“This will be a serious meeting,” Andre Breton announced, sternly. “We will conduct it in perfect parliamentary fashion. When you wish to speak you will raise your hand and I will acknowledge your signal with the words La parole est à tel-et-tel, la parole est à vous!’”
The interjection did little to curb the boisterous mood during the meeting in the backroom of some Greenwich Village bar. Amid momentary silence, Leonora Carrington burst out in laughter. She attempted to calm her herself, as Breton pounded his fist on the table in front of him. Much to his annoyance, the laughter proved contagious.
Carrington’s first New York residence only lasted a year, all told. Her relationship with Max Ernst had recently come to an end when he married Peggy Gugenheim, the art collector and socialite who had helped him out flee German when the Gestapo declared his work “degenerate.”
Carrrington, too, entered into a marriage of convenience with poet and Mexican Ambassador, Renato Leduc. The two met through Pablo Picasso, whom Leduc knew from their shared affinity for bullfighting. After her dalliance with Manhattan, she returned to Mexico, joining another population of artists seeking asylum as a second world war raged on in Europe.
Breton, too, had spent time in Mexico. He’d accepted an offer to travel from his native France in order to attend a conference at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. His impressions of the country were less enthusiastic. "I don't know why I came here,” he noted, after getting lost on the way home from the event. “Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world".
His time in the country afforded him the opportunity to visit Erongarícuaro, accessible via a long boat ride across Lake Pátzcuaro. The city, whose name translates to "Place of waiting" in the indigenous Purepecha language, served as an isolated refuge for surrealists during the war. Details of his time in the area remain scant, though it’s here the writer was said to have rubbed elbows with Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky, who would spend the final few remaining years of his life in the country, in an effort to evade Stalin.
Breton’s trip back home proved brief. He spent his time employed by the French Army medical corps, while the newly installed Vichy government placed the author under constant surveillance. His works Fata Morgana and Anthology of Black Humor were declared, “the very negation of the national revolution.” Fearing imprisonment, Breton sought the aid of Varian Fry and Harry Bingham IV, who would ultimately help some 2,500 Jews flee France during the German invasion.
As with Mexico, Breton’s time in New York left much to be desired, due in no small part to his refusal to learn English. Painter Stanley William Hayter, attempting to ease the writer and his family into life in the U.S., took the trio to the historic Brevoort Hotel in Greenwich Village, said to be the only spot in the city with sidewalk seating of the variety found in Paris.
The writer would eventually find a home of sorts among fellow European exiles, though even there the relationships could prove contentious. To Breton, Salvador Dali became the anagram, “Avida Dollars,” a unsubtle reference to the painter’s single-minded focus on money. In response, Dali told a newspaper, “Je suis le surréalisme” – that he was surrealism, not Brenton.
Brenton took additional issue with the painter’s notorious refusal to denounce fascism. Dali complained that the writer had openly accused him of supporting Hitler. Ernst had a similar encounter with Dali, when the two crossed paths on a New York sidewalk.
“I don’t shake the hand of a fascist,” Ernst said.
“I am not a fascist,” Dali characteristically retorted. “I’m only an opportunist.”
When Breton was tasked with curating the “First Papers of Surrealism,” America’s first official surrealist exhibition, Ernst’s work was shown alongside Carrington, Luis Bunuel, Roberto Matta and an unknown, self-taught Morris Hirshfield. Dali, whom Breton had put “on trial” for “the glorification of Hitlerian fascism” during the prior decade, did not make the cut.
Marcel Duchamp designed the exhibition, crisscrossing the mansion’s well-appointed ballroom with “mile of string,” which had the effect of prohibiting access to much of the work. On opening night, a group of children bounced balls and played hopscotch among the twine.
Despite the five years Breton spent there, New York was never truly home. He spoke little of the experience in subsequent years. “Where my freedom is limited, I am not, ” he briefly explained, “and my temptation is to move on very quickly.”
Sources:
Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton by Mark Polizzotti
Duchamp, Childhood, Work and Play: The Vernissage for First Papers of Surrealism , New York, 1942 https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/22/duchamp-childhood-work-and-play-the-vernissage-for-first-papers-of-surrealism-new-york-1942
Surrealist Refugees in the Tropics https://www.guernicamag.com/surrealist-refugees-tropics/
Surrealism Beyond Borders https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2021/surrealism-beyond-borders/visiting-guide
Anti-Surrealist Cross-Word Puzzles Breton, Dalí and Print in Wartime America https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/79566305.pdf
Traveling Toward the Unknown: Leonora Carrington Stopped in New York https://www.jstor.org/stable/26430757