Two rival manifestos fought over the word Surrealism in 1924
Guillaume Apollinaire coined "surrealism" in 1917 for Parade and his own play. Official movement status waited until October 1924, when André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto outmaneuvered Yvan Goll’s version published two weeks earlier—after a literal fight over the name.
Surrealism grew in Europe after World War I to let the unconscious speak through illogical, dreamlike scenes across painting, writing, photography, theatre, film, music, and comedy. Breton wanted dream and reality resolved into a "super-reality." Many members treated philosophy—"pure psychic automatism"—as primary and artworks as secondary artifacts. The movement drew on Dada’s anti-rational protest and aligned at times with communism and anarchism. Paris was the hub; influence later spanned global arts and political thought. Apollinaire preferred surrealism to supernaturalism in a March 1917 letter and applied it to Diaghilev’s Parade (18 May 1917) and Les Mamelles de Tirésias. Wartime hospital work using Freud’s methods on shell-shocked soldiers shaped Breton, who credited Jacques Vaché above even Rimbaud and Lautréamont. With Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault he founded Littérature and pursued automatic writing; Breton and Soupault published The Magnetic Fields in 1920.
Goll’s circle and Breton’s circle both claimed Apollinaire’s revolution. Breton’s group swelled to include Éluard, Ernst, Dalí, Buñuel, Man Ray, Miró, Duchamp, and many others. Freud’s free association and dream analysis mattered; Dalí quipped the only difference between himself and a madman was that he was not mad. Startling juxtapositions—distant realities in one frame—came via Pierre Reverdy’s 1918 essay into Breton’s manifesto. Dictionary definition: dictation of thought without reason’s control or aesthetic-moral filters. Encyclopedia claim: faith in neglected associations, dream’s omnipotence, and thought’s disinterested play. Mid-1920s café games and techniques such as frottage, grattage, and decalcomania overcame Breton’s early doubt that visual art could be automatic enough. André Masson’s 1923 automatic drawings mark a break from Dada; a Brussels cell including Magritte corresponded with Paris.
Object-making joined the toolkit. Dalí’s 1936 Venus de Milo with Drawers—painted plaster with metal pulls and mink pom-poms—turns the Louvre’s goddess into an "anthropomorphic cabinet," useless sculpture meant to materialize delirious fantasy. Claude Cahun’s 1936 Object, the only known surviving Cahun assemblage in original form, juxtaposes a doll’s hand, cloud-shaped wood, and a tennis ball painted with an eye, plus a base slogan mixing Popular Front rhetoric and Belgian currency text. Breton won the naming war through numbers and tactics, yet fractures and excommunications kept defining Surrealism’s history.
Source: Surrealism
