“Drawing Surrealism,” at the Morgan Library, is rather like a movie. In rhythmic array, a hundred and sixty-five works on paper, by seventy-two artists, impart shocks, laughs, star power, special effects, and intertwined plots. They track the most feverish of modern movements from the roots that it shared with Dada, starting in 1915, through its official founding, with a manifesto by André Breton, in 1924, to its fecund decay, which was well along by the show’s cutoff year of 1950. Perhaps no works quite fulfill Breton’s definition of Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism”—creation at the speed of thought—but resourceful stabs at it abound. The artists’ efforts enlisted exotic mediums—graphite rubbings (“frottage”), drawing with smoke (“fumage”), smears transferred from one surface to another (“decalomania”)—as well as collage, camera-less photography (exposing objects on photographic paper), and “exquisite corpse” collaborations, in which each participant contributed part of a figure on a folded sheet of paper, without seeing what the others had done. The artists range from masters incidentally associated with the group—Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró—through standbys like Yves Tanguy and René Magritte, to inspired amateurs, such as the writer Georges Bataille. The cumulative energy is terrific. If, as T. S. Eliot surmised, poetry is “a raid on the inarticulate,” Surrealism was an occupying invasion.
Call it a parlor epic. To the popular imagination, Surrealism may suggest little beyond Salvador Dali’s melted timepieces. But it was properly a collective of men (until late in the game, when, among a few others, the Englishwoman Leonora Carrington made signal work) doing somewhat alarming things in self-induced trance states, then rushing to show them to one another. Their perfect means was nimble drawing, rather than ponderous painting—which, in Dali’s entertaining but toilsome images, did more to advertise the movement than to advance it. Surrealism equipped a revolt against the very idea of reason, out of disgust at the First World War, with a Freud-influenced cult of the unconscious mind. Dreaming could seem a revolutionary project, destined to annihilate bourgeois norms. That presumption ran aground on the unexpected adaptability of bourgeois culture—by 1938, the Warner Bros. cartoon “Porky in Wackyland” could play a Dali-esque phantasmagoria for fun—and on the disheartening tendency of the unconscious to be, in the usual way of other people’s dreams, boring. Later Surrealist art exhausted itself through monotonously discovering, in the mind’s depths, a boilerplate lexicon of body parts, birds, beasts, and vegetation. But “Drawing Surrealism” proves the lasting punch of the movement in its heyday.
The show was organized by Leslie Jones, of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it opened, last fall, and the Morgan’s Isabelle Dervaux. In the catalogue, Jones cites a precedent for Surrealism in Francis Picabia’s faux mechanical drawings. Jean Arp, who came upon Picabia one day in 1919, wrote, “We found him very busily pulling a clock to pieces. . . . He stopped working to greet us, then taking the wheels, the spring, the hands, and other secret parts of the clock, he immediately impressed them on paper. He connected these imprints together by lines and added to the drawing sentences full of wit.” That neatly catches a spirit of eccentric invention that Picabia shared with his Dada-era comrades Marcel Duchamp (who is not in the show) and Man Ray (who is, with several ghostly “Rayographs,” made by manipulating unidentifiable objects in the darkroom). Obsessive tinkering with graphic-art techniques might be termed the hardware of Surrealism. The software of emotionally charged imagining emerged from serendipities that included, prominently, the “metaphysical” townscapes—empty streets, sinister shadows, phallic towers—that Giorgio de Chirico had started painting in 1910.
Guillaume Apollinaire coined the word “surrealism” in 1917. In 1919, Breton collaborated with the poet Philippe Soupault on “The Magnetic Fields,” the first text of dedicated “automatic writing,” in which the two took turns popping out sentences like this one: “The elephant tusks lean on the star-rise steps so that the princess can descend and the bands of musicians step out of the sea.” The doctrine found early visual expression in work by the artist André Masson, who met Breton in 1924 and was soon making furiously scribbly drawings that attempt to short-circuit his ingrained skill and talent. They are fascinating as much for their traces of an incorrigibly educated hand—flurries of hatch marks betray a will to shape space, for example—as for their fleeting hints of portentous figuration. Underrated today, Masson was the most abstract Surrealist, constantly breaking down and reconstituting formal elements of line, texture, and color, like a jazz soloist.
Was Miró ever a Surrealist? Certainly, he was inspired by the movement, early on, to produce dreamscapes of land and sky, populated by quirky creatures and occult signs. But in one way he seems as overqualified for Breton’s visual auxiliary corps—his work is temperamentally abstract—as Picasso does, with his top-to-bottom command of myriad styles. Both Miró and Picasso were attracted to Surrealism’s extreme psychology, which authorized outlandish forms with reference to ungoverned instincts. Both admired Bataille, who, with forthrightly obscene writing, rejected Breton’s often sentimental doting on the unconscious. For Bataille, horror and loathing, not buoyant liberty, grounded the mind. Six spectacularly unskilled, snarly drawings by him (circa 1925), which may have been made during a spell of psychoanalysis, stand more convincingly for the mind’s hinterlands of unlovely chaos than anything else in the show. They accompany a Miró drawing that pays him homage with an image of the big toe, which Bataille had declared the most authentically symbolic part of the human body, because it was the most repulsive. It’s amusing to notice how the sweet-tempered Miró can’t help but invest the grotesquerie with the lyrical bounce of his seductive line.
The best and worst of Surrealist art join hands, for me, in the case of Max Ernst, who, with fourteen works, is the most heavily represented artist in the show. Ernst set a benchmark for Surrealism with steamily suggestive collages, which he began in 1919, using engravings from Victorian department-store catalogues and science textbooks. He pioneered frottage, rubbing graphite on paper laid over, among other things, uneven floorboards, which he might then adapt to depict jungle landscapes. No other artist so pertinaciously worked—and lived, as a prodigious lover of women—according to Surrealist artistic principles and anarchistic ethics. But then, too, few others leaned so relentlessly on trite motifs of birds, suns, totems, and viscera. I can think he’s great except while looking at his pictures.
The worm in the apple of Surrealism as a vanguard movement is Breton’s lurking conservatism, expressed in his insistence on figurative imagery in art and in the impeccably grammatical, flowery rhetoric of his writing. The truly original art of the era grappled with inherited conventions of form, either revamping them, as Picasso and Matisse did, or replacing them with systems of abstraction, as Mondrian and Malevich did. Surrealism was more a churning eddy than a forward stream in the course of modernism. Its most radical effects occurred at the margins, nourishing the sensibilities of independent creators including Bataille, the Belgian writer and artist Henri Michaux (whose electrically jittery “Alphabet,” of 1927, a page of writing in make-believe languages, sparkles in the show), and the American angel of boxed enchantments, Joseph Cornell. “Drawing Surrealism” amounts to a soulful rummage sale as well as a cinematic spectacle. You will come away with your own favorites, whose adventures at the lacy fringes of consciousness may put you in mind of things that you didn’t know you knew. ♦