[D66] For the eightieth anniversary of the death of Lev Davidovitch Bronstein (1940-2020)

[R.O.]

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4838-leon-trotsky-and-revolutionary-art


  Leon Trotsky and Revolutionary Art

By
David Fernbach
versobooks.com
9 min
View Original 
<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.versobooks.com%2Fblogs%2F4838-leon-trotsky-and-revolutionary-art>

Michael Löwy
26 August 2020

Eighty years ago, in August 1940, Leon Davidovitch Trotsky was 
assassinated in Mexico by Ramon Mercader, a fanatical agent of the 
Stalinist GPU. In this article acclaimed historian and thinker Michael 
Löwy looks at his writing on revolutionary art and assesses their 
contemporary relevance.


First published at 
https://blogs.mediapart.fr/michael-lowy/blog/100820/leon-trotsky-et-l-art-revolutionnaire

For the eightieth anniversary of the death of Lev Davidovitch Bronstein 
(1940-2020).

Eighty years ago, in August 1940, Leon Davidovitch Trotsky was 
assassinated in Mexico by Ramon Mercader, a fanatical agent of the 
Stalinist GPU. This tragic event is now widely known, far beyond the 
ranks of Trotsky’s supporters, thanks in part to the novel /The Man Who 
Loved Dogs/ by Cuban writer Leonardo Padura.

A leader of the October Revolution, founder of the Red Army, inflexible 
opponent of Stalinism, founder of the Fourth International, Leon 
Davidovitch Bronstein made essential contributions to Marxist thinking 
and strategy: the theory of permanent revolution, the transitional 
program, the analysis of uneven and combined development, among others.

His /History of the Russian Revolution/ (1930) became an essential work 
of reference: it was found among the books of Che Guevara in the 
Bolivian mountains. Many of Trotsky’s writings are still read in the 
twenty-first century, while those of Stalin and Zhdanov lie forgotten on 
the dustiest shelves of libraries.

One can criticize some of his decisions (Kronstadt!), and challenge the 
authoritarianism of some of his writings from the 1920-21 period (such 
as /Terrorism and Communism/); but no one can deny his role as one of 
the greatest revolutionaries of the twentieth century.

Leon Trotsky was also a man of great culture. His little book 
/Literature and Revolution/ (1924) is a striking example of his interest 
in poetry, literature and art. But there is one episode that illustrates 
this aspect of the character better than any other: his authorship, 
together with André Breton, of a manifesto on revolutionary art. This is 
a rare document, of ‘libertarian Marxist’ inspiration. In this brief 
tribute on the anniversary of Trotsky’s death, I would like to recall 
this fascinating episode.

In the summer of 1938, Breton and Trotsky met in Mexico, at the foot of 
the Popocatepetl and Ixtacciuatl volcanoes. This historic meeting was 
prepared by Pierre Naville, a former Surrealist and leader of the 
Trotskyist movement in France.

Despite a heated controversy with Breton in 1930, Naville had written to 
Trotsky in 1938 recommending Breton as a courageous man who had not 
hesitated, unlike so many other intellectuals, to publicly condemn the 
infamy of the Moscow Trials. Trotsky had therefore agreed to receive 
Breton, who had taken the boat to Mexico along with his partner 
Jacqueline Lamba.

Trotsky was living at that time in the Blue House, which belonged to 
Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, two artists who shared his ideas and who 
had received him with warm hospitality (they would sadly fall out a few 
months later). It was also in this large house located in the Coyoacán 
district of Mexico City that Breton and Lamba stayed during their visit.

This was a surprising meeting between seemingly opposite personalities: 
the revolutionary heir to the Enlightenment and a fantasising romantic; 
the founder of the Red Army and the initiator of the Surrealist adventure.

Their relationship was rather unequal: Breton had enormous admiration 
for the October revolutionary, while Trotsky, though respecting the 
courage and lucidity of the poet – one of the rare French left-wing 
intellectuals to oppose Stalinism – had some difficulty understanding 
Surrealism. He had asked his secretary, Jean van Heijenoort, to obtain 
for him the main documents of the movement and Breton’s own books, but 
this intellectual universe was foreign to him. His literary tastes lay 
more towards the great realist classics of the nineteenth century than 
the strange poetic experiments of the Surrealists.

The encounter was initially very warm, according to Jacqueline Lamba, in 
an interview with Arturo Schwarz: ‘We were all very moved, even Lev 
Davidovitch. We immediately felt welcomed with open arms. L. D. was 
really happy to see André. He was very interested.’

However, this first conversation almost went badly wrong. According to 
van Heijenoort's testimony: ‘The old man quickly began a discussion 
about the word Surrealism, to defend realism against Surrealism. By 
realism he meant the precise meaning Zola gave to the word. He started 
talking about Zola. Breton was at first somewhat surprised. But he 
listened attentively and found the words to bring out certain poetic 
features in Zola's work’ (interview of Jean van Heijenoort with Arturo 
Schwarz).

Other controversial subjects arose, notably about the ‘objective chance’ 
dear to the Surrealists. This was a curious misunderstanding: while, for 
Breton, it was a source of poetic inspiration, Trotsky saw it as a 
questioning of materialism. But, despite this, the Russian and the 
Frenchman found a common language: internationalism, revolution, freedom.

Jacqueline Lamba rightly speaks of elective affinities between the two. 
Their conversations took place in French, which Lev Davidovitch spoke 
fluently. They went on to travel together through Mexico, visiting the 
magical places of pre-Hispanic civilizations, and wading into rivers to 
try out fishing by hand. In a famous photo we see them in friendly talk, 
sitting next to each other in the undergrowth, barefoot, after one of 
these fishing trips.

This meeting, the rubbing of these two volcanic stones, gave rise to a 
spark that still shines today: the Manifesto for an Independent 
Revolutionary Art. According to van Heijenoort, Breton presented a first 
version which Trotsky then edited, inserting his own contribution (in 
Russian).

This is a libertarian communist text, anti-fascist and hostile to 
Stalinism, which proclaims the revolutionary vocation of art and its 
necessary independence from states and political apparatuses. It called 
for the creation of an International Federation for Independent 
Revolutionary Art (FIARI).

The idea of the document came from Leon Trotsky, and was immediately 
accepted by André Breton. It was one of very few documents, if not the 
only one, that the founder of the Red Army wrote jointly with anyone 
else. The product of long conversations, discussions, exchanges and some 
likely disagreements, it was signed by André Breton and Diego Rivera, 
the great Mexican muralist painter, at the time a fervent supporter of 
Trotsky (they would soon fall out).

This harmless little lie was due to the old Bolshevik’s conviction that 
a manifesto on art should be signed only by artists. The text had a 
strong libertarian tone, especially in the formula proposed by Trotsky, 
proclaiming that, in a revolutionary society, the regime of artists 
should be anarchist, i.e. based on unlimited freedom.

In another famous passage of the document, it proclaims ‘every license 
in art’. Breton had proposed adding ‘except against proletarian 
revolution’, but Trotsky chose to delete this addition. André Breton’s 
sympathies for anarchism are well known, but curiously, in this 
Manifesto, it was Trotsky who wrote the most ‘libertarian’ passages.

The Manifesto affirms the revolutionary destiny of authentic art, art 
that ‘pits the powers of the inner world’ against ‘the present, 
unbearable reality’. Was it Breton or Trotsky who formulated this idea, 
seemingly drawn from the Freudian repertoire? It doesn’t matter, given 
that the two revolutionaries, the poet and the fighter, managed to agree 
on the same text.

The fundamental principles of the document are still surprisingly 
topical, even if it suffers from certain limitations, perhaps due to the 
historical context in which it was written. For example, the authors 
denounce very clearly the obstacles to the freedom of artists imposed by 
states, particularly (but not only) totalitarian ones. Curiously, 
however, there is no discussion and critique of the obstacles resulting 
from the capitalist market and commodity fetishism.

The document quotes a passage from the young Marx, proclaiming that the 
writer ‘must not under any circumstances live and write just to make 
money’; however, in their commentary on this passage, instead of 
analysing the role of money in the corruption of art, the two authors 
limit themselves to denouncing the ‘constraints’ and ‘disciplines’ 
imposed on artists in the name of ‘raison d’état’.

This is all the more surprising given the visceral anti-capitalism of 
each author: didn’t Breton describe Salvador Dali in his mercenary turn 
as ‘Avida Dollars’?^^[1] 
<https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4838-leon-trotsky-and-revolutionary-art#_ftn1> 
We find the same lacuna in the prospectus for the FIARI magazine 
(/Clé/), which called for fighting fascism, Stalinism, and religion: 
capitalism is absent.

The Manifesto concluded with a call to create a broad movement, a kind 
of Artists’ International, the International Federation for Independent 
Revolutionary Art (FIARI), embracing all those who recognized themselves 
in the general spirit of the document. In such a movement, wrote Breton 
and Trotsky, ‘Marxists can walk hand in hand with anarchists (...) on 
condition that both break implacably with the reactionary police spirit, 
whether represented by Joseph Stalin or his vassal García Oliver.’ A 
century later, this call for unity between Marxists and anarchists is 
one of the most interesting aspects of the document as well as one of 
the most topical.

In passing: the denunciation of Stalin, described by the Manifesto as 
‘the most perfidious and dangerous enemy’ of communism, was 
indispensable, but was it necessary to treat as a ‘vassal’ the Spanish 
anarchist García Oliver, Durruti’s companion, the historical leader of 
the CNT-FAI and hero of the victorious antifascist resistance in 
Barcelona in 1936?

Certainly, Oliver had been a minister in the first Popular Front 
government led by Largo Caballero (he resigned in 1937), and his role 
during the May 1937 fighting in Barcelona between Stalinists and 
anarchists (supported by the POUM) was highly debatable, negotiating as 
he did a truce between the two camps. But that did not make him a 
henchman of the Soviet Bonaparte.

FIARI was founded shortly after the publication of the Manifesto; it 
succeeded in bringing together not only supporters of Trotsky and 
friends of Breton, but also anarchists and independent writers and 
artists. The Federation had a publication, the magazine /Clé/, edited by 
Maurice Nadeau, at that time a young Trotskyist militant with a great 
interest in Surrealism (he became the author of the first /History of 
Surrealism/, published in 1946).

The magazine’s publisher was Léo Malet, and its committee brought 
together Yves Allégret, André Breton, Michel Collinet, Jean Giono, 
Maurice Heine, Pierre Mabille, Marcel Martinet, André Masson, Henry 
Poulaille, Gérard Rosenthal and Maurice Wullens.

Contributors included Yves Allégret, Gaston Bachelard, André Breton, 
Jean Giono, Maurice Heine, Georges Henein, Michel Leiris, Pierre 
Mabille, Roger Martin du Gard, André Masson, Albert Paraz, Henri 
Pastoureau, Benjamin Péret, Herbert Read, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky 
himself. These names give an idea of FIARI’s capacity to bring together 
quite diverse political, cultural and artistic figures.

Only two issues of /Clé/ appeared: the first in January 1939 and the 
second a month later. The editorial in the first issue was entitled ‘No 
Fatherland!’ and denounced the expulsion and internment of foreign 
immigrants by the Daladier government, a very topical issue.

FIARI was a beautiful ‘libertarian Marxist’ experience, but of short 
duration: in September 1939, the beginning of the Second World War put a 
de facto end to the Federation.

Postscript: in 1965, our friend Michel Lequenne, at that time one of the 
leaders of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, the French section of 
the Fourth International, proposed to the Surrealist Group a 
refoundation of FIARI. It seems that the idea did not displease André 
Breton, but it was finally rejected by a collective declaration, dated 
19 April 1966 and signed by Philippe Audoin, Vincent Bounoure, André 
Breton, Gérard Legrand, José Pierre and Jean Schuster on behalf of the 
Surrealist movement.

Bibliographical note: the book by Arturo Schwarz, /André Breton, Trotsky 
et l’anarchie/ (Paris, 1974) contains the text of the FIARI Manifesto as 
well as all Breton’s writings on Trotsky, along with a substantial 
100-page historical introduction by the author (who was able to 
interview Breton himself), Jacqueline Lamba, Jean van Heijenoort and 
Pierre Naville. One of the most moving documents in this collection is 
Breton’s speech at the funeral of Natalia Sedova Trotsky in Paris in 
1962. After paying homage to this woman, an eye-witness to ‘the most 
dramatic struggles between darkness and light’, he concluded with this 
stubborn hope: the day would come when not only would justice be done to 
Trotsky, but also ‘to the ideas for which he gave his life’.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] 
<https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4838-leon-trotsky-and-revolutionary-art#_ftnref1> 
An anagram of ‘Salvador Dali’, pronounced in French as ‘/avide à 
dollars/’ (greedy for dollars) – Trans.


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