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MEXICO, “THE SURREALIST PLACE PAR EXCELLENCE”?
A Critical Introduction to André Breton’s Marvelous Mexico
Rupert Garcia
[10.17.2013, 2.5.2014]
4.23.2014
Copyright Rupert Garcia 2014
No portion of this manuscript to be replicated in any manner without the explicit permission of the author
1. André Breton’s Parisian Dream of Mexico
In spring 1978, between semesters teaching the history of Mexican art at the San Francisco Art Institute, I met the Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902–2002). He was then the artist-in-residence at the institute, where a large exhibition of his work was on display and where one of his friends, the artist Diego Rivera (1886–1957), painted the mural Making of a Fresco (1931).
I admired Álvarez Bravo’s work and was pleased that he had agreed to spend his last days in San Francisco with my wife, Sammi, and me. During his stay with us, I interviewed him,[i] and I mentioned that I had recently read in a study by Juan Somolinos Palencia, El Surrealismo en la pintura mexicana (Surrealism in Mexican Painting, 1973), that André Breton (1896–1966), the founder, leader, and chief theoretician of European Surrealism, had described him and Frida Kahlo (1907–1953) as Surrealists. [ii] Breton, who was enthralled by Álvarez Bravo’s photographs of the late 1920s and 1930s depicting found objects in the urban and rural landscape, had in fact enthusiastically promoted the artist’s photographs as Surrealist, writing about them and featuring them in exhibitions.[iii] Breton’s advocacy of the photographer assured his association with Surrealism.
In response, Álvarez Bravo stated categorically,
I have made no Surrealistic photographs. Surrealism has as a basis an automatic or semi-automatic creativity. This spontaneity is subject to a series of previous experiences, knowledge, etc. My photographs that appear Surrealistic may be better described as belonging to “fantastic fantasy.” Surrealism is a school to which I did not belong. It has a series or group of thoughts in common. If one is not within that school of thought one does not belong to the group, one is not a Surrealist. I did not belong to the group.[iv]
He also said that to call ancient art and Hieronymous Bosch “Surrealist” was absurd and that to represent José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Mexican penny-sheet graphic journalist, as a Surrealist, as Breton did in 1937, was even more preposterous. Perhaps commenting on his own work as well, he observed that Posada’s “has a sudden [or unexpected] realism which is common in everyday life.”[v] Given Breton’s devoted promotion of Álvarez Bravo’s photographs as representations of the European Surrealist mind, I was quite surprised by the photographer’s unequivocal rejoinder. I wondered, further, to what extent Álvarez Bravo’s objection to Breton’s misleading perspective on his photographs might apply to how Breton regarded Mexico and its culture as paragons of the European Surrealist assumption of what Breton called the “marvelous”[vi] and later “convulsive beauty”—the emotional, intellectual, and somatic thrill of excitement of lived existence caused by the surprise experience of hitherto unassociated entities, fabricated or found.
As if to demonstrate the difference between his creative process and that of the European Surrealists, Álvarez Bravo told me the story of his much-reproduced photograph of a nude woman partially wrapped with white gauze, La buena fama durmiendo (Good Reputation Sleeping, 1938–39). He said that
one day as I was receiving my check at [the Academy of] San Carlos I received a telephone call from [Breton] requesting a photograph to illustrate the cover of a catalog for the [International Surrealist Exhibition] that was to take place in the Galería Inés Amor [Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City].
The photographer complied by producing, with the help of his friend and sculptor, Dr. Francisco Arturo Marín, this “Surrealist” photograph.[vii]
Álvarez Bravo’s repudiations confirmed my undecided suspicions that Breton’s confident classification of Álvarez Bravo, Kahlo, Posada, and Mexico itself under the rubrics of Surrealism and “black humor,” a key concept of European Surrealism attributed to the French dandy and iconoclast Jacques Vaché, was appreciably misplaced and supported by uncertain premises. (Breton defined black humor as “a principle of total insubordination … undermining the world, reducing everything that … seem[s] all-important to a petty scale, desecrating everything in its path.”[viii])
Before I met Álvarez Bravo in 1978, I wrote an essay on the Mexican muralists and the School of Paris for the magazine LEFT CURVE in 1976.[ix] It was an attempt to understand why the artists of the School of Paris were producing personal abstract easel paintings while the Mexican muralists were producing monumental and representational public wall paintings. While my effort produced helpful information, elements of my analysis were not fully developed.
After interviewing Álvarez Bravo, I began to rethink my earlier perspective. This perspective now concentrates on the nexus between Breton’s dream of and corresponding activities regarding Mexico and its art and culture before his stay there to the reality of Mexico and his direct experience of it to the prolongation of his dream of Mexico after departing the country. I am especially interested in his selectively assumed “Otherness,” in his search for universal freedom and humanity, he invented for Mexico and its “independent art”[x] upheld Surrealism’s subversiveness and represented a revelatory challenge and disruption to the conventions of Western civilization. He also believed the European Surrealists “were working with the universal essentials of human nature as finally revealed by [Sigmund Freud]” as the unconscious, and its “internal model,” which he identified with “primitive” art, including indigenous and post-conquest independent Mexican art.[xi] Breton’ invented mirror image of the Mexican as the “Other” to the “rational West” as the “universal norm” arguably reflects a misinterpretation and misrepresentation of Mexicans and their culture.[xii]
While this study is critical of Breton’s more egregious assumptions of Mexico, it implicitly recognizes his exemplary and fearless progressive to radical social, political, and imaginative views and resolute pursuits of absolute artistic “freedom” in Europe and Mexico, especially his anti-Stalinist left or perhaps better said, his left opposition stance. As Breton wrote in the First Manifesto of Surrealism, freedom was “the only word that still excite[d]” him. Moreover, it recognizes that his ethnographies of Mexico may not have necessarily strived to completely absorb the otherness of Mexico and its art, but to embrace this otherness as just different. Nevertheless, Bretonian Surrealism was posed as universally beneficial: following the Surrealist example would, as Breton commandingly declared in the First Manifesto of Surrealism, “ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and … substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.”[xiii] What’s more and for the most part, his appropriation of certain aspects of independent Mexican culture as Surrealist disconnected what he put in this category from the actual historical, intellectual, and sacred conditions in which they developed: Mexican culture, before and after the Conquest, Independence, and the Revolution, in all its complexity. This practice led Breton not only to distort and project his fantasies onto Mexican culture,[xiv] but also to define it as “Surrealist,” rather than to perceive it on its own terms, in its own context. In other words, it’s the rebel ethnographer sparking a reassessment of his traditional post-Renaissance Western conceptual premises by going on an ethnological field trip to study the independent/primitive life and culture of Mexico to confirm, acclaim, and nourish his alternative conceptual premises at the expense of the subject culture’s own truth.
Chapters 1 and 2 examine the period before Breton arrived in Mexico. Chapter 1 outlines Breton’s precontact views of Mexico from Paris, including his imaginary projections of European Surrealism onto historical Mexico. Although Breton courageously and commendably opposed restrictions on individual and creative freedom in the work he produced before coming to and during his stay in Mexico and while his selective and claiming gaze of Mexico as the Other valorizes its ancient culture and independent art and does not profess to turn them into the universality of sameness, “there is a very real sense in which” his notion of difference and attribution of value to them “often reveal the same familiar totalizing strategies of domination, though usually masked by [his] liberating rhetoric of First World [artists] who appropriate Third World cultures for their own ends.”[ new note: Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 37-8; mention that this is my/a revised/altered quoted and paraphrase of Hutcheon] To contextualize the political and cultural legacy and its complexity that he encountered, Chapter 2 surveys the Mexican vanguards of the decades before, during, and after the Mexican Revolution and compares the 1924 Marxist manifesto of the militant Mexican muralist and political activist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) and its ramifications for modern Mexican art with Breton’s iconoclastic First Manifesto of Surrealism of the same year and its implications for the association of Mexican art and Surrealism in and outside Mexico.
Chapter 3 examines Breton’s stay in Mexico. When he arrived in the country, his views, like other European Surrealists, “were mediated by the stereotypes of this Latin American land: images of passion, violence, bloodshed and the macabre celebration of death, revolutionary politics, ancient civilizations, exotic flora, dignified peasant existence, fiestas and fiery cultural life.”[xv] His ethnographies reified Mexico and its culture as the other, surrealizing Mexican art in the process. He ignored, for the most part, how indigenous Mexican and independent artists themselves saw their art and rituals. From this perspective, what he recognized in Mexican culture and art as flashes of the Surrealist purpose opposing the foundational values of rational Western civilization is indefensible.[xvi]
Chapter 4 centers on Breton’s international promotion of independent Mexican painting and culture following his stay in Mexico. It examines his essays for the exhibition of Kahlo’s paintings in 1938 at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City; Mexique, the survey exhibition of Mexican art held in 1939 at Galerie Renou et Colle in Paris; and his memoir of his visit to Mexico for the Parisian journal Minotaure, “Souvenir du Mexique” (Memory of Mexico), also from 1939. Though some Mexican artists surely practiced a European or Mexican hybrid of Surrealism, Breton invented a Mexican Surrealist construct that simplistically characterized Posada, Kahlo, Rivera, Álvarez Bravo, Rufino Tamayo, and a range of anonymous Mexican artists, Mexican artifacts, and Mexico itself as substantiations of European Surrealism. As far as Breton was concerned, these Mexican artists and their country were Surrealist because, as he put it, “[my] fiction and [their] history always support each other wonderfully.”[xvii] In other words, they were Surrealist because in Breton’s Surrealist mind they were. Chapter 4 comments briefly on the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Mexico of 1940 and the response to it by the press, the European Surrealist exiles in Mexico, Breton’s exile in New York, travels, and his waning attention to Mexico and its art.
[i] Rupert Garcia with Juan Garza, “Conversation with Manuel Álvarez Bravo,” unpublished interview, San Francisco, April 30 and May 1, 1978.
[ii] Juan Somolinos Palencia, El Surrealismo en la pintura mexicana (Mexico City: Arte Ediciones, 1973), 77. During the mid-1970s, the late Shifra Goldman presented me with a copy of this book, for which I am truly grateful. I have translated, edited, revised, and annotated it; the manuscript remains unpublished. All translations in the present book are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
[iii] Olivier Debroise, Mexican Suite: A History of Photography in Mexico, trans. and revised with the collaboration of the author by Stella de Sá Rego (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 226.
[iv] Garcia with Garza, “Conversation with Manuel Álvarez Bravo.”
[v] Ibid.
[vi] André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 14, 6, and 14–16.
[vii] Garcia with Garza, “Conversation with Manuel Álvarez Bravo.” Other responses to this photograph include Jane Livingston and Alex Castro, M. Álvarez Bravo (Boston: David R. Goldine; Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1978), xxxvi. In a more recent account, Susan Kismaric writes that Breton requested that Álvarez Bravo create a photograph for the catalogue cover for the International Exhibition of Surrealism to be held Mexico City in 1940. Álvarez Bravo produced this picture, but it was censored, with the photograph Sobre el invierno (About Winter, 1939–40) taking its place; see Susan Kismaric, Manuel Álvarez Bravo (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997), 33–35. Álvarez Bravo photographed Dr. Marín wrapping the model in gauze (Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Photopoetry [San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008], 140).
[viii] André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1993), 18.
[ix] Rupert Garcia, “The Mexican Muralists & the School of Paris,” in LEFT CURVE, no. 6 (Summer–Fall, 1976): 4–20.
[x] Even though I despise the fabricated term “the Other,” its function here underlines its despicable colonial roots and hegemony: the observed (the colonized) and their culture perceived as fundamentally different (less human, “primitive,” and close to nature) and from the vantage point of the dominant observer (the colonizer, who sees himself as the norm, the measurer of all things right). As used in this book, “independent” refers to the Mexican art and culture employed by pre-Conquest artists and post-Conquest Mexican artists that ran counter to or was opposed to the left-wing art practices chiefly identified with the Mexican Social Realist muralists of the 1920s and 1930s, especially Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
[xi] Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (London: Routledge, 2003), i, and Robert Goldwater, Primitivism and Modern Art (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 218 and 216–24.
[xii] Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Beyond ‘the Fantastic’: Framing Identity in US Exhibitions of Latin American Art,” in Beyond the Fantastic, Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, ed. Gerardo Mosquera (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 241–42.
[xiii] For a summary of the European Surrealists’ anti-imperialist, anticolonialist, and antiwhite supremacist praxis, see “Surrealism: Revolution against Whiteness,” ed. Franklin Rosemont, special issue, Race Traitor 9 (Summer 1998); Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic, 3; Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, 26.
[xiv] Amy Winter, Wolfgang Paalen, Artist and Theorist of the Avant-Garde (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 72.
[xv] Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic, 185.
[xvi] Oriana Baddeley and Valery Fraser, Drawing the Line: Art and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Latin America (New York: Verso, 1989), 102–03.
[xvii] André Breton, “Memory of Mexico,” trans. Geoffrey MacAdam, in “Latin American Surrealism,” special issue, Review: Latin American Literature and Art, no. 51 (Fall 1995): 14.