“Surrealism without Borders” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

by Jonathan Goodman

Surrealism, the twentieth-century movement that created odd, mostly figurative constructions emanating from intuition and the unconscious, represents a major moment in recent art. It is an attempt to explore the unreasonable in the imagination; as the title of the show indicates, it was a worldwide phenomenon, with work being made not only in Western Europe, particularly in France, where surrealism began, but also in America, Japan, Mexico, Hungary, Poland, etc. Indeed, one of the best attributes of this show has to do with its wide-ranging presentation of paintings, sculptures, films, and pamphlets, proving that the movement took place all over the world. Politically, artist participants were almost always on the left in their affiliations, and often were forced to leave their countries for other places, where they could practice their art and their beliefs in greater freedom. “Surrealism without Borders” makes it clear that the imagination, freed from the constraints of conscious reason, can produce work that is based on a transfigured realism, in which strangeness is grafted onto the ordinary–as happens in Dali’s use of a lobster as the receiver of a telephone: the perfect conjunction of the unreal with a well-known object (the piece is in the show).

It must be remembered that Freud and Marx were honorary mentors, Freud especially. He had published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, and the Surrealist movement began shortly after the First World War. So Freud’s emphasis on the irrational, the unconscious, was picked up very early on by the Surrealists, not only because Freud’s thinking opened a large window for artists seeking new avenues of expression, but also likely because of the trauma of war, whose gravity and ubiquitous, unrestrained violence deeply affected the great numbers of people involved. That said, there is not much reference to military imagery; instead, Freud’s litany of the ungoverned dreams of the id enabled artists across cultures and distant geographies to create a world that did not abandon realism so much as infuse it with a hyper-realism meant to rebel against psychic (private) and social (public) convention. In the movement’s determination to break new ground, its unwillingness to embrace the conventional or the decorative, the artists in “Surrealism without Borders” looked to unsettle their audience by juxtaposing the outrageous with the ordinary; one way of doing this was implying or distinctly depicting erotic themes. Eros was seen as a liberating, but also defiant, means of engaging the audience: who is not drawn to a sensual image?

Thus, the merger between eroticism, the provocation of the usual, and a radical political stance became the basis of an art that often made best sense to the artist making it; visual obliqueness was a concomitant to the movement’s radical stance.. Thus, Surrealism was based on a visionary mythology and communicated a general atmosphere of transgression. The first image we meet in the show, Surrealist Wardrobe (1941) by the French artist Marcel Jean, acts as an opening into a world of eccentric oppositions. It consists of two sets of partially open cupboard doors, which reveal on the top half the sky and a hilly landscape and a similar picture beneath. To experience nature via a piece of wooden furniture, which is actually a trompe l’oeil painting, is to take part in a Surrealist exercise. In this case, the artist Jean maintains the fiction of a world outdoors seen through the openings of the armoire, associated with indoor life. The painting, a small masterpiece of visual deception, introduces Jean’s audience to natural images that make use of the recognizable in ways that challenge our confidence in what we see. Surrealism is usually about defiance–of the ordinary, the acceptance of the status quo, and the belief that little in society can be changed without some sort of psychic violence.

This show illustrates very well the broad range of materials that belong to the Surrealist movement, as well as the extraordinarily large geographic participation it engendered. Its psychological underpinnings and, often, its air of immediacy and improvisation made it popular in ways that today we might find slightly difficult to understand. It looks like Surrealism is a matter of psychological juxtaposition, a collage of invented memories intended to undermine conventional attitudes toward art and politics. By merging or layering deeply disparate imageries within a single composition, the radical differences we meet become an introduction to the logic of the dream. Freud’s influence on Surrealism was immense, but perhaps it can be said that his methodologies, employed by artists all over the world, felt a bit repetitive to the show’s audience, even if the pictorial languages embraced by those working were not necessarily visually close. Instead, the process of psychological assemblage is what we find again and again in the exhibition’s art. So there is a certain sameness of process that can feel repetitive. In a way, Surrealism makes the greatest sense when it is understood as an illustration of Freudian concepts. Most of the time we don’t understand our dreams, although while we are in the midst of their grasp, they certainly seem real enough. In a similar fashion, the art of the unconscious may make only intuitive sense, resulting in paintings, sculptures, and films of striking originality, but which cannot easily be analyzed or explained.

If we regard the German-born artist Max Ernst’s Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale (1924), we see a female figure running in the grass on the left and a male figure, whose left arm is extended and whose left foot is raised, in movement on the roof of a small shack. There is a small red gate, actual and not painted, attached to the left of the paintings, while a small, modestly rendered bird flies in the abundant sky on the left. According to Ernst, the influences on the painting were personal: the death of his sister and a bout of fever as a child. But the atmosphere is hallucinatory and intuitive to an extreme degree. It has the fervid realism of a dream. This very well-known painting demonstrates to a striking degree the unreal, threatening suggestion of circumstances, realistically portrayed, that do not make sense except as a fragmentary moment of the imagination. As wonderful as the painting is, it may also indicate the limits of the Surrealist endeavor. One can only accept the scenario as something beyond the believable; indeed, it begins where accessible reality stops. This puts unusual pressure on the artist and his audience to relegate the imagination to an otherworldly place, even if its components are individually recognizable as known objects.

Not all the works in the show have been created by forcibly joined disparate imageries. The collage by Peruvian artist César Moro, Untitled (Collage-Drawing) (1927), shows the outline of the full body of a man, his head in profile directed toward the left and his bowels visible. It looks like he is about to step into a door; dusky patches of brown frame him on the right and bottom of the figure. The front of his face is dark but fully believable. His work offers proof that Surrealists were active far away from the center of the movement. The Spanish artist Remedios Varo, who wired in Spain, France, and Mexico, and Leonora Carrington, the British-born artist based in Mexico, offer realistic paintings, often of a feminist slant. Sculpture also occurs in the show. The sculptures tend to move beyond the conventional; they may be abstract in ways that defy any rational measure of interpretation. Viewers see this in the piece by Joyce Mansour, the Egyptian artist, entitled Nasty Object (1965-69), a small sphere covered with small, circular metal tokens, impaled at regular intervals by nails a couple of inches long. It is truly a deliberately disagreeable piece of work. Slightly more accessible is the Czech artist Ladislav Zivi’s Incognito Heart (1936), in which a dark green heart is enclosed within a rough cage of wire that rises from a plant pot. The work is symbolist as well as Surrealist–there is a lot to be said about an isolated heart that has been entrapped within a planter.

One of the most powerful works in the show is the Ambrym Island, New Hebrides, finial for a slit gong, made in the early to the mid-20th century. Carved from light colored wood, the work has large, circular, inset eyes, a tall forehead with a headpiece, and an elaborate necklace around its neck. During the time of Surrealism, it was much admired by its Western practitioners. As a work of impressive gravitas, coming from a distant culture in the South Pacific, the finial demonstrates the exaggerated realist properties the Surrealists made use of in different ways. Its stylized human features convey a sense of self-encompassing sacred dignity, a phrase which might be used to characterize the Surrealists in general. Looking at this piece of indigenous sculpture, the audience of “Surrealism without Borders” might well characterize its making as closely aligned to the Surrealist practice of a realism that was both liberating and, in its acceptance of the extraordinary, including the erotic, sacred. The implication of the Ambrym sculpture indicates that, for the people responsible for the work, stylization was a way of communicating the customary. And for the avant-garde in the West, stylization was an attempt to make the unbelievable usual. LIkely, the self-classified Surrealists saw in this remarkable sculpture a similar rejection of what we know, even though the work was part of regular life on the island.

Merging the unusual with the usual is central to the practices seen in this exhibition. Anything was possible, given the unlimited nature of the unconscious. It may be hard today not to see the process as a bit jaded; the movement began more than a century ago. Freud’s theories now seem slightly outdated, and we have been the recipients of a sexualized culture for decades. This means that it can be argued Surrealist art is antiquarian, out of place for a period that has thoroughly absorbed its precepts. Indeed, the important social concerns of the artists, their emphasis on eros and leftist politics, were challenging and deliberately transgressive, but today the work can sometimes seem facile as its demands for alternatives of the imagination have been incorporated into art practice for some time. If we look at a work like Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam’s The Eternal Presence (1944), we see a tan-colored painting filled with body parts and sexual presentations of natural forms. Crowded as it is, the painting disguises its allegiance to a fully figurative imagery; we keep looking for an overall meaningfulness, which escapes our gaze because its elements are so fragmentary and disjointed. Lam owes some of his style to Picasso, and some of his style to indigenous art. Here the combination is striking, but it puzzles as well. Its uninterpretable elements are generated by the mismatch of components we may individually recognize but cannot make sense of overall.

How do we judge a movement that made psychic anarchy a code of honor? We don’t associate the sharp realism that is often a part of the Surrealist esthetic with an untrammeled vision of art. The strangeness of the works shows that eccentricity can be chosen but may not communicate the strangeness that may have been felt by viewers during the earlier 20th century, when Surrealist was at its height. There is an erotic photograph by Claude Cahun, Autoportrait (Self-Portrait [Double Exposure in a Rock Pool]) (1928), in which the French female artist depicts herself in a see-through, black gauze garment in a narrow pool of water bordered on either side by rocks. In the double image of her complete body, her head is on top on the right, and on the left side, her head is extended downward, toward the bottom of the picture. Perhaps when the photo was made, the picture would have more of a sensual charge than we would experience at this point in time. At the same time, the sensual, when presented publicly, usually generates an excitement that pulls us in, even now. Seeing that Freud unlocked the eroticism of the unconscious, its seemingly unlimited freedom, we can appreciate the way in which Surrealist artists took the insight and made it their visual property. But it is also true that erotic art is a calculated risk, in which its properties may not last beyond the few moments of viewing. We are now inured to a paradigm that takes eros for granted.

Yayoi Kusama’s A Circus Rider’s Dream (1955), a mostly mottled blue painting with black forms, unreadable, mixed with some yellow on the upper right and a green circle in the middle, cannot be analytically determined. It is, as its title says, a dream embodying its own logic. Self-sufficient to the point where interpretation is not truly possible, the work nonetheless is beautiful, capturing the dream as a surface of blue light. And then there is the painting by Joan Miro, May 68 (1968-73), a tribute to a spectacularly rebellious moment in Western culture. It consists of curving black lines running throughout the composition, with a black splotch at the top, from which thin black lines drip downward. On the lower right, surrounded by black lines, we find small irregular areas of red and blue. Both the works described here show us that abstraction can be usefully employed in the service of Surrealism. Perhaps it is best to characterize these efforts as fellow travelers aligning with the movement. They expand the stylistic properties we associate with usual Surrealist work, yet they communicate the expanded sense of the possible that is a dominant attribute of Surrealism’s operations.

A good part of the show was devoted to film, often shown in unusual ways–on the ceiling, on angled white tables. Maya Deren’s piece, At Land (1944), a black-and-white work, emanates a mysterious beauty, even if its actions are not easly understood. Another part of the show was devoted to political ephemera, pamphlets and broadsides, that took a highly progressive position on the issues of the time. In the late Sixties, Chicago-based political artist Franklin Rosement  put out pamphlets with titles like “Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion.” This was a period of extreme unrest in America, fueled by the horrors of the Vietnam War. These tracts indicate that the Surrealist impulse lasted longer than we normally acknowledge. But America was not truly key to Surrealism, despite the august presence of Arshile Gorky, who is represented in the show. Seen both as a founder of abstract expressionism and a gifted Surrealist painter, Gorky may well have been the best American Surrealism had to offer. Dali’s famous 1936 painting Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of the Civil War), with its facial expression given to a coarse male and whose lower trunk appears to have been lost, revealing an open sky with clouds, announces Spain’s dark future. It is a classic Surrealist image, joining caricature to political reality. The last two works, by major artists, indicate what can be done when painters of stature apply their intelligence to the Surrealist method.

At the time of its zenith, Surrealism likely seemed prescient about what could be done in art. But its high point occurred a long time ago, and it is time to characterize its achievements realistically. One senses a greatly liberating moment in art. But the transformation seems to have been self-limited. One approaches these works with close to a scholar’s eye, mostly because its insights have been internalized within American culture and elsewhere. That does not mean the work should be seen as antiquated. But it does suggest that its affiliations, linked as they were to Freud and Marx, are of a period that does not viscerally affect viewers taken with the current populism in visual efforts. If one does not surrender to the blandishments of the school, then the assemblage process begins to look dated. The show was crowded with imageries of a consistently high quality, yet it was hard to find work that thoroughly transcended the imagination in the way the Surrealists wanted. “Surrealism without Borders” is a show of considerable worth, illustrating the capacity of the imagination to construct bridges between unlikely places. But it does not completely convince its audience that the work of the artists transforms established themes. Time, the length of a generation or two, will tell just how important Surrealism was, especially with documentary efforts such as this one.

“Surrealism without Borders” will be on view until January 30, 2022

The MET Fifth Avenue, New York Floor 2, The Tisch Galleries, Gallery 899