Art: Marvelous & Fantastic

(See front cover)

Inside the front door of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art this week, oblong slabs of glass painted with black stripes revolved steadily under a six foot pair of red lips painted by Artist Man Ray. In other galleries throughout the building were a black felt head with a necklace of cinema film and zippers for eyes; a stuffed parrot on a hollow log containing a doll’s leg; a teacup, plate and spoon covered entirely with fur; a picture painted on the back of a door from which dangled a dollar watch, a plaster crab and a huge board to which were tacked a mousetrap, a pair of baby shoes, a rubber sponge, clothespins, a stiff collar, pearl necklace, a child’s umbrella, a braid of auburn hair and a number of hairpins twisted to form a human face. There were in addition, books, prints and paintings ranging from the 18th to the 20th Century, from Pieter Bruegel to contemporary Peter Blume. Having done its best to explain abstract art to the U. S. public last spring (TIME, March 9), the Museum of Modern Art was now attempting to explain another exotic movement with an equally important show broadly titled Exhibition of Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, or Art of the Marvelous and Fantastic.

Fantastic Art has always existed, always will as long as men have illogical minds and unruly imaginations. The Museum’s walls historically carried fantastic art from the horror pictures of medieval Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, through the engravings of Hogarth, to the comic cartoons of Rube Goldberg and the frustrated drawings of James Thurber. Prominently displayed as examples of fantastic art were copies of Edward Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes, Lewis Carroll’s Jabber-wacky. This week’s exhibition did not disdain the art of the frankly insane. There was a panel of wild designs by a crazed French banknote engraver, a drawing of something like a perverted rooster from the inspired brush of an ecstatic Czech (see p. 61).

Dada is something newer, different, a bewilderment that affected the art world of Europe for a few shell-shocked years during and immediately after the War. The object of dadaism was a conscious attack on reason, a complete negation of everything, the loudest and silliest expression of post-War cynicism. “I affirm,” wrote early Dadaist Hans Arp, “that Tristan Tzara discovered the word dada on the 8th of February, 1916, at 6 o’clock in the evening … in the Terrace Cafe in Zurich. I was there with my twelve children when Tzara pronounced for the first time this word, which aroused a legitimate enthusiasm in all of us.” (Later Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck claimed: “. . . it was I who pronounced the word dada [hobbyhorse] for the first time.”) In moments of harmony and logic which they affected to despise, dadaists admitted that their object was “to spit in the eye of the world.”

A leader of the dadaists, later to be one of the most important surrealists, was a young German painter named Max Ernst. Cologne still remembers the dada exhibition organized by Max Ernst and Hans Arp in 1920. The entrance to the exhibition was through a public lavatory. Gallery-goers were given hatchets to smash any pictures they did not approve and a young girl in a white communion dress stood on a platform reciting obscene poems.

The same year Paris dadaists gave a “Festival” in the respectable Salle Gaveau Concert Hall. The program bore the announcement: “Personal Appearance of Charlie Chaplin. The dadaists will pull their hair out in public.” Neither event occurred, nor did such promised attractions as the first performance of Symphonic Vaseline by Tristan Tzara to be played by an orchestra of 20. Instead, young conservatives in the pit turned dadaists themselves, hurled tomatoes and hunks of raw meat (procured from a nearby butcher shop) at the stage while the dadaists volleyed back the missiles with delighted gusto. The owner of the building, Mme Gaveau, shouted furious protests from her box.

The black felt head with the zipper eyes, the stuffed parrot on the hollow log that appeared at the Modern Museum are typical dadaist artifacts, incorrigibly senseless but regarded by their owners as good examples of a movement that still has vivid memories.

Surrealism. An art movement without hope or object cannot last long. Dadaist Max Ernst in his desire to spit in the eye of the world was experimenting about this time with what he calls his collages: fantastic pictures made by cutting apart old engravings and rearranging them to make bustled ladies with lions’ heads, assassins with angels’ wings, strange trees growing from horses’ backs, etc. Examining these and other dadaist creations, Poet Andre Breton, who frequently dresses entirely in green, smokes a green pipe, drinks a green liqueur and has a sound knowledge of Freudian psychology, discovered behind all this a newer and better ism. In the autumn of 1924 he wrote his Manifesto of Surrealism, and a word and a school were born.* Excerpt: “Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore ; in the omnipotence of the dream and in the disinterested play of thought. . . . We who have not given ourselves to processes of filtering, who through the medium of our work have been content to be the silent receptacle of many echoes . . . are perhaps yet serving a much nobler cause.” Surrealism in plainer language is an attempt to explore the subconscious mind and to evoke emotional reactions through the illogical juxtaposition of objects. The difference between the cubists and present day abstract painters on one hand, and dadaists and surrealists on the other is basic, easily grasped. Abstract painters think of their pictures and statues as objects devoid of meaning, sufficient unto themselves. Surrealist art is still based on reproduction, one reason that its ablest exponents cling to the finicky technique of Victorian miniature painters.

Not all surrealists are serious. Some strive diligently to apply the Breton esthetic, while others are merely frivolous daubers and assemblers of miscellaneous junk. Nevertheless, one thing almost all surrealists have in common is an instinct for dramatic titles. Thumbing through the catalog last week gallery goers lifted eye brows at the following items : Melancholy and Mystery of a Street (de Chirico).

The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes (Marcel Duchamp).

Bewitched in the Zoo (Paul Klee).

Leaves and Navels (Hans Arp).

The Little Tear Gland that Says Tic Tac (Max Ernst).

Object which does not Praise Times Past (Francis Picabia).

Students of surrealism rank with Founder Breton and converted Dadaist Max Ernst, several practitioners of equal or greater importance. There is the able Italian Giorgio de Chirico, who, besides his familiar studies of prancing horses and Roman columns, likes to paint surrealist views of long deserted streets in dream cities, adding to one work a startling note by carefully painting realistic tea biscuits on the end of a painted crate. There is Philadelphia-born Man Ray, who is not only an able painter but manages to imbue Rayograph pictures of bits of wire, corks and lumps of sugar with exactly the eerie quality that surrealists desire. Least concerned with sexual symbolism and one of the most commercially successful of surrealists is genteel, dapper Pierre Roy, whose gay arrangements of bright ribbons, bits of seashells, sticks and empty wine glasses have long charmed socialites, advertising art directors and smartchart editors. But surrealism would never have attracted its present attention in the U. S. were it not for a handsome 32-year-old Catalan with a soft voice and a clipped cinemactor’s mustache, Salvador Dali.

Dali. Artist Dali was born in Figueras near Barcelona in 1904, as a child developed a strong persecution mania and a wholehearted admiration for the works of his friend and countryman, Pablo Picasso. Salvador Dali entered the Academy in Madrid, was quickly expelled for insubordination. As an art student he reached Paris in 1927 when surrealism had yet to make any headlines but was the talk of the Montparnasse cafes.

Surrealism suited his extraordinary technical facility as a draughtsman, his morbid nature. Salvador Dali, with exquisite drawing and brilliant color, began to paint his nightmares on pieces of panel hardly bigger than postcards. He not only made surrealist paintings, he wrote surrealist poems, helped produce the first two surrealist films: Le Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or. The first had a great deal to do with pianos filled with carcasses of dead donkeys. In the latter the great seduction scene to which the whole film rises is symbolized by a view of a bedroom window through which are thrown a blazing pine tree, an enormous plow, an Archbishop, a giraffe and a cloud of feathers.

Salvador Dali was first brought to the U. S. and given an exhibition in 1934 under the sponsorship of Dealer Julien Levy. Immediately one picture created a sensation. Entitled The Persistence of Memory, it showed a group of watches, limp as dead flounders and crawling with insects, drooping from the branches of a dead tree by the seaside, all this on a panel the size of a sheet of typewriter paper and painted in color as brilliant as a Flemish primitive. It now belongs to the Museum of Modern Art and was a headliner in last week’s exhibition. Other interesting Dalis exhibited included a drawing, fine as an Italian master’s, of a nude woman with a body made of half-open bureau drawers, and a painting of a group of African natives squatting before a dome-shaped hut (see p. 61).

Artist Dali who wears a knitted Catalan liberty cap whenever possible, takes surrealism in dead earnest, but has a faculty for publicity which should turn any circus pressagent green with envy. On his first arrival in the U. S. he solemnly explained: “I used to balance two broiled chops on my wife’s shoulders, and then by observing the movement of tiny shadows produced by the accident of the meat on the flesh of the woman I love while the sun was setting, I was finally able to attain images sufficiently lucid and appetizing for exhibition in New York.” He was taken up by swank New York socialites and in his honor was held a fancy dress ball that is still the talk of the West Fifties. Mme Dali wore a dress of transparent red paper and a headdress made of boiled lobsters and a doll’s head. Artist Dali wore a glass case on his chest containing a brassiere.

Six months ago he gave a lecture on art in London, stomped down the aisle to the dais wearing a deep-sea diving suit, a jeweled dagger at his belt (carrying a billiard cue in one hand and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds with the other). Nearly overcome by heat before the helmet could be unscrewed, he explained: “I just wanted to show that I was plunging deeply into the human mind.”

*The word surrealist was first used in 1917 when late Poet Guillaume Apollinaire subtitled his play Les Mamelles de Tiresias, Drame Surrealiste.