One hundred years ago last month, the 28-year-old poet André Breton penned the Surrealist Manifesto, shucking off “the reign of logic”, calling out “the pretence of civilisation and progress” and heralding “the omnipotence of dream”. Breton wanted nothing less than a new reality – one that might overturn a world shaped by religion, schools and governments – by seeking truths within the self: “The future resolution of these two states, dream and reality […] into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.” To create it, he and his evolving gang of Parisian writers and artists turned to the unconscious, spontaneity, automatic creation and collagist games.
Two exhibitions mark the manifesto’s centenary in Britain this month, giving some sense of just how playful and diffuse the fruits of Breton’s rallying cry have been. At Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes at the Hepworth Wakefield, you can encounter young artists still flying the flag for the movement alongside some of its signature historical works. These include the eerie wastelands Salvador Dalí filled with random phones, shape-shifting rocks and melting clocks, and the classic philosophical game by René “bowler hat” Magritte, where a painted landscape within a painted landscape riffs on Plato’s allegory of the cave. There’s also Max Ernst’s painting using floorboard rubbings to suggest tangled woods haunted by his childhood fears and fantasies, and his one-time partner Leonora Carrington’s fairytale-esque animal-human fusions.
Not far from the Hepworth, The Traumatic Surreal at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds will probe how German-speaking feminist artists used surrealism to address fascism and gender in the decades after the second world war. Here, violent undercurrents and animal urges erupt in disturbing psychosexual hybrid creations. Alongside the postwar cohort, it includes work by Méret Oppenheim, one of a number of women to join the movement’s boys’ club in the 1930s and the creator of that early surrealist icon, the feral furred teacup.
These follow a slew of global exhibitions celebrating surrealism’s heavy-hitters such as Imagine! 100 Years of Surrealism, the huge survey that opened at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in collaboration with the Pompidou Centre in Paris earlier this year, as well as its diverse flowerings, be it surrealist artists from the African diaspora at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth or the movement’s importance for film like the recent season at Dundee Contemporary Arts. All these exhibitions contend in some way with the question: “What do we want to look at in surrealism today?” as Eleanor Clayton, curator of Forbidden Territories, says.
Plenty of unpalatable comparison points between Breton’s world and our own give these retrospectives an urgency. Like other writers and artists of his generation, Breton wanted to cut ties with a society that had sent young men to be blown apart or lose their minds in the trenches. His particular revolutionary spirit was set alight when he worked with shellshock victims in a psychiatric hospital and switched on to Freud’s new psychoanalytic theories. As with the absurdist Dada movement that surrealism followed, his emphasis on chance and illogic was a response to a world gone mad. Now, as then, we are dealing with epic upheavals, with climate breakdown added to the horrors of war, the aftermath of a pandemic and a sharpened awareness of mental health crises.
Environmental issues are one focus of Forbidden Territories, prompted in part, as Clayton explains, by the surrealist outlier, Leonora Carrington’s writings on “What constitutes life, and what differentiates plant and animal, human and non-human? What are our responsibilities towards the planet?” The feminist anti-fascist perspective in The Traumatic Surreal is especially pressing too, given that the far-right views that blighted Europe in the 1930s have again been thrust upon mainstream politics while attacks on women’s reproductive rights in the US threaten freedoms.
There is one major difference, though, that makes the movement’s longevity all the more remarkable. Today, surrealism’s jolts – the businessmen raining from the sky, the lobster phone – no longer have the shock of the new. Instead, made-you-look surrealist weirdness saturates everything from kids’ TV to commercials and pop videos. This shift began as far back as the 1930s when dreamy visions and fetish objects were taken up in fashion, with designs such as Elsa Schiaparelli’s shoe hat, advertising like Zero’s “head in the clouds” poster for Shell oil, and furniture, beginning with Dalí’s Mae West lips sofa.
It’s thanks to Dalí’s efforts most of all that surrealism is the only modernist movement to have gone truly mainstream. In the 1940s US, he gleefully embraced mass culture designing magazine covers, creating that spooky dream sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and fashioning himself into a media personality with a trademark wacky moustache. In the intervening years, his endlessly reproduced signature tropes such as the clocks and burning giraffes have been reduced to cliche. While Breton abhorred Dalí’s commercialisation, he wasn’t solely responsible for the original movement losing its edge. Breton also fled embattled Europe to the US in 1941, following Ernst, André Masson and others. With surrealism’s prominent artists dispersed, the movement failed to provide a coherent response to the war.
And yet aspects of early surrealism still speak loudly to young artists. As Mark Polizzotti has underlined in his recent book Why Surrealism Matters, the focus has moved away from the original surrealism bros to “non-western surrealisms, gender-fluid surrealisms, racially diverse surrealisms”. Within Forbidden Territories, Clayton is using landscape as a way to map the evolution from the first explorations of uncanny psychic hinterlands to how surrealist strategies are now being used to probe issues ranging from sexual identity to animal and plant rights. “Surrealism opened the door on challenging the status quo,” the curator reflects. “Particularly in landscape, which was traditionally meant to be a faithful document of objective reality. It’s saying maybe there is no objective reality! That was very freeing to artists in the past and it remains so today.”
Early surrealism such as Yves Tanguy’s interest in biomorphism, swirling organic forms that might pour intuitively from a maker’s hand and suggest collapsing physical and mental boundaries, echoes across the decades. An outlier among 1940s and 50s British surrealists, the occultist painter Ithell Colquhoun for instance, made bodily landscapes with a confusion of internal and external organs, psychedelic thrumming coastal geologies, botanical and underwater worlds. These have been put in communion with the non-binary Cornwall-based artist Ro Robertson’s fluid steel sculptures, evoking the shifting inbetweenness of shore and sea. For both artists, landscape is a way to explore how gender is built and blurred.
The show also probes geopolitical questions. Included in a selection of Lee Miller’s Egyptian photography, her celebrated 1937 image of the desert seen through a ripped tent wall, Portrait of Space, transforms the arid vista into a threshold zone. It’s typically read as a comment on the division between consciousness and unconsciousness, but its political implications are brought out by its pairing with Wael Shawky’s The Gulf Project of 2019, sculptures and drawings fusing Middle Eastern architecture with the bodies of fantastical creatures. Both suggest how a place’s significance is slippery, acquired through what human imagination imposes on it, including in Shawky’s work, our histories and myths.
The Traumatic Surreal offers one of the most succinct examples of later generations using surrealism to their own ends. The movement’s first wave brought out a distinctly male viewpoint, be it Dalí’s phallic piles of rocks or Hans Bellmer’s headless double-ended dolls. Here, the fetish objects and sublimations get a feminist rethink, as with the Austrian artist Renate Bertlmann’s heart-shaped bust of a woman’s breasts with a surgical razor shooting from a nipple, or the Luxembourgish Bady Minck’s video in which a woman sticks out a literally furred tongue.
For its curator, the art historian Patricia Allmer, this work is also clearly anti-fascist and born of the recent Nazi history within the countries that the exhibition’s artists hail from. “Womanhood and motherhood was really important for National Socialist ideology,” she says. “When women make a feminist protest in these countries, it’s always already a protest against fascism.”
That surrealism’s relevance did not end when its original figureheads fizzled out or its tropes went stale should perhaps be no surprise. Polizzotti points out that it was never about a particular style anyway, but “a state of mind”. Successive generations cutting loose from old decrees have turned to Breton’s vision of liberating self-discovery and imagination again and again. As he wrote in his manifesto, the journey into “forbidden territories” was to be a “perpetual excursion”.
The Traumatic Surreal is at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, to 16 March; Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes is at the Hepworth Wakefield, today.
