Nicky Charlish
posted 26 June 2007

Drooping watches, pierced eyeballs, lobster telephones. Haven’t we had enough of Surrealism? Isn’t it just a passé footnote to art history? No, we haven’t, because it always has fresh excitement for us. And it isn’t, because it reminds us of some of the tougher, less flattering aspects of human existence, sometimes in ways not intended by its creators. This exhibition allows us to re-experience and reappraise what we think of as a familiar world.

Starting out in the 1920s as a literary and Marxist political movement, Surrealism soon encompassed the visual arts, too. Attracting followers from Europe and beyond, it examined ideas from politics, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Regarding society as oppressive, Surrealists had a vision of the world where desire and imagination were set free. The conventional, the rational and the reasonable had to be avoided to see how the mind really worked, to examine its possibilities of imagination, invention and dreaming. The keystone of their vision was desire. What really made the human being tick?

This raised a question for the Surrealists, which would bedevil them from the start: was the personal necessarily political? The exhibition gives us an early taste of this. Giorgio de Chirico’s 'Le Bal, set design for scene 2: The Ball' (created for Diaghilev’s 1929 production of Le Bal) gives us dreamy, Roman classically-based scenery including broken arches, shattered columns, a sleepy, toga-clad figure and, beyond, a sprinting horse. But collaborative work such as this with the Ballets Russes of the 1920s and early 1930s provoked suggestions shouldn’t ‘sell out’ by working in any way with the commercial world. This episode was the harbinger of future splits in the Surrealist camp.

But some Surrealists ploughed on regardless. Bizarre contradictions, and the meanings that could be extrapolated from them, were felt to be a way ahead. Rene Magritte’s 'Youth Illustrated', from 1937, gives us a roadway dotted with seemingly unrelated objects: a chair, a bicycle, a billiard table, a lion. His 'La reproduction interdite', from the same year, shows the back of a man’s head as he looks into a mirror which reflects – the back of his head! We see 'Wheelbarrow', made around 1937 by Oscar Dominguez, which is, well, a wheelbarrow lined with red satin. But, rather than being disturbing, it looks like just the thing to recline in: and Man Ray’s photograph 'Model in Dominguez’s wheelbarrow' of 1937 shows someone doing just that.

The home was, in Freudian terms, a place of disturbing and sexualised meanings rather than a nest of domestic security, so its furnishings also became a field of Surrealist endeavour. We see Salvador Dali’s and Edward James’ 'Lobster Telephone 'of 1938 along with their 'Mae West Lips Sofa' from the same year. These lips – based on the ones through which their film-star owner offered such immortal phrases as ‘Come up and see me sometime’ - are coloured in the shocking pink favoured by the Surrealist designer Elsa Shiaparelli. There’s Meret Oppenheim’s 'Table With Bird’s Legs' of 1939, giving the impression that the upper body of a stork has turned into a table splattered with arrows.

The female body was of interest to the Surrealists – as it was to almost every artistic movement – indeed, given their particular concerns with exposing hidden desire, possibly more so. Dali’s ‘Spain’ of 1938 shows fighting groups which when mentally joined together, depict a femail figure. This interest also led to Surrealism becoming part of the fashion scene. Striking examples of this on view include clothes by Shiaperelli and Jean Cocteau, especially their ‘Evening Jacket’ of autumn 1937, whose right-hand sleeve is patterned in gold with a hand reaching across the body, and their ‘Evening Coat’ from the same year with its black front and a decoration showing flowers in a vase on its back. When worn, this would have given the intriguing impression of a moving floral display. De Chirico’s cover for an American edition of Vogue for 8 January 1936 shows a seemingly random display featuring glove, bag, wardrobe and picture, whilst Dali’s cover for the same magazine for 1 June 1939 shows a slippery figure in a shipwreck seemingly located in a desert. Dali’s Ruby Lips Brooch of 1930 shows lips – open either in agony or ecstasy – with pearls crammed inside the mouth in place of teeth.

But after the Second World War, Surrealism’s party was over. There were some post-war offerings; the exhibition includes Leonora Carrington’s 'The House Opposite' from 1947. Here, an open-walled house shows almost free-floating female figures who are far from being domestic goddesses: two women seem to be pushing a third through a floor. But surrealism’s drive was gone. The political divisions within its ranks were now probably too deep to patch-up. New artistic movements had come along. Two world wars had rubbed humanity’s nose in its dark side: the stark black and white newsreels of the concentration camps gave a more direct lesson in this topic than did the colourful eccentricities of the Surrealists.

So were the Surrealists a waste of time, or did they have some measure of success in achieving their aims? They definitely blazed a trail. They helped to publicise Freud and the whole disturbing idea of subconscious human drives – concepts whose implications have yet to be fully comprehended by religious, political and legal establishments as well as those who would prefer human nature to be a simple matter of neatly-controllable nurture without any input from unpredictable nature. But the Surrealists were undone by a touching naïvety. They assumed that sexual shock would always be a force for change, whereas not only has almost every sexual activity become acceptable, but also sex is a major part of big business, an obvious example of which being the contribution pornography has made to the growth of the internet.

And Surrealism finally floundered because of its use of representational art by which – so the Surrealists hoped – the conventions it showed could be questioned or undermined. But when Surrealism was entering the artistic scene, ordinary bourgeois audiences were eager for conventional art after the two blobs and a squiggle boredom of Modernism. Many people overlooked Surrealism’s disturbing implications and just saw familiar stuff enlivened with a bit of whimsy.

Does that mean Surrealism should remain – unexamined – on the scrapheap of art history? No way! For all its built-in problems, it does make as think about what’s disturbing in the human psyche. Although, that being acknowledged, Freud is supposed to have said that in Classical paintings he looked for the subconscious and in Surrealist ones for the conscious. So Surrealism provides a necessary reminder that the traditional – examined afresh – can always be a source of the new, the unexpected. That said, you can go to this exhibition not only to consider the dark recesses of your own psyche – if you dare! – but also to see some beautifully executed art.

Till 22 July 2007