ANDRÉ BRETON

(1896-1966)

Minuit juste

Footnotes

Provenance
André Breton Collection; his sale, Calmels Cohen, Paris, 15 April 2003, lot 4135.
Private collection, Paris (acquired at the above sale).

Exhibited
Paris, Galerie Daniel Cordier, EROS, Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, December 1959 – January 1960.
Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, Surreal Objects, Three-Dimensional Works from Dalí to Man Ray, 11 February – 29 May 2012, no. 3.
Halmstad, Mjellby konstmuseum, Surrealistiska ting, Surreal objects, 16 June - 30 September 2012.

What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds.
- André Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 1928.

Seeking magic in the everyday, André Breton transformed ordinary objects into pathways between the physical world and the imagination. Today's art-consuming society is well familiar with objects lacking discernible meanings or narratives, that are found, combined and metamorphosed into mysterious, humorous and erotic enigmas. But it was Breton and his band of Surrealists that forged the conceptual and creative foundations for this timeless gesture of art. Minuit juste (also titled 'The stroke of midnight') stands as a waystone upon the shifting crossroads of art history, linking Dadaism and Surrealism with Conceptualism, Abstract Expressionism, Fluxus, and the artists of today.

Objects were the quintessence of Breton's Surrealist dogma. His second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929) built upon the 'pure psychic automatism' of his first manifesto (1924), calling on Surrealists to access the inner recesses of the subconscious via the 'mystique of the object'. By stripping objects of their regular functions and placing them into surprising contexts, objets surrealists could spark an explosive reaction between reason and intuition, releasing the mind from the constraints of reality. With this, the Surrealists – among them Man Ray, Méret Oppenheim and Joan Miró – applied the Surrealist ethics of combination, alienation and metamorphosis to a dazzling array of objects. Their mantra was the poet Isidore Ducasse's (Comte de Lautréamont) oft-cited simile: 'as beautiful as an accidental encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.' The resulting assemblages sought, in the words of René Magritte, to 'make everyday objects shriek out loud', achieving comical, erotic or gruesome subtexts. Breton preferred the term 'object' over 'sculpture', as the former evokes not just a physical entity but also an 'objective', while the latter seemed overburdened with outmoded notions of beauty and authorship.

Marcel Duchamp's readymades directly influenced this Surrealist subgenre. In revolutionary acts of 'non-art', Duchamp selected mass produced objects, inscribing them with artistic signatures and elevating them to the status of art. The project began with his Bottle Rack (1915) and culminated in the iconic Fountain (1917), a commercially manufactured urinal signed 'R. Mutt.' Duchamp's subsequent 'assisted readymades' juxtaposed multiple banal objects in seemingly random yet carefully orchestrated tableaux. His goal, which transformed the course of twentieth century art, was to deconstruct core notions of art, talent and genius. Breton echoed this with his use of objets trouvés, whose forgotten lives miniaturised the drama of modern Paris and evoked fragmented narratives. These were incorporated into his poèmes-objets, two-dimensional and three-dimensional collages that united the poetic and the visual in destabilising fusions of fantasy and reality.

The present work stands as such a juxtaposition. A log of dense hardwood has been directly carved with aggressive motions, exhibiting a rough-hewn, dappled surface revealing its natural properties. The resulting phallic totem emanates a raw, lustful impulse, inviting a tactile response (as signalled by the work's innuendo-laden title). Indeed, the apparently discarded ladies' garters punctuate the otherwise minimal composition with whispers of an erotic backstory. Ironically delicate and submissive, the criss-crossed garters both temper and rupture the bombastic phallus, the nails with which they are attached generating a perverse crucifix. Breton's poem-object therefore forms a variegated mise-en-scène with gruesome, comical and erotic connotations.

With its grotesque religiosity, the present work evokes the Surrealist notion that objects can possess certain magical and talismanic powers. Minute juste additionally incorporates Breton's approach of organic abstraction, which fuses modern material goods (the garters) with wider forces of nature (the unfinished hardwood). Breton's direct wood carving builds upon the materials and methods of the indigenous Pacific Island, African and North American creators he revered. The present work's verticality and stature evokes the gravitas of the totem poles which formed part of Breton's Wunderkammer-atelier. Breton's diverse trove of treasures reflected not only his rebellion against the Western world's cultural imperialism, but also his reverence toward a collective ideal of creativity – one inextricably linked with magic and mythology. Across Pacific cultures, for instance, carving is treasured not just for its aesthetic and practical uses, but also for its spiritual significance and connection to one's divine ancestors. Having published L'Art magique (1957) two years before the present work, Breton was then subsumed with the notion of 'magic', positing that objects become magical when their meanings and associations transcended their formal properties. By juxtaposing a timeless mode of magic with a readymade object, Breton generated in the present work an abstract archaeology of the everyday.

Indeed, Breton's art-making practice was indistinguishable from his collecting practice. The trinkets he trawled for in the Parisian flea market of Saint-Ouen were as significant to Breton as his connoisseurship of fine art and ethnographic objects. In his wanderings, he crafted his own semi-mythologised artistic persona, merging two popular archetypes of Modern Paris, the first being the Chiffoniers (ragpickers) who were frequently portrayed in artworks, cartoons and songs, sifted through the debris of modern Paris, identifying reusable materials and objects for resale in the flea market. The second was the flaneur of Charles Baudelaire's writings, a marginalised character who merged with the urban landscape and observed the frenetic and fragmentary realities of Modern society. Enhancing these identities with instincts of automatism and objective chance, Breton utilised the flea market as an urban studio, seeking shock and awe in the everyday. He would select indeterminate objects that provoked the imagination in some way, later assembling them with disparate companions in order to reveal surprising networks of association. For Breton, the random occurrences he experienced with such objects were creative activities in themselves. In Le Surréalisme et la peinture, he opined: 'Every piece of flotsam and jetsam within our grasp should be considered a precipitate of our desire' (p. 283). The discarded garters in the present work stand as a relic of such wanderings, a symbol of desire, and a conduit to the subconscious.

The present work was conceived for the 1959 Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme ('EROS') – its Dada underpinnings marked by its playful typography – widely considered to be the last major Surrealist exhibition. 75 artists from 19 countries collaborated on this immersive Surrealist romp at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris. Visitors passed through a 'vagina door' draped in pink, traversed through a maze emitting groans and sighs, and landed in a 'love grotto' with a Duchamp-designed ceiling that rose and fell salubriously. Méret Oppenheim curated the opening night banquet in the form of a nude female mannequin splayed on a table, with lobsters, oysters and other aphrodisiacs replacing her organs. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg also took part, demonstrating the impressive nature of Surrealist objects upon a new generation of post-war artists. Indeed, Rauschenberg's 'combines' incorporated the measured randomness of Surrealist assemblages while also evoking the readymade's references to mass culture.

The theme of eros – or 'mankind's greatest mystery', as Breton labelled it in his introductory note to the catalogue – was central to Surrealism and its objects. Their physicality provided a tactile zone through which the Surrealists experimented with Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories. According to Freud, objects could project one's unconscious sexual desires. In light of this, Breton considered images of the unconscious to be accumulations of erotic experience. Themes of fetish, bondage and mutilation thereby dominated the works of Breton, Marcel Mariën, Man Ray, Valentine Hugo and Salvador Dalí, who explored Freudian concepts of penis envy, the Oedipus complex, and fear of castration. Fusing madness and perversion with anti-bourgeois promiscuity, the Surrealist quest to combat the social and political repression of the post-Victorian era culminated in their hope of salvation through le désir (desire). Humour, satire and parody aided this impulse.

Holding close personal significance to Breton, the present work remained in his personal collection at 42 rue Fontaine, Paris, until it was sold at his estate sale in 2003. ('The Wall', an extant assemblage of Breton's collection of artworks and curiosities, is preserved at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris). An emblem of the rich and varied history of Surrealist objects, Minuit juste was featured in two major 2012 retrospectives on the subject, at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany; and at the Mjellby Konstmuseum, Halmstad, Sweden.