{"id":2049307,"date":"2026-07-17T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2049307"},"modified":"2026-07-17T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T06:00:00","slug":"how-the-surrealists-psyopped-the-gestapo-and-otherwise-fought-fascism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2049307","title":{"rendered":"How the Surrealists Psyopped the Gestapo and Otherwise Fought Fascism"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/bowels.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tWhile living on the English island of Jersey in the 1940s, a young queer French couple\u2014Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore\u2014performed a sly psyop on the Gestapo. They wrote notes taunting them to defect or commit sabotage and offering contagious complaints: I don\u2019t want to spend my whole life in a uniform, signed SOLDAT OHNE NAMEN (soldier with no name).<\/p>\n

\n\tThose \u201cpaper bullets,\u201d as Moore and Cahun called them, are on view in the heart of \u201cIn the Very Bowels of Change: Surrealism and Antifascism\u201d at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The show is a version of an exhibition that first appeared at Lenbachhaus in Munich in 2024, where it was titled \u201cBut Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism and Antifascism\u201d\u2014marrying the two best -isms, for my money, of the entire 20th century.<\/p>\n

\n\tLike too many Surrealists, Moore and Cahun got caught and sentenced, receiving six years on one charge and the death penalty on another. The sentences were no match for Cahun\u2019s wit: The artist replied by asking which should be carried out first. In the end, they were among the lucky ones: The war ended before either made it to death row. The show includes a photo of Cahun biting down defiantly on a defeated Gestapo officer\u2019s badge: While the duo\u2019s other collaborative works on view see negatives cut up and collaged, this biting commentary required no such intervention.<\/p>\n

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Leonora Carrington: Noah\u2019s Ark<\/em>, ca. 1938.<\/span>Patrick Boulen<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tWhile Surrealism is figured as a style in popular imagination\u2014trippy, dreamy, and escapist, detached from reality in every way\u2014\u201cIn the Very Bowels of Change\u201d reminds just how much the movement was formed in response to the politics of its time. Against this show, college dorm room posters of melting clocks feel utterly denuded, with regrets to the angsty teens pinning them up.<\/p>\n

\n\tExcerpts from Luis Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s film Golden Age<\/em> (1930) open the exhibition, marking the screening that radicalized Surrealism: In 1930, the shamelessly self-described Antisemitic League of France stormed a Parisian theater, where they also destroyed works by Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dal\u00ed, Jean Mir\u00f3, and Max Ernst. The act declared Surrealism an enemy of the Right: The group had been outraged by Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s Marquis de Sade\u2013inspired satire skewering the hypocritical sexual mores of both the Catholics and the bourgeoisie.<\/p>\n

\n\tSoon, of course, so much Surrealist art would be deemed \u201cdegenerate\u201d by the Nazis: Fascists everywhere knew of the work\u2019s subversive power. But that screening\u2014along with the group\u2019s 1925 protest of the French war against the native people of Morocco\u2014readied the artists for the rise of the Right.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the Surrealists mobilized quickly: Cahun, along with Andr\u00e9 Breton and Georges Bataille, formed Contre-Attaque to rally the working class. The alliance was inspired partly by Bataille\u2019s 1933 essay \u201cThe Psychological Structure of Fascism,\u201d which argued that fascists tooled the mass\u2019s repressed psychic energy toward a dynamic of authority and submission. For the Surrealists, fans of Marx and Freud, such energies could be more healthily\u2014and liberally\u2014expressed. Free the mind, they wagered, and only then can the rest follow.<\/p>\n

\n\tAttesting to these ideas, one room in \u201cIn the Very Bowels of Change\u201d features memorable works on the erotics of fascism: If Susan Sontag shocked with her 1975 essay on Riefenstahl\u2019s sex appeal, Surrealists like Bataille, Victor Brauner, and Andr\u00e9 Masson were already onto fascism\u2019s titillations in the \u201930s.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat gallery is devoted to Paris in the interwar period, the very core of the movement; later, the show extends into the 1950s and takes an accordion-like approach to capital \u201cS\u201d Surrealism, expanding its orbit but always contracting back to its central characters and concerns.<\/p>\n

\n\tThroughout, gorgeously designed vitrines introduce photographs, lost artworks, and one of the Surrealists\u2019 most essential mediums: publications. The subsequent gallery\u2014dedicated to the Spanish Civil War\u2014shows a photo of Dal\u00ed in an aquanaut suit at the first Surrealist exhibition to declare itself \u201cInternational,\u201d held in London in 1936: Dal\u00ed almost suffocated in it, but his comrades came to the rescue. Hanging nearby is another grave portrait of Surreal-ish solidarity: Picasso\u2019s Monument to the Spaniards Who Died for France<\/em> (1946\u201347). Surrealism would remain decidedly internationalist for decades (and galleries) to come.<\/p>\n

\n\tIndeed, after Surrealism was deemed degenerate art in 1937, Egyptian comrades penned their manifesto \u201cLong live degenerate art!\u201d The next galleries\u2014one on degenerate artists and their Egyptian advocates, another on artists in Germany\u2014see Surrealism slowly refigured as not only a form of psychic liberation, but as the visual language best suited for depicting the horrors of an utterly irrational world. A Hans Bellmer drawing shows an odd, improbably undulating brick wall that he drew while imprisoned at Camp des Milles in France, a brickworks camp where German nationals (including Max Ernst) were sent\u2014never mind that Bellmer had been part of the Resistance, forging passports. Just as he had refused to make his iconic dolls anatomically naturalistic\u2014a flagrant protest of Nazi eugenics\u2014his bricks do not conform to order.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the Germany gallery\u2019s postwar side are paintings and pictures by the Berlin Cabaret Die Badewanne (The Bathtub), named after its venue of origin\u2014and rhyming brilliantly with Lee Miller\u2019s iconic self-portrait in which she poses in Hitler\u2019s bathtub the day after he committed suicide. Die Badewanne\u2019s scenography borrowed from Surrealism\u2019s dreamy landscapes, yet the group wagered that they didn\u2019t need to make new Surrealist art, because destroyed Berlin was wilder than anything they might imagine. Instead, their devotion to Surrealism was reconstructive: They translated key Surrealist texts into German and recreated versions of the art they had been starved of by enlisting cabaret\u2014that quintessential Weimar medium the Nazis had targeted\u2014to perform homages to degenerate artists.<\/p>\n

\n\tA later postwar gallery, devoted to Polish and Czech artists like W\u0142adys\u0142aw Strzemi\u0144ski and Holocaust survivors Erna Rosenstein and Emil Filla, includes paintings that draw from the visual language of Surrealism to reflect the horrors such artists witnessed. This Warsaw version of the show emphasizes how, for artists in the East, Surrealism was an argument against the Socialist Realist mainstream. There was a stylistic tension on the Left: Was the purpose of art to decorate party buildings and monumentalize workers\u2019 movements, as the Stalinists had it, or to emancipate the viewer, per the Surrealists and the Trotskyites? A later photograph shows Breton and Diego Rivera discussing, with Leon Trotsky, yet one more manifesto, demanding freedom for art against both censorship and propaganda.<\/p>\n

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Victor Brauner: The Encounter of 2 Bis Rue Perrel<\/em>, 1946.<\/span>\u00a9ADAGP, Paris\/Zakis, Warsaw<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThe Surrealists, of course, more easily embraced the freedom of some than of others: I counted at least five sexualized naked women in the exhibition without faces or heads, that part of the body where individuality and free thought tends to get localized. Others, though\u2014Cahun and Moore, but also Victor Brauner\u2014saw how fascism was inextricable from patriarchal power, and sought to free themselves from the confines of gender altogether. In the \u201920s, Brauner painted King Ubu growing increasingly repulsive as he takes more faceless, inert women, and after the war, trapped in Marseilles with no money for a visa as all his comrades were fleeing, he drew androgynous figures, stiff-bodied and wide-eyed: free in their minds but trapped in the world, much like himself.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is also plenty of the usual exoticizing imagery borrowing from non-European cultures, but a memorable project puts this practice in its place. A gallery dedicated to Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, and Eva Sulzer tells of the trio\u2019s 1939 visit to the Pacific Northwest, whose Indigenous cultures they had long fantasized about. Upon finally arriving, however, they were disappointed: The thriving society and \u201cuniversal art\u201d they were seeking had been wrecked by genocide and settler colonialism. Instead of inspiring Surrealist paintings, the dismaying landscape became the subject of a documentary film by Paalen and photographs by Sulzer, showing abandoned villages and totem poles being consumed by vegetation.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat trio never made it back to Europe: The war was worsening and they lived the rest of their lives in exile. Soon, countless comrades would follow, heading for Mexico, New York, Martinique, and other locales. For a time, Marseilles was the only large European port open to the world, so they gathered there together for one last hoorah as they waited for boats and visas, passing time by making exquisite corpses and playing cards, some of which are on view. Their cards had one crucial intervention: On their faces, liberatory thinkers, like Freud and de Sade, replaced Kings and Queens.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/bowels.jpg?w=1024″] While living on the English island of Jersey in the 1940s, a young queer French couple\u2014Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore\u2014performed a sly psyop on the Gestapo. They wrote notes taunting them to defect or commit sabotage and offering contagious complaints: I don\u2019t want to spend my whole life in a uniform, signed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2049307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2049307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2049307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2049307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2049307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2049307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2049307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}