Passing through a pair of red velvet curtains hanging from the gaping maw of a huge monster, I could see a hand sticking out of a shell, a minotaur revealing its labyrinthine interior, a train flying into the living room, and tigers leaping from the jaws of a pair of fish towards a reclining nude woman. No, I was not in a risqué amusement park, but Centre Pompidou’s major blockbuster exhibition celebrating the centenary of Surrealism with artists including – you guessed it – Dora Maar, André Masson, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalí.
The curtain monster is a reconstruction of the entrance to L’enfer (Hell), the legendary Paris cabaret where André Breton and his fellow comrades used to hang out. It was delightful to watch visitors disappear or emerge through the jaws of the monster; after all, what is visiting an exhibition if not being swallowed up by something infinitely greater than oneself?
Surrealism made a comeback at the 2022 Venice Biennale and has since sparked debates. In Sweden, the art critic Sonia Hedstrand had a fit in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, warning of “the latest advance of detached, humourless, and unimaginative surrealism.” I wrote a response in Göteborgs-Posten, reminding her of Surrealism’s humour and claiming, among other things, that “Surrealism was never out of touch with reality – on the contrary, as Breton rightly claimed – it was a way of changing the world here and now by simply highlighting the hidden psychological mechanisms that govern our lives.”
At Centre Pompidou, the focus is on historical Surrealism, forty years of revolutions and provocations. After the hellish entrance, viewers are led through a corridor of photo booth pictures of Surrealism’s greatest stars – a reminder of their playfulness, but also their constant quest for fame – to a round room where their literary works, magazines, books, and the famous Surrealist Manifesto (1924) are on display in a circular vitrine.
In the promotional material, the Pompidou has recreated – using super-sophisticated technology – Breton’s voice reading aloud from the manifesto with which he broke with Dadaism, a movement which actually wanted to destroy art. Breton’s goal, conversely, was to postulate through art a point of thought beyond rationality, morality, and ethics that could lead to a “future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”
It sounds strange, but when you meditate on this point, as I do from time to time, it’s as if a hatch opens in your brain, one that allows you to imagine whole new worlds, here and now. That is where the power of Surrealism lies first and foremost: the stimulation of the imagination.
Breton was profoundly inspired by psychoanalysis. He discovered Freud’s theories in 1916 and visited him in Vienna in 1921. His encounter with the father of psychoanalysis had a decisive influence on the Surrealist movement, for example, in the practice of automatic writing and the use of dreams as a generator of images, stories, and free associations. According to Freud, there are two direct roads to the unconscious: dreams and language, which allow us to hear what the unconscious is saying and what we don’t want to hear. But there is a third road, I would argue, and I’m confident Breton would agree: namely, art. As I see it, all art is a journey to and from the unconscious. So, too, is this immersive exhibition, which curators Didier Ottinger and Marie Sarré have organised in the form of a labyrinth – one of the Surrealists’ great obsessions – divided into fourteen chapters devoted to the literary figures and concepts that inspired the movement.
One room is devoted to spiritualist mediums, with Max Ernst’s associative drawings and André Masson’s sand paintings. Outsider artist Fleury Joseph Crépin also contributes an enigmatic temple supposedly described to him by a spirit. It reminds me of Hilma af Klint’s angel paintings, not least because Crépin chose to enclose his works in boxes, as time capsules for future viewers. It’s nice to see this associative hanging between the Surrealists and the outsider artists who were inspired by them (Crépin and his fellow artist Augustin Lessage used to go with Breton to spiritualist gatherings).
Another room is devoted to the dream, with a gorgeous painting by Odilon Redon in which a gigantic, sleeping, sheer female face emerges from a sea, and a work by Dora Maar in which a horse on a chessboard meets the chess piece of history, a horse driven by a warrior on a distant monument. Dalí’s dizzying dream scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) is projected on one wall, which works well with the other lines of flight in de Chirico’s paranoid paintings and Grete Stern’s schizophrenic facial doublings which open like a highly voyeuristic peacock’s tail.
The theme of the next room is “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” a quote from Comte de Lautréamont’s novel The Songs of Maldoror (1868), which the Surrealists were highly fond of. There’s a comical, literal interpretation by Man Ray alongside Dalí’s lobster telephone, Victor Brauner’s small table with a wolf’s head and legs, a pair of sublime monster drawings by Unica Zürn, and Swedish Imagist Max Walter Svanberg’s hybrid female monsters.
After a room on chimeras and one on metamorphoses, we come to perhaps the most important part of the exhibition, political monsters, which deals with the Surrealists’ connection to politics. Of central importance are their representations of racism and fascism as part of the inherent ideology of the capitalist system – the desire for accumulation, power, and domination. These range from subtle puzzle works to caricatures of tyrants, including Hitler and Stalin. In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, the Surrealists founded Minotaure (1933–1939), a politically engaged magazine named after the mythological monster who becomes the emblem of both inner and outer evil. I can think of no other -ism that has more seriously addressed the connection between Eros and Thanatos, the desire to love and destroy. No wonder the Surrealists have become so important to queer, environmental, and alternative art movements today.
The exhibition continues on, via the “Lands of the Mothers,” which the curators could well have placed earlier in the itinerary. Because what are mothers if not the lost paradise that dreams are made of? And what does it really mean when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust says he is “going to the mothers”? This curious part of Goethe’s proto-Surrealist novel interested Breton, and he recognised it in Yves Tanguy’s enigmatic paintings.
That’s what’s so great about Centre Pompidou’s exhibition. Breton’s – and also Georges Bataille’s – art criticism and theories are bought forth by their favourite artists and writers as well as the juxtaposition between the movement’s key figures and artists they might have barely heard of. I’m thinking, for instance, of Grace Pailthorpe, the British surgeon and psychoanalyst (what better mix of professions to understand the human condition?) who also became an artist and painted deeply experimental works that look like they were made under the influence of drugs.
Continuing on, one room is devoted to Mélusine, a creature that is half woman and half snake, and which Breton describes in one of his texts as a future creature that will live in contact with nature. This is followed by a room on nature – which includes Wilfredo Lam’s depictions of the Cuban jungle – and another one on the night, in which Magritte, Brassaï, and Leonor Fini lift the veils of darkness.
Another room is devoted to humanity’s decentralised relationship with the cosmos, and features works of art (if not ‘artefacts’ and ‘cult objects’ as exoticising museum logics would have it) which relate to Breton’s visits to the Hopi People in the 1940s and Antonin Artaud’s cohabitation with the Tarahumara People in Mexico in the 1930s. The works of these unknown artists are contrasted with those of artists such as Chilean Roberto Matta, whose paintings can be likened to microcosmic glimpses of the threat of cosmic destruction that he saw in the Second World War. “The idea of the microcosm is the highest idea for man. We are all cosmometers,” as the eighteenth-century poet Novalis wrote.
In the exhibition’s final part, two thematic strands stand out. Firstly, a room devoted to Eros in which we are reminded of Breton’s theories on the importance of “l’amour fou,” the mad love for the liberation of eroticism, which he describes in his novel Nadja (1928). We are also reminded of the influence of the Marquis de Sade on the Surrealists, in particular their predilection for fetishistic art objects that turn people into objects and objects into subjects. Hans Bellmer’s female deconstructing doll installation captures it best. No wonder the room is called “Eros cries.”
Yet, Surrealism also contributed to the sexual liberation of women, and many female artists broke through in 1930, when the movement had reached its peak. In this room, there are also very beautiful works by artists who are completely new to me: the Czech Surrealist Jindřich Štyrský and the French Surrealist Valentine Hugo. The exhibition text reminds us that to engage with Surrealism is to give oneself over completely to Eros – the intoxication and pleasures of life.
The second room that captured my interest, “The Philosophical Stone,” is dedicated to the importance of philosophical meditation and alchemy for art. Bernard Roger, an alchemist and member of the Surrealist group, saw this secret and obsolete teaching as a science of love based on the most secret law of nature, according to which everything and everyone communicates with each other. This is also the case in perhaps the most beautiful and emblematic work in the exhibition, the Spanish Surrealist Remedios Varo’s chaotic-cosmic paintings of solitary, but deeply connected creatures who seem to be busy with secret preparations. The whole room is filled with artists trying to uncover the essence of existence, which is what the alchemical process is all about. “I seek the gold of time,” is the motto inscribed on Breton’s tomb.
Alchemists were also close to the Freemasons, which I think could have been addressed. The visual trope of the chessboard that recurs in this room is a typical Masonic prop and symbol of the struggle between good and evil, and this ritual scene is perfectly captured by another powerful work in the exhibition, Max Ernst’s enigmatic La toilette de lamariée (Attirement of the bride, 1940).
Besides this, I have two objections concerning the exhibition. Firstly, the curators could have devoted a room to the hundreds of absurd and deeply humorous parlour games invented by the Surrealists, like the exquisite corpse which many of us played growing up. Secondly, I think the whole thing could have been made more inviting and dreamlike if it had been dimmer and dared to play more with the viewer, as many Surrealist exhibitions – not least those designed by Marcel Duchamp – did from the 1930s onwards. In the end, this is a rather conventional presentation.
But I still left the Centre Pompidou with a renewed faith in art and its ability to make life more beautiful. No wonder Breton wrote in the Surrealist Manifesto: “‘Transform the world,’ said Marx; ‘change life,’ said Rimbaud: these two goals make only one for us.” The Surrealists may not have succeeded in transforming the world, but their dual struggle is not over yet. Every age has its Surrealists. So does ours. The struggle must go on.
