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Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny,
has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that
his nonchalance has brought his way. -- André Breton, Surrealist Manifesto,
1924
Bids for Jean Arp's relief painting "Femme" rocketed up by increments
of tens of thousands of euros, surpassing in about one minute the 800,000
euros it was estimated to fetch. To the surprise of the art dealers and
spectators packed into the blood-red-walled Paris Drouot auction house
in mid-April, the bids continued to climb, first past 1, then 2 million,
before finally settling on a cool 2.8 -- a record for any Arp. Suddenly,
a conservatively dressed man stood up, declaring, "On behalf of the Pompidou
Center, I pre-empt this sale." The normally staid group erupted into cheers.
Préemption is a unique feature of French art auctions. At the end of a
sale, federally owned institutions like the Pompidou may match any final
bid and claim the work for the state, depriving some collector of a hard-fought
artistic trophy. But for fans and scholars of André Breton (1896-1966),
author of the Surrealist Manifesto and the so-called inventor of automatic
writing, each pre-emption at the auction of his personal collection represented
a symbolic win: another treasure from Breton's 42 Rue Fontaine atelier
prevented from entering art's random, cutthroat marketplace.
For those in the art world, breaking up a private collection is nothing
out of the ordinary. For others, this particular auction seemed to herald
the passing of an era. In the last couple of years, Surrealism has been
celebrated by a major retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern and
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as by two recent books: Surrealism:
Desire Unbound (the show's catalog, edited by Jennifer Mundy) and the
massive, 805-page History of the Surrealist Movement by Gérard Durozoi.
April's Paris sale further encouraged a backward glance over a period
early in the last century mostly unmarred by irony, an age when intellectuals
made things happen.
"The auction tapped into our nostalgia for a particularly creative and
collaborative period in art history," said Jori Finkel, a senior editor
at Art & Auction magazine, who flew in from New York to witness the shopping
spree. "The organizers have been savvy. Everyone is aware that this is
a historic moment." Breton was Surrealism's figurehead for more than 40
years, so this final gathering of his belongings was a kind of last dance
with the swirling joie de vivre of Surrealism and its innocent faith in
a revolution designed to undermine Europe's tradition of rationalist thought.
Breton had amassed thousands of artworks, books, manuscripts, and miscellaneous
objects in his 9th arrondissement flat just down the street from Montmartre's
Moulin Rouge. The result of his extraordinary friendships with an all-star
team of 20th-century artists and writers, the collection contained not
only lesser-known paintings and collages by Ernst, Duchamp, Dali, and
Tanguy and photographs by Brassai, Cartier-Bresson, and Levitt, but also
books signed by Freud, Trotsky, and Apollinaire; sketches, caricatures,
and drafts of manifestoes; and sheets of Surrealist amusements such as
collaborative poems and drawings. They comprised, in the words of the
auction house's consultant for painting, Marcel Fleiss, "a kind of Atlantis
of modernity, a lost continent suddenly resurfacing from the depths."
France prides itself on the preservation of its cultural patrimoine, and
if Surrealism should ever claim a birthplace, it would have to be Paris.
But after the government failed to support a center for Surrealism, the
decision of Breton's heirs (his widow Elisa and daughter Aube) to sell
off his historic collection piecemeal and not open his old flat as a museum
was deemed outrageous by many artists, scholars, and commentators. The
dispersal was a frequent story in the French press. Tensions mounted as
the first day of the sale arrived. Protesters milled outside the auction
house. But nothing could prevent the emptying of his atelier or the auction.
Worried that Breton's significant legacy would disappear, these same artists
and scholars hoped the state would prevent at least a perfunctory sample
of Surrealist heritage from leaving French soil and maintain the "certain
homogeneity" of the collection, which, as the auction catalog declared,
"is biographical, if you will, shedding light on the life of André Breton."
Upon hearing the final tally of 325 pre-emptions by the state, for a total
of €11.8-million (including the €1.79-million the Pompidou Center paid
for "The Lovers" by Francis Picabia), some Breton preservationists quietly
claimed a battle-weary, Pyrrhic victory. Their protests may have influenced
government bureaucrats to acquire more art than they had originally planned.
But the audience's "hurrahs" each time a museum buyer stood up probably
masked the cynical snickering of disgruntled art dealers, more than pleased
to see the French government stuck with such inflated prices.
If it seems a tragedy to have let the vast majority of these objects go,
it's also hard to argue that a single museum could have preserved this
literary and artistic movement under glass and within furnished rooms
without disappointing the intended audience of such exhibitions. Many
of those types of exhibits fail as futile exercises in nostalgia. Ephemera
are ephemeral for a reason. An era's ground-breaking ideas, its presiding
intellectual energy, and how the players resisted the status quo are all
hard to bring back to life via static papers, desks, and statuettes.
As for his work space, although Breton's three-room atelier was a hangout
for other Surrealists and the site where the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto
was drawn up, what would be gained by traipsing through Breton's cramped
and cluttered flat? The force of voyeurism is not enough to justify a
museum.
The paper and drafts of Surrealist proceedings are worth keeping in an
archive accessible to scholars, but they, too, were sold to various dealers
and collectors. As for the stuff he left behind the day he died on September
28, 1966, call it a snapshot of what thrilled him. One can't quantify
how Breton's religious trinkets, baskets of beach stones, and other bric-a-brac,
taken singularly or collectively, affected both his writing and the work
of his peers. Gazing at an Uli sculpture from the island of New Ireland
may have led Breton's mind down an unexpected path, but keeping it together
with the sum total of objects he selected to adorn his life would have
dubious value for either scholars or nostalgists. Besides, those who knew
Breton claim he would have cringed had he known his atelier would end
up caged up in a museum, let alone become the subject of academic studies.
In the end, Surrealism both succeeded and failed to put "the surrealist
atmosphere ... within the reach of everyone," as Breton had hoped. We
are not all using the tools of automatic writing to expand our consciousnesses,
but decades of ingesting Dali's melting clocks have made other ways of
seeing and being more palatable and more possible. Oddly, Surrealism is
as familiar to viewers of network-TV war coverage as it is to English
majors (both of whom, in an attempt to grasp what their minds can't quite
explain, describe poems and bombing campaigns as "surreal").
At the same time, Surrealism's tenets, tricks, and techniques have been
cleverly appropriated by consumer culture. We've come a short way, baby,
since Luis Buñuel and Dali's 1929 film Un Chien Andalou -- we now have
talking dogs in Taco Bell commercials. Surrealism intended to knit together
conscious and unconscious experience, but now it can't compete with the
trippy, multidimensional dystopia of The Matrix: Reloaded, whose hero
navigates a terrifying milieu situated somewhere between waking dream
and digital nightmare. That Hollywood and Madison Avenue have embraced
a visual language of sly association and oblique meaning is Surrealism's
bittersweet victory.
And so these "objects that his nonchalance ... brought his way," these
4,100 lots requiring 21 bidding sessions spread out over 17 days, taking
in 46-million euros -- the Eskimo masks and Magrittes; the Man Ray photos
and antique iron communion-wafer molds; the skulls, Picabias, and bottles
in the shape of lobsters and violins -- these objects found on trips abroad
or accumulated, ironically, through the many auctions at Drouot that Breton
liked to attend, were returned to the watercourse of capitalist loss and
gain. And with them went the ephemeral and elusive evidence of a man's
vision and the revolution he helped forge. If we disagree about whether
the auction was justified, any spectator of the sale must admit to being
caught between nostalgia and regret. We know that all movements must end.
The dispersal of Breton's personal collection correctly invites rumination
over Surrealism's ambitious goals. As Breton said in a 1934 lecture, it
was a movement for "those who do not despair of the transformation of
the world and who wish this transformation to be as radical as possible."
We now know the age of earnest manifestoes is over. The 20th century proved
that it was not lofty artistic revolutions but the mass media and weapons
of mass destruction that would irrevocably change history and consciousness.
Thanks to Breton, seeing these phenomena through a Surrealist lens at
least helps us interpret them, reject them, or blunt their damaging effects.
Ethan Gilsdorf is a writer living in Paris.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 40,
Page B15
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