Free Rein, p. 92-3).
"Centuries from now, any art that takes new paths toward a greater
emancipation of the mind will be Surrealist," (Breton, Conversations, p. 238
).
"But surrealist painters, who are poets, always think of something else. The
unprecedented is familiar to them, premeditation unknown. They are aware
that the relationships between things fade as soon as they are established,
to give place to other relationships just as fugitive. They know that no
description is adequate, that nothing can be reproduced literally. They are
all animated by the same striving to liberate the vision, to unite
imagination and nature, to consider all possibilities a reality, to prove to
us that no dualism exists between the imagination and reality, that
everything the human spirit can conceive and create springs from the same
vein, is made of the same matter as his flesh and blood, and the world
around him" (Paul Éluard, "Poetic Evidence" in Read, p. 175).