7/27/2023 0 Comments Surrealism art view fro heavenThe show features an accordion-like version thirty-six feet long that the American poet Ted Joans took along to encounters with cultural luminaries until his death, in 2003. The vivacity of the movement frequently ran to miniature scale, as with the poetic box constructions of Joseph Cornell, which the American artist began making in the thirties, and to such epiphenomena as the party game exquisite corpse, in which players take turns drawing parts of figures on folded paper and leaving traces of outline for others to continue. Art work © 2021 ARS / ADAGP, Parisīirds always meant sex for the German Max Ernst, although you can’t fail to adore his delicate construction of little figures, “Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale” (1924). Sigmund Freud, without meaning to, had inspired the lively delusion that the fracture of rationality (he was plenty rational himself) was a royal road to universal truth, rather than, as often seemed to be the case, a repertory of clichés. Today, there’s a surprising revival, unacknowledged at the Met, among younger artists who, like the movement’s founders, have turned inward from worldly imperatives to plumb the so-called unconscious, presumably a timelessly real realm that is superior to reason. By then, what had passed for the aesthetic sorcery of the movement had petered out. Painting and photography dominate, though magazines, texts, and films explore certain scenes, such as a late efflorescence of politically militant turbulence in Chicago in the nineteen-sixties. The show tracks eruptions in about forty-five countries. Anyone could play, and for a while many sorts of people did. There were no rules or hierarchies, despite Breton’s efforts to police the ranks. Not that the revolt required much personal valor: you couldn’t be prosecuted for your dreams. The tinder was an insurrectionary spirit, disgusted with establishments. But the show’s superb curators, Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, prove that the craze for Surrealism surged like a prairie fire independently in individuals and groups around the world. As you would expect, there’s the lobster-topped telephone by Salvador Dalí and the locomotive emerging from a fireplace by René Magritte, both from 1938 and crowd-pleasers to this day, smoothly blending into popular culture. Most of the show’s hundreds of works-and nearly all of the best-date from the next twenty or so years. It had roots in Dada, which emerged in Zurich, in 1916, in infuriated, tactically clownish reaction to the pointlessly murderous First World War. “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” at the Metropolitan Museum, is a huge, deliriously entertaining survey of the transnational spread of a movement that was codified by the poet and polemicist André Breton in 1924, in Paris.
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