Class 10: Landscapes of the Mind

A. Six Painters

1. Title Slide 1 (Dalí: Persistence of Memory)

I am getting to the point now where I need to keep looking back to recall what I have already covered, and looking around to check what still needs to be done. I just have to face it: I won’t get to everything, and I won’t always get to it in the most logical order. But there is one major movement that dominated both literature and painting in the later Twenties and Thirties, and that is Surrealism. There are also two major artists loosely—but only loosely—connected with Surrealism that I need to mention, and I might as well put them here as anywhere else: Chagall and Klee.

2. Six surreal paintings

Rather than define terms and explain the history, I thought I would start by throwing the onus onto you. Here are six artworks produced in or just before1929, my focus date for the class. I am going to show them one at a time and open a ZOOM POLL, asking you to suggest a title for each one. It would be better if these could be write-in answers, but Zoom doesn’t allow that, so I have suggested two titles for each work in addition to the real one. I have also put in an “Untitled” category, for those who want to give up the struggle, but I should tell you that only one of the six is in fact untitled. So consider your choices and have fun; the point is to think what each work says to you. Even though there is obviously a “right answer” in each case, the artists’ titles are often more bizarre than anything I could come up with!

3. Zoom Poll: Chagall 4. Zoom Poll: Dalí 5. Zoom Poll: Ernst 6. Zoom Poll: Klee 7. Zoom Poll: Magritte 8. Zoom Poll: Miró 9. Six surreal paintings (repeat)

Putting these all together, I see that they are not an especially colorful lot. That’s not typical of Surrealism in general, or most of these artists in particular; here is part of my slide-sorter for the class to prove it! I chose these particular examples because they were relatively close together in date and had certain overlaps in subject. Let’s now look at the six works individually, with the correct titles.

10. My slide sorter 11. Chagall: The Rooster (1929, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid)

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) was hailed by the Surrealists as one of their own, even though he himself thought otherwise. He had been producing these fantastic images back home in Russia even before the

— 1 —

First World War, and besides always insisted that the painted exactly what he saw. That’s as may be; there is no doubt, however, that his technique was different from most of the other artists in the Surrealist circle, remaining painterly in handling, and eschewing the precise drawing that gave an air of realism to the others. We will look at him some more in the second hour of the class.

12. Dalí: Putrefying Donkey (1928, Centre Pompidou, )

Partly through sheer talent, partly because of his genius for self-promotion, Salvador Dalí (1904–89) has become virtually synonymous with Surrealism—at least its more flamboyant side—in the popular mind. But he is by far the youngest of the painters shown here (6 years younger than Magritte, 25 years younger than Klee), and leaped into public view like a prodigy. This piece from 1928 (painted when he was 20, is among the first of his Surrealist works. No question; we’re coming back to him.

13. Ernst: L’Esprit de Locarno (1929, private collection)

Max Ernst (1891–1976) may be more important historically in the development of Surrealism, which is why I intend to spend some time on him, but he has lingered less in the public eye. In 1929, he was working more with collage than with paint; this work is made up from old book illustrations, glued together and subtly altered. It is one of 147 such pieces, reproduced in a book called The Hundred Headless Woman.

14. Klee: Strong Dream (1929, private collection)

Paul Klee (1879–1940) is a very varied artist, and only part of that variety overlaps with Surrealism. I chose this because of its use of dreams. He is an artist whom I find myself liking great deal in all of his guises. I shall get back to him also after the break.

15. Magritte: L’aube à Cayenne (1926, location unknown)

René Magritte (1898–1967) challenges the remark I made earlier about Dalí being the popular face of Surrealism; for many people, that position is held by M. Magritte. I chose this relatively early picture of his because it was closer to the Surrealism shown by the others. But in most respects, Magritte is the polar opposite to Dalí: cooler, more matter-of-fact, and appealing more to the mind than the senses. I will return to him also.

16. Miró: Untitled (1929, Centre Pompidou, Paris)

I put in Joan Miró (1893–1983) for this first exercise only, and will not have time to discuss him in any depth. But I did want to include at least one example what we might call Abstract Surrealism, especially given its importance to developments in America, which will be the subject of my last class. Not quite abstract, though; like some of the work we shall see by Klee, Miró’s forms often seem to be derived from natural sources, whether on the anatomical or the cellular level.

17. Six surreal paintings (repeat)

One last look at these half-dozen works, to allow time for further comment or discussion.

— 2 —

B. Two Poets

18. Viktor Brauner: André Breton (1934, Centre Pompidou)

Surrealism, however, began as a literary movement, not an painterly one. Its leader, often referred to as the Surrealist Pope, was this man, André Breton (1896–1966), a poet, novelist, aesthetician, and obsessive organizer. Breton was in medical school, training to be a specialist in mental illness, when WW1 broke out and he was conscripted. After the War, for whatever reason, he devoted himself entirely to literature, co-founding the review Littérature (what else?) in 1919, when he was only 23. At the time, he was associating mainly with writers in the Dada movement, which suited his own taste for the irrational and absurd, but by 1924, when he published the First Surrealist Manifesto, his focus had evolved. The term “Surrealism,” you will remember, came from a description of Erik Satie by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918); Breton saw himself as the late poet’s artistic heir.

19. First Surrealist Manifesto and quotations from Breton

Here are two quotations from Breton. The first, though typical of the pomposity of artistic manifestos anywhere, is probably as good a definition of Surrealism as you are going to get. The second touches on an important Surrealist technique, separating “thought” from “reason.” Normally, we think of the two as virtually identical, but Breton distinguished “thought” as the instinctive workings of the mind, that take full flight when you least try to control it. He developed a technique known as automatic writing, where you just sit down and write, as quickly as possible, whatever comes into your head.

20. André Masson: Automatic Drawing

It is easier to illustrate this concept, however, in the visual arts. Here is an automatic drawing by the Surrealist artist André Masson (1896–1987). It is essentially just a scribble, vaguely suggestive of waves, but if you look closely you can see familiar forms emerge: a bird, a breast, perhaps a woman’s belly. I don’t know how much of Breton’s published poetry was the result of this automatic process, but it is all characterized by startling conjunctions of images, separated by lines but otherwise unpuctuated. Here is the beginning and end of his Postman Cheval; I’ll explain the title in a moment.

21. Breton: Postman Cheval 22. The Ideal Palace of Postman Cheval

Breton is describing, or at least inspired by, a real place. In 1879, a village postman named Ferdinand Cheval (1836–1924) found a curiously-shaped stone (top left) on his route. A few days later, he found more. So he decided to erect an Ideal Palace in his own garden, built of such stones and extending their wonder in a huge work of fantastic architecture. He would continue the work for the next 45 years, until he died. Naturally, Breton would sieze on this as the perfect example of Surrealist pratice, decades before he even gave the movement a name.

— 3 —

23. Max Ernst: Au rendez-vous des amis (1922, Cologne)

This is Max Ernst’s portrait of some early Surrealists: I have marked four whom we shall meet again. There are more writers than painters; only once did Breton mention painters in his first Manifesto. As an organizer, Breton seems to have combined great powers of persuasion with a certain ruthlessness. He first succeeded in establishing his circle of friends and followers as the true Surréalistes, against the claims of rival groups. But then, as the movement went on and became international, he was draconian in expelling writers and artists whose work he considered heretical. And this need not be an artistic matter at all. Breton had strong left-wing leanings, and at one time joined the Communist party; he had no time for anyone whom he saw as pandering to the bourgeoisie. He broke with his former blue-eyed boy Salvador Dalí, for example, when he saw the emergence of his slick commercial side, anagramming his name as Avida Dollars. The more I read of Breton’s dictatorial side, the less I like him. But then my faith is restored by reading his poetry—especially his love poetry—which is far, far more than some bizarre technical experiment. Here is his “Always for the first time”; the images were on the video when I found it; they come from all over, but are not entirely irrelevant. I added titles.

24. Breton: “Always for the first time,” reading 25. Ernst: At the First Clear Word (1923, Düsseldorf) with the last lines of the above

Just looking at these last few lines, I would say that, Surreal or not, this is about as good a description of love as you can get. The painting, At the First Clear Word by Max Ernst, has an appropriately literary title, and you can almost see the “lovely crossed legs” in the woman’s fingers. But there is a history here. Ernst painted it as a mural in the house of the second Surrealist poet I mentioned, Paul Éluard (1895– 1952), whom he met in 1921 and who was to remain a close friend.

26. Picasso: Paul Éluard (1936)

When Éluard visited Ernst in Cologne, he was accompanied by his wife Gala (1894–1982), whom he had met as a fellow patient in a TB sanitorium before the War. Though separated to their native countries, France and Russia, during the War itself, their love persisted, and they were reunited and married in the last years of the War. I don’t know for sure, but like to think that Éluard’s poem “I love you” was written to Gala. It is in three verses; I have put a different image of her with each.

27. Éluard: “I love you,” verse 1 28. Éluard: “I love you,” verse 2 29. Éluard: “I love you,” verse 3 30. Three pictures of Gala

Again, it is a lovely poem, but the pictures tell a more complicated story. Whether during that visit or shortly after, Max Ernst too fell in love with Gala, and when he moved to France the next year he lived with the Éluards in a ménage-à-trois. Paul accepted this for a while, but later moved out and disappeared for some months. Gala finally located him in Saigon and brought him back to Paris. Then, when the couple went to visit Salvador Dalí in Spain in 1929, Gala fell in love with the Spanish painter, ten years her junior. Although she and Paul remained friends, she moved in with Dalí, married him five years later, and remained as his muse until her death in 1982. She must have been quite a woman!

— 4 —

C. The Legacy of Dada

31. Ernst: The Elephant of Celebes (1921, Tate Modern)

Paul Éluard came up with some marvelous phrases. Among them, “The earth is blue like an orange,” which is the first line of a poem, and “Elephants are contagious,” whose source I cannot discover. I am tempted to think it came from that 1921 visit to Max Ernst when he was painting this landmark work, The Elephant of Celebes. The title comes apparently from a German schoolyard jingle, but I can’t find a non-obscene way to translate it, so you have to take that as a given. Not that it is important, for this curious being comes entirely out of Ernst’s imagination.

32. Ernst: The Elephant of Celebes, with labels

Four things to note about this. Although purporting to be an elephant, it is mechanistic, clearly made of machine parts. That said, its components are not all from the same source; it is assembled from a number of quite disparate parts. Despite its mechanical quality, it is full of erotic references: the mannequin at bottom right, for instance, or the way her other glove reappears in a suggestive position on the standing figure. And the bull’s skull at the tip of the creature’s trunk implies something primitive, totemistic. The last of these goes back at least to Picasso’s use of African masks; the others are directly inherited from Dada.

33. Ernst: The Hat Makes the Man (1920, NY MoMA)

You remember Picabia’s Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity from 1915? The mechanization of the human body was a common Dada trope. In 1920, Ernst did something similar but in an even more playful way, with his The Hat Makes the Man, showing a series of humanoid figures composed entirely of hats. But this is something more sinister, and speaks to his own War experiences.

34. Ernst: Murdering Airplane / Deadly Female Airplane (1920, Menil Collection)

Look at this strange painting from 1920, giving a WW1 warplane the arms (or is it the legs) of a woman. And look at some of the details of The Elephant. Yes, there appear to be fish swimming incongrously in the sky, but there towards the right, is not that an aerial dogfight? And the top of the Elephant looks distinctly like a tank, while that bull’s head could almost be a horned gas mask.

35. Ernst: Women reveling violently and waving in menacing air (1929)

The assembled quality of The Elephant suggests the Dada technique of collage. This would be a mainstay of Ernst’s work throughout his career, as we have seen from his plate for The Hundred Headless Woman. Here is another from the series, also comprised of cut and pasted illustrations from old books. Even when doing pure painting, as indeed with The Elephant, he would often make the work look as though it were assembled through collage. And it was not all flat: here he is doing assemblage in three dimensions, in the wonderfully titled Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale.

36. Ernst: Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale (1924, NY MoMA)

— 5 —

And as for the erotic, that should have been obvious from several of the previous works, but here is something that is much more explicit: Men Shall Know Nothing of This, from 1923. That expanse of desert landscape looks awfully like Dalí, but he hadn’t even got going yet; clearly, it was to become another Surrealist trope. But that conjugation of legs and moon up above is pure Ernst. And did I mention totemistic?

37. Ernst: Men Shall Know Nothing of This (1923, Tate Liverpool)

Let me punctuate this by showing the beginning of a documentary on Ernst, with a short internal cut. The brief poem with which it ends is by Éluard. I don’t know, but think that the opening may be also.

38. How Many Colors Has a Hand? Video documentary on Max Ernst

D. The Treason of Images

39. Magritte: La trahaison des images (1929, Los Angeles)

When choosing paintings from 1929 to show for my poll, I passed over the obvious one by René Magritte (1898–1967), because it was too well-known, and too little subject to multiple interpretations. In fact, Magritte seldom goes for Surrealist ambiguity in his mature work; his forte is to present, in the simplest possible terms, a paradox that you grasp immediately, but may take a lifetime to ponder. This one is called La trahaison des images, or The Treachery of Images. By painting what is obviously a pipe yet labeling it “This is not a pipe,” he is proclaiming the divorce of image from reality, just as the Post- Impressionists had done with color and the Cubists with form. It is a key Surrealist concept, contrasting apparent reality of depiction with a different reality of thought, but no one else expressed it so directly.

40. Magritte: Self-Portrait (1923) and The Window (1925)

Magritte’s development was one of simplification, reducing color, reducing complexity, and turning away from narrative. If I were to show you these two paintings in another context, I doubt that anyone would have guessed Magritte; they are too colorful, for one thing, too simply luscious.

41. Magritte: The Menaced Assassin (1927, NY MoMA) 42. — the same, with title

Those were to years apart. Move ahead just another two years, and we get something completely different. No longer Cubist; no longer colorful; no longer abstract. This one is in the style of a magazine illustration, or perhaps film noir. It implies a story, though it the story is so bizarre that we hesitate to guess. There is violence in the background—the woman with her throat cut—and the threat of more violence in the foreground—the men with club and net. But the figure in the middle is so nonchalant: neatly dressed, coat and briefcase on the chair, listening to the gramophone. Would we know if there wasn’t a title? Nothing is ambiguous, but what does it represent? Do we all have the potential to be

— 6 — murderers? Does danger lie in wait wherever we turn? It is the not knowing that makes it so powerful. And the deadpan ordinariness. In a review of a 2013 exhibition at MoMA, critic Richard Lacayo begins: Although he trafficked in the uncanny, or maybe because he did, the great Belgian Surrealist René Magritte was, in his personal deportment, as plain and innocuous as an aspirin. He was married all his life to the same woman and dressed most days like a bank clerk. Think of Alfred Hitchcock making Psycho and The Birds while appearing on TV as that droll gent in a suit.

43. Magritte: The Interpretation of Dreams (1927, Chicago)

Magritte seldom played with narrative in his later work. Even in 1927, he was painting works like The Interpretation of Dreams, which are more in the manner of This is Not a Pipe from two years later. Three of the objects are not what he labels them as; the fourth one is correct. But he is not quite saying that he can call things what he wants to because it is only a picture, and moreover his picture. He seems to be referring to the way that even ordinary objects can appear in dreams as the symbol of something else. His title, of course, is borrowed from Sigmund Freud’s (1881–1930) groundbreaking book of 1899. Except that Magritte—unlike, say, Max Ernst—swore he had no time for psychoanalysis and its theories. Go figure!

44. Magritte: The Lovers II (1928, NY MoMA)

As I look through the 30 or so images I have pulled in preparation for this class, I find almost none that really delve into dreams, like Dalí was to do. Yes, Magritte can make provocative and even disturbing innuendoes about life, as in this 1928 painting The Lovers, but he always does so with his eyes wide open. As Richard Lacayo says again: Magritte didn't always share the Surrealists' central concerns. In particular, the unconscious was a key notion for them. It's impossible to imagine Dalí's work of the late 1920s and the '30s without Freud's ideas about the expression of unconscious desire in dreams. The founding fathers of Surrealism, including André Breton and the poet Paul Éluard, were devoted to techniques of free association, like automatic writing and drawing, that were intended to bypass the rational mind and dredge up material directly from the unconscious. Magritte, who knew his Freud but plotted out his pictures meticulously and had no interest in automatic anything, would have said, Don't bother. The universe of words and images is already so full of booby traps and false certainties, you couldn't make sense if you tried.

45. Magritte: The Human Condition (1935, Brussels)

I have been concentrating mainly on Magritte’s early work of the 1920s. Nonetheless, like most other people, I am seduced by some of his paintings of the mid-thirties and beyond, when he allowed himself to put his technical skills as a painter rather more on display, and even let in a little color, as in this less well-known version of The Human Condition, now in Brussels. Despite its title, is this really about the human condition, or simply another of his not-a-pipe jokes about the nature of painting?

— 7 —

46. Magritte: Time Transfixed (1938, Chicago) 47. Dalí: The Persistence of Memory (1931, NY MoMA), with the above

A book I have just bought on Surrealism has this on the cover; it is called Time Transfixed and is in the Chicago Art Institute. I wonder if Magritte painted it as a deliberate riposte to Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory of a few years earlier? Certainly nothing could better illustrate the difference between them: Dalí’s soft watches versus Magritte’s marble clock and iron locomotive; desert shore versus bourgeois living room; pullulating ants versus immaculate housekeeping!

48. Class title 2 (Dalí: The Temptation of Saint Anthony)

Dalí will be my first subject after the break. Although this picture looks to be pure fantasy, I should say that it is a coded exorcism of the fetishes of a man with a highly ambivalent attitude towards sex. Because this is so relevant to his art and to Surrealism in general, I intend to delve quite deeply into this morass in my segment, including some clips from a film whose images many might find disturbing. If you would rather sit it out, come back at 11:20 or so rather than 11:05. Keep the sound on; when you hear Placido Domingo singing, it will be safe to return!

E. Sex, Dreams, and Obsession

49. Dalí: Pierrot Playing the Guitar (1925) and The Window (1926)

Here are two early pictures by Salvador Dalí (1904–89), painted when he was 21 and 22 respectively. An interesting comparison, not least because they both include a view through the window to the sea. In Pierrot, Dalí is going through the seemingly obligatory apprenticeship to Cubism required of all young Modernists; it’s not at all bad, not least for its suggestion of a second, more real, figure behing the Cubist one. But in The Window, he has discovered something different: that he can paint in an apparently outmoded style whose meticulous realism is more powerful than any abstraction. His further career would be based upon his ability to depict the most fanciful images in a totally realistic way

50. Still from Un chien Andalou (1929)

And what could be more realistic than a film? You see it happening and it is real, right? This is a celebrated shot from a film Dalí made with the director Luis Buñuel (1900–83) in 1929, a locus classicus of Surrealism made before he had truly established himself as a Surrealist painter. The man in the picture (Buñel himself) is about to slash the woman’s eye open with the razor. If you’ve even heard about the film, you know it is coming, you know the woman is perfectly compliant, you know it must be faked, but it is still a shock. If you don’t want to watch, shut your eyes until the music-hall music stops. I am following this by a very short segment showing Dalí’s horror of ants, and then a longer and more obviously sexual one. I apologize for the content in advance, but it is important; no women were harmed in the making of this picture, and I think the sex is all in his head.

51. Buñuel/Dalí: Un chien Andalou, extracts

— 8 —

52. — still from the above, with Putrefying Donkeys

Clearly, these are Dalí’s Putrefying Donkeys, with which we started, now so-to-speak in the flesh! But the painting is a nightmare for him alone; the film is shared by everyone. And yet the images clearly have some private meaning for the artist. We can go a long way towards elucidating what these are.

53. Four stills from Un chien Andalou

The general theme seems to be Dalí’s conflicted attitudes towards sex. The man pawing the woman is clearly fantasizing; his drooling face and the way the clothes disappear and come back again are proof of that. And the ants on the hand may be related to the old-fashioned warning to pubescent boys that they will grow warts on their palms if they touch themselves. When the man tries to reach the woman, but finds himself dragging two priests, it is clearly a reference to the repressive power of the Church. I cannot speak to the grand pianos, but the rotting donkeys have been explained by critic Edward Rubin: In Dalí's youth, his father had left out a book with explicit photos of people suffering from advanced untreated venereal diseases to "educate" the boy. The photos of grotesquely damaged diseased genitalia fascinated and horrified young Dalí, and he continued to associate sex with putrefaction and decay into his adulthood.

54. Dalí: The Great Masturbator (1929, Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid)

At around the same time, Dalí put some of these themes into his work The Great Masturbator. It is a curious combination of the abstract, symbolic, and almost-explicit. I’ll leave it to you to anatomize for yourselves, but I can say a little about two of its sources.

55. Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1500, Prado, Madrid), with the above

One—although this is conjectural—is from The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted around 1500 by Hieronymus Bosch and in the Prado, Madrid. People have suggested that this rock in the middle right of the central panel, might have been the suggestion for Dalí’s unusual shape, if turned sideways. I’ll give you a better explanation for that shape in a minute, but I do see a connection between Bosch’s rock crawling with unpleasant creatures and the insects in Dalí’s picture; it even explains the curious eyelashes on the figure’s belly.

56. Cap de Creus, with Dalí’s rock formation

No, Dalí later confessed that the source was a rock on the wild Cap de Creus, in Northern Catalonia and close to his birthplace of Figueres. The resemblance is actually quite striking. But what is curious to me is what Dalí said about it, completely ignoring the implications of the title he gave the picture himself, and treating the painting as a non-sexual patriotic tribute!

57. Dalí: The Enigma of My Desire (1929, Munich, Modern Art Museum)

Dalí produced a variant of the same composition in the same year, called The Enigma of My Desire, again apparently a sexual confession. We see the same general shape, the same ants and eyelashes, the same desert setting. But now each cell in the honeycombed structure—perhaps representing a human

— 9 — brain—is inscribed with the words ma mère, ma mère, ma mère… my mother, my mother, my mother. Freud would have had a field day… except that Dalí has already done half his work for him. And here he is as a sculptor in 1931, fetishizing an actual object, a shoe worn by his new muse, Gala, the wondrous woman he has taken from Paul Éluard and Max Ernst.

58. Dalí: Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically—Gala’s Shoe (1931, St. Petersburg, FL)

And here is his Temptation of Saint Anthony from 1946, after the Second World War when he was turning to religious subjects. Again, this is about resisting sexual desire, which the painter translates into images whose meanings are no doubt personal to him, but can still impress others with their magnificence and scale.

59. Dalí: The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1946, Brussels)

I realize that in emphasizing the Freudian side of Dalí’s oeuvre—which is especially important in the years around 1930 when his Surrealism first flowered—I am distorting his total legacy, especially in his later years, when he turned almost exclusively to religious subjects. So if there is time, I’ll play a video I found online that shows his work in chronological sequence; if not. I’ll put it on the website. I have no idea why whoever made this chose the aria from Puccini’s early opera Le Villi; it has no obvious relevance to anything, but at least it doesn’t distract

60. Dalí video

G. Twittering Machine

61. Surrealist timeline

A quick look back at the six painters I presented at the start. The salmon-colored bars show their effective careers. You will notice that the two painters most popularly associated with Surrealism—Dalí and Magritte—were those whose careers started the latest. Chagall and Klee, the two artists at the top of the chart, began their careers long before the birth of official Surrealism. Both were invited to join the movement, but both went their own way.

62. Paul Klee in 1909 (Self-Portrait) and in 1924 in his studio at the Bauhaus

This is a photo of Paul Klee (1879–1940) in his studio at the Bauhaus, where he taught from 1921 to 1931, first in Weimar and then in Dessau. His instinctive approach to art must have been a necessary contrast in a school devoted so much to technology and reason. Look at him: he is working in a glorious jumble, paying as much attention to the frame as to the picture it might contain. His entire career was marked by a childlike spirit of exploration and experiment—which makes him so difficult to categorize but so easy to enjoy.

63. Klee: The Föhn in Marc’s Garden (1915, Munich, Lenbachhaus)

— 10 —

I originally wrote the sentence: “In the early part of his career, Klee experimented with many different styles.” Then I realized it was meaningless; in his entire career, Klee experimented with different styles. But I was thinking, for instance, of the period in the teens when Klee was exhibiting with the German Expressionist group called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), alongside Kandinsky and others. Here he is painting in the garden of one of their leading lights, Franz Marc, in the Alps south of Munich. You can see the Expressionist exaggeration of forms, the reduction of the mountains to pointed triangles, and the strong colors. But the painting, a watercolor, is more intimate that most Expressionist landscapes. You can also see a special feeling for harmony: the rhymes between the shapes in the mountains, trees, and sky; the subtle variations in color. In particular, the patchwork-quilt effect of the adjacent rectangles in the center right of the painting would be something that Klee would return to throughout his life. Here are two others.

64. Klee: May Picture (1925, NY Met) 65. Klee: Fire Full Moon (1933, Essen)

I used the word “harmony” advisedly. In fact, Klee originally embarked on music as a career and continued to play the violin all his life, but he switched to art in his twenties, largely because he was not much interested in romantic or modern music. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about Klee in 1921, "Even if you hadn’t told me he plays the violin, I would have guessed that on many occasions his drawings were transcriptions of music." If pictures like these were all he produced, you can see that he would fit a familiar pattern: a painter who begins by trying everything, then settles into a personal vein of abstraction which he refines for the rest of his career—like a rather warmer Mondrian.

66. Klee: Room Perspective with Inhabitants (1921, ZPK Bern) 67. — the same with Chirico: The Disquieting Muses (1918, pc)

But he didn’t settle into anything. Here is a very different picture, but the one most relevant to today’s class. When André Breton asked Klee to participate in the first Surrealist Exhibition in 1925, this is what he sent, a half-drawing half-painting that he called Room Perspective with Inhabitants. Breton retitled it Spirit Chamber and wrote a catalogue entry about a man entering a mysterious mountain tunnel. In fact, though, Klee’s Surrealist qualifications were stronger than Breton’s misreading, because he painted this and a number of similar works just after seeing the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) in the Valori Plastici magazine, the same artist whose empty piazzas and haunted spaces had inspired several of the true Surrealists, not least Magritte.

68. Klee: Self-Portrait Doll and other works 1921–22

Surrealism apart, what else might Klee have sent down to Paris? Here, chosen almost at random, are six other works painted within a few months of the one he did send. Note their variety, note their childlike wonder, and note above all their playful titles. The music, in honor of Klee’s violin and his favorite composer, is the Fugue from Bach’s Violin Sonata #1.

69. Klee: Works 1921–22, video with Bach Fugue 70. Klee: Twittering Machine (1922, NY MoMA)

— 11 —

Bird Wandering Off—isn’t that delightful? Klee certainly makes a change from Dalí. While Dalí’s paintings are driven by libido, Klee’s are charged with wit. Take this wonderful work from 1922, the Twittering Machine. Klee might equally well have sent it to Paris. It is as fanciful as anything Surrealist, though it lacks the crucial jolt of reality. But really, who needs it? It is a very practical drawing, after all; we turn the handle in our minds, and the birds begin to sing. It is a lovely throwback to the age of automata and music boxes, the age of Mozart.

71. Klee: Struck from the List (1933, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern)

Hitler was not amused, however. This was one of the works labeled Degenerate Art and put on display at that notorious exhibition in Munich in 1937. It found a buyer, however, and ended up in at the Museum of Modern Art. Klee was not around to see this, however; on being fired from his job in 1933, he fled to his birthplace, Switzerland, painting this ironic self-portrait, Struck from the List. But I’ll let the Twittering Machine have the last word—or rather the last tweet—in this quite unnecessary but still delightful animation I found on the internet.

72. Klee: Twittering Machine, animation 73. Artist timeline, repeat

F. The Keeper of Memories

Which leaves us with (1887–1985), by far the longest-lived of the artists I have been discussing; he was 97 when he died. Indeed, it is Chagall’s longevity that most defines his career, since for most of it he was an artist looking back.

74. Chagal: four self-portraits

I will structure this segment around the four self-portraits shown here, all of which I’ll put up on the screen with the same video effect so that you can recognize them. They are not in chronological order, but then chronology means something different in the world of Chagall, for whom an entire lifetime, past and present, is linked in a timeless dream. But let’s start with facts and feet on the ground.

75. Chagall: Self-Portrait in Front of a House (1914)

Here is Chagall as a young man with his career ahead of him, and here is where his road would take him: from Vitebsk in present-day Belarus, to Paris at the very moment that saw the explosion of Cubism and so many other Modernist movements, back briefly to Russia only to be trapped there by the War, return to Paris, escape to America, and finally a return to France.

76. — the same with wrong date 77. — the same with correct date

I wrote this sentence in the belief that the painting was really of the young Chagall, setting out from his shtetl to conquer the world. But I checked the date: 1914, after he has already drunk deep of

— 12 —

Modernism in Paris, and painted extraordinary works like this To my Fiancée, which would place him immediately among the first Cubists; Picasso thought he must have an angel in his head to dictate his extraordinary images. The point is that, even at age 27, Chagall was looking back to an idyllic past. This would remain his predominant mode for this entire career; I call him The Keeper of Memories.

78. Chagall: To my Fiancée (1911, Bern)

The fiancée is Bella Rosenfeld from Vitebsk, whom he met in 1910 and married in 1914. But the four years he spent in Paris were spent without her. Perhaps that is why he paints himself as literally horny, surrounded by various imagined parts of her body and wardrobe!

79. Chagall: Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers (1913, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam) 80. — the same with details

My second self-portrait is actually earlier than the one I just showed, 1913 rather than 1914. Called Self- Portrait with Seven Fingers, it is a kind of amalgam of Picasso, Delaunay, Léger, and the emerging style of Chagall himself. I am interested the contrast between the picture he is painting and the view out of the window. The window view might almost be a Delaunay picture hanging on the wall; the easel painting and the thought bubble on the wall suggest memories of Vitebsk. Taken together, they show Chagall excited by his city surroundings, but also homesick for his rural home.

81. Chagall: Paris Through the Window (1913, Guggenheim) 82. Chagall: (1911, NY MoMA)

I have examples from this period of him treating each subject alone. Paris Through the Window is Delaunay with Chagall touches such as the human cat, the upside-down train, and the ambivalent artist in the lower corner. I and the Village goes right back to his homeland. In a love-letter to his native Vitebsk written after WW2, Chagall said, “I did not live with you, but I didn't have one single painting that didn't breathe with your spirit and reflection.”

83. Chagall: Self-Portrait (1968)

My third Self-Portrait is much later, from 1968, when he would have been turning 80. The artist at the easel is one again young; he is surrounded by his memories: his youthful days in Paris; his love for Bella, forever his bride; and that red rooster. This is the answer to the question I asked in the poll at the beginning; whenever the rooster appears, it is almost always in conjunction with either a bride or a pair of lovers; it seems to represent both sexual vigor and the promise of a new dawn.

84. Chagall: Bride and Groom at the Eiffel Tower (1939, Chagall Museum, )

Here is one of the most glorious of the rooster paintings, Bride and Groom at the Eiffel Tower. It is full of Chagall’s favorite symbols, once more combining Paris and Vitebsk, plus Judaism and his own personal romance—including two references to the wedding violinist, which Fiddler on the Roof has made one of the most famous Chagall images of all. But note the date: 1939. Surely Chagall must have been aware of the storm clouds gathering over Europe, especially for the Jews, but there is not a hint of them here.

— 13 —

85. Chagall: Self-Portrait with Clock (1947, private collection)

My last self-portrait is two decades earlier than the Parisian one I just showed, but it may be the most trenchant of the lot. Its subject, I think, is LOSS. When the Germans invaded France, Marc and Bella went south then fled to America in 1941. There in exile, Bella died of a viral infection. For a while in his grief, Chagall stopped painting altogether. He has begun painting again, but is still in America. Looking back at the other pictures, I am only aware of all that the has lost: time (represented by the flying clock); his youthful vision (the blank view out of the window); his marriage in his new widowhood, although his bride is still with him in memory; friends and family to the Holocaust; and maybe even himself—the painter at the easel is represented only by a red donkey and a disembodied hand.

86. Chagall: The White Crucifixion (1938, Chicago Art Institute)

The new element in this is the Holocaust. Despite what I said earlier, Chagall was of course aware of the actions of the Nazis, and themes of Crucifixion crop up increasingly in his work. It is a Christian symbol, yes, but though Chagall was raised in a Hasidic family, he no longer observed Jewish religious practice, and sought to find a language that would speak to all religions. All the same, when the art-dealer Vollard commissioned a series of illustrations from the Bible, he went to Palestine in 1931 and felt that the uncovering of his Jewish roots provided a stimulus that reinvigorated all his art. And with his Bible illustrations and Holocaust paintings, he became a keeper of new memories—those of a people.

87. Chagall: Falling Angel (1947, Basel)

In looking for music to end with, I turn to the contemporary Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov (b.1960), who is also a Keeper of Memories, specifically those of the Eastern European Jewish culture of his refugee parents. Here is a piece with a title that could almost be by Chagall: The Night of the Flying Horses. I will play the ending, which moves from tragedy to raucous klezmer, and accompany with some Chagall images dealing with love, loss, and faith.

88. Golijov/Chagall montage 89. Class title 3 (Chagall: Rooster with Lovers)

— 14 —