From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Visitors to the exhibition ‘Surrealism’ at the Pompidou are asked to ‘leave all clear ideas dictated by reason at the door’. One by one, visitors disappear, much as people do in Hans Richter’s film Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927–28), where they walk behind a lamp post and evaporate. Here, they push through a bright red tongue and are devoured, like the damned, by the monumental jaws of Leviathan. The demonic doorway is a reconstruction of the entrance of the Cabaret de l’Enfer on the boulevard Clichy in Paris, now demolished, above which stucco nudes were once licked by flames. Nearby, on the fourth floor, was André Breton’s apartment, where a hundred years ago he penned the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924).
The manuscript, with its neat hand and many redactions, is on display in a central room from which the rest of the exhibition radiates like a spiralling shell; the text is read aloud by the AI-generated voice of the author. Breton asserts that Surrealism is ‘psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express […] the actual functioning of thought’. The Surrealists advocated a form of lucid dreaming, finding a sense of wonder – the ‘marvellous’ – in the everyday. Their politics of ‘convulsive beauty’ and ‘mad love’ fused Freud and Marx to argue for revolutionary change through the unleashing of libidinous and primitive unconscious forces.
L’ange du foyer (Le triomphe du surréalisme) (1937), Max Ernst. Private collection. Photo: © Vincent Everarts Photographie; © Adagp, Paris, 2024
The exhibition opens with a photo-collage of Breton, an auto-portrait of 1938 depicting him hunched over his microscope, while imprisoned behind him is the Hollywood actress Phyllis Haver, star of D.W. Griffith’s The Battle of the Sexes (1928). The Surrealist movement has long been accused of being a boys’ club, appreciating women only as sex objects and muses. However, the Pompidou curators emphasise the many women associated with the avant-garde movement, and here they are given equal billing with their male peers, as artists and not lovers.
A corridor is lined with enlarged photo-booth strips of Breton, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst with their eyes closed, images that originally surrounded a female nude, as if they were dreaming her into existence, in René Magritte’s I Do Not See the (Woman) Hidden in the Forest (1929). Here, the lascivious men are accompanied by other photo strips featuring female members of the group, including the painter Marie-Berthe Aurenche, then married to Ernst and celebrated by the male Surrealists as a femme-enfant, and the photographer Suzanne Muzard, a former prostitute and Breton’s girlfriend.
It is only relatively recently that women artists such as Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, who are both well represented in the exhibition, have been so celebrated. Other female Surrealists whose work is on display include Claude Cahun, Remedios Varo, Dora Maar, Ithell Colquhoun and Eileen Agar. In A Family Portrait (1954), Tanning represents a world of sexual inequality, depicting a gigantic patriarch looming over a diminutive mother and child and, in a room-sized installation, Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (1970–73), sculpts pregnant, groping forms that emerge from the wallpaper, fireplace and armchair.
‘Surrealism’ is a touring show that started in Belgium and will go on to Madrid, Hamburg and Philadelphia, each time adapting to reverberate with the local history of the movement. The Paris incarnation is huge and deliberately labyrinthine. Divided into 13 rooms or chapters, with themes such as ‘The Kingdom of Mothers’ and ‘Political Monsters’, it features all the big hits: Dalí’s The Great Masturbator (1929), Maar’s Untitled (Hand-Shell) (1934), Ernst’s The Forest (1927), Man Ray’s Ingres’s Violin (1924) and Magritte’s Time Transfixed (1938). Large screens show the famous, and still shocking, eye-slashing scene in Un chien andalou (1928) and the fruits of Dalí’s collaboration with Hitchcock in Spellbound (1945), which also features the cutting of eyeballs, albeit an eye painted on a curtain.
Untitled (Hand-Shell) (1934; detail), Dora Maar. Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Jacques Faujour/Dist. RMN-GP; © Adagp, Paris, 2024
If love of women was a major theme for the male Surrealists, so was their adoration of Paris. The city was their ‘little universe’, wrote Walter Benjamin, ‘their most dreamed-of of objects’. However, apart from the Cabaret de l’Enfer, illustrative of their fascination with the carnivalesque, and the meandering exhibition route, which is supposedly based on Duchamp’s design of the 1938 Surrealist exhibition in Paris, there is surprisingly little of the metropolis on view. An exception is Brassaï’s series of photographs of the deserted city at night, cobbles and statuary shining like wet pebbles.
The curators also emphasise the movement’s internationalism, which takes us beyond Paris and indeed Europe. However much the curators seek to decentre things, though, Breton seems to always insert himself into the middle of the narrative. The anti-clerical Breton had an almost missionary zeal, sweeping up outsiders into his movement as he travelled the world. He dubbed Mexico, where he recruited Frida Kahlo and Rufino Tamayo, the most Surrealist country in the world and, during a stopover in Haiti, claimed the voodoo priest and painter Hector Hyppolite to his movement.
Face of the Great Masturbator (1929), Salvador Dalí. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Photo: Legado Salvador Dalí, 1990; © Photographic Archives Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali/Adagp, Paris 2024
The exhibition sees in Surrealism’s diversity an anticipation of current concerns with decolonisation and successfully foregrounds Surrealism’s anti-imperialism, notably around its critique of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris. Having made a short-lived alliance with the Communist Party, which many of them joined in 1927 in protest at French involvement in the suppression of Rif separatists in Morocco, they organised a Comintern-funded counter-exhibition at the Palais des Soviets in Paris called ‘The Truth About the Colonies’. It included African, Oceanic and Native American art from their private collections, Indigenous art they believed ‘was destined to turn against capitalist imperialism’. Later, in the 1940s and ’50s, the group also opposed French rule in Vietnam and Algeria.
The rapacious Surrealists enlisted all forms of culture in the service of the revolution, but capitalism co-opted their movement in turn, exploiting its disruptive imagery and appeals to our subconscious desires in a continuous assault on the senses. A century on from Breton’s manifesto, deepfake AI and social media construct a world of fragmented, alternative truths (exemplified here by his synthetic posthumous voice); truth and fiction are blurred, as if the whole world order has become surreal.
Personal values (1952), René Magritte. SFMOMA. Photo: Katherine Du Tiel; © Adagp, Paris, 2024
‘Surrealism’ is at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, until 13 January 2025.
From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.