Surrealism Beyond Borders - Microscopes and Telescopes

 

'The task for the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.'  (Leonora Carrington)

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I'll start with a confession. Surrealism can occasionally irritate me. It's often struck me that the praise attaching itself to this movement has a tendency to overstate the role of the imagination: that is, the role of the imagination in conjuring up Surrealism’s stand-out moments. Not that those moments aren’t great, but rather that the incongruity and displacement of objects that make up, say Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory - melting clocks and stop-watches in a desert landscape - somehow, in their creation, exercise a greater demand on the imagination than say - and I choose this piece of art very deliberately - Rembrandt’s 1661 Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Wife of Jacob Trip. Both pieces of art are suggestive of time and its passage. Yet for me, the Dutch artist’s unflinchingly direct portrait says so much more about that subject than Dalí’s nightmarish dreamscape. In fact, try it. Spend a moment looking at the reproductions of these two paintings, and decide which one of them leaves you ruminating more on time?  

 

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dalí (1931)

Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Wife of Jacob Trip, Rembrandt (1661)

Is that unfair? A case of comparing artistic apples and oranges? Perhaps. And maybe, now that I come to think of it, more of you may in fact side with Dalí over Rembrandt. And not just because the latter loses its formidable magic in reproduction (do access the National Gallery's enhanced image here and do zoom in on the mill-stone ruff and the jaundiced right hand of Margaretha). Additionally, in citing the subject of time, I might also be doing something of a disservice to the complexity of the Dalí. The title of that painting talks about memory rather than time and most interpretations edge towards it being a work that engages with Einstein's theory of relativity. Although it should be noted that Dalí himself pooh-poohed those interpretations and declared his primary inspiration as Camembert cheeses melting in the sun. That - and here my prejudices come to the fore again - also reveals the larger than life personality of an artist who was a consummate self-publicist. Indeed, if you want to cause a stir, take an anteater for a stroll along a Parisian boulevard. 

This airing of prejudices was all in preparation for my visit to one of Tate Modern’s big summer exhibitions, Surrealism Beyond Borders. 'Get those bugbears out in the open and it'll be easier to ignore them and keep them at an objective arm's length,' was the thinking. Easier said than done, though. 

Surrealism is bound up tightly with Freud. It’s a knot that is difficult to unpick. Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams has its theoretical fingerprints all over Surrealism. Not that the ‘Viennese quack’ - Nabokov’s overly harsh words - invented dream interpretation, but the impulses that lie behind his thinking occupy a central strand in André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, with the Frenchman praising the Austrian for bringing ‘his critical faculties to bear upon the dream’.  

And herein, perhaps, lies another of my problems with the movement. It almost feels like you are being instructed to interpret, rather than - and this is a tricky verb to use and I need to take great care with it - to feel. Often it’s the titles that draw you into this way of thinking about a particular painting. We've already had hints about this with the Dalí painting. But take Cossette Zeno’s Ni hablar del peluquín ('No use to talk about the little wig'). Before you even get a chance to bask in the Puerto Rican artist’s tropical apricots and greens, you’re drawn into something akin to solving a crossword clue. Like a gate-keeper, the title stands in the way of how you get to feel about this painting. It hinders, even bars, sensibility. Of course, I do realise that I’m making a solid argument here to ignore the title and take in the work first. Nevertheless, five minutes later I’m drawn into only viewing the work through the lens of male vanity ridiculed - a worthy subject, no doubt - but one that, once the rubric of the title is stubbornly installed, becomes the only subject.

Ni hablar del peluquín, Cossette Zeno (1930)

That's not to say that I don’t admire the painting. I think it has a heady warmth and vibrancy and I love some of the colours and shapes, particularly the yellows and oranges which bring to mind the hefty bill of a toucan.  

Likewise Eugenio Granell’s Los blasones mágicos del vuelo tropical ('The magical blazons of tropical flight'). Here I try something different. I don’t read the title. But this leads to frustration. Again, I fall into the trap of trying to interpret prematurely.  And I’m lost. And, more crucially, unmoved.

 

Los blasones mágicos del vuelo tropical, Eugenio Granell (1947)

Indeed, I am far less keen on this painting than I am the Zeno. The composition is overly cluttered and I’m put in mind of a tattoo addict rather than dreamy tropical flight. My own imagination strains and suddenly all I can see are internal organs fizzing through the sky. That my visual palette is also left sensing Picasso when standing before this work, doesn't help either. In an adjacent room, that artist's The Three Dancers lords it over all that comes within its artistic gravity. With its bolder and more lively use of paint, and the striking demarcations at work in its composition, it seems to be occupying a higher plane than the likes of the Granell. Elsewhere, the Japanese artist Yamashita Kikuji's Deification of a Soldier, initially hits hard - war and destructive futility are its subject - but that soon gives way to unfavourable comparisons with Picasso's Guernica. There's almost a sense of pastiche in some of these works. 

Deification of a Soldier, Yamashita Kikuji (1967)

My frustrations come to a head with one of the exhibition’s pin-ups. Leonora Carrington and her Self-Portrait, the hook in the exhibition’s advertising campaign, is a classic Surrealist dream scene. The artist, seated on a chair, is surrounded by an incongruous collection of equine beasts (and non-beasts). A white horse gallops off outside of the window, a rocking-horse levitates, and a half-hyena horse, along with Carrington herself, returns our gaze. The demand to interpret this dream dominates. The trouble is, where does it get you? Why does the rocking horse have no tail? Is the artist’s unruly hair meant to represent a mane? What to make of the unsightly smudge at the bottom left of the painting: something deliberately removed, or something removed or unseen in the dream? I carry on ruminating, and only end up thinking how dull nocturnal dreams can be. Indeed, if it's not Samuel Coleridge dreaming the entirety of his poem 'Kubla Khan', I'm not particularly interested. 

Self-Portrait, Leonora Carrington (1937)

Again, that isn't quite fair. I remember the fascination of taking in the Paula Rego retrospective last year, and how replete that exhibition was with image and symbol. Likewise, the same goes for Dorothea Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, a painting on display in the opening room of this exhibition that I saw at that artist’s retrospective in 2019. As an aside, surely it's not only me who can't help but think of Stanley Kubrick's horror masterpiece The Shining when looking at this painting. That hotel corridor, those doors, the two girls? Whatever, I seem to be picking and choosing which questions I find fascinating. 

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Dorothea Tanning (1943)

Tanning's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is a stirring work, beautiful and unsettling, but also brimming with something that I'm a sucker for: a creepy fairy-tale aesthetic. That was a theme that was replete in the Tanning retrospective. Maybe that's it? If I saw a Leonora Carrington retrospective, would her symbols come on stronger and shape my reaction? After all, Carrington coined the most glorious of aesthetic edicts, that 'the task for the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope'. Am I primed to enjoy the Tanning painting - and those of Rego - because I’d seen them bedded amidst a wider corpus? Do we often benefit from just one voice guiding us through an exhibition? Does a dream symbol rely upon repetition for it to have power? That we are more intrigued by the recurring dream rather than the singular one might suggest that this is very much the case. And indeed, on turning back on myself and retracing my steps, I encounter Carrington's Chiki, Your Country and despite a creeping sense of 'gallery fatigue', I want to spend more time with this painting's multitude of symbols and colour. For the moment though, I hone in on the kite in the top left corner of this painting and begin to crave fresh air. 

The sense that I’ve bristled my way through this exhibition is strong and needs to be put aside. Along with the Tanning, let’s talk about what else I loved. One particular work detained me longer than any other. Alice Rahon, a French-Mexican poet-artist and her tribute to her friend, The Ballad For Frida Kahlo, grabbed me the moment that I entered the room. 

 

The Ballad for Frida Kahlo, Alice Rahon (1955)

Its cobalt blue background feels almost planetary and your eyes can’t stray anywhere else. ‘Magical’ is the first word that enters your mind, and this depiction of a festival, iridescent and shimmering, demands that you join in. An unruly and awkward thought enters my head though, causing me to pause. Is it my imagination, or does the outline of the town take on the cartographical shape of the United States? And if so, what does that mean for our interpretation? Indeed, why am I enjoying the interpretation game here, in a way that I couldn't with other works? I cast that thought aside and choose instead to lose myself inside the dynamism of the painting, to join the festival. Rahon talked of taking inspiration from the cave paintings of Altamira, and indeed, her striking and incongruous animal heads and torsos - cats and giraffes - hint towards the primitive. But the lights also whisk us into the Twentieth-century and the heady pull of the funfair - look at that resplendent Ferris-wheel. It sparkles with the dual sense that we all remember from childhood, a combination of excitement and danger. The procession that threads its way around this island - and, to me, it is an island rather than the house that it is purported to be - has that duality too: a celebration or an angry sacrificial mob? Fifteen minutes later, and I remain transfixed, lost in this semi-mythical Mexican night. Over a month later, and I still can’t tell you what I think it means. And maybe that’s the point of the surrealist dream world. Is it enough to just be there rather than reaching after troubled and unresolvable interpretation? In short, we need to exercise a little of Keats' 'negative capability'. 

Detail from The Ballad for Frida Kahlo, Alice Rahon

I'm also - and I keep putting this off - being rather disingenuous about the exhibition, in that I've not talked about its organising principle: Surrealist works from outside the European canon and how they have engaged - or more pertinently - sometimes disengaged with the Movement's European origins. And further to that disengagement, are the political elements inherent in these works. Less we forget, Surrealism is a movement that shouts loudly about the desire for Revolution and social liberation. Perhaps that’s it? That I’ve not done my political homework. That my knowledge of Mexican and Caribbean and South American politics is sketchy; that I’m not primed enough on the the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party Revolts of the 1950s or the Guatemalan Revolution and the monsters and heroes who fire up the dreams and imaginations of these artists; that I've not dwelled long enough upon Granell's Trotskyist inclinations. In short, that I'm a bit lazy.  

But it's a huge subject. Surrealism hasn't just escaped the bounds of Europe, it's escaped the bounds of the Avant-garde. Of all the big beasts of Modernism, this is the one that can still be observed on a daily basis. Only recently, we got numerous examples of Surrealism in the Eurovision Song Contest. André Breton would surely have give France's douze points to the Norwegian entry Subwoolfer and their song 'Give That Wolf A Banana'. 

Subwoolfer, better than Sam Ryder and better than Ukraine's entry

Maybe too, my purview hasn’t extended itself enough and taken on much of the other stuff here. There are films and objects - Dali’s lobster telephone always raises a smile - and also exercises outside of the scope of the dream, such as automatism. That said, I do always find automatism tiresome, and the collaborative laid out sketches - one artist continues what another has begun - seem little more that a banal party trick. 

The Exquisite Corpse, no. 11, Aleksandar Vučo, Lula Vučo, Vane Živadinović Bor (1930)

The photographic elements of the exhibition, too, were enjoyable. It was a real delight to get a glimpse of Claude Cahun again, whose work I first encountered after reading Rupert Thomson’s superb novel Never Anyone But You. The biography alone, of this daring and gender-fluid artist, makes her images interesting. She had a way with a quote too: how very much of our Century are the words that embellish the wall of this room? 'Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.' The 'shock of the new' is often not very new at all.  

Self-Portrait, Claude Cahun

And less I forget, I do also have a real soft-spot for that other staple of Surrealism, the 'uncanny' (yes, it's Freud again), and how the familiar can be rendered disconcerting and strange when encountered unexpectedly. Anxiety, a primary symptom of the uncanny, bubbles to the surface whenever I look at Dora Maar's photograph of the Spinx Hotel. The crowds at the Parisian windows, watching what we cannot see, and we in turn watching them. I look at the date of the photograph - 1935 - and our historical knowledge, tragic and enormous, trumps whatever everyday banality - an accident? a parade? a celebrity? - is occupying the faces at the windows.  

Untitled (Sphinx-Hôtel), Dora Maar (1935)

Pondering my frustrations over the days following my trip to the Tate, it was Freud who nagged most incessantly. And that perhaps - ‘perhaps’ is a word that permeates this post - is the key. To be clear, I rather like Freud. Although I don’t buy into his model of the human mind - and many of his theories are, not to mince words, batshit crazy - I do find his work incredibly provocative. Almost all of it is worth your time, even if you are left scoffing. Some of it is quite brilliant. Take Mourning and Melancholia for example, a work that I think about on quite a regular basis, and one that allowed me to retrospectively 'psychoanalyse' my own grandma - I never told her this - as suffering from a never-ending grief that thus turned into a permanent state of melancholia.  

And for me, the example of Freud, provides the best way to think about Surrealism as an art movement. Paintings and works that don’t always move you, but always seem to provoke something, even if it’s only to take to task meaning or intention. Rembrandt's Margaretha de Geer might have more imagination flowing through the veins of her aged right hand than many of the works in this exhibition have in their totality, but that is setting the bar impossibly high. And If I'm going to press my opinions on anyone who has read this far, then I certainly ought to follow Carrington's advice - or rather one interpretation of it - and not just peer at these works through the microscope, but also, in a less lazy and apolitical mood (I blame the parlous state of my country's government), take a broader look at their international context through the telescope. Besides, I've already decided that I will pay a second visit to the exhibition, even if it’s only to spend time immersed on Alice Rahon’s magical island. That is surely testament to the provocativeness of these works. The imagination may often be over-egged, but the experience and puzzles will make it worthwhile.