All posts tagged Paul Delvaux
Surrealism by Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy (2004)
SURREALISM. Noun: Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, or otherwise, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral considerations.
(First Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924)
One of German publisher Taschen's 'Basic Art' movement series, this 95-page-long, mid-size art book consists of a series of key Surrealist art works, prefaced by a handy ten-page introduction, complete with funky timeline of historical events (e.g. 1913 – world's first domestic refrigerator sold in Chicago!).
The main body of the text consists of 34 double-page spreads, each one displaying a major Surrealist painting on the right, and a page of commentary about the artist – with their biography, photo and interpretation of the work – on the left-hand page.
The artists are presented alphabetically, not chronologically, so the commentary on them and their pictures jumps about a bit in time and space, in a pleasantly random, surreal kind of way. They are:
Hans Arp (1 painting)
Hans Bellmer (1)
Brassaï (1 photo)
Giorgio de Chirico (2)
Salvador Dalí (5)
Paul Delvaux (1)
Max Ernst (4)
Wifredo Lam (1)
René Magritte (4)
André Masson (1)
Matta (1)
Joan Miró (3)
Meret Oppenheim (1)
Man Ray (1 photograph)
Yves Tanguy (2 paintings)
As this list shows, Salvador Dalí emerges as the single biggest contributor to the Surrealist 'look'.
Like other books on the subject, the excellent introduction has problems defining precisely what Surrealism was, because its definitions, ideas and embodiments changed and evolved over the key years between the First Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 and the outbreak of war in 1939.
From this account I took that Surrealism is 'a philosophical and artistic approach which vehemently rejects the notion of the Rational Mind and all its works'. For Surrealists, the True Mind, true human nature – 'the true function of thought' – is profoundly irrational.
The Surrealists thought the Rational Mind formed the basis of 'bourgeois' society, with its moral and sexual repressiveness, its worship of work and money, its fetishisation of capitalist greed which had led both to the stifling conformity of Western society and to a series of petty wars over colonies which had themselves led up to the unprecedented calamity of the First World War.
In the Surrealists' opinion, this entire mindset had proved to be a ghastly mistake. The Surrealists thought that we had to reject it lock stock and barrel by returning to the pure roots of human nature in the fundamentally irrational nature of the human mind, liberating thought from all censorship and superficial, petty morality, seeking to capture 'the true function of thought' and creativity through the exploration of the fortuitous and the uncontrolled, the random and the unexpected, through dreams and coincidences.
The first Surrealist magazine was titled La Révolution surréaliste (1924 to 1929) not because it espoused a communist political line, but because it thought that Surrealist writing and art would, by its very nature, reveal to readers and viewers the true nature of unbounded thought and lead to a great social transformation.
Strategies of Surrealist writers
The writers who initiated the movement (André Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos) tried to get at and reveal 'the true function of thought' using a number of strategies.
Free association In 1919 Breton and Soupault spent days taking it in turns to free associate words and sentences, while the other scribbled down the results – producing monologues 'without any intervention on the part of the critical faculties, a monologue unencumbered by the slightest inhibition'. The results were published in 1920 in a work of 'fiction', The Magnetic Fields, the first Surrealist text.
Automatic writing Later, in the mid-1920s, they experimented with the ability to go into a sort of trance or half-asleep state and then write the mind's thoughts, similarly 'unencumbered by inhibition'. The poet Robert Desnos turned out to be the best at this – he could put himself into a trance-like, sleep-like state but nonetheless write reams of text – to everyone's amazement. There are photos of him doing it.
Transcribing the mad Breton was a trainee doctor and towards the end of the war worked with shell-shocked soldiers, some of whom had gone completely mad. With this experience and training, it's odd that he didn't pursue the ravings of the mad in greater detail during the 1920s. Even Freud was forced to amend his theories in light of the universal incidence of shell shock, post traumatic stress disorder and so on among Great War soldiers. So it's genuinely surprising that there isn't more about war and madness in Surrealism (not in any of the books I've read, anyway).
Compare and contrast with the traumatic war art of the Surrealists' German contemporaries, Otto Dix or George Grosz.
Paranoiac-critical method It was left to Salvador Dalí, who only joined the movement in the late 1920s, to undertake a (sort of) exploration of madness. Dalí exploited his own florid psychological issues – hysteria, panic attacks, delusions – into a system he grandly titled the 'Paranoiac-critical method'.
It was never exactly clear what he meant by this, but one definition he gave defined it as a 'spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.'
In practice this meant cultivating a state of mind in which he was open to the multiple meanings of objects, receptive to visual puns, where one object turns into another object which turns into another object, presenting a kind of vertigo of endless transmutations.
Maybe the most famous example is the image of melting clocks. This came to him at the end of a dinner as he sat watching the cheese board and some super-ripe camembert cheeses drooping and oozing over the edge of the plate. In a flash he saw clock faces, melting clock faces, in the round cheeses, and rushed home to paint them. (At least, that's the story he tells in his often unreliable memoirs.)
The persistence of memory by Salvador Dalí
(I hadn't realised till I read this book that the slug-like thing on the floor of this famous painting is a self-portrait. If you rotate the image through 45 degrees you can see Dalí's big nose pointing to the left and that the fringe of hairs are the eyelashes of his closed eye. This 'self-portrait as a slug' appears in a number of early paintings – look out for the eyelashes.)
Strategies of Surrealist painters
We know that the artists who joined the group at first struggled to compete with the 'pure' automatism of their writer colleagues. After all the ability to free associate words and text is a pretty cheap and easy technique, difficult to replicate with oil paints and brushes.
Automatic drawing Early member André Masson simply free-associated his drawings, letting his pen wander over the surface of paper or canvas, drawing inconsequential lines, dots and squiggles. Many of these were saved and recorded but it's difficult to get too excited by them.
Automatic Drawing (1924) by André Masson
Interesting up to a point, but you can see how after a certain number of these you might get bored. Is this all the Unconscious had to say?
Collage Max Ernst was a member of the Cologne Dada group when he discovered the hallucinatory power of cutting up graphic elements from newspapers, magazines, adverts and so on and sticking them together in strange combinations.
Illustration from A week of kindness by Max Ernst (1934)
More than letting the pen or brush wander at random, it is this idea of the bizarre yoking-together of elements from different spheres, realms or discourses, the notion of strange and unexpected combinations, which lies at the heart of Surrealist art.
(The art of jarring juxtapositions is a technique Dalí would bring to a kind of cartoon, fluent perfection in Surrealist objects like the famous lobster telephone of 1936.)
Max Ernst emerges as the most prolific innovator among Surrealist artists: he went on to develop a number of other techniques designed either to remove the artist from the process of creation, or to fully incorporate elements of chance and randomness – both with the aim of getting at 'the true function of thought':
frottage – The technique of taking a rubbing from an uneven surface to form the basis of a work of art. In frottage, the artist takes a pastel or pencil or other drawing tool and makes a rubbing over an uneven surface. The drawing can be left as it is or used as the basis for further refinement.
grattage – Laying a canvas prepared with a layer of oil paint over a textured object and then scraping the paint off to create an interesting and unexpected surface.
decalcomania – Applying paint to paper then folding it, applying pressure, and unfolding the paper to reveal a mirror pattern, then turning the resulting patterns into landscapes and mythical creatures. A kind of Rorshach diagram, with elaborations.
Biomorphic shapes Much Surrealist art uses existing objects and motifs from the real world, albeit placed in unexpected combinations, but there also developed a whole sub-set of Surrealist art which explored shapes and patterns for their own sake, creating a whole new visual vocabulary of the strange and uncanny. Klingsöhr-Leroy says this type of exploration distinguishes the first wave of Surrealist painters – Masson, Miró, Arp and Tanguy.
Azure Day by Yves Tanguy (1937)
Dreamlike serenity Although the writers often invoked 'revolution', 'overthrow' and 'violence', there is a whole strand of Surrealist art which is the exact opposite, creating a dreamlike sense of stasis. Think of the mysterious empty cityscapes of de Chirico, the somnambulistic people in Paul Delvaux or the apparently relaxed way the figures in Magritte paintings blankly accept the oddest apparitions.
Klingsöhr-Leroy Cathrin says dream paintings are more characteristic of the painters who joined the movement later on, like Magritte and Dalí. And contrary to all Surrealism's revolutionary rhetoric, many of these works were, by the time I was growing up in the 1970s if not before, best-selling posters, calm and bright and pretty on the walls of the hated 'bourgeoisie'.
The 'Second Surrealist Manifesto' of 1929 was a lot fiercer in tone. I've read various reasons for this, including Breton's growing involvement with Communism or his own personal life being in disarray. The Second Manifesto notoriously accompanied the expulsion of a number of writers from the movement, angrily denouncing them for abandoning the cause.
But, on the positive side, it also expanded the movement's terms of reference by namechecking medieval alchemists, drawing a parallel between their arcane quests for knowledge and the Surrealist investigations. And it introduced a distinct new idea, that of exploring 'the Surreal object' – using art or writing to reveal 'the remarkable symbolic life of quite ordinary, mundane objects'.
To no artist is this more applicable than Magritte. What could be more normal than his apples and clouds? Or, in the way he deploys them, more disturbing?
The Son of Man by Rene Magritte (1946)
Naked women Coming from the generation born around 1900, all these men had been brought up in a traditional Roman Catholic society which was staggeringly repressive about sex.
When they looked for the aspect of 'bourgeois' society which would be easiest to provoke, or when they delved into themselves to try and identify their deepest unconscious urges, or when they read any of Freud's numerous writings about the Unconscious – everywhere they looked, the Surrealists tended to find sex sex sex.
Hence, the most tiresome element of Surrealism, which is the endless images of naked women. I expected sex-mad Dalí would be the most guilty party, but they were all at it – bosoms and fannies as images of 'liberation'.
La Poupee by Hans Bellmer (1935)
Nude by Brassaï (1933)
Approaching puberty by Max Ernst (1921)
The Mystery of the Ordinary by Rene Magritte (1926-1938)
The Eternal Evidence by René Magritte (1930)
Rape by René Magritte (1935)
Representation by Rene Magritte (1937)
Le violin d'Ingres by Man Ray (1924)
For all of them the female body, depicted realistically, or chopped up, or morphing into abstract shapes, was a constant source of inspiration.
Should it be? If feminists had their way, would male artists be allowed to charge the female body with all kinds of 'profound' meanings, as the repository of 'fertility', 'sensuality', 'sexuality', 'mystery', 'consolation', 'depravity' – all the hackneyed attributes of the famous madonna-whore complex, plus many more?
It's partly the tedium of looking at yet another pair of bare boobs which draws me to more abstract artists like Paul Klee. He had a vast amount of beautiful, strange ideas to express, and not a bosom in sight.
Room perspective with inhabitants, 1921
Primitivism In a way it's surprising that there isn't more evidence of 'primitivism' in Surrealist art i.e. the use of images and motifs from the supposedly more 'primitive' cultures of Africa or Oceania. According to Sue Roe's book In Montmartre, there's some debate about who introduced the taste for African and Oceanic fetishes and statues into avant-garde circles, but it was certainly present by around 1905.
So by 1925 it was a very well-established taste, with most artists having 'primitive' masks scattered about among the other bric-a-brac in their studios. But looking at some of the images in this book the main conclusion is that the cult of weird faces and masks had become so diverse that, by the 1930s and 40s, it is difficult to tell where 'primitivism' ended and a kind of science fiction weirdness began (the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, was published in 1926).
Capricorn by Max Ernst (1948)
The Surrealist Revolution?
How tiresome modern artists and modern art experts are with their persistence in thinking that modern art 'undermines' or 'subverts' 'bourgeois' values.
It's hard for us, nowadays, to recreate just what the 'bourgeoisie' ever meant. The word derives from mid-19th century France. Are we to think of the narrow-minded townsfolk in novels by Flaubert or Zola? Men who shave, dress 'correctly', have sensible jobs as doctors and lawyers and bankers?
Looking at all the photos of Surrealist artists in this book, one of the main visual impressions is how very smart and shaved and formal they themselves look, often in a nice suit, with white shirt and dark tie.
Living in 2018 London packed with stubbly dudes with nose piercings carrying huge backpacks, it's difficult to imagine these ancient, respectable-looking men ever subverting anything.
It's very hard to recapture 'the shock of the new' so long afterwards. The 1930s when Surrealist artworks began to be widely exhibited, were 20 years after Cubism had 'shocked the world', getting on for 30 years since the Fauves scandalised Paris, 40 years since Symbolist and decadent art upset newspaper columnists and 70 years after Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe 'scandalised' Paris.
You have to wonder who these people are, who keep on being scandalised by modern art. Hadn't they read about the previous scandal? And the one before that? And the one before that?
Klingsöhr-Leroy tells an anecdote about when the Surrealist gang broke up a literary banquet being held in honour of the rather conventional poet Saint-Pol-Roux at the Closerie des Lilas bar on 2 July 1925. Tables were overturned, crockery broken, the gang chanted 'anti-bourgeois' slogans, blows were exchanged. She goes on to comment:
The incident is characteristic of the Surrealists' anarchic and anti-bourgeois attitudes. Their actions were an attack on the established bourgeois order, designed to undermine all that was generally accepted and revered by respectable society. (p.17)
Really? A punch-up in a café? Undermining the whole of bourgeois society? I don't think so, and the fact that, 80 years later, Klingsöhr-Leroy thinks this, undermines your confidence in her sense of history or perspective. Choosing a punch-up in a bar as an outstanding example of their 'anarchic and anti-bourgeois' values somehow reduces the whole movement to a set of schoolboy pranks.
In fact the the Surrealists' 'anarchic' and 'anti-bourgeois' behaviour and attitude sound like standard undergraduate high jinks to me, precisely the kind of 'wild' behaviour that is expected of upper or upper-middle-class 'rebels' and bohemians, wild and crazee artists (all men, of course) who, in the final analysis, depend on money and connections (or in the Surrealists' case) on rich patrons and rich buyers, to bail them out.
1. The connection between money and art was one of the messages of Sue Roe's gossipy book about Picasso and Matisse, In Monmartre, set in the 1900s and explaining how the competition between the two Great Men of Modern Art was not only to find new artistic avenues of expression but, just as importantly, to curry favour with rich collectors and influential dealers. By 1910 both Picasso and Matisse had good working relationships with both and began to flourish.
2. In her book, Surreal Lives, Ruth Brandon writes a simple and devastating sentence which ought to be inscribed at the entrance to every modern art gallery in the world and tattooed on the forehead of every modern art scholar and curator.
Art is a luxury product, and artists rely for their living on rich patrons. (p.326)
3. I've known about Luis Buñuel's 'subversive' early films Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or for forty years or more, but it was only when I read Brandon's book that I learned about the key role played in funding them by the wealthy French aristocrat Arthur Anne Marie Charles, Vicomte de Noailles. According to Wikipedia:
Charles financed Man Ray's film Les Mystères du Château de Dé (1929), which centers around Villa Noailles in Hyères. He also financed Jean Cocteau's film Le Sang d'un Poète (1930) and Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalì's L'Âge d'Or (1930). In 1930 Charles made possible the career of Dalí by purchasing in advance a large work for 29,000 francs, thus enabling Dalí and Gala to return from Paris to Port Lligat and devote themselves to his art.
The take-home message from all these books is that art – no matter how ostensibly 'revolutionary' and 'subversive' – depends on rich patrons to make it possible. Radical art may upset conservative newspapers and, through them, the great philistine middle classes. But it doesn't 'subvert society'; the opposite: it is the plaything of the rich.
There is more 'radical' art about than ever before in the history of the world, and yet finance capitalism has never been more entrenched and powerful.
Because their art revelled in images of sex and death, because they behaved like spoilt schoolboys, because they were sponsored by aristocrats, and because they had absolutely no understanding of the fatal consequences of revolutionary politics, it is difficult to disagree with the Soviet Commissar who pointed out that Surrealism itself represented 'the ultimate degeneration of the French bourgeoisie' i.e. the complete opposite of the values Breton claimed for it.
In any case, the Surrealists soon recognised the essentially luxury nature of their output. Just six years later, in 1933, the group launched a new, glossy Surrealist magazine, Minotaur. It was limited to 3,000 copies, intended for connoisseurs and collectors only and, as the Hungarian photographer Brassaï put it, was priced far
beyond the reach of proletarian purses and could only serve a milieu of rich, titled snobs, the first patrons and collectors of Surrealist works. (quoted page 23)
'Rich, titled snobs, the first patrons and collectors of Surrealist works.' Precisely.
Dalí grasped this from the start and went to America to become rich – which is why the others came to loathe him. Like Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst in later generations, he realised that the best art is business. In fact art is a form of business, it's just another specialist provider of luxury objects to the rich.
The artistic legacy
Surrealist art didn't overthrow anything, but its explorations and experiments opened the way for an entirely new visual language to be created, for loads of individual masterpieces, styles and looks to be developed, which filtered through into all aspects of design, fashion, advertising, film and TV.
It became an imaginative climate where we still, to a large extent, live, strangely appropriate for the disjointed and technology-driven lives of the 20th century Western world.
And, having read so much about the earnestness and seriousness with which Breton set up his Institute of Surrealist Research, with which he and colleagues carried out their automatic writing and painting and so on – I wonder if the movement made any lasting scientific discoveries. Are psychologists, linguists or experts in perception and cognition aware of any lasting scientific facts which came out of this explosion of ideas and researches into the unconscious workings of the mind, about language and images and the unconscious?
Or was it all an enormous, delightful, argumentative and hugely influential but, in scientific terms, inconsequential game?
Surrealism on Amazon
Full list of Surrealist techniques on Wikipedia
Related art reviews
Jean Arp: The Poetry of Forms @ Turner Contemporary (November 2017)
Dalí / Duchamp @ the Royal Academy (November 2017)
Related book reviews
Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917-45 by Ruth Brandon (1999)
Nadja by André Breton (1928)
Surrealism by Michael Robinson (2005)
Dalí: Genius, obsession and lust by Ralf Schiebler (1996)
Marcel Duchamp by Dawn Ades, Neil Cox and David Hopkins (1999)
Salvador Dalí: Exploring the irrational by Edmund Swinglehurst (1996)
by Simon on January 4, 2018 • Permalink
Posted in Art, France, French literature, literature, politics, Sex
Tagged 2004, Alberto Giacommetti, André Breton, André Masson, art, automatic writing, Brassaï, Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy, collage, Giorgio de Chirico, Hans Arp, Hans Bellmer, Joan Miro, La Révolution surréaliste, Louis Aragon, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Matta, Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, painting, Paul Éluard, Paul Delvaux, Paul Klee, Philippe Soupault, primitivism, René Magritte, Robert Desnos, Ruth Brandon, Salvador Dalí, Sue Roe, Surrealism, Wifredo Lam, Yves Tanguy
Posted by Simon on January 4, 2018
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/01/04/surrealism-cathrin-klingsohr-leroy/
This is an almost square, thick, glossy art book (17.1 x 16.1 cm) whose 384 pages – after the brief foreword and introduction – contain nearly 200 colour reproductions of Surrealist works of art. Each one gets a 2-page spread, image on the right, text giving the artist, title, medium and some interpretation, on the left. A kind of flip book of Surrealist painting, divided into four sections – Movement overview, Influences, Styles & techniques and Places.
The left-page analyses vary widely in quality, some telling you really insightful things, others little more than recaps of so-and-so's career or an anecdote behind the picture. There is an obtrusive political correctness in many of them – Robinson is the kind of white man who has to make it quite clear he is on the side of feminists in their struggle against the patriarchy, and regrets the cultural misappropriation of colonial exploiters like Picasso, Matisse and the rest of those awful white men.
Here he is discussing Meret Oppenheim's Occasional Table (1939):
Occasional table (1939) by Meret Oppenheim
In this work Meret Oppenheim continues with a number of Surrealist preoccupations, the most significant of which is the preconception of specific gender roles and stereotyping in a patriarchal society. At first this object may appear as an opulent or even decadent excess of Art Deco design for the bourgeois market, particularly in its use of gold leaf. Oppenheim is, in line with Dada and Surrealist ideals, commenting on bourgeois excesses, as well as on gender stereotypes.
Let's just stop here and ask if you, the reader, can identify specifically how this work of art is tackling 'the preconception of specific gender roles and stereotyping in a patriarchal society'. Spotted it? Good. Now, read on:
As a (male) viewer one is drawn to the legs to consider their shape before considering their functionality. There is an obvious parallel here with women being viewed in the same stereotypical manner. The viewer is also being denied access to the rest of the body, emphasised by the flatness and width of the table's top. (p.224)
So, if I'm reading this correctly, Robinson is claiming that if you are struck by the fact that an ordinary-looking table is being supported by a pair of bird's legs, this is not because it's rather unusual and incongruous – in the deliberately disconcerting Surrealist/Dada fashion – it's because you are always looking at legs and sizing them up, because you are a misogynist member of a patriarchal society guilty of gender stereotyping. Unless you are a woman. In which case you just see a pair of bird's legs.
I hope all my male readers have gone away suitably chastened and reformed.
Here he is preparing to talk about a work by Wifredo Lam:
At the turn of the nineteenth century many modernists adopted and adapted ritualistic or totemic motifs from Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Oceania – in fact from most places that were European colonies. The use of these misappropriated motifs can be found in the so-called 'primitive' aesthetics of Paul Gauguin's Post-Impressionism, the Cubism of Picasso and Georges Braque, much of German Expressionism and some of the Fauvism of Matisse. However, Surrealism differed in this regard thanks largely to the multi-ethnicity of its group and a genuine interest in anthropology. (p.184)
Will all those white European artists who 'misappropriated' motifs from non-European cultures please stay behind after school and write out one hundred times 'Michael Robinson says I must only use subjects and motifs from European culture and not misappropriate motifs from any other source'. Naughty Picasso. Naughty Matisse. Unless you're black or Asian or non-caucasian, in which case it's fine: you can use any motifs and imagery you like.
Your use of non-European motifs is cultural misappropriation; our use of non-European motifs is different, because we have 'a genuine interest in anthropology'. Michael says so.
The sheer number and variety of art and artists tell their own story about the Surrealists' broad-spectrum dominance of the inter-war period.
First conclusion is there were so many of them – Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise, Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy – just for starters.
Surrealism followed on from Dada, founded in 1916 in Switzerland as a really angry response to the pointless barbarity of the Great War.
By 1920 a lot of former Dadaists had gravitated to Paris and were experimenting with Freud-inspired ideas of accessing or depicting the unconscious, via stream-of-consciousness prose or automatic writing. One of them, the bullish, domineering poet André Breton, decided the trouble with Dada is it had been too anarchic, chaotic, unfocused – which had led to its eventual collapse.
Breton decided to form a real movement, not just literary but with social and political aims. This led in 1924 to the publication of the first of numerous Surrealist manifestos.
It was primarily a movement of writers – poets and novelists – not artists. Artists came later. Ironic, because now we are soaked in the artists' imagery and I wonder if anyone reads the old surrealist prose works, or could name any.
And Surrealism was political, designed to undermine and overthrow the existing scheme of things, opposing traditional bourgeois values (kinder, küche, kirche), religion, the rational, the scientific – all the things which, it was claimed, had led Europe into the inferno of the Great War.
Breton conceived of Surrealism as a philosophy and a way of life, rejecting the stifling repression of bourgeois society, setting free our deep inner selves. It wasn't just teenage rebellion for its own sake. Breton and many of the others thought that Western society was really seriously crippled and doomed by its steadfast refusal to acknowledge the most vital part of the human being – the unconscious, source of all our creative imaginative urges, which can only be accessed via dreams and other specialised techniques.
Only if we can tap into our unused creativity, into our irrational minds, into the sensual part of our psyche, can we ever hope to change the repressed, uptight, bourgeois, scientific, technocratic society which is leading us to destruction.
You can see why this genuine commitment to radical social change led many Surrealists, as the 1920s turned into the Fascist 1930s, to declare themselves communists and how this led to numerous splits and bitter quarrels among them.
In his rules Breton declared that surrealist writers and artists (and film-makers and photographers) could work in any medium whatsoever, depicting any subject whatsoever, with only one golden rule – it must come from inside, from the unconscious, from the free imagination untrammeled or restricted by conscious thought or tradition. You could use realistic figures and objects from the real world – but only in the service of the unconscious.
Of the scores of artists connected the movement, probably Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of Surrealism. Dalí joined the group in 1929 (after his brief abandonment of painting for film and photography) and played a crucial role in establishing a definitive visual style between 1930 and 1935.
The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dali
The Mystery of the Ordinary (1926–1938) by Rene Magritte
Assuming we're all familiar with the usual suspects – Dali, Miro, Ernst, Arp, Magritte, Ray – one of the interesting facets of the book is how widely it casts the net, to include artists never part of the official movement but clearly influenced by it. I enjoyed the inclusion of English artists like Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth and, especially, Roland Penrose.
Circle of monoliths (1938) by Paul Nash
Bien vise (1939) by Roland Penrose
The conquest of the air (1938) by Roland Penrose
The real pleasure of the book was coming across quite a few artists I'd never heard of before:
Paysage meduse (1937) by Wolfgang Paalen
Lion Bicycle (1937) by Oscar Dominguez
The Germ of the Night (1937) Jacques Hérold
The man in the street by Paul Delvaux (1940)
The great jungle (1943) by Wifredo Lam
Cup of doubt (1946) by Victor Brauner
There were quite a few women surrealist artists and it was genuinely interesting to a) learn about them and their work, considered purely as artists b) to learn how many of them really were feminists, how many disliked the bullying male environment created by Breton, how many of them tried to develop an aesthetic which escaped male stereotyping and the sexualising of women's bodies. From a crowded field I think Dorothea Tanning stood out for me.
Dejeuner en fourrure (1936) by Meret Oppenheim
A little later (1938) by Kay Sage
Muse of construction (1939) by Eileen Agar, whose work looked more interesting than Nash's own when I saw samples of both at Tate's recent Nash exhibition.
Rivieres Tiedes/Tepid Waters (1939) by Ithell Colquhoun
The Spotted Ousel (1942) by Grace Pailthorpe
At the chateau Lacoste (1946) Toyen (pseudonym of Marie Čermínová)
Plain chant (1947) by Leonora Carrington (in the late 1930s Max Ernst's lover and collaborator)
The Friend's Room (1950) by Dorothea Tanning (married Max Ernst in 1946)
Composition with figures on a terrace (1939) by Leonor Fini
Lee Miller was an important muse for many of the male Surrealists. She had an intense affair with the photographer Man Ray, who taught her photography as well as making her the subject of many of his greatest works. Later she married Roland Penrose, the English Surrealist painter. His painting, Bien vise, above, depicts her naked torso. But Miller also painted, created surrealist objects and took surreal photos in her own right (as well as her later, awesome, war photos).
Good and Bad Posture, Vogue tearsheat by Lee Miller (1942)
Montage of photos by Lee Miller
Surrealism and gender
The gender issue with Surrealism strikes me as simple enough: all these men thought they had a duty to express the unconscious; the dominating master and 'discoverer' of the unconscious was a man, Sigmund Freud; Freud insisted that the unconscious was drenched in repressed sexuality (only later adding aggression and violence in the form of the Death Wish); which meant that this large and influential group of male artists felt it was their moral and artistic duty to be as frank as possible about sex and sexuality, to be as shocking and provocative as they could be; and so they saturated their works with erotic images and symbols; and, being men, these tended to be images of women, their own objects of desire.
And almost all the women, in one way or another, reacted against this use of women as sex objects, as objects of desire, in male painting, and tried to redress the balance by painting women fully dressed or in poses where they obviously dominate men or as girls on the cusp of adolescence (or abandoned figuration altogether to paint abstracts).
The really interesting biological-anthropological question is about the difference in 'desire' which this tends to bring out. Men paint women, but women paint women, too. Everyone seems to take 'women' as a fit subject for painting. Very few of the women artists paint pictures of big naked men or fixate on the penis in the same way that men paint countless breasts and vulvas. Why? Broadly speaking, feminists from de Beauvoir onwards say that gender differences are entirely due to social conditioning; the vast majority of the population and all the biologists and evolutionists I've read point out that there are certain unavoidable differences in DNA, physiology and behaviour between males and females of almost every species: why should we be any different?
All that said, I've just flicked slowly through the nearly 200 images in this book and only a handful of paintings – about ten – actually depict realistic images of naked women (and some of those are by women e.g. Dorothea Tanning's Birthday; among the men Paul Delvaux had the most persistent in (admittedly dreamy zombie) naked women e.g. The Sleeping Venus).
If you go looking for naked women to support this thesis, they are in fact surprisingly absent from the classic surrealist images (by Magritte, Dali, Ernst).
I had no idea that Desmond Morris, author of the immensely popular Naked Ape/Manwatching books, was an official member of the Birmingham Surrealist group while still an undergraduate studying biology. This work, painted when he was just 21, is immediately pleasing, in colour, design and the formal symmetric arrangement. It also demonstrates the general rule that Surrealism, which set out to turn society upside down, ended up producing charming and delightful images which could safely hang on the walls of any investment banker or corporate lawyer. Art changes nothing.
Rank and file (1949) by Desmond Morris
This book is a useful reservoir of some classic Surrealist images, but its real value is as a stimulating introduction to a far wider range of less well-known artists.
Surrealism by Michael Robinson was published by Flametree Published in 2005.
Surrealism-related blog posts
Arp: The Poetry of Forms @ Turner Contemporary
Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture @ Tate Modern
Dalí/Duchamp @ the Royal Academy
Georgia O'Keeffe @ Tate Modern
Paul Klee – Making Visible @ Tate Modern
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
Paul Nash @ Tate Britain
by Simon on November 8, 2017 • Permalink
Posted in Art, Books
Tagged 2005, André Breton, André Masson, Antonin Artaud, automatic writing, Benjamin Péret, Braque, Cubism, Dada, Dalí, Desmond Morris, Dorothea Tanning, Edward Wadsworth, Eileen Agar, Fauvism, Freud, Gala Éluard, Gauguin, Georges Limbour, Georges Malkine, German Expressionism, Grace Pailthorpe, Great War, Hans Arp, Henry Moore, Ithell Colquhoun, Jacques Baron, Jacques Hérold, Jacques Prévert, Joan Miro, Kay Sage, Lee Miller, Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Luis Buñuel, Magritte, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Marie Čermínová, Matisse, Max Ernst, Max Morise, Meret Oppenheim, Michael Robinson, Michel Leiris, Oscar Dominguez, Paris, Paul Éluard, Paul Delvaux, Paul Nash, Picasso, Pierre Naville, Post-Impressionism, Raymond Queneau, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Roger Vitrac, Roland Penrose, Salvador Dalí, stream-of-consciousness, Surrealism, the Naked Ape, the unconscious, Toyen, Victor Brauner, Wifredo Lam, Wolfgang Paalen, Yves Tanguy
Posted by Simon on November 8, 2017
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/11/08/surrealism-michael-robinson/