By Pia Bhatia '25

Access the scans of this periodical via Princeton University Library.

Despite Breton’s best efforts, his ideal of a unified vision of surrealism was never realized. The periodical Documents, edited by George Bataille, ran from 1929 to 1930 in Paris and challenged the movement as Breton had defined it, and provided perhaps an alternative definition of surrealism. There was a mutual animosity between the two groups: Breton was a staunch critic of Bataille, whose work he interpreted in his second surrealist Manifesto to be "[professing] to wish only to consider in the world that which is vilest, most discouraging, and most corrupted.” Bataille, on the other hand, thought that surrealism as Breton had defined it, was too idealistic. Many prominent artists, previously associated with Surrealism, contributed to the periodical including André Masson, Joan Miró, and Michel Leiris. In the large and long arc of surrealism, Documents can be seen as a “dissident surrealism” that critiques the movement but also enriches it.

Indeed, Documents mirrored La Révolution surréaliste in many ways, and considering Breton’s La Révolution surréaliste is a useful lens through which to understand Bataille’s periodical. It was primarily composed of text which was juxtaposed with seemingly disconnected imagery. Comparing both covers of the first issue, there are clear similarities in the uses of stark font and austere formatting. The resulting impression is that of competing ‘official’ documents of the movement that are intended to create a sense that they are both legitimate. That said, Documents’ content departs from that of LRS. Documents often focused on grotesque depictions of violence intended to disturb readers. In the second surrealist Manifesto, Breton engaged directly with a work used in Documents as a means to critique Bataille” describing the intentions behind Bataille’s work as being “[derived]from medicine or from exorcism.”

In fact, Bataille proposed an “extremist” counter approach to Breton’s definition of the movement. As Jeremy Biles writes in his book Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form, “For Bataille reality is ineluctably contradictory and base, whereas for Breton it is baseness itself that must be transfigured in the productions of surrealism.” Bataille concentrated almost exclusively on a base materiality of the real without transgressing it. Breton’s surrealism, on the other hand, considers this base materiality but not exclusively, and, as of any other aspect of the real, wishes to transgress it.

It is worth noting then how photography, which is often considered a very ‘literal’ medium that is grounded in reality, figured in this periodical. The use of photography in Documents is a striking reconfiguration of how La Révolution surréaliste deployed images. While photography in La Révolution surréaliste was presented without further qualifications, letting it thus obtain an almost poetic polysemy, Documents contained photographs that, while often decontextualized, were less difficult to decipher, presented, precisely as objective “documents.” One such example is found in the seventh issue, the photograph “Main Droite d’Igor Strawinsky” (Right Hand of Igor Strawinksy) by Jacques-André Boiffard. The straightforward titling of the photograph of the Russian conductor and composer’s right hand makes it appear to be a plain documented fact, which relates to the title of the periodical. But this seemingly innocuous photograph is far more laden with meaning, if we interpret it by Bataille’s characterizations.

The hand of an artist in the context of Documents thus becomes just another body part, an organ or tool with a preordained function that is almost biological. In the sixth issue of Documents, Boiffard provides two close-up images of big toes, which could be seen as counterparts to this photograph of the artist’s hand. In these images, the toes are shot in gros-plan, like portraits of faces, but they are magnified to such an extent that they become grotesque. Each minute imperfection is deliberately observable, and the photograph intends to share this detailed, base, bodily depiction. Seen against the photograph of the artist’s hand, the absurdity of the image of the toe, a body part that does not have the noble character of the hand that creates, puts the hand of the artist on the same level as the toe of the foot: no redeeming element coming out of art, just the materiality of the real.

Finally, amongst these photographic works are a spread of black-and-white film stills from Sergei Eistenstein’s 1925 film Strike. There is no linear narrative that can be derived from these photographs: each still contains a face - though there are two that are pictures of goats. Some are laughing and some appear to be squinting towards the Sun, while there are also numerous shots of faces whose expressions betray ambiguous, indescribable agony. What they are facing in the photograph is unknown, and none of them look into the lens. There is a direct comparison between these film stills and Atget’s photograph of the eclipse on cover of the seventh issue of La Révolution surréaliste—the way individuals are looking towards an unknown threat in Eisenstein’s film, holds the same aura of mystery as Atget’s Paris photograph showing a crowd looking towards an unknown celestial body. But rather than a group of people looking upwards, perhaps towards something ‘higher,’ a higher reality unseen to us, the spread in Documents shows faces focusing on the reality around them. Despite Bataille’s intention to make ideological departures from André Breton’s surrealism in Documents, the periodical ultimately shares many strategies with mainstream surrealism. In both, text and images, especially photography to probe the question of what the nature of the ‘real’ truly is.

Breton, André, et al. Manifestoes of Surrealism. University of Michigan Press, 2008.

Biles, Jeremy. “Chapter Three: The Labyrinth: Toward Bataille’s ‘Extremist Surrealism,’” 72-74. Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form (New York, NY, 2007; online edn, Fordham Scholarship Online, 10 Mar. 2011), https://doi.org/10.5422/fso/9780823227785.001.0001, accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

Hudson, Mark. “Mark Hudson on Surrealist Visionary Georges Bataille.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 23 Apr. 2006, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/apr/23/art.