Chapter 7 - Surrealist Collections in Paris and Sussex

Summary

Surrealism thrived within environments characterized by a profusion of collected objects that inspired the surrealist collector’s work and thought. André Breton (in Paris) and Roland Penrose and Lee Miller (in Sussex) had well-documented collections that reveal the practice of collecting at the root of surrealist theories of the object; they anticipated recent explorations of new materialism by Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, and of the object as thing by W. J. T. Mitchell. Breton saw “concealed realities” and “latent possibilities” in objects in a way that foreshadowed the “vital materialism” Bennett finds in things. Like Breton, Penrose and Miller favored objects that had had a ceremonial function in their culture of origin, remote in time as well as geographically, as a way of understanding themselves better. In both collections, the impressive sculptures from the Pacific Islands exemplify the surrealist desire to orient the self within a larger world through objects capable of looking back.