Surrealism

Author: Natalia Brodskaïa

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ISBN: 978-1-68325-473-7

Natalia Brodskaïa

Surrealism

Contents

Surrealism

Max Ernst (1891-1976)

Yves Tanguy (1900-1955)

Joan Miró (1893-1983)

André Masson (1896-1987)

René Magritte (1898-1967)

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)

Paul Delvaux (1897-1994)

List of Illustrations

Notes

René Magritte, The Liberator, 1947. Oil on canvas, 99.1 x 78.7 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

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 World War I. The Child’s Brain had a wonderful effect on someone else besides Yves Tanguy, André Breton later recalled:

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. 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. Fate linked Giorgio de Chirico’s life to the places and the landscapes which fed his imagination. He was born in 1888 in Greece, where his father built railways. His birthplace was the town of Volo, the capital of Thessaly, from which, according to legend, the Argonauts had set out on their quest for the Golden Fleece. For the whole of his life Giorgio de Chirico retained the vivid impression of the Classical architecture of Athens.

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. Later, he spent two years in Munich where he studied not only painting, but also classical German philosophy. Schopenhauer wrote:

"In order to have original, extraordinary, perhaps immortal ideas, it is enough to isolate oneself so completely from the world and from things for a few moments that the most ordinary objects and events should appear to us as completely new and unknown, thereby revealing their true essence.[3]

In Munich he saw a kind of painting which awakened the craving for mystery that lay sleeping in his soul – he got to know [Arnold] Böklin. In 1911 Giorgio de Chirico arrived in Paris and settled in the Montparnasse district, on the Rue Campagne-Première. When his paintings appeared at the Salon d’automne, the Parisian artists saw the de Chirico who would later impress them with his Brain of the Child, and who wrote: What I hear is worth nothing, the only thing that matters is what my eyes see when they are open, and even more when they are shut.[4]

Giorgio de Chirico turned up in the right place at the right time. For the young people of Montmartre and Montparnasse he became an inspiration and almost a prophet. In 1914 de Chirico depicted Apollinaire in profile against the background of a window. On the poet’s temple he drew a white circle. When Apollinaire went off to the front soon afterwards, he was wounded in the left temple, in the place shown in the picture. The artist had become a visionary for them, with the power to see into the future.

Giorgio de Chirico summoned to the surface what had been hidden deep within the art of the beginning of the 20th century. In the course of the following decades, the spirit of de Chirico found its way into the painting of all the Surrealist artists. References to his pictures turned up in their canvases, mysterious signs and symbols born from his imagination; the mannequins he invented prolonged their lives. However, for the seed of the art of Giorgio de Chirico to be really able to germinate, the young generation of the 20th century would have to experience a vast upheaval.

Giorgio de Chirico, Melancholia, 1912. Oil on canvas. Estorick Foundation, London.

Giorgio de Chirico, Spring in Turin, 1914. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

Giorgio de Chirico, Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire, 1914. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 81.5 x 65 cm. Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.

The War – The Stimulus For Dada

The art of Surrealism was the most direct outcome of its time. Those who created it, literary men and artists, date from the generation that was born in the last decade of the 19th century. At the start of World War I, each of them was about twenty years old. After the monstrous crimes of World War II, after the extermination of millions of people in concentration camps and the destruction of Japanese cities with the atomic bomb, previous wars seemed only like distant historical episodes. It is difficult to imagine what a disaster, and in fact what a tragedy, World War I was. The first years of the 20th century were marked by outbreaks of conflict in various parts of the world, and there was a sense that people were living on a volcano.

Nevertheless, the start of the war came as a surprise. On 28 June 1914, in the Serbian city of Sarajevo, the student Gavrilo Princip killed the Austrian Archduke.Franz Ferdinand and his wife. A war began in the Balkans. On 1 August, Germany declares war on Russia, and on the 3rd and 4th of the same month, France and Britain declared war on Germany. It was only the defeat of the Germans on the Marne from September 5 to 10 that saved Paris from destruction. At the same time, this led to a drawn-out positional war which turned into a nightmare. Many thousands of young people from every country took part in the war. And it was exactly this generation that would create the art of the 20th century and carry on from the boldest beginnings of its predecessors.

Before the war, the artistic life of Paris reveled in the most complete and entrancing freedom. The Impressionists and the masters of the period of Post-Impressionism untied artists’ hands. A sense of the barriers in art established by a tradition or a school had vanished. Young artists could permit themselves everything that was possible or impossible. In 1909, the Futurist Manifesto was published in Milan and then Paris. Its author Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote: Our poetry is courage, audacity and revolt. The Futurists were the first to rise up against old-fashioned art and cultural tradition. Marinetti wrote:

Down with museums and libraries! We issue this flaming manifesto as a proclamation announcing the establishment of Futurism, because we want to deliver this country from the malignant tumour on its body – from professors, archaeologists, cicerones and antiquarians... Hurry over here! Burn down the libraries! Dam the canals and sink the