Latest news with #SurrealistManifesto
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.
The Guardian
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dismissed, excluded and now adored: why are women surrealists suddenly everywhere?
'Of course the women were important,' said the artist Roland Penrose in 1982, 'but it was because they were our muses.' Penrose was talking to the art historian Whitney Chadwick, who was interviewing him for a book she was writing about women surrealists. 'They weren't artists,' insisted Penrose, who thought she shouldn't even be writing about them. But Chadwick did anyway – and the result, her 1985 book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, fundamentally changed our understanding of both surrealism and female artists. In the 40 years since, many of the women Chadwick wrote about have gained wider fame, but the past few years have seen an explosion of interest in surrealist women. Last year was the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto, which was actually two competing manifestos published by competing groups of (male) surrealists in Paris. So it's unsurprising that we saw so much interest in the movement. But it is striking that the centennial prompted a flurry of interest in the women – who were actually excluded from those groups. Indeed, many weren't even in Paris. Why the sudden broadening of the lens? When Chadwick asked the surrealist Leonor Fini about Penrose's muses claim, she responded with characteristic directness, calling it 'bullshit'. Fini was born in Argentina and spent time in Italy before ending up in Paris. She was openly bisexual and spent the later part of her life living in a polyamorous relationship with two men – and dozens of cats. 'I am a painter,' she once said, 'not a woman painter.' Her words reflect the complex politics of pursuing art as a woman. While their lives were defined by their experiences of being born women, and many of them made art that was explicitly about femininity and sexuality, they also bucked assumptions based on their gender that were made by their male peers and by the viewing public. Claude Cahun, as early as 1914, went even further than Fini in her radical identification as lesbian and non-binary. She is famously quoted as saying: 'Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.' Currently the subject of a touring exhibition courtesy of London's Hayward Gallery, Cahun's photography was made with her partner, Marcel Moore, a lesbian who also lived androgynously. Even among surrealist women who did not identify as queer, there is often an element of queerness to their work – either through an exploration of the 'divine feminine', or through a more fundamental sense of enigma. The late US scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick described 'queer' as an 'open mesh of possibilities' between genders and sexualities, a defining way of using the word that has made it such a sweeping term today, sometimes meaning no more than 'impossible to categorise'. Fini and Cahun were based in the surrealist centre of Paris, but many of the other women receiving new attention were not. Ithell Colquhoun was a British surrealist and is currently the subject of a major retrospective at Tate St Ives. It is a seismic exhibition that forcefully makes the case for Colquhoun's powerful legacy. Colquhoun was connected to so many occultist and spiritual groups in Britain that it's hard to count them all. From druidism to Tantra to Christianity, she spent her life seeking a higher truth, all reflected in her work. Like Fini, Colquhoun was attracted to people of all genders, and her art was often explicitly sexual. She made one painting that depicted castrated male bodies, and it was immediately censored for its shocking content. Other works show abstracted, vulva-like landscapes, explore goddess imagery, and deploy techniques that introduce an element of chance – to allow the unconscious to take over the creative act. There has long been a connection between women and magic – think of witches, goddesses, healers and storytellers. And for almost as long, this connection has been weighted with a sense of threat. The mystical, intangible power women could wield threatened patriarchal systems and needed to be controlled. In western art, it was written off as foolish or irrelevant. Colquhoun was pushed out of the British surrealist group because of her fascination with occult sects, which came to dominate her work. Surrealism, although it is distinctly strange, was not concerned with the supernatural. The movements in Paris and Britain both rejected it. Their interest in the unconscious mind was largely scientific, even if it was also irrational (or perhaps anti-rational). Today, though, there is much more interest in these themes: Colquhoun's biographer Amy Hale has called it the 'Shamanic turn', as our collective consciousness becomes more open to esoteric beliefs. Last autumn, the London gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan hosted Enchanted Alchemies, a show that focused on mystic and occult surrealists. Almost all women, they included Eileen Agar, Leonora Carrington, Fini and Colquhoun. Mary Wykeham, a British surrealist whose work features in the Hepworth Wakefield's current exhibition Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes, found spiritual fulfilment in a slightly different way: after a tumultuous lifetime spent as a wartime nurse, political activist and professional artist, she became a nun. Many of her surviving works are on paper, making them more fragile and smaller-scale. They are filled with swirling or geometric lines, almost completely abstract. Like all surrealist work, they strive to unlock the unconscious mind, bypassing rationality in favour of an often disquieting exploration of the inner self. Another British surrealist, Lee Miller, followed an entirely different path: after building a successful career as a surrealist photographer and model in Paris, she became a photojournalist during the second world war. Miller was present at the liberation of the concentration camps Buchenwald and Dachau, and the photo of her taking a bath in Hitler's tub has become iconic. Often remembered more as a model and muse – she was married to Penrose – Miller recently had her story retold in Lee, a film starring Kate Winslet in the title role. Maruja Mallo, shortly to be the subject of a major retrospective at the Centro Botín in Santander, Spain, lived and worked in Madrid. She knew major Spanish surrealists like Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca, but unlike them she remained in Spain for her whole career – aside from her exile to Argentina during the civil war. Her work incorporated Spanish folk imagery, but became more geometric and abstract. Mallo was a writer as well as a painter, contributing to magazines and books. Surrealism was an especially multidisciplinary movement. Along with writing, film-making was popular, tying the movement to modernity despite its impulses towards timelessness. This plethora of mediums reflects how surrealism is, at its core, a practice of thinking radically differently, using words as well as images – any medium in fact, so long as it brings the unconscious out into the world. 'We are in a wave of rediscovery around women generally,' says Tate St Ives curator Katy Norris, 'and it's allowing us to recognise differences among them – they weren't a single breakaway group.' In fact, the basic surrealist impulse of dreams, sexuality and obsession had a global reach and appeal: unlike previous avant-garde movements in the early 20th century, which often sought to overturn previous -isms, surrealism quickly stopped being so centralised. The diversity among its adherents' lives, styles and priorities is huge. 'Surrealism responds to uncertainty,' says Norris, 'so it speaks to us now in times of uncertainty.' That impulse to examine one's inner self feels very familiar today. But the magnanimity of the surrealists – with their unflinching drive to put themselves into their art in all their irrational, weird glory – is different from the tide of social media-driven, self-critical narcissism that's so prominent today. The fierce individualism of these artists, these women who were so relentlessly themselves, is a tonic. It's no wonder they are capturing public attention like never before. In a world that feels increasingly unpredictable, there's a real resonance in women embracing instability and using it to fuel their creative work. It is, says Norris, 'a perfect storm'.
