Surrealism: A Light That Failed

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

There was a time when Salvador Dali and Toulouse-Lautrec were my favorite painters. I still admire Lautrec’s nervous energy and acid colors. But Dali’s melting watches no longer dazzle me the way they used to. His giraffes with telescoping legs, his flaming ladies with drawers protruding from their anatomies interest me more as psychological curiosities than as valid statements about the human condition. Even Dali’s immaculately rendered nudes and “atomic” reconstructions of religious themes once favored by the Old Masters now strike me more as gimmickry than as honest expressions of human feeling.

Partially it’s a matter of my growing older, but age doesn’t explain it all. There’s a problem with Dali’s art: It no longer speaks to my heart. I can still respect Dali’s technique, and he certainly has a way with images, but none of that matters much to me any more. In fact, the more of Dali's work that I see in one place—be it on the walls of a gallery (as in the Art Museum’s recent Dali retrospective) or in the pages of a book—the less it moves me, beyond a certain cold respect for his draftsmanship.

Dali, for me, has become the Modernist Ingres. Both artists offer the same exactness of line, the same icy perfection.

If I characterize Dali’s art as marmoreal, it’s because—for me at any rate— it’s cold to the touch. It freezes my mind out, presenting it with a visually elaborate, painstakingly-rendered image— be it a hunk of bread in a wicker basket, his wife Gala’s back, or one of his “paranoiac-critical system” fantasias— and says callously: Here it is, admire it.

A strong visual sense is certainly no drawback for any artist, but creation is merely one part of the artist’s work; the other is communication. When an artist’s imagery is too private— too much of an in-joke— it can succeed at the first part and fail miserably at the other.

Now, Dali was no Van Gogh, in the sense that public misunderstandings of his art never caused Dali to lose a single night’s sleep. I doubt that it would concern him one whit whether or not I “got” what he was attempting to do. And in fact, I haven’t lost any sleep over my inability to penetrate Dali’s mind. So I suppose my relationship with Dali is a mutually beneficial arrangement. But the fact remains that Dali was a master of public relations who anticipated the cult of personality by making himself, rather than his art, the product that was marketed to the public.

This was a very canny move on Dali’s part. Rather than present himself as a humorless artiste, Dali posed for a book of photographs celebrating his moustache. He could paint all the flaming giraffes and melted watches that he wanted; as long as the public perceived him as “Dali, the screwball artist,” he had transformed himself into a brand name.

Although Dali succeeded in promoting himself to the public, the Surrealist movement, with which he is generally associated, didn’t fare as well. Surrealism was one of the most intelligent of artist movements, but unfortunately that intelligence was all too often malign. Surrealism enjoyed mocking the things it disagreed with—bourgeois respectability, the Church, the military— and mockery is at best a one-way form of communication. The Surrealists were very certain of the things they disapproved of— in fact, the same things poets and artists had disapproved of since the Romantic Movement— and one of the great services the Surrealists performed for literature as a whole involved the number of forgotten forebears whose works they brought back into the public eye— successfully in the cases of Alfred Jarry, Gerard de Nerval and Lautreamont, not so successfully in the cases of Petrus Borel, Charles Cros and Aloysius Bertrand. I’ve always found it touching the way the Surrealists were so concerned about establishing their literary lineage and then paying the requisite homage to these “ancestors.”

But as intellectual salesmen the Surrealists seem to have failed miserably. All of Surrealism’s soft targets— custom-made for the ridicule of bright young men and women— were thoroughly, almost ritualistically savaged, yet few minds were changed. No matter how many priests Benjamin Peret, the movement’s Angry Man, slapped in public, people who were inclined to believe continued going to church. Young men still contemplated careers in the military. And everyone still dreamed of attaining the sort of middle-class comfort that the surrealists mocked even while certain of their lesser members literally starved to death.

André Breton, one of the founders of Surrealism along with Dali, Paul Eluard and Luis Buñuel, couldn’t even keep his own colleagues in line. Not for nothing was Breton referred to as the “Pope of Surrealism.” Many were the “heretics” he ousted from his movement, including such illustrious names as Philippe Soupault (who in 1919 had co-authored with Breton the first true surrealist text, The Magnetic Fields), Antonin Artaud, Louis Aragon and Robert Desnos, while others, equally illustrious, such as Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau and Yvan Goll, either refused to join Breton or were never recruited in the first place. When Breton lost Robert Desnos, the movement’s greatest imagist—whose single line, “I’ve dreamed of you so much that you have lost your reality” (presumably written to his wife), is worth several Breton manifestoes— the writing was on the wall.

Besides, what was the good of your disciples slapping some parish priest if you were going to command that they genuflect at the altar of Joseph Stalin? Andre Breton may have been a brilliant man, but a tough old bird like W.R. Burnett wouldn’t have needed 30 seconds to eye up “Uncle Joe” and classify him as a gangster masquerading as a political revolutionary. In fact, Burnett’s quip, “A revolutionary is just a politician looking for a job,” should have been the Surrealist movement’s political credo.

(Ironically, the finest surrealist statement on politics and politicians, the 1932 anti-war film comedy Duck Soup, was made by the very bourgeois Marx Brothers, who worked hard for their money and the comforts it could buy.)

Thus far I’ve been kicking dirt on Surrealism’s tombstone, but the movement did accomplish a few worthwhile goals. The Surrealist writers Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos and Joyce Mansour revolutionized the love poem by discarding trite formulas and hot-wiring their emotions to their own subconscious minds. What emerged were torrents of astonishing imagery, and new visions of mad love, dirty love and sick love that work like drugs. Breton’s own novel Nadja set the tone for this new treatment of love, with his concept of amour fou—mad love—but his novel was tame compared to what Georges Bataille, Laure and the other writers of the Acephale group would soon unleash. (But then, they didn’t necessarily regard themselves as Surrealists either.)

Let’s also credit the Surrealists for elevating the entire notion of happenstance as a causative factor. Before the Surrealists came along, happenstance might be used as a simple plot device, but it lacked the almost divine force that Surrealism invested it with. The Exquisite Corpse game, automatic writing, the art made with sand— all of it sent the message that the truth was found not in calculation but in going with the moment. The Surrealists’ interest in dreams and psychiatry are well known and extensively documented, and in a sense this last bit was Dali’s stock in trade.

Most of the non-museum-going public has been exposed to Dali in one of two ways. The elders among us may recall Dali’s American antics (the outrageous public pronouncements, the relentless publicity barrage) and some may have ventured into Dali’s exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where it was erected in the area set aside for amusement attractions. Billed as a “Surrealist Funhouse,” and titled “Dali’s Dream of Venus,” this production, with its bevy of scantily-clad models and dancers, was more likely regarded as the fair’s pre-eminent “stag” attraction than an introduction to Surrealism.
(The exhibit proved so popular that it was still in operation a year after the fair had officially closed. Could it have been Dali’s imagery? Could it have been the scantily-clad female dancers?)

For the rest of us under 70, and not the sort of cinéastes given to swooning over Dali’s silent film collaborations with Luis Buñuel, the seminal surrealist encounter would have been a viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound, with its Dali-designed psychiatric dream sequence that holds the solution to the film’s mystery.

Another artist might have been miffed to be known for something so frivolous. But Dali would have taken producer David O. Selznick’s money and run.