Writing in the years after the first world war, French writer and poet André Breton lamented that under “the pretence of civilisation and progress,” European culture had “managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy”. The first surrealist manifesto Breton co-wrote in 1924 called on writers and artists to explore all that fell beyond rational and the conscious thought: dreams, hallucinations, unedited streams of thought and childlike wonder.
Honouring that manifesto, 2024 has been designated the centenary of surrealism. Anniversaries are just the kind of bourgeois convention that would have got Breton’s dander up (it rose easily). Nevertheless, homage is being paid. West Yorkshire joins the celebration with two exhibitions taking appropriately irreverent and sideways views: The Traumatic Surreal in Leeds and Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes in Wakefield.
Forbidden Territories is a lushly installed extravaganza that takes its design cues from the wigged-out scenography of early surrealist exhibitions. Sacks of “coal” hang ominously overhead in the opening chamber – a tribute to a 1938 installation by Marcel Duchamp, for which the French provocateur suspended 1,200 coal sacks from the gallery ceiling and positioned a brazier in the middle of the room. In subsequent galleries, historic paintings by Francis Picabia and Pablo Picasso magically “hang” from a patterned curtain designed by Aliyah Hussain. An intensely coloured pastel mural of a fairytale forest by Swiss artist Nicolas Party performs as the backdrop to Max Ernst’s ominous 1927 painting Cage, Forest and Black Sun.
Ernst was fascinated by forests, connecting them to memories of his childhood in Germany. Here, the dark, leafless trunks are textured with rubbings taken from wooden floorboards. With a blue-eyed bird suspended in a cage at its centre, Ernst’s forest is not a portrait of a place but of a state of mind. The blue-eyed Ernst had an avian alter ego named Loplop: here was the tiny creature in the cage.
This relationship between the natural world, the unconscious and the realm of feeling is the unifying concept for Forbidden Territories. In art from across the last century, water becomes a medium for the exploration of sexuality and gender, landscapes are scarred with the trauma of war, and imaginary beasts evoke the animal qualities of the human experience. Surrealism in the Breton era was quite the boys club: women were rarely exhibited. Forbidden Territories allows women working in the surrealist tradition to shine, among them Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Edith Rimmington and Marion Adnams.
Many of Adnams’ paintings star fantastical paper dolls – in Alter Ego (1945), the stiffly pleated figure is joined on the beach by an outsized skeleton bird. I can only recall seeing one work by Rimmington before (it was certainly memorable – a dissected hand territorialised by pupating caterpillars). Her work here includes photography, collage, drawing and painting, all uncanny and meticulously composed. In Family Tree (1937), two lines of thick chain stretch over the sea along an endless jetty while a tiny viper weaves its way between the links – a work shimmering with insidious threat.
The Traumatic Surreal is a view from the other side – art by women in German-speaking countries made in the decades after the second world war. Inspired by a recent book by Patricia Allmer (who co-curated the exhibition) it makes evident the multi-generational trauma of nazism, and its impact on girls growing up within conservative cultures in which their prescribed role remained Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church).
Meret Oppenheim’s Word Wrapped in Poisonous Letters (Becomes Transparent) (1970) is made of stiffened string, structured to look like the twine wrapped around a (now absent) bundle of letters. The shadow it casts is reminiscent of a swastika, suggesting a ghostly presence of the past still bound tight around the present. In Birgit Jürgenssen’s Untitled (Dog) (1972) a readymade ceramic statue of a doberman has two holes smashed in his side through which spill stockings filled with chemical fertiliser granules – a broken emblem of macho power. You need to walk around the side of Renate Bertlmann’s fur heart to see the tiny tip of a razor-sharp knife blade emerging from its centre.
Surrealism was a bit of a poisoned chalice for women, who were seen within the movement as having a special facility for non-rational thought, being more childlike and closer to nature than men. The Traumatic Surreal makes a strong case for the liberatory potential of the tradition – in particular its capacity for coded dissent. It is notable how many of the works here subvert cliches about women’s “natural”, “animal” nature through the use of fur and feathers in works that speak both of confinement, and the capacity for resistance.
• Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes is at Hepworth Wakefield until 21 April. The Traumatic Surreal is at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, until 16 March.
