While living on the English island of Jersey in the 1940s, a young queer French couple—Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore—performed a sly psyop on the Gestapo. They wrote notes taunting them to defect or commit sabotage and offering contagious complaints: I don’t want to spend my whole life in a uniform, signed SOLDAT OHNE NAMEN (soldier with no name).
Those “paper bullets,” as Moore and Cahun called them, are on view in the heart of “In the Very Bowels of Change: Surrealism and Antifascism” at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The show is a version of an exhibition that first appeared at Lenbachhaus in Munich in 2024, where it was titled “But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism and Antifascism”—marrying the two best -isms, for my money, of the entire 20th century.
Like too many Surrealists, Moore and Cahun got caught and sentenced, receiving six years on one charge and the death penalty on another. The sentences were no match for Cahun’s wit: The artist replied by asking which should be carried out first. In the end, they were among the lucky ones: The war ended before either made it to death row. The show includes a photo of Cahun biting down defiantly on a defeated Gestapo officer’s badge: While the duo’s other collaborative works on view see negatives cut up and collaged, this biting commentary required no such intervention.
Leonora Carrington: Noah’s Ark, ca. 1938.
Patrick Boulen
While Surrealism is figured as a style in popular imagination—trippy, dreamy, and escapist, detached from reality in every way—“In the Very Bowels of Change” reminds just how much the movement was formed in response to the politics of its time. Against this show, college dorm room posters of melting clocks feel utterly denuded, with regrets to the angsty teens pinning them up.
Excerpts from Luis Buñuel’s film Golden Age (1930) open the exhibition, marking the screening that radicalized Surrealism: In 1930, the shamelessly self-described Antisemitic League of France stormed a Parisian theater, where they also destroyed works by Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Jean Miró, and Max Ernst. The act declared Surrealism an enemy of the Right: The group had been outraged by Buñuel’s Marquis de Sade–inspired satire skewering the hypocritical sexual mores of both the Catholics and the bourgeoisie.
Soon, of course, so much Surrealist art would be deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis: Fascists everywhere knew of the work’s subversive power. But that screening—along with the group’s 1925 protest of the French war against the native people of Morocco—readied the artists for the rise of the Right.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the Surrealists mobilized quickly: Cahun, along with André Breton and Georges Bataille, formed Contre-Attaque to rally the working class. The alliance was inspired partly by Bataille’s 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” which argued that fascists tooled the mass’s repressed psychic energy toward a dynamic of authority and submission. For the Surrealists, fans of Marx and Freud, such energies could be more healthily—and liberally—expressed. Free the mind, they wagered, and only then can the rest follow.
Attesting to these ideas, one room in “In the Very Bowels of Change” features memorable works on the erotics of fascism: If Susan Sontag shocked with her 1975 essay on Riefenstahl’s sex appeal, Surrealists like Bataille, Victor Brauner, and André Masson were already onto fascism’s titillations in the ’30s.
That gallery is devoted to Paris in the interwar period, the very core of the movement; later, the show extends into the 1950s and takes an accordion-like approach to capital “S” Surrealism, expanding its orbit but always contracting back to its central characters and concerns.
Throughout, gorgeously designed vitrines introduce photographs, lost artworks, and one of the Surrealists’ most essential mediums: publications. The subsequent gallery—dedicated to the Spanish Civil War—shows a photo of Dalí in an aquanaut suit at the first Surrealist exhibition to declare itself “International,” held in London in 1936: Dalí almost suffocated in it, but his comrades came to the rescue. Hanging nearby is another grave portrait of Surreal-ish solidarity: Picasso’s Monument to the Spaniards Who Died for France (1946–47). Surrealism would remain decidedly internationalist for decades (and galleries) to come.
Indeed, after Surrealism was deemed degenerate art in 1937, Egyptian comrades penned their manifesto “Long live degenerate art!” The next galleries—one on degenerate artists and their Egyptian advocates, another on artists in Germany—see Surrealism slowly refigured as not only a form of psychic liberation, but as the visual language best suited for depicting the horrors of an utterly irrational world. A Hans Bellmer drawing shows an odd, improbably undulating brick wall that he drew while imprisoned at Camp des Milles in France, a brickworks camp where German nationals (including Max Ernst) were sent—never mind that Bellmer had been part of the Resistance, forging passports. Just as he had refused to make his iconic dolls anatomically naturalistic—a flagrant protest of Nazi eugenics—his bricks do not conform to order.
On the Germany gallery’s postwar side are paintings and pictures by the Berlin Cabaret Die Badewanne (The Bathtub), named after its venue of origin—and rhyming brilliantly with Lee Miller’s iconic self-portrait in which she poses in Hitler’s bathtub the day after he committed suicide. Die Badewanne’s scenography borrowed from Surrealism’s dreamy landscapes, yet the group wagered that they didn’t need to make new Surrealist art, because destroyed Berlin was wilder than anything they might imagine. Instead, their devotion to Surrealism was reconstructive: They translated key Surrealist texts into German and recreated versions of the art they had been starved of by enlisting cabaret—that quintessential Weimar medium the Nazis had targeted—to perform homages to degenerate artists.
A later postwar gallery, devoted to Polish and Czech artists like Władysław Strzemiński and Holocaust survivors Erna Rosenstein and Emil Filla, includes paintings that draw from the visual language of Surrealism to reflect the horrors such artists witnessed. This Warsaw version of the show emphasizes how, for artists in the East, Surrealism was an argument against the Socialist Realist mainstream. There was a stylistic tension on the Left: Was the purpose of art to decorate party buildings and monumentalize workers’ movements, as the Stalinists had it, or to emancipate the viewer, per the Surrealists and the Trotskyites? A later photograph shows Breton and Diego Rivera discussing, with Leon Trotsky, yet one more manifesto, demanding freedom for art against both censorship and propaganda.
Victor Brauner: The Encounter of 2 Bis Rue Perrel, 1946.
©ADAGP, Paris/Zakis, Warsaw
The Surrealists, of course, more easily embraced the freedom of some than of others: I counted at least five sexualized naked women in the exhibition without faces or heads, that part of the body where individuality and free thought tends to get localized. Others, though—Cahun and Moore, but also Victor Brauner—saw how fascism was inextricable from patriarchal power, and sought to free themselves from the confines of gender altogether. In the ’20s, Brauner painted King Ubu growing increasingly repulsive as he takes more faceless, inert women, and after the war, trapped in Marseilles with no money for a visa as all his comrades were fleeing, he drew androgynous figures, stiff-bodied and wide-eyed: free in their minds but trapped in the world, much like himself.
There is also plenty of the usual exoticizing imagery borrowing from non-European cultures, but a memorable project puts this practice in its place. A gallery dedicated to Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, and Eva Sulzer tells of the trio’s 1939 visit to the Pacific Northwest, whose Indigenous cultures they had long fantasized about. Upon finally arriving, however, they were disappointed: The thriving society and “universal art” they were seeking had been wrecked by genocide and settler colonialism. Instead of inspiring Surrealist paintings, the dismaying landscape became the subject of a documentary film by Paalen and photographs by Sulzer, showing abandoned villages and totem poles being consumed by vegetation.
That trio never made it back to Europe: The war was worsening and they lived the rest of their lives in exile. Soon, countless comrades would follow, heading for Mexico, New York, Martinique, and other locales. For a time, Marseilles was the only large European port open to the world, so they gathered there together for one last hoorah as they waited for boats and visas, passing time by making exquisite corpses and playing cards, some of which are on view. Their cards had one crucial intervention: On their faces, liberatory thinkers, like Freud and de Sade, replaced Kings and Queens.
