An entrancing exhibit highlights women artists, painting a dreamy path to revolution.
When I was in Venice to visit the Biennale, I saw Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. I enjoyed it, but how could I not? It’s about magic, alchemy, the occult, witches, war, sex, goddesses, cosmic unity, and existential anguish. And it’s in Peggy Guggenheim’s sultry, oddball palace on the Grand Canal. It begins with Enrico Donati’s Evil Eye, from 1946, a sculpture made from painted plaster, glass, mirrors, and glass. “Oh, the nogoodniks who deserve the Evil Eye,” I thought. Dating to the time of the pharaohs, it’s the oldest known curse. “But you’re a good Methodist, Brian, and don’t believe in such things.” After seeing this exhibition, I left thinking, “Well, we’ve forgotten our dreams.”
“We can dream, can’t we?” is the first question to ask ourselves in looking at Surrealist art, which draws, in part, on the unstable, unpredictable realm of dreams. Though we live, more or less, in a world ruled by reason, by logic, we all dream in our sleep, even if, on waking, we’ve forgotten our dreams. This endows Surrealism with accessibility, since, like our dreams, it doesn’t have to make sense, and like our dreams, interpretation is personal. Unlike lots of modern art, then, it’s accessible.
Surrealism and Magic is closed now in Venice but opens in a few days at the Barberini Museum in Potsdam. It’s the perfect introduction to Surrealism, with big hits by Georgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Kurt Seligmann, René Magritte, André Masson, and Paul Delvaux. The stars, though, are Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo, women Surrealists who fashion a feminine mystique that turns the tables on Betty Friedan.
The exhibition presents Surrealism as both an art movement and a way of life rebelling against the cult of reason, science, and rationality. The art dates from the mid-Teens and the start of the horrific First World War to its aftermath, the rise and bloody fall of Fascism, and exiles of the various artists, into the ’50s and the nuclear age.
It starts with André Breton (1896–1966), the French poet whose 1924 “Surrealist Manifesto” proposed Surrealism as an aesthetic means to revolution and the rejection of nationhood, hierarchy of all kinds, and capitalism through enchantment. “Wouldn’t be prudent,” as George H. W. Bush would say, but, essentially, Surrealists proposed a new world order where individuals could find and free their imaginations and desires. It’s part nihilist, part utopian, and part libertarian.
For Breton, de Chirico (1888–1978) was the prototype Surrealist artist and the first modern artist to depict a dream world that could be accessed and analyzed and that could invite a way of living unshackled by convention. His Child’s Brain, from 1914, is an anchor painting in the first section of the exhibition and was in Breton’s collection. The Child’s Brain and another de Chirico, Muse Metafisiche, from 1918, are brooding, enigmatic pictures, classical, yes, but not rational. The male figure in The Child’s Brain is godlike and otherworldly, not strictly androgynous, but he looks as if he could be the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret. Is the book the unborn, inchoate child? We really don’t know.
Nearby, the exhibition reunites Ernst’s Attirement of the Bride from 1940 and Carrington’s Portrait of Max Ernst from 1939. Ernst (1891–1976) and Carrington (1917–2011) were a couple, and both were Surrealist heavy hitters. This is the first time the two paintings have been seen together in 80 years. She’s depicted as a witch or an enchantress, both willowy and bulging, conveyed in garish colors. Set in a frozen landscape, he looks like a shaman, wearing a feathered, fish-tailed robe and striped yellow socks.
Ernst was German and immersed in old German fairy tales. Carrington, then only 22, came from a rich Anglo-Irish Roman Catholic family and was educated by nuns. Both saw themselves as mediums between a prewar world of reason, descending from the Enlightenment but gone mad, and a better, aspirational world of spirits.
Ernst’s Europe After the Rain II, from 1940–42, and Wolfgang Paalen’s Magnetic Storms, from 1938, are Surrealist apocalyptic paintings and very powerful. Paalen (1905–1959) was a revelation to me. I’d heard of him but knew next to nothing about him. He’s from a rich Austrian family. His father invented the thermos. Paalen floated in the late ’20s and ’30s from Vienna to Rome, Paris, Berlin, and back to Paris, studied with Fernand Léger, and was in the circle of Breton and Picasso. He studied waking dreams, or hypnopompic hallucinations, which he visualized in paint first by photographing the arbitrary, serpentine shapes that cigarette smoke makes as it wafts above an ashtray. His work is bewitching and bewildering, both unsettling and beautiful.
Paalen isn’t exactly undiscovered. Compromising his renown are his many years living in Mexico, having fled Europe before the Germans invaded France. He spent some time in San Francisco, but as an Austrian in Mexico, he occupied a niche of one. The Galerie Belvedere in Vienna did a retrospective of his work in 2019, the first big exhibition he ever had.
The Swiss-American artist Kurt Seligmann (1900–1962) gets his own gallery, in part, I think, because the curator of the exhibition wrote her dissertation on Seligmann. This is dangerous, since it invites a reign of tangents that, though not always tedious, make a slow storyline and sometimes derail the show. Seligmann is both an artist, and a good one, and the scholar who wrote The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World, published in 1948.
Magic, he wrote, is the ultimate weapon that humanity uses to arouse good spirits and enlist them in the endless battle against evil ones. It’s a useful book, looking at magic from the Assyrians to the Zoroastrians through the Greek gods and the Bible, the Middle Ages, and the founding of the Masons. I read it earlier this week and learned a lot about the Magus, Bael, and the Wonder Cave, and the divination of moles, palms, and heads. “Magic was a stimulus to thinking,” Seligmann wrote, putting a gloss on it all. “It freed man from fears, endowed him with a feeling of power to control the world, sharpened his capacity to imagine, and kept awake his dreams of higher achievement.”
I wish I’d read Seligmann’s book when I was a graduate student. Magic and the occult are big topics in Northern Renaissance art, and the Enlightenment was, among other things, the great debunker of superstition as ideology. Still, the Romantics and Symbolists used the thousands-years-old iconography of magic
The exhibition presents Seligmann’s Isis and Melusine and the Great Transparents as an introduction to the women whose work delivers the exhibition’s most provocative and original ideas. Attributes uniquely possessed by women, presented through the lens of Surrealist style and philosophy, could rejuvenate a world traumatized by war.
It’s the Seligmann section that takes Surrealism and Magic from the general, or the touristical, to the specific and enlightening. Surrealist men such as Magritte, Delvaux, and Masson depicted women as fertile and erotic, to be sure, but also as having the power to kill and to disarray. This isn’t new. The diabolical woman is an Old Master trope with traction from the Romantics through Picasso. Breton, however, wrote passionately about women’s liberation, which he saw as integral to his Surrealist revolution. Drawing on the legacy of witchcraft, he saw women as having unique access to the power of magic.
There’s plenty of good work by Carrington in the show. It’s strange stuff. I’m not sure, though, aside from reiterating Breton’s theories, that the curators make a good case. She’s a very good painter, but her subject matter, drawing from old Celtic and Frankish, needs to be explained and probed. Pictures such as The Distractions of Dagobert, from 1945, and The Necromancer, from 1950, are very indebted to Hieronymus Bosch, too indebted to feel revolutionary. That a woman painted them doesn’t a call to arms make.
Fini and Varo depict witches to signal a woman’s mastery of her own destiny, but their esoteric work needs explanation. It’s beautifully painted, and the subject matter is so creepy, it startles, but what’s missing from the interpretation is depth and incisiveness. Tanning (1910–2012), one of two American artists in the show, gets two pictures, The Mirror, from 1950, and The Magic Flower Game, from 1941, but barely a mention in the catalogue. That’s a shame. She and Ernst were married for 30 years, after Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim divorced (he had married Guggenheim in the U.S. after his relationship with Carrington ended). Tanning’s a good artist as well as a writer.
Kay Sage’s Tomorrow Is Never, from 1955, is in the exhibition, too. Sage (1898–1963) is a wonderful artist and mostly unknown today. She did Surrealist architecture scenes that, alas for Surrealism and Magic, have nothing to do with the themes of the exhibition. Her work is about dreams of entrapment. She was married to Yves Tanguy, an abusive husband whose work is also in the exhibition and, also, doesn’t implicate magic is any meaningful way.
The women artists are the stars of the exhibition in part because they’re new to many visitors and need to be better known. Though Surrealism and Magic doesn’t do a deep dive into their iconography and themes, each of these women is a better painter than Frida Kahlo, who is on the fringe of Surrealism and is far more famous, deservedly, as a personality.
There are many wonderful things about the exhibition. But there are also three problems with it, though none are fatal given the quality of the art and its arrangement in the galleries. First, Breton’s infusion of a grand, profound social, economic, and political ideology in these pictures is mostly bullshit. The art’s delectable and provocative, and some of it is very original, but lots of it is a pastiche of old styles ranging from medieval illuminated manuscripts, with their jewel-like colors and spindly figures, to Dürer’s witches, Bosch, Goya, Henry Fuseli, Caspar David Friedrich, and Symbolists such as Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Félicien Rops, and James Ensor.
I think part of the genius of the Surrealists lies in how they repackaged, or amalgamated, old art using a look that’s modern. It’s still intensely personal, subjective art. Breton, in portraying it as art with a secular, communal, political message, pushes it into a place where it really doesn’t belong.
The second problem is Surrealism and Magic’s relationship to the Venice Biennale. The Biennale is on the other side of town, but Venice is small, and the Biennale is all-consuming. Milk of Dreams, the mammoth, main exhibition at the Biennale, which I reviewed this summer, is, whether the curator admits it or not, an exhibition about contemporary Surrealism. Surrealism and Magic serves, accidentally but probably not intentionally, as a necessary introduction to Surrealism and a springboard to the Biennale.
This makes for a feeling of overreach in Surrealism and Magic. It covers a sprawling chronology from the First World War well into the ’50s, 20 artists, none of whom I would call inconsequential, and the vast themes of magic, alchemy, and the occult, each, in its way, as old as humanity. Throw in the place of the modern goddess, and we visitors have too much to absorb. The museum, like every other museum that relies on income from admissions, needs to balance general accessibility, and a Surrealism survey show is a tourist draw, against genuinely new scholarship. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is, above all, a scholarly place.
The third problem is the catalogue, which has eleven short essays by eight authors. It’s a beautiful book and copiously illustrated, and it’s also roughly chronological. I think there’s too much overlap and, overall, too many voices and a feeling of a story that moves in fits and starts. The old approach to exhibition catalogues for thematic shows — three essays and a page-or-so entry for each object — is out of style now but might have tightened and clarified the intellectual content. I know, it’s an exhibition about art that draws from dreams, so clarity is counterintuitive. Still, it helps.
The glossary at the end is very good, with long, incisive definitions of such terms as magic, androgyny, occultism, tarot, minotaur, and sphinx. I would have sprinkled these entries as sidebars among the essays where they seemed most relevant.
I know, I’m an Americanist, and scholars of American art tend to like exactitude, linearity, and transparency. It’s not for nothing that American painting starts with Copley. Still, I enjoyed Surrealism and Magic, saw some great art, learned a lot, and polished my “Evil Eye” technique.
