Surrealism: The Split in the Movement 1929

The Surrealist movement took place under the First Manifesto by Breton for most of the 1920s. A division occurred in 1929 between Breton and Bataille, “where a single month saw the publication of both Breton’s ‘Second Manifesto’ of Surrealism in La Revolution Surrealiste and Bataille’s ‘Le “Jeu lugubre”’ in Documents. Breton criticized Bataille for his ‘vulgar materialism’, which went against what he described surrealism as being actual functioning thought in the first manifesto. Breton saw a clear connection between both the ideas on dreams by Freud and the Communist ideals of Marx. Breton did not agree with Bataille on the basis of Marxism. Bataille’s approach to surrealism did not have Marx in the equation. Breton goes on to write the second manifesto, in which he condemns men like Bataille whom he believes threatened the ideals of surrealism and his own authority. Breton writes, “ What we are witnessing is an obnoxious return to old anti-dialectal materialism, which this time is trying to force its way gratuitously through Freud”. In addition to Bataille, Breton shuns several other artists that were apart of surrealism from the start and the first manifesto. Bataille was interested in a type of materialism in which he argues for the concept of an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilizes all foundations. His interest goes on to include bassasse, or baseness. This is a mechanism that caused decay or the process through which form is undone. Some of Bataille’s ideologies come from a place of cruelty and belief in sacrifice. He admired Manet for ‘destroying’ the subject of painting. Breton and Bataille both had different ideas as to the direction they would like to see surrealism go, despite sharing similar notions of Freud’s unconscious mind and dream state. It seems as though both men were threatened by one another and Breton was not willing to give up his title as creator of the Surrealist movement. Breton writes in the Second Manifesto, “It is to be noted that M. Bataille misuses adjectives with a passion: befouled, senile, rank, sordid, lewd, doddering, and that these words, far from serving him to disparage an unbearable state of affairs, are those through which his delight is most lyrically expressed”. The clearest way to analyze the split is one between poetry and action, Breton on the poetry side and Bataille on the action side. Breton created Surrealism as a movement based on ‘pure psychic automatism’ and automatic writing, in addition to exploration, through poetry and prose, the psychic dimension of the human mind. The split resulted in a second manifesto by Breton and can mark the point in which the surrealist movement becomes much more vast and spread out. The result is a lot more artists trying new things because it is less of an exclusive club.

Full text: Briony Fer, David Batchelor and Paul Wood. “Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism Art between the Wars.” Breton and Bataille Division: 1929. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2012. http://courses.ucsd.edu/nbryson/Vis128csp10/BrionyFerPart2.pdf

-Dana Rich