The importance of the Historical Avant-gardes of the early twentieth century has long been established, but it has not always been so. Italy played a central role in the rediscovery and rehabilitation operations, for example, of Italian Futurism, by Maurizio Calvesi and others, in the mid-1960s. Shortly after, more precisely in the early Seventies, another spotlight was turned on another early twentieth-century avant-garde movement: Surrealism.
The setting is the city of Salerno, or rather, theInstitute of Art History of the University of Salerno of which he is president Filiberto Mennawhich during the academic year 1972-1973 organizes with Angelo Trimarcoprofessor of Theory of Art Criticism at the same university, the conference of Studies on Surrealism.
Not a conference stricto sensu, but a succession of interventions which between March and May 1973 saw Italian academics and scholars as protagonists “all engaged in a re-examination of Surrealism from the point of view of different disciplines. The objective declared by Menna is “to make Italian culture react […] faced with the complex data provided by the surrealist story, after many, perhaps too many years of inattention or even contemptuous refusal”. Rereading, even partially, the list and contents of the speeches testifies to the extraordinary nature of the event: “The subliminal sublime of Max Ernst” (Giulio Carlo Argan); “On eroticism: Sade, Bataille, Breton (Alberto Boatto); “The esoteric tradition in Duchamp and Surrealism (Maurizio Calvesi); “Erik Satie and the music of Surrealism (Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi); “Artaud and the theater of cruelty” (Achille Mango); “The transgression of Surrealism” (Mario Perniola); “La femme introuvable” (Silvana Sinisi). And it also testifies to an approach that intends to cross the various layers of the movement and restore an image of it as varied as possible in the belief that many and various trajectories contributed to fueling the surrealist epic. An explosive mixture that was undoubtedly nourished by slightly earlier experiences, such as Dadaism and Metaphysics, and which certainly found its nerve center in the powerful and cumbersome figure of André Breton, but not its only source of propulsion. With this approach the Salerno assembly reconstructed the surrealist mosaic.
Today, more than fifty years later, the University of Salerno has recovered that key experience by seeking a connection and a possibility of continuity by proposing, within the Doctorate in Methods and Methodologies of Archaeological and Historical-Artistic Research, a cycle of interdisciplinary seminars that call into question the prismatic charge of Surrealism (https://www.dottoratomem.it/seminari-2024/).
One hundred years after his birth, in particular since the publication of his first manifesto (Editions du Sagittaire, Paris, October 1924), the publishing house minimum fax has published, in the “Untraceable” section, the book by Matthew Josephson, Surrealists and expatriates. Literary Paris of the 1920sin the translation of Matilde Boffito Serra. An autobiographical text published in the United States for the first time in 1962 which reconstructs the life experience of its author, a New York writer and journalist, a passionate frequenter of Paris in the early twentieth century, a magnet city also for generations of young American poets and writers. A text that initially tells of the desire for emancipation of these young authors who find a first landing place in the lively disappointing scene of Greenwich Village, whose avant-garde promise, unfulfilled, pushes Josephson and many others to seek new stimuli and creative energies from this side of the Atlantic.
Paris, the city that more than any other could welcome and satisfy that pressing need to realize oneself as writers, and most of all, the city where the pact between art and life was able to be forged in the most extreme forms. And in fact Josephson’s initial impact with the Parisian cultural climate is colored by the anarchic and extreme tones of Dadaism and its festivals, in which the author has, among others, the opportunity to get closer to those characters who a little later they will give life to the surrealist movement: Breton, Aragon and Soupault, in particular. After various wanderings, and a crucial visit to Berlin, Josephson returned to Paris precisely in the years in which he was working on “magnetic fields” and automatic writing. From this period the author records the impressive energy that was released within the Bretonnian circle, but also notes the despotic charge of his saint. Breton, with whom Josephson, like others, at a certain point had disagreements and differences of opinion that led the French poet to launch an excommunication on the American writer.
The surrealist story is the central part of a long book which is exciting and entertaining precisely in the story of the Parisian vicissitudes: the ecstasy and collective exploration of the world of dreams, the telepathic communications between Desnos and Duchamp, the hypnotic parties gone awry , the attacks of spleenthe pride of anti-social acts, the unbridled cult of heresy.
But as often happens with every autobiographical account, it runs the risk of stumbling over the inaccuracies of long-term memory (the first manifesto was published in October and not in December 1924), and of giving in to the flattery of self-celebration.
