Old Friends: The Surrealists at the National Galleries of Scotland

When Roland Penrose began buying artwork after returning to England in 1935, he focused on purchasing the works of the Parisian Surrealists—the circle of artists that had embraced him as one of their own. Old friends such as Dali, Magritte, Miro, Picasso, De Chirico, and others graced Penrose’s walls. Penrose left most of his collection to the National Galleries of Scotland, who bring the old gang together in Another World: Dali, Magritte, Miro and the Surrealists, an exhibition running through January 9, 2011. Scotland doesn’t seem like the obvious place for Surrealism, but isn’t that the point of Surrealism? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Old Friends."



[Many thanks to the National Galleries of Scotland for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to Another World: Dali, Magritte, Miro and the Surrealists, which runs through January 9, 2011.]

Stop Making Sense

If Salvador Dali is the king of Surrealism, Max Ernst is the court jester. Born April 2, 1891, Ernst took the absurdity of Surrealism and Dada and emphasized the humor of the joke of reality over the existential angst accompanying the loss of rationality. In Aquis Submersus (above, from 1919), a doll-like figure with a handlebar mustache stands at the edge of a swimming pool surrounded by buildings. The buildings, however, seem more like two-dimensional stage backdrops. Their shadows appear behind as if projected onto a wall. The moon reflected in the water turns out to be a clock hung high above the scene. It is as if one of Giorgio de Chirico’s ominously unpopulated towns had been recreated by a grade school class for the school play. Ernst certainly knew of de Chirico’s art and is playing off of him here. de Chirico actually resisted the label of Surrealist, so Ernst may be trying to help him out here by showing how a little absurdity could be injected into de Chirico’s surreal seriousness.

For Ernst and other Surrealists and Dadaists, every scrap of the world around them was fodder for foolishness. In The Hat Makes the Man (above, from 1920), Ernst cut out pictures of hats from catalogues, pasted them to a page, and linked them with lines of color to “make” living creatures roaming across the page. Always the clown, Ernst puns visually on the idea of “the hat makes the man” and literally constructs a “man” out of hats. Ernst claimed that the pictures of the hats and other bourgeois items for sale “provoked” him to action. Freud, in many ways the Surrealist’s best friend, saw hats as symbolizing repressed desire, literally keeping a lid on the id. Ernst runs with that idea and creates phallic columns of writhing hats struggling to keep things tidy. Just as Rene Magritte would later use bowler hats to stand in for the erasure of the modern man’s sense of self, Ernst uses hats to signify the fruitless struggle to cover up human urges.

Ernst’s Ubu Imperator (above, from 1923) pays homage to the father of Dadaism, Alfred Jarry. Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi inspired generations of European artists to “stop making sense” and thus deny the conditions of society presented by authority. Jarry founded the fake science of 'Pataphysics, or "the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments," as Jarry unhelpfully described it. Like The Hat Makes the Man, Ubu Imperator is an individual made up entirely of accoutrements. Whatever animates the clothing might be human, but we’re not sure. All we know is that the clothing, which represents the commercialism and standards of a society, however vain and cruel, is coming our way. The great paradox of Ernst’s work is that while it almost never depicts a recognizable human, it contains a great deal of humanism. I look at some of Dali’s paintings and feel only sadness and horror at how they tear open the inhumanity of the world. When I look at Ernst and his covered-up characters, I laugh and feel hopeful that there’s something still worthwhile deep inside.

Reproductive Rights

Surrealism often takes a sinister turn. Just think of Salvador Dalí’s more nightmarish works, full of sexual innuendo and physical violence. Of course, not all of Dali’s works walk on the dark side, but no Surrealist stayed on the sunny side of the street as much as Rene Magritte. Born November 21, 1898, Magritte loved to explore the depths of the unconscious mind with humor and gentleness, yet always with some deeper philosophy lurking beneath. Golconda (above, from 1953) shows Magritte playing with multiplicity, one of his favorite themes. It’s literally raining men in Golconda—all identical men in bowlers and overcoats. Magritte often used the bowler hat as a symbol of the faceless modern male. In the 1950s, the drive to conform after the trauma of World War II spawned a world-wide state of repression that eventually exploded in the release of the 1960s. Magritte may be arguing that this shower of dopplegangers shows how the individual has become as insignificant as a single raindrop in the great flood of humanity. Or, he may be suggesting that this faceless lack of individuality is falling upon the world like the bombs that rained down upon Europe during the war, with the detonation itself delayed by a decade.

Magritte’s Not to Be Reproduced (above, from 1937) allegedly shows the back of the head of the poet Edward James, friend and benefactor of Magritte. Identifying the sitter is pure guesswork, however, when all you can see is the back of his head, even in the reflection in the mirror. In Not to Be Reproduced, Magritte questions the ability of art to reproduce reality in any accurate way. Every production is an interpretation in some way, not a true duplication free of bias. The fact that we can see the back of the money sitting on the mantle piece but not the man’s face suggests that it is human nature itself that Magritte finds especially impossible to reproduce convincingly. On one hand, Magritte’s suggestion seems sad—an endless source of frustration for those who would plumb the depths of humanity. On the other hand, putting yourself in Magritte’s place in 1937, as Nazism, fascism, and totalitarianism all threatened to extinguish all human individuality, Magritte may actually be saving humanity by putting it beyond the reach of such powers. In such a situation, arguing that the human individual could never be reproduced, never duplicated as part of some “master race,” would be an act of courage.

In 1966, near the end of his life, Magritte painted The Two Mysteries (above), in which he placed a pipe next to a inset duplicate of his famous 1928 painting, The Treachery of Images, in which he placed a pipe above the inscription “Ceci n'est pas une pipe,” French for “This is not a pipe.” In The Two Mysteries, Magritte connects the beginning and the end of his career like a Mobius strip. Magritte’s puts his playing around with the ideas of representation and duplication into a infinite loop that invites us to join him for the ride. In 1928, Magritte saw such issues as “treachery,” a betrayal of sorts against rationality. By 1966, the kindler, gentler Surrealist no longer felt such betrayal and allowed himself a sense of hopefulness and peace with the “mysteries” of art and existence. Magritte remains one of those trippy artists that college students love to hang on dorm room walls, but behind all the humor rests a restless mind that navigated the events of the twentieth century and their impact on the individual and emerged with his faith intact.