by Philipp Blom
Dreams and trauma: The French painter Fernand Léger dramatized his experiences in his experimental film Ballet Mécanique, 1924.
It begins, seemingly innocent enough, with a woman swinging on a swing like a little girl. Soon, however, the backward-and-forward movement of the swing becomes insistent, filmed from unusual angles and mirrored in the mechanical swinging of a pendulum and in images of machine parts in action, distorted and multiplied by the camera. The woman’s lips and eyes appear, and a man’s head emerges from a hiding place, images that are always interrupted and intercut with the pitiless swing and thrust of technological images. We see the legs of marching soldiers, people on a speeded-up merry-go-round, pistons, racing shapes, and cars seemingly running over the camera. The whole creates a sense of dislocation, claustrophobia, and insistent movement, almost cutting into the viewer’s head. The woman’s lips, her heavily made-up eyes, and the incessant thrusting have an obvious sexual dimension, but the imagery also vividly exemplifies the widespread sensation of human bodies becoming machine parts, swallowed up by technology and enslaved by machines.
As the tempo of the cuts speeds up, the sentence On a volé un collier de perles de 5 millions (someone stole a pearl necklace worth five million) becomes almost obsessively dissected, dismembered, and repeated, as the words’ meanings break down and are shattered into the individual letters, as in the fractured perception of a traumatized patient. The face of another woman, a vamp this time, smiles alluringly into the camera but is broken up into various cubist facets. The entire film dramatizes a world without meaning, shattered and broken apart (another sequence focuses on mannequin legs, eerily similar to the prosthetic limbs so common after the war), a perception deranged and distorted by a traumatized mind that sees masks where there are faces, nonsensical shapes in words, bizarre and threatening shapes in everyday scenes, mutilation in beauty, and artillery shells in the shape of bottles.
Léger’s work was not so much a mechanical ballet as a machine-made nightmare of mental disintegration, an unparalleled visual dramatization of fragmented mindscapes. Despite the fact that its creator did not officially belong to the surrealist movement, he had used the same techniques and the same artistic vocabulary to create one of the psychologically and poetically most incisive works of the period.
The Surrealist World Revolution
FOR BRETON, SUCH CREATIONS outside his tight control were irritations and wasted opportunities for publicity. But he was already moving on to the next stage. Impatient with Dada’s anarchic exuberance, dissatisfied with the aesthetic and personal squabbles within the surrealist fold, and exasperated at what he saw as the ideological confusion of his fellow artists, he decided to seek another direction. If, as he believed, surrealism really had the potential to subvert and ultimately bring down the values of a decayed society and to build something fresh in their place, then there was only one possible route: political action. “Communism alone among organized systems permits the accomplishment of the greatest social transformation,” Breton wrote in 1925. “Good or mediocre in itself, defensible or not from the moral point of view, how can we forget its role as the instrument by which ancient buildings are destroyed?”15
Breton threw himself into political activities. He signed petitions and wrote his own, penned one article after another, declared his solidarity with the suffering peasants of Bessarabia and the workers of Hungary along with the oppressed everywhere, discussed the end of the bourgeoisie on the terrace of the Café de Flore, read Marx and Hegel, drafted proclamations in support of the working class, and wrote disavowals, doctrinal clarifications, and revolutionary slogans. Among his artist friends, some were interested in this political turn, while others were bored or even horrified but did not want (or did not dare) to incur the famous wrath of the man who had put surrealism on the cultural map practically single-handedly.
Breton himself was torn, as always, between his sudden, overwhelming infatuations with ideas and people and the inevitable disillusionment that followed: “I am extremely tired, morally fatigued . . . Either because the tendencies I’ve recently had to adopt for myself run too counter to my previous tendencies, or because in trying to break down others’ resistances I’ve momentarily killed my own.”16
The irreverence and ideological insouciance of his friends made disciplined work all but impossible, Breton concluded. The official communists, however, did nothing to make his life easier. For three years, he vacillated, sought contact, declared his loyalty, and sought to distance himself again. Finally, in 1927, he decided to apply for membership in the French Communist Party in order to work for world revolution from the inside. As a famous left-wing intellectual, he expected to make policy, take part in discussions at the highest level, and be recognized as one of the leading minds of the revolution. He thought his own tactic, surrealism, could do as much to shatter the citadel of the bourgeoisie as any general strike or a whole army of armed peasants could.
The Party, however, remained cool. The top brass distrusted the mad antics of these young, middle-class men who refused to work with their own hands and instead spent their time with poetry, hypnotism, and weird public performances. This was not the kind of revolution they had in mind. When Breton finally got his membership card after an extended and by all accounts almost hostile series of interviews with Party functionaries, he was not invited into the general secretariat as secretary for culture, but instead assigned to a cell of workers at a gasworks.
C’est la Vie
AS ANDRÉ BRETON IN PARIS was succumbing to the totalitarian temptation, the fame of surrealist and Dadaist works spread. Germany had had highly active and rebellious Dada groups since before the war, Zürich had been a sanctuary for experimental artists and social revolutionaries, and in Belgium, too, the influence of Dada was present in paintings, in print, in public performances, and in poetry. But while this avant-garde landscape on the European continent was vibrant and varied, Dada and surrealism had surprisingly little resonance in the Anglo-Saxon world, and particularly in the United States.
A solitary artist with an aversion to groups and dogmatic artist’s manifestos, Marcel Duchamp had moved to New York before the war and had created a huge and controversial success with his Nude Descending a Staircase, a dynamic image capturing a sequence of movement on a single canvas. The work had been exhibited at the now legendary Armory Show of 1913 in New York and had been purchased on the very last day of the exhibition by Walter and Louise Arensberg, an eccentric and wealthy couple whose collection concentrated on avant-garde works long before they became fashionable in the United States. The Arensbergs’ home on New York’s Upper West Side became a meeting point for many artists and intellectuals interested in new ways of seeing, among them Duchamp himself, and after the war also Francis Picabia, the controversial photographer and novelist Carl van Vechten, the composer Edgard Varèse, the writer William Carlos Williams, and the photographer Charles Demuth.
The dynamic paintings of futurism and the broken perspectives of cubism had been key to Duchamp’s aesthetics, but they proved nothing more than a phase for the artist, who would subsequently invent his very own brand of surrealism with seminal works such as Fountain (1917), a urinal he had signed and exhibited in a gallery, and his cryptic masterwork The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923), to which he devoted a large part of his career. Never content to stand still and settle into a routine, and horrified by the idea of being subsumed into any movement, Duchamp reinvented himself in drag as Rrose Sélavy, a pseudonym that can be read as “Eros, c’est la vie” (Eros is life) or as “arroser la vie” (making a toast to life), and eventually ceased producing art altogether, preferring to invest his immense subversive energy into playing chess and composing chess problems.
Though not part of Breton’s cohort, Duchamp formed a direct connection between Paris and New York, as did another artist, the American Man Ray, who had repeatedly photographed Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy and who soon found himself at
the heart of the Paris surrealist crowd. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky to Russian Jewish immigrants, Ray had moved to Paris in 1921 and had fallen in love with Kiki de Montparnasse, one of the emblematic female protagonists of the almost exclusively male surrealists (whose attitudes toward sex and women, incidentally, were remarkably archaic).
Kiki, whose actual name was Alice Prin, had been raised in dire poverty and had started to work in factories at the age of twelve. Her gamine, almost doll-like beauty was soon discovered by Montparnasse artists frequenting the same cheap cafés as she did, and she was soon modeling for, among others, Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Francis Picabia, and Fernand Léger, who also used her as the female seductress in his short film Ballet Mécanique. Man Ray fell in love with this young woman who did not let her poverty destroy her spirit of independence or her determination to have fun. They became lovers, and Ray used her as subject of hundreds of photographic portraits, among them such iconic images as Le Violon d’Ingre (the famous nude seen from behind with the f holes of a cello superimposed) and Noir et Blanc, in which a highly made-up Kiki seems to be lost in contemplation of a small African mask she is holding in her hand.
Man Ray was to stay in Paris for twenty years, during which he met and photographed the entire intellectual and artistic avant-garde, from André Breton to Gertrude Stein. The French capital provided a context for him in which he was understood and appreciated. In his native United States, interest in this kind of art was still very weak, and only with the advent of Nazism would there be a massive influx into New York of surrealist artists such as Picabia, Breton, Ernst, and the young Dalí, creating a critical mass that would inspire and influence a younger generation of American artists.
“There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it,” Man Ray would write in 1948, and this statement curiously bridges the gap between artists on both sides of the Atlantic. The point was that for many of them art was an act of love, of instinct, the expression of an erotic relationship with the present. Surrealists and Dadaists in Europe, drawing on cubism and Freud, on the destructive abandon of futurism, had found a way of giving voice to the feeling of their generation, to the anger and disillusionment with values that had not been able to prevent the world from collapsing around them.
The war was present in the work of the surrealists, but mainly as a background attitude, a disillusionment with all values of bourgeois society, from its morality, its rationality, and its idea of objective truth to its concepts of beauty. In Germany the experience of the war was used in a more immediate form, if fueled by a similar anger. The painters George Grosz and Otto Dix had initially used the devastated faces and amputated bodies of veterans as an expression of their anger. Both had served at the front, and both had been traumatized by the experience.
Dix chose to immerse himself in a cathartic process when he began work on a cycle of etchings and a large triptych, both entitled Der Krieg (The War). As an immediate inspiration he used drawings he himself had made at the front as well as his war diary, which chronicled the brutal awakening and disillusionment of a young man who had gone to war hoping for adventure. One jotting from late 1914 reads: “In the past wars were led for the sake of religion; today for the sake of trade and industry (money)—a step backward.”17 There was nothing left to believe in; naked greed was all that was left. Another note reads simply, “Jeremiah 20:14.” The Bible verse it refers to is “Cursed be the day wherein I was born: let not the day wherein my mother bare me be blessed.”
Especially in his etchings, Dix created a stunning panorama of the conflict as experienced by common soldiers. Corpses, twisted limbs, grinning skulls, and uniformed skeletons form the backdrop for the monotonous routine of the living, one of whom can be seen wolfing down his food next to a dead comrade. The landscape around is nothing but a pockmarked expanse of putrid mud. Soldiers whose faces are distorted in anguish seek distraction with local whores. A distraught mother is trying to feed her baby’s corpse. The faces of the fighting men are turned into identically monstrous insects by gas masks or transformed into grotesque masks of suffering by shrapnel.
It took the artist six years to find the graphic language in which he could tell this tale. The black and white of the etchings heightens the bleakness of the experience and lends added depth to its overwhelming darkness. To find the appropriate technique, however, Dix had not looked at new forms of expression. He had chosen styles and ways of working the printing plates that alternately used fine, free lines and atmospheric acid washes reminiscent of the two great masters of the medium: Rembrandt, with his subtly explored depths of darkness and light and his freedom of line, and Francisco Goya, whose cycle The Horrors of War was a direct inspiration in many ways. Dix was not the only artist to turn to the masters of the past in search of a language adequate to capture an experience that initially passed all bounds of expression. A similar return to classical molds and models could be observed in a wide range of artists, from Picasso to Léger.
Analyzing the American Way of Life
IN MANY WAYS the surrealist guerrilla tactics and the expressionist detonations of anger were less interesting to American artists because they were dealing with a different set of questions. The impact of the immediate war was far less present in the buoyant economy of the early 1920s. Instead, the United States presented a burgeoning immigrant society with apparently infinite improvements in living standards. Here, a critical generation of artists and intellectuals faced other challenges.
What connected artists on both sides of the Atlantic was Breton’s idol Sigmund Freud, whose teachings not only had been the most important influence behind surrealist interest in the creativity of the subconscious and its liberation from bourgeois repression but also were enthusiastically received and discussed by East Coast intellectuals eager for a new vocabulary with which to understand the galloping changes society was undergoing.
Freud had accepted an invitation to lecture at Clark University in 1909, and despite the fact that he himself remained cool toward American culture, his teaching was received with genuine enthusiasm. It inspired doctors and educators, social thinkers and self-help gurus. In 1924, the legendary movie executive Samuel Goldwyn even made the arduous journey to Vienna to convince Freud to write a movie that was to be a great love story, a proposal he sweetened with a fee of $100,000. Freud declined. He disliked the United States, hated to be addressed as “Sigmund” instead of “Herr Professor,” and felt humiliated by the offer.
Despite the master’s aversion to the United States, Freud’s teachings lent themselves wonderfully to a very American gospel of self-improvement, even self-transformation, which for the first time was also tapped into by professional advertisers, who studied their targets, the consumers, not only from a social point of view but also from a psychological one. “The growth of popular magazines and national advertising . . . is concentrating increasingly upon a type of copy aiming to make the reader emotionally uneasy, to bludgeon him with the fact that decent people don’t live the way he does,” an influential 1929 study into city life concluded.18
Both prompted and repulsed by this commercial pressure, artists and writers were trying to understand the relationship between individuals and society in a time increasingly dominated by mass production, media, advertising, conspicuous consumption, and convenience. As the economy picked up after the unsettled years directly following the war, these developments accelerated, and they raised fundamental questions for artists and their art. How should they deal with this new world? Should they embrace it or retreat from it into a more individual, more traditional, and more conventionally pleasing aesthetics?
Psychoanalysis provided a framework for asking these questions because it contained not only an idea of self-transformation but also a critique of social conventions. If society demanded that sexual impulses were to be suppressed, and if this resulted in people being stunted and unhappy, then Americans had to develo
p a new relationship with their own bodies and emotional lives and a rejection of the frantic, commercialized society that made these demands. “Something oppressed them,” wrote the novelist Malcolm Cowley. “It was the stupidity of the crowd, it was hurry and haste, it was Mass Production, Babbittry, Our Business Civilization; or perhaps it was the Machine, which had been developed to satisfy men’s needs, but which was now controlling those needs and forcing its standardized products upon us by means of omnipresent advertising and omnipresent vulgarity.”19
Plumes of Saffron Smoke
ONE ANTIDOTE TO THIS DULLNESS lay in the magnificence of art. Painters such as Joseph Stella devoted themselves to exploring and showing the magical, dreamlike beauty of human bodies freed from social constraints, as in his Birth of Venus, a work radiating color and a curiously prim, stylized nakedness. Other painters went down the same road, concentrating on portraits, heroic nudity, grand landscapes, or the intimacy of still lifes.
But the rejection of modernity seemed helpless and deeply inadequate in the face of the awakening of a great civilization and of new if ambiguous forms of living. Writing about an exhibition of new paintings, the art critic James N. Rosenberg commented:
[It] seems to me that American art shrinks from contact with American life. . . . And this gigantic life of capitalism, of the machine that has become a Frankenstein, has it nothing for art? Vast furnaces with plumes of saffron smoke; naked men sweating at the forge; turbines, motors, engines, power, water-falls, vessels in the harbor, dock-hands, sweat shops, cabarets, midnight follies, politicians, towering buildings lost in steam, crowds on the city streets; grain elevators, wharves, battle ships—is there no food in these for art? Yet the American painter turns his back on stuff of such a sort, seeks refuge at Woodstock or Gloucester, and buries himself in Cezanne.20