I summarize the development of the Surrealist movement in the essay below, concentrating on the works of artists Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. I show that Surrealism was never an artistic style so much as a state of mind – one in which normal reality was disrupted to reveal the mercurial world of the liberated unconscious.
Proto-surrealism was born in the ashes of the First World War. The founders of the movement, the French poets Breton, Soupault, Aragon and Eluard, had all been conscripted and had personally witnessed the carnage wreaked by the products of Western “reason” in the world’s first mechanized war. They believed that the “war to end all wars” had effectively exposed the emptiness of all immutable values, timeless concepts and received aesthetic taste. Of the First World War, the German surrealist artist Max Ernst wrote: “Max Ernst died on 1 August 1914. He was resuscitated on 11 November 1918, as a young man aspiring to become a magician.”[1] Dadaists and proto-Surrealists amongst them thus sought to subvert the doomed bourgeois society whose rottenness the war had finally exposed. Through the use of complex irony and nihilistic interventions, they denuded “art” until it was laid bare as a mere matter of received taste and repeated habits. Much as Dadaist Raoul Hausmann ridiculed the gibberish spouted by the self-important art critic by affixing random bits of nonsense words on to a poem-poster collage in his The Art Critic (1919-20), Max Ernst painted a muscular Virgin blasphemously spanking the infant Jesus while Breton, Eluard and Ernst himself look on in The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Infant Jesus (1926), mocking the self-referential nature and ridiculous solemnity of the art world.
Max Ernst | The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Infant Jesus (1926)
By 1921, however, proto-Surrealists within the broader anti-art movement experienced a growing dissatisfaction with what they perceived to be Dada’s anti-art dead-end nihilism, whose determined negativity seemed to preclude the creation of a substantive, vivifying art form suitable for the new age. This led Breton, the charismatic future leader of the Surrealist movement, to write: “Dada… seemed to open wide the doors, but we discovered that they opened onto a corridor which was leading nowhere.”[2] Dada’s parochial insistence on “nothing, nothing, nothing” ultimately led to a schism between the proto-Surrealists and Dadaists.[3] Breton, having cemented ties with Dada artists such as Arp and Ernst, launched a series of experiments known as the “season of sleeps” in order to investigate the creative potential of the unconscious. It was this untapped source of “pure creativity” that ultimately gave rise to the Surrealist movement.
The first phase of Surrealism lasted roughly from 1922-9. Excited by Freud’s theories on the unconscious, the early Surrealists sought to access the secrets of the “marvelous” by liberating the unconscious from its rational overseer. Through the use of stream-of-consciousness automatic painting and other methods, they sought to “short-circuit their rational apparatuses,” denying or deferring input from their conscious mind until a later stage of the creative process.[4] On automatic painting, Joan Miró wrote: “as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself, under my brush… The first stage is free, unconscious… The second stage is carefully calculated.”[5] Ernst used a technique he termed “grattage” to create the Forest and Dove (1927), for which he placed planks of wood and fish bones under a thickly painted, wet canvas. After scraping off successive layers of paint, he found that paint invariably remained in the indentations, resulting in an involuntarily produced pattern that suggested a forest-like figuration. Ironically, his unconscious processes exactly reversed the “conversion of the natural into the man-made” dictated by rational processes that had created the wood plank in the first place.[6]
Max Ernst | The Forest and Dove (1927)
An exchange between Masson and Matisse in 1923 underscored the fundamental differences between the early Surrealists and other Modernists of their time:
Masson: “I begin without an image or plan in mind, but just draw or paint rapidly according to my impulses. Gradually, in the marks I make, I see suggestions of figures or objects. I encourage these to emerge, trying to bring out their implications even as I now consciously try to give order to the composition.”
Matisse: “That’s curious. With me it’s just the reverse. I always start with something – a chair, a table – but as the work progresses I become less conscious of it. By the end, I am hardly aware of the subject with which I started.”[7]
The admittance of Salvador Dalí into the Surrealist movement in 1929 marked a “real break” with the emphasis on automatic imagery that had until then largely characterized the Surrealist project.[8] Members of the group increasingly shifted interest towards the dream as the “locus of mental activity corresponding most closely to the Surrealist marvelous,”[9] resulting in “dream paintings” that referred to and evoked dreams and dream-like states, the conditions of dreaming, as well as Freudian symbolism. Moreover, Dalí’s painstaking, hallucinatory illusionism and “undeniable technical mastery” (an observation attributed to Freud) had “little resemblance to the exuberant, unconscious mark-making” of earlier automatic imagery and was often the result of “extensive readings of psycho-analytical textbooks.”[10] Indeed, the perceived danger that Dalí would produce paintings that were “mere psycho-pathological documents” nearly denied him entry into the group.[11] His Dismal Sport of 1929 in particular raised red flags – the “excrement-bespattered pants” of the man in the right foreground seemed to reveal unacceptable copropilous tendencies.[12] Dalí’s protestations to the contrary were finally accepted and he moved officially to join the Surrealists in Paris in 1929, even as he continued the use of increasingly direct Freudian imagery.
Salvador Dalí | Dismal Sport (1929)
Dalí’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) is one such example. He borrowed directly from the Greek myth used by Freud to illustrate an arrested stage of psycho-sexual development. The Greek youth Narcissus projected nascent sexual drives onto himself and seemed to perfectly embody the Surrealist relationship between reality and illusion, falling in love as he did with his own reflection and transformed by the gods into a flower as punishment. To the left of the picture kneels Narcissus, his oval head bowed and supported by his bent left knee, his right leg crossed and tucked partially underneath in the water, shoulders shrugged and red hair billowing in the wind. This complicated configuration of knees and elbows is painted in soft, golden colors, and if gazed at “begins to melt into the red and gold rocks and their reflections.”[13] A similar configuration is repeated to the right, yet the repeated motif appears this time as an enormous gray stone hand, holding an egg from which bursts forth a narcissus flower. It is the verisimilitude of these images and the ambiguity of appearance and representation that are largely responsible for the metamorphosis of Narcissus. Once the viewer’s perceptual filter has been distorted by the gray stone hand holding an egg, it is nearly impossible to look back at the figure of Narcissus to the left and see anything but a golden stone hand also holding an egg: Narcissus has thus been turned to stone. The moment of metamorphosis takes place at the precise moment that the viewer changes his or her perceptual filter. Ultimately, it is the viewer's “voluntary powers of hallucination” that condemn Narcissus to his fate.[14]
Salvador Dalí | Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937)
Dalí’s masterful deployment of double-images was a core component of his “paranoiac-critical method.” He deliberately set out to simulate the paranoiac’s “delirium of interpretation,” for whom a series of images or ideas could harbor causal connections that were internally coherent yet meaningless for an outside observer.[15] The “curse of reason” did not govern the paranoiac, who was therefore able to access unadulterated insights that were closed off to the sane. Dalí’s obsession with paranoia effectively allowed him, “like the paranoiac, to reorder the world according to his interior obsessions, [so that] everything is potentially something else.”[16] An excellent example of this is his Mountain Lake (1938), in which a placid lake is transformed with a little paranoia into an image of a fish lying on a table. Seemingly unimportant elements such as the reflection of the rock in the surface of the “lake” and a stream to the left of the painting become “pivotal points of paranoid transformation.”[17] Once the viewer’s perceptual normality has become destabilized, the hitherto overlooked elements mutate into the fish’s gills and tail. The viewer’s voluntary powers of hallucination again transform the “lake” in scale (from landscape to domestic still-life), composition (from inorganic to organic), and emotional tenor (from placid to sinister). The ensuing disorientation caused by a world in which all images are subject to sudden mutation allows the sane viewer access finally to the Surrealist holy grail: the realm of the marvelous, where “the boundary between the real and the imagined becomes ambiguous,” a dream world of “incipient metamorphosis,” irrational beauty, and destabilized normality.[18]
Salvador Dalí | Mountain Lake (1938)
Surrealism was never an artistic style so much as a state of mind. The various techniques experimented with by Surrealist artists – Ernt’s grattage and satiric images, Dalí’s trompe l'oeil dream imagery – were ultimately “lamentable expedients” in the Surrealist effort to disrupt normal reality, liberate the unconscious imagination, and unveil the mercurial dream world of the marvelous.[19] Surrealist actor and writer Antonin Artaud wrote: “Surrealism is not a style. It is the cry of a mind turning back on itself.”[20]
[1] Bradley, 11
[2] Bradley, 19
[3] Louis Aragon, quoted in Bradley, 19
[4] Bradley, 21
[5] Ades in Britt, 231
[6] Bradley, 23
[7] Ades in Britt, 229
[8] Ades, 70
[9] Bradley, 32
[10] Ades, 70
[11] Ades, 71
[12] Ades, 71
[13] Ades, 133
[14] Bradley, 38
[15] Ades, 122
[16] Bradley, 41
[17] Bradley, 41
[18] Bradley, 41
[19] Andre Breton, quoted in Ades in Britt, 251
[20] Bradley, 7
References
Ades, Dawn. Dalí (World of Art). London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.
Adres, Dawn. Dada and Surrealism. (In Britt, David. Modern Art: Impressionism to Post-Modernism). London: Thames & Hudson (1999)
Bradley, Fiona. Surrealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Cullen, Michael. The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Infant Jesus - Max Ernst (2008, October 28). Retrieved December 2, 2010, from http://michaelcullenart.blogspot.com/2008/10/blessed-virgin-chastising-infant-jesus.html
