Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Tate Modern, Sunday 10th April 2022

 Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Tate Modern, Sunday 10^th April 2022

 

The international reach of Surrealism is what is at stake in this exhibition, from its origins in the French art movements in the 1920s to its global extensions in the USA, Japan, literally everywhere.

Eugene Granells Los Blasones Magicos del vuelo tropical 1947

Co-Founded in 1924 by Andre Breton whose Manifeste du Surrealisme (Manifesto of Surrealism) defined surrealism as “a pure psychic automatism”.  The word Surrealism was first coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollonaire when he used it in reference to the ballet Parade which contained music by Eric Satie.  The movement was formed out of Breton’s preoccupation with authors like Rimbaud, Jarry and the current ideas of both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.  Breton even went so far as to join the Communist Party in 1927, but he was expelled six years later, a typical trajectory for a Surrealist in the 1920s and 30s.  By 1924 there were two surrealist movements, and two surrealist manifestoes.  Ultimately the Breton, Dali, Ernst movement gained prominence. 

Salvador Dali, Lobster Telephone

One of the fundamental tenets of surrealism was the artists connection to the unconscious, that part of the mind beyond consciousness which Freud found access to through dreams, jokes, and parataxes (slips of the tongue or Freudian slips).  Hence the principle of automatism or automatic writing and painting where the hand moved randomly across the page, or the poet poured out words with no attempt at conscious intervention or craft.  However, it soon became clear that more craft was being used than the artist acknowledged.  Automatism led to reams of doggerel but the fundamental principle that art originates in the unconscious, source material to be worked into art by the artist, became an unquestioned fact.

Koga Haru, The Sea

The Surrealists sought to explore the unconscious, depict it in political terms through the paradigm of Marxist dialectics, and further deconstruct it using Freud’s analysis of dreams.  Freud’s seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams depicted the unconscious in terms of primal drives, Eros, and Thanatos.  He derived the terms from Greek myth.  Indeed, Freud was fascinated by myth, taboo, and the products of ancient civilisations such as the Greeks and the Egyptians.  Freud proceeds to analyse Sophocles’s play Oedipus Tyrannos and Shakespeare’s Hamlet in terms of the Oedipus Complex.  This complex is the basis of society but also, mysteriously, the basis of civilisation too.

Ithell Colquhoun, Scylla

The Surrealists set out to depict the unconscious in its fundamental estrangement of everyday objects.  The iconic Surrealist object is Dali’s Lobster Telephone, created by Dali in 1936 for the English poet and collector of surrealist objects, Edward James.  The object that bites back is the archetypal surrealist artwork, simultaneously fascinating yet useless.

Claude Cahun, Self Portrait in Reflecting Mirror

Picasso, although implicated in Surrealism through his associations and therefore a fringe member, is also represented.  It seemed that Picasso was astute enough never to become closely identified with any of the movements he became associated with, moving on quickly before becoming too involved.  So too is Joan Miro’s work May 1968 (1973).  Catalan particularism as well as anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and the left generally, find a place in the Surrealist movement.  Surrealisms relationship with political parties like the Communist Party was inevitably uneasy, for example Breton’s expulsion.  However, it might also be conjectured that Surrealism also represented a romantic and aristocratic rejection of the Enlightenment which insisted on scientific rigour, rationalism, and rejection of superstition.

The Tate exhibition, therefore, does not dwell on Breton, Dali, Magritte, or Ernst, only a few of their works are presented.  Rene Magritte has a single work Time Transfixed (1938, oil on canvas).  Magritte’s exceptional talent for precise realism contrasts with an imaginary train’s sudden emergence from a fireplace.  A clock ticks away on the mantelpiece. 

Rene Magritte, Time Transfixed 

Another quintessential Surrealist activity is the game Exquisite Corpse where artists and writers create an image or text which is then continued by another member of the group.  There are examples by Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Riviera to see here.   There is also a much longer example of an Exquisite Corpse by Ted Jonas called Long Distance.  Begun through correspondence in 1975, it concluded some 30 years later.  Eminent contributors include William S Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  Exquisite Corpse coincided with automatism and ran parallel to the work of artists who creatively turned their attention to esoteric subjects like the occult, mediums, and the use of planchettes to gain inspiration for their writing and art. 

Mayo, Coup de Batons

Filmmakers like Maya Deren are also presented, as are photographers like Claude Cahun.  Maya Deren, a notable experimental filmmaker most famous for her film Meshes of the Afternoon, made At Land in 1944 to foreground the plight of diasporic communities during the WW2.  A woman appears and a chess game is re-played, firstly in a dining room, then on a beach.  The heroine plays chess, a game of highly conventionalised yet static moves, with two friends, then runs into some sand dunes.  She re-appears playing chess, then, lastly, she is seen running along a beach.  The film has a dream-like quality but, like so many other artworks referenced in the exhibition, Maya Deren is only tangentially included as a ‘surrealist’.  It seems that the exhibition’s curators almost feel that any experimental filmmaker is a surrealist, a very common mis-perception.  In fact, the two most famous Surrealist films Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age D'Or (1930, directed and written by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel) are not mentioned here.  Indeed the relative dearth of surrealist films is notable and surprising, since the surrealist aesthetic seems ideally suited to film.  Today film makers like David Lynch still derive much from the Surrealist influence on film.

Leonora Carrington, Self-Portrait, 1937-8

The exhibition focuses on two locations, Cairo, and Mexico City, to depict the second wave of Surrealism’s influence.  In Egypt this was a consequence of post-colonialism.  Artists discovered Surrealism as a form of dissent which evaded convenient ideological labels.  

Romantic and individualistic elements are perhaps best summarised in the work of Leonara Carrington (1917-2011), a British-Mexican artist who is also called 'the lost Surrealist'.  Carrington was unknown in Britain, even to her family, while she was a famous surrealist in her adopted homeland of Mexico.  She had met the surrealist Max Ernst at the beginning of WW2 when, since he was German, he was interned as a hostile alien in France.  His work Two Children are threatened by a Nightingale (1924) is presented here.  Carrington fled to Spain where she was eventually admitted to a psychiatric hospital, undergoing the predictable so called 'therapies' of the time, such as electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) and treated with drugs like Cardiazol, a drug which caused convulsions and whose side-effects outweighed its gains.  She eventually managed to escape the clutches of her family, who had decided to send her to a sanitorium in South Africa, via a marriage of convenience to the Mexican Ambassador, Renato Leduc.  Carrington then fled to Mexico.

Max Ernst, Two Children are threatened by a Nightingale

Carrington's love of horses meant that they were used as subjects in many of her paintings as was the hyena because Carrington thought of herself as being like a hyena, always curiously nosing through garbage.  Her work Self Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) (1938-8) is known as her first surrealist painting.  A white horse escapes through the window, symbolising the energising power of creativity and freedom and consonant with the Celtic goddess Epona (meaning Great Mare).   Carrington is depicted with crazily flowing hair, wearing a pair of white riding jodphurs, gesturing to a lactating hyena.  A white rocking horse floats above Carrington.  

Max Ernst also re-emerged later, coming to be associated with the American surrealist Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012).  Ernst divorced Peggy Guggenheim who had rescued him from Europe and married Tanning in 1946.

Surrealism Beyond Borders is an essential exhibition for those wishing to understand one of the main dynamisms of the 20th century which has still not quite faded into history.

Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, April 2022