Chapter 16 - Picasso’s Habits: André Breton on Art, Nature and Reflexivity

Summary

In André Breton’s 1933 essay “Picasso in His Element” for the journal Minotaure, the surrealist poet underlines the intertwinement between Picasso’s recent sculptures and his studio environment, which the photographer Brassaï documented in such a way as to reflect Picasso’s everyday habits. Drawing on the philosophy of Hegel and Ravaisson, this chapter explores the preeminence of nature in Breton’s essay in terms of questions of materiality and habit, the latter being a common trait shared by humans and animals. In light of Roger Caillois’s contemporaneous effort to make nature the new paradigm for a revised theory of automatism, it is argued that Breton’s reading of Picasso’s work and environment advances instead a theory of art as self-reflexive nature, which recognizes the material continuity between art and nature without reducing their relationship to one of homology.