Magazyn MSN

Surrealism is most commonly associated with the uncanny, with oneiric images and dreams as domain of hope—and quite rightly so. The exhibition In the Very Bowels of Changes: Surrealism and Antifascism, however, takes place in the real world. Works of art are presented here against a backdrop of the turbulent political climate of the 20th century; they are involved in the conflicts of their time as they emerge in the shadow of totalitarian projects. In this account, rather than furthering the history of the avant-gardes, Surrealism becomes part of the history of the political imaginary. But—is that history a thing of the past for good? Or, on the contrary—should we be looking at this display in our present context above all? That is—is the conflict in question really over, or is it arising all over again?

 

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The year 2024 marked the centenary of the Surrealist Manifesto, prompting a crop of institutional initiatives dealing with the movement. Some of the special exhibitions were primarily designed to undermine the fame of Surrealism as an “aesthetic of strangeness” while other examined its legacy critically and reviewed the most widespread preconceptions about its nature. With Paris-centric narratives subject to deconstruction, Surrealism was being presented as an international and highly diversified platform for sensibility, not just another “ism”—another merely stylistic invention developed deep down in the laboratory of the avant-garde sprawling throughout the artistic districts of the French capital. Surrealism was being de-Europeanized altogether, and more importantly: feminized in historical terms. Reinstating long-marginalized female artists before the general public, and recognizing at last their contributions to the movement, was undisputably a worthy achievement of centennial celebrations.

 

Among the projects celebrating one hundred years of Surrealism’s foundational text was the exhibition But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism and Anti-Fascism at Munich’s Lenbachhaus, of which the current display at Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art is an extension; the original curatorial narrative has been expanded to also include local, Polish themes and threads.

Throughout 2024, the notion of Surrealism was examined and explained in every possible way—and yet, the exhibition at Lenbachhaus stood out as a unique undertaking. Although a number of institutions had set out to avoid trivialization and keep their subject from being reduced to style (if not plain “weirdness”), it was Munich’s museum that succeeded notably in reconstructing the political and social contexts of the Surrealist movement.

 

Especially significant is the fact it was Munich that originated and hosted a project focused on the antifascist dimension of Surrealism. After all, the city played an essential role in the rise of fascism in Germany, and was called that movement’s “capital” for a reason. It is where the Nazi Party was established, and where a coup was attempted—unsuccessfully, but that event did mark an important step in Hitler’s march towards unconstrained power nevertheless. As soon as he grabbed it, Germany became a battlefield where the authoritarian regime strived to eradicate the artistic avant-garde. Coining the term “degenerate art,” the Nazi meant—and targeted—all of modernity in the arts, including that of Surrealists more than anyone else.

 

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One significant absence in the exhibition, in both Munich and Warsaw, was and is that of Salvador Dalí’s. But—is he actually missing here? The answer is, yes and no. Dalí was conflicted with Surrealist circles practically from the moment he joined them. Already in 1934 he faced a kind of a court of honor as convened by André Breton, and even before World War II broke out he was effectively expelled from the movement. Regardless, Dalí continues to emblematize Surrealism in the public consciousness.

 

From among those who came within the orbit of the Surrealist movement in prewar years, Dalí was the one who best understood how art is perceived in a mass society—how the economics of attention worked in late-stage capitalism. After war’s end he carried Surrealism all the way from the field of niche avant-garde pursuits to the forum of popular culture; he turned it into a spectacle, a show—extensive publicity included—and into a style, design-wise. There is no doubt he did popularize that movement’s principles, but in the process he also commodified and trivialized them.

 

It was Dalí who propagated the notion of Surrealism as dreamlike visions and Freudian riddles depicted with an almost photographic accuracy—a notion standing strong today in the collective imagination. As an artist of an elitist disposition, conservative and reactionary in his own way, he turned for inspiration to the old masters rather than to contemporary experimenters.

 

Surrealism of this kind does not abound in the exhibition In the Very Bowels of Changes, since this particular display is not concerned with the style, and not even with the genre in strict artistic terms—rather, it is about a certain attitude which transcended the aesthetical framework of one Modernist sect, developing distinctively political attributes. In the 1920s and ’30s—decades of rapid civilizational transformation, crisis of liberal democracy, and rise of totalitarian tendencies—that attitude clashed with fascism. Accordingly, the exhibition presents politically imbued works, some of them explicitly antifascist. These, however, are not predominant; quite the opposite. Referencing current politics directly wasn’t part and parcel of Surrealists’ practices as they were in fact dealing with fascism on a much deeper level. Their fight was about the politics of imagination, about the allowed manifestations of desire in public life, about the ways in which identity is constructed and the role it plays in society—and, last but not least, about the room for the non-rational in the psycho-political landscape of modern times.

 

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Surrealism and fascism are presented in this exhibition as diametrically opposed elements, them being indeed antithetical systems for the organization of people’s imaginaries and affects. Paradoxically though, the two contradictory discourses largely share their genesis as they both emerged in response to the same problem and even sought solutions in similar areas.

 

The two movements came into existence at practically the same time, conceived in the early 1920s by veterans of World War I, right after it ended. Many of the artists in Breton’s circles, himself included, had seen the front firsthand; the rest had otherwise witnessed the four years-long carnage. When Surrealists were about to edit their manifesto, their peers, carrying the same burden and trauma, were enlisting in Freikorps, the reactionary troops, and listening to Hitler and the likes of him agitate down at Munich’s beer halls.

 

“A cloaca of blood, stupidity, and mud,” André Breton said when summarizing his experience of fighting in World War I. He was from the generation that had been gravely disillusioned with social order—the one they had grown up in—by the 1914–1918 period. It was this generation that gave rise to National Socialism in Germany: not only combatants, victims (as well as perpetrators) of the Great War’s violence, but also deeply disappointed civilians, orphans of the prewar, bourgeois world.

 

That world was marked by a peculiar boredom. Walter Benjamin described it when writing about his childhood years, spent in the bourgeoisie of Berlin; Erich Auerbach echoed those observations, and Thomas Mann captured that state most accurately, perhaps, in The Magic Mountain. At the close of the 19th century, capitalist order brought about by the first globalization seemed to be “the end of history” avant la lettre—but it also was a spectacle of denial, one of epic proportions. The social cost of industrial progress and development was being accrued invariably to the working class, indebted beyond repair already. Suppressed desires had been corseted into patriarchal hypocrisy. Violence and bestiality, upon which the economic success of belle époque had been founded, were being exported to the colonies. Science unmasked religion, exposing its falsehoods, but the latter continued to operate as a zombie institution.

 

Benjamin’s boredom—a feeling something’s about to happen at last—was a symptom of the collective subconscious being overloaded. The excess of unwanted content had to overflow eventually, spilling right onto the surface of modernity. As it happened, the Great War erupted.

 

In 1917, having received news of the February Revolution, Nicholas II of Russia ordered his troops, fighting the German army at the time, to march on Petrograd (formerly Petersburg) and put the rebellion down. The attempt was in vain, for he had lost control of both the state and the armed forces by then. It became evident that the emperor had no clothes, not unlike many other European leaders whose power and authority were of hopelessly outdated, post-feudal origins; after World War I, most of them were deposed and done away with. The old order fell to moral bankruptcy in the bloodied mud of war—but none of the inherent contradictions that had caused it to burst were really resolved. There was no going back to how things had been in the past, and the new order was a scenario still to be written.

 

Being discourses of change, both Surrealism and fascism employed the rhetoric of revolution. With modern rationalism in disgrace as it had produced the pointless slaughter of the Great War, the two movements set out to overthrow the decayed bourgeois order using that which is non-rational: the force of desire. The projects in question were in fact libidinal, and visibly so. Both campaigns recognized it is not only reason, economy, or class that motivate people’s actions; both knew that politics, as much as culture, works through images, fetishes, fears, phantasms, and projections.

 

Fascists and Surrealists were alike in their diagnoses of the liberal, bourgeois order, complete with the hypocrisy it entailed and the violence it concealed and denied. Both the former and the latter tried the same kind of means in their attempt at dealing the final blow to the old system as it could barely stand anymore, severely wounded in the Great War. Having a common starting point, however, the two movements diverged radically as far as their goals were concerned.

 

Surrealism demanded that non-rational elements, repressed by the reactionary reason of the bourgeois, be liberated. The subject was to be unfastened, untied; the subconscious, set free; norms and rules, deconstructed; boundaries of reality, opened to diversity and ambiguity. Fascism, on the other hand, harnessed the non-rational as a source of primitive, tribe-like unity, channeling all affects into the cult of the leader and power, aestheticizing violence, reinventing desire in order to seduce the masses—and reinventing myths in order to mobilize them.

 

In this context, a clash between Surrealism and fascism was inevitable, and not only for the fact that so many Surrealists (although not all, to be sure) were members of, or at least sympathized with, communist parties in their respective countries. The case runs deeper than that; specifically, the two movements were drawing on the same resources, trying to respond to the same needs and longings—but in terms of method they went to opposite extremes.

 

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Among the episodes from the history of Surrealism being retold in the exhibition In the Very Bowels of Changes as they unfolded under imminent fascist threat, there is that of the legendary Villa Air-Bel. From 1940 to 1941, the residence outside Marseille served as a safe haven to political refugees, being a stop along the way to those who were desperately trying to flee Europe. The operation was run by Varian Fry, American journalist and head of the southern French unit of the Emergency Rescue Committee—an organization founded in New York with a mission of helping intellectuals and artists who had found themselves in grave danger because of fascist repression. And those included many Surrealists as the figures staying at Air-Bel at this or other point in time included André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Max Ernst, Wifredo Lam, Victor Brauner, Benjamin Péret, and Marcel Duchamp.

 

Villa Air-Bel makes a perfect allegory of Surrealism in exile. By the 1940s the movement had become one of refugees, camp interns, and otherwise blacklisted artists—hunted by the Gestapo, waiting for new, forged documents in the south of France, applying for American visas in Lisbon, crossing borders illegally, leaving for Martinique or Mexico. Consequently, the history of Surrealism’s struggle against fascism can be told exhaustively through wartime life stories of Surrealist artists featured in the exhibition.

 

There’s Toyen, co-founder of the Czech Surrealist Group, who adopted male pronouns and dressed likewise decades before the notion of non-binary identity would become known to Western societies. She illustrated the works of Sade and was friends with Breton. Throughout the period of occupation she was hiding the Jewish poet Jindřich Heisler in her apartment.

 

There’s Wifredo Lam, born in Cuba to a Chinese immigrant and an Afro-Caribbean Creole woman who had descended from slaves brought to the New World from the Congo. In Europe, Lam studied in Madrid and formed ties with Surrealists in Paris. Like so many other artists subscribing to the avant-garde, he fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War—and later, as a veteran of that conflict, he wouldn’t be spared by fascists. During World War II he was hiding in Marseille before he made his way to Martinique together with Breton and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

 

Or Claude Cahun, French artist, photographer, and writer connected with Surrealism, holding an important place today in historical narratives of queer and feminist art. During the war she found herself on the German-occupied island of Jersey together with her partner Suzanne Malherbe (known as Marcel Moore). They formed a two-woman resistance movement that produced leaflets and other persuasive messages directed at German soldiers, pretending to come from a much larger and actually fictional organization. The Gestapo eventually tracked them down; both were arrested and sentenced to death. They survived in the end but would spend another year imprisoned before the island was finally liberated by the Allies.

 

Max Ernst, one of the major Parisian Surrealists, was German. Him being a declared antifascist, there was no future for Ernst in his homeland after Hitler’s rise to power. Still, when the Reich attacked France, he and many more German nationals who had emigrated on political grounds were interned in France as potential “enemy aliens.” And when the Nazi took Paris, his situation got even more dangerous. Had he been captured by the Gestapo, that would be the end of him: in the eyes of National Socialists he was a leading figure of “degenerate art,” and a renegade as such. Thanks to the help of certain powerful friends of his, among them Peggy Guggenheim, he managed to get to Villa Air-Bel first and later leave Europe for the United States.

 

Leonora Carrington, a prominent British surrealist, was Max Ernst’s life partner when the war broke out. Upon receiving news of his internment, feeling alone and terrified, she fled to Spain where she then had a nervous breakdown. The paintress’s father, who had always considered her artistic pursuits as a sign of madness and a source of shame for the family, took advantage of the situation and placed his daughter in a mental asylum. Carrington later described this nightmare of a period in a deeply moving book titled Down Below. The family intended to have her transferred to a clinic in South Africa—to keep her at a “safe distance” from the likes of Ernst and the supposedly detrimental effect of Surrealism—but she managed to escape that and made her way to Portugal. In Lisbon, she was trying to board any of the ships heading for the U.S., and was ultimately helped in doing so by Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc. The two entered into “white marriage,” so as to give Carrington diplomatic protection and allow her to leave the continent. In 1942 she met with Ernst in New York, but at this point he was married already to his savior, Peggy Guggenheim. Carrington never returned to Europe. Even before war’s end she relocated to Mexico and started a new life there.

 

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The Allies liberated Paris, but that didn’t give the city back the importance it had had for the arts before the war broke out. It was no longer the unofficial capital of modern art, nor was it the headquarters of the Surrealist movement. Surrealists had spread around the world during wartime; their ideas had globalized as well as dissolved in other, newer artistic currents. From then on, the Surrealist gene would be found in the DNA of most diverse genres and movements, from pop-art to Fluxus and the Situationist International. At the same time, the history of Surrealism as a coherent grouping was coming to an end. Symbolically, the passing of André Breton in 1966 made a dividing line between actual existence of the Surrealist movement and just recurrences of its spirit alone.

 

There is a tempting analogy between Surrealism’s dissolution in artistic practices of the second half of the 20th century—or, in its culture as a whole—and the post-war fate of antifascist attitudes. Before 1939, Surrealist antifascists were facing a clearly defined enemy. With the war concluded, fascism at its most uniform—marked by unambiguous symbols, embodied by Hitlerism—had been defeated along with all of its supporters. However, fascist ideas, mentalities, and imaginaries survived that defeat; they have just taken other forms, much less conspicuous than those known from 1920s and ’30s Germany or Italy.

 

Even before the outbreak of World War II, Surrealists recognized that same paradigm in Europe’s colonial projects. Overseas dominions of modern empires had become laboratories of genocide, dehumanization, and absolute supremacy. The concept of a concentration camp had already been tested out in the colonies when it was being put into practice in the Old Continent. As shown by Sven Lindqvist in his seminal book Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, the European-conquered territories was where modernity shoved its own savagery and barbarism.

 

The anti-colonialist dimension of Surrealism does reverberate throughout the display In the Very Bowels of Changes. In 1931, Surrealists organized an exhibition titled La Vérité sur les colonies [The Truth about the Colonies]. It was their response to Exposition Coloniale Internationale, held in Paris at the time and officially presenting colonial projects as peak achievements of modernity’s mission to civilize the world. In their counter-proposition, Surrealists unsparingly depicted colonialism as workings of violence and racism, fueled by exploits and marked by crime.

 

Among the latest works on display at MSN is a poster by Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta—an artist who had come within the orbit of Breton’s group before World War II broke out—designed in 1968 for demonstrating students. “Be realistic, demand the impossible,” the rebels of the time cried. This and many other slogans of the counterculture revolution do sound as if they quoted from Surrealist manifestoes. And the year 1968, fairly close to where the exhibition’s narrative ends, can be seen as an epilog of sorts to the political history of Surrealism. Let us not forget, however, that the sexual revolution of the late 1960s remains one of the origin myths of the contemporary—so if conclusions are to be drawn from In the Very Bowels of Changes, then it has to be done in the present-day context and circumstances.

 

But there’s no easy moral to any story these days. Deleuze and Guattari once wrote about capitalism as a schizophrenic system; sadly, implications of this have become quite literal. In a sense, Surrealism won in historical terms—but that victory is rather bitter, if not Pyrrhic. The reality of the digital era is overwhelmingly surreal. Lautréamont’s “chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”—the turn of phrase that Surrealists admired so much—has become the modus operandi of TikTok, X, or Meta’s reels. Virtual streams of images are fundamentally oneiric: contexts keep changing abruptly as erotics, disasters, absurdity, advertising, war, puppies, trauma, and irony all operate in a single plane of perception. The view of the world as mediated by the internet is surreal not because it is weird, but because it blurs any reliable relationships between signs, reality, and meaning. Collapsing logical sequences, paranoidal connections, hallucinatory oversupply of content—these are not strategies of the avant-garde anymore but everyday conditions for us to drown in while trying to inhale any information.

 

The problem is, reality’s digital “surrealization” does not offer any kind of straightforward emancipatory potential. On the contrary, it is rather the new reactionism, alt-right, conservatism on steroids, and other political imaginaries in which fascist legacies shape people’s understandings of social order that feel at home in this realm of ubiquitous hallucination. Idioms of dreams, catastrophe, mutation, paranoia, and conspiracy are all too easily seized and instrumentalized.

 

The internet—before it was appropriated by corporations and turned into a revenue machine, and before reactionaries learned to play it better than liberals—used to promise equality, decentralized production and distribution of knowledge, and emancipation. In times of AI, the digital world no longer makes such promises; nor does it hold out any prospects of fulfilling those made in the past, when Silicon Valley was still young and romantic. Today, CEOs of major tech companies are issuing manifestoes with authoritarian undertones—demanding clear social hierarchies in place of equality, pondering over what would best tackle today’s challenges: oligarchy, neo-monarchy, or some kind of surveillance capitalism straight out of sci-fi dystopias.

 

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The exhibition In the Very Bowels of Changes takes us to the first half of the 20th century—but seeing it one cannot help the impression that history, today, is just doing its thing: repeating itself. Rationalism seems to have plunged to its lowest since the Enlightenment, and democracy—just like before World War II—fails to respond convincingly to rising authoritarian tendencies.

 

With the ubiquitous instability of meanings, identities, and notions about the future, old demons reappear: enforcement of borders, fantasies about “cleansing,” panic in the face of otherness, longing for the “golden age,” the mythologized past. Retrotopias proliferate, abandoning ideas of progress in favor of some long-lost “greatness.” This kind of fears, yearnings, and phantasms make rocket fuel for machines that produce reactionary social orders.

 

Are these machines able to again produce fascism on a mass scale? If so, then we ought to look out for symptoms other than those known from the 1920s and ’30s. Contemporarily, fascism wouldn’t go for brown or black shirts, or any other uniform for that matter. Its supporters wouldn’t be gathering at stadiums—those are taken by the likes of Taylor Swift. Potential recruits of neofascist projects today are not frustrated, unemployed veterans reaching out to Freikorps for a sense of belonging, but lonely web and mobile app users, paralyzed by conspiracy theories, doomscrolling at the break of dawn. In other words, we are no longer living in an era of twentieth-century totalitarianisms, nor is our time one of classical avant-gardes like that of Surrealism, historically.

 

If we then approach the exhibition In the Very Bowels of Changes not as historical account but as source of inspiration and school of resistance against today’s fascization of collective artifacts and imaginaries—then one important note needs to be made; that is, the display does not provide any simple answers, any reliable tools ready to be used, or scenarios for immediate action. For the emancipatory force of historical Surrealism that could be activated these days as well, one should rather turn to the lives of that movement’s figures: to their ethical choices, their rejection of violence and tyranny, their praise of diversity and claims to every individual’s right to be different. And also, to the instincts that allowed them to tell liberation from instrumentalization, as far as the imaginary is concerned.

 

It is precisely this distinction that separates Surrealism from fascism. And in this respect, little has changed since the 1920s, when the two movements had only begun to take shape.

 

 

Translated by Błażej Bauer