Surrealism in Australia on display at Melbourne NGV exhibition
An exhibition of surrealist works at the NGV contains some of Australia’s most important works from the movement.
Modernism, for all its tendency to amnesia and cult of innovation, recognised precursors more often than is sometimes apparent; but no modernist movement was as eager to cite forerunners and exemplars as surrealism, ostensibly the most revolutionary of all. In the first Surrealist Manifesto (1924), the movement’s leader, Andre Breton — often called the pope of surrealism — mentions not only Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade, but Jonathan Swift, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, even Dante and Shakespeare.
The most important cluster of forerunners was in the romantic movement and the post-romantic authors who continued to explore related themes throughout the 19th century. The romantics turned away from the rationalistic and mechanistic ideas of the 18th-century Enlightenment to rediscover the dark and pre-rational dimensions of human experience revealed in dreams, drug-induced visions and various degrees of mental derangement from erotic passion to psychosis, as well as exalted states of spiritual insight and mystical rapture.
All great art has a counter-cultural aspect in the sense that it upholds higher ideals than are generally practised by its contemporaries. Gothic cathedrals illustrate the point in the way they embody a spirituality that was undoubtedly higher and more refined than that of most people of the time. But the ideal the cathedrals exemplified was one certainly recognised by contemporaries, if imperfectly followed.
That is something that changes with the romantics: in the world of the industrial revolution, they promoted values that ran largely counter to the ones implied by the new industrial and economic order. In that sense romanticism was the first fully counter-cultural movement, and the tendency of modern culture to be radically critical of its own society remained a characteristic of modernism up to the last generation or so, when contemporary art has been almost entirely assimilated into the globalised economic order.
Surrealism arose in the wake of the Great War, and many of its exponents had been originally involved with dada, the short-lived anti-art movement that expressed little more than radical and semi-coherent revulsion at the murderous conflict that had broken out between what were meant to be the most advanced nations in the world.
Dada could not survive without repeating itself; surrealism moved on from rage to a renewed exploration of the dark depths of the psyche earlier investigated by the romantics, and by now they were aided by the theories of psychoanalysis — themselves an expression of the post-romantic period — and in particular Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900). If the romantics had been shocked by the dehumanised world of the “dark Satanic mills” effectively produced by modern rationalism, the surrealists and their contemporaries were confronted by the still more dramatic horror of the war, equally a product of the modern world of scientific progress and mechanisation.
Just as Freud showed that the ego, the mature and socialised self achieved by the subordination of unconscious drives (the id) to a higher sense of right (the superego), is seldom harmonious and often riven with the wounds of imperfect development, World War I revealed fatal flaws in the collective social self of the modern world. Nation-states that were supposedly highly sophisticated, with effective political and legal systems, were suddenly engulfed in a cycle of violence that was comparable to an individual’s psychotic breakdown.
The war brought about the overturning of political order in Russia and Germany as well as in the vast and multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. In the years that followed, pre-war institutions attempted to re-establish or renew themselves, but they suffered from a crisis of credibility. The world of surrealism is still full of the uniforms of office — generals, bishops, government ministers — but they all seem absurd or even vaguely sinister.
The surrealists themselves were not free of the surviving social habits of their time. They were surprisingly hierarchical, emulating the habits of contemporary bureaucracy and the structure of political parties, and Breton enforced compliance with party standards. Dissenters, or those considered to have overstepped the official line, such as Salvador Dali, could be summarily expelled. As so often in such organisations, adherents were meant to challenge authority in the authorised manner.
Arising in a country such as France with a short-lived tradition of democratic government — and in an intellectual environment that had little understanding of liberal democratic institutions — they gravitated towards the model of revolution and for a time tried to align themselves with the Communist Party until it became apparent their aims were incompatible. When World War II broke out and France capitulated to the Germans, the surrealist vision of the world proved woefully unequal to the demands of their time; most of them simply fled, and after the war surrealism lived on in a nostalgic afterlife, bereft of moral authority.
Thus the heyday of surrealism was the 1½ decades between the early 1920s and the late 30s — broadly contemporary with the Weimar Republic in Germany. And it happened that the end of this period coincided with the arrival of surrealism in Australia, so this was the first modernist movement that arrived in this country while still a living force in Paris, then the epicentre of modernist art. Cubism, in contrast, was already an academic and formalist routine by the time it was introduced to Australia and had almost nothing in common with the intellectual adventure of the original analytical cubist paintings.
A direct point of connection — though in the postwar epilogue of the movement — was when in 1949 Breton had No 35 Madame Sophie Sesostoris, carved by Robert Klippel and painted by James Gleeson, exhibited in Paris. The two artists were living in London at the time and took the title from TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922), one of the great sources of inspiration for Australian modernists, though the name of Eliot’s fortune-teller was deliberately misspelled.
Klippel and Gleeson’s sculpture is part of the National Gallery of Victoria’s survey of surrealism in Australia, the most ambitious on the subject to date. There have been several significant exhibitions devoted to the movement during the past couple of decades, starting with Surrealism: Revolution By Night at what was then the Australian National Gallery in 1993. More recently, there was Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire at the NGV in 2009; then Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams , which came to the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane from the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2011. This is, however, the first exhibition to concentrate not only on Australian artists who were directly involved with or consciously influenced by European surrealism but also on the broader significance of the surrealist vision for Australian modernists before and during World War II, and even in the postwar period and down to our own day.
The show includes some of the most important early works by Gleeson: We Inhabit the Corrosive Littoral of Habit (1940) in which we see identity unravel in a way that recalls Eliot’s The Hollow Men (1925) and The Sower (1944), based on Jean-Francois Millet’s painting of the same subject but evoking, instead of the perennial labours of the fields, the fury of war and recalling the biblical proverb that those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind.
Albert Tucker — whose Futile City (1940) is also an homage to Eliot — is well represented, though he translates the surrealist influence into a more vernacular style and, as I have observed elsewhere, has an emphatic and especially morally censorious tone that is quite unlike anything found in the work of the original surrealist painters, whether Andre Masson, Dali or Yves Tanguy.
It is clear from many of the works on display, from Tucker to Arthur Boyd and more obscure figures, that the context of war and acute danger that surrounded the Australian artists influenced by surrealism was fundamentally different from the postwar world of decompression and aimlessness in which the movement originally arose, and that it drove the Australians towards an anguished and expressionistic sensibility that was profoundly at odds with the more desultory malaise that one senses in the work of the French surrealists.
Klippel’s collages, with their playful transformation of mechanical illustrations into quasi-biomorphic forms, are more directly in the surrealist spirit, as are various biomorphic sculptures, evoking the unknown interior of the human body, particularly what was seen as the mysterious and disturbing female body.
More unexpected is to contemplate the influence of the movement on someone such as Russell Drysdale. Clearly he is not a surrealist in any straightforward sense, but it is plausible to consider that the opening up of dreams as a legitimate subject for the artist could have made it easier for him to imagine many of his strangely memorable visions of outback life, from Man Reading a Newspaper (1941) to The Rabbiters (1947).
The influence of surrealism on photography, particularly in the work of Max Dupain, is also significant, although it reminds us how readily surrealism could be assimilated as style without much content. Australia, as I observed on another occasion, did not generally have the cultural depth and sophistication to understand the aesthetic necessity of surrealism, the cultural anxieties to which it corresponded, but even the advertising industry could seize on it as a source of new and surprising imagery.
As well as suggesting a broader diffusion of influence, however actually assimilated, on art in Australia in the years around World War II, the exhibition also reveals the continuing resonance of surrealist themes among artists of more recent generations. It is intriguing to see practices such as automatic drawing have found new expressions, including in the form of the double performance by the Mangano twins, Gabriella and Silvana, on video.
Dreams too have continued to fascinate us, although psychoanalytic theory since structuralism has considered even these products of our unconscious as to some degree shaped by culture and articulated on the model of language. But the continued relevance of the surrealist project itself is ultimately questionable because it was predicated on a criticism of the ego in the name of all that had been repressed, a kind of revolt of the id — signified already by the term desire, later much abused in French theory of the 1970s.
This all might have made sense in a time when the self seemed hemmed around by powerful but dysfunctional systems of authority. Today, however, we live in a world in which the mass media and other agencies of the consumer economy have undermined many of these once authoritative values and have marshalled the forces of the id in the interests of mass manipulation. The self or ego is less distorted now by archaic and hypocritical values than by instrumentalised and exploited desire; and liberation consists in rising above the desiring ego rather than indulging what lies below.
Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and Its Echoes
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Until January 31.