The automatic image know what it looks out on, it is not in order to follow the beaten tracks of the

works of art in museums. As Breton sees it, painters had been far too content with using visual models of objects selected from the external world.This inexcusable abdication was, he now argues, in any case to be replaced: in a total revision of real values, the plastic work of art will either refer to a purely internal model or will cease to exist.68 By insulating and becoming (temporally) withdrawn from the external world the mind could become preoccupied with itself, with its own life, in which the attained and the desired no longer excluded one another. In Surrealism and Painting Breton acts like a critic, establishing the importance of various visual artists for surrealism. While today, all the artists he mentions are canonical, we should not forget that they were then quite marginal. Against the utter bankruptcy of art criticism (so-called scandals of Czanne and neo-academicism), Breton elevates the stakes of his argument against the mundane grocers assistants-type criticism; that the critical signicance of a work should not be dened by the formal choice of elements. (Breton is anti-modernist.) The trajectory of his paper ows from a rejection of external objective realism to Picassos break with tradition, a guiding light for models of visualizing internal thought and through to dream-painting by de Chirico, two- and three-dimensional collages and frottages by Ernst, dream-illusion paintings (and objects), photographs by Man Ray, paintings by Yves Tanguy and Joan Mir, automatic drawings and frenetic (including sand) paintings by Andr Masson, combined forms and bas relief sculptures from Jean Arp. In Bretons view, the rst artist to break with the facile connotations of the visual images everyday appearance and challenge the external model was Pablo Picasso, the creator of tragic toys for adults. Breton claimed Picasso as one of us, but nevertheless distanced him from the surrealists proper, because in the application of his methods, he was not entirely surrealist. Then against Matisse and Derain (Les Fauves), Giorgio de Chiricos earlier work is praised, but his work since is rejected because, Breton contests, de Chirico no longer has the slightest idea of what he is doing.69 Next

In French, a modle purement intrior, ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .

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