André Breton turned surrealism into an act of will. That is, its apparent opposite. But before he had covered the entire territory on the margins of reality - or he had denied reality, because he was not interested, to look further - and had named the sea of ​​the winters of our psychic limbo among white waves of infinite abysses , dreamed and unknown. His formula was to throw a short pass: from a state prior to thought, to the word, made a handle of revelation.

Devoid of logic and turned into a fever of saying, the poetic voice regained its original place as a breath of consciousness. Because from the beginning, from psychiatry with Freud in the background on the broken glass of automatic writing, verbal reason had been the enemy to beat: his Manifesto of surrealism was going to transform our lyrical landscape of life: «Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association disdained until the appearance of the same and in the free exercise of thought ». That was going to be and it was until Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon and André Breton himself joined the Communist Party in 1927 .

There ended the vastness of free association: the second surrealist manifesto was a return to a reason, this time covered with social justice. But Breton was more visionary or faster than others and left the party eight years later, because Marxist realism left little room for imaginative freedom, unless one developed it over the brutal blank page, definitive on the other hand, of the desert of snow of Siberia. It was, of course, nothing surreal André Breton when he called Salvador Dalí, his companion of aesthetic hallucinations, «Ávida Dollars», but his poetry drank with lucid astonishment of the flow of Rimbaud, Apollinaire or Mallarmé , and did not need any social pretext. Perhaps that is why he has never finished penetrating among us, although he is recognized as a teacher: because Spain is a country much more given to realism in art, committed or not, and to surrealism in politics.

Starting from that discourse, can surrealism be applied to the study of any art? Beyond the poetic expression, where the formula seems simple - or evident, from Góngora to Berta García Faet, through the last Gimferrer, with that torrential association of beauty drinking in its margins - is it possible to establish a structuring in the analysis of Any work of art that originates from a stage prior to its approach, from a previous region, to its outcome? Andre Breton thought so; and after enjoying The Magic Art , the wonder that Atalanta just published, I think so too. The book was first published in 1957, with a minimum circulation for members of the Club Français du Livre, within a project with several authors and volumes for the study of art, and soon became the object of worship for French bibliophiles .

But in The Magic Art , André Breton looked at the creation from the prism of light of surrealism , without space or time, with the poetic vision of a man who had made his aesthetic a personal conquest. He always wanted to publish it again, because in that first edition the illustrations had become vignettes and Breton aspired to a maximum dialogue between the text and the selection of the images, as Jacobo Siruela explains in his note to the edition. Thus, after the illuminating introductory essay, Magic art is structured in three parts: Art, vehicle of magic , Modern times: crisis of magic and Recovered magic: surrealism . On the final survey, presented to Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Leonora Carrington, René Magritte, Juan Eduardo Cirlot or Julien Gracq, among many others, Martin Heidegger replied that he doubted his knowledge to be able to face it and the approach of the questions, and Octavio Paz that there is no art without magic at any time.

The beautiful edition of Atalanta is, visually, the culmination of that work in progress of interpellation between the unconscious and the art that André Breton envisioned, from the magical origins of the architecture in the cave, guarded by primitive peoples at risk of disappearance, the shamanism or the mystery of the megaliths , with Easter Island and the Stonehenge circle, or from Crete to Rome; the medieval fight against witchcraft, embodied in El Bosco, cabal or alchemy, to the analysis of Ingres, Gauguin or the metaphysical poet-painter Giorgio de Chirico, together with filmmakers such as Méliès, Josef von Sternberg and Abel Gance.

For Breton, magic is the pure and archaic irrational . From Indian America to Orson Welles, everything is surrealism before surrealism. The result is eloquent: the conversation is there, in that visual quality of the page, with the magic before the intellectual approach turned into an awareness of an artistic truth, and we cannot stop reading and looking.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • culture
  • art
  • Paris

The PaperHemingway Sphere in Cuba: 22 years of literature and rum

Culture Preserving the Alhambra tourism conservation and management model will guarantee the monument of the future

Culture Low culture spending in Spanish households by 5%