Class 10: Landscapes of the Mind
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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, Paris) 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.