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Surrealism and Australia: Towards a World History of Surrealism

There have been over the past few decades several art shows dedicated to global aspects of well-known art movements. World Impressionism, Feminism and Conceptualism have all had their turn at being anthologised.1 But there has not been to our knowledge a similar exhibition undertaken with regard to Surrealism. We attempt to write here the Australian entry for such an exhibition. However, before doing so, we might speak for a moment about the special place such a project would have because, if Surrealism can now be seen from a global perspective, it also like those other art movements casts a particular light upon this globalism. In some ways, we must try to think the fact that, if today Surrealism can be seen from a global perspective, the very notion of globalism is 'surrealist': not only an aspiration of the original movement (as globalism was also implied in Impressionism and Feminism), but itself a 'surrealist' idea.Of course, Surrealism is famously - at least at the beginning - a movement strongly identified with a single figure, a single place and a single time: Andre Breton in Paris in 1924. Breton's particular genius, we might say, was to take the post-War energies of Dada, which happened variously in Zurich, Hanover, Berlin and New York, and involved artists from many different countries (Belgium, Romania and Holland), and out of this dispersal constitute a coherent, centrally organised art movement. And he was able to keep its fire alight - for Surrealism was a particularly long-lived art movement - for some 30 years.But at the same time Surrealism - we might say due both to Breton's own personal inclinations and the very nature of the movement - was also expansionist. With an internationalism already built into his Communism, Breton's expatriatism in New York during the 1940s became crucial to that city's artists. And equally important at the time was Breton's engagement with Surrealism in Mexico, which found its ultimate expression in the International Surrealist Exhibition, held in Mexico City in 1940. And equally Breton's famed collection of the art of the Sepik River in his flat at 42 rue Fontaine in Paris just after the War was also an attempt to take Surrealism around the world, in something like an extension of Picasso's and others' 'primitivism' some 30 years previously.However, more than Breton's own actions, the logic of Surrealism is already effectively globalist - and perhaps even more so than those other art movements. It is not about an outer landscape (like Impressionism) but about an inner landscape. It is not about a particular social subject (like Feminism) but about a universal unconscious subject. It attempts to put forward an argument not about art (like Conceptualism) but about life. And, more than this, once Surrealism is proposed, it is seen to be everywhere. That is, for all of Breton's efforts to take Surrealism to Mexico, he found that once there Mexico was already surrealist. Japan too, which Breton never visited, not only had itself its own identified Surrealist movement, but this movement subsequently discovered that Japan was surrealist before Surrealism.2 More particularly, from the perspective we undertake here, following on from (but in a way reversing) the 'primitivist' logic of his interest in the art of the Sepik River, Breton discovers that Australian Indigenous art is already surreal, as he acknowledges in his Preface to Czech artist Karel Kupka's Un art a l'etat brut [The Dawn of Art: Painting and Sculpture of Australian Aborigines], a forerunner to Kupka's later Doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne.3 Thus it was that Paddy Compass Namatbara's large bark depicting two Maam figures ended up on the wall of Breton's studio on the Left Bank after the War. (It is also somelike this that can be seen in Adelaide-bom Stella Bowen's Le Masque (1930), painted in Paris deep into the failure of her marriage to Ford Maddox Ford, with its extraordinary split image of a white bourgeois woman holding up an African mask, her right hand with white bracelet and ring and her left hand with black bracelet and ring. …