Latest news with #Surrealism
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jazz, Paris and war's brutality: the radical watercolours of Edward Burra, British art's great unknown
On any objective reading, Edward Burra occupies a distinguished place in the history of 20th-century British art. His work, especially his watercolours of demi-monde life in interwar Paris and New York, is a distinct and vivid record of the times. His paintings are held in major institutions – as is his extensive archive, which is housed at Tate Britain in London. And yet he remains 'one of the great known unknowns of modern British art', according to Thomas Kennedy, the curator of a new retrospective show at Tate Britain. It is being held more than half a century on from Burra's last show at the Tate in 1973, three years before he died aged 71. There are lots of reasons for Burra's 'unknown' status, explains Kennedy. 'He worked alone, and not being part of a defined group doesn't help to place an artist. But probably more important is the fact he absolutely hated talking about his work.' Kennedy cites some excruciating documentary footage (also from the early 1970s) illustrating Burra's painful reluctance to engage with questions about art. 'He just hated that stuff and would call art 'fart' and things like that. Apparently, he walked through that Tate show as if wearing blinkers, not looking at the work and just wanting to get it over with.' The exhibition runs alongside a parallel show of works by Ithell Colquhoun, another radical British artist who, like Burra, challenged artistic conventions and explored parallel ideas of identity and sexuality in surrealist work that often reflected her occult beliefs. The two defining features of Burra's early life – he was born in 1905 – were the wealth of his family (prominent in banking) and the fact he suffered from extremely poor health. This combination resulted in him later being able to travel – to France and Spain, the United States and Mexico – then return home to Rye in East Sussex, where he spent most of his life, to recuperate after his exertions and paint the things he had seen. His illnesses – rheumatoid arthritis and the blood disease spherocytosis among other conditions – also helped dictate the nature of his art in that it was physically easier for him to work with watercolours flat on a table than with oils at an easel. 'As a watercolourist he pushed the boundaries of a traditionally delicate medium to create bold graphic works, rich in detail,' says Kennedy. His illness also informed his empathy for those on the fringes of society and in his subject matter he engaged with some of the 20th century's most significant social, political and cultural events. 'After Paris in the roaring 20s and the Harlem Renaissance, he sort of pivoted to depict the violence of the Spanish civil war and then the second world war, before taking on British landscapes and reflections on postwar industrialisation and environmental degradation.' While Burra was publicly reticent about his art, the Tate show's exploration of his archives serves to deepen understanding of the man. As well as letters there are his gramophone records – mostly jazz – books and calendars he kept that show his obsessive cinema-going, sometimes seeing several films a day in French and German as well as English. 'Bringing these sources together is quite revealing,' says Kennedy. 'It all adds to the tapestry of his influences and what emerges is a socially conscious art that is warmly satirical while also being willing to confront the darker side of life.' Three Sailors at a Bar, 1930Burra's sexuality is ambiguous, but his work in the 20s and 30s often reflected queer culture and sensibility. While this image of a bar in the south of France is among his more explicitly queer work, it also reflected a general sense of sexual liberation among Burra's circle in the roaring 20s. Minuit Chanson, 1931 (main image above)In this Parisian music shop where you could pay to listen to a gramophone record, Burra's vibrant street scene celebrates its diverse clientele. In characteristic fashion, he deploys a satirical eye to heighten his subject matter rather than to cruelly caricature it. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Beelzebub, c 1937Burra loved Spain and was devastated by the outbreak of the civil war, as he was to be again by the second world war a few years later. In this painting, he transforms historical Spanish conquistador imagery into a grotesque tableau accompanied by an unnerving sexual charge. Cornish Clay Mines, 1970In his later years, Burra's travel was restricted to motoring around Britain, and here he presents a commentary on postwar car culture, featuring ghost-like figures and advertising icons, such as the Michelin Man, all the while acknowledging his own participation in modernity's environmental depredations. Near Whitby, Yorkshire, 1972 One of Burra's final works shows an empty road disappearing into the fog. With lighter applications of watercolour than his earlier graphic style, possibly due to his declining health, the painting's suggestion of moving into the unknown is typical of his later works in which he seems to be searching for moments of quiet reflection. Edward Burra – Ithell Colquhoun is at Tate Britain, London, 13 June to 19 October.
CBC
5 days ago
- Politics
- CBC
Behind the Surrealists' obsession with Indigenous masks
Watch the documentary So Surreal: Behind the Masks on CBC Gem and YouTube Indigenous masks from B.C. and Alaska influenced the work and world view of some of the most well-known modern artists and writers. In the 1930s and '40s, European Surrealists were obsessed with masks from the northwest coast of North America, many of which had been stolen, seized by the government or sold by people who didn't have the right to sell them. In So Surreal: Behind the Masks, Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond investigates how the pieces ended up in the hands of some of history's greatest artists, influencing the work of Max Ernst, André Breton, Joan Miró and others. Diamond begins his quest in New York, where a century-old Yup'ik mask is selling at a high-end art fair alongside works of modern art. Always fascinated by the intersection of Indigenous and mainstream cultures, Diamond attends the fair and learns the mask was once in the hands of the Surrealist Enrico Donati — and that Donati wasn't the only Surrealist who collected Indigenous masks. Intrigued, Diamond sets off to find out how the pieces ended up in Surrealist collections to begin with. Image | SoSurreal-2 Caption: A collage of photos from So Surreal: Behind the Masks shows Surrealist artists and anthropologist (and part of the Surrealist entourage in New York) Claude Lévi-Strauss, bottom right, with their collections of Indigenous masks and other items. (Rezolution Pictures) Open Image in New Tab Diamond's journey takes him to Yup'ik territory in Alaska and down the coast to the lands of the Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw on B.C.'s southwest coast. These were hot spots for collectors, who came to trade and purchase ceremonial masks at the turn of the 20th century under the guise of salvaging artifacts of "the Vanishing Indian." But some of the masks had been stolen. As Diamond traces the movements of the masks in the early 1900s, he learns of a missing ceremonial raven transformation mask, which was taken from the Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw on Canada's West Coast more than a hundred years ago. Image | SoSurreal-4 Caption: The Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw raven transformation mask, top centre — surrendered under duress in Alert Bay, B.C., in 1922 — is currently in the hands of the Duthuit family. (Royal BC Museum) Open Image in New Tab Juanita Johnston of U'mista Cultural Centre and art dealer Donald Ellis have been trying to recover it. Although currently held by the family of French art critic Georges Duthuit, the mask's exact whereabouts are unknown. (The family has not responded to the community's requests for its return.) In search of the Surrealist collections, and with an eye out for the missing mask, Diamond goes back to New York, where the Surrealists and their entourage had stumbled upon the masks during their exile in the Second World War. Then he follows the trail of the masks across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris, where the Surrealists returned after the war, with their acquisitions in hand. Image | SoSurreal-3 Caption: Ceremonial masks were bought, traded and stolen by museum collectors. In some cases, the items were purchased from people who didn't have the right to sell them. Many remain in museums and private collections today. (Rezolution Pictures) Open Image in New Tab In Paris, Diamond meets with Yup'ik storyteller and dancer Chuna McIntyre, who's in Paris to reconnect with the Yup'ik masks that were formerly in Surrealist collections and now hang in museums like the Louvre. Along the way, Diamond meets art scholars and contemporary Indigenous artists who explain the profound impact of these masks on the art and world view of the Surrealists. And throughout his journey, he continues to look for clues about the missing mask. Will the community finally bring it home? So Surreal: Behind the Masks is a detective story, which delves into the complex world of repatriation and access while exploring the meaning and importance of the masks and how they came to influence an iconic art movement.
Hindustan Times
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Drawing Room: Ritika Aurora loves how Arpita Singh uses pink
Arpita Singh's vibrant, vivid oil paintings often focus on female figures traversing the vagaries of age and the weight of societal expectations. She uses bright colours and packs her visuals together to cover every inch of her canvas, taking inspiration from Indian miniature. This is in stark contrast to the Western concept of showcasing depth through perspective and the strategic placement of figures. And yet, Western abstractionist movements such as Surrealism are also evident in her work.
New York Times
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Last Surrealist
It was Paris in the late 1950s, and Jean-Claude Silbermann knew where the Surrealists met every evening from 5 to 6 p.m. He waited outside Le Musset, a cafe between the Palais Royal and the Louvre, until André Breton — the writer and poet who led the fluctuating, anarchic group — emerged with about 15 of his acolytes. 'I didn't know how to do anything. I hadn't even written any poems,' Silbermann, now 90, said. 'It was ridiculous, but I went straight over to him and said: 'You are André Breton. I am Jean-Claude Silbermann. I'm a Surrealist.' At the time, and now, Silbermann thought of Surrealism as a frame of mind, a way of being in the world, and at its heart is revolt. Breton told the young man to join the nightly meetings whenever he wanted. Born in 1935 in Boulogne-Billancourt, on the western outskirts of Paris, Silbermann cut ties with his family as a teenager, leaving home to try his hand at poetry instead of joining his father's successful hat making business. 'I loved poetry since I was a little boy. At 18, I read 'Alcools,' by Guillaume Apollinaire. I opened the book, and when I closed it, the world had changed,' he told me, his French gallerist Vincent Sator, and the critic and art historian Philippe Dagen, on a recent sunny afternoon in Paris at Galerie Sator in the Marais, where some of the artist's enigmatic works hung on one wall. From the leafy suburbs of Paris, the young Silbermann traveled to Oslo and then Copenhagen, where he hitchhiked, worked on cargo boats and sometimes read palms to make a meager living. 'It was a con, but it paid for my cigarettes, my room and my food,' he said. 'It was a very pleasant life.' Back in Paris a few years later with a wife and a child, he acceded to pressure from his father to work in the family trade but was miserable with his bourgeois lifestyle. 'I gained 15 kilos in three months,' he said. 'Fifteen kilos of anxiety. Fifteen kilos of anguish.' His fateful meeting with Breton brought him back to poetry and, later, painting, both of which remain critical in life. In 2024 Dagen introduced Silbermann to Sator, whose grandmother Simone Khan was Breton's first wife. She was an active member of the Surrealists and opened her own gallery after World War II, to champion the movement's artists. And from May 8 to May 11, at the Independent Art Fair in Manhattan — just over 100 years after Breton wrote his first 'Manifesto of Surrealism' — Sator is showing Silbermann's colorful works filled with dreamlike imagery in the United States for the first time. Last fall, Silbermann's canvases, which are mounted on wood and cut into various shapes with a saw, were shown at the Pompidou's blockbuster 'Surrealism' exhibition, one of many global exhibitions to celebrate the movement's centenary. The show eschewed chronology for a spiraling maze of themes — dreams, the chimera, political monsters, the night, eros and more — that traced Surrealist tendencies all the way back to ancient Greece. 'Listen, I was very happy I was the only Surrealist alive in the exhibition. All the others were dead,' Silbermann told us in the gallery when asked what it was like to be part of a momentous historical retrospective. 'Maybe not for long, but still, I was the only one alive, and that was a lot of fun.' He insists that Surrealism — 'an attitude toward the world, not a stamp you put on a passport,' he said — is not over. The museum, the past, can only teach you so much: It is 'a great tomb, we have to do something else. Me, it's over, but the young people will interpret Surrealism in new ways,' he said humbly. 'I am the last Surrealist alive, but not the only living Surrealist.' Sator said that he will be showing 'young works,' with nearly all paintings made from 2021 to 2024. Only 'Vous Partez Déja?' ('You're already leaving?') is from earlier. That 2009 work shows a bright yellow bird, its feathers flecked with light, clutching two dusky pink and purple skulls as it takes flight. Golden foliage sprouts from the feathers atop its head. 'I have a taste for intellectual provocation,' Silbermann said. 'I never know what I'm going to do when I start working. This is not extraordinarily original. But I stop working when I don't understand it, when it escapes me. That's when I tell myself that it's over, because all of a sudden, I don't understand anything about it.' He has trouble with titles but is happy with 'You're Already Leaving?,' which he realized after it was finished must be a portrait of himself and his wife, Marijo. When I asked who the bird is, he laughed and did not answer. He and Marijo now live on the island of Port-Cros and Sannois, a Paris suburb. Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious has been important to Silbermann, as it was to many of his peers. He also talks about ideas like intuitive knowledge over reason, of the importance of the unknown, of being entangled in your life and art, and of having the profound desire, as well as the courage, to pursue art. 'There are better things to do with your life,' he said of his art practice, 'but I couldn't do anything else. I didn't have a choice. I had to be an artist. Surrealism is courage, fantasy, liberation, revolt.' In some works, figures move through fantastical scenes, locked in ambiguous courtship, becoming one with animals or landscapes, as in 'L'Attente et Le Moment du Fruit Orange' ('The Wait and the Moment of Orange Fruit,' 2024), or 'L'Attente et Le Moment du Blason' ('The Wait and the Moment of the Shield,' 2021-2022). Other pieces may be read as psychological stages both pained and transcendent. 'L'Attente et Le Moment de La Nuit' ('The Wait and the Moment of Night,' 2023) and 'L'Attente et Le Moment de L'Arc-En-Ciel' (The Wait and the Moment of the Rainbow,' 2022) feature writhing, nightmarish figures. 'La Nuit' is ominous, while 'L'Arc-En-Ciel' has a sense of release: The monsters take up only the lower half of the image, which is otherwise serene, with two men hovering weightlessly. These artworks appear slight from afar, but up close they possess a quiet luminosity and — even when dark — a sense of combinatorial play and tongue-in-cheek titles that also defined Silbermann's early work. In 1965, he created the centerpiece for the 11th International Exhibition of Surrealism. Entitled 'Le Consommateur' ('The Consumer'), the giant sculpture was a figure made from what he called a 'disgusting pink mattress' with a siren for its head, an open fridge for its back and a washing machine for its gut, in which daily newspapers tumbled over and over. Silbermann said that he is political in his life as a citizen, but not in his art. The stories he tells of his life bear witness to the violence and turmoil of the 20th century, and yet carry humor, amazement, modesty, optimism. He told of the French German Dadaist Hans Arp, who evaded conscription in World War I by filling in his papers with the correct details but then adding them all up in a vague column of nonsense — 'a recipe for imbecility.' To Silbermann this was not just chance or fate but play in the face of life and death. 'It's beautiful,' he said. He told of the relative of a friend in the World War II French Resistance who made a daring escape from the Gestapo. At the end of the war, Silbermann, who is Jewish, and his extended family were hiding in a house in the hills while his father served in the Resistance. German soldiers arrived and burned the house to the ground, giving the group just 10 minutes to escape. Silbermann described the fire as transfixing, Sator told me. In 1960, along with many other French intellectuals, Silbermann signed the 'Manifesto of the 121,' an open letter opposing the Algerian War, in which he refused to serve. Wracked and disoriented by the conflict, Silbermann was nearly driven to suicide, he said. He was ill for three years and couldn't write poetry any longer. At the suggestion of a friend, he began to paint. During our interview, he smiled and said it came more easily than poetry, quoting an old jazz standard: 'It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.' Then he adapted the sentence, perhaps so it covered the relationship between art and life: 'if you don't have this thing, you don't have anything.'
Forbes
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
This Exhibit Asks Whether Surrealism Would Have Been Better Without Its Leading Men
On October 15, 1924, André Breton published a manifesto that was as notable for its belligerence as its egotism. Striving to define one of the most influential artistic movements of the 20th century, his Surrealist Manifesto laid claim to 'the actual functioning of thought… exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.' Together with eighteen collaborators – predominantly poets and painters – Breton declared 'the omnipotence of dream' and provided a scheme for trouncing the 'reign of logic' through the practice of 'psychic automatism'. Leonora Carrington. Darvaux, 1950. Oil on canvas. 80 × 65 cm. Colección particular. © 2025, Estate of Leonora Carrington / VEGAP. Photo: Willem Schalkwijk Willem Schalkwijk But Breton was not the only one with designs on surrealism. Earlier in the same month, a poet named Yvan Goll published his own Surrealist Manifesto, backed by a completely different group of artistic confederates, standing for a completely different ideal. 'Reality is the basis of all great art,' he proclaimed. 'Without it there is no life, no substance.' The terms of disagreement were no mere coincidence. Goll set 'the emanation of life' in opposition to the exaltation of 'the dream and the random play of thought' that he attributed to 'ex-Dadaists' such as Breton. Goll's vision of Surrealism was situated in 'the ground under our feet and the sky over our head'. Even though Goll was the first to publish a manifesto of Surrealism – and in spite of the care he took to align himself with Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet who coined the term surreal in 1917 – Breton took such a forceful position that he effectively ousted Goll from art history. Breton's victory can partially be attributed to the relative novelty of his project (which transplanted Freud from the clinic to the gallery), in contrast to Goll's vaguer claims to radical change. To an even greater extent, Breton's triumph was achieved with aggressive ambition. (Concurrent with the publication of his manifesto, he and his collaborators established a Bureau for Surrealist Research in Paris. Ostensibly set up to study the 'unconscious activity of the mind', the bureau also issued letters to perceived enemies who called themselves Surrealists without permission, threatening to track them down and beat them to a pulp.) A century after the publication of Breton's manifesto, the identification of Surrealism with Breton's circle is scarcely questioned, even by the select few who know about his rivalry with Goll. Without challenging these historical facts, a major exhibition at the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid beguilingly sets out to explore 'Surrealism without Breton'. It should be stated upfront that 1924. Other Surrealisms is hardly a work of alternative history. The museum does not ask visitors to imagine that Breton had never been born, or to ask what would have happened if Goll had somehow outmaneuvered him. (Consistent with his historical erasure, Goll doesn't rank a single mention in the Fundación MAPFRE's 300-page exhibition catalogue.) Instead the exhibition curator emphasizes much of what Breton ignored or squelched within the realm of psychic automatism. In that sense, 1924 continues the efforts art historians have made since at least the 1980s, notably advanced several years ago in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Surrealism Beyond Borders. As scholarship becomes more encyclopedic, Surrealism benefits from greater inclusiveness. Approached as a phenomenon instead of a movement, Surrealism can encompass the work of artists who never enrolled in Breton's program (such as Joan Miró), those who were 'excommunicated' (such as Salvador Dalí), and those who were marginalized (such as Remedios Varo). Remedios Varo. Icon, 1945. Oil, mother-of-pearl inlay and gold leaf on panel. 60 × 70 × 35 cm. Colección MALBA. Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires 1997.02 © Remedios Varo; VEGAP, Madrid, 2025 Photo: Nicolás Beraza Nicolás Beraza There is real merit to this curatorial reconsideration of the artistic activity surrounding André Breton and his Bureau for Surrealist Research. His myopia was at least as deleterious to the liberation of the unconscious mind as his charisma were beneficial. Much is achieved through the simple act of exhibiting the numinous paintings of Varo and those of other women such as Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, who the misogynist Breton counted as muses rather than artists. Their work rewards the eye and mind to a greater extent than many of the more familiar paintings of more famous Surrealist men. And yet the invitation to explore Surrealism without Breton has the potential to be more generative than curators have heretofore allowed (even without entering into fantasies that his adversaries beat him up and chased him out of town). During the rivalry of 1924, Goll's ally Paul Dermée justly chastised Breton for 'monopoliz[ing] a movement of literary and artistic renewal that dates from well before his time and that in scope goes far beyond his fidgety little person'. The question that naturally arises is this: What might Surrealists have achieved had Surrealism been more inclusive while the Surrealists were alive? Breton presented Surrealism as pure and restrictive. Whereas Dada had upset the artistic and sociopolitical status quo with a panoply of absurdist antics, Surrealism was approached as a research and development program that would leverage Dadaist gains to complete the societal revolution that Apollinaire and his fellow agitators started. Logic would be supplanted in favor of a deeper truth revealed through Freudian psychology. For Breton, art was operational. Artists were enlisted to plumb surreality and to popularize it. The inherent orthodoxy of his premise excluded all other alternatives to narrow-minded rationalism and its ethical constraints. Goll's position is far too amorphous to extrapolate what his allies would have attempted (though his inclusion of the arch-Dadaist Tristan Tzara was auspicious). One reason why Breton's Surrealism ultimately proved so facile on aesthetic and moral grounds is that his methodology amounted to pseudo-science yet lacked the self-awareness to embrace its own phoniness (in contrast, for instance, to the performative irony of Dadaist pataphysics). Another reason is that it was built on the contradictory impulses to liberate the unconscious and to police those whose psyches were freed. Other Surrealisms that were genuinely different might have enriched Breton's project. They might have realized the potential he identified in his Manifesto to an even greater degree than the Surrealist works of women who proved better at pursuing his premises than the men he anointed. Dorothea Tanning. Birthday, 1942. Oil on canvas 102,2 × 64,8 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Adquirido con fondos aportados por C. K. Williams, II, 1999 1999-50-1. © Dorothéa Tanning; VEGAP, Madrid, 2025 ©Philadelphia Museum of Art Philadelphia Museum of Art When he sought surreality in 'the ground under our feet and the sky over our head', Yvan Goll provided at least one hint about what might be found there. 'Everything the artist creates has its point of departure in nature,' he wrote in his Manifesto. The strangeness that nature was already revealing as he wrote – from Einstein's General Relativity to the first inklings of quantum reality – has proven at least as unsettling as Freud's ideas about the human mind. The interaction of a Surrealism born out of physical phenomena with one emanating from psychology might have achieved the revolution sought by Breton and by the Dadaists before him. Otherness is the most potent quality of art as a sociopolitical proposition. Only a fidgety little person would seek to control it.
