Modern Mind

biological lyricism, increasingly abstract as time went by. In
The Farm
1921–2, he painted scores of animals in scientific detail, to produce a work that pleases both children and adults. (He carried dried grasses all the way from Barcelona to Paris to be sure he got the details right.) In his later Constellation series, the myriad forms echo earlier artists such as Hieronymus Bosch but are joyful, more and more abstract, set in a nebulous sky where the stars have biological rather than physico-chemical forms. Miró met the surrealists through the painter André Masson, who lived next door to him in Paris. He took part in the first surrealist group show in 1924. But he was less a painter of dread than of the survival of the childlike in adult life, the ‘uncensored self,’ another confused concept drawn from psychoanalysis. 76
    The wastelands of Salvador Dalí are famous. And they
are
wastelands: even where life appears, it corrupts and decays as soon as it blooms. After Picasso, Dalí is the most famous artist of the twentieth century, though this is not the same as saying he is the second best. It has more to do with his extraordinary technique, his profound fear of madness, and his personal appearance – his staring eyes and handlebar moustache, adapted from a Diego Velázquez portrait of Philip IV of Spain. 77 Discovering his facility with paint, Dalí found he was able to render crystal-clear landscapes that, given the themes he pursued, played with reality, again in the way dreams are supposed to do. He had the lyricismof Miró, the afternoon light of de Chirico, and Ernst’s sense of dread derived from subtly changing familiar things. His images – cracked eggs (‘Dalinian DNA’), soft watches, elongated breasts, dead trees in arid landscapes – are visually lubricious and disturbing to the mind. 78 They convey a world pullulating with life, but uncoordinated, as if the guiding principles, the very laws, of nature have broken down, as if biology is coming to an end and the Darwinian struggle has gone mad.
    René Magritte (1898–1967) was never part of the salon of surrealists – he spent all his life in Brussels – but he shared their obsession with dread, adding too an almost Wittgensteinian fascination with language and the hold it has on meaning. In his classic paintings, Magritte took ordinary subjects – a bowler hat, a pipe, an apple, an umbrella – and made extraordinary things happen to them (he himself often wore a bowler). 79 For example, in
The Human Condition
(1934), a painting of a view through a window overlaps exactly with the same view, so that they fuse together and one cannot tell where the painting begins and ends. The world ‘out there,’ he is saying, is really a construction of the mind, an echo of Henri Bergson. In
The Rape,
also 1934, a naked female torso, framed in hair, forms a face, a prim yet at the same time wild face, casting doubt on the nature of primness itself, suggesting a raw sexuality that lies hidden. This image is seen against a flat, empty landscape, a purely psychoanalytic wasteland. 80
    The surrealists played with images – and the verb is pertinent; they were seriously suggesting that man could play himself out of trouble, for in play the unconscious was released. By the same token they brought eroticism to the surface, because repression of sexuality cut off man from his true nature. But above all, taking their lead from dreams and the unconscious, their work showed a deliberate rejection of reason. Their art sought to show that progress, if it were possible, was never a straight line, that nothing was predictable, and that the alternative to the banalities of the acquisitive society, now that religion was failing, was a new form of enchantment.
    Ironically, the wasteland was a very fertile metaphor. What underlines all the works considered here is a sense of disenchantment with the world and with the joint forces of capitalism and science, which created the wasteland. These targets were well chosen. Capitalism and science were to prove the century’s most enduring modes of thought and behaviour. And by no means everyone would find them disenchanting.
    * In fact, Ulysses is more deeply mythical than many readers realise, various parts being based on different areas of the body (the kidneys, the flesh); this was spelled out in James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in collaboration with Stuart Gilbert in 1930. It is not necessary to know this for a rich