a view from the edge

Surrealism, as an art movement, had its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s but had largely petered out as a creative force by the start of the Second World War. Although some contemporary artists continue to paint in a quasi-surrealist style, repeating what has gone before isn’t art, so this essay focuses on the work of the artists who were active during the movement’s most prolific and influential period.

In some respects, surrealism was as much a literary as an artistic movement. Its leader was a poet, André Breton, who had no talent as an artist but managed to attract some of the brightest talent in the art world with his ideas. The movement was centred on Paris, which was a mecca for both artists and poseurs during the 1920s.

The surrealists rejected formalism in art and were influenced instead by the primitive, as revealed in the paintings of children, lunatics and untutored amateurs. In this latter category, the best-known painter is probably Henri Rousseau, a small-time customs official who had had no formal training and who didn’t start painting until he was 40.

Rousseau may have been untutored, but he harboured an ambition to exhibit in the established salons of the day. He never did, but from 1886 he was able to exhibit his work in the Salon des Indépendents, which had been established as an outlet for the work of leading impressionists such as Cézanne, Monet and Renoir, who had been excluded by the ‘official’ salon of the time. Rousseau also had high confidence in his own ability, if a remark he is reported to have made to Picasso is anything to go by, that the two were the greatest living painters: “I in the modern manner and you in the Egyptian.”

The overriding impression that a modern viewer takes from any of Rousseau’s paintings is their extraordinary stylization, although this is not what the artist intended. His aim was to depict his subjects as realistically as possible. Hence the sheer amount of detail with which every component of his ‘jungle’ canvases was painted, which gives them a dreamlike quality that the surrealists admired and sought to replicate in their own work.

One of Rousseau’s best-known works is The Dream, which was painted a few months before his death in 1910 and which provides one of the best examples of his peculiar style. Note the incongruity of a formal nude in a jungle setting, and the apparently friendly disposition of the two lions:

Another naif who was much admired by the surrealists was postman Ferdinand Cheval, who picked up an unusually shaped stone on his delivery round one day, continued this practice every day and subsequently spent a third of a century using these found objects to build what he called his Palais Idéal (‘Ideal Palace’):

Just as Rousseau is often referred to as the Douanier Rousseau as a nod to his daytime job, so Cheval is also known as the Facteur Cheval to acknowledge his employment as a small-town postman. It is not known when the surrealists first became aware of the Palais Idéal, but once discovered, it quickly became a place of pilgrimage for the leading figures in the movement. To these luminaries, the Palais Idéal was a construction of the unconscious mind that had not been glimpsed, let alone designed, by a formally trained architect. This was manifest obsession, another word that features prominently in the surrealist lexicon.

However, the artist who exerted the greatest influence on the surrealist movement was Italian Giorgio de Chirico, whose weird juxtapositions on canvas would be replicated in one form or another by the leading surrealist painters. His Melancholy and Mystery of a Street is typical of his work in the second decade of the twentieth century:

The first thing that one notices in this painting is the perspective, which is not remotely realistic. And the shadows are not in alignment. However, these faults do not detract from the ‘message’ that the artist is trying to convey: a young girl is bowling a hoop along the street—a popular children’s pastime in the pre-television era—while up ahead, hidden around a corner and revealed only by its shadow, a mysterious figure is lurking. We cannot know any more about this menacing figure, the presence of which threatens the innocence represented by the unsuspecting girl.

Many of the fringe artists in the surrealist movement have now been forgotten, at least by me, so I’ve chosen to take a closer look at the work of three leading exponents of the style. René Magritte is the least formally gifted of the three, but he dropped quite a few bombshells. Take a look at The Treason of Images:

In case you’re unfamiliar with French, the legend translates as ‘this is not a pipe’. Of course it’s a pipe, you are probably thinking, but bear in mind the title that Magritte gave to his painting. It really isn’t a pipe; it’s a picture of a pipe!

Magritte painted several versions of The Human Condition, but they all had the same central message:

How do you know that what is depicted on the painting on the easel represents what is behind the easel? You cannot know for certain. This painting reflects the unease that is at the heart of the surrealist ‘message’.

Salvador Dalí is almost certainly the best-known surrealist artist, at least to the general public, and at the peak of his powers he also made some powerful statements. Le Jeu Lugubre is about masturbation—note the enlarged right hand of the statue, and its averted gaze, reflecting the shame that attached to this activity almost a century ago:

However, the most interesting part of this painting is the gibbering man in the bottom corner. He has just shit himself, which Dalí painted in exquisitely minute detail. In fact, this painting caused quite a furore when first exhibited. Breton was mortally offended, but as Dalí pointed out, a censored dream is no longer a dream. And dreams were at the heart of the message that the surrealists were attempting to convey.

Dalí’s best known work is probably The Persistence of Memory, posters of which have adorned the walls of the bedrooms of thousands of students over the years. This is also a kind of dreamscape, and it’s the only painting I’m discussing here that I’ve actually seen. What is particularly striking for me is the size—24´33cm—which gives the impression that one is looking at the landscape through the wrong end of a telescope!

However, the ostensible theme/meaning of this painting—that time is mutable—is not my take on this composition. Notice the ants crawling over the red watch on the left of the painting. This is a reference to an event that occurred when Dalí was an adolescent, which he related in his autobiography and is a reflection of yet another perversion to go with his coprophilia and masturbation fantasies: necrophilia.

Surrealism was always intended to shock its audience, and Dalí may have been a master shocker, but he wasn’t the ultimate. He may have created dreams, but there was another artist who went one step further by creating nightmares. That is the only interpretation that I can provide for Joan Miró’s The Harlequin’s Carnival:

Try imagining yourself in this room. There is so much happening that you would probably go insane. But that’s it: insanity is the central message of surrealism, which is why, as an art movement, it was moribund by the time the Second World War—the ultimate insanity—had engulfed Europe.