Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams features both well-known names and lesser-known later artists who fell under the movement’s spell.
Dora Maar's Sans titre [Onirique
Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams, from the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, is on show at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane and is just such a treat. Comprising 186 works, including paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs and films by 54 artists, the exhibition covers a wide swathe of material and time, with well-known names central to the development of the movement (Marcel Duchamp, André Masson, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Paul Éluard, Salvador Dalí, etc), alongside lesser-known later artists who fell under the surrealist spell.
The surrealists fascinate on a number of fronts. They were outspoken, often brilliant, self-obsessed and entirely uninterested in (and disillusioned with) the rules of conventional society. If World War I had exposed some of them to horrors best left unseen, the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and most importantly Carl Jung pointed them in new directions and provided a conduit to the unconscious and the strange and heady world of dreams.
Photographs abound of André Breton & Co, eyes closed tightly as if in the trance necessary for producing automatic writing or drawing, or else widely staring, as if confronted by their own nightmares. Such imagery might seem faintly humorous today, but the power of the mind to see and the hand and eye to interpret were essential to their practice. And let’s not forget most of them were young.
You can enter the exhibition in several directions, but when you take the path indicated by the Pompidou’s deputy director and exhibition curator, Didier Ottinger, you are met with early paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, Yves Tanguy and Jan Arp during their Dada phase. Surrealism was the child of Dada, the anarchic anti-war movement whose purpose was to mock tradition, both in the art world and bourgeois society as a whole. However, it is the elegant shadow cast by Duchamp’s suspended ready-made, Porte-bouteilles (Bottle rack) (1914/1964), that sets the tone. Its sculptural wire frame seems entirely contemporary to modern eyes, demonstrating the enormous influence Dada and surrealism continue to have throughout the arts today, a benchmark against which work should still be judged. Another seminal bronze sculpture, Magritte’s David’s Madame Récamier (1967), is a remarkable work in which Jacques-Louis David’s famous 18th-century white-clad woman is replaced by a life-size coffin reclining on its own chaise longue, heralding the desire to bury dead art history but also forcing us to recognise that the past won’t lie down.
Throughout the exhibition, flickering images of a wide range of experimental films, including Luis Buñuel and Dalí’s iconic Un chien Andalou (1929), play across floor-to-ceiling walls, animating the more static displays of paintings, sculpture and photography. Each space is full of light and shadows, enhanced by the moody deep-toned walls. Sculpture in its many forms is one of the great strengths of the exhibition. While the bronzes of Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti are a timely reminder of the expertise of French foundries during the period, pieces such as Victor Brauner’s Loup-table (Wolf-table) (1939/1947) throw the rulebook aside. Surprisingly, in Brisbane’s show, this work stands on a relatively low plinth.
When it was originally installed in the exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947 at Galerie Maeght in Paris, it stood inside a somewhat randomly draped interior; placed at a height where you are confronted by the wolf’s rabidly biting mouth lunging ineffectually at its own tail. This, along with its ghostly shadow shimmering on the fabric wall, made it appear far more threatening and radical (see page 25 of the comprehensive catalogue accompanying the show).
In startling neon in the hall outside, Breton exhorts, “Leave everything, Leave Dada, Leave your wife, leave your mistress, Leave your hopes and fears, Leave your kids in the middle of nowhere, Leave the substance for the shadow, Leave behind, if needs, your comfortable life and promising future, Take to the highway.”
Breton posits his reader/listener as male. Not that women aren’t ever present – as object of desire, muse, femme fatale, the mysterious and suspect subject of dreams. The naked female body – sliced, bound, veiled or decapitated – looms large within surrealist imagery. So do disembodied eyes, not least of the glass variety. Bodies may be there for the looking, but gazing can prove a dangerous game. Yet Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams reminds us that female artists were just as revolutionary within the movement. Dora Maar, too often relegated to just being one of Pablo Picasso’s lovers and model for his famous weeping women series, was a prolific experimental photographer in her own right. To those familiar with her photographs in books, it comes as some surprise to find that, along with Man Ray and Lee Miller’s experiments in black and white, her prints were originally produced at a very small scale, so the viewer has to get uncomfortably close to their arcane subject matter.
A stand-out work in the show has to be its only installation, Dorothea Tanning’s Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot (1970). Born in 1910, Tanning is often described as the world’s oldest living surrealist, although she insists the movement ended in the 1950s. In 1942, she was invited by Peggy Guggenheim to participate in the exhibition 31 Women. (Serial monogamist Max Ernst, former lover of British surrealist Leonora Carrington and husband of Guggenheim, fell for Tanning, and married her in turn.)
Lit by a single stark bulb, part of the rear wall in Chambre 202 has a patch where a painting or mirror once hung and the original functions of tweed-clad furniture and fireplace have been usurped by bulging, phantasmagorical forms. High on one wall, a fecund female body bursts through the torn and curling wallpaper. Another plunges out of view, but whether she is being pulled or willingly enters the embrace of two arm-like protuberances is unclear. The dynamic actions of these figures belie their fleshy corpulence, their actions part of some surreal dance that you join at your peril. Even the air in the space seems thick with tweedy dust.
The power of the written word was central to surrealism, and the gallery has mounted a comprehensive display of recently acquired original manifestos, exhibition catalogues, journals and books about surrealism. Most important of these is the journal Minotaure, published from 1933-39, to which almost all the leading figures of the movement contributed. The minotaur, buried deep within the secret twists and turns of the labyrinth, came to stand for the journey into the unconscious, where the animalistic side of humankind awaits, ready to entrap and seduce.
Thanks to the Tim Fairfax Funding Foundation, a vast space outside the exhibition (Surrealism for Kids) is given over to activities that allow exploration of some of the more arcane precepts of the surrealists. These include techniques such as Dalí’s favourite paranoiac-critical perception, where something that looks like a cloud might equally be read as a human form. As the photographs scattered throughout the show attest, there’s a surrealist lurking in all of us, whether eyes wide open or eyes tight shut.
SURREALISM: THE POETRY OF DREAMS, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, until October 2.
Mary Kisler travelled to Brisbane courtesy of Tourism Queensland.