Surrealized Zombie

With all the solemnity of a high court rendering judgment, the handful of loyal surrealists who still rally round Poet Andre Breton, 59, intoned a malediction on one of their founding members, then relegated him to the ranks of the living dead. The victim: Painter Max Ernst, 63, whose dreamscapes haunted with women in birds' plumage, boilerplate elephants and the carnage of dismembered mannequins long kept him in the surrealist van. His crime: winning first prize in last year's Venice Biennale (TIME, June 28).

Beyond the Pale. The verdict, published in the current issue of surrealism's official magazine Medium, recited Ernst's sins in surrealist detail. "Understanding that Max Ernst won the First Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale, and that under the circumstances one cannot even allow that he was the winner of a competition, since a separate pavilion had been placed at his disposal . . . thus affording evidence that this official recognition was preconceived, and could not have been so well arranged if it had not been obstinately schemed for, "That, an old Dadaist and Surrealist from the very start ... he has [now] renounced in the most flagrant manner the nonconformism and the revolutionary spirit that he previously embraced.

"That as signer of most of the [principal] collective texts ... he has long shown himself to be among those most merciless toward any kind of divergence or defection,

"That in assuming such 'honors,' he blithely sacrifices for his material interests .. . the superior interests of the spirit . . .

"[We] consider that Max Ernst has placed himself outside Surrealism, and decree that whatever he undertakes in the future will no longer interest [us].''

It was the most sensational expulsion since Salvador Dali (whose name surrealists still anagram as "Avida Dollars") was kicked out in 1935 for commercialism. It left surrealism, once the rage of the 1920s and 1930s, with scarcely a recognizable name to call its own.

Down the Path. But High Priest Breton was inflexible. In his studio overlooking Paris' Place Pigalle, where he lives surrounded by surrealist mementos (canvases by De Chirico, Picasso and Miro, an obscene Dali and a fading collage by Marcel Duchamp), with tables and shelves covered with crystal balls, African masks and bronze hands, he explained: "We had to take this step because of the younger members. Moreover, the independence of art was at stake." Is surrealism finished? "Definitely not," says Breton. "Surrealism has no age. Goya was a surrealist, so was Dante. But the public has been vaccinated. Nobody starts a riot any more over a surrealist show. But we continue to stick to our fundamental ideas: la poesie, l'amour and la liberte. There is no room among us for those who deviate from this path."

From Huismes, in central France, where he was vacationing last week, old manifesto writer Max Ernst was not long in replying: "I left the surrealist group in 1939 and have never since belonged to it. It seems to me that all those who have made the discoveries and the greatness of surrealism, have over the last 20 years either left or have been 'excluded.' (To name a few: Picabia, Magritte, Giacommeti, Brauner, Tanguy, the artists, and Crevel, Desnes, and Eluard, the poets.) For me, surrealism will continue to be represented by poets such as these, rather than by the mediocrities clinging to the masthead of Andre Breton. No wonder he is lonely! I am sorry for him."

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