Stille Omgang

I

In 1926, Louis Aragon sent André Breton a letter with a photo of a part of the painting La Profanation de l'Hostie. This painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello consists of six separate panels. These scenes tell the story of the desecration of the Sacramental bread by a Jew. The story of Uccello's painting is naively painted like the Epinal engravings, it tells a story like in comics and on the Bayeux tapestry. The correspondence with Epinal engravings establishes a direct line between the photo received and the plates and prints sold by the peddler, a man whom Nadja and Breton meet a few days later in a restaurant.

The photo Breton received shows the second panel: there is a Sacramental bread is on the fire, some people are in a room, and soldiers are trying to force the door of the room. Breton receives the image on October 8, when he dwells trough Paris with Nadja, as described in the book with the same name. The evening of the seventh runs towards the end when Nadja exclaims: ‘Que ce baiser la laisse sous l’impression de quelque chose de sacré, où ses dents « tenaient lieu d’Hostie ».’[1]

The burning, but not burning Sacramental bread on Uccello's painting is like the flaming hand above the Seine seen by Nadja.[2] Like the burning / non-burning objects in the paintings of Dali and Magritte. Remarkably, in Breton description, both of Nadja's Sacramental bread / teeth and the reference to Uccello's scene are not anti-clerical, but strictly objective. The teeth transform into a Sacramental bread, as we see a transformation in the movie Le Chien Andalou, where a butterfly and armpit hair take the place of the mouth, well, there is the French expression ‘Prendre l'hostie à la chapelle’. The burning Sacramental bread elevates the sacral almost pubescent image of the kiss / Sacramental bread.[3]

The painting and its subject also bring a theme into the book, as a "ready made". In addition to the "profanation de l'hostie", Breton discusses the film L’étreinte de la pieuvre [The trail of the octopus], in which a Chinese tries to take over the dominion in America through self-multiplication.[4] Both ready made topics – marginalized Jews in medieval Italy and Chinese in America - treat xenophobia as everyday examples of the then prevailing zeitgeist. Breton had a general aversion to the Italian spirit all his life, he would never set foot on Italian soil where fascism reigned most of his life, the more striking is his interest in Uccello. André Breton wrote in his article Surrealism yesterday, today, tomorrow,, published in the This Quarter magazine in 1932, that Uccello was surrealist ‘in the free for all fight’.[5] Breton was not the only one in his admiration for Uccello, Antonin Artaud was also impressed by Uccello's painting, he published the article Uccello, Le Poil in La Révolution Surréaliste of December 1, 1926. Some years later, in 1929 (ten years after their Champs Magnétiques), the former surrealist Philippe Soupault wrote a monograph in the series Maitres de l’art Ancien about Paolo Uccello. Breton would return to Uccello in his Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (RS, no. 6, p. 30) and in 1949 he published the poem Sur la route de San Romano, almost similar to the title of a painting by Uccello: la Bataille de San Romano.

Nadja's Sacramental bread does not stand alone in the writings of Breton. “Ma femme à la langue d'hostie poignardée,” is a line in the poem L'Union Libre. Other surrealists were fascinated by this object. Dali painted a Profanation de l'Hostie (1929). There is a priest in Thirion's Le Grand Ordinaire (1934), who is present in the castle for the "Profanation de l'Hostie", Georges Hugnet made a La profanation de l'hostie (1935). The last to be mentioned is Pierre Mabille's description of this object in Thérèse de Lisieux from 1937. So far the Sacramental bread in some surrealist works.

Salvador Dali, Profanation de l’hostie (1929)

- 100 x 73 cm -

Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida

Salvador Dali, Giraffe en feu (1936/1937)

 René Magritte, L´échelle de feu (1939)

  

René Magritte, La découverte du Feu (1936). 

A similar composition appeared under the same title in Documents 1934. 

De Stille Ommegang 

II

The painter J.H. Moesman started work on the painting De Stille Ommegang in 1935, the heyday of Dutch surrealism. In a desert landscape an "Animal brut" walks with the hind legs of a lion and the head of a pelican. Several themes recur in this painting, which place this painting in the pivot of surrealist ideas.

J.H. Moesman, De Stille Ommegang, 1935

First, the design; the preliminary design of the painting is a cadavre exquis (a piece of paper is folded in half, the participants make a drawing on one part, without knowing what the other has made or is going to draw). The cadavre exquis was created by the writer Anton Koolhaas, (1912 - 1992) who gave the assist, and Moesman who responded. One side of the paper has the drawing of a Pelican Lion, the other side contains a Pig Elephant. This suggests that an agreement was made to draw animals, which is at odds with the premise that the cadavre is made automatically and without any rule or predefined theme.

In addition, the title should get attention. The title was given to the painting by the painter Fedde Weidema (1915 - 2000), and the usually stubborn Moesman has accepted it. Giving titles to paintings by others is a practice that was common practice in the group around René Magritte, where writers regularly gave titles to paintings, titles that could be completely separate from the image. In the Netherlands, where collective actions are virtually unknown, a collaboration as described above in creating works and giving a title to a painting is an exception. Comparable experiments are only known from the group around De Schone Zakdoek magazine.

The title is a reference to the Stille Ommegang ("Silent Walk" or circumambulation), a Catholic procession in the city center of Amsterdam, known from the 14th century and forbidden after the Protestant revolution. This custom was restored by two people in 1881, and in the 1930s, ten thousand people participated in this procession in March. The Stille Omgang commemorates the so called Miracle of Amsterdam. In 1345 a Sacramental bread floated above the fire in the home of an ill Amsterdammer. Just before that, the Sacramental bread had been thrown into the fire with the vomit of the man, and miraculously: the bread did not catch fire, as in the painting by Uccello (and until the 19^th century Catholics were marginalized in The Netherlands).

After the removal of several of his paintings from a exhibitions touching taboos in Dutch society of the 1930ties, this title in with a Catholic connotation fits in the line. Or maybe Moesman thought "Oh no, that animal just walks around, "à pas de loups" it is a silent detour." Here we can make a reference to the previous story in this series (Utrecht, 1713 & André Breton): The 1713 Peace of Utrecht, in the words of Breton a ‘Paix pattes de velours’ seems a reference to the words Breton wrote in Les Champs magnétiques: ‘Pneus pattes de velours’.[6] On March 31, 1963, Breton and the other surrealists of the Parisian group gathered in the café, as usual in the late afternoon. Here Arrabal, André Breton, George Goldfayn, Ragnar von Holten, Radovan Ivsic, Alain Joubert, Joyce Mansour and José Pierre wrote a brief and concise tribute to Moesman:

‘J.H. Moesman : trente ans durant une œuvre menée à pas de loup mais, au sortir du bois, des tapis se déroulant à la rencontre d’une nouvelle hypotase de la femme, ici gorgée d’insolite. D´un bouge voisin, par un soupirail, s´élève la voix de Monsieur Bougrelon : « Hypothétique luxure, Messieurs ! Hypothétique luxure ! »’[7]                    

André Breton

Vente Breton 2003, lot 2514

With this Pelican Lion, a mythological animal has been created like the phoenix and the griffin, and the Cameléopard from Apollinaire.[8] In addition, the pelican and lion have an important role in the gnosis. The lion would eat the sun loosing his head. The pelican ripped her body open to feed its young, and she has only her head left. Do the two continue together in an unknown stage of the transmutation of which the Sacramental bread itself is also an example?

We see the interaction between truth and fiction in the whole story. The Sacramental bread is a well-known example of this unity, and it is shown in Uccello's painting and the Amsterdam example that the power of the people should not mock this interaction. It is precisely within the philosophy of Breton and Moesman that it is a challenge to place the truth and fiction as close together as possible, so that an infra-thin field is created were these truths merge as communicating vessels.

Moesman's Stille Ommegang is a good example of showing that Moesman was interested in the similar phenomena that haunted surrealists in other countries - and these shared fascination form the surrealist movement, not a simplified comparison of colors used, statues without legs or place of the horizon in the composition.

Bastiaan van der Velden

[Translated and published on 22 march 2020; tonight this year’s Stille Omgang in Amsterdam was cancelled]

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[1] A. Breton, Œuvres complètes, tome I, p. 703.

[2] A. Breton, Œuvres complètes, tome I, p. 697.

[3] Brandend / niet-brandende voorwerpen komen ook in schilderijen van surrealisten veelvuldig voor. In de briefwisseling van René Magritte met Torczyner (Letters between friends (New York 1994) p. 35) zette Magritte uiteen dat hij de ‘bedenker’ van de brandende objecten was, maar dat Dali de publiciteitscampagne voor zichzelf beter organiseerde. Dali schilderde een van zijn schilderijen met brandende giraffen in Wenen in 1936, enkele maanden voor de Anschluss, en dit schilderij met de titel ‘Les inventions des monstres’ had volgens hem een profetisch karakter. In Dali zijn eigen woorden: ‘la giraffe en feu [représentent] le monstre cosmique apocalyptique masculin’ (Dali, catalogus Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam 1970, schilderij no. 56). In 1938 verscheen Bachelard’s Psychoanalyse du Feu (Paris: Gallimard 1938). Hierin tracht hij niet het vuur, maar het kijken naar vuur te onderzoeken, en analyseerde hij de wijze waarop het vuur – door wetenschappers – beschreven was.

[4] A. Breton, Œuvres complètes, tome I, p. 633.

[5] This Quarter, II, n. 1, september 1932.

[6] A. Breton, Œuvres complètes, tome I, p. 65. En dat veertien jaar voor het fameuze kopje van Méret Oppenheim.

[7] Monsieur Bougrelon is de titel van en de hoofdpersoon in een roman van Jean Lorrain (1897) die zich in Amsterdam afspeelt.

[8] Apollinaire Œuvres complètes en prose, tome I, p. 842.