Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, has declared his position on many political issues through his public comments and legislative records. The Obama Administration
stated that its general agenda was to "revive the economy, provide
affordable and accessible health care to all, strengthen our public
education and social security systems, define a clear path to energy independence and tackle climate change, end the War in Iraq responsibly and finish our mission in Afghanistan, and work with our allies to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon."
President Obama was first inaugurated in January 2009, in the depths of the Great Recession and a severe financial crisis that began in 2007. His presidency continued the banking bailout and auto industry rescue begun by the George W. Bush administration and immediately enacted an $800 billion stimulus program, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
(ARRA), which included a blend of additional spending and tax cuts. By
early 2011, the economy began creating jobs consistently each month, a
trend which continued through the end of his tenure.
Obama followed with the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
By 2016, the law covered approximately 23 million people with health
insurance via a combination of state healthcare exchanges and an
extension of Medicaid. It lowered the rate of those without health insurance from approximately 16% in 2010 to 9% by 2015.
Throughout his administration, healthcare costs continued moderating;
for example, healthcare premiums for those covered by employers rose by
69% between 2000 and 2005, but only by 27% from 2010 to 2015. By 2017, nearly 70% of those on the exchanges could purchase insurance for less than $75 per month after subsidies. The law was evaluated multiple times by the Congressional Budget Office,
which scored it as a moderate deficit reducer, as it included tax hikes
primarily on high income taxpayers (roughly the Top 5%) and reductions
in future Medicare cost increases, offsetting subsidy costs. No House Republicans, and only a few in the Senate, voted for the law.
To address the excesses in the banking sector that precipitated
in the 2007-2009 financial crisis, Obama signed into law the 2010 Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which limited bank risk-taking and overhauled the outdated regulatory regime ineffective in monitoring the non-depository or shadow banking sector at the core of the crisis, which had outgrown the traditional depository banking sector. The Act also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
but did not breakup the largest banks (which had grown even larger due
to forced mergers during the crisis) nor separate investment and
depository banking, as the Glass-Steagal Act had done. Only a few Republicans voted for the law.
Next came the federal budget debates. The Great Recession
had caused federal government revenues to fall to their lowest level
relative to the economy's size in 50 years. At the same time, safety
net expenditures (including automatic stabilizers such as unemployment
compensation and disability payments) and stimulus measures caused
expenditures to rise considerably. This drove the budget deficit up,
creating significant debt concerns. This caused several bruising debates
with the Republican Congress. President Obama signed the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which included the expiration of the Bush tax cuts
for high income earners and implemented a sequester (cap) on spending
for the military and other discretionary categories of spending.
Compared against a baseline where the Bush tax cuts were allowed to
expire on schedule in 2010 for all income levels, this law significantly
increased future deficits. Compared against the previously years, it
reduced the deficit and limited future cost increases. Along with the
recovering economy, the law even lowered the deficit back to the
historical average relative to GDP by 2014.
Barack Obama campaigning in New Hampshire, August 2007
With
the economy recovering and major budget legislation behind him,
President Obama began shifting to another priority: income and wealth inequality.
From 1950 to 1979, the Top 1% earned roughly a 10% share of the income.
However, this had risen to 24% by 2007, due to a combination of
globalization, automation, and policy changes that had weakened workers'
bargaining position in relation to capital (owners). He referred to the widening income gap as the "defining challenge of our time" during 2013.
His tax increases on higher-income taxpayers lowered the share of
after-tax income received by the Top 1% from 17% in 2007 to 12% by 2015, while job creation remained robust.
Wealth inequality had also risen similarly, with the share of wealth owned by the Top 1% rising from 24% in 1979 to 36% by 2007.
While U.S. household net worth rose to nearly 30% from its pre-crisis
peak from 2007 to 2016, much of this gain went to the wealthiest
Americans, as it had before Obama became president. By 2015, the wealth
share owned by the Top 1% reached 42%.
President Obama also tried addressing inequality before taxes
(i.e., market income), with infrastructure investment to create
middle-class jobs and a federally-mandated increase in the minimum wage.
However, the Republican Congress defeated these initiatives, but many
states actually did increase their minimum wages, due in part to his
support.
At Andrews Air Force base on March 31, 2010, President Obama
announced a "Comprehensive Plan for Energy Security", stating that
"moving towards clean energy is about our security. It's also about our
economy. And it's about the future of our planet."
His plan included raising fuel efficiency standards. He also announced a
decision to double the number of hybrid vehicles in the federal
government's fleet and one to expand domestic offshore oil and gas exploration in Alaska, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and off the east coast of the United States.
Disaster relief
Obama proposed cuts of $1 billion, or 3%, to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for 2013. More money would be given to state and local programs under Obama's proposal.
Obama's overall foreign policy philosophy has been postulated as the "Obama Doctrine" by Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, which the columnist describes as "a form of realism unafraid to deploy American power but mindful that its use must be tempered by practical limits and a dose of self-awareness." An op-ed article in The New York Times by David Brooks identified Obama as a person having enormous respect for and being deeply influenced by the philosophy of Reinhold Niebuhr.
Obama's first major speech on foreign policy was delivered to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs
on April 23, 2007. He identified the problems that he believes the
current foreign policy has caused, and the five ways the United States
can lead again, focused on "common security", "common humanity", and
remaining "a beacon of freedom and justice for the world":
"Bringing a responsible end" to the war in Iraq and refocusing on the broader region.
"Building the first truly 21st century military and showing wisdom in how we deploy it."
"Rebuild and construct the alliances and partnerships necessary to
meet common challenges and confront common threats," including global warming.
"Invest in our common humanity" through foreign aid and supporting
the "pillars of a sustainable democracy – a strong legislature, an
independent judiciary, the rule of law, a vibrant civil society, a free press, and an honest police force."
United States electronic surveillance
reached what was at the time an all-time high under Obama, with
increased monitoring of emails, text messages and phone conversations.
In 2010, Obama signed the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010,
which ended a policy of not allowing gays, lesbians and bisexuals to
state their sexual orientation openly in the military. In May 2012, he
became the first sitting U.S. president to announce his support for
legalizing same-sex marriage.
During his second inaugural address
on January 21, 2013, Obama called for full equality for people who are
LGBT: "Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters
are treated like anyone else under the law — for if we are truly created
equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as
well." This was a historic moment, being the first time that a president
mentioned gay rights or the word gay in an inaugural address.
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality. It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media.
Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur.
However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an
expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost (for
instance, of the "pure psychic automatism" Breton speaks of in the first
Surrealist Manifesto), with the works themselves being secondary, i.e.
artifacts of surrealist experimentation.
Leader Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above
all, a revolutionary movement. At the time, the movement was associated
with political causes such as communism and anarchism. It was influenced by the Dada movement of the 1910s.
The term "Surrealism" originated with Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917. However, the Surrealist movement was not officially established until after October 1924, when the Surrealist Manifesto published by French poet and critic André Breton succeeded in claiming the term for his group over a rival faction led by Yvan Goll, who had published his own surrealist manifesto two weeks prior. The most important center of the movement was Paris, France. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, impacting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.
The word 'surrealism' was first coined in March 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire. He wrote in a letter to Paul Dermée: "All things considered, I think in fact it is better to adopt surrealism than supernaturalism, which I first used" [Tout bien examiné, je crois en effet qu'il vaut mieux adopter surréalisme que surnaturalisme que j'avais d'abord employé].
Apollinaire used the term in his program notes for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Parade, which premiered 18 May 1917. Parade had a one-act scenario by Jean Cocteau and was performed with music by Erik Satie. Cocteau described the ballet as "realistic". Apollinaire went further, describing Parade as "surrealistic":
This new alliance—I say new, because until now scenery and costumes were linked only by factitious bonds—has given rise, in Parade,
to a kind of surrealism, which I consider to be the point of departure
for a whole series of manifestations of the New Spirit that is making
itself felt today and that will certainly appeal to our best minds. We
may expect it to bring about profound changes in our arts and manners
through universal joyfulness, for it is only natural, after all, that
they keep pace with scientific and industrial progress. (Apollinaire,
1917)
The term was taken up again by Apollinaire, both as subtitle and in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias: Drame surréaliste, which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917.
World War I
scattered the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and in
the interim many became involved with Dada, believing that excessive
rational thought and bourgeois values had brought the conflict of the war upon the world. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued.
During the war, André Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from shell-shock. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché, Breton felt that Vaché was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry.
He admired the young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for
established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, "In literature, I
was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most."
Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. They began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously
writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as
well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault
continued writing evolving their techniques of automatism and published The Magnetic Fields (1920).
As they developed their philosophy, they believed that Surrealism
would advocate the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are
vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be
open to the full range of imagination according to the Hegelian Dialectic. They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse.
Freud's work with free association, dream analysis, and the
unconscious was of utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing
methods to liberate imagination. They embraced idiosyncrasy,
while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness. As Dalí later
proclaimed, "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am
not mad."
Beside the use of dream analysis, they emphasized that "one could
combine inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to
produce illogical and startling effects." Breton included the idea of the startling juxtapositions in his 1924 manifesto, taking it in turn from a 1918 essay by poet Pierre Reverdy,
which said: "a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The
more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant
and true, the stronger the image will be−the greater its emotional power
and poetic reality."
The group aimed to revolutionize human experience, in its
personal, cultural, social, and political aspects. They wanted to free
people from false rationality, and restrictive customs and structures.
Breton proclaimed that the true aim of Surrealism was "long live the
social revolution, and it alone!" To this goal, at various times
Surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism.
In 1924 two Surrealist factions declared their philosophy in two separate Surrealist Manifestos. That same year the Bureau of Surrealist Research was established, and began publishing the journal La Révolution surréaliste.
Surrealist Manifestos
Yvan Goll, Surréalisme, Manifeste du surréalisme, Volume 1, Number 1, October 1, 1924, cover by Robert Delaunay
The other group, led by Breton, included Aragon, Desnos, Éluard, Baron, Crevel, Malkine, Jacques-André Boiffard and Jean Carrive, among others.
Yvan Goll published the Manifeste du surréalisme, 1 October 1924, in his first and only issue of Surréalisme two weeks prior to the release of Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme, published by Éditions du Sagittaire, 15 October 1924.
Goll and Breton clashed openly, at one point literally fighting, at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, over the rights to the term Surrealism. In the end, Breton won the battle through tactical and numerical superiority.
Though the quarrel over the anteriority of Surrealism concluded with
the victory of Breton, the history of surrealism from that moment would
remain marked by fractures, resignations, and resounding
excommunications, with each surrealist having their own view of the
issue and goals, and accepting more or less the definitions laid out by
André Breton.
Breton's 1924 Surrealist Manifesto defines the purposes of
Surrealism. He included citations of the influences on Surrealism,
examples of Surrealist works, and discussion of Surrealist automatism.
He provided the following definitions:
Dictionary: Surrealism, n.
Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either
verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of
thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by
reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.
Encyclopedia: Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the
belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected
associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of
thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and
to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of
life.
The movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes
where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games, discussed the
theories of Surrealism, and developed a variety of techniques such as automatic drawing.
Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the
Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to
chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage, grattage and decalcomania.
André Masson's automatic drawings
of 1923 are often used as the point of the acceptance of visual arts
and the break from Dada, since they reflect the influence of the idea of
the unconscious mind. Another example is Giacometti's 1925 Torso, which marked his movement to simplified forms and inspiration from preclassical sculpture.
However, a striking example of the line used to divide Dada and Surrealism among art experts is the pairing of 1925's Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person (Von minimax dadamax selbst konstruiertes maschinchen) with The Kiss (Le Baiser) from 1927 by Max Ernst.The
first is generally held to have a distance, and erotic subtext, whereas
the second presents an erotic act openly and directly. In the second the influence of Miró and the drawing style of Picasso
is visible with the use of fluid curving and intersecting lines and
colour, whereas the first takes a directness that would later be
influential in movements such as Pop art.
Giorgio de Chirico, and his previous development of metaphysical art,
was one of the important joining figures between the philosophical and
visual aspects of Surrealism. Between 1911 and 1917, he adopted an
unornamented depictional style whose surface would be adopted by others
later. The Red Tower (La tour rouge) from 1913 shows the stark colour contrasts and illustrative style later adopted by Surrealist painters. His 1914 The Nostalgia of the Poet (La Nostalgie du poète)
has the figure turned away from the viewer, and the juxtaposition of a
bust with glasses and a fish as a relief defies conventional
explanation. He was also a writer whose novel Hebdomeros
presents a series of dreamscapes with an unusual use of punctuation,
syntax, and grammar designed to create an atmosphere and frame its
images. His images, including set designs for the Ballets Russes,
would create a decorative form of Surrealism, and he would be an
influence on the two artists who would be even more closely associated
with Surrealism in the public mind: Dalí and Magritte. He would,
however, leave the Surrealist group in 1928.
In 1924, Miró and Masson applied Surrealism to painting. The first Surrealist exhibition, La Peinture Surrealiste, was held at Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. It displayed works by Masson, Man Ray, Paul Klee,
Miró, and others. The show confirmed that Surrealism had a component in
the visual arts (though it had been initially debated whether this was
possible), and techniques from Dada, such as photomontage, were used. The following year, on March 26, 1926 Galerie Surréaliste opened with an exhibition by Man Ray. Breton published Surrealism and Painting in 1928 which summarized the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the 1960s.
The first Surrealist work, according to leader Brêton, was Les Chants de Maldoror; and the first work written and published by his group of Surréalistes was Les Champs Magnétiques (May–June 1919). Littérature
contained automatist works and accounts of dreams. The magazine and the
portfolio both showed their disdain for literal meanings given to
objects and focused rather on the undertones, the poetic undercurrents
present. Not only did they give emphasis to the poetic undercurrents,
but also to the connotations and the overtones which "exist in ambiguous
relationships to the visual images."
Because Surrealist writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize
their thoughts and the images they present, some people find much of
their work difficult to parse. This notion however is a superficial
comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton's initial emphasis on
automatic writing as the main route toward a higher reality. But—as in
Breton's case—much of what is presented as purely automatic is actually
edited and very "thought out". Breton himself later admitted that
automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and other elements
were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of visual artists
in the movement forced the issue, since automatic painting required a
rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus such elements as collage
were introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling
juxtapositions as revealed in Pierre Reverdy's
poetry. And—as in Magritte's case (where there is no obvious recourse
to either automatic techniques or collage)—the very notion of convulsive
joining became a tool for revelation in and of itself. Surrealism was
meant to be always in flux—to be more modern than modern—and so it was
natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new
challenges arose. Artists such as Max Ernst and his surrealist collages
demonstrate this shift to a more modern art form that also comments on
society.
Surrealists revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, and for the line "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", and Arthur Rimbaud, two late 19th-century writers believed to be the precursors of Surrealism.
Examples of Surrealist literature are Artaud's Le Pèse-Nerfs (1926), Aragon's Irene's Cunt (1927), Péret's Death to the Pigs (1929), Crevel's Mr. Knife Miss Fork (1931), Sadegh Hedayat's the Blind Owl (1937), and Breton's Sur la route de San Romano (1948).
La Révolution surréaliste
continued publication into 1929 with most pages densely packed with
columns of text, but which also included reproductions of art, among
them works by de Chirico, Ernst, Masson, and Man Ray. Other works
included books, poems, pamphlets, automatic texts and theoretical
tracts.
Roger Vitrac's The Mysteries of Love (1927) and Victor, or The Children Take Over (1928) are often considered the best examples of Surrealist theatre, despite his expulsion from the movement in 1926. The plays were staged at the Theatre Alfred Jarry, the theatre Vitrac co-founded with Antonin Artaud, another early Surrealist who was expelled from the movement.
Following his collaboration with Vitrac, Artaud would extend Surrealist thought through his theory of the Theatre of Cruelty.
Artaud rejected the majority of Western theatre as a perversion of its
original intent, which he felt should be a mystical, metaphysical
experience.
Instead, he envisioned a theatre that would be immediate and direct,
linking the unconscious minds of performers and spectators in a sort of
ritual event, Artaud created in which emotions, feelings, and the
metaphysical were expressed not through language but physically,
creating a mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely related
to the world of dreams.
In the 1920s several composers were influenced by Surrealism, or by individuals in the Surrealist movement. Among them were Bohuslav Martinů, André Souris, Erik Satie, Francis Poulenc, and Edgard Varèse, who stated that his work Arcana was drawn from a dream sequence. Souris in particular was associated with the movement: he had a long relationship with Magritte, and worked on Paul Nougé's publication Adieu Marie. Music by composers from across the twentieth century have been associated with surrealist principles, including Thomas Adès, Pierre Boulez, György Ligeti, Mauricio Kagel, and Olivier Messiaen.
Germaine Tailleferre of the French group Les Six wrote several works which could be considered to be inspired by Surrealism, including the 1948 ballet Paris-Magie (scenario by Lise Deharme), the operas La Petite Sirène (book by Philippe Soupault) and Le Maître (book by Eugène Ionesco).
Tailleferre also wrote popular songs to texts by Claude Marci, the wife
of Henri Jeanson, whose portrait had been painted by Magritte in the
1930s.
Even though Breton by 1946 responded rather negatively to the subject of music with his essay Silence is Golden, later Surrealists, such as Paul Garon, have been interested in—and found parallels to—Surrealism in the improvisation of jazz and the blues. Jazz and blues musicians have occasionally reciprocated this interest. For example, the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition included performances by David "Honeyboy" Edwards.
Surrealism and international politics
Surrealism
as a political force developed unevenly around the world: in some
places more emphasis was on artistic practices, in other places on
political practices, and in other places still, Surrealist praxis looked
to supersede both the arts and politics. During the 1930s, the
Surrealist idea spread from Europe to North America, South America
(founding of the Mandrágora group in Chile in 1938), Central America, the Caribbean, and throughout Asia, as both an artistic idea and as an ideology of political change.
Politically, Surrealism was Trotskyist, communist, or anarchist.
The split from Dada has been characterised as a split between
anarchists and communists, with the Surrealists as communist. Breton and
his comrades supported Leon Trotsky and his International Left Opposition
for a while, though there was an openness to anarchism that manifested
more fully after World War II. Some Surrealists, such as Benjamin Péret, Mary Low, and Juan Breá, aligned with forms of left communism. When the Dutch surrealist photographer Emiel van Moerkerken
came to Breton, he did not want to sign the manifesto because he was
not a Trotskyist. For Breton being a communist was not enough. Breton
denied Van Moerkerken's pictures for a publication afterwards. This caused a split in surrealism. Others fought for complete liberty from political ideologies, like Wolfgang Paalen,
who, after Trotsky's assassination in Mexico, prepared a schism between
art and politics through his counter-surrealist art-magazine DYN and so prepared the ground for the abstract expressionists. Dalí supported capitalism and the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco
but cannot be said to represent a trend in Surrealism in this respect;
in fact he was considered, by Breton and his associates, to have
betrayed and left Surrealism. Benjamin Péret, Mary Low, Juan Breá, and
Spanish-native Eugenio Fernández Granell joined the POUM during the Spanish Civil War.
Breton's followers, along with the Communist Party, were working for the "liberation of man". However, Breton's group refused to prioritize the proletarian
struggle over radical creation such that their struggles with the Party
made the late 1920s a turbulent time for both. Many individuals closely
associated with Breton, notably Aragon, left his group to work more
closely with the Communists.
Surrealists have often sought to link their efforts with political ideals and activities. In the Declaration of January 27, 1925, for example, members of the Paris-based Bureau of Surrealist Research
(including Breton, Aragon and Artaud, as well as some two dozen others)
declared their affinity for revolutionary politics. While this was
initially a somewhat vague formulation, by the 1930s many Surrealists
had strongly identified themselves with communism. The foremost document
of this tendency within Surrealism is the Manifesto for a Free Revolutionary Art, published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera, but actually co-authored by Breton and Leon Trotsky.
However, in 1933 the Surrealists’ assertion that a "proletarian literature"
within a capitalist society was impossible led to their break with the
Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, and the
expulsion of Breton, Éluard and Crevel from the Communist Party.
In 1925, the Paris Surrealist group and the extreme left of the French Communist Party came together to support Abd-el-Krim, leader of the Rif uprising against French colonialism in Morocco. In an open letter to writer and French ambassador to Japan, Paul Claudel, the Paris group announced:
We Surrealists pronounced ourselves
in favour of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial
form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the disposal of
the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and defined our
attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the colour
question.
The anticolonial revolutionary and proletarian politics of "Murderous
Humanitarianism" (1932) which was drafted mainly by Crevel, signed by
Breton, Éluard, Péret, Tanguy, and the Martiniquan Surrealists Pierre Yoyotte and J.M. Monnerot perhaps makes it the original document of what is later called "black Surrealism", although it is the contact between Aimé Césaire and Breton in the 1940s in Martinique that really lead to the communication of what is known as "black Surrealism".
Anticolonial revolutionary writers in the Négritude movement of Martinique,
a French colony at the time, took up Surrealism as a revolutionary
method – a critique of European culture and a radical subjective. This
linked with other Surrealists and was very important for the subsequent
development of Surrealism as a revolutionary praxis. The journal Tropiques, featuring the work of Césaire along with Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, Lucie Thésée, Aristide Maugée and others, was first published in 1941.
In 1938 André Breton traveled with his wife, the painter Jacqueline Lamba, to Mexico to meet Trotsky (staying as the guest of Diego Rivera's former wife Guadalupe Marin), and there he met Frida Kahlo and saw her paintings for the first time. Breton declared Kahlo to be an "innate" Surrealist painter.
Internal politics
In 1929 the satellite group associated with the journal Le Grand Jeu, including Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Maurice Henry and the Czech painter Josef Sima,
was ostracized. Also in February, Breton asked Surrealists to assess
their "degree of moral competence", and theoretical refinements included
in the second manifeste du surréalisme
excluded anyone reluctant to commit to collective action, a list which
included Leiris, Limbour, Morise, Baron, Queneau, Prévert, Desnos,
Masson and Boiffard. Excluded members launched a counterattack, sharply
criticizing Breton in the pamphlet Un Cadavre, which featured a picture of Breton wearing a crown of thorns. The pamphlet drew upon an earlier act of subversion by likening Breton to Anatole France, whose unquestioned value Breton had challenged in 1924.
The disunion of 1929–30 and the effects of Un Cadavre had
very little negative impact upon Surrealism as Breton saw it, since core
figures such as Aragon, Crevel, Dalí and Buñuel remained true to the
idea of group action, at least for the time being. The success (or the
controversy) of Dalí and Buñuel's film L'Age d'Or
in December 1930 had a regenerative effect, drawing a number of new
recruits, and encouraging countless new artistic works the following
year and throughout the 1930s.
Disgruntled surrealists moved to the periodical Documents, edited by Georges Bataille, whose anti-idealist materialism formed a hybrid Surrealism intending to expose the base instincts of humans. To the dismay of many, Documents fizzled out in 1931, just as Surrealism seemed to be gathering more steam.
There were a number of reconciliations after this period of
disunion, such as between Breton and Bataille, while Aragon left the
group after committing himself to the French Communist Party
in 1932. More members were ousted over the years for a variety of
infractions, both political and personal, while others left in pursuit
of their own style.
By the end of World War II the surrealist group led by André
Breton decided to explicitly embrace anarchism. In 1952 Breton wrote "It
was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised
itself." Breton was consistent in his support for the francophone Anarchist Federation and he continued to offer his solidarity after the Platformists
supporting Fontenis transformed the FA into the Fédération Communiste
Libertaire. He was one of the few intellectuals who continued to offer
his support to the FCL during the Algerian war when the FCL suffered
severe repression and was forced underground. He sheltered Fontenis
whilst he was in hiding. He refused to take sides on the splits in the
French anarchist movement and both he and Peret expressed solidarity as
well with the new Fédération anarchiste set up by the synthesist anarchists and worked in the Antifascist Committees of the 60s alongside the FA.
Golden age
Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in London and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition
was a high-water mark of the period and became the model for
international exhibitions. Another English Surrealist group developed in Birmingham,
meanwhile, and was distinguished by its opposition to the London
surrealists and preferences for surrealism's French heartland. The two
groups would reconcile later in the decade.
Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of
the movement. Dalí joined the group in 1929, and participated in the
rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.
Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose
psychological truth; stripping ordinary objects of their normal
significance, to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary
formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.
1931 was a year when several Surrealist painters produced works
which marked turning points in their stylistic evolution: Magritte's Voice of Space (La Voix des airs)
is an example of this process, where three large spheres representing
bells hang above a landscape. Another Surrealist landscape from this
same year is Yves Tanguy's Promontory Palace (Palais promontoire), with its molten forms and liquid shapes. Liquid shapes became the trademark of Dalí, particularly in his The Persistence of Memory, which features the image of watches that sag as if they were melting.
The characteristics of this style—a combination of the depictive,
the abstract, and the psychological—came to stand for the alienation
which many people felt in the modern period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality".
Long after personal, political and professional tensions
fragmented the Surrealist group, Magritte and Dalí continued to define a
visual program in the arts. This program reached beyond painting, to
encompass photography as well, as can be seen from a Man Ray
self-portrait, whose use of assemblage influenced Robert Rauschenberg's collage boxes.
Max Ernst, L'Ange du Foyer ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme (1937), private collection
During the 1930s Peggy Guggenheim,
an important American art collector, married Max Ernst and began
promoting work by other Surrealists such as Yves Tanguy and the British
artist John Tunnard.
1938 – A new Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme
was held at the Beaux-arts Gallery, Paris, with more than 60 artists
from different countries, and showed around 300 paintings, objects,
collages, photographs and installations. The Surrealists wanted to
create an exhibition which in itself would be a creative act and called
on Marcel Duchamp, Wolfgang Paalen, Man Ray and others to do so. At the
exhibition's entrance Salvador Dalí placed his Rainy Taxi
(an old taxi rigged to produce a steady drizzle of water down the
inside of the windows, and a shark-headed creature in the driver's seat
and a blond mannequin crawling with live snails in the back) greeted the
patrons who were in full evening dress. Surrealist Street filled
one side of the lobby with mannequins dressed by various Surrealists.
Paalen and Duchamp designed the main hall to seem like cave with 1,200
coal bags suspended from the ceiling over a coal brazier with a single
light bulb which provided the only lighting, as well as the floor
covered with humid leaves and mud.
The patrons were given flashlights with which to view the art. On the
floor Wolfgang Paalen created a small lake with grasses and the aroma of
roasting coffee filled the air. Much to the Surrealists' satisfaction
the exhibition scandalized the viewers.
World War II created havoc not only for the general population of
Europe but especially for the European artists and writers that opposed
Fascism and Nazism. Many important artists fled to North America and
relative safety in the United States. The art community in New York City in particular was already grappling with Surrealist ideas and several artists like Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell
converged closely with the surrealist artists themselves, albeit with
some suspicion and reservations. Ideas concerning the unconscious and
dream imagery were quickly embraced. By the Second World War, the taste
of the American avant-garde in New York swung decisively towards Abstract Expressionism with the support of key taste makers, including Peggy Guggenheim, Leo Steinberg and Clement Greenberg.
However, it should not be easily forgotten that Abstract Expressionism
itself grew directly out of the meeting of American (particularly New
York) artists with European Surrealists self-exiled during World War II.
In particular, Gorky and Paalen influenced the development of this
American art form, which, as Surrealism did, celebrated the
instantaneous human act as the well-spring of creativity. The early work
of many Abstract Expressionists reveals a tight bond between the more
superficial aspects of both movements, and the emergence (at a later
date) of aspects of Dadaistic humor in such artists as Rauschenberg sheds an even starker light upon the connection. Up until the emergence of Pop Art,
Surrealism can be seen to have been the single most important influence
on the sudden growth in American arts, and even in Pop, some of the
humor manifested in Surrealism can be found, often turned to a cultural
criticism.
The Second World War overshadowed, for a time, almost all
intellectual and artistic production. In 1939 Wolfgang Paalen was the
first to leave Paris for the New World as exile. After a long trip
through the forests of British Columbia, he settled in Mexico and
founded his influential art-magazine Dyn. In 1940 Yves Tanguy married American Surrealist painter Kay Sage. In 1941, Breton went to the United States, where he co-founded the short-lived magazine VVV with Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and the American artist David Hare. However, it was the American poet, Charles Henri Ford, and his magazine View which offered Breton a channel for promoting Surrealism in the United States. The View
special issue on Duchamp was crucial for the public understanding of
Surrealism in America. It stressed his connections to Surrealist
methods, offered interpretations of his work by Breton, as well as
Breton's view that Duchamp represented the bridge between early modern
movements, such as Futurism and Cubism, to Surrealism. Wolfgang Paalen left the group in 1942 due to political/philosophical differences with Breton.
Though the war proved disruptive for Surrealism, the works
continued. Many Surrealist artists continued to explore their
vocabularies, including Magritte. Many members of the Surrealist
movement continued to correspond and meet. While Dalí may have been
excommunicated by Breton, he neither abandoned his themes from the
1930s, including references to the "persistence of time" in a later
painting, nor did he become a depictive pompier. His classic period did
not represent so sharp a break with the past as some descriptions of his
work might portray, and some, such as André Thirion, argued that there were works of his after this period that continued to have some relevance for the movement.
During the 1940s Surrealism's influence was also felt in England,
America and the Netherlands where Gertrude Pape and her husband Theo
van Baaren helped to popularize it in their publication The Clean
Handkerchief. Mark Rothko took an interest in biomorphic figures, and in England Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Paul Nash used or experimented with Surrealist techniques. However, Conroy Maddox,
one of the first British Surrealists whose work in this genre dated
from 1935, remained within the movement, and organized an exhibition of
current Surrealist work in 1978 in response to an earlier show which
infuriated him because it did not properly represent Surrealism.
Maddox's exhibition, titled Surrealism Unlimited, was held in
Paris and attracted international attention. He held his last one-man
show in 2002, and died three years later.
Magritte's work became more realistic in its depiction of actual
objects, while maintaining the element of juxtaposition, such as in
1951's Personal Values (Les Valeurs Personnelles) and 1954's Empire of Light (L’Empire des lumières). Magritte continued to produce works which have entered artistic vocabulary, such as Castle in the Pyrenees (Le Château des Pyrénées), which refers back to Voix from 1931, in its suspension over a landscape.
Other figures from the Surrealist movement were expelled. Several of these artists, like Roberto Matta (by his own description) "remained close to Surrealism".
After the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Endre Rozsda
returned to Paris to continue creating his own word that had been
transcended the surrealism. The preface to his first exhibition in the
Furstenberg Gallery (1957) was written by Breton yet.
Many new artists explicitly took up the Surrealist banner. Dorothea Tanning and Louise Bourgeois continued to work, for example, with Tanning's Rainy Day Canape
from 1970. Duchamp continued to produce sculpture in secret including
an installation with the realistic depiction of a woman viewable only
through a peephole.
Breton continued to write and espouse the importance of liberating the human mind, as with the publication The Tower of Light
in 1952. Breton's return to France after the War, began a new phase of
Surrealist activity in Paris, and his critiques of rationalism and
dualism found a new audience. Breton insisted that Surrealism was an
ongoing revolt against the reduction of humanity to market
relationships, religious gestures and misery and to espouse the
importance of liberating the human mind.
Major exhibitions of the 1940s, '50s and '60s
1942 – First Papers of Surrealism – New York – The
Surrealists again called on Duchamp to design an exhibition. This time
he wove a 3-dimensional web of string throughout the rooms of the space,
in some cases making it almost impossible to see the works.
He made a secret arrangement with an associate's son to bring his
friends to the opening of the show, so that when the finely dressed
patrons arrived they found a dozen children in athletic clothes kicking
and passing balls, and skipping rope. His design for the show's catalog
included "found", rather than posed, photographs of the artists.
1947 – International Surrealist Exhibition – Galerie Maeght, Paris
1959 – International Surrealist Exhibition – Paris
1960 – Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters' Domain – New York
Post-Breton Surrealism
In the 1960s, the artists and writers associated with the Situationist International were closely associated with Surrealism. While Guy Debord was critical of and distanced himself from Surrealism, others, such as Asger Jorn, were explicitly using Surrealist techniques and methods. The events of May 1968
in France included a number of Surrealist ideas, and among the slogans
the students spray-painted on the walls of the Sorbonne were familiar
Surrealist ones. Joan Miró would commemorate this in a painting titled May 1968. There were also groups who associated with both currents and were more attached to Surrealism, such as the Revolutionary Surrealist Group.
During the 1980s, behind the Iron Curtain, Surrealism again entered into politics with an underground artistic opposition movement known as the Orange Alternative. The Orange Alternative was created in 1981 by Waldemar Fydrych (alias 'Major'), a graduate of history and art history at the University of Wrocław.
They used Surrealist symbolism and terminology in their large scale
happenings organized in the major Polish cities during the Jaruzelski
regime, and painted Surrealist graffiti on spots covering up
anti-regime slogans. Major himself was the author of a "Manifesto of
Socialist Surrealism". In this manifesto, he stated that the socialist
(communist) system had become so Surrealistic that it could be seen as
an expression of art itself.
Surrealistic art also remains popular with museum patrons. The Guggenheim Museum in New York City held an exhibit, Two Private Eyes, in 1999, and in 2001 Tate Modern held an exhibition of Surrealist art that attracted over 170,000 visitors. In 2002 the Met in New York City held a show, Desire Unbound, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris a show called La Révolution surréaliste.
Surrealists groups and literary publications have continued to be active up to the present day, with groups such as the Chicago Surrealist Group, the Leeds Surrealist Group, and the Surrealist Group of Stockholm. Jan Švankmajer of the Czech-Slovak Surrealists continues to make films and experiment with objects.
Impact and influences
While
Surrealism is typically associated with the arts, it has impacted many
other fields. In this sense, Surrealism does not specifically refer only
to self-identified "Surrealists", or those sanctioned by Breton,
rather, it refers to a range of creative acts of revolt and efforts to
liberate imagination. In addition to Surrealist theory being grounded in the ideas of Hegel, Marx and Freud, to its advocates its inherent dynamic is dialectical thought. Surrealist artists have also cited the alchemists, Dante, Hieronymus Bosch, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, Comte de Lautréamont and Arthur Rimbaud as influences.
May 68
Surrealists
believe that non-Western cultures also provide a continued source of
inspiration for Surrealist activity because some may induce a better
balance between instrumental reason and imagination in flight than
Western culture.
Surrealism has had an identifiable impact on radical and revolutionary
politics, both directly — as in some Surrealists joining or allying
themselves with radical political groups, movements and parties — and
indirectly — through the way in which Surrealists emphasize the intimate
link between freeing imagination and the mind, and liberation from
repressive and archaic social structures. This was especially visible in
the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and the French revolt of May 1968, whose slogan "All power to the imagination" quoted by The Situationists and Enragés from the originally Marxist “Rêvé-lutionary“ theory and praxis of Breton's French Surrealist group.
Postmodernism and popular culture
Many
significant literary movements in the later half of the 20th century
were directly or indirectly influenced by Surrealism. This period is
known as the Postmodern era; though there is no widely agreed upon central definition of Postmodernism, many themes and techniques commonly identified as Postmodern are nearly identical to Surrealism.
First Papers of Surrealism presented the fathers of surrealism in
an exhibition that represented the leading monumental step of the
avant-gardes towards installation art. Many writers from and associated with the Beat Generation were influenced greatly by Surrealists. Philip Lamantia and Ted Joans
are often categorized as both Beat and Surrealist writers. Many other
Beat writers show significant evidence of Surrealist influence. A few
examples include Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Artaud in particular was very influential to many of the Beats, but especially Ginsberg and Carl Solomon. Ginsberg cites Artaud's "Van Gogh – The Man Suicided by Society" as a direct influence on "Howl", along with Apollinaire's "Zone", García Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman", and Schwitters' "Priimiititiii". The structure of Breton's "Free Union" had a significant influence on Ginsberg's "Kaddish".
In Paris, Ginsberg and Corso met their heroes Tristan Tzara, Marcel
Duchamp, Man Ray, and Benjamin Péret, and to show their admiration
Ginsberg kissed Duchamp's feet and Corso cut off Duchamp's tie.
William S. Burroughs, a core member of the Beat Generation and a postmodern novelist, developed the cut-up technique with former surrealist Brion Gysin—in
which chance is used to dictate the composition of a text from words
cut out of other sources—referring to it as the "Surrealist Lark" and
recognizing its debt to the techniques of Tristan Tzara.
Postmodern novelist Thomas Pynchon,
who was also influenced by Beat fiction, experimented since the 1960s
with the surrealist idea of startling juxtapositions; commenting on the
"necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and
skill", he added that "any old combination of details will not do. Spike
Jones Jr., whose father's orchestral recordings had a deep and
indelible effect on me as a child, said once in an interview, 'One of
the things that people don't realize about Dad's kind of music is, when
you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or
it sounds awful.'"
Many other postmodern fiction writers have been directly influenced by Surrealism. Paul Auster, for example, has translated Surrealist poetry and said the Surrealists were "a real discovery" for him. Salman Rushdie, when called a Magical Realist, said he saw his work instead "allied to surrealism". David Lynch
regarded as a surrealist filmmaker being quoted, "David Lynch has once
again risen to the spotlight as a champion of surrealism," in regard to his show Twin Peaks. For the work of other postmodernists, such as Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover, a broad comparison to Surrealism is common.
Magic realism,
a popular technique among novelists of the latter half of the 20th
century especially among Latin American writers, has some obvious
similarities to Surrealism with its juxtaposition of the normal and the
dream-like, as in the work of Gabriel García Márquez. Carlos Fuentes
was inspired by the revolutionary voice in Surrealist poetry and points
to inspiration Breton and Artaud found in Fuentes' homeland, Mexico.
Though Surrealism was a direct influence on Magic Realism in its early
stages, many Magic Realist writers and critics, such as Amaryll Chanady and S. P. Ganguly,
while acknowledging the similarities, cite the many differences
obscured by the direct comparison of Magic Realism and Surrealism such
as an interest in psychology and the artefacts of European culture they
claim is not present in Magic Realism. A prominent example of a Magic
Realist writer who points to Surrealism as an early influence is Alejo Carpentier
who also later criticized Surrealism's delineation between real and
unreal as not representing the true South American experience.
Stand-up comedian Steven Wright became popular for his surreal
humor. Delivered in a drowsy, deadpan monotone, Wright conjured up
situations that were totally unreal. "There was a switch on my wall
that didn't do anything. I flicked it on and off and nothing happened.
A week later I got a telegram from a woman in Germany, saying, 'Cut it
out!'"
Surrealist individuals and groups have carried on with Surrealism
after the death of André Breton in 1966. The original Paris Surrealist
Group was disbanded by member Jean Schuster in 1969, but another
Parisian surrealist group was later formed. The current Surrealist Group
of Paris has recently published the first issue of their new journal, Alcheringa. The Group of Czech-Slovak Surrealists never disbanded, and continue to publish their journal Analogon, which now spans 80 volumes.
Surrealism and the theatre
Surrealist
theatre and Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty" were inspirational to many
within the group of playwrights that the critic Martin Esslin called the
"Theatre of the Absurd"
(in his 1963 book of the same name). Though not an organized movement,
Esslin grouped these playwrights together based on some similarities of
theme and technique; Esslin argues that these similarities may be traced
to an influence from the Surrealists. Eugène Ionesco in particular was fond of Surrealism, claiming at one point that Breton was one of the most important thinkers in history. Samuel Beckett was also fond of Surrealists, even translating much of the poetry into English. Other notable playwrights whom Esslin groups under the term, for example Arthur Adamov and Fernando Arrabal, were at some point members of the Surrealist group.
Alice Farley is an American-born artist who became active during
the 1970s in San Francisco after training in dance at the California
Institute of the Arts.
Farley uses vivid and elaborate costuming that she describes as "the
vehicles of transformation capable of making a character's thoughts
visible". Often collaborating with musicians such as Henry Threadgill, Farley explores the role of improvisation in dance, bringing in an automatic aspect to the productions. Farley has performed in a number of surrealist collaborations including the World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago in 1976.
Alleged precursors in older art
Various much older artists are sometimes claimed as precursors of Surrealism. Foremost among these are Hieronymus Bosch, and Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who Dalí called the "father of Surrealism." Apart from their followers, other artists who may be mentioned in this context include Joos de Momper, for some anthropomorphic landscapes. Many critics feel these works belong to fantastic art rather than having a significant connection with Surrealism.