Violently Vibrant, Obscurely (Un)Alike: Surrealist Representations of Plants in the Avant-Garde Magazine 'Minotaure'

Abstract

This article investigates how artists depict and relate to plants in the early twentieth-century surrealist magazine Minotaure. I will illuminate the diversity and continuity of the textual and visual engagements with plants of Roger Caillois, André Masson, Max Ernst and Benjamin Péret. Some of these surrealists highlight physical and behavioural areas of overlap between humans, animals and plants, thus blurring hierarchical taxonomies. Others reflect on the obscure and radical otherness of plants, which inhibits their connection-seeking endeavour and leads them to question the place of humans in a vast, potentially indifferent and violent vegetal world. Ultimately, through their engagements with plants, these surrealists rethink traditional world views and push imaginative boundaries in ways that resonate with the twenty-first-century endeavours of plant critics. The centrality of the vegetal realm to surrealist thinking, which this article underlines, contributes, firstly, to the wider investigation of scholars into surrealism’s ecological and anti-anthropocentric attitudes, and, secondly, to the central endeavours of critical plant studies of removing plants from their neglected positions.