Drawing Surrealism

The Morgan Library & Museum, Jan 25 - April 21, 2013

THE FINE LINE BETWEEN ART AND ACCIDENT





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

“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.  

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…