Poignancy is not a word we associate with surrealism, but you feel it when you walk down a corridor of blown-up photobooth pictures and enter the Pompidou’s blockbuster marking the movement’s 100th birthday. Everybody was so young when the first surrealist manifesto was published in October 1924: was it really a century ago? Painter Yves Tanguy sports a punk hairstyle as he grimaces for the automatic camera; Marie-Berthe Aurenche, another painter, whips her hair up into chaos; Salvador Dalí closes his eyes as if asleep.
These people are funny and having fun. Of all the modernist art movements, it was the surrealists who were best at enjoying their revolution. In the Pompidou’s perfectly judged exhibition, that pleasure shines through as you meet these artists, all dead now, not so much as giants of art history as extremely amusing companions.
