THE FINE LINE BETWEEN ART AND ACCIDENT
“Drawing Surrealism” is less surprising
for the virtuosity of the works than for the fact that the techniques employed were
never destined to achieve the truly free, unmediated expression the surrealists
sought. The exhibition, curated by
Leslie Jones of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Isabelle
Dervaux of the Morgan Library & Museum, only proves that the Surrealist
Movement was mostly a failure in terms of its own agenda—if also a great
success for artists, critics, historians, curatorial staffs and gallery
visitors. If surrealism produced works
of enduring beauty for private and institutional display, by definition it must
have also failed to revolutionize society through the contagion of delirium it
hoped to spark. Francis Picabia’s
portrait drawing “Olga” (1930), featured on the exhibition catalogue, perfectly
illustrates the problem. The tohu-bohu
of the image is a perceptual effect of a very conscious double-rendering of the subject: one, a perfectly naturalistic depiction of a woman
with sharp, chiseled eyebrows, deep-pooled eyes and parabolic chin; and the
other, a more expressionistic image of the same woman (presumably), which
overlaps the first. A case of highly
conscientious artistry, no mistake.
 |
Francis Picabia (1879–1953) Olga, 1930. Graphite pencil and
crayon on paper. Bequest of Mme Lucienne Rosenberg 1995.
CNAC/MNAM/Dist.RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris |
That being said, the
show suggests that drawing, because of its immediacy, creates the look of the unconscious
better than any other medium. The immediate
appeal of the works, then, is still ideological: it is the artist’s conscious faith in the unconscious
itself—a genuine desire to provoke a societal outbreak of the irrational through
plastic experiments that disrupt preconceived notions of order and beauty. Techniques such as chance operations,
automatism, collage, frottage, rayographs and decalcomania—categories by which
the exhibition is laid out—create effects both visually riveting and
psychologically unsettling. Unlike
paintings with all their formal grandstanding, these sketches, scribbles and jottings
seem to capture the unconscious on the wing, conveying some of the original
excitement of harnessing new creative forces.
They remind us that the surrealists’ top priority was, as the poet Rimbaud
said of his own work, to “change life.”
As postmoderns and
postmillennials, we find it hard not to like artwork inspired by the impulse to
undermine art itself and to destroy old habits of mind. But the drawings are still gorgeous, and this
simple fact allows museums like the Morgan to provoke mass delusional disorder
without being ransacked and burnt to the ground—presumably in a riot of
surrealist ecstasy. The surrealist gambit
of using chance, speed, revolutionary agitation, Freudian insinuation, and the
phenomena of dreams as the basis for art is just the kind of naïve risk-taking
that expands our conception of the beautiful and the worthwhile. But no one attending the show is going to initiate
a cultural potlatch of the sort celebrated by surrealist outlier Georges
Bataille. As if tempting fate, the
curators have included some of his drawings in the show and go on to speculate
that his sketches probably came out of psychoanalytic treatment he received in
the 1920s. In other words, they are as
likely to be seen as clinical evidence of a disturbed mind as artistic products
of a creative one. The six sketches are
drawn on lined cahiers, each one luring the viewer into a psychoanalytic puzzle,
a circuit of Freudian dreamwork visually rendered in quick, light strokes of
the pen. The mind is coaxed into a
startled instant of pleasurable perplexity and we wonder why Bataille didn’t try
to paint his obsessions for money. Other
surrealists seem to take Bataille’s cue when, for example, Joan Mirò draws a fantastically
flat-footed creature (“Composition,” [1930]) visually invoking Bataille’s essay
on the big toe as a figure of base materialism.
All this seems calculated to help bring surrealism down off its romantic
high horse and into the real muck of the human mind.
Not far away we
find two works by Henri Michaux that look like crossovers between conventional
handwriting and hieroglyphic signs. The
first is a drawing of a literal narrative
written in an unknown, indeed, completely made-up language (we know it’s a “narration”
only because its French title says so), while a second drawing presents a
made-up alphabet. To ask if the latter
is the key to deciphering the former might seem impertinent, and yet Michaux’s assumption,
I think, is that the only honest response would be to accept his crazy alphabet
as genuine and to assume the task of decoding it—like some Champollion of the
ineffable. Later in the exhibit, we are treated
to a larger work by Michaux—certainly not his best, but evocative of the
painter-poet’s tendency to use sinuous, almost runic marks to trace the pulsations
of the brain or to depict the chromosomal line-up of an impossible mitosis.
The
exhibition is housed in the Morgan Stanley galleries of the museum. While the west gallery focuses mostly on the
international ramifications of surrealism and includes some real surprises, the
east gallery concentrates on works by classic surrealist artists and their
forerunners who worked in Paris from the Nineteen-teens to the Forties—artists
such as Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Joan Mirò, Giorgio di Chirico, Picasso and eventually
Salvador Dalí, the latecomer whose obsessive character, technical wizardry, and
deliberate cultivation of delirious states overturned the surrealists’ original
impulse toward passive immediacy.
Interestingly enough, the exhibition begins—after the obligatory manikins
of Di Chirico—with a work more closely bound to literature: a calligramme
by Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet who coined the term “surrealism” and whose pictographic
“Mandolin, carnation and bamboo” (c. 1915-17) presents these three objects as
little pictures made of sentences. The calligramme highlights the close
proximity of surrealist art to a range of avant-garde literary activities developing
at the time and surrealism itself continues to be thought of in France primarily
as a literary movement, the canon of which is less well known in this country.
Connections between
drawing and literature punctuate the entire show, continuing in the section le cadavre exquis, where we find writers
such as André Breton, Tristan Tzara, and Max Morise participating with artists
in this almost juvenile game of chance.
Though the examples given are all drawings (not lines of poetry as other
versions of the game indicate), they seem premised on the analogy between body
parts and parts of speech, being done on folded pieces of paper in which an
image begun by one participant is continued by another who is unable to see the
preceding portion, but who knows the figure started with the head (not, alas, the toe). The illustrations at the Morgan are all top quality,
vividly conveying the bizarre figurative effects of the game, but also a
remarkable cohesion in the images drawn, as if proving that the “juxtaposition
of distant realities” so dear to the surrealists would always yield
artistically satisfying results. A
remarkable consequence of these games is revealed in four large drawings by
Victor Brauner, works clearly inspired by the exquisite cadaver experiments, exhibiting
an infantine quality that betokens the savagery of children, only
monumentalized.
Another intersection
of the literary and art worlds comes up with three surrealist illustrations of the
Comte de Lautréamont’s Chansons de
Maldoror by Oscar Dominguez, Roberto Matta, and René Magritte, the last being
the most memorable (along with his wonderful “Storm” sketch), depicting an
oversized eyeball wearing a wig and sitting astride a young female body. Even today, it looks hideously succuboid in its
forest of bedposts. A final example
shows up later in an early work by Mark Rothko (“Geologic Reverie” [1946]) presenting
two or three horizontal fields of dry gouache and watercolor with scattered fragments
resembling broken pieces of type or scripts morphing into other shapes.
The most
conspicuously virtuoso works in the show are the predictable Miròs, Ernsts,
Picassos, and others, presented in ample numbers. If one is constantly being dazzled by the draftsmanship
of Mirò, rising up to ever higher levels of artistry in such works as “The
Migratory Bird” (1941) from his “Constellations” series, one is equally awed by
the sheer inventiveness of Ernst in his ability to discover provocative techniques
for depicting unconscious states. His
oeuvre is a catalogue of methodological novelties as proved by his ingenious collages,
his primeval, wood-grained frottages, and the eerily glaucous landscapes created
by means of decalcomania. Finally, no
exhibition of surrealist art would be complete without Ernst’s wacky collage-narratives,
exemplified in one the first great graphic novels, The Hundred Headless Woman (1929), using old prints and recombining
them to present a story straight from the oneiric recesses of a disturbed sleep. Dalí’s works, on the other hand, flabbergast
us with their “paranoiac-critical method,” a technique by which he conflated double,
even multiple, figurative elements in a single image—a kind of visual punning—as
his “Study for ‘The Image Disappears’” (1939) reveals: a distorted, half-nude version of Vermeer’s “Woman
Reading a Letter” metamorphosing before our eyes into the lurid grin of a
mustachioed lecher. We find the antidote
to this grin in the work of Leonora Carrington, whose “Nursery at Midnight” (1941)
is delicately sketched on off-white paper—not without traces of frottage—and conjures
up a mystery-space of infancy using a rocking-horse, mirror, and curtain while
hinting at repressed horrors. This work
is followed up with her maps of “Down Below”—two drawings relating to the Nazi
Occupation when Ernst, her lover, was arrested by the Gestapo and Carrington
herself fled to Spain where she had a breakdown and was institutionalized
(Ernst was quickly rescued by Peggy Guggenheim who whisked him off to America
and marriage—a supremely surreal achievement).
Carrington’s map is a kind of mnemonic chart of social and historical insanity
as diagnosed by one of its most creative victims.
But the most
aggressively spontaneous works are the early automatic drawings and sand
paintings of André Masson, which by many accounts come closest to—if they also spectacularly
fail at—capturing the spirit of automatism through a trance-like circling of
the pencil around an occult subject, one that gradually exposes the manifest content
of sexual wish-fulfillment. Masson’s
visual allegories obsessively and explicitly depict human body parts—hands, eyes,
breasts, anuses and genitalia. Critics
have accused Masson of bad faith in these works, insinuating that a clear,
conscious intention has crept into a supposedly unconscious process. But in the end, the criticism seems debatable
or even meaningless, since, as some have argued, no one can say for sure
whether there isn’t an unconscious motive behind every conscious act. If some of these “Vegetal Deliria” amount to nothing
more than contour maps of the so-called “partial objects,” who can say exactly when
the unconscious impulse became conscious, or when the linear curves and twists
became the fleshy swells and wrinkles of a pudendum? It’s a fine line that seems easy enough to
cross—or to fail to reach. In the end,
the pleasure afforded comes as much through the manner as the motivation. “Drawing Surrealism” is about drawing out-of-order
in a way that expands consciousness, captures surprise, and ideally catches
fire in a public contagion of delirium.
If only…
