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James Voorhies; Josh R. Rose; Dr. Charles Cramer; Dr. Kim Grant; Dr. Steven Zucker; and Sal Khan

In this chapter

Surrealism

Surrealism (Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essay)

by JAMES VOORHIES, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early ’20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious. Officially consecrated in Paris in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by the poet and critic André Breton (1896–1966), Surrealism became an international intellectual and political movement. Breton, a trained psychiatrist, along with French poets Louis Aragon (1897–1982), Paul Éluard (1895–1952), and Philippe Soupault (1897–1990), were influenced by the psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the political ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883). Using Freudian methods of free association, their poetry and prose drew upon the private world of the mind, traditionally restricted by reason and societal limitations, to produce surprising, unexpected imagery. The cerebral and irrational tenets of Surrealism find their ancestry in the clever and whimsical disregard for tradition fostered by Dadaism a decade earlier.

Surrealist poets were at first reluctant to align themselves with visual artists because they believed that the laborious processes of painting, drawing, and sculpting were at odds with the spontaneity of uninhibited expression. However, Breton and his followers did not altogether ignore visual art. They held high regard for artists such as Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Francis Picabia (1879–1953), and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) because of the analytic, provocative, and erotic qualities of their work. For example, Duchamp’s conceptually complex Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23; Philadelphia Museum of Art) was admired by Surrealists and is considered a precursor to the movement because of its bizarrely juxtaposed and erotically charged objects. In 1925, Breton substantiated his support for visual expression by reproducing the works of artists such as Picasso in the journal La Révolution Surréaliste and organizing exhibitions that prominently featured painting and drawing.

The visual artists who first worked with Surrealist techniques and imagery were the German Max Ernst (1891–1976), the Frenchman André Masson (1896–1987), the Spaniard Joan Miró (1893–1983), and the American Man Ray (1890–1976). Masson’s free-association drawings of 1924 are curving, continuous lines out of which emerge strange and symbolic figures that are products of an uninhibited mind. Breton considered Masson’s drawings akin to his automatism in poetry. Miró’s Potato (1999.363.50) of 1928 uses comparable organic forms and twisted lines to create an imaginative world of fantastic figures.

About 1937, Ernst, a former Dadaist, began to experiment with two unpredictable processes called decalcomania and grattage. Decalcomania is the technique of pressing a sheet of paper onto a painted surface and peeling it off again, while grattage is the process of scraping pigment across a canvas that is laid on top of a textured surface. Ernst used a combination of these techniques in The Barbarians (1999.363.21) of 1937, a composition of sparring anthropomorphic figures in a deserted postapocalyptic landscape that exemplifies the recurrent themes of violence and annihilation found in Surrealist art.

In 1927, the Belgian artist René Magritte (1898–1967) moved from Brussels to Paris and became a leading figure in the visual Surrealist movement. Influenced by de Chirico’s paintings between 1910 and 1920, Magritte painted erotically explicit objects juxtaposed in dreamlike surroundings. His work defined a split between the visual automatism fostered by Masson and Miró (and originally with words by Breton) and a new form of illusionistic Surrealism practiced by the Spaniard Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), the Belgian Paul Delvaux (1897–1994), and the French-American Yves Tanguy (1900–1955). In The Eternally Obvious (2002.456.12a–e), Magritte’s artistic display of a dismembered female nude is emotionally shocking. In The Satin Tuning Fork (1999.363.80), Tanguy filled an illusionistic space with unidentifiable, yet sexually suggestive, objects rendered with great precision. The painting’s mysterious lighting, long shadows, deep receding space, and sense of loneliness also recall the ominous settings of de Chirico.

In 1929, Dalí moved from Spain to Paris and made his first Surrealist paintings. He expanded on Magritte’s dream imagery with his own erotically charged, hallucinatory visions. In The Accommodations of Desire (1999.363.16) of 1929, Dalí employed Freudian symbols, such as ants, to symbolize his overwhelming sexual desire. In 1930, Breton praised Dalí’s representations of the unconscious in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism. They became the main collaborators on the review Minotaure (1933–39), a primarily Surrealist-oriented publication founded in Paris.

The organized Surrealist movement in Europe dissolved with the onset of World War II. Breton, Dalí, Ernst, Masson, and others, including the Chilean artist Matta (1911–2002), who first joined the Surrealists in 1937, left Europe for New York. The movement found renewal in the United States at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century, and the Julien Levy Gallery. In 1940, Breton organized the fourth International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City, which included the Mexicans Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) and Diego Rivera (1886–1957) (although neither artist officially joined the movement). Surrealism’s surprising imagery, deep symbolism, refined painting techniques, and disdain for convention influenced later generations of artists, including Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) and Arshile Gorky (1904–1948), the latter whose work formed a continuum between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.

Surrealism, an introduction

by 

Reshaping the world

When you think of maps, what comes to mind?  An informative document used by travelers? Demarcations of national borders and geographic features?  At the very least, we might think of some factual representation of the world, not one that is fictitious or subjective.

Imagine a map of the world. Now take a moment to examine the following map, created by members of the Surrealist movement and published in the Belgian journal Variétés in June 1929.

Le monde au temps des Surrealistes (The World at the Time of the Surrealists), image from p. 26-27 in special issue “Le Surrealisme en 1929″ of Varietes: Revue mensuelle Illustree de l’espirit contemporain (June 1929)

This anonymous map might seem unsettling; it emphasizes certain areas while removing others, and changes dramatically the size of landmasses. How is this map different from the world we know? And, although it might seem like an odd place to begin, what can it tell us about the ideas and approaches of the Surrealists?

Marcel Jean, Spector of the Gardenia, 1936, plaster head, painted black cloth, zippers, film, velvet-covered wood base (MoMA)

Psychic freedom

Historians typically introduce Surrealism as an offshoot of Dada. In the early 1920s, writers such as André Breton and Louis Aragon became involved with Parisian Dada. Although they shared the group’s interest in anarchy and revolution, they felt Dada lacked clear direction for political action. So in late 1922, this growing group of radicals left Dada, and began looking to the mind as a source of social liberation. Influenced by French psychology and the work of Sigmund Freud, they experimented with practices that allowed them to explore subconscious thought and identity and bypass restrictions placed on people by social convention. For example, societal norms mandate that suddenly screaming expletives at a group of strangers—unprovoked, is completely unacceptable.

Man Ray, Recording a waking dream séance session, Bureau of Surrealist Research, c. 1924

Surrealist practices included “waking dream” séances and automatism. During waking dream seances, group members placed themselves into a trance state and recited visions and poetic passages with an immediacy that denied any fakery. (The Surrealists insisted theirs was a scientific pursuit, and not like similar techniques used by Spiritualists claiming to communicate with the dead.) The waking dream sessions allowed members to say and do things unburdened by societal expectations; however, this practice ended abruptly when one of the “dreamers” attempted to stab another group member with a kitchen knife. Automatic writing allowed highly trained poets to circumvent their own training, and create raw, fresh poetry. They used this technique to compose poems without forethought, and it resulted in beautiful and startling passages the writers would not have consciously conceived.

Envisioning Surrealism: automatic drawing and the exquisite corpse

In the autumn of 1924, Surrealism was announced to the public through the publication of André Breton’s first “Manifesto of Surrealism,” the founding of a journal (La Révolution surréaliste), and the formation of a Bureau of Surrealist Research. The literary focus of the movement soon expanded when Max Ernst and other visual artists joined and began applying Surrealist ideas to their work. These artists drew on many stylistic sources including scientific journals, found objects, mass media, and non-western visual traditions. (Early Surrealist exhibitions tended to pair an artist’s work with non-Western art objects). They also found inspiration in automatism and other activities designed to circumvent conscious intention.

André Masson, Automatic Drawing, 1924, ink on paper, 23.5 x 20.6 cm (MoMA)

Surrealist artist André Masson began creating automatic drawings, essentially applying the same unfettered, unplanned process used by Surrealist writers, but to create visual images. In Automatic Drawing (left), the hands, torsos, and genitalia seen within the mass of swirling lines suggest that, as the artist dives deeper into his own subconscious, recognizable forms appear on the page.

Another technique, the exquisite corpse, developed from a writing game the Surrealists created. First, a piece of paper is folded as many times as there are players.  Each player takes one side of the folded sheet and, starting from the top, draws the head of a body, continuing the lines at the bottom of their fold to the other side of the fold, then handing that blank folded side to the next person to continue drawing the figure. Once everyone has drawn her or his “part” of the body, the last person unfolds the sheet to reveal a strange composite creature, made of unrelated forms that are now merged. A Surrealist Frankenstein’s monster, of sorts.

Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, and Man Ray, Untitled (Exquisite Corpse), 1926-27, colored pencil, pencil, and ink on paper, 35.9 x 22.9 cm (MoMA)

Whereas automatic drawing often results in vague images emerging from a chaotic background of lines and shapes, exquisite corpse drawings show precisely rendered objects juxtaposed with others, often in strange combinations. These two distinct “styles,” represent two contrasting approaches characteristic of Surrealists art, and exemplified in the early work of Yves Tanguy and René Magritte.

Left: Yves Tanguy, Apparitions, 1927, oil on canvas, 92.07 x 73.02 cm (Dallas Museum of Art); right: René Magritte, The Central Story, 1928, oil on canvas (Private collection)

Tanguy began his painting Apparitions (left) using an automatic technique to apply unplanned areas of color. He then methodically clarified forms by defining biomorphic shapes populating a barren landscape. However, Magritte employed carefully chosen, naturalistically-presented objects in his haunting painting, The Central Story. The juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated objects suggests a cryptic meaning and otherworldliness, similar to the hybrid creatures common to exquisite corpse drawings. These two visual styles extend to other Surrealist media, including photography, sculpture, and film.

The Surrealist experience

Today, we tend to think of Surrealism primarily as a visual arts movement, but the group’s activity stemmed from much larger aspirations. By teaching how to circumvent restrictions that society imposed, the Surrealists saw themselves as agents of social change. The desire for revolution was such a central tenet that through much of the late 1920s, the Surrealists attempted to ally their cause with the French Communist party, seeking to be the artistic and cultural arm. Unsurprisingly, the incompatibility of the two groups prevented any alliance, but the Surrealists’ effort speaks to their political goals.

In its purest form, Surrealism was a way of life. Members advocated becoming flâneurs–urban explorers who traversed cities without plan or intent, and they sought moments of objective chance—seemingly random encounters actually fraught with import and meaning. They disrupted cultural norms with shocking actions, such as verbally assaulting priests in the street. They sought in their lives what Breton dubbed surreality, where one’s internal reality merged with the external reality we all share. Such experiences, which could be represented by a painting, photograph, or sculpture, are the true core of Surrealism.

Meret Oppenheim. Object, 1936. Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, cup 4-3/8 inches in diameter; saucer 9-3/8 inches in diameter; spoon 8 inches long, overall height 2-7/8″ (The Museum of Modern Art)

The “Nonnational boundaries of Surrealism”[1]

Returning to The Surrealist Map of the World, let’s reconsider what it tells us about the movement. Shifts in scale are evident, as Russia dominates (likely a nod to the importance of the Russian Revolution). Africa and China are far too small, but Greenland is huge. The Americas are comprised of Alaska (perhaps another sly reference to Russia’s former control of this territory), Labrador, and Mexico, with a very small South America attached beneath. The United States and the rest of Canada are removed entirely. Much of Europe is also gone. France is reduced to the city of Paris, and Ireland appears without the rest of Great Britain. The only other city clearly indicated is Constantinople, pointedly not called by its modern name Istanbul. An anti-colonial diatribe, the Surrealists’s map removes colonial powers to create a world dominated by cultures untouched by western influence and participants in the Communist experiment. It is part utopian vision, part promotion of their own agenda, and part homage to their influences.

It also reminds us that Surrealism was an international movement. Although it was founded in Paris, pockets of Surrealist activity emerged in Belgium, England, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, the United States, other parts of Latin America, and Japan. Although Surrealism’s heyday was 1924 to the end of the 1940s, the group stayed active under Breton’s efforts until his death in 1966. An important influence on later artists within Abstract Expressionism, Art Brut, and the Situationists, Surrealism continues to be relevant to art history today.

Surrealist Techniques: Subversive Realism

by  and 
Giorgio de Chirico, The Uncertainty of the Poet, 1913, 106 x 94 cm (Tate Gallery, London)

The omnipotence of the dream

A central approach of Surrealist visual art was derived from André Breton’s assertion of “the omnipotence of the dream” in the first Surrealist Manifesto. Following the ideas of Sigmund Freud, the Surrealists saw dreams as visual representations of unconscious thoughts and desires. In their first magazine, La Révolution Surréaliste, they published accounts of their own dreams and reproductions of art that seemed to record dream images, notably the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.

In addition to the dream-like atmosphere of de Chirico’s work, the Surrealists were attracted to what are often called its literary qualities. The strange juxtaposition of female nude, bananas, and train in The Uncertainty of the Poet seems like a literal illustration of the discordant imagery of a modern poem. In addition, the erotic symbolism of the image conforms to Freud’s belief in the central importance of sexuality in the unconscious.

Rejecting the formal concerns of modern art

Giorgio de Chirico, The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914, oil on canvas (Private Collection)

In claiming de Chirico’s pre-war work as exemplary, the Surrealists implicitly rejected modern art’s emphasis on formal innovation. De Chirico’s use of linear perspective, his inexpressive representation of objects, and his lack of interest in the material qualities of paint all seemed to revive the outdated naturalistic conventions of pre-modern painting, as did his use of complex, symbolic subject matter.

For the Surrealists de Chirico’s style was irrelevant; what mattered to them was his ability to represent unconscious dream images. They were interested in the subject of his painting, not how it was painted. In their willingness to elevate subject matter over painting style and technique the Surrealists explicitly placed themselves outside of what they considered were the limiting concerns of established modern art. In return, many critics (and later art historians) attacked the Surrealists for failing to understand and appreciate the formal achievements of modern art.

Because the movement was initiated and led by writers, Surrealist art was often considered to be literary and illustrative rather than a properly modern visual art. This overlooked the fact that many prominent Surrealist artists, including André Masson, Joan Miró, and Max Ernst, frequently employed modern styles and developed innovative artistic techniques.

For the Surrealists, an artist’s style and technique were the means to concretize inspired thinking, the creative activity of the unconscious. Whether those means were traditional naturalism or the more abstract innovations of modern art was not important as long as they were effective. The use of meticulous naturalistic techniques — traditionally employed to represent the accepted “reality” of the external world — demonstrated the equal reality of the unconscious world revealed by Surrealism.

A window into another world

Max Ernst, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924, oil with painted wood elements and cut and pasted printed paper on wood with wood frame, 27 ½ x 22 ½ x 4 ½ inches (MoMA; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Max Ernst, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924, detail, oil with painted wood elements and cut and pasted printed paper on wood with wood frame, 27 ½ x 22 ½ x 4 ½ inches (MoMA; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The complexity of the Surrealists’ challenge to modernist values can be appreciated by considering Max Ernst’s Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale. This painting was one of the first works by a Surrealist artist reproduced in the group’s journal, La Révolution Surréaliste. It combines echoes of de Chirico’s classical architecture and deep perspectival space with an incomprehensible nightmarish scene of violence in the foreground. Small wooden elements are attached to the painting to form a building, gate, and doorknob. The title is handwritten on the edge of the frame, which connects the painted world to the world of the viewer.

Ernst’s combination of painting, writing, collage, and relief sculpture disrupts the established categories of the individual arts as much as the image defies rational explanation. The painting is no longer simply a flat plane covered by colors, it has returned to its pre-modernist role as a window into another world, and that world is one into which we as viewers are invited. The gate on the left has swung open towards us, and the man running on the roof of the building at the right reaches for the “doorknob” on the frame that separates our world from his.

For the Surrealists who desired the complete breakdown of distinctions between art and life, dream and reality, Ernst’s disruption of pictorial boundaries meant far more than a challenge to the conventional distinctions between the different arts. It was the means to enter an entirely new world and heralded the concrete realization of Surrealism’s ultimate goal, the resolution of dream and reality into a new surreality.

The interior model

The Surrealists believed that the world of the imagination was the only proper subject for the arts, which must challenge what Breton called “the poverty of reality.” He claimed that the work of art must “refer to a purely interior model.” While this statement applies to all Surrealist artworks, regardless of productive technique, style, or subject, many Surrealist artists followed de Chirico’s example and created dreamlike imagery that appears to literally reveal the “interior model.”

Yves Tanguy, Mama, Papa is Wounded!, 1927, oil on canvas, 36 ¼ x 28 ¾ inches (MoMA)

Yves Tanguy’s meticulously painted depictions of imaginary landscapes stretching off to an infinitely distant horizon combine the naturalistic rendering of real space and light effects with suggestive abstract forms. Their naturalism invites the viewer’s imaginative entry into the world they make visible and presents the possibility that the world of the unconscious can be made real.

Realism as subversive

The realistic representation of the world of the unconscious reached its apogee in the paintings of Salvador Dalí, who adopted an extremely detailed realistic technique reminiscent of nineteenth-century academic painting. This was an explicit attempt to turn academic naturalism into a subversive technique.

Salvador Dalí, The Lugubrious Game, 1929, oil and collage on cardboard, 44.4 x 30.3 cm

The vivid realism of Dalí’s bizarre scenes seems to confirm that the world they represent is just as real as scenes encountered in ordinary waking life. In paintings such as The Lugubrious Game, Dalí minutely depicted his psychological obsessions, which were largely derived from Freud’s theories of infantile eroticism.

The artist’s profile floats horizontally in the center of the painting and generates a bizarre collection of objects, human figures, animals, and insects. Explicit and symbolic depictions of male and female genitalia abound, as do direct references to Freud’s theories of castration anxiety and anality. In this painting and many others Dalí portrays a universe in which the most apparently innocent objects, from a seashell to a man’s hat, acquire erotic significance.

Systematic confusion

Salvador Dalí, The Invisible Man, 1929, oil on canvas, 140 x 81 cm (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid)
Salvador Dalí, The Invisible Man, detail, 1929, oil on canvas, 140 x 81 cm (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid)


His first published paranoiac painting, The Invisible Man, depicts a strange landscape with multiple figures and objects. Individual elements also create the figure of a large seated man. The back of a nude woman in the upper center of the image is one of his upper arms. His face appears in a collection of architectural elements, and his hair is also clouds. The longer you look at the painting, the more figures and parts of figures you will see. Paintings such as this were intended to make viewers aware that the “reality” they see is only one view. It is possible to make reality answer our desires simply by changing the way we look at things.Dalí invented a technical strategy for Surrealist art that he called “paranoia criticism.” In Dalí’s view unconscious erotic desires inevitably shape our vision of reality, and the Surrealist artist’s role is to demonstrate this in order to “systematize confusion,” overthrow rationality, and discredit what we think of as reality. Just as paranoiacs are convinced that seemingly unrelated objects and events are in fact intimately connected to their own obsessions, Dalí’s paranoiac paintings were intended to demonstrate how his imagination radically transforms objects to make them conform to his desires.

Philosophical conundrums

René Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933, oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 31 7/8 inches (National Gallery of Art, Washington) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

In contrast to Dalí’s often obscene and intentionally shocking imagery, René Magritte used realistic painting techniques to present philosophical conundrums about the nature of representation and its relation to reality and language. In The Human Condition, Magritte depicts the way a painting’s representation “replaces” reality, leading us to consider the many assumptions we make about realistic images and their relationship to what they represent.

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1929, oil on canvas, 23 ¾ x 32 inches (LACMA)

The Treachery of Images presents the disjunctions between the written phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe) and the depiction of a pipe above it. Representation is not reality, although it may look like it; nor is language to be trusted as a source of truth about what is real. The painting of a pipe is not a pipe; but the word “pipe” is not a pipe either. By undermining comfortable assumptions about the human ability to understand reality through language and representation, Magritte’s works demonstrate that we make the world we think we know. Everything is, in the end, a question of representation (in words or images) in which we choose to believe, or not.

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory: A Conversation

Dr. Steven Zucker and Sal Khan

To watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mp-fBJNQmU

 

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Oil on canvas, 9 1/2 x 13″ (24.1 x 33 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Steven: At the Museum of Modern Art there is this tiny painting by Salvador Dali, which is the painting that everybody wants to see. That and Starry Night by Van Gogh are the two stars. We thought it would be really interesting to talk about why this painting is so wildly popular. This is The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali.

Sal: And here I understand why people kind of connect to it now. I mean anybody who has ever tried to make an album for a rock band is inspired by Salvador Dali. There is also this kind of fun of, “What are you looking at?” is really playing with reality. It’s kind of like a visual brain teaser.

Steven: Is that it? Is it so popular? Is it on album cover art because it’s this attack on the rational and that’s such a seductive idea?

Sal: Yeah, it’s mind trippy. I like the way you put it. It’s an attack on the rational. I guess I don’t… There might be more to it. That’s my sense.

Steven: You know, you were talking about album cover art and posters in maybe a dorm room. What’s interesting is that these artists took these ideas really seriously. This was Surrealism. This was painted in 1931. Dali, the Spanish artist, this Catalan artist, had just come to Paris and had joined the Surrealist group.

Sal: I’m assuming he’s considered significant because he was the first person to essentially do dreamscapes, and as you mentioned, attack on the rational.

Steven: When you walk into this painting visually, you enter into this really deep open and lonely space, and is this really quiet image.

Sal: Yeah it’s kind of this desert-scape, ignoring the melting clocks for a moment, you feel that okay if you were in this landscape, yes, time really does not really carry a lot of weight. You could just kind of wither there and die and no one would care. Even that kind of water in the background. There’s no waves in it. It’s like they’ve had time to settle down. There’s literally no activity.

Steven: There’s this unbearable sense of quiet. There is almost no movement and I think it does feel very desert-like, very hot. Literally time has melted, right? But we have this absurd environment. We do have this very naturalistic rendering but the things that are being rendered are not naturalistic at all. You mentioned the dead tree on the left but it’s growing out of something that seems clearly man-made or at least geometric, a table top perhaps. You have ants that seem to be eating and attracted to a piece of metal as opposed to a piece of rotted flesh.

Sal: Oh that’s what that is. I couldn’t fully make it out. Okay so they’re eating away at a time piece. That’s fascinating.

Steven: And of course you have the drooping clocks. And that’s such an interesting and provocative idea because time is something that is so regimented. Time is something that rules us, that is so associated with the industrial culture that we live in, and here it responds to the environment as we respond to the environment.

Sal: Well one you have that tabletop. There’s another one in the background. And even the way the light is set up, especially on the cliff, it looks like it’s sunset so it’s kind of like, “Hey another day has passed, who cares?”

Steven: Now there are some identifiable things. For all the absurdity and for all of the impossibility of what we’re seeing, there are some things that our historians have recognized. The cliffs in the back are, we think, the cliffs of the Catalonian coast in Northern Spain where Dali is from and so this is his childhood perhaps. Some art historians have concluded that that strange figure, almost a profile face. Can you make out an eye with extremely long lashes and perhaps a tongue under the nose?

Sal: This is the whole optical illusion part of Dali. Yeah I thought it was a blanket but now I completely see the eyelashes. I thought it was a duck for a second too. I see the eyelashes and the top of a nose.

Steven: Yeah, Dali does that fun thing where one object can actually be several things at once, sometimes really convincingly. Some art historians think this is his face but elusive and very much a kind of dream.

Sal: That goes back in the category of is this more that kind of dorm room optical illusion type art.

Steven: Well that’s right. Surrealism positive to that, the rational world that we have so much faith in, was perhaps not worthy of all that faith. The irrational was just as important but was something that we had sublimated. Something that we had tried to drive out of our life. And the way that these artists and writers thought about it was if only they could retrieve the world of the dream. Some of the artists have read Freud. Some of them had only heard sort of secondhand accounts of Freud. But the idea that the dream was a place where the irrational mind came to the fore unrestricted.

Sal: This is something that often confronts me. Even the notions that how we perceive what we think is objective reality is really based on how our brain is wired. We see these causes and effects. We see linear time. This is how humans are wired. I think that’s what’s fun about these type of things. Look, there are different forms of reality and who are we as creatures that are wired one particular way to be all that judgmental about what’s real.

Steven: When people have looked at this painting they have sometimes, I think unconvincingly, tried to link it to fine signs earlier, ideas of the…

Sal: Time dilation.

Steven: Exactly and time in fact was not a strict thing. I think there is more evidence that Dali is thinking about, ideas of a philosopher, whose name who is Bergson, who thought about time as something that was not simply what struck on a clock, but that there was something that kind of unit of time that was more subjective and that expanded and contracted according to our experience.

Sal: Time is this thing that sometime scares us. We completely don’t understand it, even though it’s kind of the most fundamental component of our existence. We fundamentally don’t understand it. We try to measure it out. We try to constrain it and define it in some way that makes sense to us. Actually I think that’s what this piece is maybe trying to do. It’s like, “Look these clocks are stupid.” These are just our futile attempts to try to label. It’s kind of like if you label something or you measure something, you feel like you actually understand it even though you don’t.

Steven: I think this is that moment when all of those safe ideas of objectivity are being blown out of the water and we’re seeing an art that is in some really interesting ways confronting that.

Surrealism and Women

by  and 
Max Ernst, image from Une Semaine de Bonté: Book II Water, 1934 (MoMA)

Women as objects of fear and desire

Women were a central subject in Surrealist art. Male Surrealist artists often portrayed fragmented, deformed, and dismembered female bodies as objects of violent erotic imaginings. This may be attributed, at least in part, to the Surrealists’ engagement with Freudian psychoanalytic theories, in which the female body is both the primary object of male heterosexual desire and a source of great anxiety resulting from male fears of castration. Women thus represent the greatest source of erotic satisfaction, while also inspiring disgust and terror.

Hans Bellmer, The Doll, 1935-37, gelatin silver print (MoMA)

With her seemingly endless permutations and multiplication of body parts, Hans Bellmer’s fetishistic doll can be seen as an objectification of these powerful and contradictory emotions. The Surrealists’ perception of women as terrifying but erotic objects also appears in their fascination with the praying mantis. In the 1930s many Surrealist artists depicted this insect, whose female beheads and eats the male during or immediately following copulation. Max Ernst’s ironically titled The Joy of Life shows the insects in the foreground of an ominous jungle scene filled with half-hidden, menacing creatures.

Max Ernst, The Joy of Life, 1936, oil on canvas, 73.5 x 93 cm (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art)

Women as a source of inspiration

The other side of the coin was a tendency to idealize women as beautiful, mysterious sources of inspiration. The violated and debased female body is such a commonplace of Surrealist art that it may seem surprising that the Surrealists were dedicated to romantic love. This is more evident in Surrealist writing than in the visual arts, but it was an attitude that affected the personal lives of artists and writers alike.

Man Ray, photograph of Nusch Eluard, 1935, gelatin silver print, 23 x 17.8 cm (MoMA)

Man Ray photographed the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard’s second wife Nusch as the beloved muse to whom he dedicated many love poems. The wives and lovers of the male Surrealists were often key figures in the movement even if they were not themselves artists or writers. They were celebrated in Surrealist art and writings and often directly participated in the movement by signing manifestos, making objects, and contributing to exquisite corpses and other group activities. Gala Dalí was the most prominent. First the wife of the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard, then the lover of Max Ernst, she ultimately became the wife of Salvador Dalí, who dedicated all his work to her, even signing her name to his paintings because she inspired them.

Salvador Dalí, Gala and the Angelus of Millet before the arrival of the Conical Anamorphoses, 1933, oil on canvas, 24.2 x 19.2 cm (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa)

Women Surrealist artists

Lee Miller, Portrait of Space, 1937, gelatin silver print, (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)

In the early years of Surrealism no women artists were members of the group, but this changed over time as the movement grew in size and influence. Many of the most well-known women associated with Surrealism became involved with the movement through their personal relationships with Surrealist men. Meret Oppenheim and Lee Miller both worked with Man Ray, in addition to making their own Surrealist works. Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning became involved with Surrealism through Max Ernst; Remedios Varo through the Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret; and Kay Sage through Yves Tanguy.

Kay Sage, A Finger on the Drum, 1940, oil on canvas, 15 x 21½ inches (National Gallery of Art, Washington)

Leonor Fini exhibited with the Surrealists in the 1930s, as did the Czech Surrealist painter Toyen, and the photographers Claude Cahun and Dora Maar.

Left: Toyen (Maria Čerminová), The Message of the Forest, 1936, oil on canvas, 160 x 129 cm (National Galleries of Scotland); right: Dora Maar, Le Simulateur, 1936, gelatin silver print, 30.2 × 23.5 cm (The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

Surrealist women representing women

Leonora Carrington, Self Portrait, c. 1938, oil on canvas, 25 5/8 x 32 inches (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Given the Surrealist interest in creating art that manifested the unconscious and the prominence of Freudian themes in the work of male Surrealist artists, certain questions inevitably arise. How did female Surrealist artists represent their dreams and unconscious desires, and how are they different from the representations of male Surrealist artists? These are difficult questions to answer, in part because the Surrealists strongly rejected conformity. Although there are similarities between certain Surrealist artists, it is impossible to make sweeping generalizations about all male Surrealists, and this is equally true of the women.

Dorothea Tanning, Birthday, 1942, oil on canvas, 40¼ x 25½ inches (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Many of the women associated with Surrealism were as interested in women as an artistic subject as the male Surrealists were. Their representations of women are, however, notably different. While male Surrealist artists often depicted faceless, distorted, and violated female bodies, artists such as Carrington, Varo, and Fini portrayed women, including themselves, as young and beautiful. In depictions of their dreams and in their self-representations, women artists associated with Surrealism often seem to conform to male Surrealist idealizations of women as beautiful, child-like creatures inhabiting magical dream environments.

Remedios Varo, The Call, 1961, oil on masonite, 39 ½ x 26 ¾ inches (National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC)

Women’s self-representations

Left: Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944, oil on masonite, 30.5 x 39 cm (Museo Dolores Olmedo); Right: Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940, oil on canvas, 15 ¾ x 11 inches (MoMA)

Self-portraiture was a more significant genre among Surrealist women artists than it was among the men, and several women artists associated with the group are particularly notable for the depth and complexity of their engagement with self-representation. The most famous of these is Frida Kahlo, whom the Surrealist leader André Breton saluted as a natural Surrealist, although she never considered herself a member of the movement. Kahlo used her own image as a primary subject, often combining it with symbolic objects and scenes that represent her thoughts, feelings, and memories. She was also concerned with constructing her image in life, dressing in men’s clothes, or more often in traditional regional Mexican costumes, as a means of proclaiming her identity.

Leonor Fini, The Alcove/Self Portrait with Nico Papatakis, 1941, oil on canvas

Leonor Fini, who also never joined the group but was friends with many Surrealists and participated in Surrealist exhibitions, was similarly preoccupied with her own image in art and life. She appears in her paintings as a beautiful, dominating, and sensual woman, often surrounded by imagined figures and environments. The self-image in her paintings was not unlike the figure she presented in person. She wore dramatic costumes, and once received the Surrealists dressed in priest’s robes, clothing she found particularly erotic and transgressive.

Claude Cahun, Self Portrait, 1928

Unlike Kahlo and Fini, Claude Cahun participated in a variety of Surrealist group activities in the 1930s. In addition to making Surrealist objects, she produced a series of photographic self-portraits in which she transformed herself radically from one image to the next, appearing in several wearing masks and costumed as a doll. The gender ambiguities in many of her self-portraits suggest an exploration of her own image that is concerned with both personal and social issues of identity.

The role of women in Surrealism was complex and contradictory. The movement both infantilized and empowered women, treated them as erotic objects and supported their sexual emancipation, subjected them to the male gaze and validated their own self images. Furthermore, it is important to note that while women were a minority within the Surrealist group, many more women artists achieved significant recognition in the context of Surrealism than in other major modern art movements.

  1. André Breton, “Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism,” in Free Rein, trans. Michel Parameter and Jacqueline d’Amboise (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp. 7-18. ↵
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History of Modern Art Copyright © by James Voorhies; Josh R. Rose; Dr. Charles Cramer; Dr. Kim Grant; Dr. Steven Zucker; and Sal Khan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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