It
is one of the legacies of Freud that we see scribbles on paper as
revealing something about the unconscious mind of the person who drew
them. A new show organized by the Morgan Library’s Isabelle Dervaux and
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Leslie Jones focuses on automatic
drawing, dream imagery, frottage, exquisite corpse, collage and other
drawing techniques of the Surrealists. It might be of interest to anyone
who has found himself doodling idly, drawing his dreams, or
interpreting inkblots.
Early predecessors on display hint at the Surrealist drawing to come:
Dadaist Jean Arp’s collage works randomly dropped pieces of colored
paper into arbitrarily ordered checkerboards of reds and grays. A 1915
calligramme, or visual poem, by the writer Guillaume Apollinaire lays
out text in the shape of a mandolin, a carnation and piece of bamboo:
forms that reflect the contents of the poem.
Works on paper had a privileged position in the Surrealist canon from
the very start, thanks to André Breton’s “First Manifesto of
Surrealism,” written in 1924. He argued that because of drawing’s
immediacy, there is a direct link between the artwork and the artist’s
unconscious mind. At the Morgan, the works on display support his
thesis. Georges Bataille’s 6 Untitled Drawings for Soleil Vitré
were executed during the psychoanalytic treatment the author underwent
in 1925; they combine fragments of faces with top hats, Eiffel Towers,
elephant ears and this exhibition’s most ubiquitous motif, the eyeball.
Man Ray’s “camera-less” photograms link drawing from the imagination to
photographs made without a camera. Yves Tanguy’s drawings feature
petri-dish-like landscapes, and Salvador Dali’s have kinky dream imagery
such as a man feasting on a woman’s high-heeled shoe. Henri Michaux’s Alphabet
(1924), is a teasingly nonsensical system of nervously drawn
pictograms. In 1926, Breton, Tanguy, Marcel Duhamel and Max Morise made
“exquisite corpse” drawings—each artist got to add to a figure, with the
previous contributions folded back and thus unseen—complete with
elephant heads and serpentine tails. They look like exactly what they
are: the nonsensical fruits of a drunken dinner party game. René
Magritte’s Interpretation of Dreams presents self-contained one-liners: a black hat is captioned “the snow,” a woman’s shoe “the moon.”
The works in the show are grouped by technique, and for sheer
experimental zeal, German Surrealist Max Ernst comes across as the
group’s real innovator, the Thomas Edison of the Surrealist drawing. His
technique of frottage, or rubbing with graphite on paper, translates
into seascapes in which wood patterns bloom under the ocean and sun. The
quasi-narrative juxtapositions of images from pulp novels, advertising
and scientific journals in his collages yielded odd visual novels in
which, for example, a Maori-tattooed woman refuses the advances of a
manacled Venus.
Breton’s call was for images made spontaneously, without appeal to
aesthetics, reason or morals. But at the Morgan, you can see that the
idea of unconscious and unfiltered drawing was often used to say
something else: Eduardo Paolozzi’s 1948 collages made from advertising
images critique consumer culture. Czech Surrealists like Jindrich
Styrsky constructed poetic/erotic fantasies: a steel axe rending a fuzzy
peach, fish with comely legs in a cracked aquarium. Japanese
Surrealists like Ei-Kyu, Terushichi Hirai and Kansuke Yamamoto made art
that pushed back against the complacency of culture. And much of the
work in the show is just plain beautiful, like Hans Bellmer’s
gouache-on-black-paper painting Seated Young Girl with Two Heads (1935-37), with her oddly lovely labial petticoat folds and spider-
webby spun stockings, or a 1935 collage by César Moro made on sparkling
sandpaper. Often there is more deliberation in these works than the term
“automatic” would seem to imply.
There is work by only two women here—Surrealism was a male-dominated
movement—and they both cultivated symbolic lexicons. Leonora
Carrington’s haunting drawing Down Below (1943) steals the show:
it is a map of a mythical world that overlaps significantly with Spain,
where she was institutionalized when she made the drawing. Suns, spirals
and snakes fill out the territory. Frida Kahlo’s graphite works mix
Mexican folk art with dream imagery.
The show extends its definition of Surrealism into the 1950s with
drawings by Ellsworth Kelly (a 1951 grid of brushstrokes cut up and
arranged by chance, reminiscent of the 1915 works by Jean Arp) and
Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock (his tangled ink Untitled to PG,
from 1943, is dedicated to Peggy Guggenheim). There is a pleasant
contrast between the modesty of the mostly small-scale drawings on
display and the sweep of the show, which traces the unconscious and the
dream-image in art from about 1915 to 1955 through 70 artists and 15
countries.
But beyond its art-historical scope, the show will be of interest to
those with a curiosity about the relationship between the thought and
the mark. Flirting with dreams, language, politics, chance and sex, the
Surrealist drawing is something you can do at home—it is, the show
suggests, an attitude towards the unconscious mind, rather than a
historically bound epoch. (Through April 21)
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