Surrealism Exhibition at London’s Tate Modern Gallery – Culture

Surrealism is booming this summer: from small stages like this Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna to the mighty ramp of the Art Biennale in Venice, where not only the celebrated “Surrealism and Magic” exhibition can be seen at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation, but also in the main exhibition, the Biennale, which is actually reserved for contemporary art, with artists like Dorothea Tanning under this year’s title “The Milk of Dreams”. , Eileen Agar and Leonora Carrington are celebrated. The latter gave the exhibition its name with her children’s book of the same name.

The art movement, which is now almost a century old, seems highly topical. This is certainly also due to the fact that many contemporary artists are turning away from modernism, this idea of ​​progress based on rationality and science – but also because there is a lot to discover in Surrealism, especially by female artists. From the photographs of a Claude Cahun to the almost subtle paintings of a Leonor Fini, which focus on nature, femininity and organic growth.

What else is there to say about surrealism? All!

The most comprehensive exhibition is the show “Surrealism Beyond Borders”, which is currently still being held at the Tate Modern in London and was shown at the New York Metropolitan Museum last winter. And the Tate Modern is the ideal place to frame this highly thoughtful reappraisal. Because it is a pioneer of an understanding of art that reaches out in the best sense beyond the borders of a periphery. Today, works from Latin America, North Africa and Asia are a matter of course in the rooms reserved for the collection.

So what else is there to say, from an art historical point of view, about such a popular art movement as surrealism? You have to find out everything – because beyond the blockbuster exhibitions on Salvador Dalí or Rene Magritte and the poster and coffee table book industry that relies on hearty, overly connoted motifs, there is an art movement to be discovered that could hardly be more up-to-date. Although the curators Stephanie D’Allesandro, Leonard A. Lauder and Matthew Gale also celebrate the movement that emerged in Paris in the early 1920s with iconic works, taking Salvador Dali’s “Téléphone homard” (1938), for example, as a starting point.

The “spirit of revolt” has not yet been fully explored

But the shiny pink crustacean earpiece is more than a nightmare objectified here. In fact, it also seems to suggest connections, communication and mutual exchange. “Surrealism Beyond Borders” is a first attempt, as it says programmatically, “not only to redefine a wide, multiple connection” of surrealism, but also a content that not only aims at the unconscious and the psyche, but also “a spirit of revolt” in itself. Which was also intended as a very specific questioning of political or social systems, conventions and ideologies and early on resisted racism, imperialism, fascism, capitalism and militarism. The process of decolonization is identified as one of the driving forces. Or to paraphrase Léopold Senghor, the surrealist poet and first President of Senegal: “We accepted surrealism as a means, not as an end, as an ally, not as a master.”

By focusing precisely on biographies, exhibitions, publications, routes and stages in their introductory essay, Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, the art historians not only give Paris a break as a setting, but also draw all the bright, playful, more or less naive reverie of canvas and paint from its pedestal. Because – that’s what they realized – Surrealism was above all infatuated with paper, its legacy does not also include, but above all: maps, magazines, manifestos, as well as letters, photographs, posters, ID cards, sketches, blotted notebooks, painted over book pages, Collages and a whole chapter of the “Journals”.

Open detailed view

The exhibition succeeds in honoring founding figures such as André Breton, while at the same time not giving too much art-historical space in the catalog to the well-known mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion of the Surrealists. Instead, the introductory essay quotes Takenaka Kyushichi, who succinctly stated as early as 1930 that genuine surrealism really couldn’t stop with “Breton’s authority” and begins the discussion with a map. “The World at the Time of Surrealism” is a page from the Varieties special edition on Surrealism, published in Brussels in 1929: Its center is the Pacific Ocean, flanked by an oversized Alaska and a bloated Russia. The Bismarck Archipelago is suddenly the center of the world, flanked by India and Mexico. Europe is disappearing over the horizon, as is the United States of America.

China promised to end vulgarity forever

This seems like a premonition: with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, art left Paris. Breton fled to New York via the Antilles, Joan Miro went back to Spain, Max Ernst was interned as a German, entire groups such as “La main à plume” went underground and joined the Resistance, André Breton and André Masson fled after them Marseille to escape overseas. And the artists’ trips to Martinique or to cities like Buenos Aires, Havana, Mexico City, New York were an exodus only from a European perspective – basically new chapters of Surrealism began there.

Discoveries like the “lost surrealism in China” make the catalog a standard work, a vademecum for a journey to places of surrealism, which now also include Guangzhou and Shanghai. There the groups Juelanshe and Zhonghua duli meishu siehui organized a series of exhibitions and in a radical manifesto in 1932 announced not only a new world of colours, lines and forms, but above all a “turning away from all vulgarity”.

Surrealism Beyond Borders is on view at London’s Tate Modern Gallery until August 29th. The catalog costs 35 pounds.