A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920-1950.

What Dickran Tashjian's Skyscraper Primitives, achieved in establishing an accurate account of Dada in America during the years of World War I, his Boatload of. Madmen proposes to accomplish for that history of Surrealism in the generation that follows. But as the author himself readily admits, the approach used in his first book was inadequate for the task of the second. To begin with, In America Surrealism did not develop logically out of Dada, as it did in Europe, where the two movements shared many of the same adherents. By 1925, the artists, writers, participated in the American manifestation of Dada had largely dispersed, either heading off to seek refuge in California (as in the case of Walter and Louise Arensberg and their friend Beatrice Wood), or seeking a more receptive audience for their work by moving to Europe (as with Man Ray, who left for Paris in 1921, where a number of his French Dada colleagues had already returned). Moreover, the events that constitute the episode of New York Dada are confined to the years of World War I and its immediate aftermath, whereas the influence of Surrealism spreads unevenly over the next three decades of American history, beginning with a select group of American writers and magazine editors living in Paris in the '20s and moving on to the eventual absorption of Surrealist automatism into the visual vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism during the years of World War II.

Tashjian's gifts as a writer are unquestioned. His book is anything but a simple, straightforward chronological history of Surrealism in America; it is rather a lively and informative account of, as he so eloquently expresses it, "a precarious orbit through magnetic fields." His account of the relationship between Andre Breton's complex and oscillating political allegiances and his view of Surrealism is as entertaining to read a, his account of Salvador Dali's controversial design for the "Dream of Venus" Pavilion at the 1939 New, I York World's Fair. Tashjian is al his best when he discusses works of literature, especially poetry, as in his deft analysis of Charles Henri Ford's "Afternoon with Andre Breton."

The book is organized thematically, into 12 chapters that follow one another in a roughly chronological sequence. This results in some inevitable repetition, and the burden of ordering specific events is placed on the reader. We are provided with a description of Marcel Duchamp's involvement with various publishing projects in New York during the war, for instance, before we read about the difficulty. experienced by many of his friends in the U.S. who, some four years earlier, had tried to arrange for his departure from occupied France. Moreover, if a subject did not fit into Tashjian's ordering plan, it seems to have been forgotten altogether. We have a detailed account of Man Ray's years in Paris during the '20s and '30s, for example, but we are told almost nothing about the decade he spent in Hollywood during the '40s - nor, for that matter, anything about Dali's exciting flirtations with Hollywood filmmakers in the same period (not only in his work for the Disney studios, but also in the great Surrealist dream sequence he designed for Hitchcock's Spellbound).

Tashjian believes that a view of history through its artistic production alone is insufficient, preferring, instead, a broader sweep, what he calls a cultural history. What is forgotten through this approach is that visual images are capable of engaging in a meaningful exchange with only a modicum of human intervention, a silent but effective method of communication that transcends obstacles of language and time. Tashjian misses few opportunities to cite the inadequacies he perceives in a standard art-historical approach to his subject (dismissing, in large measure, for example, the catalogue and exhibition by Jeffrey Wechsler, Surrealism and American Art 1931-1947, the only major study devoted to this period before Tashjian's, as well as Richard Martin's Fashion and Surrealism of 1987 still the most complete and reliable book on this subject). Yet, as he acknowledges in his footnotes, Tashjian relies heavily upon the various publications of Martica Sawin, an art historian whose own book on the Surrealist exiles in New York, Surrealism in Exile, recently appeared from MIT Press.

Surrealism in America is a subject that has long been neglected - by literary, cultural, and art historian alike. These lacunae are destined for correction in the foreseeable future. one study has just appeared (a traveling exhibition organized by Susan Ehrlich, "Pacific Dreams: Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art, 1934-1957," which opened this spring at the Oakland Museum) and others are underway (Sawin's book, as well as a show of European exiles during World War II being prepared by. the Los Angeles Country Museum). For the time being, despite the reservations I have expressed-most of which are comparatively minor - Tashjian's book is a welcome and delightful excursion into the labyrinth of American Surrealism.