Surrealist networks: Post Surrealism and Helen Lundeberg

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how surrealist aesthetics spread to the United States from Europe through a system of cultural and social networking, and hence emerged in southern California in the mid-1930s, years before the usual dating of the aesthetic in the Americas to the early 1940s when European Surrealists fleeing the war emigrated to New York City. In Los Angeles in the early 1930s, Helen Lundeberg along with Lorser Feitelson organized a movement first called “New Classicism,” but dubbed by the critics “Post Surrealism.” The manifesto which Lundeberg wrote was illustrated by her painting Plant and Animal Analogies, and together text and image demonstrated her belief in the need to infuse Surrealism with structure. The seemingly haphazard arrangement of still life elements in the painting along with its collage effect demonstrate Guy Debord’s and the Situationists’ principles of mapping known as drift (dérive) and diversion (détournement). Plant and Animal Analogies should be considered an icon in the history of Surrealism.

Keywords

• post surrealism
• surrealism
• new classicism
• social network theory
• women artists
• American surrealism