A surreal dream of an exhibition at Tate Modern

It is rare that you visit an art exhibition and come away with both a sense of having been thoroughly entertained, yet also feeling that you’ve seen a work of revolutionary scholarship and been thoroughly schooled too.

But the Tate Modern’s new blockbuster, Surrealism Beyond Borders, nails on both of those counts.

 

Personally, I’ve long liked some Surrealism very much – and some considerably less so. But I’ve also seen it as a very European school, and indeed, a very masculine one. And the iconic status of Salvador Dalí as the popular leading Surrealist has also left me with a sense of it being a tad on the political right.

A perfect illustration of at least some of this is the one book about the school in my personal art library. Surrealism, written by Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy and edited by Ute Grosenick for Taschen, was first published in 2006. It is worth noting that the latter has worked on at least one title for Taschen specifically around women artists.

 

Now, it is a slender volume, made up of short pieces about specific, important works in the school.

 

Thirty-five works are featured, by 18 artists. Five are by Dalí, with four each by René Magritte, Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst. Of the artists here, only Meret Oppenheim (a single work) is female. Only Matta (Chile), Wilfredo Lam (Cuba) and Man Ray (USA) were born outside Europe. Of these, only Matta didn’t die in Paris.

 

So for instance, no Leonora Carrington or Dorothea Tanning.

 

Tate Modern has long been working to rectify some of this: its 2019 Tanning exhibition was excellent.

 

But however basic such Taschen guides are intended to be (and that basic nature does not mean that they are not good), this all feeds an idea of a movement that was almost entirely European – indeed, almost entirely centred on Paris, where poet André Breton penned the Manifeste du surréalisme in 1924 – and predominantly male.

 

Wrong. Wrong – and then wrong again. As this extraordinary exhibition makes quite clear. 

 

Indeed, the very title of the exhibition, Surrealism Beyond Borders, makes that point – that this is not just about geo-political borders, but about sex and gender ones too.

 

With Surrealist groups in Japan, South America and Egypt, it can hardly be seen as  exclusively ‘European’. And it is most certainly not a predominantly male thing.

Co-produced by the Tate Modern and New York’s Metropolitan Museum, we open with Marcel Jean’s Armoire surréaliste (Surrealist Wardrobe, left) from 1941, when he was trapped in Hungary.

It is both of and painted on wardrobe doors – complete with real keyholes – and has an impossible double landscape behind those parts of it that are open. It is classic trompe-l’œil, stunningly executed; a real mind messer and arguably precisely the sort of thing that I have most relished about Surrealism for years – superb technique in a super-realistic approach, married with a dreamlike subject.

 

On the same themes, it’s why I have loved Giorgio de Chirico’s works since studying art for A’ level. And Magritte too, though I have had very few chances to see works by either of them in real life and away from the printed page or digital image.

 

Here, we have de Chirico’s Le rêve de Tobie (The Dream of Tobias) 1917 (see final picture in this post) and Magritte’s La durée poignardée (Time Transfixed) 1938, both of which are wonderfully, gloriously executed.

 

Incidentally, as the Magritte is framed and under glass, you can get very up close and personal to it at this exhibition – and it is worth doing so, because the brush work is absolutely sensational.

 

These were personal highlights because they were works not seen before ‘live’ by artists I personally love, but there were plenty of new discoveries that were highlights too.

 

For instance, from 1961 we have Remedios Varo’s autobiographic triptych – brought together here for the first time in years – showing her strict Catholic upbringing (left), a group of female artisans weaving a mantle for the world (one – how apt for these times – masked) and a depiction of the artist and a friend leaving Spain for Mexico.

 

It is fantastical – and (as observed by The Other Half) harks back to Bosch and Bruegel, yet is utterly different from anything we’d seen previously of their work.

The exhibition also includes Fantomerne by Danish artist Rita Kernn-Larsen (second picture from the top), which she created after the shock of witnessing a drowning.

 

Then there is the anti-colonialism of Malangatanta Ngwenya’s Untitled from 1967.

 

Perhaps the major revelation is of Surrealism in Japan – Kikuji Yamashita’s The Deification of a Soldier, from 1967 (see below), is astonishing; a visceral response to the artist’s own experience as a Japanese soldier in WWII. There are other works by Japanese artists using Surrealism to express the horror of the war. All of them are absolutely worthy of inclusion in this exhibition – they are not present for the sake of it.

Yet Koga Harue’s Umi (The Sea) from 1929 (see top picture) is a lovely, upbeat work bringing together images that he had collated from magazines and postcards, presenting a positive future.

 

Then there is Laurent Marcel Salinas’s Naissance (Birth) from 1944. Born in Egypt – that there was a Surrealist group based in Cairo is just another revelation here – he signed a 1938 group manifesto, Yajya al-fann al-munhatt/Vive l’art dégénéré (Long Live Degenerate Art).

 

As only a slight aside, I was delighted – albeit rather surprised – that, at this point, the curators didn’t feel the need to point out the ‘degenerate art’ was a Nazi description for any art that didn’t fit their rather limited view of the world.

And in keeping with moving away from a very limited idea of Surrealism, in this exhibition, there is just one work by Dalí – his lobster telephone, while both Carrington and Tanning have works included.

There are two works by Picasso – it's difficult to see how Les Trois Danseuses (The Three Dancers) 1925 really fits, but Composition au Gant (Composition with Glove) 1930, certainly does.

However, even if the former doesn’t really ‘fit’, its inclusion still raises an interesting question of the overlaps and similarities between Surrealism and Cubism. Similarly, de Chirico never identified as a Surrealist, yet it’s difficult for any viewer looking at his works not to see him as one.

And Tanning has in other places (indeed, another Taschen book), been categorised as producing “fantastic art”. But what is Surrealism if not ‘fantastic’?

And here you have a perfect illustration of why this exhibition, is not simply called Surrealism Beyond Borders, but genuinely goes beyond the previous borders erected around the school, whether formally or informally.

 

The last time that The Other Half and I visited an exhibition was in May 2021, but the Tate Modern’s Making of Rodin was a tad disappointing. However, it had felt safe – timed entries so no overwhelming crowds and, of course, face covering.

This still felt safe, with continued timed entry and at least half people wearing a face covering. What it also did was succeed in being a really excellent exhibition.

• Surrealism Beyond Borders is at Tate Modern in London until 29 August 2022.

 

Modern art in its pomp, I do like

Les Quatre Races, Ozenfant

Another day, another gallery. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, since we took a day off on the Thursday, heading for the Jardin des Plantes to amble among flower beds and the menagerie (I saw a baby vulture!), enjoy a decent lunch and, frankly, get absolutely toasted in the glorious sunshine.

But with rain promised for the Friday, we had planned for the Pompidou, which was a mere 10 minutes away on foot from the garret.

There was no need to fret about queues: a relatively short one disappeared quickly within minutes of the centre opening its doors at 11am, while we sat opposite supping coffees at a café.

Europe, de la Serna

On our previous visit, we’d seen an exhibition on architect Richard Rodgers, who had co-designed the Pompidou itself, and had also taken in some of the most modern exhibits.

Now to be quite frank, I have little memory of what we saw of the latter – other than a Jackson Pollock – because my feet were in the process of murdering me.

So this time, I was determined to see the key collection covering the 70 years of the 20th century.

Thus we headed to the top of the building to find ourselves at the start of a walk into artistic modernity.

It begins with two works by artists previously unknown to me.

First, straight ahead as you enter, is Les Quatre Races, a vast piece by Amédée Ozenfant from 1928, which uses highly simplified human forms and interesting, architectural textures to create an optimistic view of a post-WWI future.

Girl With a Black Cat, Matisse

The architectural aspect is not surprising when you read that Ozenfant was, with Le Corbusier, a co-founder of the Purist movement.

However, we then find Ismaël de la Serna’s Europe – painted in around 1935, as Spain was on the cusp of the civil war – and this is something altogether less hopeful: a view of a continent being handed, once again, to death.

It’s a disturbing canvas, brilliantly executed.

Beyond that, one of the next things to see was a Matisse canvas – Girl With a Black Cat (1910), which was posed by his daughter, Marguerite, and had been in a private collection until last year.

And through a door next to it was an entire room – albeit a small one – full of nothing but works by Matisse, including Portrait of Auguste Pellerin II (1916-17) and Portrait de Greta Prozor (1916).

Femme nue couché, Picasso

Beyond that was a larger room, hung on one long wall with a couple of dozen paintings, like the rooms of early 20th-century Parisian collectors such as the Steins.

High up were a couple of works by artists who were very clearly trying to emulate Matisse and, in effect, reproduce the likes of Luxe, Calme et Volupté and others.

The colours merely managed to look garish – providing an excellent illustration of just how good Matisse really was.

We avoided the one tour party that was breezing through and then enjoyed another Matisse.

Still Life With Arums & Mirror, de Lempicka

Luxe I, which was painted in 1907, provided an opportunity to appreciate what I’d learned when reading Hilary Spurling’s excellent Matisse biography.

In this case, the hills in the background are those marking the south of Collioure, while it was painted in the hills above the village, beyond the railway line, because the rather religious inhabitants would not have been impressed by nude models.

Moving through initial rooms, the art gradually abstracted, while The Other Half got vaguely excited by a replica of the Tatlin Tower.

And since the museum was so generally quiet, it was with great pleasure that we able to sit down and contemplate Picasso’s Femme nue couchée (1936) without interruption for some time.

Perhaps I’m wrong or simply linking the blue of the Blue Period rather too greatly with Picasso’s entire oeuvre, but the green background seemed to lend the work a very different tone to many of those I’ve seen.

The Journalist Sylvia von Harden, Dix

Since you cannot go wrong with a spot of Art Deco, I also enjoyed seeing works by Tamara de Lempicka, and while the portrait style might be familiar, It was nice to see Still Life with Arums and Mirror (1938), which showed the style in a less-familiar way.

We also found Otto Dix’s iconic and absolutely wonderful Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden from 1926, which seems to so utterly represent the Weimar period that it’s no surprise that it was recreated fleetingly in the opening titles of the 1972 film of Cabaret.

Henry Valensi’s Symphonie verte from 1935 and Symphonie vitale from 1952 are both non-figurative canvases that I took to instantly, simply because he makes the colours work so well.

These were works that further increase the question in my own mind of just what constitutes ‘art’, and I see no reason why decorative works are not, in some minds, considered as highly as figurative.

Symphonie Verte, Valensi

We found a Max Beckmann – an artist we’d first really encountered at a Tate Modern exhibition some years ago – and Édouard Pignon, whose paintings we’d discovered at the Museum of Modern Art in Collioure, just last summer.

If there was a disappointment, it was that we didn't see any of the Centre’s works by Léopold Survage – but you can't have everything.

In another gallery, we came across an industrial scene by Bernard Boutet de Monvel (1881-1949), a French fashion illustrator and society portraitist.

View of Pont-Aven, de Monvel

His View of Pont-Aven (1928) is hardly an obvious fit with that sort of portfolio, but it is a striking image that made me think of Metropolis. It has an interesting perspective and use of angles that creates movement in an apparently deserted – dehumanised – industrial landscape.

In the same room were two canvases by Alexandre Hogue (1898-1994), an American painter whose work focused particularly on landscapes during the Dust Bowl, with an ecological message at its core.

Drought Survivors from 1936 has a naive style that completely belies its theme, with signs of man-made life dead or rusting as the man-made ecological disaster rolls in.

Petrol in the Dunes (1944) may not have the same immediately haunting impact, but it’s still a striking and impressive work with the same underlying ethos.

Drought Survivors, Hogue

The entire floor has been recast in recent years under a heading of ‘multiple modernities’, which seeks to explore modern art from across the world and also by there: there is, for instance, a room dedicated to anti-fascist art.

Tarsila do Amaral – usually known simply as Tarsila – is considered one of the most important figures in Brazilian art.

Her A cuca (1924) is another deceptively naïve work, but stays in the mind – and is certainly shown off particularly well in a snakeskin frame that was made especially for it at the time.

A cuca, Tarsila

The way in which the works have been organised does create surprises.

It was more than a tad unexpected to round one corner and find yet another Matisse – this time, Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background (1925-26), which presented an opportunity to look at how the artist incorporated his love of decorative fabrics into his own works.

Brought up in a weaving area of northern France, Matisse later collected and carried around with him snippets of fabric that he had spotted and liked.

The final corridor, which takes you back to where you started, brings with it several pleasures – not least, Picasso’s Woman in a Turkish Turban (1955) and Giorgio di Chirico’s Il Ritornante (1918), which has all the typical strangeness of that painter’s metaphysical works.

Il Ritornante, de Chirico

Unfortunately, the light from the windows makes it difficult to really see one of Dalí’s myriad masturbation paintings. Perhaps that was a deliberate little joke on the subject matter?

And to finish, a pair of Chagall’s, one of which, Double Portrait with a Glass of Wine (1918) showed him ‘riding’ on the shoulders of his wife as way of showing how she made him feel.

We were delighted to be able to ‘get’ it without looking at the labels, on the basis of what we’d discovered at last year’s Liverpool Tate exhibition.

The Pompidou serves up a wonderful walk through the first 70 years of the 20th century – and three hours had been whiled away so easily and pleasantly.

And it also leaves the visitor with plenty to think about.

Portrait With a Glass of Wine, Chagall

To talk of ‘modern art’ is, really, such a dreadfully clumsy way of indiscriminately lumping together myriad different styles and approaches to myriad different subjects and questions.

That might not be what the Pompidou was attempting specifically to address with its exhibition title of ‘multiple modernities,’ but it is certainly one way of looking at such a wide range of artistic endeavour over almost three quarters of a century.

Picking just a handful of pictures of the works we saw to illustrate this post is evidence of the breath of ‘modern art’ – and that doesn’t even bring us slap bang up to date.

By the time we were ready to conclude our visit, we’d not seen anywhere near all the exhibits, but I had reached a point of recognising a Rothko but feeling no great need to go and examine it in detail. 

But while a stand-alone trip is hardly problematic, a visit to the Pompidou is a perfect way to continue an exploration of the modern that began with some of the art that’s on display in the Musée d’Orsay, given that Manet is seen as the painter who began ‘modern art’.

From the metaphysical to a shiny metal box

The Melancholy of Departure

The weekend’s visit to the Tate Modern for the Paul Klee exhibition also included a wander around the rest of the gallery.

We’d planned well: arriving for around 10.30am after a pleasant walk over the Millennium Bridge on a bright, fresh winter morning.

The plan was to see the Klee first and then have lunch.

It’s worth noting that the gallery’s café is far from the most expensive eatery around and we enjoyed fish and chips – and very good battered fish it was too – with dandelion and burdock, leaving me feeling really rather Famous Fiveish.

And we were lucky enough to sit by a window that gave us a wonderful view beyond bare but lithe silver birches, over the river and to the dome of St Paul’s in the brittle December sunlight.

It’s a vast gallery and you’re never going to seriously see it all in

Spanish Landscape with Mountains

one go, but I’d done my homework and picked two of the permanent collections to look at.

Once fed and refreshed, first up was the Poetry and Dream section, because it promised Picasso, Dalí and de Chirico.

Only recently had I put the latter’s name to paintings we were shown during A’ level art: I remembered the perspective of his metaphysical pictures and this was the first chance to actually see any.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus

The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913), at the entrance to this part of the collection, was crowded. It was easier to view The Melancholy of Departure (1916) later in the displays, although being hung high up doesn’t give you much chance to really look at the brushwork, for instance.

Fortunately, Dalí’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) was better positioned.

I’d not seen any Dalí in ‘the flesh’ before: this is one of his iconic images and is technically stunning – painted before he got so full of himself that he ceased to be bothered with anything beyond promotion of himself as his main work.

Head of a Woman (Fernande)

Autumnal Cannibalism (1936) and Mountain Lake (1938), although less well known and less vibrantly colourful, are also fascinating canvases.

There was no shortage of Picasso here: including Weeping Woman from 1937 and The Three Dancers from 1925, for which Will Gompertz provides an excellent description in What Are You Looking At?

One of the smaller rooms had three Picasso nudes of varying styles, plus a small sculpture by Matisse – fascinating contrasts.

There was plenty that was entirely new to me, though: Dorothea Tanning’s work is fascinating – Some Roses and Their Phantoms (1952) is just one example that caught the eye of both of us.

Paul Nash’s Landscape from a Dream (1936-38) was an interesting companion to Landscape of the Moon’s Last Phase that I’d seen at Liverpool’s Walker Gallery last month.

Self-Portrait

And then there was Max Ernst. I knew the name, but Celebes (1921) and Forest and Dove (1927) are wonderful examples of the fantastical – the latter again reminding the viewer of the place of the forest in German culture.

We’d been lucky with the Klee exhibition not being very busy, but these galleries were rammed.

Other paintings of particular interest included Christian Schad’s Self-Portrait from 1927, which has an Otto Dix-like woman in the background, while the face and expression reminded me very much of those by Albert Aereboe that I’d seen in the Museum Behnhaus Drägerhaus in Lübeck in April.

Dora Carrington’s Spanish Landscape with Mountains (c1924) is another painting you can get lost in, and which seems to float somewhere between the real and the imagined.

And in a similar vein, I was also taken with The Invisibles (1951) by Yves Tanguy – a painting that hovers between the abstract and some sort of alternate, sci-fi reality that you feel yourself nearly but not quite ‘seeing’.

Portrait of Greta Moll

There were works by Duchamps, some Giacometti, some Man Ray, some Miró and some Joseph Beuys too – and again, the Gompertz book helped when looking at some of these, even if they were not always things that excited me the most.

But it was with real delight that we walked into one room to see Portrait of Greta Moll (1908) by Matisse – so that’s why it’s not on display in the National Gallery; it’s on loan at the South Bank!

With some energy left, we pottered up to Structure and Clarity on the fourth floor, which was nowhere near as heavily populated – possibly because this was where things got rather less figurative and much more ‘modern’

in the way that some people mean when they’re not being very complimentary.

I wanted to see the Cubist works – not least, those by Georges Braque, simply because I’d not seen any by him in the ‘flesh’. They don’t bowl me over, even though I understand what the Cubists were trying to do, but it was good to actually see some.

Composition C (NoIII) with Red, Yellow and Blue

At this point there was also more works by Picasso, illustrating yet again his incredible range of styles.

The sculpture, Head of a Woman (Fernande), 1909, particularly caught the eye.

The gallery also offers the chance to see some Piet Mondrian, including Composition C (No III) with Red, Yellow and Blue (1935), and Kandinsky’s Swinging (1925).

Like the Klee earlier in the day, the Mondrain had layers to it, as the artist himself had mounted and framed his work, often giving it a sort of added depth in the choice of mounting.

Gompertz argues that however simple you might consider Mondrain’s iconic geometric paintings, they have a great democracy about them – they appear on all sorts of everyday objects, from bags to phone covers. It’s art for everyone and for every day, as promoted by Bauhaus and back to William Morris.

Pierced Hemisphere II

In the same area of the gallery was to be seen Dan Flavin’s ‘Monument’ for V Tatlin’ – which was one a series of four neon installations with the same name, and which date from 1966-69.

We were getting seriously into the realms of the minimal, which is where I’d point out that

Gerhard Richter’s comment on Grey (1974), that the subject of his painting “is the epitome of non-statement” ... “it does not trigger off feelings or associations, it is actually neither visible nor invisible ... Like no other colour it is suitable for illustrating ‘nothing’,” did take me well beyond Gompertz levels of understanding and into the terrain of ‘what pretentious twaddle’.

On the other hand – and thanks in part to Gompertz who discusses it in his book – I actually liked Donald Judd’s untitled open metal box from 1972 – although the line around it that marks the perimeter over which you’re not supposed to step does not take into account short arses like me.

Study for Homage to the Square

The texture and the colour of it, however, are warming and pleasant, and actually seem contrary to conventional, cold minimalism of many other works.

The gallery also displays Henry Moore’s rather sensual Composition from 1932 – The Other Half gets excited over Moore because he were a Castleford lad too – and a number of works by Wakefield’s own Barbara Hepworth, including Pierced Hemisphere II (1937-38).

And going for the really abstract and the minimal, I liked the colours of Joseph Albers’s Study for Homage to the Square (1964) and the sheer simplicity of Ellsworth Kelly’s Black Square with Blue (1970).

Untitled

In fact, the more that I look and explore, the more I realise that I’m fascinated by colour in a way that is very recent – or at least the conscious interest is.

Gompertz’s book has made a huge difference to helping my somewhat more opened mind actually understand what I’m looking at – I’ve recommended it before and will happily do so again.

The visit also offered a great opportunity to – in effect – put into practice what I’d read, and try to approach very modern works from a different perspective.

Some Roses and their Phantoms

Such a visit also adds to an understanding that, contrary to what might be a popular belief, there have been plenty of quality female artists around and rather more British ones (of both sexes) than one might realise.

The former was something that struck me when visiting the Walker Gallery. It had also cropped up during the Royal Academy’s Manet exhibition in the spring, which introduced me to Berthe Morisot – and I later saw work by her in the National Gallery.

Waiting for a bus later, as dusk reclaimed London, we both looked forward to a nice cup of tea – but the effort felt like it had been well worth the effort.