A History of Surrealism
(an unfinished book project)
2024
| This is a project I really wanted to do,
following an invitation from the legendary graphic novel/comic
book editor Paul Buhle, with whom (and Sharon Rudahl, the
writer) I'd worked successfully on The Bund.
I was sent a contract with an American publisher that was also
bringing out an academic book on Surrealism for the centenary of
the movement's founding by André Breton and others in Paris in
the wake of WWI. But the more I dug into the material, I realized I couldn't present the characters without calling out their extraordinary combativeness (especially Breton's) and their attitudes toward women, who were seen as delightful sexual objects rather than serious artists, let alone serious human beings. This caused a clash and the summary cancellation of the project by the publisher. Paul Buhle stayed supportive of it. What I was doing was not a standard graphic novel with everyone speaking in balloons on each page. It may not have been any good, I don't know. So far another publisher hasn't emerged who wants to complete the project, and we're probably too late anyway – there was an avalanche of Surrealist publishing and exhibitions in 2024. Anyway, it was fun taking it this far, and revisiting the art history I studied more than 50 years ago at UBC. See the notes to individual pages below. And the typesetting in it would probably have been replaced with a hand-drawn font. |
At this point, the beginning of Chapter 2, I introduce my Gen Z character who is going to read and critique the book.
He would be joined a little later by a young woman friend who would also throw in opinions.
This was going to be the way to insert 21st-century critiques of the Surrealists and their attitudes, especially to women,
without it being "the narrator's point of view."
For their time, the Surrealists were remarkably non-racist; however, their Marxist politics haven't held up that well.
...and it fell apart as it wasn't sufficiently reverential, I believe. Whatever...
The ending would have been my belief that the contemporary artists most true to Surrealist beliefs
are the street painters/graffiti artists....