G. Appolinaire

organized a provocative exhibition, and Jean Cocteau

Elena Diakonova, whom he married in 1917. Elena entered the world of the Dadaists, and later, by which time she was known as Gala, “the muse of the Surrealists”.

Unable to resign himself to the death of Dada, Tristan Tzara tried in July 1923 to organize a performance at the Michel Théâtre in Paris entitled “Evening of the Bearded Heart”.

In this way, according to Aragon, by the end of 1922 “an epidemic of sleeping hit the Surrealists... Seven or eight of them came to live only for those instances of forgetfulness when, once the lights were out, they spoke unconsciously, like drowned people in the open air...”After that there arose a fashion for “speaking one’s dreams”, even though for this there was actually no need to sleep. This period in the history of Surrealism was later called “the era of rest”.

However, just at that moment, in the spring of 1922, an event took place heralding the birth of Surrealism from within the Dadaist movement. A new number of Littérature, a journal which had not come out for sometime, appeared on March 1, 1922. In it were published Breton’s “Three Tales of Dreams” and his article entitled “Interview with Professor Freud in Vienna”. In 1921, at the time of his visit to Vienna, Breton failed to get an interview with Freud, but both publications testified to the author’s interest in using psychoanalysis for the expression of the unconscious in art. From the fourth number of the journal onwards, Breton took the entire management of the journal on himself.

Little Eskimo Venus, The Slightly Ill Horse, Dada Dega

Portrait of an Unknown Figure. Other works by Soupault were titled The Garden of My Hat, Sympathy with Oxygen, and Bonjour, Monsieur. In addition to all the other absurd inscriptions, a placard hung in the lift cage which reads, “Dada is the biggest swindle of the century”. This exhibition already clearly pointed to Surrealism.

Dada had assembled so many outstanding people in Paris from many different countries that a brigade of construction workers was already on standby. Dada had developed numerous new concepts and ideas, which Surrealism was later to use. But the main thing was that through Dada, the major artists of Surrealism became Surrealists. However, it seems that too much was destroyed. Dada strove to deprive literature and art of everything in it that was romantic and lyrical, of everything that stirred and roused the impulses of the soul. When the science of psychoanalysis, the spirituality of Symbolism, and the romanticism of all the centuries of the past were all combined together and then added to the anarchism and absurdism of Dada, the result was Surrealism.

I would venture to say, that felt like it was banging at the window-pane ... it was something like: “There is a man cut in half by the window.

artzfeld even changed his German name to the English-sounding John Hartfield as a gesture of protest against German patriotism.