Surrealism and Canada:
History of the Idea of Surrealism in English Speaking Canada
between 1927 and 1984, or:
General Course on Surrealism to English Canada, or:
In the Totems' Shadows ©
by Dr. Yves Mr. Larocque
Edition Lille-Theses ISSN:0294-1767
©A.N.R.T. University of Lille III (FRANCE)
Introduction
The autodissolution "of the Parisian surrealist group on October 4, 1969 gives finally the opportunity to embrace the aspect holistic and holographic surrealism, to seize of them all the direction which such" a company prométhéenne delivers and adding up "(J Chénieux-Gendron ). Yoshio Abé and Francoise Will consider Japanese surrealism, Vovelle on surrealisms Belgian and Dutch, Hanifa Kapidzic-Osmanagic on that of Serbia, Michel Rémy , the United Kingdom. As for the surrealism of the Iberian peninsula, Pierre Rivas in made his vocation, and on the other side of the Atlantic, in Canada, André G Bourassa , François-Marc Gagnon and Lise Lamarche analyze certain vestiges of a movement which lived in Quebec. But the surrealism of other Canada, that of the anglophone people, one seems to occult it by inadvertency, perhaps for reasons of inadmissibility and knowledge. One believed over there in a movement having ceased, even not having never existed, although at the same time, Vancouver as in Toronto, surrealist animation redoubled intensity. But this activity went and continuous of going against the paradigms of continuity and evolution establish by the official thought emanating from the "university mortuaries" and the Canadian "tombs muséals" (Alain Jouffroy). To discuss surrealism would be to move back in time, or to achieve Wie be eigentlich gewesen war [ an integral resurrection of last ], whereas this thought is unaware of always all the adaptability of surrealism in a given space time. Although "the truths are essential all alone" (Régis Debray), this untruth seems perdurer. Very recently, the cuff of Vancouver Sun entitled "Simpson: Thrown up against the wall by arts Establishment "(Peter Wilson," Simpson: Thrown up against the wall by arts Establishment ", Vancouver Sun (Vancouver), 1995.)confirmait the narrowness of this thought" established "in the case of the painter Gregg Simpson that Pierre even brought in the enclosure of surrealism. This example is not only. The ambivalence of the situation could only encourage us to undertake a study on surrealism Canadian-English, us French Canadian, especially after having discovered that nothing had been written scientifically on the question.
But it should be admitted that with the threshold of this thesis, we are unaware of that we would be a historian taking part in the history. We discovered that the pendulums of surrealism in Canada and in the world were always per hour, and for a long time. The review Art and Artists reports that "the corpse still moves" in its heading not less revealing "Premature burial" (Arts and Artists , New York, March 69, pp. 20-5). There are also all the others: "Surrealism Ressurected" ( Apollo, London, May 1966, pp. 380-2), "Surrealism Hits Back" (Artsmagazine, New York, May 1968, pp. 23-5), "Paris: the new Surrealists "(Artsmagazine, New York, March-April 1970, pp. 129-132.)," Europe and America: two aspects of the new surreal "( Flash Art, Italy, April-May 1985, No 122, pp. 20-5.)," Surrealism Again "(Artsmagazine, New York, December - January 1972, pp. 52-3.). And that to say surrealist publications vancouveroises Scarabeus and Melmoth which, punctually, always scramble the axioms of the official art. As surrealist Canadian Michael Bullock underlines it, the recent publications on the movement of Andre Breton always seem to raise the same question: "What surrealism, and, surrealism remains an alive force"? However, we were unaware of that we would do at the same time a work on a lived painting, one on a work presents, one on pictorial modernity, one on the ideas in more than one research on an idea that we believe dead. Such is the unpredictability of surrealism.
There are two types of theses: that which turns over the surface of a very great periphery, and that which digs in very great depth a well delimited surface. One does not go without the other. The covered subject made that we must adopt the first type of excavation since four people only made only scrape, not to say to scratch, the surface of this Canadian shield: Paddy O' Brien (1964), Karen Wilkin (1972), Natalie Luckyj (1978) and Pierre (1980). They are the first to announce a surrealist presence on the Canadian ground, but it still had to be confirmed. With this intention, we were to be solved to deepen and surfaces it and the time of so large and so young country to unearth the first objects of study. Signs, documents, artifacts were stripped of their gangue; discontinuities, parallelisms, exposed vectors layers. As for work of archeometry, we achieved some several but others remain to be made. The acquisition of "the idea of surrealism" in anglophone Canada between years 1927 and 1984 appeared as a subject as vast as the geography from where it results.
Doubly relevant subject, since it is the first scientifically to examine the impact of a European movement on the Canadian art, an art which, which one wants it or not, was always victim of an "excessive" nationalism on behalf of the history and criticism; consequently, this subject also dictated to us to probe the Canadian-English mentality, which mentality qualified the surrealism of "degenerated " as of his arrival on the Canadian ground. It was necessary to know the origin of a so uncivil matter to seize the totality of the social framework. Consequently, our study of surrealism Canadian-English was to fit within the framework of the intellectual history, disciplines estimated, especially since the new tendencies in historiography. For this reason the present study carries the title: Surrealism and Canada: history of the idea of surrealism in English Canada between 1927 and 1984.
The seizure of this subject of research is articulated around many problems which will be duly exposed during the first part of this thesis. But that it is enough here to state the principal problems:
1. To know by which mediation the Idea of French surrealism became in English Canada a force, a spirit, at the time of these six last decades. I.e. when, how and why it was received? Was it Canadian- English subjected entirely to the cultural determinism? If so, how? How the idea was propagated? How did it contribute to the development of new ideas? In short, to study how the reception of the surrealist message meant refraction and transformation of the message by the receiver coming from anglophone Canada of mobility.
2. To know with precision, up to what point this idea contributed, qualitatively, with the creation of a Canadian surrealist painting and, quantitatively, with its expansion through all Canada; in short, to determine the pictorial use which one made of this one.
3. To define the characteristics and the influences which rose from it, in order to establish a typology tested and from there, to better integrate whole Canada in the great surrealist revolution.
If according to Paul Veyne "the first duty of a historian is not to cover its subject, but to invent it" to release it from its "conventional limits," (How the history is written, follow-up of Foucaultrévolutionne history, Paris, Seuil, 1971, p.196.) we believe that it is the same with our methodology. Traditional methodologies are not enough any more: the recourse to the quantitative analyses and serial approaches new fields; "the testamentary formulas, the iconographic reasons and the printed contents replaced the prices of corn" wrote Roger Chartier. As for ours, it was binding on us during our research, so much so that it built "our object by putting a remote familiarity". Debray was right.
Our method is made up of multiple scaffolding. Construction reflects our imagination and our intellection, those of the French Canadian resulting from an anglophone province. The empirical scaffolding finds its foundations in Great Britain and the rationalist scaffolding finds to undoubtedly them his in France, the countries founders of Canada. We could not escape from our biological memory just like Marshall MacLuhan could not dodge his. It is besides one of the important angles under which one recalls the eminent professor:
"It is however misunderstood by a great number of people because of its revolutionary ideas and its style prosaic and full with aphorisms. It insists on the connexity of the things and built what it rather calls of ' ' the mosaïques' ' of significance than to present only one simple argument supported by a logic of specialist at a dimension "(Encyclopaedia of Canada, vol. p. 1159.).
And it was the same with his colleague Northrop Fry for the University for Toronto. However, our scaffolding tributary of the Amerindian people, the geography, nature, the climate, the distance, the nordicity, the religion also took part in the membrane structural of this methodology. Let us take again Debray which, here, supports us: "To propose overall pictures is not inevitably synonymous with documentary insufficiency or idleness in the investigation and the analysis, and Auguste Count was not wrong to estimate that ' ' the general sights are related to the feelings généreux' '. We became quite miserly and dry, lately. In short, one will not yield here to terrorism debilitating complexity, held up like prohibition to think simple "(Régis Debray, Cours of general mediology, Paris, Gallimard, 1991, p. 16). In addition, we must be aware of the limits of what we believe it, and to endeavour to determine the zones of shade. We thus had to be resigned not all to include/understand and limit thereafter our objectives. It is a question of humility and honesty.
We are persuaded consequently of the importance of the history of the ideas (intellectual history ) like disciplines principal our research, and history of art like twin discipline of equal importance. Let us recognize with the new history the nonlinear character of historical causalities, "insistence on the social practices in-depth rather than on the systems of representation on the surface", and the widening of the supports of the cultural life, which in fact a "careful" history much more (Mornet). It is for these reasons that we insist on this one. We also develop a whole of new paradigms: 1) the mediology, which studies "the whole of the circulation symbolic systems and transmission resources; together which precedes and exceeds the sphere of the contemporary media ": "message = message", 2) dromology, study speed compared to a geographical environment: "message = speed" (Paul Virilio, the negative horizon, Paris, Galileo, 1984.), and obviously, of the disciplines more tested and as much important in which our primary sources (texts), secondary sources (works), tertiary sources (monographs, catalogues of exposures and stories) find their account: 3) sociology, 4) the pragmatic one of the literary speech, and 5) the iconography, iconology. "Beautiful" historical study in prospect, because it calls with very an other vision, other that positivist legitimated too a long time by the history of art.
The informaticielle quantification becomes also an important method as for the development of certain conclusions. Although it does not answer the criteria of a traditional methodology dialectician where the tryptic thesis, antithesis and synthesis are required, it does not remain about it less than the research computerized in history of art announces apparent signs which indicate other fields of research, confirms and disabled person some intuitions starting and manages to shake certainty that one believed quite founded. Computerized research also exposes times of "silence", like the year 1957 for us, very barren as for the diffusion of the ideas of the surréalismedans the international press. Easily locatable by the visualization of histograms, they should not be neglected as Michel Foucault advises it: "the concept of discontinuity takes a major place in the historical disciplines... Discontinuity, it was this mark of the temporal scatter which the historian had with responsibility of remove of the history. It became now one of the fundamental elements of the historical analysis "(Archaeology of the knowledge, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, p.16.). The study of art by data processing concerns the autopsy; research is fine and precise and the presentations in histograms, curves and sectors of our study are taken of it. It is an attentive and thorough examination data base where the dissection (by the interrogation) plays a dominating part. This vivisection updates the framework of the corpus, its "structure absent" as would say Umberto Eco; this invisible structure, hidden at the beginning by the intention but revealed later on by state intervention, sometimes without pity, of the sorting and the indexing.
Our study is divided into three parts: the conditions prérévolutionnaires, the phase of apprehension, and the phase of emancipation. These stages, given thanks to the trajectory and with the acquisition of the idea of surrealism on the Canadian geography, invite to continue the interrogation upstream on the concerns expressed, on the one hand, by general public with respect to surrealism (since 1927) and, on the other hand, by the painters Canadian-English vis-a-vis with the automatism (since 1939). Does surrealism Canadian-English of the Forties, 50 and of the beginning of the Sixties correspond to Proclamations of Breton? Crucial question which raises two types of problems: firstly, the problem of the evolution of surrealism and, secondo, that of the validity of the criteria of fastening, proclaimed by the criticism of the time and that of today, certain Canadian painters with the surrealist movement. As many interrogations which require a detailed attention to recognize, on precise conventions and social and historical justice, the true share of the heritage of the surrealism which would be indebted in anglophone Canada.
Although it discusses surrealism little, would be this only only on these propellant principles, the first part entitled surrealism and anglophone Canada: conditions prérévolutionnaires anchors English Canada in its physical and human geography. As Fernand Braudel affirmed it, the geographical factors whose history must hold account, "take a decisive importance only put in connection with other data, economic, social, cultural" (the Mediterranean. Space and history, Paris, Champs/Flammarion, p. 127.) ; it it on what is put this first part. Geography, religion, culture, history, are the same foundations of the history of the ideas and, any good considered, of the history of art: a history of the art which is erased in front of the history, it is what returns it possible said Debray (Life and died of the image, Paris, Galllimard, 1992, p. 11). We will thus see Canada little progressist, with the reins of an impetuous nationalism, the ball of a cold Anglo-Saxon puritanism and, consequently, a country far from inclined with the pictorial experimentation. For example, the press albertaine wondered in connection with a mural of Shadbolt Jack of pace automatist if "one were not rather to hang the painter instead of work" with the airport of Edmonton for which it was intended. We are however in 1963.
A synopsis of Canadian art was necessary so that surrealism can be imbricated more calmly in Canadian painting. It is this subject which connects the second part to the first. We will write that "Canadian art is thus with the crossroads of an important decision: either to remain in the bosom of nationalism, or to give up itself in the current of internationalism; either to perpetuate the tradition victorienne, or to accept the formal designs of European contemporary painting ". All of it were conscious, and this is why, in 1932, the director of the national Gallery of Canada calls upon the famous Roger Fry in order to realize of the situation on the spot and to solve the question:
"Artistically, Canada is At has very interesting not. Year indigenous and quite characteristically Canadian movement is under weight which the traditionalists have usual are fighting to the last ditch and are using any influence to kill. [... ] The moment is has very pathological one for year outside authority of unquestioned status to look At the been worth give situation interestedly and dispassionately and to his views upon to the country broad At and I cannot overestimate the of such has review of the situation in your hands"(Letter January 6 1932 of Eric Brown in Roger Fry: ARCH. M.B.A.C. Carnegie Corporation.). With the great disappointment of Eric Brown, the English refuses for reasons of health. One was to still have patience to know the outcome of the match putting at the catches the nationalists and the internationalists. But a few years later, a small blow of inch of England supports the latter. Surrealism appears officially for the first time in Canada at the time of the exposure of painting of Canadian National ExhibitionC.N.E.) from Toronto at the end of the summer 1938. Roland Penrose had brought together the exhibitors and Herbert Read had written the catalogue. It is the apprehension and this, in the two directions of the term.
In spite of a vaporous fear, certain liberal spirits try to seize the object of surrealism . Jock Macdonald , Marion Nicoll and Alexandra Luke follow to the letter the lesson of Grace W Pailthorpe that itself accepted the Breton one . A little later, Miller G Brittain , Patricia K Irwin , Marian Scott , Shadbolt Jack , Edna Taçon and Florence Vale will tease the automatism; and there are others of them. Surrealism infiltrated in Canada by many articles which published the American artistic press. One reads, one experienced, one risks sometimes timidly, sometimes boldly, to cross the doors of internationalism by the means of the surrealist automatism. Some prefer to be exiled towards hotter countries, spiritual exile also in order to follow the road of Shine Buñuel , of Leonora Carrington and Wolfgang Paalen , three artists among so much of others. Catholic Mexico seems their place of predilection: Paved Husband , Allan Glass , Gary Slipper , Henrietta Shore form part of those which choose a painting outside nationalism and Protestantism Canadian-English.
If "the true surrealist development of ' ' the capital' ' of Holland is around 1960" (Vovelle, Surrealism in the countries nééerlandophones, Thèse of doctorate of state, Université of Paris 1, 1984, under the direction of Rene Jullian, p. 150.) the same applies to English Canada. It is the emancipation. The rise of the media of masses, the acceleration speed, in short, the reducing of planet in a large "total village" (for finally making smile MacLuhan), are there certainly for something. The translation in English language of the great syntheses of surrealism, the death of the "pope" in 1966 and the end of historical surrealism in 1969 allow finally a development without having to undergo the lightnings of the Parisian episcopate. Vancouver and Toronto do not miss the occasion to seize the holism of surrealism. Groups are formed, of the exposures take place, of the publications appear, the "surrealist power stations" appear, the whole to release the art of the tares of the paradigm of one supposed continuity that promoted the official thought. It is for that that we will expose also the possible stakes: problems of peripheral surrealism and its margins, echoes attenuated, deformed; importance of the evolution of the artistic and cultural character of Canada, and his report/ratio to post-modernity; interest carried to historiography and its reports/ratios with surrealism.
Years 1927, 1938, 1944, 1964 and 1984 were essential to become our ideological beacons. The year 1927 announces the presence of the first surrealist fabrics to Canada at the time of the exposure from the Limited company in Toronto organized by Marcel Duchamp, Katherine Dreier and Lawren S. Harris. The surrealist exposure of the C.N.E. marks the year 1938, as well as the criticism (in the periodic publications) which did not return from there. At the time of the Second World War, surrealist English Grace W Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff prefer to be exiled in Vancouver rather than in New York like had done the others. Vancouver Art Gallery expose their works in 1944 and, for the occasion, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation diffuses a text on surrealism. Twenty years later, Paddy O' Brien feels a surrealist presence in Canadian painting, reason for which it goes up in 1964, Surrealism in Canadian Art in London in Ontario. And still two decades later, it is the international exhibition of surrealism under the title of Sign of Enchantment in Vancouver (1984) where the surrealist fabric of international extraction finds finally a climate of reception. Also determined by the trajectory of the reception of the idea of surrealism in Canadian geography, these chronological stakes mark the phases of refusal, acceptance and emancipation. These stages invite us to continue the interrogation on the expressed concerns, on the one hand by general public and, on the other hand, by the painters Canadian-English.
Us here now in front of the thorny question of the choice of the artists. Which are our criteria of selection? Can one judge an explorer of the automatism in the same terms as an executant of the automatism? Where to place the "surrealist one in spite of it, him"? How to tackle the problem of the margins, and where to locate them? Paddy O' Brien would have needed well a grid of selection, of a methodology tested for the choice of its forty artists. To have felt in a work or does a another climate close to surrealism do those of surrealist works, even if they are different contexts? Of the 17,382 visual artists who live and who lived in Canada, of many hundreds, even of the thousands, integrated in their works an impression of strangeness, a metaphysical feeling. To have included would not have only contributed to render a bad service to them, but would have also taken part in the heaviness of a subject already so vast and difficult to manage. Between the quantity and quality, between volume and the statute, exists the ordinance of the good and worst.
It should be also said that our thesis relates as much to the problems of diffusion as on the problems of pictorial natures. Consequently, our criteria of selection are based as much on the question of the radiation as about those of quality or the value. In addition, two Zeitgeist cover the temporality of this research: the first, which ranges between 1927 and 1964 and which is with the research of surrealism; and the second, between 1965 and 1984, which takes part in the emancipation of this one "O Tempora, O mores" says the aphorism; thus various sights too. However, to analyze on the same foot a work former to 1964 and another posterior on this date, without considering the determinism ambient, that it is psychological, geographical, historical, religious or national would be unconscious since they have quite different contextual significances.
Consequently, our selection, imposed by criteria at the same time of quality and radiation, criteria also determined by two distinct contexts psycho-temporal good, arises according to two following sectors':
1) those and those were selected which, entered in direct and/or indirect contact with the surrealist official ones or having relationship with the surréalismegrâce with the force of the writing, tried an exploration applied of the surrealist automatism to resist so that Edgar Morin calls "the social imprinting" ; were also retained those and those which were closely related to the problem of the diffusion of surrealism, without what pictorial modernity would have been long in being established in anglophone Canada.
2) Due to a psychosphère quite different, we also chose those and those which formed or did not form part of a surrealist group but which "made intellectual or moral accession act to surrealism; who recognized surrealism like concerning their own concerns, approved this recognition "(Pierre). It is these criteria on which Vovelle was based at the time of its study of Belgian surrealism.
To make the history of art and to make art are two quite different things and to even more make the criticism of art; it is an action which a many painters condemn. The Argentinian writer Ernesto Sabato, who at one time of his life côtoya the surrealist ones, is one of those which recognizes it in its novel the Tunnel : "CRITICISMS: It is a wound which I never could include/understand. If I were a large surgeon and that a Mister who never handled a lancet, which is not a doctor, who did not put a gutter at the leg of a cat, comes to explain me the defects in my way of operating, what would one think about it? The same applies to painting ". This is why as a historian of art, and more still perhaps, as a painter, we abstain from giving an opinion on the contents of works knowing that the many times where one related from there to our own painting, the remarks were digressing. We are remained primarily attached to the principles of the mediology and surrealism with this centralizing thesis : "there did it have surrealism in English Canada"?
"There was surrealism in English Canada"? Question skeptic and facetious in his contents, exclamative in its intention, answered us fellow-members, colleagues and bonzes muséologiens who were unaware of all surrealisms bretonnien, orthodoxe, hétérodoxe, eternal, history, and very of its close and remote margins. Surrealism, it is always Dali, it is always the fantastic one, it is always the same galvaudé term. Even Shadbolt Jack shown of a voltairianism moderated vis-a-vis with these problems, him which took part even in the Canadian adoption of the automatism: "Generally speaking surrealism seems year element not to congenied to the rather practical, matter of fact living room patterns of most Canadians" (Letter of Shabolt to the author, November 1991.). But if it refers to "most of Canadians", it is that it refers at the same time to the exceptions, with those and those which took the risk to go up in this Trojan horse to be transported in the enclosure of pictorial conservatism in order to open very large the doors with the automatism of surrealism.