Museum open at 12:00pm
Cinema is closed now
Museum open at 12:00pm
Cinema is closed now
IN THE VERY BOWELS OF CHANGES:
SURREALISM AND ANTIFASCISM
26.06.2026–10.01.2027
VICTOR BRAUNER, LA RENCONTRE DU 2 BIS RUE PERREL [THE ENCOUNTER OF 2 BIS RUE PERREL], 1946, oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art in Paris © ADAGP, Paris / ZAIKS, WarsawCurated by
Dorota Jarecka and Magda Lipska, in collaboration with Stephanie Weber, Adrian Djukić, Karin Althaus, and Paweł Polit
Artists
Jankiel Adler
Eileen Agar
Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Hans Arp
John Banting
Ezekiel Baroukh
Hans Bellmer
Erwin Blumenfeld
Marian Bogusz
Vladimír Boudník
Victor Brauner
André Breton
Emmy Bridgewater
Luis Buñuel
Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob)
Leonora Carrington
Laura Corsiglia
Zbigniew Dłubak
Óscar Domínguez
Inji Efflatoun
Max Ernst
Merlyn Evans
Emil Filla
Leonor Fini
František Foltýn
Esteban Francés
Wolfgang Frankenstein
Eugenio Fernández Granell
Thomas Samuel Haile
Stanley William Hayter
John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld)
Jindřich Heisler
Werner Heldt
Georges Henein
Jacques Hérold (Herold Blumer)
Karol Hiller
Hannah Höch
Kati Horna
František Janoušek
Ted Joans (Theodore Jones)
Marion Kalter
Fouad Kamel
Tadeusz Kantor
Ida Kar
Katarzyna Kobro
Aleksander Krzywobłocki
Jerzy Kujawski
Wifredo Lam
Jean-Jacques Lebel
Johannes Lederer
Alfred Lenica
Jean Lurçat
Dora Maar (Henriette Théodora Markovitch)
Conroy Maddox
René Magritte
Jeanne Mammen
André Masson
Roberto Matta
Leonore Mau
Willy Maywald
Jadwiga Maziarska
F.E. McWilliam
Mikuláš Medek
Katja Meirowsky
Kazimierz Mikulski
Lee Miller
Joan Miró
Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe)
Arturo Nathan
Amy Nimr
Wolfgang Paalen
Roland Penrose
Pablo Picasso
Pere Portabella
Alice Rahon (Paalen)
Vilém Reichmann
Alain Resnais
Edith Rimmington
Erna Rosenstein
Alberto Sánchez
Hans Rudolf Schiess
Kurt Seligmann
Jerzy Skarżyński
Humphrey Spender
Jonasz Stern
Władysław Strzemiński
Jindřich Štyrský
Eva Sulzer
Marian Szulc
Bogusław Szwacz
Yves Tanguy
Karel Teige
Hervé Télémaque
Franciszka Themerson
Stefan Themerson
Václav Tikal
Toyen (Marie Čermínová)
Heinz Trökes
Raoul Ubac
Remedios Varo
Alois Wachsman
Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze)
Kati Horna and Wolf Hamburger (WoTi)
Ramses Younan
Enrique Zañartu
Unica Zürn
Teresa Żarnower
As an artistic and political movement, Surrealism had an international reach and internationalist beliefs. Rooted in art and literature, it cherished much wider ambitions: to revolutionize society and redefine life itself. “‘Transform the world,’ said Marx; ‘change life,’ said Rimbaud: these two goals make only one for us,” André Breton declared in 1935.
Since their emergence in the 1920s, Surrealists have confronted a number of political programs that contradicted the ideals of equality and freedom. They would condemn Europe’s colonial projects, organize themselves against fascists, fight in the Spanish Civil War, join the resistance during World War II—to be denounced as “degenerate” by the Nazi, face internment or persecution, ultimately flee Europe or die on the battlefields or in camps. Their resistance was art itself. Through poetry, painting, photography, collage, and exhibition-making they strived to expose flaws in the supposedly rational message of the supposedly rational civilization of the West.
As fascism gained ground in Europe, as Nazification of Germany progressed, as World Wars and colonial wars broke out—Surrealists wouldn’t budge; protagonists of Surrealism remained radical in their ideological and political choices. At the same time, these upheavals resulted in extraordinary encounters and a truly global solidarity: Prague would stand with Coyoacán, Mexico; Cairo, with the Spanish Republic; Marseille, with Martinique’s Fort-de-France; Puerto Rico and Paris, with Chicago; and London, with New York. Surrealist thought and action have had an all-encompassing simultaneousness to them. Accordingly, the show unfolds as if on a map rather than a timeline. The intent here is to present Surrealism as an international movement invested heavily in society and politics—in line with how its members perceived it.
VICTOR BRAUNER
LA RENCONTRE DU 2 BIS RUE PERREL [THE ENCOUNTER OF 2 BIS RUE PERREL]
1946
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art in Paris
© ADAGP, Paris / ZAIKS, Warsaw
LEONORA CARRINGTON
L’ARCHE DE NOÉ [NOAH’S ARK]
ca 1938
oil on canvas
Private collection
MAX ERNST
TÊTE DE L’ANGE DU FOYER [HEAD OF “THE FIRESIDE ANGEL”]
ca 1937
oil on canvas
The Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection, Berlin
© ADAGP, Paris / ZAIKS, Warsaw
KURT SELIGMANN
COMPOSITION SURRÉALISTE [SURREALIST COMPOSITION]
1956
acrylic on canvas
The Mayor Gallery
© The Mayor Gallery
© The Mayor Gallery
YVES TANGUY
LA SPLENDEUR SEMBLABLE [THE SIMILAR RESPLENDENCE]
1930
oil on canvas
Art Museum Basel
REMEDIOS VARO
MI GENERALITO (LE MARQUIS DE LA CONTRE-CROUPE) [MY LITTLE GENERAL (THE MARQUIS OF COUNTER-CROUP)]
1959
oil on masonite
Private collection
VEGAP, Madrid / ZAIKS, Warszawa
Surrealists demanded absolute freedom, and wanted it to permeate every section of society. Emancipation, to them, meant life liberated from any imperative on the part of the state, the nation, the church, or the bourgeoisie. They read Freud and Sade, proclaimed anarchism and socialism, subscribed to Marxism and Communism, opposed fascism and colonialism as well as all sorts of imperialism. They lamented the lack of imagination displayed by most, feeling hurt by the common perception that their art and poetry was but an eccentric whim. Members of La Main à plume, a group operating in Paris under Nazi German occupation and circulating verse underground, once wrote: “If anyone comes to tell us that our present has other things on its mind than writing poetry, we’ll reply: ‘So do we!’” In 1924, La Révolution surréaliste persuaded their readers: “If you’re fond of love, then you’ll love Surrealism.” To Surrealists, political and artistic transgression was inseparable from the affirmation of life, from love, and from the erotic.
And it was this openness about the political and the artistic being linked together that attracted many emancipatory movements to Surrealism. The student demonstrations of May 1968, several post-war anti-totalitarian campaigns in Eastern Europe, and even the Black Liberation Movement in the United States were all inspired to an extent by Surrealist methods and beliefs. The exhibition traces these struggles as it attempts to revise the widespread preconception of Surrealism as a style in painting only meant for representing dreams, fantasies, and magic; doing away with the notion of a Surrealist canon, once again it poses this provocative question: “What is Surrealism?”
PABLO PICASSO
CABEZA DE CABALLO. BOCETO PARA „GUERNICA” [HORSE HEAD. SKETCH FOR „GUERNICA”]
1937
oil on canvas
Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
© Succession Picasso 2026
The exhibition In the Very Bowels of Changes: Surrealism and Antifascism is an adaptation of a display presented at Lenbachhaus in Munich, Germany, from October 15, 2024 through March 30, 2025 and originally titled Aber hier leben? Nein danke. Surrealismus + Antifaschismus [But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism + Anti-fascism]. The current display at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, extending that of Lenbachhaus, was produced in collaboration with Munich’s institution as well as with Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.
In Warsaw, curators Dorota Jarecka and Magda Lipska included an exploration of Surrealism as practiced in Poland and wider Eastern Europe. Another collaborating curator, Paweł Polit from Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, contributed a chapter on the collection of the a.r. group, which was assembled in the early 1930s for the then-established museum in Łódź and featured several prominent Surrealists. The chapter on Prague’s Surrealism is now more exhaustive, as are the presented wartime and post-war histories of Surrealist artists—their persecutions, flights, and lasting migrations. But most significant as an addition, perhaps, is the perspective of Holocaust studies now present in the narrative of this exhibition.
ERNA ROSENSTEIN
SPOKOJNY ŚWIAT [PEACEFUL WORLD]
1954
oil on canvas
National Museum in Wrocław
© Estate of Erna Rosenstein, Foksal Gallery Foundation
The exhibition is divided into 12 sections:
1. SURREALISM AND THE A.R. GROUP
In 1930s Poland, Surrealism was seen as a dangerous departure from the order that the liberal arts provided, if not a threat to culture altogether. The far right associated it with “Judeo-Bolshevism,” while average viewers dismissed it as the exact opposite of sanity and reason. But to a small group of intellectuals and artists who appreciated novel ideas, it would become a source of inspiration.
A breakthrough in the dissemination of Europe’s avant-garde art in Poland came in 1931, when the Museum of History and Art in Łódź received the collection of the a.r. group, including works by Max Ernst, Kurt Seligmann, and Hans Arp. Apart from these, modern art held in today’s Muzeum Sztuki—acquired back then at the initiative of Władysław Strzemiński, Henryk Stażewski, and Katarzyna Kobro—also includes pieces by Jean Lurçat and Hans Rudolf Schiess. After Łódź’s annexation by Nazi Germany in 1939, however, the municipal museum was forced to give up the so-called “degenerate art.” The part of the a.r. group’s collection destroyed during World War II is referenced in paintings by Arp and by František Foltýn, leased for display here from Düsseldorf’s Kunstsammlung NRW and from Galleries of Modern Art in Hradec Králové and in Roudnice nad Labem.
After Łódź was annexed by the Reich in 1931, the Nazi compiled a list of works of “degenerate and Jewish art”; paintings from the Museum’s collection were listed too, including by Arturo Nathan and Jankiel Adler as well as from the a.r. group’s collection. Under occupation, an exhibition of listed works might have been held too, and some of those collected by the a.r. group were forever lost.
In the 1930s, Kobro and Strzemiński drew inspiration from the biomorphic forms originated by Hans Arp. Arp’s verse too was translated into Polish, for a monograph by Jan Brzękowski. Reproductions of works by Max Ernst were featured in Brzękowski’s volumes of poetry. In Karol Hiller’s paintings and heliographs, Constructivist Abstraction came together with Surrealism. Marian Minich, having become the director of the said museum in Łódź in 1935, invested in Surrealist threads in particular as he acquired for their collection a number of works by Trieste’s Jewish painter Arturo Nathan as well as by Henryk Streng (Marek Włodarski) from the Artes group based in Lviv. In the 1960s, Muzeum Sztuki would acquire new works again and organize exhibitions that revived the traditions connected with the a.r. group’s collection.
In 1969, André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto received its first print publication in the Polish language.
2. PARIS: A SURREALIST REVOLUTION?
The Surrealist movement was founded in 1924 in Paris, in a circle of artists surrounding the poet André Breton. Surrealists demanded that society be revolutionized and life itself reinvented. Faced with the brutality and sheer absurdity of World War I, they came to dispute the existing social order. In their attitudes, Marxist ideas combined with Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind. By endorsing chance, spontaneity, and an individual’s right to dream, they challenged capitalism, the church, as well as the bourgeoisie.
Two events shaped Surrealists’ worldview more than other circumstances. One was France’s and Spain’s colonial wars fought with the indigenous people of Rif in northern Morocco (1921–1926). The other—the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931, which they boycotted by concurrently throwing their own exhibition in the French capital. Surrealists engaged with the communist party (PCF); some of them joined the A.E.A.R., Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers. Around 1935, a rift followed in the group: Breton’s faction broke off their ties with PCF, though retaining Marxism as their ideology.
Over the nineteen thirties, the dangers of fascism loomed larger and larger over Europe. In 1930, in a movie theater in Paris an exhibition of Surrealist painting accompanied a screening of Luis Buñuel’s Golden Age (excerpts from which are also featured in this show). Members of the Antisemitic League of France disrupted the event and destroyed the display, ruining works by Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró. The film itself was pulled from distribution in France.
Surrealists responded to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany by joining the antifascist movement. In 1933, Georges Bataille published his seminal essay The Psychological Structure of Fascism. Reflecting Surrealists’ views were such magazines as La Révolution surréaliste, Surréalisme au service de la révolution, Documents, or Minotaure, as well as occasional declarations and manifestos.
3. SPECTERS IN PRAGUE
“A spectre is haunting revolutionary Europe… the spectre of fascism,” the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovakia (Skupina surrealistů v ČSR) warned in their 1934 founding manifesto signed by Vítězslav Nezval. That was a clear reference to the opening sentence in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Speaking of the “spectre of communism,” however, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels hinted at mere rumors meant to undermine the communist movement—while by the 1930s, the specter of fascism had become all too real.
As National Socialists seized power in Germany, Prague emerged as a center of antifascist avant-garde, with such exiles operating in the city as John Heartfield. The Munich Agreement, reached in September 1938 by the Third Reich, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy, provided for the German annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. On October 1, 1938, the Wehrmacht invaded the region, then went on to occupy the entire country; its capital city would be annexed by March 15, 1939.
Throughout the 1930s, Czech Surrealists held exhibitions and produced many publications. Besides the paintress Toyen, the Group in Prague included another painter Jindřich Štyrský, writer Vítězslav Nezval, psychoanalyst Bohuslav Brouk, Karel Teige who acted as their leading theorist, as well as other individuals active in the fields of theater, film, or linguistics. Toyen’s and Štyrský’s paintings played a decisive role in the Group’s program. In 1938 they were joined by photographer and poet Jindřich Heisler. His Jewish ethnicity made him especially vulnerable under German occupation. For three years and a half he would pursue his photographic work while in hiding at Toyen’s.
Surrealist circles in Czechoslovakia extended beyond Prague’s Group too. Among those taking up Surrealism in an antifascist stance were painters Alois Wachsman and František Janoušek. Václav Tikal and Mikuláš Medek continued this tradition after the war ended, despite Surrealist practices being outlawed in the country. Toyen and Heisler left for France in 1947, before pro-Soviet communists came into power in Prague.
4. THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Fought from 1936 to 1939, the Spanish Civil War was covered by the press all over the world and inspired immense international solidarity. In 1931, the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed. Five years later, war began with a coup planned by monarchists and fascists—led by General Francisco Franco and endorsed by Germany, Italy, and Portugal. „The revolution divided Spain into two factions. On the one side were the poorly armed, improvised militias with their socialist ideal. On the other side, Franco was supported by the powerful armies of the modern fascist states” (Eugenio Granell).
The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM, Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) played a special role, being the most important left-wing Marxist group during the civil war. Poets such as Benjamin Péret, Mary Low, and Juan Breá were members of POUM. Other intellectuals and artists whose works are presented in this exhibition have been actively involved in the Republican matter—these include painters André Masson, Wifredo Lam, Stanley William Hayter, and Roland Penrose. Photographer Kati Horna documented civilian lives and drew illustrations for satirical magazines. David Seymour (Dawid Szymin, known as Chim) reported from the front lines, sending in photographs to the press. The clash between democracy and fascism prompted Max Ernst to paint his Angel of Hearth and Home.
Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is dedicated to the eponymous Basque town destroyed by Germany and Italy’s aerial bombings in April 1937. That monumental piece was first displayed at the Spanish Republic pavilion during the International Exposition held in Paris that same year. In London, a group of British writers and artists arranged for it to be exhibited in 1938, in connection with their aid and propagandist efforts; the piece later toured to Manchester and Leeds as well. F.E. McWilliam drew direct inspiration from Guernica when sculpting his Spanish Head: its anthropomorphic features speak abject terror, while empty space accentuates the nature of work that the artist himself referred to as “complete fragments.”
5. LONG LIVE DEGENERATE ART!
National Socialists came into power in Germany on January 30, 1933. Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, with NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) being the sole political group legally allowed to exist and operate in the country. As far as culture was concerned, Nazi Germany’s politics of art dismissed all modernism as “degenerate.” Jewish and leftist artists in particular faced denigration and persecution, which forced them to either flee abroad or go underground.
The Degenerate Art exhibition was first held in Munich in 1937, concurrently with the National Socialist Great German Art Exhibition taking place at Haus der Deutschen Kunst, and then travelled to a number of German cities over the following years. Among other artists, Hanna Höch was featured, known best for her politically imbued collage pieces and photomontages. Höch’s output also included paintings: symbolical in their message and aesthetically surreal. Two of these serve as emblems of her antifascist attitude: one is Wilder Aufbruch [Savage Departure], dated 1933 and referencing the birth of fascism in Germany; the other—1945, painted after the war ended, showing dead human bodies with their eyelids closed.
In 1938, Cairo’s Surrealist group Art et Liberté presented their manifesto titled Vive l’art dégénéré [Long Live Degenerate Art], written by Georges Henein. By intercepting the derogatory term, they expressed solidarity with artists and intellectuals being persecuted. Highly heterogeneous—linked to Arab, African, and European parts of the art world—in addition to Henein the group had such figures as Amy Nimr, Ramses Younan, Inji Efflatoun, as well as Lee Miller and Roland Penrose. In Egypt, Surrealism was a device for social critique above all else, fighting fascism, colonialism, and inequalities, including those in the extremely stratified Egyptian society.
6. BUT LIVE HERE? NO THANKS
After 1933, most Surrealists living in Germany had to leave the country because of their left-wing, antifascist views—it was only in exile that they could possibly continue to practice Surrealism. Those who ended up in France included Max Ernst, Wols, Hans Bellmer, John Heartfield, and Erwin Blumenfeld—all born in Germany—as well as Hungarian-born Kati Horna and Austrian Wolfgang Paalen.
After Germany’s invasion of France, which began in the summer of 1940, many of them were interned as enemies of state. Camp des Milles, in the commune of Aix-en-Provence, is where Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer, and Wols found themselves, among other artists. Their drawings from the time repeatedly feature the camp’s characteristic brick building. It was there, too, that Wols took up drawing, unable to work in his primary medium of photography while imprisoned.
Freed from the camp, Bellmer came to live in Vichy France. He kept revisiting themes present in his celebrated photographic series Doll, a contestation of Hitlerian ideals of racial hygiene. When the war ended, he settled in Paris, his work an inspiration from then on to the likes of writer Konstanty Jeleński or paintress Leonor Fini.
War had to end before Surrealism could return to Berlin. In 1949, among the ruins of the bombarded capital, artists founded a cabaret named Die Badewanne [The Bathtub]. The group mostly carried on French Surrealist traditions. Contributors included poets, painters, dancers, and musicians. All genres were equal: Paul Klee’s, Joan Miró’s, and Pablo Picasso’s paintings served as scenography and came to life in the company of dance, while Paul Éluard’s and André Breton’s verse was being set to music. Largely improvised, Bathtub’s programs drew on personal experiences of contributing artists and on the most recent past of Germany.
7. EXILES
On March 24, 1941, the freighter Capitaine Paul-Lemerle departed from Marseille, heading for the United States. On board were André Breton and Jacqueline Lamba Breton, writer and revolutionary Victor Serge, photographer Germaine Krull who also documented the journey, as well as anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, among others. Many of them owed their salvation to USA’s Emergency Rescue Committee and its prominent envoy to Vichy, Varian Fry.
Most would spend months awaiting evacuation in Villa Air-Bel, a residence in town—unheated, but with a private garden. Max Ernst found shelter here upon release from Camp des Milles; so did Remedios Varo and Óscar Domínguez, who came from Paris having fled Francoist Spain, as well as painters Jacques Hérold and Victor Brauner.
More often than not, Martinique was a stop along the way to safety. Refugees arriving from France were taken to an internment camp. In the years that followed, many of them reached out to editors of Tropiques, a Surrealist magazine co-founded by Suzanne and Aimé Césaire. Editorial staff also included René Ménil, Lucie Thésée, Aristide Maugée, Georges Gratiant, and Étienne Léro.
Mexico became an important center for artists and revolutionaries in exile, welcoming writers Anna Seghers and Paul Westheim, painters Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Wolfgang Paalen, as well as photographer Kati Horna, among others. Many would stay in the country long after World War II ended; some would never relocate again.
Memories were alive of Breton’s and his wife Jacqueline Lamba’s 1938 visit to Mexico City, on invitation from Leon Trotsky who had settled there the year before. The couple stayed in Casa Azul, at Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s in the borough of Coyoacán. Together, Trotsky and Breton wrote a manifesto that laid foundations for the establishing of F.I.A.R.I. (International Federation of Revolutionary and Independent Art), an organization later joined by many Surrealists.
8. VOYAGE TO THE NORTHWEST
In May 1939, Wolfgang Paalen embarked on a journey around British Columbia together with his life partner Alice Rahon and friend Eva Sulzer. Officially representing Musée de l’Homme in Paris, he was able to traverse Indian reservations freely. In September that year, Hitler’s army attacked Poland, then invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and France—and BC, to Paalen, was just a stop on his way to Mexico. As war broke out, he became an émigré: there was no going back to Europe.
That was not the first time a representative of Musée de l’Homme had been sent to Canada’s southwesternmost province—in the year before, Swiss painter and Surrealist Kurt Seligmann travelled in that same capacity. He managed to acquire a totem pole, twenty meters high, from the people of Tsimshian. In order to do this, Seligmann joined a clan and took their name. This gave him access to the symbolism of that totemic sculpture, something he would later discuss in an article for Journal de la Société des américanistes. The totem was eventually bestowed on Musée de l’Homme and erected near its entrance on Place du Trocadéro in Paris where it stood until 2006. After a brief stay back in the French capital, Seligmann left the country again shortly before the outbreak of war, for the United States; it was a one-way journey this time.
Paalen’s goals were somewhat different from Seligmann’s as the Austrian intended to “integrate the enormous treasure of Amerindian forms into the consciousness of modern art.” In the face of horrors unfolding in Europe, he set out to find truly “universal art.” Admiration for everything exotic, for the local and picturesque was, to him, the manner of intellectual provincialism. Paalen believed his quest would lead him to such art that allows one to express “the new, the indispensable world-conciousness.”
But the visits to British Columbia were, after all, mostly disappointing. What transpired from Paalen’s and Seligmann’s writings, and from some three hundred photographs taken by Eva Sulzer, was that the world they were all looking for had long ceased to exist. Villages are abandoned in the pictures; and totems, once marks of a thriving culture, on the verge of being consumed by vegetation. Sulzer’s photographs show what settler colonialism and forced assimilation have done to these lands and their native inhabitants. At the same time this documentation makes a bitter addendum to Surrealists’ relationship to indigenous cultures—a relationship that came down, so very often, to casual admiration for otherness.
9. POETRY AND RESISTANCE
France remained under Nazi Germany’s control from 1940 to 1944. The country was initially divided into two parts: north was occupied; south—the so-called Vichy France— “free,” headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain who collaborated with the Reich. Starting in 1942, the latter territory was placed under direct German administration.
It was in these historical circumstances that the Surrealist group La Main à plume emerged. They took their name, meaning “The hand that holds the pen,” from a prose poem by Arthur Rimbaud. Members stayed in the occupied zone and joined the resistance. Left-wing, they supported Marxism while distancing themselves from the French Communist Party; many of them opposed Stalinism. In 1943, the communist poet Paul Éluard parted with the group on ideological grounds. Both French-born artists and immigrants formed La Main à plume. They published volumes of poetry, essays, and political writings; engaging in conspiracy, many fell victim to the Nazi.
The group saw their work as resistance, like Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob) and Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe) had done, running a salon in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s. Connected with Surrealist circles, the two relocated to Jersey in 1937. When Germany took over the Channel Islands, Cahun and Moore began producing anti-Nazi propaganda: they distributed flyers, handwritten in German and signed “anonymous soldiers,” meant to spread defeatism among the occupant’s army. Eventually captured, the two women were first sentenced to death for their political activity, then pardoned in 1945. Cahun’s self-portrait dating to that period refers to the defeat of National Socialism: the artist is depicted chewing on an SS badge, its eagle and swastika bitten by her teeth.
10. RESTLESS WORLD: 1948
In June 1947, the Surrealist Group opened an exhibition at Galerie Maeght in Paris—titled Le Surréalisme en 1947, it had been conceived by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp, and included scenography by Frederick Kiesler. Jerzy Kujawski took part in the show as one of signatories to the manifesto Rupture inaugurale [Inaugural Rupture], in which loyalty to the labor movement was declared along opposition to monopartisan dictatorship. In response to that, the group Surréalistes-Révolutionnaires accused Parisian Surrealists of betraying revolutionary ideals. Close to that group was Bogusław Szwacz, a painter who worked with the magazine Surréalisme Révolutionnaire.
In Poland, artists drew on Surrealist techniques and themes to preserve the memory of wartime and Holocaust. Władysław Strzemiński employed biomorphic forms in his war drawings and collages dedicated to Jewish victims of the Litzmannstadt (Łódź) Ghetto. Jonasz Stern and Alfred Lenica used the process of decalcomania. Moved by the events of the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace held in 1948 in Wrocław, where Aimé Césaire gave a speech condemning colonial projects, Marian Bogusz made anti-war paintings based on his personal experiences of imprisonment at the Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen.
Czech artists took a firm stance against fascism in their work too, as exemplified here by painter Emil Filla (survivor from Buchenwald), graphic artist and poet Vladimír Boudník, and Vilém Reichmann whose photographs draw a comparison between bombarded city and injured body. In 1955 Erna Rosenstein, who had survived the Holocaust living in Lviv and Warsaw, painted the piece Peaceful World, at which the title of this chapter hints.
11. ŻARNOWER AND THE THEMERSONS
In the late 1930s, among the people of the arts leaving Poland for Paris were the Themersons—Franciszka and Stefan—as well as Teresa Żarnower. As antisemitism rose and liberties of speech shrank, they couldn’t possibly see themselves grow as artists in their home country anymore. And when Nazi Germany took Paris in 1940, they found themselves in southern France. While Stefan enlisted in the army, Franciszka made her way to London; he later managed to join her in the United Kingdom in 1942. Żarnower stayed in Lisbon at the time and applied for a U.S. immigrant visa.
In their film Calling Mr. Smith, commissioned by the Polish government-in-exile based in London, the Themersons showed British viewers the scale and monstrosities of Germany’s occupation of Poland. Music, text, and juxtapositions of images spoke volumes: dead women hanging on the gallows, Adolf Hitler addressing the crowds, marching Nazi troops, monuments being overturned. Inspired by the language of the avant-garde, the film-making couple created a piece that was Surrealist in form and propagandist in content. In post-war years they would advocate for Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi to be translated into English. Working on masks for a stage performance of the play, Franciszka evoked one of Europe’s common avant-gardist tropes by making the eponymous king into an overblown caricature of authoritarian power.
Żarnower was eventually admitted to the United States; she reached New York via Canada. Constructivist-turned-Surrealist, her art dealt with solitude and grief after her closest ones died in the Warsaw Ghetto, and with compassion for the suffering brought about by the Holocaust as a whole. In 1946, her work was shown in New York and in San Francisco. In 1949, Teresa Żarnower committed suicide.
12. ORDER AT ANY PRICE
The Algerian War of Independence started in 1954 and concluded successfully in 1962. The French troops resorted to torture and rape in their attempts to suppress rebel resistance, which came to be represented in many paintings and writings of the time. In his book-long essay The Question, Henri Alleg described his experience of being tortured by French paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers in 1957. Sixty-five thousand copies of the book had been sold before it was banned from circulation in France; it also became a best-selling title in the United States.
In 1959 Roberto Matta, André Breton, Francis Picabia, Benjamin Péret, Victor Brauner, Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Wifredo Lam, and others condemned the Algerian War in Front Unique, a magazine edited at the time by the young and radically oriented artist Jean-Jacques Lebel who openly voiced his support for Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN). Together with Enrico Baj, Roberto Crippa, Gianni Dova, Erró, and Antonio Recalcati, in 1960 Lebel created the Large Collective Antifascist Painting, in which elements of Surrealism combined with the collaborative composition method known as cadavre exquis (“exquisite corpse”); the piece was an expression of solidarity with Djamilia Boupacha, female Algerian militant who faced terrorism charges. In 1962, Matta painted Charonne, l’ordre à tout prix [Charonne, order at any price], his take on the brutal suppression by the police of protests against the Secret Army Organization (OAS), whose plan was to thwart decolonization processes.
Haitan artist Hervé Télémaque, living in Paris since the 1960s, painted One of the 36000 marines over our Antilles to denounce the U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic. Afro-American Ted Joans, who fled the States in that same decade to escape institutional racism, also condemned imperial violence in his artistic output. In a letter to Breton he wrote: “Surrealism became the weapon that I chose to defend myself, and it has been and always will be my way of life.”
Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Surrealists endorsed various movements aimed at radical transformations of the world. They opposed warfare, exploitation, sexism, racism, and class domination. Their demands, justified as they are, await effective recognition to this day.
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Film program accompanying the exhibition „IN THE VERY BOWELS OF CHANGES: SURREALISM AND ANTIFASCISM”
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