Me and Surrelaism (along with some less egotistical thoughts)

I have always been fond of the surrealists, including André Breton, shown above from an article concerning the current inflated value of his manuscripts. Several news items this week discussed a sale at Sotheby's yesterday of nine of these. All noted the surreal nature of their present high value, which is so at odds with their contents. A French collector, Gérard Lhéritier, founder of the privately-owned Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in Paris, purchased all of these documents for €3.2 million -- around $5 million. I believe that the actual auction price was quite a bit more than predicted, in fact.

Irony, iconoclasm, lack of respect for the conventionally "great," disparaging the tight links between art and money, and nonconformity naturally dominated quite a few of these documents. I love a situation filled with contradictions such as this. It's totally amusing.

I like to think that my Mona Lisa interests and collections are influenced by some of the absurdist approaches to art that originated in the 1920s. I believe that Jean Margat, who invented the term Jocondologie in an important issue of Bizarre (right) was still reflecting some of these ideas in the 1950s.

Besides making art of various sorts, surrealists were taken with the idea of a "manifesto" -- a document that laid out some principles of art and self-expression and usually decried the capitalist use of art and giving it a value in mere money. An early example -- perhaps the first -- is Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, written in 1924, included in yesterday's sale. A comment by Kevin Jackson, from the Guardian: "The true offense [of this sale] lies in the way in which sneaky old capitalism, once again, has so ingeniously taken a movement aimed at its violent destruction and turned it into luxury goods."

And of course the political manifesto is a concept that both preceded and followed the early 20th century art movements. I recently blogged about a related document, from the Futurists, a related art movement of that era. Who could forget The Communist Manifesto from the previous century? Who remembers the S.C.U.M Manifesto by Valerie Solanis, which appeared in the 1960s or 1970s some time. (S.C.U.M. as most people have probably forgotten if they ever knew, stands for "Society for Cutting Up Men" and was an outlier in the Feminist movement, which had other slightly saner manifesto writers among its adherents as well. But I digress from Surrealism.)

From the Independent, dated May 20: "Breton (1896-1966) preached, and practised, an 'instant' approach to art and thought which rejected the conventional idea of enduring value. He might well have rejected as an absurdity the idea of paying an estimated €500,000 (£400,000) for his hand-written and illustrated 21-page argument for 'uncontrolled' art."

Besides the surrealists, I also love Dada, an allied movement (though distinguished profoundly by the theoreticians and manifesto writers). Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, early Dadaists, later re-made their earlier disposable artworks, such as L.H.O.O.Q. or Mona Lisa with a mustache, and the famous urinal titled R.Mutt. In case you are new to this, L.H.O.O.Q. pronounced letter-by-letter in French is an off-color pun, contributing to Dada view of the concept of a masterpiece and of Mona Lisa worship. Just my thing.

After first throwing things away, Duchamp and Ray made sure that museums and galleries had ample works to display. In old age, they changed their minds about money, it seems. Breton may never have done any such thing, but time has done the job.

Just one absurd thing: publication of the many photos of surrealists inspired by news of the sale of Breton's papers show that these extreme non-conformist art experimentalists seemed virtually always to wear a suit and tie. Wow, times change don't they?