It goes without saying that miserabilism,
an apparition which may be held to be one of the specific phenomena of these
last few years, miserabilism, this plague against which the moment has
come to take energetic measures, permits of as many variations in art as there
are categories of misery: physiological misery, psychological misery, moral
misery, etc. The time has come to study it clinically.
Miserabilism cannot pass for having raged in France in an endemic manner. The
Middle Ages, as elsewhere, were exempt from the contagion. The fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries turned their backs on it, in so doing braving the already
deliquescent Italy of the popes. Against its infiltrations the nineteenth
century, for which the Beast had taken the name academicism, reacted in heroic
manner (Hugo, Nerval, Géricault, Corot, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Gauguin, Seurat,
Henri Rousseau). Behind them, the great bridge whose first spans were laid by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sade, the French Revolution.
Today, miserabilism, in this very
country, is the offspring of the perfect coupling of those two vermin, hitlerite
fascism and stalinism, as thick as thieves in their attempt to apply the death
sentence to artists by injecting them with their poison. It also produces
deferred results, since we are still saddled with the nauseating aspect of
existentialism, Léger’s repulsive Eves in
air-chambers, and Buffet’s clown-Christs fashioned from ribs of an umbrella
blown inside out – a bankrupts’ stock exchange quoted at a million apiece or
more.
There should be no need to emphasize that
quarrels between rival factions play no part whatsoever in this. The whole
question and the only question is that of ‘sacred language’. ‘Can one,’ asked Eugène
Soldi already in 1897, ‘separate a concrete fact from a generalized idea, from
an abstract thought? Can one give an idea of the ideal without exalting the
sense of a reality? Can the human brain conceive a thing lacking attachment to
the real? No’. The case is overwhelming. But the depreciation of reality in
place of its exaltation - there we have miserabilism,
there is the crime.
ANDRÉ BRETON, "Away with Miserabilism!"(1956)
(translated by Simon Watson Taylor)
Any idea what Andre's on about here?
It seems like possibly a rather local and very topical response to something-or-other.
Miserablism seems to have been a real thing, although it was mostly a one-man genre created by Bertrand Buffet.
ReplyDeleteHere's Time in 1952, identifying the theme and its leading light, but failing at the all-important job of christening the genre:
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,822153,00.html
Schoolboy error
Interesting! I had never heard of him - sounds like an intriguing figure, especially the contrast between his subject matter and his blingy lifestyle as art superstar:
ReplyDelete"By the age of 21, Buffet was already considered one of the greatest stars of the art world, frequently compared to Pablo Picasso. A 1958 article in The New York Times called him one of the "Fabulous Five" cultural figures of post-war France (the other four were Brigitte Bardot, Françoise Sagan, Roger Vadim, and Yves Saint Laurent).,,,
However, by the end of the 1950s, both the public and the art world had turned against Buffet. His lavish lifestyle--including a Rolls Royce with a chauffeur and a private castle in Provence--made him seem out of touch with the still-struggling economy of post-war France, which he had memorably portrayed in his early paintings. A 1956 magazine photograph of Buffet being helped into his car by the chauffeur was a particular turning point in the public's views of him.Another magazine published photographs of Buffet's lifestyle--large castle, expensive furniture, well-fed dogs--alongside the miserable figures of his paintings to implicitly accuse him of hypocrisy."
Intrigued also that he did illustrations for an edition of "Les Chants de Maldoror"
ReplyDelete