[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.
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. The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Re: Surrealism
Posted by Gerard on March 22, 2025, 5:43 pm, in reply to "Surrealism"
"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" ..and as such totally discredits it surely? https://www.arafel.co.uk/2015/06/red-star.html
Re: Surrealism
Posted by Keith-264 on March 22, 2025, 6:32 pm, in reply to "Re: Surrealism"
Perhaps a risky conclusion, given that the taint of fascist collaborationism is still wafting over us. ;O)The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Bull..
Posted by Gerard on March 22, 2025, 8:59 pm, in reply to "Re: Surrealism"
I'd say because..to my mind, as is intimated more than once in this article, ..this seems to be an exercise in German neoliberalism...the mask of acceptability....propaganda disguised...manufacturing consent..I could go on..to my mind the attitude that defines an era of "no-art"...a discipline that has lost its relevancy & therefore, raison d'etre. Why, for instance, has no-one considered creating a "tongue-in-cheeky"; Picasso, Cubist, blue-period, "bullfighting" Lamborghini?
Re: Bull..
Posted by Gerard on March 22, 2025, 9:02 pm, in reply to "Bull.."
We may be conditioned to offering an opinion at the push of a button, but before venturing on the question of whether we can, or should, separate the art from the artist, it seems ever prudent to ask, “Which art and which artist?” There are the usual case studies, in addition to the recent crop of disgraced celebrities: Ezra Pound, P.G. Wodehouse, and, in philosophy, Martin Heidegger. One case of a very troubling artist, Salvador Dalí, gets less attention, but offers us much material for consideration, especially alongside an essay by George Orwell, who ruminated on the question and called Dalí both “a disgusting human being” and an artist of undeniably “exceptional gifts.”
Like these other figures, Dalí has long been alleged to have had fascist sympathies, a charge that goes back to the 1930’s and perhaps originated with his fellow Surrealists, especially André Breton, who put Dalí on “trial” in 1934 for “the glorification of Hitlerian fascism” and expelled him from the movement. The Surrealists, most of whom were communists, were provoked by Dalí’s disdain for their politics, expressed in the likeness of Lenin in The Enigma of William Tell (view here). It’s also true that Dalí seemed to publicly profess an admiration for Hitler. But as with everything he did, it’s impossible to tell how seriously we can take any of his pronouncements.
Another painting, 1939’s The Enigma of Hitler (view here) is even more ambiguous than The Enigma of William Tell, a collection of dream images, with the recurring melting objects, crutches, mollusk shells, and food images, set around a tiny portrait of the German dictator. Kamila Kocialkowska suggests that psychoanalytic motifs in the painting, some rather obvious, reflect Hitler’s “fear of impotence, and certain commentators have noted that Hitler’s enthusiastic promotion of nationalistic breeding can further explain the innuendo present in this image.”
The Hitler obsession began years earlier. “I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman,” Dalí supposedly said,
His flesh, which I imagined as whiter than white, ravished me. I painted a Hitlerian wet nurse sitting kneeling in a puddle of water….
There was no reason for me to stop telling one and all that to me Hitler embodied the perfect image of the great masochist who would unleash a world war solely for the pleasure of losing and burying himself beneath the rubble.
The painting Dalí alludes to, The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition (view here), is the work that first raised Breton’s ire, since “Dalí had originally painted a swastika on the nurse’s armband,” notes art historian Robin Adèle Greeley, “which the Surrealists later forced him to paint out.” Dalí later claimed that his Hitler paintings “subvert fascist ideologies,” Greeley writes: “Breton and company appear not to have appreciated a fellow Surrealist suggesting that there were connections to be made between bourgeois childhoods such as their own and the family life of the Nazi dictator.” Likewise, his creepy dream-language above is hardly more straightforward than the paintings, though he did write in The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, “Hitler turned me on in the highest.”
Other pieces of evidence for Dalí’s politics are also compelling but still circumstantial, such as his friendship with the proudly professed Nazi-sympathizer, Wallis Simpson, the American Duchess of Windsor, and his admiration for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, whom he called, as Lauren Oyler points out at Broadly, “the greatest hero of Spain.” (Dalí painted a portrait of Franco’s daughter). Oyler points out that Dalí’s “wickedness,” as Orwell put it in his scathing review of the artist’s “autobiography” (a spurious category in the case of serial fabricator Dalí), matters even if it were pure provocation rather than genuine commitment.
The claim carries more weight when applied to the artist’s attested sadism in general. Dalí spends a good part of his Confessions delighting in stories of brutal physical and sexual assault and cruelty to animals. (The famous Dalí Atomicus photo, his collaboration with Philippe Halsman, required 28 attempts, Oyler notes, and “each of those attempts involved throwing three cats in the air and flinging buckets of water at them.”) Whether or not Dalí was a genuine Nazi sympathizer or an amoral right-wing troll, Orwell is completely unwilling to give him a pass for generally cruel, abusive behavior.
“In his outlook,” writes Orwell, “his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.” But perhaps Dalí means to say exactly that. Allowing for the possibility, Orwell is also unwilling to toss aside Dalí’s work. The artist, he writes “has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings.”
When it comes to the question of Dalí as fascist, some less-than-nuanced views of his work (“Marxist criticism has a short way with such phenomena as Surrealism,” writes Orwell) might miss the mark. The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition, writes Greeley, seems to reveal “a secret about his own middle-class background” as a nursery for fascism, especially given the “disturbing” fact that “the nurse is a portrait of Dalí’s own, and that she droops hollowly on the shore near the painter’s Catalan childhood home, suggesting that Dalí himself might have had a ‘hitlerian’ upbringing.”
Greeley’s further elaboration on Dalí’s conflict with Breton further weakens the charges against him. “Ten days before the February meeting, he had defended himself to Breton,” she writes, “claiming, ‘I am hitlerian neither in fact nor in intention.’ ” He pointed out that the Nazis would likely burn his work, and chastised leftists for “their lack of insight into fascism.”
The question of Dalí’s fascist sympathies is incoherent without the biography, and the biographical evidence against Dalí seems fairly thin. Nonetheless, he has emerged from history as a violent, vicious, opportunistic person. How much this should matter to our appreciation of his art is a matter you’ll have to decide for yourself.
Related Content:
George Orwell Reviews Salvador Dali’s Autobiography: “Dali is a Good Draughtsman and a Disgusting Human Being” (1944)
Ernest Hemingway Writes of His Fascist Friend Ezra Pound: “He Deserves Punishment and Disgrace” (1943)
Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” Suggest He Was a Serious Anti-Semite, Not Just a Naive Nazi
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
more facts...this IS when Thelema was rising.....Dali. the libertarian. tended to fascism as do all those who refuse to restrain their desires..this is not conscious viciousness it is instead egoid narcissism..something Picasso could also be charged with esp. re: his apparent misogyny & blood-lust..Why should any discipline be unproblematic? Fundamentalists reduce..
Is there any chance of expanding on any of the very complex notions which you reducing to an internal debate with yourself .. i.e. external referencing .. without getting into your X references (eyes roll) .. which are normally pretty much meaningless (as it happens)?
Please do explain Thelema to TLN punters for example amongst many other notions which you are putting on the table, as though it's normal.
"Do What Thou Wilt" The pernicious (& far more so than most here seem to realise) creed of A.Crowley....for surely if; "by their works shall he know them!" the manifestation of the cancer that is neoliberalism is the inevitable outcome of a belief that will demonise anything (re: the laissez-faire imperative) and justify any treachery in order to survive..
on March 22, 2025, 12:19 pm