In 1916, a trainee doctor befriended a wounded young soldier in a hospital in Nantes. André Breton was working in the neurological ward and reading Freud. Jacques Vaché was a war interpreter, moving across the front between the Allied positions and disrupting where he could; he once collected cast-off uniforms from different armies, including enemy forces, and sewed them together to make his own “neutral” costume. He sent Breton letters describing his “comatose apathy” and indifference to the conflict, though, he wrote, “I object to dying in wartime”.
Weeks after the Armistice, Vaché killed himself in a hotel room. Breton hailed him “the deserter from within” and one of the key inspirations for “The Surrealist Manifesto”, published in Paris in 1924.
This slim volume turned out to be the most influential artistic pronouncement of the century. Breton argued that rational realpolitik had created the catastrophe of the first world war. Championing the irrational, the subconscious, dream states — “pure psychic automatism” — he called for a revolution of the mind: “thought dictated in the absence of all control exercised by reason.”
Is a departure a disruption? One can depart the norms of art without disrupting the norms of art as the latter would seem to require some exertion of force or participation in. If you have no concerns, aesthetic or moral, it doesn’t really seem like you’re participating.
Disruption is a term that is in vogue at the moment and so appeals to headline writers. The same question could be asked In most of the situations in which it is used today, IMHO.
I would very much expect that if it had been an ‘in’ term at the time, it would have been applied to the movement by contemporary copywriters.
However, in bringing the unconscious to the fore in one form or another, I would say that surrealism was at the very least part of a wider movement that did very much disrupt and transform the arts permanently, though it was probably Freud and Jung who were the key disruptors in that regard.