Elza Adamowicz

Queen Mary, University of London

In May 1929, the Surrealist Michel Leiris records a conversation he had with Picasso. His diary entry reads:

Saw Picasso. Talked of the burlesque and of its equivalent with the marvelous (Reich). At the moment, there is no way one can consider an object as ugly or repulsive. Even shit is pretty.[1]

Leiris is raising here a fundamental question in the contemporary debate on aesthetics, concerning the materiality of the art object versus its transposition. I should like to explore a moment in this debate, by focusing on André Breton and Georges Bataille's texts on the artist Salvador Dali (1929-30). Dali had come to Paris in April 1929 to collaborate with Bunuel on the filming of Un Chien andalou [2], and was introduced by Miro to aristocratic art-collectors, art dealers, and the surrealist group. His first Paris exhibition, which opened in November 1929, included paintings such as Les Plaisirs illuminés, Le Grand Masturbateur and Le jeu lugubre, all dated 1929. Critical response to the exhibition was mixed: while one journalist compared Dali's talent for detail to Persian and Japanese art and claimed that he 'expresses all the poetry, both terrible and sweet, of Freudianism', another critic dismissed the paintings as provincial ('provincial despair trying to be up-to-date') and full of empty virtuosity ('revolutionary gesticulations like those of a "vicious baby"') [3]. Two groups sought to appropriate Dali for their movement: André Breton for the 'orthodox' surrealist cause, and Georges Bataille, the dissident Surrealist who had challenged Breton's leadership by setting up a rival group (which included Michel Leiris, André Masson and Robert Desnos) around the review Documents (1929-30). Beyond personal rivalries, the two men's intellectual positions were fundamentally opposed: Breton's idealism conflicted with Bataille's materialism, and to Breton's transformation of matter into metaphor, Bataille riposted with his concept of 'base materialism', matter as irrecuperable matter. This polemic can be linked to the contemporary political and ideological debate: the Surrealists, who had joined the French Communist Party in 1927, favoured (difficult) cohabitation over total assimilation by the party, and were critiqued by party officials for their stand as 'idealist troublemakers' ['emmerdeurs idéalistes']. Dali's paintings thus became the site of a polemical jousting between Breton and Bataille. [4]

André Breton's reaction to the young Dali was to enthusiastically admit him into the surrealist movement. He bought Les Accommodations des désirs before the exhibition, and wrote the preface to the catalogue.[5] The December issue of La Révolution surréaliste reproduced two of the paintings in the show and published Bunuel and Dali's script for Un Chien andalou, which marked Dali's entry into the surrealist movement. Breton's preface is both an appropriation of the artist for the surrealist movement, and a forum for his polemic with Bataille and the Documents group, and it forms part of a network of texts centred on the debate on materiality and sublimation of the work of art.

Firstly, Breton celebrates the hallucinatory power ('Dali's art, the most hallucinatory we have ever known') and 'poetic' quality of Dali's paintings, thus annexing the young painter to the surrealist doxa. His metaphors - the painting as window giving onto an inner landscape ('With Dali, it is perhaps the first time that our mental windows have opened wide'), or as mythical or exotic landscape - reiterate those of his earlier text 'Surrealism and painting' (published in La Révolution surréaliste in 1925-6), and thus endow Dali's paintings with a surrealist stamp of approval alongside Tanguy, Miro or Ernst. When discussing the paintings themeselves, Breton refers in passing to recurrent pictorial motifs (lions' heads, ants, anteaters, scarabs, treeless landscapes); however he focuses less on painting as icon than as affect: he expresses his fear of images which appear to engulf the viewer both into the painting and into his own inner depths. While the images raise questions ('What is the purpose of these strange scarabs rolling a huge ball in front or behind them, stumbling along, tirelessly?'), his questions remain rhetorical; and while he suggests that something might lie hidden behind the images ('The secret of Surrealism rests on the fact that we are persuaded that something is hidden behind them'), he does not seek to explore what might effectively be there. The paintings thus appear to invite decoding yet resist meaning, and their enigmatic qualities and poetic aura are carefully guarded by Breton. Above all, and this is essential to my argument, Breton appears to turn a blind eye to the violence of the imagery in Dali's paintings, the dismembered or decomposing bodies, images of castration or ejaculation. And there is only a passing allusion to 'a character with a shirt covered in excrement' ['un personnage à la chemise merdeuse'] in the lower right of Le Jeu lugubre.

However, Breton's preface is not only an enthusiastic account of the discovery (invention) of a new surrealist painter. The text can be read as a strategic annexation of Dali for Breton's brand of Surrealism against Bataille's own attempt to coopt Dali for the Documents group, and hence as a stage in their polemic. Breton expresses a certain reticence at Dali's facile talent and immediate commercial and social success among the mites and vermine of Paris art-lovers and aristocrats - Breton is alluding here to art patrons such as the Vicomte and Comtesse de Noailles who had bought Dali's painting Le Jeu lugubre - and he warns against the danger of Dali's being adopted by 'certain "materialists"', in an allusion to Bataille's group.

Beyond the personal aspects of this quarrel, a doctrinal battle is being waged in Breton's preface on the continuing debate on materialism and idealism. In his article 'Matérialisme' (Documents I, 3 (June 1929), 170) Bataille critiques the idealist tendencies of the majority of materialists: 'they yielded [... ] to the obsession of an ideal form of matter, a form which closer than any other to what matter might be' ['ils cédaient... à l'obsession d'une forme idéale de la matiére, d'une forme qui se rapprocherait plus qu'aucune autre de ce que la matiére devrait être'], and offers his own definition of materialism as resolutely non-dialectic. Breton's preface can thus be read as a riposte to Bataille. To Bataille's implicit critique of Breton's surrealism as a form of idealism, Breton responds by underlining the power of transmutation of Dali's images into 'a hallucinatory landscape' ['un paysage second']:

Cimmeria, the only place that we have rediscovered and that we intend to occupy. Dali, who reigns on these distant lands, must be aware of too many guilty examples to let himself be dispossessed of this marvelous treasure island. [la Cimmérie, seul lieu qu'à nouveau nous avons découvert et que nous entendons nous réserver. Dali, qui régne sur ces contrées lointaines, doit être instruit de trop nombreux et de trop coupables exemples pour se laisser déposséder de sa merveilleuse terre de trésors.]

Breton evokes here a mythical space, Cimmeria (the ancient Greeks designated thus a mist-covered country situated at the ends of the earth), an exotic space, to suggest the effect of disorientation [dépaysement] which Dali's paintings exercise on the viewer, thereby claiming that Dali's 'brute phenomena' are indeed sublimated in a poetic transposition of the pictorial. The rhetoric of the exotic alludes less to the iconography of Dali's paintings than to their evocative power: 'everything depends on our deliberate hallucination' ['tout dépend de notre hallucination délibérée']. Breton is clearly alluding to his own imaginary landscapes rather than to Dali's.

However, Bataille's materialism could also fittingly annex Dali to his own camp, and indeed he had been among those who had courted Dali since the latter's arrival in Paris in spring 1929. There were strong affinities between Bataille and Dali, whose article 'Limits of painting' (1928) had explicitly linked rotting matter and flowers - 'flowers are intensely poetic precisely because they resemble rotting donkeys' -, which could have informed Bataille's own article 'Language of flowers' (published in the third issue of Documents in 1929).[6] In the September issue of Documents, Bataille had reproduced three of Dali's paintings [7] and reviewed favorably Un Chien andalou, 'that extraordinary film [...] penetrating so deeply into horror'.

Bataille's refutal of Breton's position on Dali appeared in his article 'Le "Jeu lugubre"', published in the December issue of Documents. Bataille's detailed analysis of Dali's painting constitutes both a case-study of his concept of 'base materialism', and a harsh critique of Breton's preface. Unable to obtain permission to reproduce Le Jeu lugubre, since Dali himself had written to Viscount Charles de Noailles asking him not to give Bataille a reproduction for his Documents article, Bataille illustrates his article with a schematic drawing. From the opening words Bataille presents his text as an implicit response to Breton's preface. While Breton asserted that beyond intellectual despair lies hope, 'the hope that all will not sink', Bataille counters with the statement: 'Intellectual dispair leads neither to spinelessness nor to dreams, but to violence'. ['Le désespoir intellectuel n'aboutit ni à la veulerie ni au rêve, mais à la violence']. His argument adopts a standard polemical two-part structure: first an attack of the position of the orthodox Surrealists, 'these doddery idealists', then a counter-affirmation of his own materialist position. He constantly opposes Breton's reading of Dali, (mis-)quoting him then violently refuting his position, without ever deigning to refer to Breton by name however:

This leads one to ask seriously what is the position of those who see our mental windows open wide for the first time, who express an emasculated poetic complacency where there is a pressing need for recourse to ignominy. [Ceci permet de demander sérieusement où en sont ceux qui voient s'ouvrir pour la premiére fois les fenêtres mentales toutes grandes, qui placent une complaisance poétique émasculée là où n'apparaît que la nécessité criante d'un recours à l'ignominie.]

Against half-measures, evasive statements and delirium betraying great poetical impotence, we can only oppose black anger and even indisputable bestiality. [Contre les demi-mesures, les échappatoires, les délires trahissant la grande impuissance poétique, il n'y a qu'à opposer une colére noire et même une indiscutable bestialité.]

He condemns Breton's essentially poetic approach to Dali as an act of cowardice - 'it has now become impossible to retreat and shelter in the "treasure island" of Poetry without being publicly called a coward' ['il est devenu impossible dorénavant de reculer et de s'abriter dans les "terres de trésors" de la Poésie sans être publiquement traité de lâche'] - and critiques the image of the mythical region of Cimmeria celebrated by Breton, as a form of escapism:

Dreams and Cimmerias are the lot of totally irresolute persons whose unconscious strategy is quite cunning since they innocently place revolt outside the law. [Les rêves et les Cimmérie illusoires restent à la portée d'irrésolus à tout crin dont l'inconscient calcul n'est pas si malhabile puisqu'ils mettent innocemment la révolte à l'abri des lois].

Bataille refers to Breton and other Surrealists only indirectly, preferring insults and unacknowledged (mis)quotation, in order to deride and dismiss the opponents' arguments. (Breton's verbal attacks on the contrary are openly dialogic: he refers to his opponent by name - 'Monsieur Bataille' - quoting him at some length before refuting him.)

In contrast to Breton, Bataille adopts a deliberately anti-aesthetic position: 'Picasso's paintings are hideous... Dali's are terrifyingly ugly' ['les peintures de Picasso sont hideuses... celles de Dali sont d'une laideur effroyable']. He presents a violent vision of Dali:

Dali's razors hack out of our faces grimaces of horror that might risk making us drunkenly spew out that servile nobility, that idiotic idealism which left us in thrall to some ridiculous prison-warders.

[Les rasoirs de Dali taillent à même nos visages des grimaces d'horreur qui probablement risquent de nous faire vomir comme des ivrognes cette noblesse servile, cet idéalisme idiot qui nous laissaient sous le charme de quelques comiques garde-chiurmes.]

He focuses on images of rotting matter, mutilation, bestiality and abjection, and on actions of violent dismemberment, masturbation, ejaculation or castration. Bataille's claimed reaction is bestial rather than poetic: 'In front of his paintings, all I want to do is let out a pig's scream'. Whereas Breton mentions only in passing the excremental motif in Le Jeu lugubre, and hovers on the edge of interpretation in his wish to preserve the enigmatic quality of the painting, Bataille focuses on images of sexual perversions, and makes of 'the ignoble stain' a central element of his detailed psychoanalytical interpretation of the painting, read in terms of the Oedipal scenario of punishment, castration and ignominy, supporting his argument via explicit reference to Freud's theory of dreams.

Breton and Bataille's very different reading tactics are a sign of their divergent intellectual positions. Breton the idealist, whose imaginary Cimmeria is situated elsewhere, turns a blind eye to the paintings, preferring to map out his own mental spaces; whereas Bataille, whose reading of Dali is grounded on (and in) the real (pictorial) space of the painting, literally inscribes his narrative on the schematic drawing itself. Each seeks to appropriate Dali for his camp through deliberate mis-readings. Breton uses the exotic paradigm, which was commonplace in surrealist texts of the 1920s, to suggest not the content of the painting, but the impression of alterity of surrealist pictorial and mental images. Bataille's interest in Dali, equally strategic, is filtered through the Marquis de Sade (the title for the first draft of his article was, in fact, 'Dali screams with Sade').

The polemic is reworked in Breton's Second manifeste du surréalisme, also published in December 1929.[8] To Bataille's celebration of bestiality, ignoble matter and putrefaction, Breton responds by privileging another aspect of Freudian theory, sublimation, and the alchemical transmutation of matter. Faced with the aggressive return of Bataille's 'old antidialectic materialism', Breton counters with the Hegelian dialectic, with his idea of the 'supreme point' or the dialectical resolution of opposites, so that 'high and low will cease to be perceived as contradictory'. To Bataille's descending movement, the 'base materialism' of 'rotting matter', 'slimy roots', defending the material axis of the abject, Breton opposes an ascending movement of sublimation of reality, where matter is transformed through metaphor. He is also responding to Bataille's article 'The language of flowers': referring to an alleged image of Sade throwing the petals of a rose onto a dungheap, Bataille had amalgamated the flower and dung-heap in the orchid's cycle from rubbish-heap to dung: 'the most ideal flower will rapidly be reduced to tatters on an aerial dung-heap' ['la fleur la plus idéale est rapidement réduite à une loque de fumier aérien'][9]. Breton, on the contrary, sublimates the rose in an essentializing movement - 'the rose, deprived of its petals, is still a rose' - thus keeping rose and dungheap rigorously separate.

Bataille and friends responded to Breton's attacks in his Manifesto by a particularly ferocious 'cadavre'. In a short text titled 'Le lion châtré' [The castrated lion], Bataille refers to Breton as

a false chap who died of boredom in his absurd 'treasure lands', that's fine for religion, for little castrated men, little poets, mystical little yapping dogs. But you can't overturn anything with a big soft club, with a library-parcel of dreams.
[un faux bonhomme qui a crevé d'ennui dans ses absurdes 'terres de trésor', c'est bon pour la religion, bien assez bon pour petits châtrés, pour petits poétes, pour petits mystiques-roquets. Mais on ne reverse rien avec une grosse gidouille molle, avec un paquet-bibliothéque de rêves].

What was Dali's position in relation to the Breton-Bataille polemic, for which he served as pretext? In 'L'Ane pourri', published in the first issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930), Dali positions himself in relation to both Breton and Bataille. On one hand, he overtly rejects Bataille's materialism, 'all that ancient materialism which this gentleman claims senilely to be rejuvenating by gratuitous references to modern psychology' ['tout le vieux matérialisme que ce monsieur prétend sénilement rajeunir en s'appuyant gratuitement sur la psychologie moderne']. On the other hand, he qualifies his adhesion to Breton's surrealism in the last words of the article, referring to them as 'idealists without participating in any ideal'. He gives the example of a rotting donkey (a recurring image in his work, including Un chien andalou), which may appear real, 'really and horribly rotting, covered in thousands of flies and ants', but which he claims is also a multiple image, created through desire:

Nothing can convince me that this cruel putrefaction of the donkey can be anything other than the blinding and hard reflexion of new precious stones. And we know not whether behind the three simulacra, shit, blood and putrefaction, might lie hidden the desired 'treasure island'. [Rien ne peut me convaincre que cette cruelle putréfaction de l'âne soit autre chose que le reflet aveuglant et dur de nouvelles pierres précieuses. Et nous ne savons pas si derriére les trois simulacres, la merde, le sang et la putréfaction, ne se cache pas justement la désirée 'terre de trésors'].

Dali appears to side with Breton in his suggestion that material reality is sublimated, while gleefully focusing on base matter - 'shit, blood and putrefaction' - and parodying Bataille's language in his reference to 'ignominious scatalogical simulacra'. There is both Bretonian sublimation of the image and Bataillean refusal of repression in the focus on the scatological. Yet his position can be seen to constitute a radical questioning of both Bataille and Breton's positions, and a shift in the debate.[10] By introducing the notion of the simulacrum, which is neither a real nor a symbolic image, Dali shifts the discussion from the Manichean struggle between materiality and transcendence to a plane of overt theatricalized ambiguity, developed in his idea of the 'paranoiac' image, the double or multiple image (as in Le jeu lugubre, where the eye is also a parrot or hare) defined as a simulacrum, a means to 'systematise confusion... and discredit reality'. In his emphasis on a series of visual images produced through an associative process, Dali moves away from Breton's vertical concept of the image, as well as from Bataille's base materialism, to a concept of laterality, shifting from the depth and latency of the double image to the serial co-presence of multiple images. Dali's position cannot be reduced to surrealist thought, since it is resolutely non-dialectical in its lateral associative process and deferral of meaning.[11] Nor can Dali's scatological thought be totally assimilated to Bataille: his valorization of excrement is too jubilatory, a child's joy in manipulating or transforming matter, to be fully identified with Bataille's materialism, although he echoes Bataille's statements on fetishism when he declares (tongue in cheek so to speak): 'We love totally when we are prepared to eat the shit of the woman we love'.

In his autobiographical text, Comment on devient Dali, Dali comes back to the debate, which in the early 1930s had become a polemic between Dali and Breton. He claims that Breton, shocked by the image in Le Jeu lugubre, 'demanded I admit that this scatological detail was a simple pretence' ['un faux semblant']. Dali replies that 'excrement brought good luck and that its appearance in his surrealist work was the sign of a new departure for the entire movement', and he mockingly gives 'excremential allusions' an art-historical lineage. His critique of Breton's surrealism is worthy of Bataille's cadavre:

I realized on that day that I was in the presence of toilet paper revolutionaries, steeped in petty bourgeois prejudice, and in whom classical morals had left an indelible mark. They were terrified by shit, shit and the anus. Yet what is more human and more in need of transcendance! [je compris dés ce jour-là que j'étais en présence de révolutionnaires en papier hygiénique, pétris de préjugés petits-bourgeois et en qui la morale classique avait déposé des marques indélibiles. La merde leur faisait peur. La merde et l'anus. Quoi de plus humain cependant et de plus nécessaire à transcender!].[12]

As for Breton, he was to come back yet again to the theme of excrement in an article written in 1933, 'Picasso dans son élément'. His text is a response to the view - held by the Documents group, who had published a special issue on Picasso in 1930 - that Picasso was a realist painter. Breton's approach appears at first to be resolutely materialist: he describes in detail the objects scattered around Picasso's studio (the article is illustrated by photographs by Brassai of paint-pots, paint-stains, objects cluttering the mantelpiece), and focuses on the materiality of Picasso's painting process. He goes so far as to consider the work of art as a form of excretion, focusing on the perishable materials used by the painter. Has Breton crossed into Bataille's camp? He gives the impression that he is bowing to Bataille's 'base materialism', yet his approach remains resolutely dialectical ('the conception that Picasso has formed of his work can be considered as absolutely dialectical'). And when Picasso shows him a small canvas composed of a single large lump, which he claims represents an excrement - this would become clearer, he states, once he had added flies to the work - Breton overcomes his 'slight disgust' by imagining how the artist would magically transform this base matter. And he finishes his text with a mock-poetic flourish:

Everything brightened up; not only could I no longer remember having seen anything disagreable, but I was elsewhere where everything was fine and life was pleasant, among the wild flowers and the dew; I walked freely into the woods. [Tout s'égayait; non seulement mon regard ne se souvenait de s'être porté sur rien de désagréable, mais encore j'étais ailleurs où il faisait beau, où il faisait bon vivre, parmi les fleurs sauvages, la rosée; je m'enfonçais librement dans les bois.]

There is clear self-parody in the overblown style and cliches Breton uses: 'il faisait beau... il faisait bon vivre'. Breton is here writing both for and against Bataille, in a text where he plays with his opponent by giving the impression that he has been initially won over by Bataille's position in his celebration of Picasso's materialism, then destabilizing this position by creating a pastiche of his own style, a text which Bataille would have loved to hate. This stage of the polemic, for Breton at least, would thus seem to have come to a (temporary) end, deflated by a pastiche.

Beyond the anecdotal, the mud and insults flung at each other, oppositions fundamental to 1920-30s ideological and aesthetic debates were being fashioned through these texts: the question of the dialectic, or of materialism versus transposition in the fields of art and philosophy. In these texts, Dali's paintings or Picasso's sketches, far from being the central subject, are simply a point of departure, a support, or a battlefield. Such texts are essentially pre-texts for poetical development or polemical exchange, as in this case-study of the philosophical jousting between the 'excremental philosopher' (Breton on Bataille) and the 'doddery idealist' (Bataille on Breton). For the Surrealists, writing on painting, I have argued, is essentially writing against, alongside, beyond painting, with words which glance off, or turn a blind eye to, pictorial representation, to pursue their own deviant (and often devious) poetic, political or polemical trajectories.

[1] Michel Leiris, Journal 1922-1989, Paris: Gallimard, 1992, p.154.

[2] Un Chien andalou was previewed on 6 June 1929 at the Studio des Ursulines, and opened to the public on 1 October at Studio 28, where it ran for 8 months. Photogrammes of the film were reproduced in Variétés (July 1929), 209; Cahiers d'art (July 1929), 230; and Bifur (August 1929), 105.

[3] 'Flouquet', Monde (30 November 1929); Tériade L'Intransigeant (15 November 1929).

[4] On the Breton-Bataille polemic see Jean-François Fourny, 'A propos de la querelle Breton-Bataille', Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 84, 3 (1984), 432-8; Marie-Christine Lalla, 'Bataille et Breton: le malentendu considérable', in Surréalisme et philosophie, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992, pp.49-61. While Fourny claims that the theoretical divergence between Breton and Batille hid deep psychological motivations of envy and rivalry, Lall situates the debate on a philosophical level.

[5] 'Premiére exposition Dali', in André Breton, Oeuvres complétes II, Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade), 1992, pp.307-9.

[6] The last issue of the Catalan avantgarde journal L'Amic de les Artes (31 March 1929), edited by Dali, reproduced several photographs from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Bauhaus publication Painting, Photography, Film (1925), including a close-up of an eye, and shots of fingers, which could well have influenced Boiffard's photographs which illustrated Bataille's article 'Le gros orteil', published in Documents in November 1929. In October 1929 Dali participated in the group exhibition 'Abstrakte und Surrealistische Malerei und Plastik', organized by the Documents group in the Zurich Kunsthaus.

[7] Le Sang est plus doux que le miel, Baigneuses and Nu Féminin.

[8] André Breton, Second Manifeste du surréalisme (1930), in Oeuvres complétes I, Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade), 1999, pp.774-837.

[9] 'Le langage des fleurs', Documents 1, 3 (1929), 160-8.

[10] Marc LaFountain considers Dali's position as a radical destabilising of Bretonian surrealism: 'For the signe ascendant he substituted alterities that transgressed the very possibility of ascendance'. Marc J. LaFountain, Dali and Postmodernism. This is not an essance, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997, p.67. I would add that Dali also destabilises Bataille's materialism.

[11] Ibid., p.70.

[12] Salvador Dali, Comment on devient Dali. Les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, Paris: Laffont (1973), p.139.

Back to Contents