FOR
THE
surrealists, the street was a field for experimentation where they wandered
in search of random encounters and discoveries. There, André Breton
found "like nowhere else, the wind of possibility." Living in
Paris, the surrealists were less interested in the city's historic monuments,
sweeping views or architectural harmony than in what Louis Aragon referred
to as "the wonderful sense of the everyday."
They placed a special value on posters, painted wall advertisements, shop
windows, displays and store signs. Absorbed in thought or oblivious to
the familiar images, few passersby even noticed them. If they observed
these objects at all, they thought of them as mundane commercial messages.
But for the surrealists, who wanted to free themselves of "every
restriction that reason imposes," those same inscriptions were sources
of beauty, dreams, anxiety and the backdrop of our memories.
Beauty
In
Louis Aragon's book Les Beaux quartiers, the character Armand leaves
the provinces for Paris. Arriving in the city, the beauty of the signs
strike him:"The golden letters on the wholesale merchants' second
story balconies, baroque and lyrical, managed to distract his newly-minted
eyes, caught by a gleaming brass plate announcing a bailiff's offices
or a surgeon-dentist's advertisement."
Louis
Aragon was not the first to celebrate the beauty of advertising copy.
Guillaume Apollinaire praised it as poetry: "Oh poet, rival of
the perfume-seller's offers," and Arthur Rimbaud, in A Season
in Hell (Une Saison en Enfer), declared his love for "absurd
paintings, pictures over doorways, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored
prints."
Anxiety
But
the surrealists appreciated street graphics for more than their formal
beauty. These pedestrian messages and images also provided a foundation
for their dreams and imagination and could take a threatening turn: "Storefront
inscriptions only ask to change their sense … The large letters painted
on shop windows mutate into new forms, becoming weird hieroglyphics. The
manufacturers' names take on ominous meanings." Louis Aragon.
Anicet.
In
Louis Aragon's Du décor, buildings can also provoke anxiety:
"The dizzying, thousand-eyed façade of the thirty-story
house".
André Breton placed the image of a wood and charcoal seller's sign
at the end of Les champs magnétiques, followed by a dedication
to his friend Jacques Vaché, who
committed suicide. The
image of this frightening sign haunted Bréton, as if it were beckoning
him to throw himself out of a window.
Dreams
In
the surrealist imagination, however, the street was not always a source
of unease. It also had dreamlike and, sometimes, playful dimensions.
Robert
Desnos took pleasure seeing in Paris the ruins of the industrial age's
civilization. For him, the city was a ghost town that had once been very
wealthy: "These ruins are situated on the banks of a winding river.
The town must have been quite sizable at some time in history. A few large
buildings, a network of underground galleries, and a number of towers
of bizarre construction are still to be seen. In these sunny and deserted
squares fear takes hold of us. But despite our fear, nobody, absolutely
nobody, approaches us. The ruins are uninhabited.To
the southwest, a tall edifice of some kind, open-sided and made of metal,
has been erected, the purpose of which remains uncertain. It looks as
if it is on the brink of toppling over, for it leans out at an angle over
the river." Robert Desnos, Deuil pour Deuil.
Sometimes
billboards, advertisements and signs came to life as characters in the
novel. In La liberté ou l'Amour! , the barmen in the poster
advertising the aperitif Raphaël appear to Corsaire Sanglot, the
main character, at the end of his sexual encounters.
The
surrealists gave themselves over to every aspect of the urban landscape,
from painted advertisements, posters, signs and the play of light produced
by neon signs and streetlights. They
even let themselves be carried away by the illusions created by shop windows
and display cases:
"The entire ocean here in the Passage de l'Opéra. The canes
were gently swaying to and fro, like kelp. I hadn't yet recovered from
this spell when I noticed a form swimming between the various strata of
the display. Her diminutiveness seemed the optical effect of distance,
yet this apparition was directly inside the window. Her hair had come
undone, her fingers occasionally grasped the canes. I would have taken
her for a siren in the most literal sense of the word, for it seemed to
me that the lower portion of this charming spectre, who was naked to the
girdle which she wore a hip level, tapered into a dress of steel or scales
…" Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris.
It's easy to imagine a half-naked prostitute passing behind Aragon, who
is looking at a shop window display. Reflected in the glass, the woman's
image is transformed into a siren, swimming in the window, which is itself
transformed into an aquarium.
Memories
While
the graphic art of the streets can provoke reverie or fill us with wonder
at its beauty it is, above all, part of the stage set of everyday life
and, thus, an integral part of our memories.
"For
the observant child, those large-scale images will always form childhood
memories, memories that last a lifetime. Who does not recall a poster
that, at 10 years old, caught one's attention; an image that formed part
of the backdrop of what some call the 'happy age'?" Philippe
Soupault. Affiches.
