ANNE EGGER, LE SURRÉALISME : LA RÉVOLUTION DU REGARD

par Myriam Felisaz-Debodard

Parallel to "La Révolution surréaliste," the great exhibition presented by the Centre Georges Pompidou (March 6-June 24, 2002), but without direct connection to it apparently (this is not an exhibition catalog), Anne EGGER, doctor in art history, offers us in the "Tableaux choisis" collection from Scala editions: Le Surréalisme : la révolution du regard. This small work (127 pages) is as pleasant as it is curious. Pleasant to look at first, because it benefits from a most attractive layout: the chapters are indeed interspersed with sections of two to six pages whose text is presented on backgrounds of different pastel colors; moreover, we must note the abundant iconography that illustrates the work on each page, iconography whose often reduced format of reproductions, however, we might regret, which harms the good perception of the works. A curious work then, because its layout also presents the defects of its qualities, namely that the plan adopted by the author is not always obvious to follow, and, consequently, the logical progression is difficult to discern (but the table of contents is there to serve as a handrail for lost readers). However, if we accept to let ourselves be taken from one to another of these "chosen tableaux" according to the connections decided by the author, the pleasure of a stroll among the main representations of an "art in surrealism" is indeed at the rendezvous of this intimate work.

This expression "chosen tableaux" deserves some clarification. The back cover, indeed, specifies that they number twelve. From then on, it seems that the expression would designate the twelve full-page reproductions of which Anne Egger offers a quick commentary: Les Ciseaux et leur père (Max Ernst, 1919, p. 24), rayograph from Les Champs Délicieux (Man Ray, 1922, p. 30), Les Villageois (André Masson, 1927, p. 40), Le Grand Masturbateur (Salvador Dali, 1929, p. 46), La Sieste (Joan Miró, 1925, p. 56), Querelle des universaux (René Magritte, 1928, p. 62), Un bas déchiré (André Breton, 1941, p. 68), Boule suspendue (heure des traces, objet mobile) (Alberto Giacometti, 1930, p. 78), untitled Cadavre exquis (André Breton, Marcel Noll, Max Morise, 1927, p. 84), sequence from L'Âge d'or (Luis Buñuel, 1930, p. 94), La Poupée (Hans Bellmer, 1936-1937, p. 100), Ubu imperator (Max Ernst, 1923, p. 109). Note that this last work also illustrates the cover of the book, on the other hand that Ernst is the artist who opens and closes this gallery of tableaux and portraits: he is therefore implicitly designated by the author as the main revolutionary of the gaze.

Let us also note that, in the case of the surrealists, this expression of "chosen tableaux" covers as well pictorial works (tableaux in the strict sense) as photographs, collages, sculptures, objects. This well illustrates the group's desire "to modify the gaze one casts on things and to intervene on the things themselves" (p. 75), through the search for "a pooling of thought" and through "the updating of a collective imagination" (p. 89). But, parallel to the works submitted to commentary, these "chosen tableaux" also designate the numerous reproductions, of "artistic" objects (in the surrealist sense), found, created or recreated, of photographs of group members, of tracts and magazine covers. It is to this diversity that the richness of this book owes, mixing intentions of popularization and will to elitism. The interest of the work also lies in the pertinent connections that the author proposes between the creative approaches of the surrealists and those of artists closer to us, for example: André Masson - Jackson Pollock ("painting the gesture," p. 45), Joan Miró - Pierre Alechinsky - Jean-Michel Basquiat (from sign to graffiti, pp. 60-61). Also evoked are the works of other surrealists or close to surrealism in their intentions and/or their realizations, such as Hans Arp, Victor Brauner, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Hérold, Valentine Hugo, Henri Michaux, Pierre Molinier, Max Morise, Meret Oppenheim, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning... to cite only the main ones. The names of all the artists whose works are reproduced in the book appear in the Index on page 27. We might regret that some of them did not figure among the artists of the "chosen tableaux," notably Victor Brauner or Yves Tanguy – a page and a half is however devoted to the latter (pp. 50-51).

The artists who sign the "chosen tableaux" are distributed among the six main sections of the work, in which, for the first five, they are brought together under the aegis of a common axis of creation: "An art of illusion" (Ernst and Man Ray, pp. 21-35), "Explorations of the unconscious" (Masson and Dali, pp. 37-51), "Words and images" (Miró, Magritte, Breton, pp. 53-73), "Reinvented daily marvelous" (Giacometti, Morise – Breton - Noll, pp. 75-89), "Desire and black humor" (Buñuel, Bellmer, pp. 91-105), "Guided analysis" (Ernst, pp. 107-109).

These sections are introduced by two technical sheets, a first one that traces the path of the showing of surrealist works "From workshops to museums" (pp. 8-13), and a second one that gives elements of response to the question "What is surrealism?" (pp. 15-19). From the start, the author defines (rightly) surrealism as an unprecedented human adventure, collective above all, and especially not with a doctrinal vocation. From the same intention to take stock of what surrealism is – in regard to what it is not – participates the denunciation of some topoi that are attached to it: Breton equal terrorist, surrealist painting as "unusual figuration" and, above all, the semantic shift of the adjective "surrealist" to designate "any unusual or paradoxical situation" (p. 15).

Surrealism, a collective adventure and a "mixture of arts and genres" (p. 9). To make understandable what this acceptance in matters of creation covered for the surrealists, the author first describes Breton's apartment, reminder, she writes, of the "cabinets of curiosities of the Renaissance" (p. 8), opened to the press in 1960. The two photographs on pages 8 and 9, set against a photograph of Desnos's home (p. 9), give a good overview of it. Properly surrealist creation remains for its part long marginalized, by the public but even more by the press and criticism – it is only from 1960 that surrealist works are integrated into museum collections –, especially since, as Anne Egger recalls, the two new avant-gardes of the post-war period (abstraction and new figuration) further marginalize it by conceptualizing the artistic object and the approach that underlies its elaboration.

The author then describes in detail (pp. 11-12) one of the group's most important exhibitions, that of 1938 at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts, the famous exhibition during which, among other things, it rained in a taxi. Three other major exhibitions are also mentioned, in the author's opinion: Le Surréalisme en 1947, EROS (1959-1960) and L'Écart absolu (1965). If Anne Egger particularly retains the exhibitions after 1938 for their more spectacular aspect, we might regret, perhaps, that she does not return in detail to the exhibitions of the movement's early hours, which, more modest in their scenography, are also less known.

"What is surrealism?" examines more particularly the beginnings of surrealism in gestation, recalling the concomitance of the Manifesto and Mein Kampf (1924), and endeavors to define some essential notions of the movement. Thus the particularity of surrealism's plastic manifestations is specified as follows: "It is the advent of the imaginary in art. (...) There is no surrealist painting but surrealists who make painting." (p. 19). And this painting, Anne Egger places it in the lineage of three artists: Chirico (for the dream), Picasso (the abandonment of mimicry) and Duchamp (the questioning of the notions of artist and work).

The work still proposes, in its last pages, ten "Biographical sheets" (pp. 110-115) on the artists who created the "chosen tableaux," sheets among which we must note the unfortunate absence (but perhaps this is a fortuitous oversight?) of Morise and Noll, who composed in 1927 with Breton the untitled Cadavre exquis reproduced on page 84. On the other hand, an eleventh and last sheet is ironically devoted to the (game of) Cadavre exquis, this famous dead man (!) having the right, he too, to his necrology. A "Surrealist repertoire" (pp. 116-120) then offers a quick abecedary of the group's main ideas, from Adhésion to Voyage, passing for example through Compagne and through Meuble. Then a "Crossed chronology" (pp. 121-125) examines, from 1919 (foundation of Littérature by Aragon, Breton and Soupault) to 1969 (self-dissolution of the group by Jean Schuster), the events, in literature and painting, directly linked to the surrealist movement, as well as those falling within the cultural domain other than surrealist and the main historical facts. Finally, a "Selective bibliography" (p. 126) presents the essentials of overall knowledge about the movement. Only given, in pictorial matters, are the references of the two classics that are now Jacques Baron's Anthologie plastique du surréalisme and René Passeron's Histoire de la peinture surréaliste, as well, of course, as the reference to André Breton's Surréalisme et la peinture. We might therefore regret that some references to exhibition catalogs are not proposed, to allow a deeper exploration of the subject. The work ends with the previously mentioned Index.

The problematic that Anne Egger illustrates in this work follows two main axes. On one hand, the desire of surrealist artists to obey the "interior model," of which all their creations are imprinted, desire that is well summarized by Masson's words, reported on page 41: "I paint without any concern. I no longer worry about anything. I let myself paint." On the other hand, "the will for a democratization and an anti-specialization of means of expression, of artistic or literary practices" (p. 23), which also characterizes, according to the author, their approach.

However, some reservations can be made about the subtitle adopted by the author. First, proposing this equation between surrealism and the revolution of the gaze seems excessive, insofar as, however great our recognition for the various liberations brought by surrealism, we know well that the surrealists are not the only ones to have imposed this revolution on the viewer. What then to do with the approaches, however opposed but all contributing to this same goal, like those, certainly closer to us, of arte povera, pop art, body art, or, at a more individual level, of Joseph Beuys for example? The use of the definite article la is therefore not fully justified. In the course of the work, Anne Egger explains her title several times, notably on page 23 when she writes: "Thus, painters who cast a new gaze on what surrounds them, on existing materials or images, reveal another reality, subjective or suggestive. (...) Their images provoke an earthquake in our habits of seeing. To see better, is this not the art of flushing out the marvelous under the appearances of the everyday? Poetry is also found in the gaze one casts on things." But the whole of the work demonstrates, with brilliance in the choices adopted there, that this revolution of the (sole) gaze could have also been called, in a significant order: a revolution of the looked-at, of the looker and of the gaze. But that would have been a bit long.