The Critics - The Art World - Bad Dream - What was Surrealism really about?

What was Surrealism really about? Where are we with Surrealism, then? Quite possibly in the same plain little room where we began. The lighting is clear, the walls straight, the corners decorously right-angled. Something is off, but psychoanalysis won't help us.

- By Jackson Arn

Yvan Goll was born in 1891. In his twenties, he moved to Paris, where he wrote antiwar poetry and absurdist drama, met Picasso and Chagall, and gorged himself on the era's avant-garde buffet. Photographs show us a laser-eyed face that is either wrapping up a sneer or embarking on a new one. He looks like the kind of person who would pen an attack on the young rascals who called themselves Surrealists, and, in 1924, he did. By making "Freud a new muse," Goll wrote, Surrealists were "confusing art and psychiatry," producing glib, trivial work that strained to "shock the public."The good news was that it would "quickly disappear from the scene." I should add that Goll considered himself a Surrealist, and that he was jabbing at his rivals' ideas in an issue of Surréalisme, the journal he founded. You should also know that he did the jabbing days before the poet André Breton published his first Surrealist manifesto.