74

Photography and surrealism

75

The automatic image

is no Surrealist painting’, he claimed.63 Breton objected and took over editing of the journal and, going further, asserted in four separate issues of La Révolution surréaliste: ‘Le Surréalisme et la peinture’ (‘Surrealism and Painting’).64 These four articles were then collectively published as a separate book, Le Surréalisme et la peinture (Surrealism and Painting), in with photogravure plates of various works by ten artists, as illustrations to support the argument: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Francis Picabia, Max Ernst, Man Ray, André Masson, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy and Jean Arp.65 All this was not merely a power play between Naville and Breton, but also a theoretical dispute over what forms a surrealist image could take. Hitherto the automatic image had been primarily conceived in literary terms. Automatic writing, dream recitals and monologues under hypnosis all had understandable relations to states of psychic automation as the mode of producing images. But could a state of distraction be maintained with highly technological processes? How could the ‘contrived’ eld of painting, for example, relay visually the automatic images of mental or ‘psychical’ images? This was Naville’s objection.

In the rst Manifesto the issue had been made quite clear: ‘psychic automatism’ is surrealism, no matter what form of representation it takes: ‘verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner’. Whatever Breton or Naville personally privileged as the means to surrealist images, the form of ‘psychic automatism’ was not dogmatically proscribed. Even in the later essay ‘The Automatic Message’ () where André Breton claims auditory (‘verbo-auditive’) automatism to be the ‘innitely richer’ source of ‘visual meaning’, he does so with a caution that lays down a gauntlet for artists: ‘This much having been said, the painters obviously are now the ones to speak, whether to contradict or not.’66

In the early episodes of Surrealism and Painting Breton railed, as he had in the Manifesto, against art based in mimetic realism. ‘What does it matter to me whether trees are green, whether a piano is at this moment “nearer” to me than a carriage, whether a ball is cylindrical or round?’67 And if Breton envisages a picture as ‘a window’ and poses the question ‘to

Pierre Naville, ‘Plus per-sonne n’ignore qu’il n’y a pas de peinture surréaliste’ (see his ‘Beaux-Arts’, in La Révolution surréaliste, no. , April , p. ).

Breton’s views are recorded in his interviews with André Parinaud, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, p. . The essays by Breton, ‘Le Surréal-isme et la peinture’, appeared in La Révolution surréaliste, no. ( July ), pp. –; no. (March ), pp. –; nos and – (October ), pp. –. The book included additional written material.

André Breton, Le Surréal-isme et la peinture (Paris: Gallimard, ). The cover is metallic green with black lettering. Breton’s essay was printed in its entirety with the photogravure plates set at the back in sections by individual artists.

See André Breton, ‘The Automatic Message’, in Rose-mont (ed.), What is Surrealism?, p. .

Breton, Surrealism and Painting, p. .