15

DAWN ADES

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Csar Moro and Surrealism

In histories different exhibition

of surrealism,

Csar Moro's name crops up sporadically

and in

contexts, mainly as a poet, but also as essayist, artist, activist, and organizer. He has been described as "single-handedly promot-

ing surrealism Argentina;'l adequately

across the Latin American continent,

from Mexico to Peru to

but the full scope of his role is difficult to evaluate and cannot be contained within the history of surrealism in Latin America. Not

only was he also active in Europe but he-wrote most of his poetry in French rather than Spanish. Many of the shockingly large number of poems and texts that remained unpublished at Moro's death in 1956 have now been published;

it is to be hoped that the letters he wrote, also mostly in French, to his friend and colleague the Peruvian surrealist poet Emilio Adolfo Westphalen will also be made publico They offer an unusually full picture, not only of Moro's active promotion and defense of surrealism but also of his personal commitment to

its ideals and his ultimate disillusionment

with it. 2 The letters are passionate,

lucid, and often bitter; they make no secret ofhis love affair with a married man, Antonio Acosta, and they frequently move into the same heightened regio n of expression about an impossible love as his poems.3 Moro's indifference, alism in Latin America art historians, though or rather opposition, contributed to the powerful cultural nation-

to his relative neglect by scholars and

this began to change in the decades after his death.4

Moro, whose given name was Alfredo Quspez Asn, was born in Lima in
1903. His pseudonym

(which he adopted very early, at least by 1921) must be, but Romanthe

as Jason Wilson suggests, an "identity pun; not Peruvian-Spanish Moorish:'5 "Moro"aligns him immediately

against Spanish America:

Spanish conquerors

brought to the New World ritual celebrations

of Spain's

defeat of the Moors in 1492, and in Peru dancers still annually don masks that indicate "Espaoles" vs. "Moros:' As Spains defeated opponents, the "Indios"

often became equated with the "Moros:' With his adopted last name, Moro could be aligning himself with the Indian side of his mestizo background, while his first name, Csar, perhaps pays tribute to an earlier imperial queror. Certainly, con-

the name Csar Moro seems crafted to distance Alfredo

Quspez Asn from Spanish Peru.

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Moro led a peripatetic life that took him from city to city and back againLima, Paris, London, Lima, Mexico City, Lima. But his were not the wanderings of aman of wealth. Poverty, war, and repression either caused him to

move on or trapped him where he was. "Exile" might not be the right word to describe his status, because that implies absence from a home, a country. Moro described himself and the surrealists as "we who have neither church

nor country."6 His ambivalent attitude toward Peru was bolstered by the surrealists' militant antinationalism; in his often-Ionely state, he felt most acutely and his surrealist

exiled not from his nominal homeland but from surrealism comrades. The deliberately meager curriculum

vitae that he drew up mentions

his few publications and his expulsion from the Jesuit college in Lima (fig. l)-a foretaste ofhis violent and unchanging anticlericalism, that ofhis friend the surrealist poet Benjamin Pret. which was on a par with

Moro left Lima for Paris in 1925 to pursue a career as a painter; despite sorne modest early success/ he failed to make a living in this way and returned penniless to Peru in 1933. But while in Paris he made contact with the surrealists, an encounter that had a radical and lasting effect on him. He became part of the inner circle of the surrealist group that met regularly in Andr Breton's apartment and at the caf on the place Blanche. He signed the surrealist tracts

Misere de la posie (1932) and La mobilisation contre la guerre nest pas la paix
(June 1933).8 He added a paragraph regarding the situation in Peru to the latIn 1933, ter and was charged by Breton with sending it there for distribution.9

he participated in the internal surrealist enquete, "Recherches exprimentales;' published in the sixth issue of the journal Le surralisme au savice de la rvolu-

tion (SASDLR)lO; his poem "Renomme de l'amour" was published in the previous issue of SASDLR (May 1933), making him the only Hispanic poet to appear in one of the great interwar surrealist journals. He contributed a poem to the surrealist pamphlet Violette Nozieres, although this was not published until after he left Paris.11 The experience of being at the heart of the surrealist collective in Paris between about 1928 and 1933 was in many ways the defining event of Moro's life. He felt he belonged with the surrealists; he felt at home, politically, in the movement, which opposed capitalism and the Catholic Church, rejected nationalism and militarism, and at the same time resisted the pressure of the French Communist Party to suspend poetic experiment in the name of politinurtured

cal action. This small group-a individual expression-provided

collective in spirit that nonetheless

Moro with an ideal that he never forgot and

that he hoped to recreate on American soil. For the surrealists, writing-including poetry-was to be pursued not as movement

a career but as a way of life. Moro felt at home in the surrealism

"WE WHO HAVE NEITHER

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C@~sr Mo~c.- Lima. Perti; Estuvo en un colegio de J~suita$ d~l que ru expulsado. Ha Ti~ido en Francia y V~~8 ae~ualmente en Mexieo.
Ha e'Jlabor&do en s lA R15voltrtion 5urrsalistf$ - Dyn = Let-5.g de Mxieo - El Hijo Pr.ais', Nozi~r$" Organizador con Andre Breton y Wolfgang Paalen de la Exposiein Interna;;;l;;..;.,al d~l Surrealis1Il0 ~n 1940. Ha I5XPU&!lto pintura en, "I:abinet Maldoror", Bru~el9.s.~ nFaris-llJlleri:l<9 Latine", parls.Exposicin Internacional del Surrealiellio,1940, Mxico.Academia Saleedo, I.ma, Psr- "La Pea". Lima. Per. Ha publicados "Le ChSteau da Grisou" y "~ttr. d' Amour".

"Ho!!I!l!!l.ge a Violette

partly because he recognized that it was not a new literary or artistic school But a complete attitude toward the world. As he wrote to his friend the Peruvian poet Emilio Adolfo Westphalen in February 1940, just after the opening of the

Fig. l. Csar Moro's typewritten curriculum vitae, ca. 1944. Los Angeles, Institute, Getty Research 980029.

International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City:

1 must draw up a rsum of all the idiocies the Mexican press has said about surrealismo And we must put sorne surrealist slogans [mots d'ordreJ in visible places: such as "Down with Work" [a bas le travail], which 1 particularly like and was basic for my adhesion to surrealism.l2

"Et guerre au travail" (war on work) was the watchword

on the cover of

the fourth issue of the surrealist journal La rvolution surraliste, published July 1925, the year Moro arrived in Paris from Lima. In that issue's editorial, "Pourquoi je prends la direction de La rvolution surraliste" (Why 1 am taking over the editorship of La rvolution surraliste), Andr Breton gives an impassioned account of the status of surrealismo Barely ayear after the movement was founded, much was both expected-and feared-of the "revolution:' Breton

warns, in his editorial, that the traps of literary celebrity, or the "literary alibi;' are to be avoided at all costs. It is crucial, as far as the outside world is concerned, that the enterprise make no tactical mistakes; however, internal differences of opinion could one day paralyze the movement. "What is surrealism

anyway?" Breton asks in the editorial: "ls it a form of absolute opposition or an ensemble of purely theoreticai propositions, or a system based on the confusion According to each

of all systems, or the first stone of a new social structure?

individual's response, each will offer surrealism what he can: we are not afraid of contradiction:'13 In 1928, Moro wrote a poem that has remained unpublished,

18

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"Abajo el trabajo" (Down with work).14 In a flow of puns on clothes and worktaking "prendas de vestir" (talents) as a starting point-Moro affirms his to the com-

opposition to the capitalist work ethic and methods of production,

mercialization of art, and to the sale of talents. In 1929, at the time of Breton's

Second manifeste du surralisme, several surrealists had been expelled from the
movement for "prostituting" themselves to journalism -a form of writing that was anathema to surrealismo Using abnegation of work as a form of resistance taps into a key aspect of the experience of modernity-it capitalist control. is a way of resisting

Surrealism encouraged its adherents to experiment in any medium they chosepoets made collages and objects, painters wrote poems, and so on. Moro

seems to have been primarily regarded as a poet, as no visual work by him was included in the surrealist journals published in Paris, although he did participate in the internal circulation of"objects" stimulated by Salvador Dal's launch, in 1931, of the "surrealist object functioning symbolically."1S This raises the

question of surrealism's effect on Moro as a painter. The following discussion is speculative because his works have not been adequately published, are often undated, and are now rarely exhibited. Paintings from the early 1920S, made before he left Lima for Paris in 1925, were striking for their linear refinement and bold decorative composition. Moro was evidently familiar with art no u-

veau, with the work of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, and with the drawings of the English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. In Paris, he had become interested in Pablo Picasso and cubism, to judge by a review in Le bulletin de la vie artistique of an exhibition of young artists from Latin America, Paris-Amrique (1926).16The painting by Moro reproduced

Latine

in that review, where it was titled

Les "cholos" (The "mestizos"), suggests that Moro was also prepared to play on
his exotic Latin American origins at a time when Paris was in thrall to jazz, to Josephine Baker and other African American singers and musicians, and to African art. 17In Les "cholos,"a boldly sketched couple, the woman wearing the unique black manto of Lima, stand s in front of what appears to be an abstract, geometric background (fig. 2). Although Moro did not exhibit with the surrealists while in Paris, and none of his works was reproduced at the time in any surrealist publications, his

encounter with surrealism certainly altered his practice as an artist. Apart from collages, he seems to have responded
Fig.2. Csar Moro (Peruvian,

to surrealism

in two main ways: First,

he experimented with automatism,

l8

primarily in drawings. Collage-drawings line

1903-56).
Les "cl1olos," Location ca. 1926, oil on canvas (7). unknown.

from the late 1920S (fig. 3) combine pasted elements with a meandering

that has the spontaneity of automatic gestures. Second, he set about unlearning his early expertise in painting. In line with the surrealist interest in the

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rudimentary

and the untrained,

in the work of children

and the insane, he

began painting in a deliberately naive manner. But, judging from the works he exhibited later in the 1930S and from his writings, he never fully resolved for himself the contradictions ist attitude toward art. As Breton said, "We are not in literature in the surrealand in arf'19

Between 1928 and 1933, while Moro was with the surrealists in Paris, dramatic developments had unfolded in the visual arts. In the early 1930S, surrealists

were insisting that art be superseded entirely, one of the most striking signs of which was the invention of the "surrealist object." At the same time, paradoxically, painting was moving in extraordinary notorious description new directions-despite Breton's

of the medium as a "lamentable

expedient."20 Dal and

Ren Magritte, who had joined the movement in the late 1920S, led surrealism's return to meticulous figuration-in tographic" image of dreams-which nated the movement's Dal's case, what he described as the "phoreplaced the automatism that had domi-

first years. Max Ernst introduced

his "collage-novels;'

recycling nineteenth-century

engravings into sexually charged, iconoclastic stoaggressive collages, automatism, readymades

ries. Paintings and anti-paintings,

and the surrealist object, the found object, the found natural object, and other surrealist techniques and approaches were establishing an entirely new arena

of visual expression, one in which issues such as the relative claims of figuration and abstraction that concerned modernist Moro's wholehearted artists were no longer relevant.

embrace of the movement meant that he also absorbed its

ambivalence toward the medium of painting. 21

After his return to Lima in 1933, Moro continued realist group in Paris. He expressed his longing community in an unpublished manuscript

to correspond

with the sursurrealist

for the Parisian

notebook of poems and drawings dedicated to Breton and the poet Paul luard.22 His fellow surrealist Maurice Henry sent him a long account ofthe Dal-Hitler
23

debacle and ofthe new surViolette

realist games they were playing, as well as a copy of the pamphlet Nozieres. Dal's contribution to the publication, a drawing

related to his

recent illustrations to Les chants de Maldoror, made a strong impact on Moro, as can be seen in the curious drawings in Moro's notebook (fig. 4). In Dal's

drawing, Paranoiac Portrait of Violette Naziere (Nozieres) (1933), the head is distorted through anamorphosis, with elongated cranium, nose, and eyelashes,
Fig.3. Csar Moro (Peruvian,

and the individual elements take on other identities, like the doubled images in Giuseppe Arcimboldo's paintings. Moro's drawings, too, seem haunted by

1903-56). Untitled (collage-drawing),

April 1927, newspaper drawing, clipping, pen-and-ink

stretched shapes, but while Dal's forms often seem compressed

by space-

and brown ink wash on paper, 28 x 19.8 cm (11 x 7% in.). Los Angeles, Getty Research I nstitute, 980029.

a mixture of hard and soft (the flaccid breasts and bony brow of Paranoiac Portrait, for example)-Moro's spin in a more immaterial way, as if they were

22

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-1

I I I
I

j. i

l
I

Fig.4. Csar Moro (Peruvian,

automatic drawings scattered across the page. It is interesting that Moro's line is often abstract, reminiscent ofthe refined and expert art-nouveau earliest art. In Lima, faced with a retrograde art scene and fueled by his recent expepainting, and the object, attitudes style ofhis

1903-56).
Untitled 1934. drawing, 26 May / et sont From "Ces pomes et consquente

leur ombre consquente leur lumire

ddis / Andr Breton / Paul Eluard / avec I'admiration sans fin de / Csar Moro," unpublished June 1934, Los Angeles, I nstitute, notebook of March21.7 x 16.8 cm Getty Research poems and drawings,

riences at the heart of discussions about surrealism,

Moro took a drastically negative view of art. In Paris, the surrealists'

toward art were sophisticated, if ambivalent. It must have been a bitter shock to return to a place where cubism, let alone a more radical movement like surrealism, was barely heard of. Having been thoroughly at home in Paris, Moro now

(8112 x 6% in.).
980029.

"WE WHO HAVE NEITHER

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23

felt alienated and angry. His frustration

at the conditions

of "life, art and love"

in Peru probably explain the title of a text he wrote shortly after his return, a manuscript that remained unpublished in his lifetime: "Los anteojos de azufre"

(Sulfur goggles).24 Was he suggesting something painful to the sight, or perhaps something that burns up whatever is in front of it? "Los anteojos de azufre" was unfinished, surrealism, though Moro probably intended to publish it as a tract promoting possibly as an introduction to an anthology of surrealist poetry:

"The beautiful deadly bomb, surrealism ... will reach this sad, provincial place, sordid as an empty barrel:'2S "Los anteojos de azufre" also contains guarded but still quite transparent references to a sexuality at odds with the heterosexual

norm of Peru's conservative society. In "Los anteojos de azufre;' Moro condemns all art in Peru with the exception of two things: "the texts, objects, and pictures of the mad in the lunatic asylum of the Hospital L. H. Luego [Larca Herrera Hospital):' and a monu-

ment in Lima to Bergasse du Petit -Thouars, which he describes in terms drawn from Dal as the "inexhaustible, magnificent, delirious, palpitating, and obscene illustration of the castration complex:'26 Moro possessed several works by the

alins (the insane) of the hospital, where he worked as curator of the Museo de Obras de los Enfermos: "Exceptional people from whom we have so much to learn;' as he later wrote to the Chilean surrealist Enrique Gmez-Correa, whom he had "the luck to know and to treaf'27 . Moro had in his possession them one that introduces pre-Columbian a small group of paintings by alins, among to the passionate interest in and

an unusual dimension

and Native American

art, artifacts, and writings that Moro wash painting signed by Juan

shared with the surrealists. Isa uro Villafuerte

A monochrome

Loor and titled Profancion [sic1 animal depicts a winged menaced to an

hero, perhaps the artist, seated on a globe showing the Americas,

by a snarling wolf-like creature (fig. 5).28It bears a striking resemblance illustration in an extraordinary

and long-Iost book from 1615, Felipe Guamn

Poma de Ayala's Nueva cornica y buen gobierno, which shows a cowering figure surrounded by a bevy of threatening creatures with open fangs. The

resemblance between the two images may be coincidental, but it is possible that Moro had managed to acquire a copy of the first facsimile of Nueva cornica, which was made in Paris in 1936. The chroniele takes the form of a letter from Guamn Poma, a descendant of the Inca nobility, to King Philip III of Spain

protesting the injustices of Spanish colonial rule. Written in Quechua and in Spanish, it ineludes a detailed history of the Inca dynasties and is a major source of information about socioeconomic and cultural life before the Conquest.

Guamn Poma makes an appeal for a return to better practices from this earlier time. Although the idea of the artist menaced by wild beasts was not expressed

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in the Guamn Poma drawing, which shows a malefactor being punished, it is an image Moro might well have sympathized with.

To judge from the first surrealist

exhibition

in Latin America, organized by

Moro in Lima in 1935, he had been prolific since his return. The exhibition was announced not as a surrealist exhibition but as (according to the title on the cover of the catalog) an exhibition of the works of Jaime Dvor, Csar Moro,

Waldo Parraguez, Gabriela Rivadeneira, Carlos Sotomayor, and Mara Valencia (fig. 6). However, the catalog's texts-by
29

Moro, Lautramont,

Breton, Louis the affiliation

Aragon, Ren Crevel, Dal, and luard, among others-made clear.

The vast majority of the works were by Moro: paintings, drawings, and Color Creen or taking the

collages, the latter with such titles as The Abominable

form of automatic texts such as, "The cannibal eye aboye the sky seeks anude

Fig.5.
Juan Isauro Villafuerte (aet. Peru, 19005). monoehrome Loor

Profancion animal, n.d., wash, 23.5 x 13.8 cm (91/, x 5% in.).

Getty Re5earch 980029.

Los Angeles, I nstitute,

"WE WHO HAVE NEITHER

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25

eye plaster nose anude sky born of plaster the petrels shining far away in the menacing granite of delirium:' One of the collages reproduced in the catalog gun text

presents a powerful conjunction of photographs: it shows a double-barreled in close-up, a rack of pen nibs, and a pearly shell, with a poem/automatic

carefully inscribed in the upper corner: "Fifty years ago it was dreadful misery the horses the stones the buttons the hats."30 The painting Pietn (Pedestrian) by Moro is reproduced on the cover of the catalog and was shown again in the

Exposicin internacional del surrealismo, which Moro organized in Mexico City in 1940. It is a curious, deliberately naive image: beneath a roughly drawn tent, large feet poke out, while a bulbous form resembling one of Tanguy's shapes that, as Breton wrote, "have no immediate equivalent in nature"31 floats aboye a crude horizon. The short texts in the catalog are a mixture of the negative and the exalted. Among them is one from Ren Crevel, who committed suicide in June 1935, dictum

a month after the exhibition in Lima opened, quoting Lautramont's

that "poetry must be made by all, not one:' The catalog flaunted quotations insulting the public, such as Francis Picabia's "Art is a pharmaceutical product

EXPOSICION DE
LAS OBRAS

JAIME CESAR WALDO GBRIELA CARLOS MARIA

DVOR MORO PARRAGUEZ RIV ADENEIRA SOrOMAYOR VALENC-IA

Fig.6. Cover of exhibition catalog (ca. 1935). de las obras Gabriela 5howing Csar Moro's painting

1935 Lima
PRECIO, 20 Ctvs.

Pietn (Pedestrian) From Exposicion

MalfO

de jaime

Ovor, Cesar Moro, Carlos Sotomayor.

Waldo Parraguez, Rivadeneira, (Lima: C.I.P.,

Maria Valencia, exh. cat.

1935).
Getty Research

Los Angeles, In5titute,

1397-768.

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for imbeciles" (fig. 7). Dada-style wrecking tactics are also evident in Moro's unsigned introductory text, which, rather than announcing the new enterprise

of surrealism, attacks the local art scene and a society and culture in Peru that more and more was taking on the "horrific" (horripilante) color of a church at

dusk. "We have the simple temerity to wish to shut off definitively the possibilities of success from every young person who wants to paint; we hope in this way to discredit painting in America .... This exhibition shows for the first time in Peru a collection of unchosen works intended to provoke the scorn and the anger of the people whom we despise and detest:'32 Moro is saying that he and his fellow exhibitors are against painting and against any claim made for art. 33 Moro was struggling not only against a highly conservative and oldThe introan attack on writer in

fashioned art academy but also against an eclectic avant-garde. duction he wrote for the exhibition catalog was, by implication, Vicente Huidobro, probably then the most prominent South America. Huidobro had long-standing

avant-garde

c6hnections

with the Parisian

Fig.7. Page from exhibition 5howing inscription by Moro. From Exposicion Waldo Parraguez, Rivadeneira. (Lima: de las obras Gabriela de Jaime Ovor, Cesar Moro, Carlos Sotomayor, catalog Francis Picabia'5 to Ren Crevel; text

slogan and Csar Moro's

Se abren, se cierran las exposiciones j se abren, s-e de.ran las ventanas que renuevan el aire. En el Per, dori~e todo se cierra: donde todo adquiere, ms y ms, un co~or de jgl'esla al crep'sculo, color particularmente horripihnte, tenemos nosotros la simple temeridad de querer cerrar definitivamente las po;sibliidades de xito a todo joven que desee pintar j esperamos desacreditar en tal forma la pintuOa e.~~ Am-ica, que n: uno solo de eSoOs bravos e intrpidos pintores pueda ya enfrentarse a la tela sentir la urgencia de mandar todo al Diablo y de hacer3e reemplazar PO~ un aspil'ador mecrico. Sin duda. conocemos bien nuestras Debilidades: alguien entre nosotros pinta todava impregnado de amor a la pintura, tal Oh'Ol eX'pementa, por !su parte, la necesidad malsana de firmar sus (?) obras j otros escojen sus colores; todos, en fin pinta~ mas en lugar ;de simplem~nte recoger basuras y hacerlas enmarcar lujosamente. Esta exp'osicin, mue~!"a 'sin emhargo, tal cual es, por pl"ime~ l'a vez en el Pero, una co!eccia sin: eleccin de obras destinads a provocar el desprecio y la clera de las gentes que desprecia~ mos y que detestamos. No tenemos ni el deseo ni, la sospecha de Gustar; sabemos que no esl!atmos sino con nosotros mis~ mos y con aquellos que quisieran hacerr:os creer que estn a nuestro lado; pero no hay que temer: los sabremos desenmascarar a su de'bido tiempo. Del ob'o . Jada estn los zumbones, los astutos, los sabios, los pelTOS guardianes, los artistas, los profesio nales de los vernissages, etc. etc. y si alguien tuvo la ingenua i:dea de hacernos servir para algo, de emplearnos en algo o de pedirnos algo, que se desengae y salga can toda la prisa de que sea capaz, a refrescarse en el, primer ;,brevadero que encuentre.

sm

Maria Valencia, exh. cal. C.I.P., 1935). Getty Research 1397-768. Los Angeles, Institute,

"WE WHO HAVE NEITHER CHURCH NOR COUNTRY"

27

avant-garde

and had been publishing

little reviews since the 1920S. He had

written the catalog for an exhibition showing the same group of artists (Dvor, Parraguez, Rivadeneira, and Valencia) at Santiago, Chile, in 1933. In the Santiago catalog-which contained many of the same works that Moro included in his Metal-Huidobro

Lima exhibition, such as Dvor's abstract collage-construction

is quoted as saying, "In art, natural forms do not interest us; what interests us are the forms of your spirit:'34 Moro's tirade is directed against such vague optimism about art's spiritual values, and he launched a blistering attack on Huidobro, accusing him of plagiarism and calling him a "nauseating literary puppet."35

Huidobro hit back in his little review Vital, June 1935, showering Moro, whom he referred to as "Don Cesar Quispez Morito de calcomania;' with homophobic insults ("piojo homosexual").36 In February 1936, Moro continued the battle with his pamphlet Vicente Huidobro; o, El obispo embotellado (Vicente Huidobro; or, The bottled bishop), describing his opponent a brother'37 Moro showed twelve collages in the 1935 Lima exhibition a distinctive form of collage-poem in combining and developed as "a cretin whose work is just

found images and texts

(fig. 8). In 1936-37, he composed a series of these in a student notebook, which remained, like so much ofhis work, unpublished in his lifetime.38 Constructing poems from found and chosen readymade among Dada and surrealist artists and poetssentences was quite widespread Breton recommended the tech-

nique of random assemblage of words, scraps ofheadlines,

and so on in his first

manifesto (Manifeste du surralisme, 1924; Manifesto of Surrealism, 1968). But Moro's collage-poems, with their rhythmic and elegant interspersing of image

fragments and pasted sentences, are particularly melding his dual gifts as poet and artist.

striking and often unsettling,

Moro's combative attitude toward local culture and art was combined with active protests against the Peruvian dictatorship and its connections with

European fascismo Moro and Westphalen joined a cell of intellectuals including Manuel Moreno Jimeno; in 1936, they founded the Comit de Amigos de los Defensores (CADRE), producing five issues of a bulletin attacking fascism in Peru and in Spain.39 As a result of their activities, de la Repblica Espanola

Westphalen was arrested and Moro fled to Mexico.

For the first few years in Mexico, Moro continued to pro mote surrealismo He collaborated with Westphalen, who was still in Lima, on the long-planned

review El uso de la palabra. When the review finally carne out, in December
1939, Moro was disappointed

by the way it looked. Being in Mexico, he had he had planned the juxtaposi-

been unable to oversee the design,. although tions of texts and photographs.

Moreover, the name had been stolen by a new

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review in Paris, L'usage de la parole. Moro wrote to Westphalen that they would have to change the title (evidently envisaging future issues), even though they had thought of the name first-it had been advertised on the back of Moro's

1935 exhibition catalog, itself reproduced

in Minotaure in 1936. It would, Moro feared, provide a great opportunity for Huidobro to accuse them of plagiarism.40 the surrealist dissidents who had quarreled with Breton and with whom Moro did not wish to be associated.41 "About Painting attacked indigenism, in Peru;' Moro's important text in El uso de la palabra,

Worse, the Paris review gathered together

in particular the fashion in Peru for images of the Indian at the time), "which the ruling class accepts in its

(to use the term common

houses of appallingly bad taste, as long as they come framed and without the peculiar smell of wool, which, according to this class, characterizes the Indians.

They really prefer the cadaverous smell given offby indigenist painting .... These paintings serve Aryan fat cats as proof of the supposed inferiority of the races of color:' Anyone who "dares to look at the world with eyes that are not those of a brave indigenist foreign-Ioving, painter or of a folkloric writer is immediately treated as

frenchified

and bitter enemy of the Indian, of this fabulous images Moro men-

cardboard myth that gives them a living:' The picturesque

tions exemplify the real cruelty with which the great misery of indigenous peoples-their complete ostracism and exploitation-is in his magazine Amauta, traduced on canvas

or on the pottery knickknacks Carlos Maritegui

sold to tourists. Like the Peruvian socialist Jos though with less faith in social with the actuality of the

and political reform, Moro contrasts the picturesque Indian "who works tirelessly in implacable

climates with a pathetic handful

of maize for food, [or] drowns in the refuge of cocaine and alcohol."42 The fashion for indigenism is, moreover, paired with ignorance of history; the

indigenist painters and their collectors are conscious only of the Inca period and know nothing of the ancient and highly refined coastal civilizations, preferring, if anything, "coastal primitivism" the Miracles. Moro inverts the values usually ascribed Western Catholicism-as the Miracles-is primitive to "primitive" and "civilized": such as processions of Our Lord of

expressed, for example, by the fiesta of Our Lord of in contrast with the Nazca or Moche civilization.

In so doing, he recalls Georges Bataille's strategy in the magazine Documents, whose radical challenge to the hierarchy of values that had invariably placed Western civilizations at the summit of human achievement had a harsher edge than the core surrealist magazines.43 Unl1ke Bataille, however, Moro feels absolutely no existential anguish about the absence of god and the absence of myth in the modern remains-the world. The past that haunts him is embodied art, the walls, the stones-of pre-Columbian in the physical
Fig.8. Csar Moro (Peruvian,

1903-56).
Untitled April (collage-poem), clippings on

1935, newspaper

and magazine cardstock,

30 x 21.1 cm (l13/4 x 8114 in.).

Los Angeles, Getty Re5earch

civilizations. Moro

Institute,

980029.

30

ADES

harbors no illusions about a revival (unlike the characters in D. H. Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent, who launch one) but honors "their exemplary art,

which, like the decapitated head of an animal, does not cease to threaten with the terrible power of its dreams the miserable reality that surrounds and spoils

it:'44 The poetic essay on the Coricancha, the Inca temple in Cuzco, that Moro wrote shortly after "About Painting in Peru;' meditates more directly on the

echoes of the wonderful past, from which people "turn their faces ... in order to lose ourselves fully in the banality of the Occident. All our Orient lost! "45The final paragraph invokes Breton's late- Dada text:

Leave everything ... Leave the substance [prey 1 for the shadow. Leave behind, if need be, your comfortable life and promising future. Take to the road.46

Moro wrote: "1 salute you, vanished

strength,

whose shadow 1 take for

reality. And, as is right, 1 let go the prey for the shadow. 1 salute only you, great shadow, strange to the country that saw my birth. You no longer belong to it, your domain is vaster, you inhabit the hearts of poets, you dampen the wings of the ferocious eyelids of the imagination:'47

El uso de la palabra had not reached Mexico in time for the Exposicin internacional del surrealismo, the major show that Moro, together with Breton and
Wolfgang Paalen, organized at the Galera de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City in 1940 (fig. 9). He wrote in desperation to Westphalen to send a copy-"to

see proof of our activity however small it may be!"48 The exhibition-built round Paalen's collection, with the addition of Mexican artists, including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo-had opened on 17 January: a private viewing "with a

totally mad and imbecile crowd, less reaction even, so far, than in Peru:'49 In the catalog, Rivera and Kahlo were listed among the surrealist artists, while

other Mexican painters in the exhibition, among them Moro's friends Agustn Lazo and Xavier Villaurrutia, were listed in a separate section. Clearly, this was not Moro's decision; Rivera and Kahlo had insisted on it: "You cannot imagine the fuss Diego has made, who, like Frida, has painted two enormous
Fig.9. Csar Moro in fron! of works by Wolfgang Paalen and Max Erns! at the Exposicin

canvases

and wants the best place ... and the idiotic titles of his paintings .... There were many unfortunate circumstances that caused Breton to fall into Rivera's trap:'50 The catalog, with ~ photograph by Manuel Alvarez Bravo on the cover,

internacional del surrealismo,

Galeria de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City, Mexico, Los Angeles, In5titute,2001.M.21 1940. Getty Re5earch

was denounced by the Mexican mural painter David Alfaro Siqueiros for the "aesthetic crime of Bretonism:' Moro's preface to the catalog was censored by the gallery, which asked him to suppress references to Spanish "barbarians"

"WE WHO HAVE NEITHER

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NOR COUNTRY"

31

(subsequently

restored) and to former surrealist Louis Aragon (presumably for reference to the 15 April1925 cover of La rvolution sur-

fear of offending his fellow Stalinist, Siqueiros), and to omit a paragraph on the end of Christianity-a

raliste, which announced "1925: fin de l'ere chrtienne."51 In the catalog he sent
to vVestphalen, Moro inscribed the missing paragraph:

At this precise moment the Christian era ends. A great wind has been unleashed, at whose origin we see the moral, poignant support of Sigmund Freud, which has just dispersed forever the props of Golgotha, and deathloving ivy devours the crosses where birds would never live. Surrealist clairvoyance situated the end of the Christian Era in 1925; in 1939 we need to remember this.52

32

ADES

Moro's catalog introduction continues the theme ofhis essay ''About Painting in Peru" and explicitly if vaguely links surrealism to the pre-Columbian past:

For the first time in centuries, we witness a heavenly combustion Mexico. A thousand tokens mingle and are seen in the conjugation stellations that renew the brilliant pre-Columbian

in of con-

night. The most pure made the pow-

night of the new continent where great dream potentialities

erful jaws of civilizations in Mexico and Peru clash together. Countries that keep, in spite of the invasion of the Spanish barbarians and their fol-

lowers of today, a thousand luminous points that must join very soon with the line of fire of international surrealism.53

It seemed as if the constellation Moro's introduction

of international

surrealists

invoked

in

was becoming a reality, though for tragic reasol1S. After along with many other artists
1940, Moro wrote, "we must

-- France fell to Germany in 1940, the surrealists, and intellectuals, were in danger. In September

snatch them from the hell in Europe, write to all officials and intellectuals, without mentioning surrealism; they should try to get Breton and Pierre Mabille to Mexico, Eluard and Pret to Lima:'54 In June 1941, Moro wrote to Westphalen that Breton, now in New York, would certanly come to live in Mexico. He

predicted that the painters Roberto Matta and Gordon Onslow- Ford, who had been close to Breton in France before the war, would come, too. They would join Paalen, Alice Rahon, and others, he believed, to form the nucleus of a reborn group that would also enjoy the support of artists and writers like Lola and Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Villaurrutia. Mexico would become the new

center for surrealist activities. This hope did not grow out of a pursuit of power on Moro's part; rather, it reflected his enthusiasm in a community oflike-minded at the prospect ofliving again

friends who all shared an abiding commitment

to surrealism's core beliefs: to poetry lived and the power of desire. Moro was bitterly disappointed when his utopian vision failed to materialize. Breton settled in New York, announced the new review VVV there, and reignited action across the globe, summoning collaborators and contributors of writers and artists. He nominated representatives asked to represent Mexico-something from a wide range

in each country; Moro was

he learned about, ironically, via a letter

from Breton to Wolfgang Paalen. It was ironic because the letter coincided with Paalen's decision to separate from surrealism and found his own review, Dyn.

Moro eventually sided with Paalen, although the latter urged him to think about his decision and gave him his liberty.55 Moro recommended felt distanced from the movement. that Westphalen

agree to be the surrealist representative in Peru. He himself, however, already

32

ADES

Moro's catalog introduction continues the theme of his essay ''About Painting in Peru" and explicitly if vaguely links surrealism to the pre-Columbian past:

For the first time in centuries, we witness a heavenly combustion

in

Mexico. A thousand tokens mingle and are seen in the conjugation of constellations that renew the brilliant pre-Columbian night. The most pure made the pow-

night of the new continent where great dream potentialities

erful jaws of civilizations in Mexico and Peru clash together. Countries that keep, in spite of the invasion of the Spanish barbarians and their fo1-

lowers of today, a thousand luminous points that must join very soon with the line of fire of international surrealism.53

It seemed as if the constellation Moro's introduction -

of international

surrealists

invoked

in

was becoming a reality, though for tragic reasons. After along with many other artists
1940, Moro wrote, "we must

France fell to Germany in 1940, the surrealists, and intellectuals, were in danger. In September

snatch them from the hell in Europe, write to all officials and intellectuals, without mentioning surrealism; they should try to get Breton and Pi erre Mabille to Mexico, Eluard and Pret to Lima:'54 In June 1941, Moro wrote to Westphalen that Breton, now in New York, wou1d certainly come to live in Mexico. He

predicted that the painters Roberto Matta and Gordon Onslow- Ford, who had been close to Breton in France before the war, would come, too. They would join Paalen, Alice Rahon, and others, he believed, to form the nucleus of a reborn group that would also enjoy the support of artists and writers like Lola and Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Villaurrutia. Mexico would become the new

center for surrealist activities. This hope did not grow out of a pursuit of power on Moro's part; rather, it reflected his enthusiasm in a community oflike-minded at the prospect ofliving again

friends who all shared an abiding commitment

to surrealism's core beliefs: to poetry lived and the power of desire. Moro was bitterly disappointed when his utopian vision failed to materialize. Breton set-

tled in New York, announced the new review VVV there, and reignited action across the globe, summoning collaborators and contributors of writers and artists. He nominated representatives asked to represent Mexico-something from a wide range

in each country; Moro was

he learned about, ironically, via a letter

from Breton to Wo1fgang Paalen. It was ironic because the letter coincided with Paalen's decision to separate from surrealism and found his own review, Dyn.

Moro eventually sided with Paa1en, although the latter urged him to think about his decision and gave him his liberty.55 Moro recommended that Westphalen

agree to be the surrealist representative in Peru. He himself, however, already felt distanced from the movement.

'WE WHO HAVE NEITHER

CHURCH

NOR COUNTRY"

33

Moro was aware that he had forfeited Breton's comradeship

by collaborat-

ing on Dyn. Breton was among those who had not thanked him for his recent book"he's probably annoyed that 1 collaborated on Dyn and refused to collabrather, that 1 never responded to his rather belated invitation

orate on IfVV -or,

to collaborate on VVV Braulio Arenas, Jorge Cceres, Abril have collaborated. It's unbelievable but it's a fact."56At the same time, Moro knew that Dyn could not replace surrealism, for which he retained a definitive admiration being thoroughly disillusioned by its dogmatic aspects.57 At the end of 1941, Moro (fig. 10) left Mexico City to stay with GOldon and Ruth Onslow- Ford, close allies of Paalen, in Ptzcuaro, where they were building a house. He worked on the garden, and the physicallabor helped take his mind
Fig. 10. Csar Moro in Mexico, December 1940. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2001. M.21.

even while

34

ADES

off the depressing things that weighed on him. His lover, Antonio Acosta, was ill and far away, and it was a time of terrible confusion, when the only certainty was that there would be no prolongation of what happened before; things would have to change, though how was anyone's guess. Surrealism seemed to belong to a different world: it was as though centuries had passed since the "avant-guerre" of two years earlier. '''Le cOtillustratif of surrealism;' he writes, "is completely over."58 Of course, the essential part of surrealism remained, but how could

he activate it anew? Like Pret, Moro believed there could be no return to old practices-but he had no clear idea about what to replace them with.59 He now abandoned the idea of surrealism as a collective. AH the surrealists, he believed, were still too close to the cataclysm of the war to see clearly. As for him, "Politics can never interest me again. 1 only believe in the individual ... politics has no armpits, so sex, no smell:' Rather than ideas, he himself had "only sensations:'60 "1 would like to do nothing, just read and painf'61

Moro had, therefore, already withdrawn

from surrealism by the time he pub-

lished his negative review ofBreton's book Arcane 17 (1944) in El hijo prdigo in
1945. Although Moro was highly critical of the book's single-minded

promotion 62 ofheterosexuality, that was not why he left the movement. It is interesting that

Moro and Roger Caillois, both early surrealist adherents in Paris and both active in Latin American avant -gardes, took utterly divergent paths in their respective critiques of surrealismo Caillois objected to the lyrical and poetic treatment of

the mind and the world. Breton, Caillois felt, protected rather than sought to unmask the mysterious and the marvellous, as he wrote in 1935 on resigning from the movement.63 Caillois took refuge from the war in Buenos Aires and was a regular contributor to Victoria Ocampo's journal Sur. He refused to publish a review of Moro's book of poems Le chdteau de grisou: "1 would have been surprised;' Moro wrote to Westphalen, "had 1 not long known that M. Caillois is the declared enemy of poetry and a pedant:'64 For Moro, what still mattered was the practice of poetry; the pretensions to scientific or pseudoscientific His own notion

experiment and investigation seemed increasingly redundant.

of poetry, however, had changed, and he no longer insisted on automatismo "Is poetry automatic? What a joke! One works and chooses the elements provided by automatism and not but absolutely not outside all moral or aesthetic preoccupations .... That is the misunderstanding surrealism perpetuates:'65

Moro may have been responding to what he regarded as a regressive move on the part of surrealism to reinstitute automatism-regressive, because the

movement had already opened so many other potential routes for experiment and expression. That he was still regarded as part of the broad surrealist community is clear from Pierre Mabille's 1945 text "Message personnel" (Personal

"WE WHO HAVE NEITHER

CHURCH NOR COUNTRY"

35

message). Breton's friend Mabille was a doctor, art lover, and anthropologist who had spent part of the war in Mexico. In his text, Mabille surveys the remnants ofthe surrealist communities scattered all over the world-Aim in Martinique, Csaire

Wifredo Lam in Cuba, Breton in New York, and so on-and

places Moro in Mexico with Leonora Carrington, Esteban Frances, Paalen, and Pret. "Cesar Moro has published a few collections of poems, of a very authentic sensibility, expressing the charm of his nature which is at once refined and intransigenf'66 a tantalizing Just before finally leaving Mexico to return to Peru, Moro gives glimpse of renewed communal activity. He and his old surreal-

ist comrades Leonora Carrington and Remedios are writing a novel togethervery amusing, he tells Westphalen, but unpublishable because the characters are too recognizable.67 Moro's final engagement when he responded-together nonsurrealists, Lvi -Straussincluding with surrealism carne at the very end of his life, fellow travelers, and

with many surrealists,

Georges Bataille and the anthropologist published

Claude

to the questionnaire

by Breton in L' art magique. to the movement's

Moro's words still ring with his personal fundamental ideas:

commitment

Neither science nor religion-as

they seem to me-suffice

for the need to

express, to realize, desire, art alone being able to establish the unconditional, nonutilitarian irrational. Essentially unreadable, one can only get and its attraction, alas, is not as violent as it once

close to it intermittently,

was. Artist and magician are divorced .... 1wish for the rehabilitation of magic, which would substitute for the

H bomb and presidents of republics an unexpected world of interferences and real adventure.68

Notes All translations of quotations are my own, unless otherwise noted.

1. Jason Wilson, "The Sole Surrealist Poet: Csar Moro (1903-1956):' in Stephen M. Hart and David Wood, eds., Essays on Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Peruvian Literature and Culture (London: Centre of Cesar Vallejo Studies, 2010). 2. Many of Moro's letters are held in the Emilio Adolfo Westphalen Papers regarding Surrealism in Latin Ameriea (2001.M.21) at the Getty Researeh Institute, Los Angeles (hereafter Westphalen Papers). Westphalen published a seleetion of those written after 1943, but not those between 1938 and 1943. 3 Moro's Mexiean lover, Antonio Aeosta, was married and in the army for mueh of the time Moro knew him. Antonio was the sole foeus of Moro's desire during the years he spent in Mexieo. Moro's letters frequently dwell on his longings,

36

ADES

disappointments,

and occasional ecstasy at their infrequent

encounters.

On the

cover of Moro's book of poems Lettre d'amoUl; which presents the words "love letter" repeatedly inscribed in many languages by Moro's friends, Antonio's handwriting is in the center (see fig. 4 in the essay by Westphalen, this volume), though Moro admitted that his lover understood little of the book's contents. enthusiastically to his In 1944, Antonio had a son, whose arrival Moro announced

Westphalen. Moro's homosexuality has been suggested as one reason he distanced himself from surrealism, but this is not borne out by the facts. Throughout writings-many of which, admittedly, remained unpublished in his lifetime-

Moro maintains a critique of "normative sexuality" that was ahead of its time. 4 Moro was included in the first major postwar anthology of surrealist poetry, JeanLouis Bdouin, La posie surraliste (Paris: ditions Seghers, 1964). Interestingly, surrealists, on the one hand, and Peruvian and Latin American critics, on the other, have come together to rescue and promote Moro's work. See, for example, the 1973 exhibition in Lima, Homenaje a Csar Moro (Tribute to Csar Moro), organized by Edouard Jaguer and the Phases group, as wel! as the fol!owing publications: Yolanda Westphalen, ed., Csar Moro y el surrealismo en Amrica Latina: Actas del coloquio internacional (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la UNMSM,
200S); Emilio Westphalen, Escritos varios sobre arte

y poesa (Mexico City: Fondo

de Cultura Econmica, 1997); Carlos Estela et al., Amour termina la tranquilidad;'

a Moro:

Homenaje a

Csar Moro (Lima: Signo Lotfago, 2003); Andr Coyn, "El arte empieza donde in Con los anteojos de azufre: Csar Moro artista plstico, and Andr Coyn, "Csar exh. cat. (Lima: Centro Cultural de Espai.a, 2000);

Moro: Surrealismo y poesa;' in Joseph Alonso, Daniel Lefort, and Jos A. Rodrguez Garrido, eds., Avatares de surrealismo en el Per y en Amrica Latina
=

Avatars du surralisme au Prou et en Amrique latine (Lima: Institut

Franyais d'tudes Andines, 1992).

S Wilson, "The Sole Surrealist Poet;'

n
ms. poem, box 1, folder 6, Getty Research Institute, Los

6. Csar Moro, "Nous qui n'avons ni glise ni patrie ... ;' unpublished n.d., Csar Moro Papers (980029), Angeles (hereafter Moro Papers).

7 Moro exhibited at the Cabinet Maldoror in Brussels in 1926, according to his

curriculum vitae (Moro Papers), and in a group show in Paris, Paris-Amrique Latine, also in 1926. See note 16, below. 8. See Andr Breton, Misere de la posie: "L: affai;eAragon" devant l'opinion publique (Paris: ditions Surralistes, 1932), a tract signed by surrealists including Moro, and Andr Breton et al., La mobilisation contre la guerre nest pas la paix: Les raisons de notre adhsion au Congres international contre la guerre (Paris: Imp. Union, 1932), a surrealist tract largely drawn up by Crevel, siged by the surrealists, on the occasion of the Communist Party Congress in Amsterdam. we believe, that you 9 "Here is the tract with your postscript. ... It is very important,
17 June 1933, Moro Papers, box
10.

make sure some of these leaflets are sent to Peru." Andr Breton to Csar Moro,
1.

This enqute, unlike 111anyof those organized by the surrealists, was internal, with frol11nine to fourteen respondents, basically the kernel of the group. 1he "experimental research" was focused on, among other things, "1he irrational knowledge

"WE WHO HAVE NEITHER

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NOR COUNTRY"

37

of an object (the seer's crystal ball);' and "The irrational possibilities of penetration and orientation in de Chirico's painting Tlle Enigma of a Day," which included the questions "Where is the sea?"; "Where would you make love?"; and "\Vhere would you masturbate?" au service de la rvolution,
ll.

See "Recherches exprimentales;'

Le surralisme

no. 6 (1933): 10-24. au service de la rvolution, Editions Papers, La

Csar Moro, "Renomme de l'amour:' Le surralisme Nicolas Flamel, 1933),29

no. 5 (1933): 38. Csar Moro, untitled poem, Violette Nozies(Brussels:

12. Csar Moro to Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, 8 February 1940, Westphalen

box

l.

13. Andr Breton, "Pourquoi je prends la direction de La rvolution

surraliste,"

rvolution

surraliste, no. 4 (1925): 1-3 Le surralisme au service de la rvolution, 7,

14. Moro Papers. 15. Salvador Dal, "Objets surralistes:'

no. 3 (1931): 16.

16. F. M., "On demande de la peinture de sauvages:' Le bulletin de la vie artistique

no. 15 (1926): 234-35 F. M. surveys young painters from South America in Paris. Having praised the art of the Incas and of the Aztecs, the review continues: Southern America is not just one huge necropolis. A country that lives well, is very modern, and animated by an aesthetic effervescence cedes nothing to ours .... But it's all Peru that sings in the watercolors and paintings of the delicious Csar Moro, the handsome colonial Peru of viceroys and chariot of the Holy Sacrament, the Peru of cholos and coquettes swathed in the black cloak that makes such a fresh contrast with their pink skirts, and also the older Peru of kings dressed in feathers, the Peru of the Indians of the interior, weeping their decadence to the sound of the heartbreaking queno. It's with this young artist, like an irresistible source of freshness that springs, today, between the rigid quays of a new conception, sober and strict, born ofhis cult for Picasso. A flowery geometry. In the same issue of Le bulletin, a long article by 'H' titled "La peinture et le surralisme" (pp. 229-32) is probably a response to the first surrealist exhibition, at Galerie Pierre in Paris, 1925. In a sympathetic and largely positive review, 'H' admits to having previously confused the painters with Paul luard and Breton: "one confused their associated names in an atmosphere of heroism, scandal, and poetri' It ends, having noted possible weaknesses following the defection of Max Ernst and Jon Mir and the loss of Giorgio de Chirico, by quoting Breton: "we are 110t in literature and in art" (see note 18, below).
17 F. M., "On demande:' 234-35. 18. Surrealism was defined by Breton in his 1924 Manifeste

du surralisme

as "Pure

psychic automatism, by which it is in tended to express, either verbally, or in writing, or in any other way, the true functioning of thought. 111edictation of thought in the absence of any control exerted by reason, and outside any aesthetic or moral considerations:' Andr Breton, Manifeste du surralisme: Poisson soluble (Paris: of Surrealism, transo ditions du Sagittaire, 1924), 42. 111istranslation by the author. For English translations of all the manifestoes, see Andr Breton, Manifestoes Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1969).

38

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No methods were proposed by which the surrealist artists were to produce work "automatically;' and each developed distinctive forms of automatism, such as Andr Masson with his ink automatic drawings, or Max Ernst's frottage. Automatism was far from being the only direction surrealism took in the visual arts.
19 Andr Breton, "Le surralisme et la peinture;' (1926): 6. 20. Andr Breton, "Le surralisme et la peinture;' (1925): 29 21. Later, in Mexico,

pt. 3, La rvolution pt. La rvolution

surraliste,

no. 7

1,

surraliste, no. 4

he started taking drawing and painting lessons with his friend with

the Mexican artist and writer Agustn Lazo, and became preoccupied

the material elements of paintings. Looking back on surrealism, he wrote to Westphalen: "what 1reproach surrealist painting with, is the fact that it systematically forgot the painting element." Csar Moro to Emilio Adolfo Westphalen,
27 January 1947, Westphalen Papers, box 1. 22. Csar Moro, "Ces poemes et leur ombre consquente

/ et leur lumiere consans fin

squente sont ddis /

a Andr

Breton /

a Paul

Eluard / avec l'admiration

de / Csar Moro;' March-June 1934, unpublished

23 Maurice Henry to Csar Moro, 27 December

notebook;- Moro Papers, box 1. typescript, Moro Papers,

1933, Moro Papers, box 1.

24 Csar Moro, "Los anteojos de azufre;' 1934, unfinished

box 1. This was later published as Csar Moro, Los anteojos de azufre, ed. Andr Coyn (Lima: Ediciones Tigrondine, 1958); quotes are from the typescript.
25 Moro, "Los anteojos de azufre" (1934),3. 26. Moro, "Los anteojos de azufre" (1934), 2. 27- Csar Moro to Enrique Gmez-Correa,
10

December 1942, Enrique qmez-

Correa Papers (970015), box 1, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (hereafter Gmez-Correa Papers).
28. Moro Papers, box 29 Exposicion
1,

folder

12.

de las obras de Jaime Dvor, Cesar Moro, Waldo Parraguez,

Gabriela

Rivadeneira,
30. Exposicion

Carlos Sotomayor, Maria Valencia, exh. cat. (Lima: c.I.P., 1935). de las obras de Jaime Dvor ... Maria Valencia, n.p., cat. no. 32. and

31. Andr Breton, "What Tanguy Veils and Reveals" (1942), in idem, Surrealism

Painting (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 179.

32.

[Csar Moro Valencia, n.p.

l, untitled

text in Exposicion

de las obras de Jaime Dvor ... Maria in arranging

33 One of them, Mara Valencia, seems to have been instrumental

for the works to come from Chile; subsequently, several of the other exhibitors objected that they had not been consulted and would never have agreed to the exhibition had they known of the catalog's slant and Moro's attack (in the catalog) on Vicente Huidobro. It is interesting that the same artists, plus Sotomayor, showed later that year (December 1933) in Chile in association with the Uruguayan artist Joaqun Torres-Garca
34 Vicente Huidobro, quoted in Exposicin

rather than with surrealists.

19 al31 de Diciembre;

de Diciembre:

Mara Valencia, Gabriela Rivadeneira, (Santiago: n.p., 1933), n.p.

35 Csar Moro, "Aviso;' in Exposicion

Jaime DV01~ Waldo Parraguez,

exh. cat.

de las obras de Jaime Dvor ... Maria Valencia, n.p. [sic], contra los

36. Vicente Huidobro, "Don Csar Quspez, Morito de calcomania

"WE WHO HAVE NEITHER

CHURCH NOR COUNTRY"

39

cadveres, los reptiles;' Vital, no. 3 (1935): 3.

37. Csar Moro,

Vicente Huidobro; o, El obispo embotellado (Lima: n.p.,

pamphlet with contributions

1936), 3. This

was a self-published

by Westphalen, Rafo Mndez,

et al., created in February 1936 and republished in the portfolio Csar Moro et al., El uso de la palabra & Vicente Huidobro; o, El obispo embotellado, ed. David Ballardo and Walter Sanseviero (Lima: Sur Libreria Anticuaria, 2003). The more long-Iasting damage was almost certainly felt by Moro, who lacked Huidobro's eclectic network of support; see also Wilson, "The Sole Surrealist Poet;' 80.
38. Csar Moro, "Raphael;' 1936-37, notebook, Westphalen

Papers; subsequently

published in Csar Moro, Raphael, transo Armando Rojas and Ricardo SilvaSantisteban (Lima: Universidad de Lima, 1991).
39. See Kent Leslie Dickson, "Csar Moro and Xavier Villaurrutia:

The Politics in

Eros;' (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2005), 112-17. The situation in Peru was oppressive; the dictator, General Osear Benevides, supported Franco's fascist rebellion in Spain and had invited Italian fascist advisers to instruct the Peruvian police force on suppression of dissent. In 1936, national elections were annulled. Moro joined the Comit de-Amigos de los Defensores de la Repblica Espanola (CADRE) and published in its Boletn de los Amigos

de los Defensores de la Repblica Espaola: "To help distribute this pamphlet is a

cultural duty in the face of the barbarism and oppression that blind our country. Intellectuals, workers, students for a united front against the murderous fascism of Spain, conqueror of Ethiopia, persecutor of the Jews, and enemy to the death of culture and democraci' Xavier Villaurrutia;'
40.

Csar Moro, quoted in Dickson, "Csar Moro and

1March

115 (author's translation). 1940, Westphalen Papers, box 1.

Csar Moro to Emilio Adolfo Westphalen,

41. Csar Moro to Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, 42.

May 1940, Westphalen Papers, box 1.

Csar Moro, "A propsito de la pintura en el Peru;' El uso de la palabra 1 (1939): 3.

El uso de la palabra was a single-issue journal published in Lima. A facsimile was

later published in the portfolio Csar Moro et al., El uso de la palabra & Vicente

Huidobro; o, El obispo embotellado, ed. David Ballardo and Walter Sanseviero

(Lima: Sur Libreria Anticuaria, 2003).
43 Bataille masterminded

and published regular, shocking articles in the magazine

Documents (Paris, 1929-30). See Dawn Ades and Simon Baker, eds., Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
44

Moro, "A propsito de la pintura en el Peru;' 7. the Golden Quarter ofthe City;' Dyn, nos. 4-5 (1943):

45 Csar Moro, "Coricancha, 73-n 46.

Andr Breton, "Lchez tout;' Littmture, n.s., no. 2 (1922): 10; translated by Mark Polizzotti as "Leave Everything;' in Andr Breton, The Lost Steps (Lincoln: Univ. ofNebraska Press, 1997), 77-79.
75.
==

Les pas perdus

47 Csar Moro, "Coricancha;' 48.

Csar Moro to Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, 19 February 1940, Westphalen Papers, box 1. Csar Moro to Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, 19 February 1940, Westphalen Papers, box
1. 1.

49

50. Csar Moro to Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, 27 January 1940, Westphalen Papers, box