This sensational conflict is recounted by art historian Abigail Susik in her recent book Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work. Shortly thereafter, Breton’s faction decisively broke with the French Communist Party (PCF), repudiating, in a collectively written tract, not only the “ultra-conformist” socialist state under Stalin, but also the “wretched products of ‘proletarian art’ and ‘Socialist realism,’” which had been officially instated as the USSR’s cultural policy in 1934.
They are too busy studying pederasty and dreams,” with support from “their inheritances or their wives’ dowries.” The obloquy escalated to blows when Breton encountered Ehrenbourg in Montparnasse. Responding in kind, Ehrenbourg's “The Surrealists” rebuked the artists as trifling libertines, as fond of “‘revolution’ as they are of cocktails and sexual perversions.” While posturing as “champions of a proletarian purity,” he charges, they “will have nothing to do with work. Pierre Revel (Adolphe Menjou).ĭirectly provoking this screed was an article by philosopher and Surrealist affiliate Ferdinand Alquié, who publicly condemned a Soviet film’s glorified depiction of a labor commune and pugnaciously denounced a “wind of cretinism” blowing from Moscow. “I’m not quite sure,” the author confesses, “whether the Parisian ‘Surrealists’ are to be compared to the pheasant strung up by the neck or to the wily chef,” but the text’s subsequent invective against André Breton and his circle makes plain Ehrenbourg’s contempt for these would-be revolutionaries and their epicurean brand of radicalism.Ĭharlie Chaplin, A Woman of Paris, 1923, 35 mm, black-and-white, 82 minutes. A cultural ambassador to the Parisian intelligentsia who had Stalin’s ear, the critic here abandons diplomacy to aggravate a growing rift between official Communism and the “phosphorescent youths” of the interwar avant-garde. This campy vignette opens Ilya Ehrenbourg’s essay “The Surrealists,” translated from the Russian for Partisan Review in 1935. Holding an aging pheasant carcass to his nostrils, a chef affirms its quality for the “delighted gourmet,” who, in turn, luxuriates in “the spoiled meat odor as greedily as if it came from a cluster of lilies of the valley.” IN A PANTOMIMED SCENE from Charlie Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923), the bon vivant Pierre Revel visits an upscale restaurant’s kitchen to vet the preparation of his meal. Photo: Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2022. Published on the cover of La Révolution surréaliste 1 (December 1924). Left to right: Max Morise, Roger Vitrac, Simone Breton, Jacques-André Boiffard, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Pierre Naville, Robert Desnos, Giorgio de Chirico, Philippe Soupault, Jacques Baron. Man Ray, Séance de réve éveillé (Walking Dream Séance), 1924, gelatin silver negative on glass, 3 1/3 x 4 3/4''.
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