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, although it leaves men whose importance escapes no one, has often been nothing more than a very superfluous hype , a prostitution of feelings, attitudes and reasons for living. If André Breton is a remarkable man and quite dangerous, we can only regret for him (as well as for Paul Éluard and for Louis Aragon), that he was unable to do without this court which, far from raising him towards himself, has only diminished him, circumscribed him by removing from him the grandeur and rigor of his solitude. I would also like to say that their theories, whatever they may be and put together, constitute only the worst of aesthetics, precisely what the surrealists most ardently wanted to fight against. They spoiled the unconscious and the dream by putting a fairground turnstile there and freedom, they gagged it. Prisoners of themselves, they could only die, and the worst death: of inanition, in “ avant-garde ” writer groups around him , rightly taken abroad for “ the ambassador of French Letters ” . therefore not surprising that young people feel more or less directly this literary poisoning, because by wanting to destroy it, they have introduced into their blood the least authentic literature , react against it, 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 Desno s , Louis Aragon) do not reveal than emptiness and a void hidden under a poetic [sic] reh oric which denies poetry. be said that this state became inevitable because of all the followers, because of all those who vegetate in any shadow, and because it rejects [ sic] this right that Baudelaire demanded so strongly: the right of contradiction. Poetry, although unfortunately it certainly becomes so And they made poetic feelings that did not deserve that , they demeaned while wanting to elevate them : Sade Baudelaire , Nerval, Rimbaud, Ducasse.

And the same case happens in painting . Here too comes the time to free yourself. Cubism a long time, painting is dying. Its last breath will only appear official when the next “ Decorative Arts ” have crowned surrealism as they have already crowned cubism. The “Fine Arts” be surrealist and the “ Galeries Lafayette ” will be decorated by them. I would not want to take away their value from certain surrealist painters that I love and admire : André Ma ss on, Max Ernst, Mir ó … But what makes them exist is that before being surrealist s they are above all painters . Unlike other painters who only exist because they have surrealism to inflate them, I think that surrealism has rather harmed this flow that I have just named. Surrealist painting has a fault which condemns it in itself : it is poetic  . This defect is also a test: some painters held on, the others 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. 

She needs another domain, a space that is denied to her, 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's open our eyes and be free. Let us destroy these rules and this choice which become only a new aspect of good taste, this revolutionary poetry for the use of the bourgeoisie. Enough dreams, Freudianism, automatic writing, troubled philosophy. Poetry is everywhere, wherever we can see it, surprise it. It goes from dream to sleep, from surprise to concert, 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 the great poets know how to reveal to us trapped in the trap of their imagination. Poetry is saying: 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: we read poems everywhere that are admirable or pass for such. But who 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, while “ poetry,” said Theo Briant, “is what we deserve to write . ” George Hugnet. »