From Dalí's nightmarish erotic fantasies to Magritte's calculated intellectual games, the Surrealists have permeated our culture. Lara Marlowe went to see the La Révolution Surréaliste exhibition at Paris's Pompidou Centre
A winged insect clings to the belly of an amorphous form resembling a man's head, which grows into the bust of a beautiful woman with her eyes closed and her nose nudging a man's genitalia. Blood vessels course like the tributaries of a river over the woman's face, while a phallic Easter lily lies against her breast. Seashells suggest an ear; a swarm of ants, fecundation. A tiny male figure embraces a jagged stone. The gradated blue sky, black shadows, rocks, a hook and bleeding cuts place us in Salvador Dalí's nightmarish, erotic dreamworld. Before the Surrealists, no one would have dared to paint such a painting; no one but Dalí would have named it The Great Masturbator.
Three decades have passed since France held a major exhibition of Surrealist art. Werner Spies, the curator of The Surrealist Revolution at the Pompidou Centre, is particularly proud to count the Dalí canvas from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, among the 600 works on show until June 24th. It is, he explains, "one of the most difficult paintings to borrow, and the most extraordinary work of the artist".
Spies has spent the past five years organising the exhibition, but says it was in gestation since he first met Max Ernst in 1996. The author of the Catalogue Raisonné of Ernst's work and the former director of the French national museum of modern art, Spies describes Surrealism as "the only successful revolution of the 20th century" because it changed attitudes to art and society and our very perception of the world. The Surrealist Revolution was also the title of the review which the group began publishing in 1924.
Without the Surrealists, it is impossible to imagine the subsequent history of cinema, advertising, the pop art and psychedelic movements. That the word "surreal" so often replaces other terms - bizarre, strange, unusual, extraordinary, fantastical, absurd - in everyday vocabulary shows how completely it has permeated our mentality.
The Surrealist Manifesto, published by the "pope of Surrealism", André Breton, in 1924, combined the two most influential thinkers of the past century, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. From Marx, the Surrealists took their ambition "to change the world"; from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, their belief in the creative power of the subconscious. Most of the Surrealists joined the Communist Party, though some - like Dalí (who was fascinated by Hitler and Franco) - were expelled by the doctrinaire Breton.
Surrealism grew out of the post-first World War Dada movement, which called itself non-art or anti-art, but was in essence a nihilistic rejection of the civilisation that created the war. Surrealism kept the provocative, humorous approach of the Dadaists, but introduced a constructive and uninhibited determination to explore the "more real than real world behind the real".
A cosmopolitan mix of artists, all born around 100 years ago, helped make Dada- ism and Surrealism truly international movements from their inception. (The term "Surrealist" was taken from the subtitle of a play by the first great modern French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, who died in the 1918 flu epidemic). Max Ernst and Hans Arp were German; Francis Picabia, Cuban; Man Ray, American; René Magritte, Belgian; Roland Penrose, English; Giorgio de Chirico, Greco-Italian; Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, Spanish; and Tristan Tzara, Romanian.
So it is only fitting that the curator, Werner Spies, is a German married to a French woman.
In 1925, Pierre Naville wrote that there was "no such thing as Surrealist painting" because dreams and imagination could not be painted. It is a persistent prejudice, especially in France, where the literary aspects of the movement left a more lasting impression. From the first of 20 rooms devoted to the exhibition on the top floor of the Pompidou Centre, Warner Spies refutes Naville and proves the unique and magical quality of Surrealist painting.
Two de Chirico canvases from 1914, Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire - with a dotted circle showing where the poet would be wounded in the head - and Song of Love, in which a pink rubber glove is thumb-tacked next to a plaster replica of the Belvedere Apollo, show how much the Surrealists owed to the inventor of the pittura metafisica in modern Italian art.
Max Ernst's 1922 group portrait of Le Rendezvous des Amis shows the original members of the Surrealist movement against an Alpine background, and throws in Dostoyevsky and Raphael Sanzio for laughs. Ernst lived for a time in a ménage à trois with Paul and Gala Eluard, who also appear in the group portrait. (Gala later left her poet husband for Salvador Dalí.) On the wall of the house he shared with the Eluards in the Paris suburb of Eaubonne, Ernst painted a wonderful mural in 1923. It shows turgid artichoke plants, two ant-eaters and insects in a garden. A woman's hand with crossed index and middle fingers holds a red ball though an opening. Forty-five years later, Ernst returned to the house, which was by then inhabited by a butcher who had painted and papered over his mural. It was retrieved and cut into two, on Ernst's instructions. An art dealer sold one panel to the Dusseldörf museum. Farah Diba, the former empress of Iran, bought the other. After the revolution, it ended up in storage in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.
Reuniting the two panels after 34 years was one of Spies's greatest coups.
The silliest remark about The Surrealist Revolution was no doubt made by Le Monde's critic, who complained that there was "a bit too much Dalí" in the exhibition. Who could fail to marvel at the originality and craftsmanship of Partial Hallucination, Six Images of Lenin on a Piano, or the unleashed tigers in Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee? Among the Surrealists, only Magritte attained a comparable level of genius in oil paint, but his canvases are coolly calculated, intellectual games compared to Dalí's wild fantasies.
The number of techniques used by the Surrealists is impressive. Max Ernst invented frottage when he was inspired to rub pencil-lead over a wooden floor in a house in Brittany. He was also a master of collage, another favourite Surrealist art form. André Masson's "automatic drawings", in which he squirted glue on canvas, threw sand on the glue and then paint in haphazard fashion, prefigure Jackson Pollock's work more than 20 years later. The cadavres exquis, a group effort in which each artist added a feature, uninfluenced by what was painted before or after his contribution, grew out of a game in which words were written on a folded piece of paper.
The first such experiment resulted in the eminently surreal sentence: "le cadavre - exquis - boira - le vin - nouveau" ("the exquisite cadaver will drink the new wine").
In their Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism, Breton and Eluard listed "real and virtual, mobile and silent objects, ghost objects, interpreted objects, incorporated objects, to be objects, etc." The playful fascination with the barrier between the imaginary and physical led to works such as Magritte's painting of a piece of cheese, under a genuine glass cheese bell, entitled This is a Piece of Cheese. Man Ray's superb photograph of a nude woman is a joke on several levels: black curlicues show her back to have the shape of a violin. The title, Violon d'Ingres, means a hobby or pastime in French, and the model's oriental turban and earring make her look like a painting by Ingres, who played the violin in his spare time.
In 1936, the Charles Ratton gallery in Paris held an Exhibition of Surrealist Objects which Spies has reconstructed in the Pompidou Centre. The objects include a fur-covered breakfast cup, saucer and spoon by Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray's iron with nails and Dalí's Bakelite telephone with a red lobster clutching the receiver.
Spies says that Surrealism ended in 1942, when many of the artists fled to New York. Other art historians claim it lasted until the 1960s. But as the dreary, final rooms of the exhibition at the Pompidou Centre make clear, the onset of the second World War drained the movement of its energy and humour.
La Révolution Surréaliste is at the Centre Pompidou until June 24th. The exhibition is open every day except Tuesday (11 a.m. - 9 p.m.; until 11 p.m. on Thursdays). Admission: €8.50. Booking and information: www.centrepompidou.fr