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SURREALISM GeuesisGenesis ofof aa RevolutionRevolution Nathalia Brodskaïa Author: Nathalia Brodskaïa Layout: Baseline Co Ltd, 33 Ter - 33 Bis Mac Dinh Chi St., Star Building, 6th Floor District 1, Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam © Parkstone Press International, New York, USA © Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA © Hans Arp Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Art © Peter Blume, Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY © Victor Brauner Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ ADAGP, Paris © André Breton Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS)/ ADAGP, Paris © Carlo Carra Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ SIAE, Roma © Leonora Carrington Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA © Federico Castellon © Georgio de Chirico Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ SIAE, Roma © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA © Paul Delvaux Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ SABAM, Brussels © Oscar Domínguez Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA /ADAGP, Paris © Max Ernst Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ ADAGP, Paris © James Guy © Hannah Höch Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA /VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn © Jacques Hérold Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA / ADAGP, Paris © Valentine Hugo Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA / ADAGP, Paris © Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. 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All rights reserved © Francis Picabia Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ ADAGP, Paris © Charles Rain © Kay Sage © Jindrich Styrsky © Yves Tanguy Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ ADAGP, Paris © Estate Marie Toyen, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA / ADAGP, Paris © Estate Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA / VEGAP, Madrid All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyrights on the works reproduced lie with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case we would appreciate notification. ISBN: 978-1-78042-873-4 Nathalia Brodskaïa SURREALISM Genesis of a Revolution CONTENTS SURREALISM . GIORGIO DE CHIRICO: THE CATALYST OF SURREALISM 7 . THE WAR – THE STIMULUS FOR DADA 11 . DADA – THE CRADLE OF SURREALISM 20 . DADA OUTSIDE ZÜRICH 26 . DADA IN PARIS 33 . THE BAPTISM OF SURREALISM 48 . THE DEVELOPMENT OF SURREALISM 51 . THE SURREALISTS BEFORE SURREALISM 62 MAX ERNST 77 YVES TANGUY 111 JOAN MIRÓ 133 ANDRÉ MASSON 157 RENÉ MAGRITTE 171 SALVADOR DALÍ 197 PAUL DELVAUX 233 SURREALISM WITHOUT FRONTIERS 247 NOTES 250 INDEX 252 SURREALISM GIORGIO DE CHIRICO: THE CATALYST OF SURREALISM The history of Surrealism maintains a beautiful legend. After a long voyage, a sailor returned to Paris. His name was Yves Tanguy. As he was riding in a bus along the Rue La Boétie, he saw a picture in the window of one of the numerous art galleries. It depicted a nude male torso against the background of a dark, phantasmal city. On a table lays a book, but the man is not looking at it. His eyes are closed. Yves Tanguy jumped out of the bus while it was still in motion and went up to the window to examine the strange picture. It was called The Child’s Brain, and was painted by the Italian Giorgio de Chirico. The encounter with the picture determined the sailor’s fate. Tanguy stayed on shore for good and became an artist, although until then he had never held either a pencil or a paintbrush in his hands. This story took place in 1923, a year before the poet and psychiatrist André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in Paris. Like any legend, it does not claim to be exact in its details. One thing cannot be doubted: Giorgio de Chirico’s painting produced such an unforgettable impression that it became one of the sources of the art of Surrealism as it began to develop after the First World War. The Child’s Brain had a wonderful effect on someone else besides Yves Tanguy. “Riding along the Rue La Boétie in a bus past the window of the old Paul Guillaume Gallery, where it was on display, I stood up like a jack-in-the- box so I could get off and examine it close up”, André Breton later recalled. “For a long time I could not stop thinking about it and from then on I did not have any peace until I was able to acquire it. Some years later, on the occasion of a general exhibition of de Chirico [paintings], this painting returned from my home to where it had been before (the window of Paul Guillaume), and someone else who was going that way on the bus gave himself up to exactly the same impulse, which is exactly the reaction it still provokes in me all this time after our first encounter, now that I have it again on my wall. The man was Yves Tanguy.”1 The consistency and details of the events are not as important as the basic fact that de Chirico’s pictures had an unusual effect on the future Surrealists. The artists themselves guessed at its reasons. However, explanation became possible only with the passage of time, once the painting of European Surrealists had become an artistic legacy, and when the time arrived to render an account of it and interpret its language. The closed eyes of de Chirico’s figure were associated with the call of the Romantics and Symbolists to see the world not with the physical but with the inner eye, and to rise above crude reality. At the same time, the artist depicted his figure with a prosaic naturalism. His typical-looking face, his protruding ears, fashionable moustache, and the sparse hairs on his chin, in combination with a body which is by no means unathletic but which has filled out a bit too much, are material and ordinary. The sense of mystery and abstraction from life that the painting carried within it is made frighteningly real by this contradiction. De Chirico’s metaphysical painting gave his contemporaries an example of the language of Surrealism. Later on, Salvador Dalí defined it as “the fixation in trompe l’oeil of images in dreams”2. Each of the Surrealists realised this principle in his own way; however, it is in this quality of their art, taken outside the bounds of realism, that Surrealism lies. Surrealism would never have occurred at any given moment had it not been for Giorgio de Chirico. Giorgio de Chirico, Fate linked Giorgio de Chirico’s life to the places and the landscapes which fed his imagination. He was Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume born in 1888 in Greece, where his father built railways. His birthplace was the town of Volo, the capital of Apollinaire, 1914. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 81.5 x 65 cm. Thessaly, from which, according to legend, the Argonauts had set out on their quest for the Golden Fleece. Centre Georges-Pompidou, For the whole of his life Giorgio de Chirico retained the vivid impression of the Classical architecture of Athens. Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. 7 “All the magnificent sights that I saw in Greece in my childhood (I have never seen such beautiful ones since) certainly impressed me deeply and remain firmly imprinted in my soul and in my mind”, he wrote in his memoirs.3 There are recollections of Classical architecture and of the sculpture of ancient Greece in almost every one of his paintings. In Greece he received his first lessons in drawing and painting. At the age of twelve, de Chirico began to study at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Athens. At the age of sixteen, after the death of his father, he left for Italy with his mother and brother. De Chirico then discovered the wonderful Italian cities in which the spirit of the Middle Ages still survived – Turin, Milan, Florence, Venice and Verona. Together with his memories of Greece, these cities lay at the basis of his own private world, the one that he created in his painting. The paintings of de Chirico’s youth, in his so-called “Arcade Period”, are fascinating because they possess a quality which avant-garde painting often lacked. De Chirico built the city of his dreams. A white city stood on the shore of a dark-blue sea. Its straight streets were lined with arcades, as in Turin or Ferrara. The streets open out onto the area of a square, decorated with ancient sculpture. But this town was completely empty, uninhabited. Only occasionally could a man be seen in the perspective that was formed by a street; sometimes it is not even a man but only his shadow. In some places a cane that somebody had forgotten was still leaning against a wall.