Nine years later, Picasso still complained of how Breton and his followers had misconstrued his meaning: “The surrealists never understood what I intended when I invented this word, which Apollinaire later used in print-something more real than reality.”Ĭonflicting concepts of surrealism did not prevent Breton from striving to ingratiate himself into Picasso’s life and lure him into the movement. Breton defined surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state,” and expounded its relation to Freud’s theories on the workings of the subconscious mind. Guillaume Apollinaire was the first to publish the term sur-réalisme, in the program for the 1917 ballet Parade-produced by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes with sets by Picasso-but by the time poet and writer André Breton wrote the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, the unhyphenated word’s significance had expanded beyond the sphere of art and aesthetics. Indeed, the movement’s very name had been adapted from a term Picasso claimed to have coined to denote, in his words, “a resemblance deeper and more real than the real, that is what constitutes the sur-real.” Pablo Picasso’s contributions to the inaugural issue of Minotaure in 1933 brought him closer to surrealist writers and artists, who had sought from the start to coopt him into their ranks.
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