| This dissertation focuses on the shifting position of French Surrealism during World War II and its immediate aftermath. My historical and contextual analysis examines what was at stake for the Surrealists faced with exile, clandestine activities conducted by Main a Plume during the German Occupation, and a radically changed postwar cultural milieu. I scrutinize Surrealist practice as visual strategy, intellectual history, political engagement, and cultural critique. Postwar Surrealism established its position in relation to the strategies of Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism, the cultural policies of the French Communist Party (P.C.F.) articulated by Louis Aragon, and the re-emerging Parisian avant-garde.;I analyze how artists, writers, and group exhibitions made concrete the expanded wartime boundaries of the movement and how physical sites of exile informed Surrealist activities. War-era journals---View, VVV, and Dyn---provided intellectual spaces for the promotion of both Surrealist ideas and dissent among members of the group. I also consider Andre Breton's search for a new Surrealist myth, an inquest that paralleled the contemporary preoccupation with mythical subjects among Abstract Expressionists such as Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock.;To address the Surrealists' return to France, I utilize the sociological theory of boundary disputes to assess how postwar ideological clashes established parameters of debates. Significantly, I argue that the Communist and Existentialist intelligentsia defined themselves in relation to the Surrealists, and kept the group in public view until its first exhibition of the postwar period, Surrealism in 1947. The poetic origins, international roster, and critical reception of the exhibition, which promoted esotericism and mythical initiation, are examined as well.;Shifting postwar definitions of 'real' and 'realism' are also analyzed, and the approach of Surrealist artists and writers---Georges Bataille, Victor Brauner, Charles Duits, Jindrich Heisler, and Toyen, among others---is compared with that of Socialist Realism (adopted as official P.C.F. policy in 1947) and the brute materialism of Jean Dubuffet. In the broadest terms, this dissertation explores to what extent artistic practice can be bound to social practice, and how the Surrealists modified yet maintained their carefully crafted revolutionary mantle. |
