A Century of Surrealism

The more you know about Surrealism, the more you realize there’s much more to know. That may be exactly what André Breton, the movement’s instigator and ringleader, wanted us to feel. A movement that celebrates the power of the unconscious and the unknown needs to remain open-ended. So we can hardly be surprised that in the hundred years since the publication of Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” in 1924 the fundamental principles and ambitions that animated Breton and his many friends and collaborators haven’t become any clearer. Not that people don’t keep trying to nail things down.

The centennial brought a torrent of books and exhibitions, including a lollapalooza of a show last fall at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a version of which will open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in November. Critics and historians still look to the early writings of Breton, who until his death in 1966 kept a tenacious hold on what could be said about Surrealism or done in its name. But however tantalizing we may find some oft-quoted passages from his first manifesto—the definition of Surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state” or the belief in “the omnipotence of dream”—they can’t begin to explain the hold that Surrealism continues to exert on artists, writers, filmmakers, critics, curators, and scholars, as well as the educated public that takes an interest in new exhibitions and the even wider public for whom “surreal” has become the all-purpose adjective to describe anything strange or unexpected. When Sarah McBride, the first transgender member of Congress, was asked how it felt to find herself walking next to Pete Hegseth, the new secretary of defense and a man who has made his feelings about transgender people perfectly clear, she had one word: “Surreal.”

In Why Surrealism Matters Mark Polizzotti, whose finely detailed biography of Breton, Revolution of the Mind (1995), is an enduring achievement, makes a brave attempt to define its endless appeal. Polizzotti, who probably knows as much about Surrealism as anybody alive, describes it variously as a tool, a methodology, and an agent for change. He characterizes Surrealism as a “disruptor,” a “drama,” an “adventure,” a “multinational current,” an “energy,” a “language,” a “state of mind”—and that’s only in his first forty or so pages. These fluctuating definitions reflect Breton’s own sense of the fluidity of Surrealism, which from the moment it was launched had both political and cultural aspirations. In 1935 he made one of his most famous declarations: “‘Transform the world,’ Marx said; ‘change life,’ Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are but one for us.” I wonder how many people actually believe that Marx’s economic revolution and Rimbaud’s program of self-transformation can ever be united. Certainly the French Communist Party, with which Breton sought some kind of alliance in the 1920s and 1930s, had no interest in combining Parisian bohemianism with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Perhaps no one summarized the problem more succinctly than the writer André Thirion in the title of a memoir of the movement published later in his life, long after he’d joined Charles de Gaulle’s postwar political organization: Revolutionaries Without Revolution (1972).

Surrealism always seems to be breaking apart, its enormous ambitions complicated by the differing claims of public, private, political, and artistic life—and competing approaches to experiencing or interpreting all this. The movement’s multidirectional character is reflected in the books published for the centennial, which range from Forbidden Territories, the catalog of a show in which one hundred years of Surrealist landscapes suggest a luxuriantly otherworldly travelogue, to Surrealism and Anti-fascism, also associated with an exhibition, a nearly seven-hundred-page anthology of writings that includes such heavy hitters as Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, and Aimé Césaire. For some Surrealism offered ways to embrace and transform the popular imagination—Salvador Dalí’s melting watches come to mind—while for others, especially the painters Joan Miró and André Masson, Surrealism’s improvisational practices stimulated lyrical divagations. Anyone who’s dipped into the many magazines that the movement produced—some are featured in Les Portes du rêve, 1924–2024: Surrealism Through Its Journals—can see that from the beginning the Surrealists had anthropological and sociological aims and a fascination with nontraditional, non-European, and premodern cultures, as well as an interest in the byways of psychological and sexual experience.

A movement that celebrates the dream, the other, and the unconscious offers limitless possibilities. The Pompidou exhibition was divided into thirteen thematic sections, including “Trajectory of the Dream,” “Chimera,” “Political Monsters,” “Hymns of the Night,” “Tears of Eros,” and “Cosmos.” If those themes are central to Surrealism, what are we to make of the titles of the chapters in Polizzotti’s Why Surrealism Matters, which include “Transformation,” “Appropriation,” “Subversion,” “Transgression,” “Disruption,” and “Revolution”? Surrealism is a shape-shifter, mixing eros and revolution, politics and dreams, and just about anything else.

A new generation of scholars has taken a dialectical approach to the movement’s more retrograde attitudes toward colonialism and sexuality, which they see as provoking fresh thinking—the old Surrealism reconfigured as a progressive tool. Historians dive in, some thirty contributing to the Pompidou catalog and some forty-five to the catalog of “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021. Essays in the Pompidou catalog include “Surrealism vs. Colonialism, 1930s,” “The Surrealists and Algeria: 1954–1962,” and “Black Flower: Surrealist Revolt in the Age of Rebellion, 1960s,” while among the topics covered in the Metropolitan’s catalog are “Sufism and Surrealism in Turkey,” “Catholicism and Surrealism in the Philippines,” “Seascapes and Blue Lobsters: Surrealism on the Colombia Coast,” and “Surrealism and the Global Colonial Order.”

Born in 1896, Breton served as a medical orderly during World War I and witnessed the collapse of an entire generation’s hopes for rational human progress. He spent several months working at a psychiatric center where he came face-to-face with the traumatic impact of the war on young Frenchmen and explored the literature of neurology and psychology, the beginning of a lifelong fascination with Freud’s ideas. Already an aspiring poet, Breton aligned himself with the Dadaist cult of the irrational that had emerged during the war in cities in Europe but also in New York. The eccentricities and extravagances of Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Hugo Ball, Hans Richter, and others offered literary, theatrical, and pictorial ripostes to geopolitical mayhem. Breton aimed to take the reins of the avant-garde when he declared the Surrealist revolution in 1924, giving Dada’s incendiary spirit a sturdier theoretical foundation, or so he believed. Some of the leading Dadaists, among them Arp and Marcel Duchamp, would in the years to come not infrequently find themselves allied with the Surrealists.

Surrealism entered an already crowded ideological arena. Parisians in Breton’s circle felt the pull of Marxism, Freudianism, and new fashions in mysticism and the occult, while art for art’s sake still held its own and the visual arts were generating an alphabet soup of isms, from Cubism, Orphism, and Futurism to Constructivism, Neoplasticism, and Neoromanticism. Surrealism, which drew from Marx, Freud, Mallarmé, de Chirico, Picasso, and many others, was just the kind of bold stroke the avant-garde demanded. It helped that Breton had the politician’s gift for insisting on his certainties even as they were eclipsed by new certainties, to be embraced with equal fervor. Like Marxism and Freudianism, Surrealism wasn’t a viewpoint so much as a worldview, an omnivorous vision complete with precursors—many of whom Breton invoked in the first manifesto—including Swift, Sade, Hugo, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. Alyce Mahon’s The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde explores the long reach of a fascination with the marquis and his writings that began with Breton and his cohort and even now shows no sign of slowing.

Marcel Raymond, in his brilliant book From Baudelaire to Surrealism (1933), described Breton’s

quest for the marvelous and for integral poetry; cries of hatred against what is; aspirations toward a total freedom of the mind, all this thrown together pell-mell in a Manifesto alternately imperious and nostalgic.

Perhaps one of the central dilemmas or quandaries—or is it strengths?—of Surrealism was that Breton kept looking for the future in the past, the new painting grounded in old dreams, the new social order in what he at times seemed to regard as primitive simplicities. In the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” published in 1929, he wrote:

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

The Surrealists, he continued, were devoted to “finding and fixing this point.” They believed that “construction and destruction can no longer be brandished one against the other.” What does it mean to fix a contradiction? Whatever it may mean, it has proved an influential idea or anti-idea, down to Robert Rauschenberg’s 1959 comment, “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)”

My sense is that connoisseurs of modern French poetry don’t rank Breton among the greatest, but a couple of his works in prose, Nadja and L’Amour fou (Mad Love), are recognized as classics that shatter the line between fiction and poetic nonfiction. Whatever his merits as a writer and thinker, without Breton Surrealism simply wouldn’t exist. And without the cohort that he worked and argued with, the movement wouldn’t have grown and prospered. At one time or another it included the writers Paul Éluard, Georges Bataille, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and Robert Desnos, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and the artists Max Ernst, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte; that barely scratches the surface.

Breton was nothing if not charismatic, a striking figure with a leonine head, large eyes, the profile of a Roman emperor, and hair worn rather long. He was adept at ideological and intellectual warfare, and at times so dogmatic that he was nicknamed the Pope of Surrealism, an irony that played on the movement’s violently anticlerical outlook. Polizzotti’s biography offers an unrivaled picture of Breton’s complex personality, the overweening narcissism fueling a hunger for friends and acolytes that expressed itself in acts of great generosity even as it encouraged the bitter disputes that characterized the movement. Polizzotti writes that “those who saw the legendary intransigence, the authoritarianism, were often unaware of how much doubt and indecision lay beneath it.”

After fleeing Hitler’s Europe, Breton spent the war years in the US along with other members of his old Parisian cohort, among them Masson, whose work had a decisive impact on the Abstract Expressionists. The presence of the Europeans supercharged New York’s already lively art scene, a story well told in Martica Sawin’s Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (1995). Breton’s postwar return to France wasn’t easy. The French Communists, who were allied with Stalin and the Soviet Union and admired for their courage in the Resistance, couldn’t forgive Breton his friendship with Trotsky, with whom he’d collaborated on an important statement about artistic freedom. Breton was undeterred, and until shortly before his death maintained weekly gatherings of colleagues and followers in a beloved café, a practice begun in the 1920s. Although he died too soon to witness the events of May 1968, in his later years he could see that his unconventional leftism was finding a sympathetic audience among the young. The aestheticizing of politics that Jean-Luc Godard both celebrated and critiqued in some of his movies had roots among the Surrealists. In Why Surrealism Matters, Polizzotti observes of the Surrealists that “their sympathies were ultimately more emotional than practical…. It was the poetry of politics that attracted them, not its machinery.”

Although the visual arts weren’t the focus of Breton’s first and second manifestos, in Surrealism and Painting, published first in 1928 and in expanded editions throughout his life, he demonstrated a deep, instinctual feeling for the work that visual artists do. Breton was an incisive critic of the art of his own time and an avid collector, not only of his close contemporaries but of the sculpture of Africa and the South Pacific. In the 1920s he made some money advising the couturier Jacques Doucet on purchases of paintings, rare books, and manuscripts; it was Breton who persuaded Doucet to buy Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which in the late 1930s was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During his years in the US he became an admirer and collector of Native American art and was one of the first to take an interest in Yup’ik masks produced in southwestern Alaska, with their intricate openwork designs. For the past two decades a selection of works from 42 rue Fontaine, the Parisian address where Breton lived for some forty years, has often been on display at the Pompidou, the paintings and sculptures arranged chockablock, as they had been in his apartment. Another new book, L’Atelier de André Breton: Mur Mondes, offers a detailed accounting of these eclectic works.

While Breton saw Surrealism as having implications that went far beyond the visual arts, he embraced exhibitions of Surrealist art as a way to promote it when its broader social and political programs seemed stalled. That was certainly the case after his return to France. There is reason to locate the beginning of what amounts to a worldwide obsession with the movement in an exhibition of Surrealist art that Breton and Duchamp mounted in Paris in 1947 at the Galerie Maeght, then a relatively new enterprise that by the 1960s was a leader in postwar art in Europe and beyond. The catalog of that show, designed by Duchamp, with a cover showing a woman’s breast rendered in three dimensions—a sort of soft sculpture—is now a collector’s item as well as a reminder of what snickering smartasses the Surrealists could be when it came to women.

“Surrealism,” the exhibition that the curators Didier Ottinger and Marie Sarré organized at the Pompidou, left visitors in no doubt as to the movement’s complexities. It opened with a dramatic homage to Breton, his cohort, and Paris in the 1920s. You entered through a doorway shaped like the mouth of an immense hungry monster, modeled on the entrance to the Cabaret de l’Enfer in Montmartre, a spot beloved by the Surrealists. At the end of a passage lined with photo-booth portraits that the Surrealists took of themselves and their friends there was a big circular space featuring a wraparound audiovisual mash-up evoking the rise of the movement out of the chaos of World War I, with texts by Breton, photographs of the Surrealists, the clickety-clack of old-fashioned typewriters, and swarms of fish, which referred to a group of romantic texts entitled Soluble Fish, for which the first manifesto was originally intended as an introduction. This Parisian prelude was bookended by a corridor toward the end of the show lined with Brassaï’s photographs of Paris at night, silken dark visions of the city that the Surrealists saluted in many works, among them Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926).

The rest of this capacious show was a geographical, chronological, and stylistic free-for-all, with paintings, sculpture, photographs, drawings, collages, and assemblages by artists who worked in different times and places grouped thematically. The themes and selections within the themes were open-ended, so that a painting by Picasso, Acrobate bleu (1929), was included in a section dedicated to the Surrealists’ interest in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, although I doubt that anybody could convincingly relate Picasso’s well-established interest in acrobats, clowns, and the circus to Carroll’s work. This sort of thematic exhibition, still less common in the US than in Europe, can pack a wallop when the curator has the intellectual breadth of Jean Clair, whose “Identity and Alterity: Figures of the Body, 1895–1995,” at the Venice Biennale thirty years ago, pushed visitors in refreshingly unexpected directions.

The Pompidou show, far from the inspired recklessness that might be true to certain aspects of Breton’s legacy, was both overly impressionistic and overly schematic, with little thought for the impact that works have when exhibited together. I don’t know what purpose was served by hanging Joan Miró’s La Sieste (1925), a blue-gray vision as haunted and austere as one of Satie’s Gymnopédies, near a Dalí dreamscape from 1944 that’s an exercise in bombastic fantasy, with two hyperrealistically rendered tigers attacking a reclining female nude who might have been borrowed from a porn site. “Trajectory of the Dream,” the rubric that brought these two paintings together, was broad enough to also include a clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), in which Ingrid Bergman plays the psychiatrist analyzing a dream of Gregory Peck’s—the dream staged by Dalí. In this setting nobody was going to bother with Miró, who although never a card-carrying Surrealist came as close as any artist to giving the movement’s doctrines a visual ineffability.

One of the most famous passages in the first manifesto is Breton’s attack on literary naturalism, complete with his mocking response to Dostoevsky’s literal description of a room in Crime and Punishment. Surrealism was supposed to go beyond appearances and uncover deeper or different realities, an effort that aligned with some of the goals of psychoanalysis. In the early pages of the first edition of Surrealism and Painting, Breton embraced Picasso’s most radical Cubist works of the mid-1910s, writing that they offered “a purely internal model” for this kind of investigation and a “drama whose only theater is the mind.” Breton believed that at least from time to time visual artists ought to draw without preconceptions—a pictorial equivalent to the literary automatism that he advocated as a way of accessing as yet untapped mental dramas. The truth, as most creative spirits acknowledged sooner or later, was that automatism, whether writing or drawing without preconceptions, wasn’t all that free-flowing. Certain patterns always seemed to emerge, the meanderings of the mind and hand perhaps more culturally conditioned than Breton had hoped. Nonetheless, letting go, at least as an initial act, as a kind of preparation, was an aspect of some of the greatest work that Miró, Masson, and Picasso produced in the 1920s and 1930s.

In the many years that Breton was writing about the visual arts he took an interest in works that moved beyond reality in different and even contradictory ways. He praised artists who were interested in reimagining the fundamentals of the painter’s craft—the manipulation of line, shape, and color—including some who were never directly associated with Surrealism, among them Paul Klee. He admired the radical experiments in sculptural form of Arp and Alberto Giacometti, although he never forgave Giacometti for returning to a direct confrontation with the human figure in the 1940s. He also celebrated artists, especially Dalí, Magritte, and Tanguy, who remained naturalists in the sense that they rendered their dreams, nightmares, and fantasies literally, with techniques pretty much indistinguishable from those of nineteenth-century academic realism. These Surrealist painters might be regarded as documentarians, their works meticulous transcriptions of their wildest imaginings. Breton referred to Magritte’s paintings as “object-lessons.”

Magritte’s ideas were certainly original. His paintings stay in the mind, whether a darkened street with a bright sky above (L’Empire des lumières, 1954) or a train emerging from a fireplace (La Durée poignardée, 1938), both in the Pompidou show. But I find Magritte’s work unsatisfying, even dismaying, the sensational conceptions given a poker-faced presentation that if it impresses at all does so only momentarily. As for Dalí, he made no bones about his affinities with nineteenth-century academic painting. He praised some of those earlier artists in his writings, but even when his glittering phantasmagorias are realized with techniques that recall eminences of an earlier official art world such as Meissonier and Gérôme, his paint handling isn’t as lively as theirs. Dalí’s paintings have dead, glassy surfaces. They’re narratively interesting but visually inert.

There was something clinical about the Surrealists’ attitude toward works of art. Their interest in the drawings, paintings, and sculpture produced by men and women without conventional training or with what were regarded as mental impairments was sometimes a search for new forms of beauty but also had its sociological or psychological aspect. Breton and his cohort wanted to see what otherness looked like. That could involve revealing the other in oneself. Hans Bellmer’s photographs of the limbs of dolls, combined to create provocatively erotic or sadistic situations, beg to be approached in a psychoanalytic spirit. The same holds for the cluttered dreamscapes that Ernst made of clippings from engravings and illustrations of all kinds, all the cutting and pasting animated by an archivist’s fascination with unfashionable furnishings, superannuated machines, and Victorian damsels in distress. It’s as if Ernst’s mind were a junkyard where the remains of pre–World War I Europe had been left to rot, albeit in interesting ways.

The Surrealists regarded art as evidence. And scholars have fallen in line, working overtime to decode symbols and examine the extent to which the images and narratives in a particular artist’s work can be aligned with the artist’s biography. In recent decades there has been a groundswell of interest in the women who managed to establish a place in the movement despite the misogyny that was so essential an aspect of the Surrealists’ erotic mythomania. The painters Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning made an impression at the Pompidou show as artistic explorers with stories to share, but I think that what fascinates in their work is what it tells us about their own thoughts and feelings, not what it makes us feel. A late work by Tanning, the installation Chambre 202, Hotel de Pavot (1970), occupied an entire room. This mixed-media reconstruction of a corner of a tawdry hotel, with lumpy gray woolen blobs shaped into a chair, a figure or two, and something strange spilling out of the fireplace, is a bad dream reconfigured as a diorama, a reconstruction of the scenario in a song that apparently interested Tanning when she was young. It’s Surrealist taxidermy—undeniably creepy, emotionally dead. Tanning’s work, however engaging as an account of the artist’s memories, dreams, and fantasies, doesn’t take on a life of its own. It’s illustration, without the pictorial openness and unpredictability that can expand and sometimes even explode a narrative.

The Pompidou show was both more and less than an art exhibition. It was a history lesson. It was a walk down memory lane. It was Psych 101. The curators seemed eager to test museumgoers’ responses to dark forests, sexual fantasies, political horrors, cosmic visions, and one or another kind of monster. The popular success of exhibitions devoted to Surrealism was of course something that Breton hoped for. But he was also aware of the dangers involved when unruly experiences and perceptions—all the aspects of life he believed were overlooked, if not buried—become part of the mainstream. In the 1930s Dalí excitedly wrote to Breton from New York that “the influence of Surrealism is enormous; they’re decorating the windows of the most luxurious stores with Surrealism. The creators of animated cartoons are proud to call themselves Surrealists.” In his biography Polizzotti observes that for Breton this “seemed to be taking Surrealism in precisely the wrong direction: Surrealism as fashion, to be flattered for a moment, then thrown out with yesterday’s news.”

Breton had many reasons to feel uneasy about Dalí, who was a political reactionary in the 1930s and whose obsession with money Breton skewered with a nifty anagram: Avida Dollars. But Breton must have also seen that Dalí’s popular success suggested how dangerous it could be to find your wildest daydreams—and maybe your nightmares—paraded in public. There was a risk that in the end your experiences were going to be sanitized, revelation giving way to glib sensation. Surrealism has for generations now been a kind of open source, ubiquitous in the cultural world. It has shaped the work of artists who show in some of the biggest commercial galleries, among them Lisa Yuskavage, Dana Schutz, George Condo, and Neo Rauch. We see it in advertising and the movies. J. Hoberman, writing after the death of David Lynch, observed that “if classic surrealists celebrated irrationality and sought to liberate the fantastic in the everyday, Mr. Lynch employed the ordinary as a shield to ward off the irrational.” Surrealism keeps spinning, with what Hoberman refers to as Lynch’s “performative normality” perhaps now another version of the surreal.

One of the more interesting books to appear in time for the centennial is a collection of essays by Mary Ann Caws, for decades a significant figure among scholars and writers interested in the Surrealists and French modernism more generally. By titling her book Symbolism, Dada, Surrealisms, Caws has chosen to fly in the face of a tendency among her colleagues to focus on the specifics of this or that artist or movement. Art historians, wary of sweeping generalizations, tend to resist what were traditionally viewed as the significant connections between Dadaism and Surrealism. Some of the newer scholarship is terrific, especially “Dada,” the brilliant show that Leah Dickerman organized at the National Gallery in Washington in 2006 in collaboration with Laurent Le Bon of the Centre Pompidou. But however different Dada and Surrealism may have been, there’s also much to be said for seeing a through line, one that begins in the nineteenth century with the Symbolists, who sometimes mixed art for art’s sake and radical politics in ways that prefigure Breton. A case in point is the fascinating figure of Félix Fénéon, who was both an aesthete and an anarchist.¹ Roger Shattuck, in a forceful consideration published in these pages more than fifty years ago, insisted on joining Dada and Surrealism in what he dubbed the “D-S Expedition.”²

Caws enjoys weaving together several generations. She’s unflappable as she moves from Mallarmé to Duchamp and Breton. She has known some of the artists and writers, in one instance recalling tea with Jacqueline Lamba, Breton’s wife in the 1930s and 1940s, but even when she hasn’t actually met them she approaches their work with an easy familiarity and a conversational tone. In the essay “How to House the Surrealist Imagination?” she embraces within a couple of pages Joseph Cornell’s boxes, the architect Frederick Kiesler’s Endless House, works by Bellmer, Duchamp, Tanning, and Leonor Fini, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “meditation in Being and Nothingness on the embarrassment of someone looking through the keyhole of a hotel room, seen by someone else.” “The imagined Surrealist house is about the mind,” she writes, “so that the expansion of the setting takes place mentally for the viewer—like the Symbolist theater of Stéphane Mallarmé, a mental scene for the poetry of place.”

What some may dismiss as Caws’s meanderings seem to me true to the spirit of open-ended investigation that animated the movement. Writing about Masson, she considers the idea that his work is Baroque:

The reds and the blacks—the flaming sun and the shadowy Earth-Mother—the violence, the bodies suffering and erotic in their ghastly, enlivening and mortal writhing everywhere in these works: had we not already suspected the intimacy of Surrealism and the baroque, we would surely see it now.

Caws operates less as a scholar of Surrealism than as a kind of Surrealist. I like the play of her mind. She underscores the extent to which Surrealism is unfixed, building on a cultivation of uncertainties that reaches back deep into the nineteenth century, when Baudelaire first spoke about “a forest of symbols,” and she finds this fluid Symbolism recapitulated in the early twentieth century with Odilon Redon’s forever floating and fleeting paintings and pastels, works that Breton admired.

Breton was such a fierce polemicist that we are sometimes in danger of forgetting that at their best his polemics were dedicated to aspects of experience that are troubled, unruly, enigmatic, unresolved. For all his didacticism, there was something flexible about his thinking. In the 1920s he criticized Braque for loving “the rule that corrects emotion,” arguing that his “sole concern” was “to deny this rule violently.” And yet by the 1950s he was writing of Miró’s great series Constellations—several were in the Pompidou show—that they represent “an order of things over which the calamities of the external world could finally never prevail.”

Perhaps Breton’s ultimate argument wasn’t between order and disorder, but a search for both the order and disorder that lie beneath appearances, the germinating forces that make for art, for life. In his last book, Magic Art—only now translated into English—Breton wrote about Leonardo da Vinci, whom he argued must not be consigned to “the oubliette of la belle peinture.” Leonardo was more interesting than that, “one of the most fraught artists in the history of art,” at least if you turned to “the confused but definite richness of his Notebooks.” Despite the extraordinarily public life that Breton lived, the search to which he was devoted—the Surrealist search for a reality beyond reality—was a very private one.