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Surrealists, Stalinists, and Trotskyists - theories of art and revolution in France between the wars

Art Journal, Spring, 1993 by Helena Lewis

Theories of Art and Revolution in France between the Wars

After World War I and the Russian Revolution, it was taken for granted that art had a social content, and it was understood that the artist would participate in the political life of the day. On the Left, it was widely believed that, while a work need not be overtly political, there could be no such thing as "art for art's sake," because, as Communist intellectual Louis Aragon declared, "apolitical works are really militant works for the benefit of the bourgeoisie in power."(1) French artists of the most disparate tendencies eagerly acknowledged the truth of Stalin's flattering dictum that artists and writers "are the engineers of the soul."(2) The pronouncement was gratifying because it meant that artists would no longer be considered marginal figures, as they so often felt themselves to be in bourgeois society. On the contrary, they could now play a vital role in bringing about the revolution.

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Such a definition of the role of the artist created an unforeseen problem, however, because if it were true that art could influence consciousness, then it followed that art was far too important to be allowed complete license. By the mid-1930s, the French Communist Party was attempting, in the name of socialist realism, to dictate form as well as content to those artists who were Party members. By the resolutions of the Communist International of 1932, augmented by the Kharkov theses of the Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, the method of socialist realism was defined. It was to be a historically truthful and concrete depiction of reality with a thematic emphasis on the coming of the revolution. The most immediate task was the Communist education of the masses; it was vital, therefore, that the artist be made aware of his obligations to the proletariat. These concepts were continuously debated by French left-wing writers and artists in the 1920s and 1930s in a vain effort to resolve the inherent contradictions between the desire to uphold artistic freedom and the need to direct art into revolutionary channels.

The five journals to be discussed, La Revolution surrealiste |The Surrealist revolution~ (1924-29), Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution |Surrealism in the service of the revolution~ (1930-33), Clarte |Clarity~ (1919-23), Commune |Commune~ (1933-39),(3) and Cle |Key~ (1938-39), represent ideologically diverse responses to the left-wing debate on the relationship between art and politics. The two Surrealist journals demonstrate a progression of thought from a virtually total disregard for politics to an espousal of Marxism, as shown by the decision of the leading Surrealists to join, albeit briefly, the French Communist Party. The pacifist journal Clarte initially collaborated with the Surrealists but soon repudiated them in favor of closer ties with the French Communist Party, eventually becoming a publication of the Trotskyist Fourth International. Commune exemplified the position of the French Communist Party on questions of art, which, in practice, meant struggling to work out the implications of socialist realism. From an ideological point of view, the most original of the journals was Cle, founded by Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera, and Andre Breton. A publication of the Federation Internationale de l'Art Revolutionnaire Independant (International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art), or FIARI, a Popular Front organization of artists, it sought to unite the anti-Stalinist Left, calling for a new revolutionary aesthetic that would preserve the freedom of the artist.

La Revolution surrealiste, published irregularly from 1924 to 1929, was never intended to be an art journal, although it was profusely illustrated with images from all the modernist schools in addition to Surrealism. Among its most significant texts were artists' accounts of their dreams in both visual and written form. Fundamentally, artists who contributed to the magazine were opposed to art in the usual sense, that is, they maintained the attitude of total revolt against tradition and orthodoxy that stemmed from Surrealism's Dadaist past. In a deliberate attempt to emulate the serious presentation of a scientific journal, the layout of the cover combined the austere lettering of the title with a small circular collage of textually contrasting materials, an emblem that alluded to Dadaist chance-induced methodology (pl. 8, p. 16). Given the fact that the Surrealists' goal was nothing less than a revolution in consciousness, the editors and contributors had no wish to be regarded merely as a frivolous band of artists and poets.

The quasi-scientific, objective nature of the Surrealist movement was evident in the establishment of a "Bureau of Surrealist Research," where examples of dreams, strange coincidences, and bizarre happenings were collected. According to Breton, leader and chief theoretician, the movement was not concerned with aesthetics but only with the search for the "marvelous," that future point of resolution where the two opposing states of dream and reality would merge. The Surrealists were determined to introduce a whole new way of seeing the world. As an example, they transformed a page from a hardware catalogue into an abstract composition simply by giving it a caption and putting it into a new context. Furthermore and most important for the Left, the Surrealists asserted that talent was irrelevant, that the artist was a mere "copying machine," and that anyone could be an artist(4)--a position that would appear to fit admirably with the call for proletarian art.

Surrealists, Stalinists, and Trotskyists - theories of art and revolution in France between the wars

Art Journal, Spring, 1993 by Helena Lewis

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