Philippe Soupault's Lost Profiles Reviewed at Hyperallergic

We have Philippe Soupault, City Lights, and Joseph Nechvatal at Hyperallergic to thank for setting the record straight on Surrealism as it rose to prominence as a leading movement of the Parisian avant garde in the 1920s. And of course we also have Alan Bernheimer to thank for translating Soupault's Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, originally published in 1963, which chronicles leading literary and Surrealist figures as they found themselves ushering the transition from Dada to Surrealism. A little about monsieur Soupault from Nechvatal's review:

Soupault, whose style of disaffection favored plain living and high thinking, lived a lengthy literary life, never ceasing to write improbable tales. Rather young during World War I when he served in the French army, he saw the Parisian art spirit of the times as one based in Dada iconoclastic destruction, bent on devastating conventional systems of representation, traditional morality, and all sorts of “rational” social organization (which the Dadaists saw, in light of the war, as depraved and crazed). This effervescent mood, which fêted scandal, was particularly incited in Paris by the arrival of Tristan Tzara. This closed a circuit, as Dadaist Tzara had been influenced by Parisian Cubism: borrowing and intensifying the anti-logic of juxtaposition, condensation, and displacement specifically from Synthetic Cubist collage. For Soupault, Tzara’s tipsy Dada showed the nonsense latent in all sense.

As Soupault writes, Dada was out to “destroy all the established values, the literary practices, and the moral bias” in the interests of what Apollinaire (an outspoken and thought-provoking defender of Cubism) called the “new spirit” in art. Perhaps that is one reason that the essay “Steps in the Footsteps” (“Les pas dans les pas”) has been moved from the end in the French edition to open the collection in English: It is here that Soupault recalls how he and Breton were first affiliated through Apollinaire’s friendship and encouragement as they came to know Tzara and participate in the earliest performances of the Paris Dada movement. In 1919, with Breton and Louis Aragon, Soupault co-founded the Dada journal Littérature. That same year, Soupault collaborated with Breton on Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), the text of automatic writing that inspired André Masson’s automatic drawings. Together, these works are widely considered the foundation of the Surrealist movement and the greatest contributions by the original Surrealist group.

Of course, Soupault and Breton would go on to have a falling out. Nechvatal follows with a discussion of Soupault's post-Breton-friendship works and then ends his review thinking about how Dada may have laid the groundwork for our post-truth era, with a look at the language and motivation of alt-right and Trump trolls. Take the time to consider for yourself at Hyperallergic.