Georges HUGNET severely criticizes the legacy of the surrealist movement.

Georges HUGNET (1906.1974)

Signed autograph manuscript.

From France to America

Three pages in-4°. Slnd

“They belittled while wanting to elevate them : S ade , Baudelaire, Nerval, Rimbaud, Ducasse. » 

Very interesting manuscript by Georges Hugnet criticizing a posteriori the heritage of the surrealist movement. Evoking among others Picasso, Breton, Éluard, Aragon, Miró and Ernst, as well as all the inspiring figures of the group such as Rimbaud, Sade and Freud, the author draws up a series of vehement reproaches and invites the reader to definitively bury the said movement by taking refuge towards the only truth: poetry.

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“ Our time is more thirsty than ever for freedom , not for this spiritual freedom which is now acquired or almost so despite the fact that this pseudo-freedom is often only a product manufactured for snobs and at the cost of what constraints, but of a moral and physical freedom which admits no limits. I mean that schools and groups are succeeded by an independent state of mind, eager to manifest itself without control, without concern to please or displease, and which if it unites through friendship a few men of this same atmosphere, admits no regimentation, no yoke. The same road brings these men together almost in spite of themselves and no one can blame them. What matters above all is that no link hinders either their walk or their spirit. A period similar to that , all things considered, which brought together in 1905, Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso , without obliging them to any other settlement than a friendship born of their age and their common spirit, seems to want to be born .

We have witnessed the abortion of many schools and we have measured their weakness, we have witnessed the almost complete ruin of the surrealist group , the emergence of the neo-Catholic fetus. The surrealist group, if it leaves men whose importance escapes no one, has often been nothing but a very superfluous hype , a prostitution of feelings, attitudes and reasons for living. If André Breton is a remarkable man and moreover quite dangerous, we can only regret for him (as well as for Paul Éluard and for Louis Aragon), that he could not do without this court which, far from raising him in relation to himself, only diminished him, circumscribed him by taking away the grandeur and the rigor of his solitude. I also want to say that their theories, whatever they may be and taken together, constitute only the worst of aestheticisms, precisely what the surrealists most ardently wanted to fight against. They spoiled the unconscious and the dream by putting a fairground turnstile there, and they gagged freedom. Prisoners of themselves, they could only die, and the worst death: starvation, just like the small committees of mutual admiration gathered around him by an " avant-garde " rightly taken abroad as " the ambassador of French Literature . " therefore not surprising that young people, feeling more or less directly this literary poisoning, because in wanting to destroy it, they have introduced into their blood the least authentic of literatures , react against them, not only because their regimentation is a constant attack on the freedom of the individual, but also because their works ( I exclude the works of André Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos , Louis Aragon) reveal only emptiness and a void hidden under a poetic rhetoric [ sic] which denies poetry. It must be said that this state became inevitable because of all the followers, because of all those who vegetate in some shadow, and because it rejects [ sic] Baudelaire so strongly demanded: the right of contradiction. Poetry, if alas it certainly becomes so And they made poetic feelings that did not deserve it , they belittled while wanting to elevate them : Sade , Ducasse.

And the same thing happens in painting . There too, the time has come to free oneself. Cubism, long dead, is dying, and painting is dying. Its last breath will only appear official when the next " Decorative Arts " crowned surrealism as they have already crowned cubism. The "Fine Arts" will be surrealist and the " Galeries Lafayette " will be decorated by them. I would not want to take away the value of certain surrealist painters that I love and admire : André Masson , Max Ernst, Miró ... But what makes them exist is that before being surrealist , they are above all painters . Unlike other painters who only because they have surrealism to inflate them, I think that surrealism has rather harmed those I have just named. Surrealist painting has a flaw that condemns it to itself : it poetic . This flaw is also a test: some painters have held out, the others have died. 

Also those who see clearly consciously or unconsciously, who have something to express by one means or another, can only ignore as quickly as possible, this poetic cult which destroys poetry, this choice of elements which diminishes the horizon and which makes the air unbreathable, this rigor which is chain , this restricted and grandiloquent vocabulary or this dead matter. Young people now, moving away from this cemetery, esteem men who, whatever their qualities and faults, have retained a freedom which protects them and makes them victorious: Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, Max Jacob, Saint-Léger- Léger, Tristan Tzara, Raymond Roussel, Marcel Jouhandeau…, esteem these men and fear them. 

It needs another domain, a space that is denied it, a youth that stuns and invigorates, the need to be naked. We will never be made to believe that dreams are better than life. Let us open our eyes and be free. Let us destroy these rules and this choice that become only a new aspect of good taste, this revolutionary poetry for the use of the bourgeoisie. Enough of dreams, Freudianism, automatic writing, troubled philosophy. Poetry is everywhere, everywhere we know how to see it, to surprise it. It goes from dream to sleep, from surprise to concerted, from birth to death, from love to solitude, from the sky to the song of the streets… Greatness has no rules. Poetry is the truth that makes poetry true and not realistic; I am talking about this truth that great poets know how to reveal to us, trapped in the trap of their imagination. Poetry is to say: lemon, and let it be magnificent . A formula favored by snobbery and by " people in the know " and adopted by beings lacking in sensitivity but very intelligent, has established a cheap genius: one reads everywhere poems that are admirable or that pass for such. But which one among these poets (do they deserve this name?) has paid the price for his words? A philosopher said (I quote from memory): " Genius does what it can, talent what it wants . " Talents abound and create illusions, whereas " poetry," said Theo Briant, "is what one has deserved to write " Georges Hugnet.