Cool People Who Did Cool StuffPart One: The Surrealists Were Even Cooler Than You Thought
Margaret talks with Caitlin Durante about the queer, antifascist artists who set out to revolutionize a lot more than just the art world.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You thought I forgot how to introduce my podcast. I would never forget how to introduce my podcast, because I'm Margaret Kiljoy, the host of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, And this is what I do for a living, and I'm good at my job. But with me today is my guest, Caitlyn Dante.
Hi, Caitlin, Oh, Hi, thanks for having me.
Yeah. People, if they're keeping track, you were on when we talked about Oh God, was anti fascism in film? Was that you?
Yes? And it was specifically oh because we talked about someone named Shrek Max Streck.
Yeah.
Yeah. And then there was another episode on the printing people.
Who were the printers? Yes, yeah, all right, Well I have you on for good ones and that's cool because today is a good one.
Can't wait.
The other person who's on for the good ones. There's only good ones is Sophie our producer. Hi, Sophie.
Hi, Caitlyn Fear.
Beforehand, I asked Caitlin what they could do if I had completely forgotten my script, what they would do an episode on And we're not doing that. That's not what's happening today. I have a script in front of me. But Caitlin said Paddington Bear. Yeah, Kaitlyn, who's Paddington Bear for the listeners. He's a cool bear who did cool stuff and he's just a little sweetie pie. He loves marmalade. He is Sally.
He wears a Duffel coat.
Oh that's it.
I've definitely been with Caitlin where they were doing a show and then fans gave Caitlin orange marmalade. Mm hmm, yeah that's happened.
Yeah, people give me all kinds of Paddington paraphernalia. And yeah, he based I mean Paddington. He kind of dismantled the prison industrial complex in Paddington two.
Okay, okay.
He also fought back against racism and xenophobia and like anti immigration sentiments in Paddington I, and who knows what will happen in Paddington three.
So it sounds like he has a lot in common with people we're gonna talk about today. Ooh, it's some Paddington's cooler in some ways. Our audio engineers Ian Everyone's to say hi in Hi ian y. Our music The music was done forced by unwoman who has a new album out that you should check out on band camp or wherever you. I don't know enough about how music is distributed. It's probably on Spotify two, I don't know. But today we're gonna do an art history day. Oh but don't worry, there's still going to be revolvers. Oh good, Yeah, because did you ever take art history?
I did not. I know so little about art history. I did.
It is the boringest class I've ever taken in my life. So vay do you concur is it?
Yeah?
I get.
I took ap RT history in high school with a teacher, with a teacher who took it more seriously than a heart surgeon takes heart surgery.
WHOA.
I took art history when I briefly went to art school, and it's the only class I've ever failed in my life because it had no connection to anything that interested me at the time. Because my hypothesis, art history is taught as if it's boring, as if it's only about the ways that people like represented objects through time being like and now they represented them with more color and less color and shit like that. Right today, we're going to talk about the Surrealists.
That's awesome.
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about the Surrealists, because what I learned about them was just like, oh, they chose to paint things and they had melting clocks or whatever. To be fair, I also just said that I failed art history, so maybe they taught me more and I was asleep. But what the pieces like meant was stressed, but in this abstract way, as if art was its own realm. Kind of like how philosophy is boring as shit unless it's connected to daily life. That's my hypothesis.
Mh.
The Surrealists. What do you know about the Surrealists? What have you heard about these folks?
I don't know the difference between Like if you were like, oh, you know, like Cubism and Surrealists and the other styles, Yeah, I wouldn't be able to identify who did what what eras they were popular, and I don't I have I have no information. This is a huge gap knowledge.
Okay, I think I'm going to be able to present it where it's actually going to be exciting. I don't know whether will make you care about the Surrealist art itself. Although I actually really like some of the Surrealist art. The Surrealists were all about daily life. They actually didn't set out to be an art movement. They set out to be a revolutionary organization of artists aiming to overthrow the world order, and not just like philosophically, but like with guns and shit as necessary. Oh hell yeah, that said, probably most of them would have preferred to let other people handle the guns. Well, they did the painting, let's be real, And they did all of this as part of the larger leftist project, starting off communist, moving ever more towards friend of the Pod anarchism, though obviously they all as individuals took different routes to different destinations. But that is the selfclaimed surrealist group's movement. Okay, we are going to structure this episode differently, a bit less linearly. Partly I'm going to pretend like it's because the Surrealists would have liked it that way.
They would, I.
Actually think they would have. Yeah, there's this word that's used by the descendant of the Surrealists, the Situationists, who are really involved in like late sixties France, lefty revolution of everyday life type stuff. And they had this concept called the derieve, which is this kind of pretentious but also really cool idea of taking wandering around the city to be an art form, right, and so like the derive is just literally like you like walk out your house and you go different places than you would have and you just let the and you move from like one situation in context to another rapidly. And it's a very urban thing for that, right, is a thing that works because it is urban. I really like the derieve and you can recontextualize the city at random and you'll learn different things. So we're going to take a reeve through surrealist history and we'll start off with some of the things they did, not some of the things they thought, or some of the things that they painted or wrote. We're gonna start with a story about World War two, because apparently everything is about goddamn World War two, and also on this podcast, everything is about a goddamn lesbian and or non binary surrealist couple who found themselves on death rope during the Nazi occupation. Who these two folks, Claude Kaa and Marcel Moore, And they were both probably would have called themselves women. They both took men's names. Claude isn't could be either name, but Marcel is a man's name, and Claude at the very least espoused a non binary identity. I'm not gonna I'm just gonna use she because I'm not gonna like retroactively be like you are, the following kind of thing that we currently talk about, right, I don't know sure. I don't think she would have given a shit no matter what pronounce someone used for them. And I'm only going to use one name for each one, not because they were like terrified of anyone speaking their dead name. That concept wasn't around, and they called each other often. They called each other by their birth names. But I'm doing it because I can't keep track of more than one name for a person there, which really helps me in the modern like queer trans world. But I'm just gonna call them Claude and Marcel.
Yeah.
Claude ca A was born with a woman's name in not A city in western France in eighteen ninety four, and she was born into a prominent family of Jewish intellectuals. Her father ran a newspaper, her uncle was one of the great symbolist poets. I could not tell you what that means because I have a similar level of understanding of some of these things. If I haven't if they didn't fight Nazis. I don't really know anything about them yet, you know, sure I will. I kind of know what the romantics. They would have thrown explosives at Nazis had there been Nazis to throw them at. Anyway, Claude grew up bilingual. She grew up speaking French and English, and she went to school in England and France both And when she went to school in England, like boarding school, when she was like a teenager preteen, I think maybe she met anti Semitic abuse at the hands of her classmates. Because everything is awful, and she fell in love young, and she stayed that way for the rest of her life with the one person. And this is like one of my favorite romances in history. This might be my favorite romance I've ever recovered on this show.
Ooh.
Although it started off when she was fifteen, her dad married a Jewish woman with a seventeen year old daughter, Marcel, and they fell madly in love. The two stepsisters. Later Marcel took There's two versions of the story. Either Marcel took the boy's name first and then Claude took one later, or they both took it at the same time while they were living in Paris, US. I like the version where they took it at the same time for no good reason, and I have no It's my favorite thing about trying to tell a single linear narrative out of history when there's perfectly good arguments that completely contradict each other about minor things, and then you get obsessive about it, and then you cross reference everything and you don't get an answer. I don't know if you've had this, and.
Then it's twenty hours later and you're like, oh, no, I still have so much to do.
Yeah. I don't always sleep Wednesday nights. We record on Thursdays, just so everyone listening now knows what day I record.
Gasp.
Yeah, I don't know what they'll do with it, but I still don't trust people. Do not Okay, anyway, I've decided to trust.
You still like to know when you know, they like to have that insider information. Yeah, they like it when the curtain is pulled back and yeah, really kind of mundane details are revealed.
You see me with my hair unbrushed.
Yeah.
So they moved to Paris. They were living together, and they were rich kids. They are living off of their family money, which is good work if you can get it.
Right.
They often called each other by their birth names and then use the boys' names, as they're like pen names, but other times they totally used these other names. I think they were pretty fluid about it. It's also so they joined the Surrealist movement. We'll get to that, but this is their lesbianism, alongside of a lot of Surrealist men's open or closeted homosexuality earned the surrealis the epithet, which is now a compliment of being a homosexual organization has always been fairly welcoming to the case. Obviously, there's homophobia everywhere. It's like, we're talking about nineteen twenties and thirties. Nothing, it's perfect. Yeah, but yeah, a lot of them are game, including Claude and Marcel most to the rest of the Surrealists and most of the Western left. Claude. We have more written about Claude. She's like more famous, right. She spent the early nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties involved in communism and the Communist Party, joining a group called the Association of Revolutionary Writers, and this was buds with the Surrealists because the Surrealists at this time were also really into the Communist Party. This didn't last their interest in the Communist Party, which was controlled by Russia. Right, So in nineteen thirty two, she's like, Oh, the surrealism thing, we're all organizing together. It seems cool. Sign me up. She starts showing work at all the surrealist exhibitions and all that shit. I do not understand the art world. Like I have an understanding of like how it works, but I don't get it or like care shit. Sure, someone who's listening who cares, is like, why is this bitch to surrealists? I care about other shit. They did a lot, and I love the art they made. I just don't give a shit about the world of exhibitions and stuff.
Right, Yeah, I guess I've never even thought about it. I don't know how I feel about it because I've I don't know, I've done no thinking about it.
There's no reason too. And the only reason I have like a weird anger about it is because I like all the anti art movements that like, actually, the surrealists claim to be against the bourgeois art world and anyway whatever. By the late nineteen thirties, the Surrealists were sick of Stalin and they were getting really into Trotsky, which is like, hey, state communism still seems okay, but like Stalin is a motherfucker and authoritarianism is bad, right, So she joins the International Federation for an Independent Revolutionary Art because nothing can have a fucking nice, normal name. Everything has to be the blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Blah, so many syllables.
Yeah, yeah, that's all. I'm French too, I'm still sticking to the English translations of these. And she's making art, right, that's like her main thing. She's first and foremost remembered as a photographer. She's called a self portraiture artist. This is lesbian erasure because her partner took all the pictures. Oh I see, okay, it's like she set them up. There were collaborations, and we don't really know the details of a lot of it, I don't think, but like it was only like way later that people were like, oh, Marcel was like actually taking all these pictures. It's fine, It's like anyway, whatever, Wait, would.
They have been considered surrealist photographs?
Yeah?
So surrealism?
Does that even work?
Okay, so we're gonna talk about this more like next week when we get really in the surrealism who they are. But the basics of it is that surrealism is not about like painting melting clocks or certain color palettes or things like that. Surrealism is about reconfiguring the objects of everyday life in a way that break out of make us, break out of our assumptions about like what things are and what things can be. Surrealism is basically like, we want to pain dreams, like we want to destroy the barrier between like the dream world and the waking world. And so this is like part of their revolutionary stuff, right, is that they're like, well, we want to we want to live the way that we want to live. We want to see our dreams come into reality, and we want to get rid of this like stagnant, boring world that we've been forced into. It's kind of a rich kid problem for a lot of them. Some of them are working class. We'll talk about some of those, sure, but yeah, no, And actually men Ray is the most famous surrealist photographer, although one of the techniques that he supposedly developed was developed by a surrealist woman who he was fucking who was completely ignored for a very long time. We're gonna talk more about her. She's a very important war correspondent. But surrealist photography is absolutely a thing.
I'm a Google image searching it right now.
Okay, I don't know what's gonna come up. Is there gonna be a picture of like someone cutting someone's eyeball?
That's so whatever movie that's it? Because there's also like surrealist film movement maybe or maybe I'm thinking of German Expressionism.
I don't they both come out of World War One.
But yeah, okay, so I that was the first thing I thought of of like a surrealist photo. I was like, oh, I wonder if it's like like that image of someone, which is I don't want to think about it?
Well to me because we don't have to because that was by Deli, and Deli was kicked out of the Surrealist but for being a fascist. But we'll get to that the no go ahead. Sorry what you say.
Though, Oh no, just that it's I mean, I guess it's what you'd expect. It's like photography but surreal.
Yeah, it's like I don't know you you all can google it at home. Objects that are not where you necessarily expect objects to be, like in different contexts and stuff. It's not abstract. It's like still representational art. You know you can see, right, it's hard to describe. Yeah, but like yeah, yeah, that's the beauty of it.
Perhaps.
Yeah, I think the like most common one that like I think of is the guy with the apple covering his face. That's like the most that the one that I that when I'm like, oh this is what this is, that's what I think of.
Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I had a photograph of a painting. I can't even see the apple in the face. I think that's the painting. Yes, it is apple in front of face art.
Yeah.
Yeah, so there's a whole subgenre.
But you can do the same thing with a photo, right, there's both. Oh okay, oh yeah, all right, Sophie paid more attention art history than I did. There we go.
I passed my AP test, thank you.
Okay.
I was really scared of that teacher, like I, yeah, I talk too much in class and guess where I am now.
Yeah that's right. I have this theory about how I got listening. I'm scared of him. Still, it's been a long time, and I still have fear.
Sorry for your biggest fan.
That would be really cool, but don't tell me.
I don't need to know.
Yeah, you're just like that would be really creepy. Yeah, well, okay, so back to the surrealist by first, Oh, do you know what else? Is a juxtaposition of things that don't belong together to create a strange hole and trying to make it in the art world while at the same time holding revolutionary values. It's the fact that we have advertising. Yep, here's the Mads and we're back, and we are talking about cloud cause art that she made with with Marcel, and like, we have this assumption that women are supposed to be obsessed with ourselves, so it's all seeing a self portraiture is kind of my read on how this is read, right, And you also have like all of these like other famous women who did self portraiture and stuff like that. But it was artistic collaboration with Marcel, and we're gonna talk later about all the porn that they took of each other and shit nice and she's more reice only more recently getting any credit. So Claude became sort of well known for the Paris photographs, although really honestly really only got famous in the eighties, like years and decades after she died or whatever. In classic under misunderstood artist form, the two these photos that she takes are really into fucking with gender and costume and they're really fucking cool. And there's like photos of herself talking to herself, and there's like like photos of her like meeting her and like all of these like gender things, and she has a shaved head and most of them she's very androgynous looking. And at one point she wrote masculine feminine it depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. I see you trying to google it and her name is spelled like it would be Kahun.
I got there, Okay, yes, and now I'm looking at these images. Very cool.
Yeah, I really like her work. Like she's more famous to me for some of her later work during the Nazi occupation.
But.
She worked in every medium. She wrote and then Marcel did the illustration. Like overall, it's like they both did photos, but she was more the writer and Marcel was more the illustrator. She did collages, which is a really big important part of surrealist work. She sculpted, she did performance art, they did propaganda, She wrote theory. She especially wrote about the idea of perpetual insurrection. They also did some street fighting, which is my favorite form of art. What they they, I don't know they called it art or not. They've they formed a group called Contra Attack, which I think means counterattack, which they referred to as the quote Combat Union of Revolutionary Intellectuals, and they joined that. They did this alongside some other surrealists like Andre Bertrand Breton and George Batai, and as far as I can tell, this was like a magazine and they're talking about all this like need for revolutionary stuff. It also seems like they're throwing down in the streets because this is nineteen thirties in Europe and there's fascists and they need to be stopped right and at this point they're all moving further left. They've already left Stalinism, now they're leaving Trotzkyism, and they're making their way into anarchism. And they don't do it as by necessarily being like, this is the ideology that I want to check off, and instead they're like, actually we like freedom and all of these Like we're going to talk about this more in the longer piece, but like all the communists are like, no, you can't draw weird things. You have to draw very representational things and uphold the workers in the following ways or whatever. My favorite thing that I heard while researching this is our history people referring to her as a libertarian. This is I mean, it's a mistranslation. It is technically true. She called herself a libertarian because she was a libertarian communist. She was an anarchist. That's just how you refer to it at the time where she lived, right, implying an American libertarianism is entirely incorrect. Nineteen thirty seven, there's war on the horizon. Anti Semitism is picking up in France, and they're Jewish lesbians. So the Aazis are like, not going to be a really good thing from their point of view. I would say, no, yeah, did you know you can move from France to the UK by going to a small island immediately off the coast of France.
No, what do you wait?
The Isle of Jersey. Okay, it's just right off shore of France. I had always assumed it was off shore of England, but it's not. Okay, it's just right off of France. It's technically its own country that belongs to the UK for complicated reasons, probably involving like hundreds of years of war. Like I think they had a hundred year war. I have no idea when Jersey changed hands.
I just so it's I understand. Now, you can move to the you're technically it's something owned by the UK, but you're not like Mainland. I completely must understody.
No, no, no, sorry. They move right off of the shore of France. It is the quickest way to get to a country that is, you know, the UK, right right, okay, And and they go a bit underground. As soon as they get there, they revert to only going by their birth names, and they claim to be sisters, which is technically true. But they ran no further than that. German troops landed in nineteen forty. I feel like I should spoil this and say that they survived the war. I just want to like get that out of the way, because we're talking about like Jewish Lesbians who fight against Nazis, and I just want to like lead with a little bit.
Of hope, yes, good to know.
Yeah.
Anyway, German troops land on the Isle of Jersey in nineteen forty. They bomb the shit out of the place first, they kill a bunch of people. It's not a good way to make people like you, so Claude probably hearkening back to a different anarchist woman who inspired the surrealist that we'll talk about soon. She gets herself a pair of revolvers and she starts doing target practice. Marcel is like, look, hey, that like a for effort, but that might not go real well right, Like, that's just that might not be the most useful use of our one short, precious lives on this earth. Let's fight them, but let's fight them like surrealists. So for four years they fought the occupation. And the way they did it is they constructed this huge, elaborate false conspiracy, pretending that there was a conspiracy of German soldiers who were deserting in mass and Marcel spoke German, and so they started leaving secret messages for the Germans to find. They were like missives from the initially fictitious rebellion within German ranks, and they were all signed the nameless soldier and they would slip this propaganda into the pockets of German soldiers or push it through open windows into empty German cars. And it's fucking cool. And I want to quote. I'm going to quote from a piece from an upcoming issue of the journal Batten, which is published by Contagion Press, which is a press worth checking out for all your wild queer history needs. The quote is one of their earliest tracks, read fighting, Fighting without End, horrific, fighting without end. They would just write that in German and slip it into people's pockets. Okay, that will part, wasn't the quote? Back to the quote. Other tracks simply repeat the phrase on end without end. Theirs was a conspiracy without names or ends, because they were not aiming for revolution that would swap out the powerholders of the state, but rather perpetual insurrection and the sensibilities of all. They equipped themselves with new weapons charged with the contradiction, ambivalence, and uncertainty of the without which is just some surrealistic way of praising some shit I don't know whatever. Right back to the quote, weapons without name, weapons aligned to produce inner and outer ulterity. These nameless weapons included reports from the war tips for psychic self defense, instructions for casual sabotage, incitements to desertion with violence if necessary, and aphorisms from Nietzsche ridiculing nationalism and the state. They were posed in German in order to appear to be coming from one of the soldiers themselves, written on rolling papers and slipped into the pockets and threw fences around town.
So they were trying to convince this Nazi troops that there were like, oh, there was a movement within yeah, the yeah military that like people were trying to like defect or whatever, just like, whoa, that's awesome.
And it worked too, did it all? We have one quote about that we get to but they didn't know whether it was working. I don't think. They just did it for four years and it's like risky as shit, right, and in nineteen forty four they get caught. They had prepared for this, so they both took poison. This saved their lives. They tried to kill themselves, but it saved their lives because they didn't successfully kill themselves. But they got so sick that they missed the last transport for them concentration camps. Like I think the last transport from Jersey to the concentration. I don't know it was the last one of the day, but I think it was like the last one total. And I want to go back to quoting that article because it's just so good. They remained imprisoned on Jersey, where they discovered why their enemies considered them such a threat. The prison was filled with German soldiers who had revolted or attempted to desert. They all seemed to be aware of who the two women were and showed them care and solidarity. The theory of writing as a mean to engage others in a process of becoming had proved itself.
This should be a movie. Yeah, my gosh, this is so cool.
I know.
So the Okay, so they were slipping these secret notes trying to and then and then it worked because the various soldiers were like, wow, if someone like if there are people in here like like being critical of what we're doing, I feel that way too, So I'm gonna so yeah, okay, yeah.
And then even the fact that the soldiers knew who they were like kind of means the soldiers knew that they got tricked and were chill with it.
They were going along with it because.
Because at this point it is a real rebellion, you know.
Mm hmmm, that is awesome.
Yeah, they did get sentenced to death. They were gay, Jewish, anarchist radical rebels, so that is like four strikes in the Nazi mind. Their home was confiscated, a bunch of their art was destroyed. This is part of the reason that Claude wasn't really known until the eighties. I want to quote a German officer about them. The two Jewish women who have just been arrested belonged to an unpleasant category. These women had long been circulating leaflets urging German Schultz soldiers to shoot their officers. At last they were tracked down. A search of the house, fully full of ugly Cubist paintings, brought to light a quan of pornographic material of an especially revolting nature. One woman had her head shaved and had been thus photographed in the nude from every angle thereafter, she had worn men's clothes. Further nude photographs showed both women practicing sexual perversion, exhibitionism, and flagellation.
Wow.
Yeah, Also, I bet he actually liked it.
I'm sure he did. I would too. It is a I am mad the Nazis destroyed this.
Yeah, that is a huge bummer. Yeah.
But in nineteen forty five the island was liberated and they were freed from the prison. Claude's health was fucked up by that year in prison, and nine years later she died at the age of sixty. Marcel lived on for another eighteen years, but in nineteen seventy two she was like fucking him out and killed herself. She was probably seven nine or eighty, you know, I don't know what went into her decision making. She was buried alongside her partner in the churchyard of Saint Berlade Ballade, probably an early medieval church, like an over one thousand year old church under one headstone with two stars of David, which is just fucking like relationship goals for like lesbian Jewish rebels.
Right.
The legend on Jersey is that this church it was going to be built in one place, right, This is like and no one knows exactly when it was built, but it was built before ten thirty, not in the morning, but like the year the year, yeah, and it was going to be built in one place. The worker started digging foundations and then they like put down their tools and stones for the night went home. When they came back the next day, their tools had been moved over a mile down to the beach, so they dutifully moved all their shit back to the original place and got back to work. The next night, the same thing happened. The fairies did it, according to this legend, and the workers took the hint and they were like, all right, she'll never mind. We'll put the church where the fairies want us to put the church instead of in there like special fairy spot.
Right.
Oh, And apparently this is like a fairly common legend. There's like a bunch of churches that it is legend. But I don't care. I like that the fairies chose where these women would rest in the end.
Yeah they knew. It's like they knew they were going to come around a thousand years later.
Yeah, from a different religion. And fuck it, Well, the fairies don't give a shit. Fairies at Christian Yeah, that's kind of their old thing. They moved the church to hit the fuck away from them. Yeah, they're like, this is our spot. Yeah, get out of here. There's a street named after the pair of them. Jointly in Paris now and I'd like, hmm, I haven't off the top of my head seen a street name that's like named for more than one person, but like, oh yeah, what a cool like that is non lesbian erasure. What eventually happened was like lesbians to be an exposure, yeah exactly, which is what they took lots of pictures of.
But it, yeah, in so many different ways because I think about exposure photographs.
You know, it's true, it's true.
Something, Yeah, I'm smart.
Yeah, it's funny that mostly only Claude is remembered and mostly for her photographs, and even then she was forgotten for decades right until her photos were unearthed because history in the art world have worked really hard to conflate the surrealist down to a single dimension of just being artists. Even though art for art's sake was like high on their list of enemies, they absolutely hated the concept of art for artsake. They believe that artists to express things right, the artists to have an impact, you know, and that like you have to actually participate in the world around you, and her art matters too, and I really like her art and feminist scholar see is one of the most see her as one of the most important forerunners of discussing gender's performance. And I think she's really fucking cool. Yeah, but she was not alone in being a surrealist using weird art shit to fuck with the Nazis. You want to hear about more.
Okay, all right?
You know, like everyone from all across the world will have known a thing for thousands of years, but then when like white Western Europeans figured out, people suddenly are like it's been invented, right, Yes, of course, like the printing press that existed a thousand years earlier in China, or gunpowder that existed in thousand years earlier in China, and et cetera, et cetera. Well camouflage. Sun Zoo was a Chinese general writing during the Warring States period hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. In the book The Art of War, he wrote, quote, all warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we were able to attack, we must seem unable. When using our forces, we must appear inactive. When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away. When far away, we must make him believe we are near. Like so, deception is very important in conflict in war, right, and everyone has used camouflage forever, but Western Europe wasn't as into it for a very long time. It was used here and there in Western armies. But camouflage comes back in a big way in the First World War.
It wasn't the whole thing with like the I don't know, like, not only do I know nothing about art history, I know nothing about regular history too, just events. But I was gonna say something like, yeah, it wasn't the whole thing with like the American Revolutionary War, Like the British were like, here I am in my red coat, like the most obvious color, yeah, the most noticeable thing, not the opposite really of camouflage.
Yeah, which actually, and we're gonna talk a little bit more later too. But I was always just like, oh, it's because they're all fucking idiots, right. That was like that was like the it was actually a very conscious decision that Western Europeans were making that intimidation was a more important thing than like hiding. Oh okay, and so that's why like here's my big fuck off castle, not you can't figure out where I live. And it's like.
That's such a Broie way to be.
Yeah, and it's a Broie way that in World War One didn't work anymore because the machine gun existed, and you can kill a lot of bros in a very head.
Coat from far away and kill that person if you have, yeah, that kind of artillery.
Yeah. And of course camouflage comes back first under the name in France. And you know that because it's impossible to spell the word camouflage.
It sure is.
Yeah. If there's a word that I cannot spell on the first try, and it is a regular word in the English language, it means it comes from France, like bureaucrat, Oh yeah, bourgeois bourgeoisie.
Yeah, well I can't. How are you supposed to spell bougie good? Because every time I write it, I was like, no, that just says boogie yeah or borgies. Once ime, I made this pin years ago, and it was like someone in front of a machine I was a little edge loaded anarchy kid, and I made this like one inch pin. It's like a guy sit in front of an old fashioned machine gun and it says death to the capitalist bourgeoisie. Only I spelled it wrong, so I was actually saying death of the capitalist women, rich people, okay, instead of like all gender people. M m my, my lovely pedant friend caught it and saved me a lot of embarrassment. Good good, good good.
Anyway, in World War One, uh, there was a job someone operating in the French camouflage units was a camoufloor. And at the beginning of World one War one, a painter showed up and was like, Yo, what about like sick camouflage outfits? And the French army was like, no way, we like our blue coats and red trousers. And then just like absolute fuck tons of them died, and then the army was like, what if horizon blue is a nice color for her uniforms? Now? And so in World War One, cubists and other artists stepped up and were like, hey, we know how to deceive the eye. I am not covering the Cubists today. I don't know as much about them. The surrealist Love Picasso, who is a Cubist. And one of the things that they would do is they sort of explode out objects into sort of different geometries and just like explore different ways of seeing the world, right, And so Cubists were very good at a very different style of camouflage. You ever heard of dazzle camouflage?
No, but it sounds fun.
It is. You should google damp dazzle camouflage and look for a picture of a boat on it.
Okay, okay, dazzlemo. Well, how do you spell camera?
Just do camo. I'm sure it'll work.
Boat. Oh the boat comes up right away. Yeah, whoa okay.
And so what do you say to describe to the audience.
It's okay, so it looks like a war ship, but it's got mostly horizontal black and white stripes. But they're like they're not quite zig zaggy, but I don't.
Yeah, it's like a circus zebra, high contrast. Like it does not hide the.
Ship, right, No, I would say not.
When you would normally think of camouflaging a boat, you might think about painting it like water or islands or something. Dazzle camouflage bright bold lines that dis rupted the eye make it harder to discern how many ships there are, what they're doing, and how fast they're going.
Oh okay, yeah it oh huh.
And there's like a bunch of people who claim to have invented this. There was like a I think a lawsuit about it, and eventually this marine painter, not a Cubist, named Norman Wilkinson like one out and was like I invented it first, you know. The Cubists were like, no way, it was us, right, the jury is out. There's still people who argue about whether or not it worked. Sure, it seemed to slightly increase the chance that torpedoists would miscenter mass because they wouldn't know which direction the ship was going and like this is the like best guess of running analysis. On the other hand, it seemed to make it more likely to be seen overall, so it was like kind of a.
It is not subtle, No, we're not talking.
About and it's not done anymore. Although it's not done anymore, mostly because like radar and other technology like methods of detecting ships became more advanced there. And yeah, so Cubist camouflage tended towards like bold lines that disrupt the eye. Right, But camouflage importantly isn't just about having like cool uniforms, right, And of course I don't know if this is part of your world, but obviously camouflage is mostly known as having the latest real tree baseball cap. So people know that you're a cool rural queer even though you live in New Orleans. Right, It's about disguising things more generally like. Also, what they were starting to do during this war was built fake trees to use as observationists, you know, kind of like we have cell towers now, right, And Cubism provides us sort of fundamental ideas to World War One camouflage, but surrealism provides it for World War II camouflage. Most of the camoufloors weren't surrealists, but they did partake in buying stuff from things that were advertised to them on podcasts. In the middle of a sentence, switched like that, pretty fancy. This is what we do. We do fancy transitions.
Love it.
Yeah, if you're against my transitions, then you are anti trans I'm sorry. Ahha, that's the worst fun I'll ever. Here's some ads and we are back. So most of the camoufloorers were not surrealists, but their styles and methods were influential as fuck. The guy who wrote the UK Military guide on camouflage was surrealist, and we'll get to him. And so instead of fucking with the eye with strong lines, it became about fucking with people's heads and also mimicking the natural world. A lot of early camoufloors, if they weren't painters, they were like zoologists, being like, yo, check it out. Look how this bug looks like a different kind of bug, you know. And the Surrealists were also obsessed with mimicry because so much of their work is about what objects can discuss other objects. So the main camoufloor we're going to talk about the surrealist quaker named Roland Penrose. It's been too long since we've had a cool Quaker on this show. And wait, well the name was what Roland Penrose. That's a cool name, I know, and he's like sir rolland Penrose, but it's like never written that way. I think he probably was like a little bit of embarrassed because he's supposed to be counterculture, right right. He helped establish the English Surrealist movement, which started in a lot of ways with art shows to send money to the anti fascists in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Like that was like, oh, we're going to have the big Surrealist exhibition because we need to send money to the people shooting francoists. You know, I would argue to this day one of the most important roles for artists and revolution is fundraising and drawing attention of causes. This is where I was going to put it. I actually wrote a little cue for myself to put in an ad transition here, and I completely messed it up. Because the benefit show does both of these things really well. It draws a ten things, and it also normalizes support for a thing. And this episode could be brought to you by the concept of supporting or throwing benefit shows. But since I forgot to use that que, there was a bunch of capitalist shit that got stuck in, so well.
Hey, you could always go to it.
And Third, providing identification to law enforcement required in some states and situations, giving them an address expedient in most circumstances. Never discuss the events leading to arrest with anyone except your lawyer, doctor, or therapist. Posting pictures of protests and actions on social media may lead to complications. If you have already talked to cops or experienced confusion about talking to cops, call your attorney immediately, as these may be signs of more serious legal problems. The concept of not talking to cops does not provide legal advice, and the foregoing statements are for informational purposes only. If you have specific legal questions, consult an attorney.
And we're back before World War two. Penro In a pacifist in proper Quaker form. In World War One, he'd been a conscious conscientious objector driving an ambulance around in Italy. So clearly actually conscientious objector, not like a coward or whatever. Yeah, But nineteen thirty nine he ran a civilian camouflage unit because basically at this point they're like England's going to get invaded, Like we are alone against the communist menace, and not the communist menace that comes later. We are alone against the fascist menace. Right, We're in trouble. And also we're getting all these air raids and shit, I don't I remember what year the blitz started, but it's the thing, right, And so he's helping businesses disguise themselves from air raids, and he's working alongside another surrealist who saw camouflage in practice, and that aforementioned Spanish Civil War. Everyone at home, this is her why we've already had the Spanish Civil War? Bingo checkbox. But soon enough he finds himself a captain in the Royal Engineers, and he's teaching camouflage techniques, and he teaches the fact that for previous centuries, intimidation have been the way to do things like ride elephants into battle, where red coats build huge castles. But now there's artillery and machine guns, so hiding is better than intimidation. The surrealists struggle to fit into military life, right. They are not conformists. They're like, they mostly hate government and capitalism and all this shit, but they hate Nazis more. You know, it seems like World War two kind of overrode a lot of political ideologies and people just threw down wherever they could be the most effective. But they kept doing things like adding like walking canes and funny hats to their uniforms. I read about one person who like wore his like coat when he like walked the battlements or whatever, as he's like, you know, surveilling the area or whatever. The fuck Sorry I said code, I meant cape old timing, oh, old timing coat. And so he's now a captain. His romantic partner and eventually wife is another surrealist, a photographer from the US named Lee Miller, who she had been one of the most sought after models in New York City and then spent years inventing new photographic techniques like solarization while fucking the surrealist photographer Man Ray is more famous than her for whatever audiences left to imagine why, and she leaves him and moves to London. But warheaders has a correspondent and a photojournalist, and she took photos of many of the most important parts of the war, like the liberation of Paris, the Blitz in London, and the thing that gave her PTSD for the rest of her life, the horrors of concentration camps during their liberation. What she got to do with camouflage. Well, the surrealists really like naked people, especially naked ladies, and as part of our derive through surrealism, I'm going to go on alongside note about surrealism and feminism and naked ladies and all that shit. Hell yeah, most of the readings of surrealism i'd run across had basically that weren't written women. Surrealists were basically like look at start off as a boys club that only let women in, as muses, not as people are artists, and they kind of sucked, right, and that's fair, but that's not the whole story. Later, feminist surrealists, to all the history better. Women absolutely had to fight for inclusion and it was imperfect and women were obsessed over in like objectifying and like muse ways. But there are two things that are sounds familiar. Yeah, that was why it was so easy for me to like the Someone was like it was a shitty boys club, and I'm like, yep, yeah, I've seen.
Those for almost everything.
I'm going to complicate it because I was reading feminist surrealists talking about talking about in a really complicated way. First they got better, like literally the same people got better. In nineteen twenty four, the generally accepted a sort of leader of the Surrealists, Andre Breton wrote, we shall be masters of ourselves, masters of women and of love too, because they're annoying boys club boys.
Yeah.
By the nineteen forties, the Surrealists were actively attached to the feminist movement, and the same writer Breton wrote that the time had come to quote make the ideas of women prevail at the expense of those of men.
Okay, yeah, all right, sir.
Along the way most of the sexist men dropped out of the movement, several male surrealists took their female partner's last names. I don't even think before even getting married. I think they were just like, whatever, her name's better, fuck it, you.
Know, hell yeah.
And they were into free love instead of marriage, which is absolutely a thing that could be just shitty misogyny. Right, there's this complicated feminist icon. Andrea to Work and who wrote about a lot about this in like the sixties and seventies about how like hippie men are into free love and abortion rights because they want sexual access to women right right, But opposition to marriage was absolutely a feminist issue, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, because legally marriage made women into property, right, so free love was like a women's liberation argument from within radical circles. And then the other thing that is really interesting and complicates it, even when it was a weird, shitty boys club, is that what they were doing was like fucking with masculinity. Penelope Rosemont is an anarchist, an IWW member, and the co founder of the Chicago Surrealist group, And she's one of my favorite surrealist writers that I've read during all this research, and she wrote quote as males who had no use for any of the proffered models of maleness soldier, politician, cop, gangster, banker, businessman, athlete, bureaucrat, or boss. The men who founded surrealism could be called traitors for their sex. Not only did they reject such quote masculine prerogatives as law and order, reason and logic, they went so far as to champion their opposites, the so called feminine virtues or vices, intuition, impulsiveness, and passivity as in automatic writing and trans speaking. We didn't talk about this yet, but like one of the main things surrealists were into his automatic writing, where they just sit down and like let the words flow, man, you know, which was like probably cool and radical at the time, but mostly I don't want to read it anyway. To finish the quote in a brilliant manifesto, Aragon and Breton, these are too early Surrealists hailed hysteria, a label commonly tossed at women whose emotional upheavals exceeded the boundaries of bourgeois propriety propriority stuff, as a supreme means of expression French word. Probably yeah, probably, I think I noticed spell up and not pronounce it.
Actually, oh well then it's maybe an English word.
Yeah, probably is. I'm just someone who grew up reading a lot more. And I talked, and she went on to add, despite their very real problems, confusions, and mistakes, the first Surrealist group was probably the least sexist, male dominated group of its time. And so I just I found that so interesting because like because yeah, it was just so easy to believe, like, I don't know, whatever, fuck these guys, right right.
Well, also, if surrealists are their whole thing is to like subvert like you know, what is considered quote unquote normal, or like subvert the status quo, then yeah, that would make sense that they would be more feminist than any other movement. Yeah, but also it's still like whatever the nineteen thirties, So yeah, you can only.
Get so far. Yeah, totally okay, And then like here's a complicated one the reason that all this side note existed. So so Penrose, Sir Penrose is teaching camouflage to soldiers, right, and one of the things he does is I think it's a slide, but he might just be holding up a picture. He's like showing all this stuff about camouflage and like the soldiers are dozing off, and then he holds up a picture of his hot girlfriend naked except for camouflage netting and then says, if camouflage can hide Lee's charms, it can hide anything.
That that's good.
I like it, yeah, and like it's funny to me because I'm like, all right, it's just some fucking like here's like I want to show off that my girlfriend's hot, like what. But it also he used it to try and make soldiers pay attention to his lectures and it worked and like the sleeping soldiers would like, wake up and pay attention. It also got soldiers to come more than once to his lectures.
Okay.
And also the other really important part of this, Lee is an active and willing participant in this. It is very likely that she set up the photo. She is the photographer of the pair, so it's probably her fucking idea, you know, right.
She'd be like, I know how to get meant to pay attention. Yeah, my naked body.
It has worked historically, I see no reason why it'll work again. And during all of this Lee, in particular, especially after the war, Lee is suspected of communism, and so she's like the British Red Scare I think wasn't quite as bad, but it was like not great, you know, And so they actually can't get higher ranking positions within the British government as a result. Like, but the reason we're talking about all this shit. So Penrose he publishes the quote Home Guard Manual of Camouflage. I don't know why I put quote that's just the title of it. It's because I was too lazy to italicize the title. Usually I remember to italicize the titles in my scripts, but I didn't this time, which, actually, in retrospect annoys me, because I'm the kind of pedant who really cares that short stories are in quotes and books are in italics.
Yeah, I italicize the titles of movies in emails, I write.
Yeah, as well, you should, which as I should? Does it make texting really frustrated?
I know, I'm like, how will people know that I'm referring to a movie because it's not an italic.
You better make sure that you do your title casinge.
Right, Nerds, How to do that?
Oh, just by capitalizing the first letter of all the words.
Oh, I see I say it. Yes, yeah, of course I did that.
Okay.
I thought that was like a special feature where it's like, you know how some platforms let you make something in bold by like putting asterisks on either.
Yeah.
I hate that because then it turns things into bold. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm like, why can't we do that for italics?
Though?
Well, it's the shortcut.
I'm sure it exists.
I'm gonna I'm gonna call mister Apple and say, hello, my iPhone, I need to be able to talicize my text messages. Okay, anyway, why.
Is that not a thing I was a second ago? Well it signals better than I message, that's for sure. But uh, Tim Apple, the fuck I was hating like one minute ago.
Now I'm like, you know.
What, Yeah, you're right. Time to get fired up, Time to become a surrealist. Yea, and Tim Apple.
What are you doing if you don't do this, I'm going to convince you that there's a conspiracy of your children to murder you for your their inheritance.
Yeah, we're gonna leave little notes in your pockets and yeah, it's gonna.
Until your children actually have a conspiracy. This is good and not legally.
One of the coolest. That's still one of the coolest stories I've ever heard. No, I love it and it needs to be a movie. I'm going to write this movie, please do I heard.
You know how to write movies.
Well, if you're referring to my master's degree in screenwriting from Boston University, which I.
Would never mentioned a whole hour in rich job, Caitlin, thank you.
Yeah. I actually don't know if there's a movie about this next one too, and there should be. It'd be more likely to have that one to a movie because it involves like tanks and men. But oh yeah, there's another really good one.
I'm sure Michael Bay tried to. Yeah, yeah, do it.
So.
Penrose wrote the Home Guard Manual for camouflage, and it covered how to make fake guns and fake people and how to disguise the shadows from vehicles, right, because like aircraft is now a big part, right, so you also have to disguise everything, camouflage everything from up above.
Right.
So these surrealis in Britain they start camouflaging shit all over the aisles. They're making concrete pillboxes in case everyone's pretty convinced. The Germans are about to invade, right, and so they set up pillboxes everywhere to shoot the Germans, right, But they don't want the pillboxes to get bombed, so they have to disguise them. So the surrealists and others come in and they're turning them into houses, gas stations, cafes, chicken houses, fancy ruins. This is how, you know, the fucking like this is where artists show up. They're like, we can do it. I've been waiting my life for this, you know, military budget.
Turn this yeh pillbox into something that looks like stone hengs.
Yeah, what if the original Stonehenge was camouflage makes you think, yeah, And and so there's lots of camoufloors. But the surrealists and their students are the ones who went a little bit extra. They made sure that it was like closed for seasoned signs on the fake stores, and there's like bathrooms in the fake cafes and all this shit, you know. Yeah, and surrealists all over the Allied world are joining camouflage units and basically preaching the wonders of tricking the eye, and so are like sign painters and shit, Like every artist. This is like what they're getting into but the surrealist wrote the manual on it.
Got it.
Dolly claimed that all this was his idea. This is not true. He had nothing to do with any of it. And my the way I wrote him into the script is Dali, that weird white supremacist asshole, got kicked out of Surrealist for being friends with fascists in Spain who might come up later try to take credit. But he hadn't done shit.
This is Salvador.
Yeah, Salvador delim.
I would that's funny because this is how much like history is rewritten and revised, Like when you said surrealist art and then you're talking about like melting clocks. Right at the beginning of the episode, I was like, oh, yeah, Salvador Dolly, that's the one surrealist artist I could name by name. Yeah. No, But it turns out he's not even he got kicked out.
Well, and what he did is he showed up in America and he was like, I am the surrealist and he was like very good at capitalizing and self promotion, and he was like, I am the surrealist painter. You know, he's also a very good surrealist painter. Like but he's all, he's in another part of the script. We'll talk more about him. So, the coolest use of all this camoufloor shit. You had your lesbian couple creating a fake rebellion with the Nazi ranks until it became a real one. The British managed to create an entire fake army through Operation Bertram, and it was run by folks who studied under Penrose and basically took the ideas from his book and put them into life. There was this North African offensive by the Allies coming up against a German force that it was winning and driving the Allies back over and over again. And the Allies needed a trick up their sleeve, and they realized it wasn't just a matter of disguising some stuff. They wanted to create an entire false story, right, So they created two fake armored divisions in Egypt. They made five hundred dummy tanks, one hundred and fifty dummy guns, two thousand dummy transport vehicles. Meanwhile, the actual tanks and shit, they're disguised too. This is like goofy movie stuff, right, there's like pictures of the tanks, the actual tanks. Okay, there's pictures of the disguise tanks, and they're like wire framework that they like build some shit onto, Like I think some of them are fucking paper mache and shit right, whereas the actual tanks they're like building like truck shell to go around it, you know, so it looks like a truck within. The two halves fall apart, and then there's a fucking tang.
Whoa.
This is likely the largest physical camouflage operation of all time. It was certainly the largest one of World War two. Mm hmmm, so Rommel this is a trojan horse?
Yeah, shit, sort of.
Yeah.
It also reminds me of Argo, a movie that I would put that title in italics, of course if I was writing this stone anyway, we're I don't remember it super well. But it's like they pretended to be a they made like a fake movie, or like they're like, we're developing where they needed to go in and rescue someone from another place, and then they're like, we can't do that easilyunless we pretend that we're a movie crew. Yeah is that? And I'm sure this was based on true events in history. Buff I am a movie? Buff I am?
Anyway? Well, it's like much in a very similar noble effort. I once stuck into a punk show when I had no money by taking empty pizza boxes and showing up at the back door and saying, this is pizza for the band. So sad, yeah, but the top okay. Actually it was like a bunch of a film crew had been like, hey you street kids, do you want this pizza? And there's a little bit left in each box, and so I compiled it into like one big like there was like about a whole pizza's worth. I put it in the top box so I could be like, Eh, there's a pizza and then see. But then I went in and I was like watching the show and I was like this is fun. I was like, man, I'm hungry. Oh shit, I know where there's some pizza. So I went back to the green room and grabbed pizza. And then the manager was like, hey, pizza person, did you pay? And I'm like I did not. I will leave now. So I got kicked out my hubris like Icarus, I flew too close to the pizza shaped sun, which is or is.
The is the sun shaped like pizza pizza? Or is a piece of shape like a pizza in her egg? That's moon hits your eye and pizza and that's and that's.
A more which is different than.
What's what joke? I have to sing the whole song to get there.
But you did it, you got there. I'm so proud, thank you, thank you.
So uh so. Rammel is the Nazi commander of this army, that not the Allied army, but the Nazi army.
Mm hmm.
And he couldn't tell which was a way so which was the fake army, which was the real army. So he split his army in two, and the Allies beat the shit out of him and has turned things around for the British and the North African theater, at least according to as far as I read, I read more about the way that they made fake tanks and less about the way it effected the course of the war. Right, Penrose and Miller they got married after the war. They had a kid, but Miller did have from being embedded in the front, had pretty bad PTSD. Most of the surrealists in their forties and sh at some at this point weren't directly involved in the fighting. Most fled the war, especially to New York City. But there's one other surrealist whose wartime activity is interesting to me and is a way to tie in surrealist concepts. Renee agreed. He is a Belgian painter.
He's a guy.
Have you ever seen that this is not a pipe painting?
No, but here comes another Google search this is not a pipe.
So he has a piece called I'll describe it for the listeners. It's called the Treachery of Images. Everyone calls it. This is not a pipe, and it is a It's a picture of a pipe, like a painting of a pipe that you like smoke out of, you know. And it has pretty cursive lettering that says in French, this is not.
A pipe, Caitlyn.
Once you google it, you'll be like, I've seen this a million times, say, oh.
I actually never have.
Really, you live under different rocks. I live under a rock, but you live under a different rock.
Yes, there are many types of rocks by which to obscure you knowing things.
Okay, you have seen this for the first time. What is your reaction?
Yeah, yes, fascinating. I it this. This is comedy, you know, like a pipe. And then it says this is not a pipe.
Yeah, so I.
Feel like I've seen this very commonly being used as like a tattoo.
This is like a this is a no no, no, this is not a body.
Yeah yeah, like I've seen it, but like the actual pipe of it all, like I've seen it. I've seen. I definitely know people have the statuo got it. This is like a hugely popular thing.
The best niche meme I ever made that I don't think you, either of you or any of our listeners will get is I made one a meme that said, uh, this is not a pipe bomb, and it was a picture of a bicycle and it was done in the same stuff. Do you get it?
I get it.
I do.
There's a band called this Bike is a Pipe Bomb, and there's a punk band from the early oughts, and they pretty much just existed to get people's bikes cut in half by the police because they made stickers that said this bike is a pipe bomb, and people would put them on their bicycles and entire cities have shut down over this.
That's fucking clever.
Thank you, thank you, well done. I'm sorry to have doubted your knowledge of.
Oh it's so good, but yeah sorry podcast.
Yeah yeah, okay, so this is not a pipe what it is saying, I really like this piece. I also think it's funny, and I don't have any object like. It's an exploration of the difference between the symbol and the symbolized. People would be like, but mcgreet, this is a pipe, and he would be like, of course, it is not a pipe. Just try to fill it with tobacco. The surrealists were obsessed with semiotics, the study of symbols and recognizing, like recognizing that words are arbitrary is sort of a key to surrealism. In semiotics, you have the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the expression and the signified is the content. Right, so the signified isn't it? But so it's like saying the word pipe, right, is a is not a pipe? Right? Drawing a pipe is not an actual pipe, and even the signified is not exactly the thing. I want to quote a modern surrealist author who goes by the name Merlin. For example, the signifier bird refers to a particular idea which has been constructed by humans in order to understand and refer to birds, rather than an authentic object as it exists externally to humans. The entire concept of a bird, in essence is a metaphor the bird itself is not a bird.
I wish I was smart enough. I know.
Is the kind of shit that, like, I think it's it's worth pointing out. It's just like you can stick with like the pipe is not the word pipe, or a drawing of a pipe is not a pipe, right, Yeah, you can. You can signpost to something that the stop sign doesn't make your car stop, you know. And it's like, and it's interesting. It's funny because I'm like, in some ways, I'm like, this doesn't really matter, right, Like this isn't but it's I find it neat. I guess that's the best I can say about it.
So do I am I limited understanding.
Yeah, you're gonna end up with the the tattoo. The other thing I really like about mcgree besides the fact that I didn't look up how to pronounce his name, it's probably magree because I don't know. I should have looked it up beforehand. I looked up so many words for this fucking episode. He was a commercial painter, unlike a Ball all the other surrealists, not all the other Unlike most of the other surrealists I've talked about, he actually had a work for a living. He wasn't a ser you know.
Yeah, he wasn't a member of the bourgeoisie or the boogie Yeah.
Yeah, he wasn't a boogeyman, a bougie man. He worked as an advertising designer and a wallpaper maker and shit. And so what he did is he painted this. This painting did really well. It made him famous, right, so he just painted it over and over again and sold it every single time. Okay, and like that rules. I went with one of my surrealist friends to see an exhibition of these paintings once and was like, as a matterfucker, knew how to make some money. He also made his money spinning out forgeries of picassos and shit. Okay, And during the Nazi occupation in World War Two, he also turned his art to the direct forgery of money.
Okay.
And I far too often anti capitalists are too shy to like actually just try to procure get the needs, the things they need to eat, right, Like people are like too afraid to go get fucking money. But he once wrote, the confusion and panic that surrealism wanted to create in order to bring everything into question were achieved much better by the Nazi idiots than by us. This is not a pro Nazi statement by him. It is a questioning of the value of trying to shake things up for the sake of shaking things up. It's like Trump people will be like, oh, I want the whole system shooken up, and someone's like, I'll shake up the system. People are cool and they're like, oh, you're Nazi right. He stayed in Belgium during the Nazi occupation, and basically he was like, I can't paint dark shit anymore. I need to offer hope in these nightmare times. So he started painting with bright colors like flowers and shit, and he called it sunlit surrealism. To quote him directly, before the war, my paintings expressed anxiety. But the experiences of war have taught me what matters in art is to express charm. I live in a very disagreeable world, and my work is meant as a counter offensive. Other historians claim he switched styles so they wouldn't get labeled as a degenerate artist and murdered by the Nazis, which is also fair sure, but I tend to believe him. I think he did it because, like the dark edgy shit wasn't what's called for during a Nazi occupation. Then nineteen forty eight, he's like, man, the war's over, I'm going back to paint dark shit. This is what I like. People like to say that surrealism fell apart after World War Two. That absolutely is not true. What happened as it became less the art darling of the bourgeoisie. They all hated the bourgeois anyway, except Ali, but he doesn't count. Instead, surrealism became a vibrant international anarchist movement that's still alive today. Went on the influence of the sixties radicals in particular. We will get to that next week, but first we're gonna come back on Wednesday talk about surrealism before the war, about surrealism before surrealism, and about a black sex magician in the nineteenth century who paved their way.
Okay, can't wait.
That's my cliffhanger. I keep pointing out the things for my cliffhanger. I've now done it every week. I need to stop pointing it out. But if people don't want a cliffhanger and want to go directly to the things that you do, what should they do?
Well, you should listen to The Bechdel Cast, which is a podcast that I co host with Jamie Loftis where we talk about movies and from an intersectional feminist lens. And uh, you can follow me on whatever social media platforms don't absolutely suck, just kidding, it's all of them. But I'm found at Caitlin Dronte and that's about it. Yeah, okay, my worst job plugging myself ever. I think just now.
People should go listen to the Bechdeal Cast. It's funny.
Thank you, thank you. Margaret has been a guest. It's true and we must have you back.
What was the name of this? Like a Swedish punk movie we watched We Are the Best.
We Are the Best.
Yeah, it's very good. That's what I'm gonna plug is people should go watch that movie and then listen to the Bechdel Cast talking about it. Once again, I'm gonna keep pointing out that there's something that's been in the back of my mind to plug. I remember what it is. For the past couple of weeks, I've been like, I don't remember. There's a thing of just a plug. Tell people about podcasts that you like. If you like this podcast, tell people about it. Word of mouth is cooler than algorithms. That's my plug. But you could also really like other podcasts un Cooler Zone Media because they're also really good. Because the cool thing about having a little umbrella, like the little surrealist painting of umbrella anyway, is that it has a lot of cool things under that umbrella. And Sophie is the umbrella who shelters us from the rain of the corporate world.
It may work.
Yeah, what do you need from me?
Now?
You need to plug something?
Yeah, it's up to you. You don't have to plug anything if you don't want.
No, I want you to listen to sad Oligark, hosted by jkn rhand. We just but we just wrapped it the whole things out. Listen to it.
Oh hell yeah, now that's done. I'm going to go listen to it. I binge listen. I felt really bad that I haven't listened yet. I've been wanting to. Now I'm going to go do it nice right now.
Bye bye.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
