ESSAY Surrealism: A discovered space

“So strong is the belief in life what is most fragile in life–real life, I mean–that in the end this belief is lost.” This is the first sentence of André Breton’s famous, infamous, notorious, and rarely actually read first Surrealist Manifesto. Breton was born in a small town in Normandy, France in 1896. He was thus a very young man at the outbreak of WWI. As for nearly everyone of that generation, the war was a defining and devastating experience. I myself had an obsession with learning about WWI around ten years ago. I remember reading some first-person accounts of soldiers describing the experience of gas attacks in the trenches of the Western Front. I had to put the book down. It was one of the few times in my life that I found myself literally unable to read through my tears.

Breton spent much of his wartime years at a neurological ward in the city of Nantes as a stretcher bearer and nurse. After Nantes, Breton was a student at the psychiatric clinic for the Second Army in Saint-Dizier. There he was to come into contact with many soldiers suffering from shell shock. Breton became, understandably, preoccupied with madness, neurological disorders, and then, through a correspondence with Sigmund Freud, the emerging psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious. Madness seemed to Breton to make much more sense of the world, inner and outer, than any other theory, especially theories that stressed the rational nature of human, beast, and cosmos.

As the German writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin (who was, like Breton, born in the final years of the 19th century) once wrote about the experience of WWI, “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.” It was out of this utterly bewildering and transformative experience that Breton, along with a cohort of similar-minded and similarly traumatized young Europeans, began to chart a new path through so-called reality.

Thus, the opening sentence of the Surrealist Manifesto. Breton is trying to describe what life is, real life. Human beings are defined by Breton not, as Aristotelians would have it, as the “rational animal,” but as the “dreaming animal.” Breton is arguing that human beings are fully human insofar as they pay attention to and stay faithful to their dreams. Unfortunately, this is hard to do. That’s why Breton says that the belief in real life, the life of dreams, is lost. The harsh conditions of day-to-day life strip us of the dreams and fantasies that once sustained us and made us fully human. How to get our dreams back? How to return to the beautiful reality that was taken from us when we began to accept the lie that mundane life is the true reality?

Well, that’s where Surrealism comes in. Breton came to define Surrealism as closely bound up with the technique of psychic automatism. Here’s how Breton defined Surrealism as a form of psychic automatism in his manifesto:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

Breton was to apply this technique to writing, for instance in his 1928 novel Nadja, which is ostensibly the story of a ten-day affair with a woman named Nadja but is really the attempt to penetrate the outer crust of reality into its inner dreamlike essence. Nadja also notably included a number of visual elements— photographs, drawings, and a handwritten letter—all meant to give further “reality” to the dreamworld Breton was building. Many of Surrealism’s early adherents pursued this visual element further. They asked themselves, “What does this surrealist dreamworld look like? How can it be experienced in a medium other than words?”

Max Ernst, in particular, was interested in discovering techniques by which Breton’s process of psychic automatism could be applied to works of visual art. Ernst was also deeply affected and traumatized by his four years of service during WWI. He served on both the Eastern and Western fronts. There was, therefore, barely a horror of that war Ernst did not experience. He famously wrote in his wartime journal that he died on the first day of the war and was reborn on the last. His early collage work was at least partly an attempt both to represent and perhaps stitch together the fragmented, disturbing, and overwhelming experiences of the war.

He likewise declared himself more or less done with the modern world, at least in the version that he’d experienced from his childhood until the end of the war. He wondered if there might be a way to access a different and better world. After Ernst met Breton he began to experiment explicitly with methods that would unlock a picture-making capacity beyond his own rational intention. Ernst’s first version of this technique became known as frottage, or rubbing. He would put a sheet of paper over an uneven surface, often the floor, and then rub on the paper with a soft pencil. Strange and unexpected images would emerge.

Max Ernst, Untitled (1925)

Above is a rubbing, a frottage, taken from old floorboards. One can see the grain of the wood. But what is the round figure at the top-middle of the work? Some impression that was made by an object at some point in the history of the floor, no doubt. And yet, it seems to be a ghostly image, perhaps of the sun, which also makes the entire scene look something like a landscape, though an uncanny one at that. The top edge of the floorboard becomes a skyline. Maybe there are mountains in the distance. It’s like a vista witnessed in a dream. In Surrealist terms, the metaphor becomes almost too perfect to be believed. The content of our dreams is literally hidden in plain sight. In this case, a dreamscape is embedded in the floorboards that Ernst walked upon daily. He’d developed a technique to reveal the magic and mystery contained in the otherwise mundane and unexplored objects and experiences of everyday life.

From frottage, Ernst moved on to grattage, or scraping. This was closer to a painting technique. Ernst would apply paint to a canvas. He would then place the canvas over a heavily textured object of some kind. He’d then scrape the canvas, bringing out images and textures from the object beneath.

Max Ernst, The Gray Forest (1927)

It is not clear exactly what objects Max Ernst used to create The Gray Forest, perhaps some pieces of bark, fabric, maybe a couple of old buttons and clasps. The result, like in Ernst’s work of frottage, is a ghostly and dreamlike landscape that Ernst made even more explicit by adding the disc-like sun or moon and the sky-blue background. But the key point to keep in mind with these works is that for all their mysterious and dreamy qualities, they are literally an impression of actual objects found in the everyday world, that the everyday world contains far more than we often think it contains. Ernst was not, in his frottage and grattage period, interested in composing works from his own imagination. He was interested in letting himself become a conduit, or a channel, by which a dream-reality that already exists could be brought to the fore.

I’m going to go ahead and call that the fundamental intuition of Surrealism. There is a real world. The real world is hidden within the everyday world that we experience, which is a false or obscured version of real reality. When you gain access to the real world you experience it as structured more like a dream. Max Ernst’s techniques of frottage and grattage were one way to convey that sense of double reality, or true reality hidden within false reality. But Ernst also became quite fascinated with the work of Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico.

De Chirico was of the same generation as Breton and Ernst, though he was medically unfit to serve as a soldier in the First World War. Instead, he served at a hospital in Ferrara, where his trauma was acquired second-hand, and was seemingly less crucial to his artistic path than it was for the French and German Surrealists. In fact, many of his pictures that were most inspiring to the Surrealists were painted just before WWI. They convey little of the anguish that can be seen in other Surrealist works and De Chirico never really considered himself a Surrealist. He called his art “metaphysical,” by which he meant that it conveyed something beyond the physical realm.

One gets a sense of what de Chirico meant by looking at a picture like Mystery and Melancholy of a Street.

Giorgia de Chirico, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914)

In one sense, this painting seems to be in direct historical continuity with the painting tradition of the Italian renaissance. That’s because it is seemingly so interested in establishing the lines and angles of linear perspective, the geometric rigor of columns and plazas. One wants to compare the painting, for instance, to something like Perugino’s The Delivery of the Keys.

Pietro Perugino, The Delivery of the Keys (1481-2)

But there is, obviously, also a massive difference between the two paintings. The de Chirico painting is distinctly strange and uncanny in its overall mood. Not, by the way, that the Perugino is without its weirdness. There’s already a kind of dreaminess to the otherwise clear and distinct forms and colors in the painting. But it is all a bit too clear, too distinct. De Chirico’s project was to take the nascent weirdness of classical and renaissance artworks and push that weirdness as far as he could.

The result is a scene that contains all of the mystery and melancholy promised in the title. Mostly this mystery and melancholy comes from the shadow in the very center of the picture and from the image of the little girl running with her hoop. The shadow is likely being cast by a statue that we can’t see directly because of the building looming in the foreground. But because we can’t see the statue that casts the shadow, the shadow itself becomes the only reality we have access to. Thus, the feeling of mystery that the painting creates. We are seeing something, but the something we’re seeing is hiding its true nature, or only reveals itself indirectly. And that mystery, the painting seems to suggest, is the very nature of our experience. What we’re seeing in our everyday lives is not the full story. Normal reality is loaded with something not directly knowable or perceivable, reality beyond itself.

One can understand why the Surrealists would have been so excited by these paintings. Ernst, for instance, was obviously playing with a number of de Chirico’s techniques when he painted pictures like Ubu Imperator, The Elephant Celebes, and Saint Cecilia.

Max Ernst, Saint Cecilia, (1923)

But it is perhaps Yves Tanguy who went the furthest in incorporating de Chirico’s techniques into a properly Surrealist idiom. Yet another Surrealist who came of age during the maelstrom of WWI, Tanguy ended up in Paris just after the war ended. It was in Paris that he encountered the painting The Child’s Brain by de Chirico. Tanguy became so impressed by what de Chirico was doing that he decided to become a painter then and there.

Giorgio de Chirico, Le cerveau de l´enfant (The Child’s Brain) (1917)

A few years after having seen de Chirico’s painting, Tanguy would produce the picture Mama, Papa Is Wounded.

Yves Tanguy, Mama, Papa is Wounded (1927)

This picture achieves the basic template for what Surrealist painting would look like for the next generation and beyond. Visually, the elements of this painting are relatively simple. Sky, ground, horizon line. It’s a kind of landscape, as all classic Surrealist paintings tend to be, from Ernst’s frottage and grattage work all the way to the late paintings of Salvador Dalí. There are also objects in the painting. The objects exist in obscure relation to one another. Nonetheless, the objects are clearly defined and, in some cases, hyperrealistic in their detailed illumination. The hairy pole in the foreground of this picture, for instance, is painted with painstaking attention to the clarity of each hair. It is not clear why there is a hairy pole in the picture. But it is clear that it is a hairy pole.

This is the second crucial element that Tanguy took from de Chirico, the direct reference to the painterly techniques of the High Renaissance. It is a technique that Dalí would pick up on as well. The motivation for doing so is straightforward. The paintings of the High Renaissance are visually powerful statements about the true nature of reality. And the nature of reality, to most of the High Renaissance painters, is to be a harmonious and rationally penetrable whole. By analyzing and reproducing a visual scene we are, according to the classic Renaissance painters, also gaining a deeper understanding of the very nature of our cosmos.

The Surrealist painters agree. They therefore use many of the same realist techniques. But in the case of the Surrealists, the nature of our cosmos is, crucially, unknowable to the rational mind. Thus, Tanguy’s usage of the geometrical lines connecting several objects in Mama, Papa is Wounded. These are the same kinds of lines that a renaissance painter would use to undergird the structure of a painting and to establish the vanishing point and create proper ratios of perspective. But in Tanguy’s case, the lines are more or less arbitrary and connect the objects in ways that cannot be explained or understood. It’s not that the objects of the painting are disconnected. They are connected, and we can witness the connection. But we can know no more than that.

It is often said that these kinds of Surrealist paintings create a dreamlike world that blurs the boundary between the rational and the irrational. There is truth in the point. But the landscapes of painters like Tanguy are, I think, going even further than this. It is not that the boundaries are blurred so much as that a new primacy is established. The world of dreams, of fantasy, of randomness and that which is beyond logic or understanding—this is the true world. The world we think we understand, visually or in any other way, is, in fact, the false world.

By the early 1940s, Tanguy had established such a mastery of his craft that he was able to create scenes that fit together with a complete plausibility that, at the same time, work outside of the rules of reality as we experience it in everyday life. A painting like Indefined Divisibility is a case in point.

Yves Tanguy, Indefined Divisibility (1942)

This painting is either delightful or annoying depending on one’s tastes and proclivities. For those who find it delightful, it doesn’t need to be explained or understood or decoded. It simply shows a landscape that the mind has already experienced in some form or other, whether in a dream or fantasy.

The pictorial space that Tanguy and other early Surrealist painters had discovered would be explored by any number of later Surrealists over the course of the 20th century. Standout examples of such explorations include the work of Kay Sage. A painting like Starlings, Caravans, for instance, seems very much to exist in the same world as Indefined Divisibility while, at the same time, bringing something new to the visual language of Surrealism.

Kay Sage, Starlings, Caravans (1948)

Maybe the crucial contribution is in the almost photorealist clarity to the white straps on the boat or boat-like structure. There is an amazing tension here between elements that make perfect sense, visually, while at the same time contributing to the creation of an overall scene that evades visual, or any other, sense. Sage, an American, is also an important figure in the transition of Surrealism from a primarily European phenomenon to a movement that becomes genuinely international in the period after WWII.

It is to that period that Dorothea Tanning belongs. Also an American, Tanning was born about twenty years later than the first generation of Surrealists. She became interested in the movement after seeing an exhibit of Surrealist art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1936.

Dorothea Tanning, Birthday (1942)

A painting like Birthday represents a turn in Surrealism back toward the more directly representational and figural. Not that this tendency was ever completely absent from Surrealism. Dalí, for instance, was never afraid to bring the human figure into his works, nor was Ernst. But Tanning’s Birthday is both more personal and more directly narrative than most of the paintings in the earlier Surrealist tradition.

Tanning continued in this direction with Eine Kleine Nachtmusik from 1943.

Dorothea Tanning, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943)

It seems safe to see this painting as incorporating elements from Tanning’s childhood memories and dreams. In this sense, Tanning’s pictures tend to be less radically committed to the separate and superior realm of dream-logic that we find in Tanguy’s earlier pictures. But it would also be a mistake to use this picture as a piece of dream interpretation or to attempt any facile decoding of the images and symbols.

What makes Tanning every bit as much the Surrealist as any of the Surrealists making art in the 1920s is her deep temperamental agreement with the overall approach already put into words by Breton in that first Surrealist manifesto. As Breton wrote back in 1924:

Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices. It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer — and, in my opinion by far the most important part — has been brought back to light.

A canvas like Eine Kleine Nchtmusik is, indeed, an attempt to bring to light a form of experience that, at least for much of the 20th century, had been banished. If for this reason alone, Surrealism has to be considered one of the most important movements of the last hundred years. Whether Surrealism is correct about what constitutes real life is an ongoing matter of debate. That it produced some of the most visually arresting images in the history of artmaking should not be debatable at all. One simply needs to look.