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Dreaming with Open Eyes: Dada and
Surrealist Art
from the Vera, Silvia and Arturo Schwartz Collection
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Dada and Surrealism
(1998), Matthew Gale |
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If
abstraction is at the heart of modernism, then Dadaism and Surrealism are central to its
intellect.
Dada was a response by artists and poets to the horrors of World War I.
With an anti-art attitude (the name, literally "rocking horse," was selected
randomly from a dictionary), the Dada movement mocked the rational and the conventional.
Later, in the early 1920's, Andre Breton, rejecting the nihilism of Dada,
founded Surrealism which, influenced strongly by the work of Freud, explored the
unconscious, in particular the world of dreaming and its attendant sexuality. The
Surrealists advocated "automatic" writing and painting in which it was thought
the artist's unconscious would be revealed.
Arturo Schwarz is an art dealer, publisher, and scholar who counted
among his friends Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, all prominent in these movements.
Schwarz has gifted his collection of Dada and Surrealist art and ephemera to the Israel
Museum which has mounted the exhibit Dreaming with Open Eyes, now traveling to
San Francisco and Toronto.
Central to the exhibit is a complete collection of Duchamp's
Readymades. These thirteen works are replicas of the originals which were approved by the
artist. The idea of replication would be anathema for traditional art, but for the
anti-art Dadaists--and for art largely based on found objects--it makes perfect sense. A
urinal, after all, is a urinal. It is the placement of the object on a pedestal in the
context of an exhibit that give it its meaning as an artistic (or anti-artistic)
statement. Also familiar here are the Bicycle Wheel mounted on a stool and the
unadorned Bottle Dryer. When first exhibited, these objects were found to be
unsettling, if not shocking; today that element has been lost due to familiarity and the
pieces are mostly interesting as history.
The works that do retain contemporary impact are those where the
artist's hand (and mind) is felt, more readily seen in works by Man Ray such as L'Enigme
d'Isidore Ducasse, a sewing machine wrapped in a blanket and tied with string. Thus
an ordinary item becomes sculptural and acquires an air of mystery. Man Ray's Cadeau
is a flat-iron with nails embedded in its pressing surface, amusingly negating the purpose
of the tool itself. A little irony goes a long way.
Similarly, Duchamp's print (L.H.O.O.Q.) of the Mona Lisa on
which he has pencilled a mustache and beard doesn't have much resonance for a generation
that has been subjected to a surfeit of graffiti. What was diverting then barely draws a
grin today. On the other hand, a second Mona Lisa image without the graffito,
entitled L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved and executed 24 years later, is a delightful drollery.
The painting, The Upper Side of the Sky, by Kay Sage, a detail
of which was used for the poster for this exhibition, is an evocative example of
Surrealism. Pictured is a checkered floor in a vacant room whose doors open to a
horizonless sky and a modernistic structure of architectural elements. A large piece of
fabric, a cloak perhaps, is seen billowing outside, but the edge of the wall cuts off that
to which the cloak is attached. There is surely a suggestion of someone leaping and the
overall painting is imbued with fantasy, mystery, and a powerful sense of isolation. Some
years later Sage wrote this verse: "I have built an ivory tower of despair../I
scream, I scream.../In my ivory tower." Somehow it doesn't come as a surprise that
the painter was a suicide.
Equally dramatic, if not as drastically morbid, is Remedios Varo's Insomnia,
in which heavy-lidded, disembodied eyes float through empty rooms, drawn toward a brightly
lit candle that also attracts two exotically beautiful flying insects--moths of the
imagination, if you will.
In some ways the spirit of the Surrealists is best caught by some of
the many collages included in this exhibit. Collage seems a highly suitable technique for
creating the odd and dream-like combinations of images that plumb the unconscious, though
the deliberateness of the process suggests that it is not as improvisatory as the Surreal
doctrine espouses. An untitled Joseph Cornell work superimposes a black and white
image of a reclining female nude and a basket of breads on a colored fantasy landscape of
river and castle. Another untitled collage, by Georges Hugnet, shows a couple from
the back, sitting on the top of a dune and looking out to sea. A pair of colored eyes is
superimposed on their backs, peering behind them to a partially unclad recumbent female
figure holding a pair of leering red lips. Marcel Jean's sculpture, The Specter of the
Gardenia, covers a plaster head with black felt, with zippers across the eyes and a
strip of celluloid film like a necklace around the neck, held by a paper clip.
A gallery of precursors to Dada and Surrealism is a useful adjunct that
helps place these works in a longer term context. And publications, film and photography
of the period are a positive addition to the mix. But some of the artists generally
associated with Dada and Surrealism are barely represented in the exhibit. There is one
large Miro and a couple of his prints, but they are not particularly fine examples of his
work. Much maligned Dalí (some of whose earlier paintings hold up remarkably well) is
represented by a single ink drawing. Others like Magritte and Klee are similarly
underrepresented. But what is here to be seen is nonetheless a rich and
remarkable contemporaneous collection of a diverse group of works that illuminate the
variety of expression and thought in these important periods of twentieth century art and
thought.
- Arthur Lazere
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