Midnight in Paris, 1929 – The Online Exhibit

Paris 1929 & Surrealism at the Crossroads
Welcome to our exhibition Midnight in Paris: Surrealism at the Crossroads, 1929. created in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France’s National Museum of Modern Art, and by the Members of The Dalí Museum, The Trustees, the Guild, Mrs. Jean­Francois Rossignol and Mrs. Timothy R. Ranney. You have entered through a Paris Metro stop and are now in Paris in 1929. Paris, a city that is always filled with light and shadow, always both intellectual and sensuous, was rife with artistic alliances, conflict and rivalry. Art itself was at a crossroads, unsure of its path forward, embroiled in arguments over the supremacy of various media, with everyone competing for attention.  Would painting survive the new experiments with photography, film and collage? Would politics replace art? 1929 represents the moment of a crisis of thought and artistic strategy, with lasting consequences for art. Along the various Surrealist-inspired avenues, you will meet the avant-garde artists during this  period of experiment and uncertainty. You will discover the work, friendship and clashes of over 20 artists of the era, ranging from the painters Salvador Dalí and Renee Magritte to sculptors Hans Arp and Alexander Calder, and filmmakers Germaine Dulac and Luis Bunuel.

The “Oneiric” Image: Magritte’s Red Model and Dalí’s Hand
A term often used by the surrealists was “oneiric.” It means “dreamlike.” The spontaneity of “automatic” imagery, where an artist lets their unconscious create, was valued in Surrealism’s first phase. Now surrealist leader André Breton believed the movement’s future lay in dreamlike, “oneiric” images, that capture collective desires. René Magritte’s Red Model and Salvador Dalí’s The Hand – both express this dreamlike quality through transformation or exaggeration. Both artists use realism, to undermine reality itself.  Hoping to get closer to the surrealist circle, Magritte moved in 1927 to Paris. His used a dreamlike style to create poetic associations established between otherwise dissimilar objects. The Red Model presents a pair of shoes that have become one, with the wearer. The shoes, which normally protect the feet, become the feet. Undermining the separation between human and object, between outside and inside, Magritte creates a monstrous, threatening transformation.  When Dalí arrived in Paris in 1929, he promptly met Magritte. The success of Magritte’s images assured Dalí that his own dreamlike landscapes had a place in the Surrealist Movement.  Dreams becomes political in The Hand, Dalí’s portrayal of the 19th century Catalan writer, Serafí Pitarra. Dali detested Pitarra because his writing was traditional, classical and rational. The painter humiliates the writer by presenting him in trousers smeared with excrement, and with a comically bloated hand. The hand is Dalí’s symbol for masturbation.

See also: Salvador Dalí’s The Hand

Surreal Sculpture: Man Ray
This dark bronze, totem-like statue is by Man Ray. Along with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Man Ray was part of the New York Dada group. He became part of the Paris Surrealist group in 1925. This sculpture is Fisherman’s Idol, an assemblage of wood and cork found on the beach, cast in bronze. The bronze endows the work with a presence, the original materials couldn’t offer. The resulting shape evokes primitive sculptures of gods, or talismans worn by sailors, as protection against the perils of the sea.  Along with Jean Arp’s sculpture, this work evokes the arts of Africa and Oceania, prehistoric petroglyphs and pictograms on stone, all admired by the Surrealists.

Dalí’s Paranoiac-Critical Method: Invisible Woman
Dalí arrived in Paris armed with ideas to share with the Surrealists. One of Dalí’s most important ideas is the “paranoiac-critical method.” Dalí defined this as a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge, based upon the interpretive-critical association, of delirious phenomena.”  This complex definition is clever. It refers to spontaneous creation – as in the automatic phase of Surrealist painting.  But it adds interpretation, as in the dreamlike work that dominates Surrealism after 1929.  This “paranoiac-critical method” often refers to Dalí’s double-image paintings, where a painting reveals two completely different images, depending on how you look at it.  Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion, is one of Dalí’s earliest attempts at double-imagery. In this painting, Dalí creates three overlapping images.  A boat is in the center. On its left is an egg shape, surrounded by golden hair. This is the head of a sleeping woman. Her arms drop to the floor. Her hips and legs are on the right.  Look at this again, and the woman is a horse! Her arm becomes the horse’s forehead and muzzle; the horse’s nostrils are her opened fingers. Her hair is the horse’s mane. Her hips are the horse’s back legs, and the golden pattern to the right becomes the tail.  A third figure is found in this same arrangement. The horse’s tail connects to a golden pattern that forms a lion’s head. The lion is the horse, reversed. The horse’s mane is now the lion’s tail.  Through these changes, conflicting images arise. The double-image challenges our confidence in the stability of reality.  Maybe the world really is as complex as this image, if we really look.

Surrealism + Photography: Paris
For Surrealism, photography challenged the importance of painting. Photography can capture spontaneous and surprising moments of reality. Photography can reveal unconscious aspects of reality – an alternative view.  Photography reinforced the Surrealists’ fascination with Paris. For the Surrealists, Paris was a living entity that mirrored their unconscious. They were fascinated by the haunted aspects of their city, places that seemed lost in time – the Passage de l’Opera, the arcades, the Metro stops, the flea markets.  The immediacy of photography allows an unpremeditated image of reality, but it can yield a strangeness as powerful as any painting. Photographers Brassaï and André Kertész, while not officially surrealists, were friends with many in the group – and had an immediate impact.  Their photos of mysterious Paris at night and the unusual views they captured of the Paris streets, reinforced Surrealism’s view that Paris itself was a forest of wonder and desire that contained an unconscious reality.  Jacques-André Boiffard made mysterious images of Paris as well. His photos illustrate André Breton’s surrealist novel, Nadja.  Brassaï’s graffiti photos, seen elsewhere in this exhibit, suggest that Paris could project haunting, cryptic messages for those open to it.

Dalí & Putrefaction: The Stinking Donkey
Decay became a cornerstone of Dalí’s painting and thinking in the late 1920s. It is expressed in the scene from Un chien andalou, the film he made in 1929 with Luis Buñuel. Two rotting donkeys are stuffed into pianos, one of the film’s cruelest and most fascinating elements.  Clips of this film are presented in the film area of this exhibition.  Dalí created this painting while under the spell of Surrealism, but before he travelled to Paris and met the Surrealists. He follows Miró’s example of mixing different styles and textures, arriving at a dreamlike fusion of realism and the fantastic The Stinking Donkey is also the title of the article where Dalí developed his “paranoiac critical” method in 1930, in the first issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution.  When Dalí arrived in Paris in 1929, The Stinking Donkey won the esteem of Georges Bataille, who saw it as a reflection of his own violent concepts, and published an article about Dalí in his magazine, called Documents.  Bataille broke away with a group of former Surrealists who rebelled against Breton’s doctrines. Unaware of the politics at the time, Dalí began his career with Surrealism enjoying the favor of their enemy Bataille, while being regarded with suspicion by Breton. Quickly, Dalí chose to align himself with Breton’s group.

Dreamlike: Tanguy’s The Lighthouse
A merchant marine, Yves Tanguy was so moved when he encountered a painting by Giorgio de Chirico that he immediately decided to become a painter, even though he had no formal training.  His studio on Rue du Château was a site for many Surrealist visitors, including Man Ray, André Masson and Francis Picabia.  Through these contacts and the influential journal, La Révolution Surréaliste, his primitive painting evolved toward the dreamlike side of Surrealism. Though he was one of the first visual artists in the movement, Tanguy was dedicated to the dreamlike painting style of De Chirico.  The Lighthouse shows the artist nude at the bottom of a ladder on a beach, perhaps on the coast of Brittany, France, where his mother lived.  The matches glued onto the canvas reveal Surrealist influences: they resemble glued objects in Picabia’s paintings. The matches blazing in a man’s hair recall the early Surrealist film Entr’acte. And the small folded paper boat that sails through Paris in that film also appears on the horizon, in Tanguy’s painting.

Surreal Objects: Ernst’s Loplop Introduces a Young Girl
In the 1930s, the Surrealists were excited about constructing objects. These objects were not “artistic” like traditional sculpture. They were created to challenge reason and to summon subconscious associations. These objects were democratic – everyone could produce them by assembling found materials. This surrealist object reveals the dark humor of Max Ernst. “Loplop” is a recurring bird-like figure in his work. Dominant and enigmatic, Ernst established Loplop as his artist double, referring to it as “the Bird Superior.” All three Ernst works in this section feature the bird Loplop.  In Loplop Introduces a Young Girl, an old door coated with plaster is the stage for a critical view of the art world. Here Loplop is a dealer selling gilded art. The framed “painting” Loplop presents is a sham – a metal wheel, a stone in a string bag and a horse’s mane. These objects aren’t beautiful – they assert their reality.

Automatic vs. Oneiric: Ernst’s Chimera
Max Ernst was a mercurial artist who often shifted his approach. He was comfortable with both automatic and dreamlike styles. His technique grew to include spontaneous methods like collage, grattage – or scratched imagery, and frottage – using rubbings, which were then used by other surrealists.  Chimera is a painting generated by automatism, but the result is close to dreamlike. The chimera is a classical creature from the Iliad, described by Homer as “lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle.”  The chimera became a protective deity of Surrealism. Here Ernst develops his own version, combining the figure of an eagle, with female breasts, a precursor to his own fantastic double, Loplop.  Well aware of what Surrealism owed this ancient monster, Breton jealously preserved Ernst’s Chimera in the caverns of his studio.

Automatic vs. Oneiric: Masson’s Sleeping Animals
Automatic writing and drawing were embraced in the first phase of Surrealism. The Surrealists turned to automatism because they were suspicious of painterly technique, which they felt was at odds with the search for the unconscious. But by 1929, the “oneiric,” or dreamlike way of making art, was accepted as another way to explore the irrational.  André Masson was a key practitioner of automatism. You will find several examples of his automatic drawings through this exhibit. But by the end of the 1920s, in works like Sleeping Animals, he shifts away from this spontaneous approach. His paintings became more painterly, with well-developed patterns depicting elemental forms. He began including human figures and addressing themes of life, death and sexuality.

Automatism: Miró’s Painting
André Breton founded Surrealism in 1924. His lofty definition for the movement was, “Pure psychic automatism, by which one seeks to express… the real working of the mind.” The word “automatism” is key. It means to perform actions without conscious thought or intention – to automatically create art.  Surrealism grew from the group’s enthusiasm for Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. They felt that art could put people in touch with their unconscious, the realm of dreams. Automatic writing and drawing were popular in the early stage of the movement, when the Surrealists were suspicious of traditional painting techniques. Catalan Joan Miró, who settled in Paris in the mid-1920s, shared this distrust of tradition. Miró chose to pursue what he called an “assassination of painting,” to try to unlearn his formal training. Both prehistoric cave painting and the art of children appealed to Miró, and he set out to re-think what painting was. He introduced a symbolic language using visual gestures that echoed ancient alphabets, challenging assumptions about what painting should look like and how it tells a story. Miró imagined a dreamlike and poetic world far from early automatic work.
Nevertheless, Breton called Miró “the most beautiful feather in the Surrealist cap.”

Surreal Sculpture: Arp
These two white sculptures are by Jean Arp, one of the founders of the Zurich Dada movement in 1918. When Arp moved to Paris in the 1920s, his work became more sensual. He briefly joined with the Paris surrealists, and exhibited in their first exhibition in 1925. Arp’s work suggests the spirit of automatism, taking real life figures and reducing them to abstract forms. Pagoda Fruit is an imaginary fruit. The upper part of the work reminded Arp of the hooded roof of Chinese pagodas. He offered this analogy between organic material and the creative process – ‘Art is fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in his mother’s womb.’ Behind you is a third work by Arp – a blue and white wood relief. Head with Moustache and Bottles suggests a whimsy unusual within Surrealism. The painted wooded relief conjures up lips, eyes, a moustache, even breasts, from everyday objects like bottles and glasses. Head with Moustache and Bottles was reproduced in the rival surrealist magazine Document, suggesting the complexity of alliances and defections between the various artists in this exhibition.

See also: Jean Arp’s Head with Moustache

See also: Jean Arp’s Metamorphosis

Surrealism + Film
A major theme in Surrealist film is the connection between dreams and desire. This exhibition presents clips from a variety of films where these themes appear.  In 1928, French filmmaker Germaine Dulac worked with a script by Surrealist writer Antonin Artaud to create The Seashell and the Clergyman, a silent film about repressed desire.  She explores the erotic fantasies of a priest who lusts after a general’s wife. Through slow motion shots, dissolves, blurred scenes and visual transformations, her film unfolds in dreamlike fashion.  For Dulac, speaking in 1925, “If I did not do cinema, I would do politics… Women must have the vote.” In contrast, Man Ray’s The Starfish from 1928 is less coherent, mixing visual effects with symbolic images to create a disorienting Freudian dream. Based on a short poem by Surrealist writer Robert Desnos, Man Ray used cinematic distortions to reinforce the idea of lost love. Hans Richter’s film, Everything Revolves, Everything Turns, is an attempt to translate “the uninhibited fun-making of the fair into real fantasy.” Sharp juxtapositions of images, disconnected shifts in time and the recurring image of rotating objects symbolize the instability of Germany in the 1920s.

Surrealism Film: Dalí & Buñuel
The tumultuous year of 1929 marked a crucial watershed for Dalí, who appeared on the scene with his colleague Luis Buñuel and their remarkable film Un Chien Andalou.  Dalí’s arrival propels the Surrealist movement in new directions, giving birth to a second golden age of Surrealism.  Buñuel knew they had created something shocking with the film, and expected the audience at the film’s premiere to riot, so he carried rocks in his pockets to defend himself. Instead, Un Chien Andalou was a huge hit, so popular the theater ran it for the next 8 months – and Buñuel and Dalí were invited to join the Surrealist movement.  Un Chien Andalou unfolds with the irrational logic of a dream. Dalí and Buñuel decided to abandon a storyline, filming only these inexplicable dream sequences. There are many shocking scenes, including the slicing of an eyeball. Yet they were inspired by Buster Keaton comedies, so the pacing is exhilarating.  Their second film, L’Age d’Or, a dark full-length comedy inspired by the Marquis de Sade, was one of the first movies made with sound in France. In Surrealist fashion, it attacked the hypocrisy of the Church, Family and State. When L’Age d’Or premiered in Paris, it was attacked by the League of Patriots. Ink was thrown at the screen, smoke bombs were thrown at the audience and Surrealist paintings in the lobby were attacked.  The police confiscated all copies of L’Age d’Or, and it wasn’t shown again in public for 50 years.

The Journals: Breton, Bataille & Surrealism at the Crossroads
The Surrealist Revolution, a surrealist journal published from 1924 to 1930, documented the first phase of the Surrealists’ creative exploration of automatism, dreams, the unconscious and psychoanalysis.  By 1929, things were in flux. New groups like the Belgian Surrealists were expanding the topics associated with Surrealism, and the Paris group was at odds with itself. The Surrealist Revolution reflects arguments that began dividing the artists.  Politically, many Surrealists suffered through the barbarism of the First World War. They saw the movement as a way of life. So they had a major challenge – how could an art movement help people get past societal violence? To some, merging with the communist party seemed like a necessary next step. This is what André Breton proposed in 1929, in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism. They therefore adopted a stance of collective activity and the absolute defense of freedom at all costs.  There was dissent against Breton’s authority. Breton decided to clean house. In that Second Manifesto, he expels a number of key writers and artists from Surrealism, including the painter Masson and the photographer Boiffard.  Breton attacked writer George Bataille most viciously. In turn, Bataille became the greatest threat to the Surrealist movement. He started a journal called Documents which became a beacon for dissident Surrealists. In response to Breton’s criticisms, in 1930 they published a pamphlet called Un Cadavre, or “A Corpse,” mocking Breton as a Christ-like martyr with a crown of thorns.

Alexander Calder: Masks
Calder is best known for lyrical mobiles. Before he achieved these kinetic wonders, he was a young American sculptor who moved to Paris in 1926. There he met Miró and became associated with Surrealism. This is when he produced these first works of wire, a kind of “writing in space” where tension and precarious balance are given full expression.  Further, they are weightless, defying the weight of sculpture, and transparent, defying the medium’s conventional density.  This sculpting of emptiness influenced other sculptors, including Julio González, Pablo Picasso and Jacques Lipchitz, in 1928 and ’29.  The success of these masks and the influence of Surrealism led Calder to produce his celebrated 1929 circus, with about a hundred miniature figures made of wire, that he could manipulate with strings and cranks.

The Cabinet of Curiosities
The Surrealists loved Cabinets of Curiosity. These were popular from the 16^th through the 19^th centuries, and housed objects from nature, geology, ethnography, and even historical relics. They were often more fantastic than scientific, and influenced the design of many surrealist exhibits. André Breton’s study was often described as a Cabinet of Curiosity, filled with surreal art, Oceanic and totemic artifacts.  This final room of the exhibit pays homage to the Cabinets of Curiosity tradition. It features darker and more unusual examples of Surrealism, and work by dissident Surrealists. The surrealists often associated their approach to the object as erotic provocations.  The centerpiece of this room is Giacometti’s unsettling Disagreeable Object, which seems to summon some sort of primordial fetishism.  You will see collages by Max Ernst, Surrealist games, and André Masson’s [MAH-sun] violently erotic massacre drawings, some of which were inspired by the writings of the Marquis de Sade, an eighteen-century libertine writer rediscovered by the surrealists.  You will also encounter the stark slaughterhouse photos by Eli Lotar, unveiling a little know side of Paris made to illustrate Bataille’s text “Abattoir.” And you will discover the menacing photos of monster-like figures by Jean Painlevé based on close-up images of marine creatures. Both brought new perspective to documentary photography.

Ernst: Collage Novel
Max Ernst’s collage novel of 1929 was a revelation. The title, La Femme 100 Têtes, is a double entendre. When read aloud in French, it can mean either “the hundred-headed woman” or “the headless woman.” This was the first collage novel by Ernst. Nine chapters unfold in a very loose narrative. Ernst collaged images from 19th century magazines, encyclopedias and trivial novels, to create a new and dreamlike narrative.  Scientific illustrations, religious visions and pulp fiction merge, accompanied by equally strange captions. By juxtaposing unrelated images, Ernst creates a provocative dream world that invites the viewer to participate, and create a story.  La Femme 100 Têtes is where Max Ernst introduced his bird alter ego – Loplop – into his art. This bird appears in all three of the Ernst paintings in this exhibition.  In the book’s introduction, André Breton proclaimed that, “One awaited a book that avoids all parallels with other books – aside from their mutual use of ink and type… The Hundred-Headed Woman will be preeminently the picture book of our day… Such is our idea of progress.”

Game Playing – The Exquisite Corpse The Surrealists believed profound discoveries can be made during simple activities that distract the mind. They distrusted ideas that were rational or ego-driven, so they embraced game playing.  Just as automatic writing was a weapon to use against narrative logic, collective drawing challenged the idea of an ‘individual artist.’ The “blind” execution of a work by three or four different hands drew upon the unconscious, childhood and humor.  Based on a 19th century children’s game called “Consequences,” the “exquisite corpse” can be played through writing or visual images. Three or four people gather at a table and a sheet of paper is folded.  The first person draws the head of a creature, then folds the paper so the next person only sees the lines that show where the neck is. The second person draws the shoulders and chest, and so on. In the end, an image of a new creature is created collectively.  Often, the “exquisite corpse” surprises, because of its uncanny coherence. Max Ernst called this collaborative process “mental contagion.” These drawings reveal the Marvelous, that spontaneous form of beauty the Surrealists prized over everything else. Between 1924 and 1949, the surrealists produced more than 200 exquisite corpses.

See also: Dalí’s Exquisite Corpse

Director’s Conclusion
Thank you for viewing our online exhibition, “Midnight in Paris, Surrealism at the Crossroads, 1929.”  I hope you feel the creative energy, the excitement, and the yearning of that time. Consider if we are again in a moment like that one, and if so, what can we make of this opportunity?