Contre-Attaque
Shane Boyle
21 March 2025 Culture

[The only Jonathan Meades programme I didn't finish was the one on surrealism, the small beer of modernism.]

But Live Here? No Thanks at Munich’s Lenbachhaus is a stirring retrospective of Surrealism, which places anti-fascism at its core. Marking the centenary of Breton’s first manifesto, the exhibition seeks to reclaim Surrealism as ‘a militant, internationally connected and politicized movement’ through a display of over 400 works – paintings, films, manifestos, sculptures, poems, books. It opens on familiar ground, tracing the movement’s roots in Paris, born from the traumas of World War I and nourished by Dada, Freud and Marx. But from there, it charts the movement’s evolution in response to the rise of fascism across Europe, as well as notable work by its post-war descendants. The result is both refreshing and provocative. Yet it raises important questions, not simply about the politics of the avant-garde, but Germany’s cultural climate today.

While Breton once imagined firing a gun in a crowded street to be the ‘purest’ surrealist act, Lenbachhaus spotlights those artists who took up arms with a political target in mind: figures like Wilfredo Lam and Benjamin Péret, who joined militias to fight Franco in Spain, and the radicals of La Main á plume, who split their time between writing poetry and ambushing the Gestapo in occupied Paris. It recounts harrowing stories of Jewish surrealists evading deportation – such as Jindřich Heisler, who spent years hiding in the Prague apartment of the painter Toyen. Rather than portraying Surrealism as an escape from reality, the exhibition stresses the movement’s active role in war-time resistance. The Martinican surrealist Pierre Yoyotte contended in a 1934 essay that Surrealism’s ‘anti-fascist potential’ lay in expanding the Marxist focus on material conditions to the terrain of ‘desire’ – and the exhibition embraces this thesis, portraying the movement’s aesthetic signatures as a ‘revolutionary political method’ that complemented anti-fascist militancy.

No sooner was fascism on the march than Surrealists went on the offensive, forming groups with names like Contre-Attaque. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, artists such as Kati Horna and André Masson dedicated their talents to documenting Nationalist atrocities and designing propaganda for the Republic. Many more – Joan Miró, Remedios Varo and Marx Ernst, among them – registered the mounting horror in their paintings. Ernst’s L’ange du foyer (1937) captures the fascist threat as a red monstrosity leaping into the air, indifferent to the devastation it is about to unleash. Guernica (1937) is often hailed as the exemplary anti-war painting, but Lenbachhaus instead highlights a more direct, even practical offering – a series of etchings by Picasso satirizing Franco, originally intended for postcards to raise funds for the Republican cause.

Surrealist art – denounced as ‘degenerate’ by Goebbels – was a frequent target of fascist regimes. As the Nazis advanced into the surrealist strongholds of Prague and Paris, many artists and poets fled across the Atlantic to Mexico and the United States, making such destinations – along with transit points like Marseilles and Martinique – hubs of artistic collaboration and exchange. Those who remained paid a heavy price. In Paris, many who joined the Resistance were arrested and executed. The painter Tita and poet Hans Schoenhoff were deported to death camps. Jacques Hérold and Victor Brauner, both Jewish artists from Romania, went underground – Hérold in Paris and Brauner in the Pyrenees. The latter’s imposing Totem de la subjectivité blessée II (1947) serves as the exhibition’s poster image, its earthy landscape marred by twin fanged creatures devouring a cowering third. His L’Homme Idéal (1943), also on display, is perhaps even more gripping. Created from materials scavenged while in hiding, this exquisite-corpse-like figure is composed of poured wax, pencil and pen applied to a piece of found wood. Each segment frames an uncanny tableau: one shows a wagon wheel shaped like a heart, an ambivalent emblem of forced displacement.
Victor Brauner, Totem de la subjectivité blessée II, 1948. Legs de Mme Jacqueline Victor Brauner en 1986. Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024

Claude Cahun – a queer, Jewish, anti-Stalinist communist – takes centre stage in But Live Here? No Thanks, as a quintessential anti-fascist artist. In 1937, Cahun moved to Jersey with the surrealist illustrator Marcel Moore. When Germany occupied the island three years later, the pair launched a daring campaign to undermine the Wehrmacht, distributing mocking notes that urged German soldiers to defect or commit acts of sabotage. They left these ‘paper bullets’ in cafés, slipped them into coat pockets, and pasted them on car windows. One featured a drawing of a soldier stranded on a sinking ship named ‘Das Reich’ encircled by sharks, alongside a taunting verse:

I believe, the waves engulf

skipper and barge in the end,

And this did with his roar

that Adolf Hitler.

Denounced in the summer of 1944, Cahun and Moore were sentenced to death. While awaiting execution, the pair sketched on cigarette packets – one drawing captured the dreary interior of a prison cell; in another two dragon-like monsters form a heart around a woman’s face (continuing Cahun’s explorations of gender nonconformity). The war’s end spared them from the firing squad. A defiant portrait of Cahun from May 1945 speaks for itself: clad in a large trench coat, a Nazi badge between their teeth.

An intrinsic problem with an exhibition dedicated to the ways in which Surrealism confronted fascism is that it risks imposing an artificial ideological unity on the movement. Surrealism never adhered to a strict party line, as the fierce conflicts between Trotskyite Surrealists and those like Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard who remained loyal to the French Communist Party demonstrate. Though surely aware of this danger, the curators make little effort to avoid it. More telling is what the exhibition omits: any acknowledgement of Surrealism’s proximity to fascism. Notably absent is Salvador Dalí – formally expelled for his ‘supposé hitlérisme’ and support of Franco. Defensible as his exclusion might be, it sidesteps a reckoning with the political plasticity of the surrealist aesthetic that would have been worthwhile.

If the exhibition is guilty of simplifying Surrealism – streamlining a diverse, even fractious artistic movement, which emerged in a complex and turbulent conjuncture – it also displays blind spots about Germany’s contemporary context, and the political valences of some of its curatorial decisions. The title of the exhibition is taken from a 2005 song by the Hamburg rock band Tocotronic – an ode to German anti-nationalism (‘Aber Hier Leben? Nein Danke’). The curators ostensibly chose it to evoke Surrealism’s enduring relevance, as the AfD rises to become the primary opposition party. Yet whatever resonance the phrase might hold is dampened by its tenuous connection to anti-fascism. Tocotronic’s frontman vocally opposes the BDS movement, going so far as to endorse bans and ‘reverse’ boycotts of individual artists. For an exhibition that chronicles the censorship and persecution of artists by genocidal regimes, this title feels ill-chosen. Yet it is a symptom of what Pankaj Mishra has diagnosed as Germany’s delusional ‘memory culture’, where anti-fascism is too often conflated with unwavering support for the Israeli state.

The first work one encounters upon descending into the gallery – and the exhibition’s only commissioned piece – is a video installation inspired by The Last Days of New Paris (2016), China Miéville’s reimagining of occupied Paris as a battleground where Nazis clash with Surrealist artworks brought to life. While this serves as a fitting entry point, Miéville’s inclusion is surprising. Last April, he declined a prestigious fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service, publicly expressing solidarity with artists and intellectuals whose awards and invitations in Germany have been rescinded for protesting Israel’s war on Gaza. The curators deserve credit for keeping Miéville in the exhibition. Yet given Germany’s past, what does it mean to showcase a history of anti-fascist art in a country that is, as Miéville puts it, currently pursuing a ‘shameful programme of repression and anti-Palestinian racism’, one that has disproportionately targeted Jewish artists and activists?

The timeliness of the exhibition needs no belabouring, and the curators resist reductive analogies with the ‘late fascism’ of the present, while still gesturing to Surrealism’s enduring legacy of political resistance. But Live Here? No Thanks, for instance, includes a profile of Ted Joans, the poet and jazz musician who helped give the postwar Black Arts Movement a Surrealist edge. Yet the exhibition leaves it to visitors to connect the dots between Joans’s art and anti-fascism per se – a connection that would require considering his alignment with contemporaries like Angela Davis and George Jackson, who viewed the violence of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini as part of a historical continuum including slavery, settler dispossession and racist policing. Almost from its inception, Surrealism recognized that fascism was inseparable from European colonialism. At its peak between the wars, the movement championed anti-colonial struggles, issuing manifestoes for self-determination and engaging in direct actions like the 1931 boycott of the Paris Colonial Exposition. Among the first items on display is Légitime Défense, a 1932 journal produced by Martinican students in Paris that applies surrealist techniques to ‘the Caribbean question’. This early experiment paved the way for later Surrealist-adjacent inquiries back in Martinique, including those involving Aimé Césaire, who aptly summarized the connection between fascism and colonialism as the ‘boomerang effect’ of colonial violence coming home to roost.

At Lenbachhaus, this sensibility finds its most striking expression in Le Grand Tableau antifasciste collectif (1960), a monumental work by a collective organized by the French painter Jean-Jacques Lebel in solidarity with Algerian independence. Its debts to Surrealism are unmistakable. At first glance, it presents a riotous mélange of colourful glyphs; yet a closer look reveals an infernal landscape of torn limbs, screaming mouths and intricate allusions to the conflict: the locations of settler massacres, a totem evoking the trial of Djamila Boupacha (tortured into falsely confessing her role in a café bombing), a swastika recalling the Gestapo tactics used during the Battle of Algiers, and a copy of ‘Manifeste des 121’ – the declaration signed by French artists, activists and intellectuals endorsing military insubordination and material support for the Algerian struggle. When it was first exhibited in Milan in 1961, Carabinieri stormed the gallery and tore the painting from its frame. Its creased canvas and cracked paint serve as vivid reminders of that episode, and as enduring symbols of artistic repression.
Installation Shot, But Live Here? No Thanks. Surrealism and Anti-fascism, Lenbachhaus, 2024. Photo: Lukas Schramm, Lenbachhaus.

No painting in solidarity with Palestine has been torn down in a German gallery – at least not so dramatically. Yet an atmosphere of suppression prevails: events are cancelled, artists are defamed, police a constant presence. In his 1934 essay ‘Author as Producer’, Walter Benjamin urged artists not merely to depict the fight against fascism but to take an active ‘position’ within the struggle itself. His remarks are a reminder that cultural institutions have various means of blunting the radical intentions of artists – not only by banning their work but also by ‘assimilating’ it to serve dominant interests. The historical distance between us and Surrealism feels ever more like a chasm, especially when the movement’s anti-fascist commitments – inspiring and instructive as they are – are co-opted by a culture that equates anti-fascism with solidarity with the Israeli state, no matter how many Palestinians it slaughters.

Read on: Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, NLR I/108.