“I described Surrealism as a movement which had an enthusiasm of its own,
which tried to encompass a series of very different manifestations of life,
from poetry to love, from imagination to humor, from revolt to dream,
from the indispensability of social revolution to the breaching of all dams
to creation.”

Marko Ristić, On Diaries, on Continuity, on

Surrealism and on the Wind, 1963.

The third and last, 1932, issue of the magazine Surrealism Here and Now marks the end of some, primarily collective, activities of the Serbian Surrealists which were clearly ideologically oriented towards “social revolution.” The Surrealist movement, as known, came to be politicized already after Breton’s Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929), with the about–turn in Serbian Surrealism being, albeit only partly, associable with Ristic’s and Popovic’s positions presented in the Outline for a Phenomenology of the Irrational (1931) and Ristic’s and Bor’s theses in the book Anti–zid (Anti–Wall) (1932).

In fact, already the second issue of NDIO differed from the previous one in terms of concept, so that instead of photomontages, drawings and pictures, it carried photographs taken over from Russian revolutionary publications: Skidanje krstova sa Kremlja (Taking Down the Crosses from the Kremlin), and the next issue: Deca sama sa masinom (Children Alone with a Machine) and Masta u sluzbi propagande (Imagination in the Service of Propaganda), under the joint title Nadrealisticki elementi u modernom drustvenom zivotu (Surrealist Elements in Modern Social Life).

It was at that time that NDIO, as a Surrealist publication, partly followed the concept of Stozer (The Pivot), a left–oriented revolutionary journal. Speaking of ideological parallelism, it is interesting to note that, in the same year (1932), The Pivot also borrowed photographs from the book La Russie au travail. In the wake of such major ideological realignment after the Congress in Kharkov, some of the representatives of Surrealism rallied, one last time, in 1936, around the editorial office of the journal Nasa stvarnost (Our Reality). Ideological misunderstandings from the past were also reflected on art, and Djilas, for instance, reproached Ristic for having written a laudatory essay on Picasso, having thus “undermined the new realism in painting.” In its twilight, Surrealism sought in vain to convince the untrusting left of its ideological correctness and social commitment. And how very far removed it itself was in that way from its initial positions is perhaps best illustrated by Aragon’s thesis from the 1920’s: “The thought of any human activity makes me laugh.”