Fierce Mother: Andre Breton and the Dawn of the Atomic Age

Dadadadadadadada

Liberation. anti-art

anti-bourgeois

anti-nationalist

anti-dote and then

surrealism. automatism

thinking juxtaposed

born of the montage

of cinematic editing

of the dream state

encroachment

of Freudian

psychology

thinking

no longer

spitting

but

super

real

…

where in the West did the cosmopolis intersect with the burden of marriage gone listless?

& where did the Surrealists’ reclaim the same institution?

The Architect of Surrealism gets a Divorce in Nevada at the Dawn of the

Atomic Age

“Dada means nothing. We want to change the world with nothing.” --Richard Huelsenbeck

Dada, born from the rebellion against the nationalism and flag-waving that gave rise to World War I, began as a performance and exhibition at the Café Voltaire in Zurich Switzerland in 1916. Dada rocketed—in eight short years—to an international movement among women and men of arts and letters that asked the question, “What is dada?” and answered itself with another question, “Or is it nothing at all, in other words everything?” Dada’s ambivalence was never meant to be referred to as a movement, and yet it continues to have life for artists and art-lovers and somehow its youthful transition to Surrealism left it forever fresh in our minds.

Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch, 1919

Hannah Hoch, photomontage

From Andre Breton’s 1924 Surrealist Manifesto:

SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.

By 1941 Andre and Jacqueline Breton must have been so weary of war, weary of rations, weary of hearing of the crushing of their Jewish friends and the French Resistance as they met with the Emergency Rescue Committee to plan their exodus to New York City to wait out WWII.

The Emergency Rescue Committee office in Marseilles

L to R: Max Ernst, Jacqueline Lamba, Andre Masson,

Andre Breton and Varian Fry

Perhaps Andre day-dreamed of his mentor Jacque Vache, a poet soldier whose Lettres de guerre from WWI had introduced the spirit of rebellion that marked every enterprise Breton had initiated since. By 1941 some twenty-five years of rebellion was the foundation of a mature reputation for Breton, the author of poetry, collector of artworks, a fierce intellectual fueled by the spirited thinkers and artists he courted. For Breton, resistance had become habitual.

During the long wait for the wars to subside, and now for safe passage to America to be secured, Andre and Jacqueline and their close friend Yves Tanguy played at making Equisite Corpse, a favored collaborative game of the Surrealists. But by 1940 Yves had left for America, and in ‘41 Andre had been arrested and held briefly by the Vichy government of France, where their official report on him described him as a “…dangerous anarchist sought for a long time by the French police.”

Andre Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy

Cadavre exquis ‘Exquisite Corpse’ 9 February 1938

Breton would travel here with his little daughter Aube and his second wife—her mother—the beautiful Jacqueline Lamba, joining the other Surrealists already in New York. Peggy Guggenheim paid their passage, having been asked by painter Kay Sage to sponsor their trip. Andre’s reputation with the Vichy government proceeded him, though, and he would be imprisoned in a concentration camp briefly in French Martinique when they arrived on the Capitaine Paul-LeMerle.

While in Martinique, he met with Aime Cesaire, encouraging him to “use surrealism as a weapon”. Their friendship would endure, and Breton would write the introduction for Cesaire’s “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” in 1947. Breton was said to have finally arrived in the U.S. in June, 1941 “in no mood” for white society.

Perhaps the Breton’s reunion with Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage was quite lovely, certainly they were at the center of a group of artists and intellectuals that was extraordinary: Imagine attending gatherings with Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Max Ernst, Kurt Seligmann, Andre Masson, Arshile Gorky, David Hare, Fernand Leger, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Pavel Tchelitchew, Robert Matta and a young Jackson Pollock. Paul Eluard, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp would soon join them stateside.

Kay Sage’s brother, David Hare—who Motherwell remembered later as having had “an independent income” agreed—after a tumultuous turnover of others who had accepted the task—to be the nominal editor of VVV, the surrealist anthology that Breton and others collaborated on in Grenwich Village, publishing four issues from 1942 through February of 1944. The last cover was illustrated by the Chilean surrealist Matta:

But every artist has an exquisitely personal story too. Andre Breton had met Jacqueline Lamb in a café when she was a water-dancer at the Coliseum, a cabaret in Pigalle. She’d read his writing and long had wanted to meet him…she is said to have seduced him on the 28^th of May, 1934, and he named it “The Night of the Sunflower,” after a poem he’d written prior to that.

Jacqueline Lamba performing at the Coliseum

When they married on August 14^th of that summer, Alberto Giacometti was the witness for the bride, Paul Eluard the witness for the poet, and Man Ray their photographer. Their daughter Aube Elléouët Breton was born on the 20^th of December, 1935.

However sweet, their marriage didn’t survive their stay in New York. David Hare had published a large-format book of color photographs titled Pueblo Indians as They Are Today in 1941, and it may have been that book that introduced Breton to the tribes of the American Southwest—Hare must have been refreshing as Breton was increasingly interested in utopia and community as a resolution for the conflict of wars he had been surrounded by for 25 years.

Certainly David Hare had endeared himself to the Bretons, Jacqueline, it seemed, more so than Andre. Somewhere along the way there was a touch and a first kiss and the elder Breton knew enough about passion to look the other way. After all, it was in 1918—as he had begun to disagree with Tristan Tazara about the foundations of Dada—that he’d written this:

“Leave everything. Leave Dada.

Leave your wife.

Leave your mistress.

Leave your hopes and fears.

Leave your children in the woods.

Leave the substance for the shadow.

Leave your easy life,

leave what you are given for the future.

Set off on the road.”

De Diego, David Hare, Jacqueline and Aube Breton, c. 1945

Photograph by Julien Levy

Andre Breton would find another companion, and his third and final marriage lasted until his death. According to Martica Sawin in Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, Breton met the Chilean Elisa Claro in January when “…in the midst of a snowstorm, he had stopped for lunch at a favorite refugee hangout, Chez Larre, and had noticed a woman with an overwhelming sadness on her face. He subsequently learned that her eleven-year-old daughter had drowned the previous summer while at a camp in Cape Cod and that she herself had attempted suicide.” Andre himself felt he’d lost his own daughter, and so they must have traded stories of heartbreak that day as they were drawn to one another.

Their path west to Reno together was paved for them by an obscure surrealist sculptor, Heinz Henghes. Henghes, who had first introduced Kay Sage to Yves Tanguy when she was still married to an Italian prince, eventually studied with Isumu Noguchi in New York. Later, he followed his estranged wife to Reno in 1932. He attempted suicide and spent time in an asylum in Reno before obtaining a divorce. Tanguy had later traveled to Reno with Sage and they were married here on August 17, 1940.

Andre Breton did not discover the French utopian Charles Fourier until 1940, and began to read his writings while still in New York. In the summer of 1945, the surrealist poet threw the utopian’s collected works in the back seat and set out on a cross-country trip to Reno, where he would divorce, remarry, and begin the poem Ode a Charles Fourier. Andre and Elisa traveled through Chicago on the way, and they’d later tell the Chicago surrealists that they had very much liked the city then.

Elisa Breton, 1942, New York

Marcel Duchamp wrote Breton and Elisa a letter on July 2, mailed to Breton inReno, about a window display he was creating for Breton’s publication Le Surrealisme et la Peinture. Breton was also said to be reading the Japanese Book of Tea during that time. He must have found the Japanese internment in camps alarming—he’d have seen the “racial profiing” of his day through the lens of his own recent internment in Martinique.

While in Reno, there are references to Breton collecting pebbles from the shores of Lake Tahoe with artist Jeanne Reynal, who was asked to look after him by Peggy Calder Hayes, sculptor Alexander Calder’s sister. And although he would later testify that he’d stayed in Reno “…every day since June 16^th up to and including the present day,” he must have taken other day trips—one to Virginia City, for in “Ode to Charles Fourier” there is an unmistakable reference to that place:

Fourier I salute you from the Grand Canyon of

Colorado

I see the eagle soaring from your head…

I salute you from the Nevada of the gold-prospector

From the land promised and kept

To the land rich in higher promises which it

must yet keep

From the depths of the blue ore mine which

reflects the loveliest sky

For always beyond that bar sign which continues

to haunt the street of a ghost town—

Virginia City—“The Old Blood Bucket”…

Breton’s divorce lawyer was a force to be reckoned with in the state of Nevada: Felice Cohn. Historian Jean Ford wrote about her considerable achievements:

"A substantial portion of Cohn’s private law practice involved divorces, but she also worked with child labor issues, foster homes, adoption, and other legislative issues adversely affecting women and children. She was quite outspoken nationally about the divorce laws in Nevada and staunchly supported them. She said in a speech in New York, “Nevada has been criticized for her divorce laws, but it is due almost entirely to the need of relief by the citizens of other states that we find ourselves the ‘cure’ center of the world…They came to Nevada bcause the laws of their own states afforded no avenue of escape from an intolerable condition, brought about most often by incompatibility and nothing more.” At that time, different states had different divorce laws and one could be married in one state, become divorced/single in another, and be committing bigamy in a third. Her law offices were in the Mapes Building in Reno and her residence in Reno was at 118 West Street."

Jacqueline Lamba was represented in the Second Judicial District Court of the State of Nevada by Maurice Joseph Sullivan, a democrat who was once Lieutenant Governor of Nevada and who had just finished a term of office as U.S. Representative at large in January.

Breton stumbles through the divorce proceedings—saying, in the transcripts, “I come the 14^th, the 16^th of June,” Cohn immediately asks him then, “July?” Breton replies, “June.” “Of this year?” Cohn persists. “I’m sorry,” Breton says hurridly, “because I don’t speak English.” He testifies that he and his wife have been separated for three years. Elisa and Andre had been in Reno at the guest house of Fred C. Jacobitz, at 157 Mill Street (now the post office parking lot on the northwest corner of Mill and Center) during the obligatory six weeks of residency that qualified the divorce.

The divorce is granted on July 30, 1945. He marries Elisa the same day, and they begin their trip to the Pueblos and Mesas of southwest immediately. It is almost as if Breton was attracted to the site of a momentous shift as a firefly bekons a child at dusk...

On writing the Ode a Charles Fourier, Breton later suggested that the poem “…contains something of the very strange atmosphere…where slot machines…line the walls of food-shops and post-offices alike, gathering round them in a vague kind of way the crowd of those aspiring to a new conjugal life, the cow-boys and the last gold prospectors.” Obviously he understood the spirit of this place.

Exactly one month to the day after Andre Breton’s divorce waiting period had begun in Reno, so too began the birth of the Atomic Age. On July 16^th, 1945, in the Jornada del Muerto desert, literally, ‘Working Day of Death,’ 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, the Trinity Test of an implosion-design plutonium device birthed the atom bomb.

And Breton was not oblivious, writing in Ode:

Because the “Veil of Bronze” has survived the rent you tore in it

And covers even more completely scientific blindness

“No one has ever seen a molecule, or an atom, or an atomic

link and it’s unlikely anyone ever will” (Philosopher).

Prompt proof to the contrary: in swaggers the molecule of rubber.

A scientist though provided with black glasses loses his sight

for having observed at several miles distance the first

atomic bomb tests (The newspapers).

And then, on August 6^th, 1945, an atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima, followed by another on August 9^th over Nagasaki. The photographs of a devastated Hiroshima were printed in Life Magazine on August 20, 1945. There was a collective outcry from artists all over the world. Iris and Toshi Maruki, Keiji Nakazawa, Salvador Dali, Roberto Matta, Denis de Rougemont, Langston Hughes, Laslo Maholy-Nagy, Ben Shahn, Diego Rivera, Henry Moore, Isumu Noguchi, and Jacob Lawrence responded, as have many contemporary artists.

And as the work continues,

shall we fight something with nothing?