The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter

by Mary Ann Caws

"Long, intense years of immersion in the poetry and art of the Surrealist climate endow Mary Ann Caws' responses with what the Surrealists would have called authenticity -- a rare quality. Her present meditation offers a fresh view of unusual value in her stress on the element of the Baroque in Surrealists' works. I would say that Caws enters her thoughts on the history of Surrealism with perfect pitch; both eye and ear alert to every nuance, and mind attuned to their grandest illusions. She offers a lively argument which, with considerable daring, leads her readers deeply into Surrealist territory where they must, willingly, lose themselves."
-- Dore Ashton, author and Professor of Art History at The Cooper Union How we look at Surrealism, how it looks at the objects it encounters, and how it looks from here: all these looks intertwine in this study linking Surrealism and the Baroque. "Le look" (whatever it might be): you have it or you don't, and Surrealism had it all the way. The emotional charge Surrealism extended to the objects of its encounter makes itself felt as at least philosophically erotic. This charged look determines the atmosphere around the Surrealist text and its encounters--in the world of art and the world it made into art. In this unprecedented attempt to make sense of the way Surrealism sees, conceals, poses, and stares at its own self and the selves of others, Mary Ann Caws examines the decors, games, portraits, transformations, and mirrorings that establish Surrealism's links to Baroque forms of representation. "We have to learn to look and to read slowly, " Caws writes. Her study begins with anexhortation to take one's time, for the figures in the carpet of this study are not easy, nor do they put one at ease. Take, for example, the self-portraits of Claude Cahum and Dorothea Tanning, Marcel Duchamp's creation Rrose Silavy, the crossing of Andri Breton into Melusine. The constructions of Joseph Cornell and the fashionings by Man Ray meet in a space determined by the architecture of Frangois de Nomi, Robert Desnos, and Antonin Artaud, pointed at by Marcel Duchamp in his crossings not just with Rrose but with Ludwig Wittgenstein. The game of the Exquisite Corpse has it own erotic charge, and the Baroque "vanitas" casts its shadow over everything from Cornell's Shadow Boxes to the game of chance. It all ends with two of Picasso's pipes, one by a skull and one in a frame play--signaling, perhaps, that Surrealism looks the way it looks and speaks the Baroque language it speaks because whoever is looking frames it that way.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published August 8, 1997

About the author

Mary Ann Caws is an American author, translator, art historian and literary critic.
She is Distinguished Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, and on the film faculty. She is an expert on Surrealism and modern English and French literature, having written biographies of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. She works on the interrelations of visual art and literary texts, has written biographies of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, and edited the diaries, letters, and source material of Joseph Cornell. She has also written on André Breton, Robert Desnos, René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, Robert Motherwell, and Edmond Jabès. She served as the senior editor for the HarperCollins World Reader, and edited anthologies including Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Surrealism, and the Yale Anthology of 20th-Century French Poetry. Among others, she has translated Stéphane Mallarmé, Tristan Tzara, Pierre Reverdy, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, and René Char.
Among the positions she has held are President, Association for Study of Dada and Surrealism, 1971–75 and President, Modern Language Association of America, 1983, Academy of Literary Studies, 1984–85, and the American Comparative Literature Association, 1989-91.
She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
In October 2004, she published her autobiography, To the Boathouse: a Memoir (University Alabama Press), and in November 2008, a cookbook memoir: Provençal Cooking: Savoring the Simple Life in France (Pegasus Books).
She was married to Peter Caws and is the mother of Hilary Caws-Elwitt and of Matthew Caws, lead singer of the band Nada Surf. She is married to Dr. Boyce Bennett; they live in New York City.

Reviews

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who knows why it took me so long to read a book by Mary Ann Caws. This won't be the last. She gets it.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed, insightful & far reaching.