Nancy Nesvet
At a chaotic time in our shared world, like 1918 when Tristan Tzara authored the Dada Manifesto, when art as action and idea dominated, surpassing the objet d’ art, to be concerned with change, and especially rapid change, immediacy and destruction, we find conceptual art and spectacles of art today with roots in Dada.
Dada was followed by surrealism, a movement that saw Freudian inspired dream possibilities in the world depicted by surrealist artists. Freud’s work allowed artists to follow their dreams to create possibilities, depicted in paintings. A pipe is not a pipe, but then what was it? It was whatever the artist and viewer imagined and dreamt it to be, not unlike the world we and our leaders imagine the world might become. Art as idea dominates today with symbols inspired by those ideas. Words are twisted to become meaning.
Form and content vie for superiority, with abstraction and surrealism seeming irreconcilable, but as okayed by Breton in the work of Paul Klee and Joan Miro, possibly because the symbols constituted a language without the negativity that Herbert Read claimed of the surrealists. The abstractionists were revolutionary in form, whereas the realists were revolutionary in content, but all conceded that their political allegiances, whether Communism, largely adopted by the Realists or Fascism or Capitalism affected their work. And ultimately, the recall of the recent war and the bodies literally buried emerged from the sandy ground as bones in Yves Tanguy’s painting and Salvador Dali’s Etude pour le miel est plus doux que le sang with headless bodies and bodiless heads on the beach. A headless creature symbolizing Emancipation from reason was the emblem of George Bataille and Andre Masson’s Acephale, a magazine professing a new mythology in 1936. Rene Magritte’s Le Present, (1939) depicting an eagle dressed in a bureaucrat’s jacket, talons behind eggs, occupies his high perch on a mountainous landscape. Max Ernst’s L’Ange du foyer (Le Triomphe du surrealism) (1937), The Angel of Hearth and Home, illustrates the terror of fascist, nazi and Francoist uprisings in Europe, opposing reason, Ernst’s impression of what was going to happen to the world, a year before Ernst was arrested as an enemy alien. Dali painted Construction molle avec haricots bouillis (premonition de la guerre civile) in 1936 linking cannibalism to the cruel father and the history of Spain.
The work of the Surrealists, featured currently in an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is for our times, as we explore revolutionary forms of art, with technological as well as painterly techniques, and in so doing, examine, as the Surrealists did, what our dreams and humanism might imagine. The catalogue to the exhibit at the Centre Pompidou notes that surrealism sought to respond to “the dual injunctions of Karl Marx – “change the world”. Indeed, the Surrealists co-signed their 1925 manifesto with the Clarte group of young communists denouncing the rise of fascism in Europe and reconsidering “the impermeable frontier between poetic creation and political activity they had defended until then.” (catalogue, Surrealism, Pompidou). Stalin’s doctrine of Socialism in One Country is unfortunately echoed by the nationalist doctrines of rulers of nations today. George Lukacs 1932 “Tendency” or “Partisanship” opposes the Protecult which placed Russian literary and artistic organizations under central control and instead proposed partisanship with humanism, allowing for socialist realism. The closing of borders today is opposed by artists whose work and imaginings cross those borders by uniting people in artistic pursuit. Similar to the Surrealists and opposed to the Dadaists, whose work was conceptual, artists emerging today are separated into both camps, conceptual and those who can really paint, and propel their message. And I am seeing more and more of those who are returning to understand the technical and emotional linkage that realistic painting provides, and that allows their political stance, whether presenting the challenges to the environment, to peaceful pursuits, to interest in the other, to empathy with those deserving of it, reflected in their painting and photography.
The fact that we are seeing little artwork emerging from the sites of the wars the world is currently engaged in is not surprising. Contemplation after the wars will produce the artwork, filtered through the sieve of creative thought. Dada was too immediate, chaos resulted. Surrealists filtered thought, adding process to produce imagery that chilled.
Interestingly, The Louvre Museum featured a show called “Fou”, (in English Fool) noting the image of the fool, who often spoke truth, and was deemed crazy for it. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes’ El Sueno de la razon produce monstruos (The sleep of reason produces monsters) is no different from the Surrealists’ reminders of the condemnation of reason and artist’s subsequent production of monsters of different parts, surrounded by flying bats and chimeric faces. Reminiscent of artwork highlighting social and political criticism, Goya’s paintings and drawings depict themes of madness and social criticism including Yard with Lunatics. 19th century artists painted portraits of the famous and mentally ill, Charles VI of France, Johanna the Mad, commenting on the madness of those in power. The Fool exposed the mad. Fuseli painted Lady Macbeth marchant dans son sommeil; Francois-Auguste Biard painted The Exorcism of King Charles VI’s Madness and the Lunatic Hospital (1833) both exhibited at the Salon. Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo was the ultimate figure of the fool and his play, Le Roi s’amuse features a jester, also recognized as a fool in the court of Francois I, adapted by Verdi in the opera, Rigoletto. The chimeras, at the cathedral of Notre Dame, inspired by medieval gargoyles and statues, combined two species or animals, much as the Surrealists combined man and animal or two animals to create new species and confuse. The exhibition shows the painting by Jan Matejko of Stanczyk at a Ball at the Court of Queen Bona after the Loss of Smolensk (Poland, 1862) showing a jester grieving the loss of Smolensk and the contrast between the jester’s frivolous nature, his political awareness and concern for his country. The “Portrait of a Jester” (1537) by the Master of 1537 shows a jester looking through his fingers, which is a German and Netherlandish expression meaning “to close eyes to something”, here to the folly of his fellows. The jester’s costume comprised of opposing squares of color is itself a symbol of disorder. Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, (1494) recounts the journey to the land of fools to denounce, with engravings and text, contemporary foibles. The image of the fool speaking truth survived even the enlightenment, as figures in Don Quixote’s Dulcinea, (later appearing in a print series by Picasso) to proclaim irony, farce and disorder wherever it appears.
It is up to the artists, the creatives to see through the rhetoric, the fake news, to see and depict the real world and imagine a better one. Whether called a fool or a surrealist, artists are willing to be called names to show the unvarnished truth and invite others to see what might happen if their message is not acted upon. All art is political. It is of the people, for the people, and the artist stands as one to warn of what might come.