SURREALIST CREED

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 28, 3 February 1937, Page 20

SURREALIST CREED

(PRODUCT OF BOREDOM

CLAIMS EXAMINED

Much of the mutability of human activity is based on the principle of the pendulum—the principle that, having gone as far as you can in one direction, the only thing to do is to go in the other, writes Eric Newton in the "Manchester Guardian." It is a perfectly natural principle, and it is largely due to the equally natural tendency of the human being to become bored with whatever he has been doing, especially if he has been overdoing it. Four years of war prepared us to embrace the cause of peace; eighteen years of peace have turned us back-to thoughts of war.

In the fine arts boredom sets in today more quickly than it did in the past, because today, for the first time, the fine arts (architecture excepted) have no master to serve. Priest and king no longer use the artist as a matter of course to further their spiritual or material purposes, to furnish cathedral or palace. The fine arts are at a loose end. The artist, unemployed, has nothing to do but paint and carve in a vacuum—and get bored. He gets bored not with art but with fashionable art, and he promptly reverses his direction and invents another fashion. A minor pendulum swing has just taken place in certain quarters, and, as usual, the supporters of the new movement are busily explaining that at last the way to truth and sanity has been discovered. Surrealism is the movement, and, in England, Mr. Herbert Head is its prophet. Hard on the heels of the Surrealist exhibition in London comes the publication of a manifesto in book form with a long introduction by Mr. Eead, supported by four other essays, including one by Andre Breton, the French champion of Surrealism, and nearly a hundred illustrations in half-tone. "SUBCONSCIOUS ART." It is a formidable work and far from easy to read. But that is no reason for looking on it with suspicion. The Surrealists deal in phenomena for ■which no commonly-accepted terminology is available, and a certain amount of obscurity is unavoidable. But what does make one suspect their turgid phrases, their philosophical apologetics, and their psychological rhetoric is that never once do they make the simple and natural admission fhat Surrealism is largely the result of sheer boredom—boredom with -the art-for-art's sake, formal-design school of Roger Fry, which found its logical cul-de-sac in abstract art. Fry was the defender of Classicism in the arts, and during the last generation Classicism reached a point of logical exhaustion in coming to the conclusion that the subject of a painting matters nothing and that the purest art can therefore be reduced to a series of circles and istraight lines. The pendulum was bound to swing back. The theory that the subject of a painting is the only thing that matters was bound to be put forward, and (realism, in the sense of "copying Nature," being, for many reasons, out of the question) it was bound to take a psychological form. "The subjectmatter of art is within you; let imagination run riot; paint your dreams; conless your subconscious mind,, and be ■hanged to aesthetics" is the Surrealist creed expressed in its simplest terms. NOTHING NEW ABOUT IT. , There is nothing new in this point of view. It is as much a recognised facet of the Romantic theory of art as abstract art is a facet of the Classic. The only new thing about the Surrealists is that they push it to extremes. In their enthusiasm for the cause they call loudly on the names of all the extreme romantics arid fantasists of the past. El Greco, Bosch, Grunewald, and Blake in painting; folk-ballads, nursery rhymes, the English "roman noir" of the, late eighteenth century .(especially "Udolfo"), Edward Lear, and Lewis Carroll in literature. ("Lear ■is a better poet than Tennyson; Lewis .Carroll has affinities with Shakespeare," says Mr. Read.) , But the strangest part of this apologia is their determination to put the fantastic and the illogical on a logical and philosophical basis. Mr. Bead appeals to Hegel and Marx for support, saying that Surrealism is a manifestation of "dialectical materialism." Mr. Hugh Sykes Davies appeals no less fervently to Bacon and Coleridge to justify the Surrealist practice of letting the artist's imagination lead the artist whithersoever it will. I have no complaint to make against any of these four apologists except that they seem to be making a good deal of fuss to prove a point that needs no proving and that they only tell half the truth about art. They forget that art is neither all form nor all content; neither all Classic nor all Romantic; but that in all great art the two are fused; that Michelangelo has the imagination of a Dali plus the formal harmony of a Wadsworth, and by fusing the two raises them both to a higher power. "GOOD AND BAD ART." Mr. Read does realise his omission at one point, and almost gives his case away by saying: "The Surrealist by no means denies or ridicules aesthetics as such. To him no less than to any other sensitive creature there is good art and bad art ... good Surrealism and bad Surrealism." But he bravely confesses that when writing a poem "If I had sought for rhymes I should have been compelled to distort my narlative and my imagery." But that would be just as good a reason for abandoning rhythm too. And where would the poem be then, poor thing? M. Georges Huguet is more wholehearted when he says (of Surrealist poetry and painting): "There can be no possibility for regarding them in an aesthetic light. They are pure and simple expressions of a desire, fulfilments of a dream." And again, "formal beauty plays no part in Surrealist xvritings"; and again, "Surrealism . . . is only interested in any form of writing to the extent that an author gives himself away." All these appeals to psychology and philosophy are surely a waste of time if their only purpose is to emphasise a half-truth and to justify extremism in Romantic art. Extremism can only lead once more to boredom and another swing of the pendulum. When Mr. Read says "Lewis Carroll has affinities with Shakespeare" he speaks truth, but he does not point out that, though Carroll is a bet>jr Surrealist than Shakespeare, Shakespeare is a better artist than Carroll.