Surrealism Writes the News: The Lost Photomontages

Abstract: This essay uncovers a critical lost artifact of surrealist visual production: a 1931 notebook containing more than thirty-three collaborative photomontages by three key surrealist figures: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Suzanne Muzard. Constructed in the wake of the Second Manifesto (1930), these collaborative images offer primary visual evidence of movement’s strategic attempt to reconcile surrealist ideals with those of the French Communist Party. As composite images formed from mass media fragments, the photomontages constitute a formal critique of bourgeois photojournalism—boldly targeting capitalism, militarism, and religious authority—yet despite their political intent would ultimately prove too ambivalent for communist orthodoxy in their own time, explaining their subsequent suppression and long absence from histories of surrealism and photomontage. The research reconstructs an important element of surrealism’s developing visual politics and its complex relationship with leftist movements and serves as an alternative discursive frame for photomontage’s ongoing relevance to the politics of representation.