Dreams, the Female Gaze, and the City of Paris: Urban Landscapes through the Writings of the Surrealist Movement

From the time of the Renaissance, treaties on architecture, odes to the arts, and the study of their canons through written sources, have served to defend, emphasise, or proclaim the validity of different artistic forms and styles. In this way, programmes and manifestos have reinforced the character of organisations and movements through their fundamental ideas. The artistic Avantgardes have thus used this literary resource to lay the theoretical foundations for their future artistic contributions, being able to justify without any qualifications their most extravagant occurrences. The Avant-garde manifesto shall therefore be considered a literary contribution written in the first place for the subsequent development of the artistic and creative activity of the group or school. The Surrealist Movement generated a lot of written work because the founders, André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault, were writers. Some of these texts included the Movement’s two manifestos, periodicals such as Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, Littérature, or Minotaure, and individual writings that were penned by Breton and Aragon. This study will relate the Surrealist written work with the Movement’s idea of the city and its urban imaginary.

Post-War and Post-Apollinaire

After World War I, Auric’s many friendships placed him in a unique position in the Parisian avant-garde. On the one hand, he was alongside Louis Aragon, André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Tristan Tzara for the rise and fall of Paris dada. On the other, he was a member of Les Six, the group of composers led by Jean Cocteau who came to represent Parisian art music in the 1920s. Throughout the feuds between the dadaists and Cocteau, Auric preserved his friendships and functioned as an ambassador of sorts between rival avant-garde groups. In the meantime, his scores for Cocteau’s Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel (with the rest of Les Six) and Molière’s Les fâcheux would lead to bigger and better opportunities in the mid-1920s.

Automatism

Both Dada and Surrealist writers and artists experimented with "automatic" creative production. Dadaists including Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, and Kurt Schwitters wrote "automatic" poems from 1918, so called because they were transcribed without delay, serious consideration, or revision. Dada visual artists, including Arp, Sophie Tauber, and Marcel Duchamp also relinquished creative control of their works by employing chance. At the same time a group of writers in France around André Breton experimented with automatic writing as a new method of exploring the unconscious. In 1919 Breton and Philippe Soupault published Les Champs magnétiques, the result of their first experiments with automatic writing that tried to tap new poetic imagery through uncontrolled outbursts of imagination. In the period 1922–4 dream accounts were added to automatism. In the First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) the movement is defined by Breton as "pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought." Surrealist visual artists also explored automatism. Surrealist automatism was influential in the development of modernist visual art. Robert Matta’s (1911–2002) concerns with psychological states in the late 1930s set a precedent for American abstraction. CoBrA (1948–51), an avant-garde collective established in Europe, favored automatic techniques and influenced developments in European abstraction.

Aragon, Louis (1897–1982)

French author Louis Aragon was a member of the surrealist movement until he split with André Breton and began to devote more of his energy to the Communist Party. He is best known for his love poetry and his novel, Paris Peasant. Educated as a physician, Aragon joined the army medical corps and met André Breton there. The two joined Dada in 1919 and became founding members of the surrealist movement along with Philippe Soupault in 1924. Aragon’s first two poetry collections were highly surrealist in style, but he was criticized by the group after he published Le Paysan de Paris [Paris Peasant], a novel and dialectical meditation on areas of Paris about to be destroyed by modernization. This book deeply influenced the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. Soon after he joined the French Communist Party in 1927, Aragon was ejected from the surrealist movement.

S’il vous plaît : le théâtre de boulevard au filtre de l’image dialectique

En 1920, André Breton et Philippe Soupault composent ensemble S’il vous plaît, une comédie calquée sur les codes du théâtre de boulevard. Cette pièce offre l’occasion de comprendre les mécanismes et les enjeux à l’oeuvre dans la réécriture d’un genre théâtral associé au goût bourgeois, et ce pendant la première phase d’application au théâtre des procédés surréalistes alors en élaboration. À travers l’analyse de la pièce et de ses variantes, cet article tâche de mettre en lumière les liens qui unissent théâtre et surréalisme, et les limites de ces liens.