Tate Modern’s enormous and surprising Surrealism Beyond Borders is a round-the-world tour of what must be the 20th-century art’s most far-reaching movement. It has Austrian totem poles and Egyptian fetishes, paintings from Sweden and Senegal to Haiti and Cuba, silent movies filmed in New Zealand and Colombia (The Blue Lobster, co-scripted by Gabriel García Márquez) and photographs from just about everywhere that André Breton’s call to astonish, disrupt and rifle the unconscious was ever heard.
Eighty years of art are condensed with extraordinary agility into a sequence of galleries that dramatise the transit of this comet right cross the globe, without sticking to conventional geography or chronology. Unfamiliar art from beyond the usual European circuit is subtly interspersed with old classics so that they appear on equal footing. A sinister Portuguese sculpture, featuring a cloven buffalo hoof topped with an all-seeing eye, appears next to one of Marcel Duchamp’s caged readymades. Magritte’s train rushes out of its famous fireplace alongside Japanese painter Koga Harue’s painting of a bathing belle standing triumphant between a zeppelin and a submarine (made nine years before), and both visions appear surpassingly strange.
