Dada and Surrealism - A Very Short Introduction

Question: How many Surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: A fish. Everybody knows something about Dada and Surrealism. Dada, born in 1916 and over by the early 1920s, was an international artistic phenomenon, which sought to overturn traditional bourgeois notions of art. It was often defiantly anti-art. More than anything, its participants, figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, and Raoul Hausmann, counterposed their love of paradox and effrontery to the insanities of a world-gone-mad, as the First World War raged in Europe. Surrealism, Dada’s artistic heir, was officially born in 1924 and had virtually become a global phenomenon by the time of its demise in the later 1940s. Committed to the view that human nature is fundamentally irrational, Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and André Masson conducted an often turbulent love affair with psychoanalysis, aiming to plumb the mysteries of the human mind. For many people Dada and Surrealism represent not so much movements in 20th-century art history as ‘modern art’ incarnate. Dada is seen as iconoclastic and confrontational; Surrealism as similarly anti-bourgeois in spirit but more deeply immersed in the bizarre. But why Dada-and-Surrealism? Why are they yoked together? They constitute two movements but are regularly conflated. Art historians have traditionally found it convenient to generalize about Dada ‘paving the way’ for Surrealism, although that was only really the case in one of Dada’s locations, namely Paris. This book will certainly rehearse that story again, but it will also present these movements as distinctly different, so that they can be played off against each another. Dada, for instance, often revelled in the chaos and the fragmentation of modern life, whilst Surrealism had more of a restorative mission, attempting to create a new mythology and put modern man and woman back in touch with the forces of the unconscious. Such differences touch on important distinctions which I have aimed to make as vivid as possible. More than any other art movements of the last century Dada and Surrealism now permeate our culture at large. Surrealism especially has entered our everyday language; we talk of ‘surreal humour’ or a ‘surreal plot’ to a film. This very continuity means that it is difficult to place them at one remove from us in ‘history’. Critical and historical accounts of both movements have admittedly become more and more elaborate. Dada, which might be thought to be anti-academic, is now widely studied in universities. Similarly monographs on notorious Surrealist artists such as Dalí and René Magritte are ubiquitous. But very often the sheer plethora of information is dazzling, and we lose critical distance. List of illustrations viii Acknowledgements xi Introduction xiv 1 Dada and Surrealism: a historical overview 1 2 ‘Rather life’: promoting Dada and Surrealism 30 3 Art and anti-art 62 4 ‘Who am I?’: mind/spirit/body 97 5 Politics 123 6 Looking back on Dada and Surrealism 146 References 157 Further reading 161 Dada: the main centres – key individuals and events 167 Key Surrealist events 170 Key figures associated with surrealism 171 Index 173