Modern Mind

ballet,
Parade,
which the French poet had described as ‘une espèce de surréalisme.’ 67
    Surrealism owed more to what its practitioners
thought
Freud meant than to what he actually wrote. Few French and Spanish surrealists could read Freud’s works, as they were still only available in German. (Psychoanalysis was not really popular in France until after World War II; in Britain the British Psychoanalytic Association was not formed until 1919.) Breton’s ideas about dreams, about neurosis as a sort of ‘ossified’ form of permanent dreaming, would almost certainly have failed to find favour with Freud, or the surrealists’ view that neurosis was ‘interesting,’ a sort of mystical, metaphysical state. It was in its way a twentieth-century form of romanticism, which subscribed to the argument that neurosis was a ‘dark side’ of the mind, the seat of dangerous new truths about ourselves. 68
    Though surrealism started as a movement of poets, led by Breton, Paul Eluard (1895–1952), and Louis Aragon (1897–1982), it was the painters who were to achieve lasting international fame. Four painters became particularly well known, and for three of them the wasteland was a common image.
    Max Ernst was the first artist to join the surrealists (in 1921). He claimed to have hallucinated often as a child, so was predisposed to this approach. 69 His landscapes or objects are oddly familiar but subtly changed. Trees and cliffs, for example, may actually have the texture of the insides of the body’s organs; or the backside of a beast is so vast, so out of scale, that it blocks the sun. Something dreadful has either just happened or seems about to. Ernst also painted apparently cheerful scenes but gave these works long and mysterious titles that suggest something sinister:
The Inquisitor: At 7:07 Justice Shall Be Made. 70
For example, on the surface
Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale
is cheerfully colourful. The picture consists of a bird, a clock that resembles a cuckoo clock, a garden enclosed by a wall. But then we notice that the figures in the picture are running away after an episode not shown. And the picture is actually painted on a small door, or the lid of a box, with a handle attached. If the door is opened what will be revealed? The unknown is naturally menacing.
    The most unsettling of the surrealists was Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), the ‘painter of railway stations,’ as Picasso dubbed him. An Italian of Greekdescent, de Chirico was obsessed by the piazzas and arcades of north Italian towns: ‘I had just come out of a long and painful intestinal illness. I was in a nearly morbid state of sensitivity. The whole world, down to the marble of the buildings and the fountains, seemed to me to be convalescent…. The autumn sun, warm and unloving, lit the statue and the church façade. Then I had the strange impression that I was looking at these things for the first time.’ 71 These landscapes, these townscapes, are always depicted in the same way by de Chirico. The light is always the same (it is afternoon light, coming from the right or left, rather than from above); there are long, forbidding shallows; darkness is not far away. 72 Second, there are next to no people – these townscapes are deserted. Sometimes there is a tailor’s mannequin, or a sculpture, figures that resemble people but are blind, deaf, dumb, insensate, echoing, as Robert Hughes has said, the famous lines of Eliot: ‘These fragments have I shored against my ruins.’ There are often humanlike shallows just around the corner. De Chirico’s is a cold world; the mood is forbidding, with a feeling that this is perhaps the last day of all, that the universe is imploding, and the sun about to cease shining forever. Again something dreadful has either happened or is about to happen. 73
    At first sight, Joan Miró (1893–1983) was a much more cheerful, playful painter than the other two. He never joined the political wing of the surrealists: he didn’t get involved in manifestos or campaigns. 74 But he did contribute to group shows, where his style contrasted strongly with the others. A Catalan by birth, he trained in Barcelona at a time when that city was a cosmopolitan capital, before it was cut off from the rest of Europe by the Spanish Civil War. He showed an early interest in cubism but turned against it; after a childhood spent on a farm, his interest in wildlife kept bubbling through. 75 This gave his paintings their