Long manuscript by Georges HUGNET analyzing the surrealist movement.

Georges HUGNET (1906.1974)

Partly autograph manuscript.

In a surrealist light.

Eighteen pages in-4° in red ink, with erasures, written in both hands.

Eight pages in Hugnet's hand (unidentified second hand).

“Little by little in this unfathomable where surrealism sends its light, formidable degrees of reality are established. » 

Long and fascinating manuscript of a study on surrealism (despite a numbering error, the manuscript is complete). Hugnet evokes all the heralds of the movement and its contributions to the history of art.

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“From now on, –  Surrealism – which we will no longer see in quotation marks in theoretical and critical texts, adopts a meaning, determined, a direction and already establishes its wishes. Let no one imagine that I am looking for a date and place of birth for him. It comes from the marvelous and as such it has always existed. The earth dreams of its dream of stone and the first man knew how to take refuge in this magical rock where he grasps himself through dreams and life, the stars and the elements. Voices spaced out over time, always so present, have had, conscious or not, lucid accents that we do not hesitate to describe as surreal, these unusual and unacknowledged affirmations of a reality glimpsed like Saint Elmo's fire, obvious like vertigo. Beyond time, a force perpetuates through the rational and the irrational which suddenly consents to make the shameful appearance of a ghost. I do not intend, here, to identify these flashes any more than to lock them in the small cage of possibility. If I mention a date, a fact, a gesture, works, if I cite a valid definition, it is because my aim, in this short essay on surrealist painting, is to determine, in our time, very particularly wonderful and distressing, to fix historically, the moment, the moments, the circumstances where in certain minds dissatisfied with life and reality, attentive to surprise the defect of the wall of the oubliette, surrealism became aware of itself, in as long as the search continues thought and its sources, inspiration from the inexpressible, as a viable system of knowledge, and undertook its action of rediscovery and recreation of the world of realities.

On this point, the " Manifesto of Surrealism " (1924), the first theoretical work of surrealism, provides many details. Following a history of the disarray and crises following the war, Breton relates, firstly, his personal experiences, the situation of those in whose name he speaks , the beginnings of surrealist activity which he deliberately synthesizes into encyclopedic definitions made more to strike than to pose as irreducible formulas, into recipes for poetry and practical operations in the manner of " The Magical Archidox " of Paracelsus. As far back as he can, he goes back to his poetic origins, in works and in life, among those for whom life tended to escape reality through adventure or the creation of a setting. He says in what way and why certain men were or are surrealists . And in the manifesto, the author adds this corrective explanation: " I insist, they are not always surrealists, in the sense that I unravel in each of them a certain number of preconceived ideas to which - very naively - they held. They held to it because they had not heard the surrealist voice, the one that continues to preach on the eve of death and above the storms, because they did not want to serve only to orchestrate the marvelous score. They were too proud instruments, which is why they did not always produce a harmonious sound .

Breton, after the leveling brought about by Dada anarchy, proposes to dwell on madness, the absurd, the incoherent , the hyperbolic, on everything that opposes the summary appearance of reality. Isn't surrealism within everyone's reach? Don't the immense geographies of dreams and desires remain on every wall? Who hasn't, even for a second, suddenly perceived the imperious voice from beyond memory? Always assured that literature is one of the saddest paths that lead to everything , Breton ends up wishing only to abandon himself to the imagination in what it has of most free and most in contradiction with the currents that, until this day, have directed the mind and that " to do justice to the hatred of the marvelous that rages among certain men, to this ridicule under which they want to make it fall ." He declares that " the marvelous is always beautiful, any marvelous is beautiful, only the marvelous is beautiful " and offers to anyone who wants to try the adventure, along with poetic arguments, the means of investigation of modern thought and especially the interpretations, as new as they are decisive, of psychoanalysis. During the development of surrealism, there will be situated, outside of all idealism, outside of the reveries of religious narcoses, this marvelous which comes to light in the real , the supernatural, the unusual, love, sleep, hallucination, sexuality, and the troubles it engenders, madness, chimeras, so-called disorders of all kinds, a view like all the others, poetry, blood, chance, fear, escapes of whatever kind, specters, leisure, the suggestions of dreams, empiricism, surreality . This marvelous, confined within the narrow rules of legends or children's stories, freed from its mirror, brought back to life, now comes to reveal, in its true light, in the surrealist light , the most immediate reality and the relationships we have with it. In pursuit of the " future resolution of these two states, apparently so contradictory, that are dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality of surreality." Surrealism has never despaired of this conciliation. It has attached itself and will attach itself, by all the means at its disposal, to this identification of opposites, to which all contemporary discoveries tend. The only curve of this attraction through time constitutes the history of surrealism, taking sanctions against those who still believe verification is impossible, on which reality depends.

For surrealism which is an approach of the mind and a means of investigation, which acts in parallel in all areas, for surrealism which has set itself a behavior which time has made more and more valid and which has its proofs, it proves even more difficult than anywhere else to separate the attempts, the manifestations of the painters from those of the writers. It is in the name of man, in the name of poetry, in the name of an entire system of creation, that surrealism above all raises its voice. Here and there, the same concerns are encountered, whether formal or moral. And their exteriorizations take on an analogous character, the same spirit which grants them the same brightness and the same shadows. Exhibitions, experiments, theoretical and poetic works, everything interacts and justifies itself, everything is exalted. Intellectual concerns, attitude in life, it's the man. The research is common, starts from an identical concern, reflects shared concerns, and tends towards a single goal. Surrealism focuses more on itself and time than on personalities. It is not a heroic era, fertile in anecdotes, it is a systematic enterprise, it is a rediscovered light.

Dada, having given current ideas an original vigor, surrealism, under the leadership of André Breton, devoted itself to the revision of values. In the immediate past, he regains control of the lost thread. Immediately, the painting, considered from a new angle, takes on another character and undergoes a real metamorphosis. Among certain painters who had only been highlighted for their scandalous appearance or their originality, surrealism valued more a revealing vision of a virtual world and more exciting propositions; subversiveness itself takes on a deeper meaning. This is how Cubism, its re-creation of reality, its perpetual control, finds itself on the agenda.  According to Breton, Seurat appeared to him as surrealist in the motif and Picasso in cubism . Cubist aestheticism is condemned, but only the negation of reality in favor of a superior reality comes into play. From then on certain objects composed by Picasso, around 1913 and 1914, took on considerable importance: seen in a surrealist light , certain works light up strangely. Wills, processes, attempts, successes are recorded, others deliberately rejected. Names fall, others are born or reborn.

In 1933, Max Ernst wrote: “ research on the mechanisms of inspiration, pursued with error by the surrealists, led them to the discovery of certain processes of poetic essence, capable of removing from the empire of so-called conscious faculties the development of the plastic work. These means (of captivating reason, taste and conscious will) resulted in the rigorous application of the definition of surrealism to drawing, painting, and even, to a certain extent, photography. These processes, some of which, in particular collage, were used before the advent of surrealism, but systematized and modified by it, allowed some to fix on paper or canvas the astonishing photograph of their thoughts. and their desires . »

And Paul Éluard, in 1936, told us: “  It is only from their complication that objects cease to be indescribable. Picasso knew how to paint the simplest objects in such a way that everyone in front of them became capable again, and not only capable but willing, of describing them. For the artist, as for the most uneducated man, there are neither concrete nor abstract forms. There is only communication between what sees and what is seen, an effort of understanding, of relationship, - sometimes of determination, of creation. To see is to understand, to judge, to distort, to imagine, to forget or to forget oneself, to be or to disappear . »

This choice, which is made from the outset, this consciousness which is created, form the first stage of surrealist painting and everything connected to it. Among familiar names like Picasso, Chirico and Max Ernst, we find from No. 1 of the Surrealist Revolution , a new name: André Masson . The latter, who had not participated in any movement, arrived at surrealism with a series of paintings and drawings, which he had exhibited a few months earlier at the Simon Gallery, devoid of any research into materials, caring little more than one of plastic ons, which is a sort of chemistry of lines, the work of Masson, at this time, traces new boundaries of a poetic world with very pure comparisons; there, the landscapes have strange human shapes, ghosts are present behind these transparent vaults, doves live like young girls and daggers like men, under the broken capitals, flown away by a miracle. Hands animate still lifes, and objects live this life that is theirs when the eye, in staring at them, loses all control and no longer fascinates. Then, almost at the same time, another aspect of the human universe, of the surrealist universe, is revealed by a painter who arrives from Catalonia, Joan Miró . First of all, Miró took pleasure in reproducing as best as possible a reality that it seemed out of concern for wonders. Then, faces, houses, gardens, objects, the useless fell to make way for a fantastic reality, naive and vibrant, for passion and humor, for luxuriant vegetation, resulting from the most free and absolute spontaneity of the hand. These irrevocable paintings, composed without metaphors, were exhibited in 1925, under the aegis of the surrealist group, and prefaced by Benjamin Péret.

However, that the Surrealist Revolution , whose n°2 presented French art in the figure of a scarecrow, categorically separates painting from art and links it to automatism, to dreams, to human revelation, the group poets and painters are formed, completed, evolved and determined. Among the painters' reproductions, there are strange photos, curious documents, mediumistic drawings, drawings by poets, which accompany transcribed dreams and automatic texts. The surrealist atmosphere defines itself, we can say that it is so clear that it already needs no explanation. André Breton and Robert Desnos jointly preface a surrealist exhibition, the first, in November 1925. It brings together: Arp, Chirico, Ernst, Klee, Masson, Miró, Picasso, Man Ray, Pierre Roy. Furthermore, Marx Ernst exhibits his recent paintings alone, accompanied by poems by Éluard, Desnos and Prévert and Péret. These are admirable forests through which the most beautiful surrealist images pass. Then the surrealist gallery is open, where you can permanently see works by Arp, Braque, Chirico, Duchamp, Ernst, Klee, Malkine, Masson, Miró, Picabia, Picasso, Man Ray, Tanguy. It is necessary to emphasize here that surrealism takes up certain attempts, certain behaviors, certain research. He exalts what gives him strength, he retains what helps him just as he rejects what diminishes it. He makes the marvelous, liberating wishes of Picasso, Duchamp, Picabia, Arp, Ernst, Man Ray his own. The field of his research and his interpretations falls between all the escapes from the conventional, based on subversive humor or dreams. He lives in the cities, in the superb scenery of Chirico, the latter's latest works, in academic style, dishonor the author of the "disturbing muses". A preface-pamphlet to a Chirico exhibition peremptorily settles the question and the reproduction of one of his paintings appears crossed out, in the Surrealist Revolution. (Then imaginative painting brings a new testimony: Yves Tanguy).

The surrealist gallery kept up to date with surrealist activity: books, works, illustrations, manuscripts, documents, objects (balls and discs) ... At the same time as an exhibition of wild objects and, among this, admirable masks of the New Mecklenburg is home to Man Ray's paintings. Their very particular poetry, made of technical inventions and unknown images, of reality and unreality, is adorned with a mysterious precision like mathematical witchcraft. Shortly after, Yves Tanguy presented his first paintings which were surrealist that day .

For ten years, Yves Tanguy, abandoning himself to lyrical inspiration alone, has described, painting after painting, an immense and disturbing panorama. A unique, complete universe, resembling only itself, where nothing is recognized in anything, where one can see everything and nothing, dead cities or cities in embryo, ruined marbles and dream termite mounds, where the law of gravity is a game and the horizon a last concession. Between the technical discoveries of a Max Ernst and the extreme manual freedom of a Miró, in both of whom automatism is imperative, Tanguy paints without makeup and without premeditation, but with the meticulousness of a craftsman or a madrepore. During an investigation into painting, Tanguy declared: " I expect nothing from my reflection but I am sure of my reflexes . " Tanguy's painting is foolproof. Before the blank canvas, dreams and instinct guide his hand. A task is born, an object appears there which spreads and evolves. A strange landscape populates the desert which a beautiful clarity recedes. Its first exhibition is prefaced by Breton.

At the same time, Pierre Roy exhibited his paintings in a similar atmosphere to that of de Chirico. Aragon wrote the preface. Among the surrealist editions published at this time, the most important after Éluard's astonishing "Répétitions" decorated with collages by Marx Ernst, are Péret's Dormir dormir dans les pierres Défense de savoir " decorated with a frontispiece by de Chirico. The surrealist gallery presented paintings by Malkine. Several exhibitions of Marx Ernst took place. Breton updated surrealist pictorial activity in his Surrealism and Painting . There, he took up the question in its essence; there, he joined men in their intentions. In it, he expresses the admiration he feels, whatever the differences of ideas or concerns that separate them, for certain painters who, under this or that label, by this or that intellectual or technical means, have freed painting from its smaller-than-life role. Bringing the problem of reality back into play, he discerns those who have touched the true reality of things, those who have gone to the heart of the matter, to the heart of the great trees of the forest of the marvelous. By emphasizing what touches and exalts him in certain painters, he expresses the hope he places in painting. " A very narrow conception of imitation given as the goal of art is at the origin of the serious misunderstanding that we see perpetuated to this day. On the faith that man is only capable of reproducing with more or less success the image of what touches him, painters have shown themselves not too conciliatory in the choice of their models. The mistake made was to think that the model could only be taken from the external world, or even only that it could be taken from it. Certainly, human sensitivity can confer on the most vulgar-looking object a completely unforeseen distinction; it is no less true that this is to make poor use of the magical power of figuration which some possess the pleasure of using to preserve or reinforce what would exist without them. There is an inexcusable abdication there. It is impossible in any case, in the current state of thought, especially when the external world appears of an increasingly suspect nature, to still consent to such a sacrifice. The plastic work, to respond to the need for absolute revision of real values ​​on which all minds agree today, will therefore refer to a purely internal model, or it will not exist .

At the same time as he reports the current state of surrealism in plastic manifestations, André Breton, with the clairvoyance and extraordinary lucidity that characterizes him, defines surrealist painting by assigning it a goal, by revealing to it -even her magical power, by discovering the problems that present themselves to her. In this regard, Surrealism and Painting is a crucial work . Like all surrealist manifestations, the painting becomes a document where man reveals himself to himself, where he puts forward a hypothesis which serves as a basis for all possible inductions. Since man has lost himself, he must seek himself, go back to himself. Here as elsewhere, as in the poem, as in the image, the man must give the key to the secret lock, find the piece that is missing from the perpetual clock.

Certain processes: use of elements foreign to painting, drawings, mechanics... and certain experiments had the aim, as we have seen, only of getting painting out of its rut ​​or, under the implosion of hobby, to destroy the notions of beauty, quality, purity, to exalt disorder, to put everything at all costs systematized, directed, exploited by surrealism, they no longer tend towards destruction, but become means of investigation. The written surrealist games: questions and answers, sentences made together, etc. are transposed into drawings and this is how curious characters are born: the Exquisite Corpses . When surrealism questions chance, it is to obtain oracle answers. The collage process introduced or at least used very specifically, for the first time, by Max Ernst is, on this subject, very instructive. To this revealing process, Max Ernst added another: frottage where the secrets of objects, invisible to the naked eye, appear, infinitely.

To the Cubist papiers collés, where a plastic concern prevails that governs them absolutely, the surrealist collages add the supernatural spark of this mechanical, anonymous freedom, which takes painting out of itself. The opportune figuration, within the limits of a frame, of the element, completely, taken from life, living: wallpaper, newspaper, poster, canvas, fake marble and fake wood, sand, string… had freed painting from its ideal, and brought back into play the problem of reality, the miserable misunderstanding of truth. The “this is not painting” of the public, proves in itself the colossal reality of papiers collés, the surreality of collage. The transfusion of materials: a guitar made of iron, of canvas… advocates the reality of the object. Tristan Tzara rightly wrote: "  A form cut out of a newspaper and integrated into a drawing or a painting incorporates the commonplace, a piece of everyday, common reality, in relation to another reality, constructed by the mind. The difference in materials that the eye is capable of transposing into tactile sensation gives a new depth to the painting, where weight is inscribed with mathematical precision in the symbol of volume, and its density, its taste on the tongue, its consistency, place us before a unique reality in a world created by the power of the mind and dreams. " Surrealist collages, and especially the admirable collages with captions by Max Ernst ( The Woman with 100 Heads , 1929; Dreams of a Little Girl Who Wanted to Enter Carmel , 1930; A Week of Goodness , 1934), are the fruit of the imagination, of the most unquestionable inspiration, transforming the mind into matter and making themselves accessible to all. The incorporation into a painting of the element foreign to painting reconciles the irreconcilable. It is from this destroyed contradiction that art must die and that it dies in the works of madmen when they tyrannically identify the external aspect and the dreamlike delirium. To this identification, surrealism brings the freedom of experience and reasoning, a shift of the unconscious into the conscious, a will to analysis which makes that the researches are carried out in favor of a marvel at once poetic and critical. " The painter ," declares Louis Aragon, in La Peinture au défi , if it is still necessary to call him that, "is no longer linked to his painting by a mysterious physical kinship, analogous to generation. And one sees born from these negations, an affirmative idea which is what we call the personality of choice. A manufactured object can just as well be incorporated into a painting, constitute the painting in itself. An electric lamp becomes for Picabia, a young girl. We see that painters, here, are beginning to use objects like words. The new magicians have reinvented incantation . This personality of choice, in fact, distinguishes between painters as the choice of words and the return of certain images, despite chance and automatism, separate poets from each other, even in a state of unconsciousness. Doing justice to hallucination, it is translated by the repeated use of certain commonplaces, of certain expressions that are then personal. This choice betrays man; and it is precisely to this betrayal that surrealism wants to come.

The poetic, pictorial and critical contribution of Salvador Dali oriented surrealist research in a particular direction and gave a strong impetus to attempts which had until then only been approached with timidity. His work is an immense carnivorous flower magnified in the surrealist sun. More moved by the lyrical expression of certain paintings by Ernst and Tanguy than won by their plastic processes, and taking to their extremes certain declarations of the first  Manifesto , he deliberately gives way to the dream, to the hallucinatory element that he represents as faithfully as possible, and as finely as possible. Hence his taste for chromo, the most colorful, most accomplished and least accidental invitation of nature. Disdaining any search for material and any intervention of commonplaces , his manner , his pictorial gift are at the service of delirium. Dali escapes into trompe-l'oeil. He has created a world of intensity where simulations, traumas, neuroses, sexual phenomena, repressions ... Faithful to himself, if he goes from collage to chromo, from the ready-made thing to the invitation to misunderstand it, it goes the same from Chirico and Picasso to Millet and Meissonnier by a paranoid path. His attempt, although extremely successful, cannot be generalized. However, it must be admitted that the angle from which he is situated, his vision of painting and its outcomes, which pushes him towards the anti-artistic, towards instantaneous photography by hand and towards a dual art face, his system of subjective criticism, his obsessive interpretation of the most common and widespread works, as well as his acceptance in principle of all aberrations, in his written works or his painting, and his respect for the dream in its contradictory integrity , are at the truth of essentially surrealist documents. Tempted by the totally insane appearance of certain periods of art, he feels invincibly attracted as surrealism has always been by madness, by hysterical attacks, by mediumistic cases, by the maniacal emotion of decay of this modern style with architectures steeped in irrational hairs, with sleepwalking furniture of immeasurable flowers, with the immense confusions of mentally deficient people, with fluctuating objections of defects. The rehabilitation of modern'style , of this debilitating and debilitated style, tending towards the impossible sort of collective hallucination, falls very strictly within the surrealist critical domain and its interpretations, in the same way as all manifestations of a neurotic order, and as anything which is likely to require any investigation. Thus, for example, of these pre-war cards, bizarre to say the least, always poetic, Éluard says that “ commissioned by the exploiters to entertain the exploited, they do not constitute popular art. At most, the small change of simple art and poetry. But this small change sometimes gives the idea of ​​gold. »

All these concerns, which present no contradictory side, coordinate and form, strictly speaking, profoundly, the domain of the modern marvel of surreality. Seen from this platform, everything fits together: from the unusual to the anti-artistic, from chance and dreams to automatic writing and the delirium of critical interpretation to delusional symbols, from the painting to the object usual, from the distorted object to voluntary strangeness, from organization to disorganization, from poem to everyday life... History of grandiose desires, daydreams of this world, crossed by invisible rays and flashes of lightning magnetic, he plays with disturbing lives in life. Little by little in this unfathomable space where surrealism sends its light, formidable degrees of reality are established. »