Alandmark exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York is, amazingly, among the first explorations of the graphic arts of the Surrealist movement. Co-curated by Leslie Jones at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Isabelle Dervaux at the Morgan, it is organized, interestingly, by technique.
Surrealism is one of the most interesting and perplexing “isms” of the 20th century. Few artistic movements are as celebrated and studied. Many of the works of its best known practitioners, including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, and Leonora Carrington—have become touchstones of modern art and some of the most familiar images of the era.
Whether viewed as an aberration or as a logical consequence of the turmoil engendered by World War I, in art and in literature, the Surrealist movement spread rapidly around the globe.
Undoubtedly, the most profound influence on the Surrealist movement was the work of Sigmund Freud, who sought to lay bare the workings of the human mind, with his brand-new notions of the ego, the conscious self, and the id, the dark, human subconscious. His work and ideas gave rise to an understanding that the human mind is complex and idiosyncratic, filled with images and ideas that were formerly totally off-limits, absolutely not up for discussion. One of the most important aspects of Freud’s influence on Surrealism was the understanding that one’s dreams are the roadmap to the unconscious, an infallible way in. All of a sudden, these radical ideas caught fire: nothing, absolutely nothing, was taboo.
In 1924, the French poet André Breton, who worked with shell-shocked patients in Paris after the war, wrote the “Surrealist Manifesto.” This document provided the philosophical underpinnings of the movement, and gave full credit to Freud for opening the doors to the unconscious mind. He wrote, “Perhaps the imagination is on the verge of recovering its rights. If the depths of our minds conceal strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface, it is in our greatest interest to capture them; first to capture them and later to submit them, should the occasion arise, to the control of reason.”
The Morgan exhibition is both beautiful and complex. It is challenging and layered, organized thematically, chronologically and by technique.
The art of drawing was a critical component of Surrealism. For those involved in the movement, it was a vital means of expression and innovation, resulting in a rich array of graphic techniques that radically pushed conventional art historical boundaries. Yet the medium has been largely overlooked in exhibitions as scholars and institutions have focused more on Surrealist painting and sculpture. When we think of Surrealism, we see Dali’s melting clocks and de Chirico’s colorful dreamscapes. In Surrealist paintings, we do not see the precision and effort that these drawings convey. The Surrealists, for all their declarations of independence from traditional ways of writing and of making art, adhered to a rigid set of techniques. There was automatism, in which they attempted to bypass all rational thought and go straight to the inner workings of the psyche, a process easier to describe than to achieve. Collage was another important technique, a way of juxtaposing disparate elements on paper. The works of Max Ernst in the exhibition demonstrate that he was a master of this technique. Photography and the means it presents for the distortion and manipulation of images was yet another Surrealist modality that is well represented in this show.
Frottage, or making rubbings of varied surfaces, was another way of working for the Surrealists. One of the most fascinating and collaborative techniques employed by the artists of the movement was Exquisite Corpse, a game that started with the Victorians, in which words or phrases would be assembled unseen by other participants, resulting in an absurd and often funny assemblage of words or phrases. For Surrealist artists, a piece of paper was folded in such a way that the participants could not see what others had drawn. When the paper was unfolded, an often-bizarre group of graphic elements would reveal themselves.
This exhibition is staggering in its scope: it includes 165 works by 70 artists from 15 countries. Some of the most important artists of the 20th century are represented.. Works by Miró and Dalí, Arp, Tanguy, Frida Kahlo, Ernst, as well as the exquisite dreamscapes of Joseph Cornell, are all included. The inclusion of such lesser known artists as Englishwomen Leonora Carrington, Eileen Agar and Grace Pailthorpe, Kansuke Yamamoto from Japan and Oscar Dominguez from Spain, all add depth and dimension to “Drawing Surrealism.”.
Interestingly, the exhibition leads the way to “Inventing Abstraction” at the Museum of Modern Art. The Surrealists’ pathway to the unconscious, it turns out, also proved to be the pathway to Abstraction. Both exhibitions are important explorations of how two of the most important “isms” of 20th century art were born and evolved.
(“Drawing Surrealism” is on view at the Morgan Library and Museum until April 21. A beautiful book, published by DelMonico-Prestel, complements the exhibition).u

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