The Brooklyn Rail

In her influential anthology Surrealists on Art (1970), Lucy Lippard observed that in “most opinions, the truly heroic years [of Surrealism] lasted only until 1929; certainly they were over by 1935.” The briskness of her “certainly” gives Lippard’s pronouncement a commonsensical tone—and she did generally agree with it—yet counterintuitively, she also offered a path for Surrealism beyond 1935 (or 1966, the year of André Breton’s death), after those “truly heroic years” and toward her own contemporary moment of the early 1970s. She did this by means of her anthology, its structure. Like everything Lippard accomplished, Surrealists on Art was a contemporary project, a set of ideas organized in present tense.

Similarly, Stephanie Weber, Adrian Djukić, and Karin Althaus—the curators of But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism and Anti-fascism, a retrospective marking the movement’s centenary at the Lenbachhaus, Munich—offers Surrealism, again, in present tense. Like Lippard, they do so with an anthology—in fact multiple. (A forthcoming anthology edited by the curators with Ara H. Merjian and Matthias Mühling, including newly translated primary material previously unpublished, is planned for this spring, a complement to—or continuation of—the exhibition.) Rather than narrating the history of the movement from manifesto to schism to journal to excommunication, or by mapping Surrealism as it radiated from Paris outward—strategies deployed by other recent retrospectives in Paris and New York—the curators in Munich partition their show into discrete “episodes” (the organizers’ preferred term) scattered throughout the galleries in neither chronological nor spatial order. The show is better for it. Traditional figures like Breton, Paul Éluard, and Max Ernst still appear across these “episodes,” though focus falls more frequently on lesser-known artists—Toyen, Wols, Claude Cahun—artists whose work was caught under the narrowing horizon of artistic and individual freedom from fascist proscription. As the curators repeatedly emphasize, their “truly heroic years” were only just beginning in 1935.

A striking early “episode” is dedicated to the Spanish Civil War, which though famously memorialized in Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), has faded in attention to its international context and support—both fascist support for Francisco Franco’s forces and anti-fascist support for socialist militias and guerillas. Bringing a present-tenseness to this history means recentering the bombing of Guernica (a religious and cultural capital, not a military priority), an indiscriminate attack that—though often enacted on colonized people and their land—had not often occurred on European soil. In the wake of this atrocity, the show juxtaposes support posters by Joan Miró with Picasso’s etchings for Sueño y mentira de Franco [The Dream and Lie of Franco] (1937), a suite intended for fundraising postcards to be sold at the World Exposition. Like earlier Surrealist political pamphlets of the 1920s, these were projects predicated on visibility: they were public addresses.

Other “episodes” explore alternative artistic tactics that were, by design, less visible and less public. Many Surrealists needed to go underground. In “Specters in Prague,” for example, the Czechoslovak Surrealist group Skupina surrealistů v ČSR, founded in 1934, is represented by works from Toyen, Jindřich Štyrský, and Jindřich Heisler. In addition to their individual works, the three collaborated on projects like Nur die Turmfalken brunzen ruhig auf die 10 Gebote (Only the Kestrels Calmly Urinate on the Ten Commandments) (1939), an anonymous artists’ book circulated during the first year of Nazi occupation. Heisler, whose Jewish heritage made his life especially precarious, spent more than three years hiding in Toyen’s bathroom; he occasionally converted it into a dark room, producing among the most striking photographs in the exhibition.

While some Surrealists turned to these clandestine communities for exchange and support, others pursued public action. Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, for example, residing on the island of Jersey during its occupation, turned their practice towards political subterfuge, producing “Paper Bullets.” These pseudonymous notes, circulated under the name “Der Soldat Ohne Namen” (“The Soldier without a Name”), attempted to undermine morale by sowing discontent among soldiers. Similarly, La Main à plume (the Writer’s Hand, named after a line in Rimbaud)—a fascinating group deserving more anglophone critical attention—formed in occupied France in 1941, smuggling poems and political messages through a variety of ever-changing publications, skirting censors and risking serious repercussions. Many paid with their lives.

If But Live Here? No Thanks succeeds when demonstrating these anti-fascist Surrealist strategies, it struggles to answer a related question—namely, why was Surrealism so anemic in Germany? Rather than fully addressing this question, however, the titular section contains work by German expats—Wols, Ernst—and fellow-interned artists like Hans Bellmer. Great works but incomplete. A second section features a beautiful hang of Lee Miller’s war photographs, and John Heartfield’s protest pieces were clearly anti-fascist (if more Dada photomontage than Surrealist collage), yet these inclusions felt somewhat facile, as did a nod to the postwar cabaret Die Badewanne. A fuller account might have highlighted painters like Richard Oelze, Hans Grundig, and Edgar Ende, or explored Gallophobia in Weimar society. It might have considered congruences between La Main à plume and Weiße Rose [White Rose] or examined New Objectivity artists like Heinrich Maria Davringhausen or Jeanne Mammen; Mammen, later a member of Die Badewanne (The Bathtub), even translated Rimbaud’s Illuminations on stolen Nazi stationary throughout her inner emigration.

Regardless, the show and its anthology format provide more insights than absences, laudable since Surrealism never satisfies the politically inclined. Its anti-fascist strength is conversely its political weakness: an ideological corrosiveness intuited by PCF members by the early 1930s. A final “episode” devoted to China Miéville’s The Last Days of New Paris (2016), brought this denaturing effect into stark relief. The artists Jakob and Jonathan Penca have created an animation based on a network of connections and destabilizations that transmuted Miéville’s text, rendering it dynamic. Here is a set of ideas organized and reorganized in present tense. Whereas Lippard had bent the historical movement to her own time, finally the curators collapse the gap completely—instantly, the historical tilt toward fascism feels as contemporary as our own. The effect might have been anti-fascist; certainly it is surreal.