Vienna, Berggasse 19, the world-famous address is now the seat of the Sigmund Freud Museum. The founder of psychoanalysis lived and worked in this house for almost half a century, from 1891 until the Nazi henchmen drove him to flee into London exile in June 1938. Here he wrote his epochal work “The Interpretation of Dreams”. When it appeared in 1899 (predated to 1900 by the editor), the professional world reacted with surprise, even consternation. Artists such as Salvador Dalí, writers such as André Breton, Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard threw themselves on the book as soon as they got hold of it, far more eagerly, sometimes downright obsessively.
They were artists whose basic experience included the discovery of a “second reality”. Artists for whom dreams became the paradigm of their worldview, who claimed the domain of the unconscious for themselves, devoted themselves to free association, whatever they produced in the belief that from the unconscious, the irrational, the dream, in short, from the uncontrolled regions of the soul, a new knowledge, a new truth, a new art would arise. A loose circle of like-minded people around André Breton as mouthpiece and impresario, who came together to form the Surrealist movement. A special exhibition at the Sigmund Freud Museum in the analyst’s former private rooms is dedicated to them (“Surreal! Imagining New Realities”), an intimate, almost family-like show of their works, which undoubtedly has a unique appeal at this location.
It is a geometry of play and allusion, a world of experience full of paradoxes
Around a hundred works from the Klewan Collection are on display – surrealist art in the broadest sense, from the heroic phase to the late international ramifications. The artistic physiognomy of surrealism can be read more clearly than elsewhere here in a rather small format, captivates this fragile world of experience with its paradoxes, the best exhibits reveal this very specific geometry of play and allusion and also offer an exemplary spectrum of expanded formal possibilities. In addition to drawings and paintings, there are often magical, sometimes crude collages, smooth typographies, sculptures that dissolve into the informal, or new, destructive photographic processes.
In this picture entitled “Écrire” (1936), René Magritte portrays the surrealist French poet Paul Éluard.
(Photo: Bildrecht GmbH/Klewan Collection)
One dives into this thoroughly disparate, unfamiliar world of Giorgio de Chirico’s urban landscapes, encounters René Magritte’s cunningly conservatively drawn portrait of Paul Éluard (1936), who writes “écrire” under the naked breast of a female body as if lost in thought , preserves the power of the sexual and, in Man Ray’s half-shaved self-portrait from 1943, has to deal with both conceptual and subversive impulses. A surprising degree of aesthetic sharpness speaks from a seemingly harmless sketch sheet by Alberto Giacometti, which archives his early sculptures, which were strongly inspired by Georges Bataille, under the title “Bewegliche und stumme objects” (1931), including the explicitly sadistic “Floating Ball” from 1930, an erotic one Machine for non-fulfilment of lust.
What was once shocking and disturbingly scandalous can now only be understood historically
Nobody in this selection can exhaust the license to transform everything into everything like André Masson, surrealist from the very beginning. While in “Les jeunes filles” (1926), a vertically supported composition of freely floating forms, he uses oil painting, which Louis Aragon proclaims will soon come to an end, in the automatic drawing “L’homme-cheval “, in the spirit of an art of artlessness, the handwritten excitement curve flow all the more spontaneously and also provides some of the iconic artist portraits, such as that of André Breton outlined in a few imperial charcoal strokes. Female artists, apart perhaps from Meret Oppenheim, only came into play in this distinctly male Parisian milieu, if at all, from the more mature 1940s and remain pale.
More than the big names from Max Ernst to Yves Tanguy, from Hans Bellmer to Raoul Ubac, it is primarily marginal figures who can represent the breadth of the international movement. A Pierre Molinier, for example, who gives free rein to his obscene fantasies in photomontages, or Wilhelm Freddie, a Danish surrealist, who fragments bodies in wild collages, the reverberations of which one sometimes thinks can be heard in the works of the Vienna group. What was once shocking, even disturbingly scandalous, can now only be understood historically, it has long since caught up with the first reality.
The founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. The veneration that the surrealists showed him was boundless.
(Photo: Max Halberstadt/Sigmund Freud)
In a late portrait of Salvador Dalí (1973), Freud surveys the events. The veneration that the artists had for the dream interpreter and psychoanalyst was boundless. For fifteen years, Breton maintained an exchange of letters with the always polite but distant reply, dedication copies reached the Viennese master “with deep admiration and the greatest respect” (René Char), greeted Breton and Éluard in the joint opus Freud as “notre véritable père “. However, the admiration remained one-sided. No matter how many insights Surrealism owed to an “interpretation of dreams” or a “Gradiva” study, this artistic movement remained a very distant world for Freud himself. He literally lived in another. He cultivated a conservative taste, loved his “old, dirty gods”, archaic and antique works, which he obsessively collected, with whom he liked to converse in order to elicit their secrets. In this respect, the exhibition, which is not least for that reason highly inspiring, resembles a kind of cuckoo’s egg that was placed in the former living and dining room.
The completely redesigned Sigmund Freud Museum, which reopened in 2020, conveys in an almost unique way how we can imagine Freud’s lost world. It has since become a top-tier attraction.
Surreal! imagining new realities until October 16 at the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna. The catalog costs 19.90 euros.