Surrealism, Occultism and Politics by Tessel M. Bauduin Victoria Ferentinou Daniel Zamani

Author:Tessel M. Bauduin,Victoria Ferentinou,Daniel Zamani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.1 Vincent van Gogh, Gauguin’s Chair, 1888. Oil on canvas. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. © Vincent van Gogh Foundation.

Re-enchanting Artaud

On 25 May 1946, the very day Breton arrived back at the port of Le Havre following his enforced stay in America during the Second World War, Artaud was relocated to the Hospice d’Ivry in Paris from the asylum of Paraire in Rodez in the south of France. Artaud had been kept there since February 1943, undergoing over fifty sessions of appalling electro-shock treatment following his mental collapse in September 1937, also in Le Havre, and previous internment in three psychiatric institutions.8

After a long silence by Breton from the moment of Artaud’s confinement, the two met up at the beginning of June 1946. Artaud’s renewed correspondence with Breton of the time already served up the theme of Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society where it states: “It is a fact that I am anti-social, but is that society’s fault or mine [sic].”9 Breton agreed to give an address in a tribute event for Artaud on 7 June 1946, only a few days after his return to Paris, at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt.10 He did not mention these various coincidences of time and place, but he must have noticed their correspondence with his theory of “convulsive beauty” as set out in Mad Love (1937), for it was one of that theory’s three conditions, namely “magic-circumstantial,” denoting a meaningful encounter, which marked the reawakening of Breton’s relations with Artaud. However, it was its exact opposite – a missed encounter, on the theoretical plane in this case – that would soon bring two quite differently struck chords of disenchantment to Artaud’s appraisals of post-war Surrealism on the one hand, and the art of van Gogh on the other, and I will trace their affinity here.

Keen to rekindle interest in Surrealism in Paris after five years away, Breton reminded his audience at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt of Artaud’s brief passage through Surrealism at its beginnings in the mid-1920s. He went on to confess that in his own memory of that time, “it is the personality of Antonin Artaud that stands out in its dark magnificence” and to admit that Artaud could claim sole responsibility for the third issue of La Révolution surréaliste, which “among all the other issues, is the one that reaches the highest phosphorescent point.”11 That was not to say that Artaud was the most surrealist of the surrealists, even though Artaud himself had declared as much in a letter back in 1924; in fact, Breton regretted the lack of restraint espoused in that number of the journal.12

Not long after that incendiary publication, Artaud had stated his not unrelated indifference to the politics of the surrealists. Some of the group began to turn towards Communism in 1925 through reflection on the question of colonialism, and subsequent alliances took place between La Révolution surréaliste and the pro-communist magazine and group Clarté as well as L’Humanité, the review of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF).13 Although

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