It’s art from the 1920s to the ’70s, but it still packs a punch.
This past October was the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Surrealist manifesto, which gave an intellectual foundation to a movement in which dreams and reality meet, blur, and conspire, and where thought thrives untethered from reason and morality. Today, Surrealism is alive and kicking. Milk of Dreams, after all, the title of the 2022 Venice Biennale, recognized and revived women Surrealist artists from the Teens through the 1950s but mostly concerned contemporary art that I’d call Surrealist.
Then there’s the latest wacky news. Trump and Musk vie for a new take on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Who’ll tweet “YOU MAKE ME PUKE” first? There’s that new economic plan called “Fifty Shades of Tariff,” suiting every whim. Lotsa left-wing love for the cold-blooded killer and unforgivably unibrowed Mangione, and for the alleged human trafficker Abrego Garcia. And what about all those baby showers for all those pregnant men? We’ve truly gone through the Looking Glass. No wonder Surrealism’s still in style.
More proof is The Surrealist Collage, a wonderful show at Di Donna Galleries on Madison Avenue between 64th and 65th Streets. It’s a dealer show, of museum quality, done by specialists in Surrealism. It’s about 75 objects, arranged with panache and with economic interpretation. Surrealism is about individuality and eccentricity, on the parts of artist and viewer. No need for curators to put fingers, thumbs, and toes on the scale. Lots of big names are in the show — Breton, Miró, Picasso, Magritte, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Dalí, and Joseph Cornell — but the thrill is in the artists most don’t know. Max Bucaille, Paul Éluard, and Jindřich Štyrský, for instance, are brilliant and new to me.
What’s a collage? It’s art made from different materials — fabric, newspaper and magazine clippings, photos, wood, and ornaments as well as paint, watercolor, and other conventional art media — fixed to a base surface. The word comes from coller, the French verb for “to glue” or “to stick together.”
What to make of Éluard’s Volcanic Woman, from 1932? Éluard (1895–1952) is best known as a poet, combustible, tubercular, and searching for what he called “sizzling dreams.” He was Picasso’s close friend but was so revolted by power, convention, and politics that not even the French Communists wanted him. Between marriages, he made Volcanic Woman from bits of newspaper clippings and photographs. A perfectly nice-looking woman, with an edge but not too much, modern, but in her wake, lava, jagged rock, and likely whiffs of brimstone follow. It’s intimate and a tiny thing, a bit bigger than 3 by 5 inches, in an ornate Victorian frame. It’s also sinister. Small enough to cherish, it suggests a grudge to be indulged. It’s displayed between two Picasso collages from 1932 and a Miró collage.
Volcanic Woman is Collage 101 in straightforward messaging. By the 1930s, collage was a Surrealist staple. That’s no surprise. Surrealism thrives on bizarre, zingy juxtapositions, and bits of paper ephemera from, say, a magazine or a greeting card or a party invitation exponentially expand imagery and themes. Picasso and Braque introduced collage to avant-garde art around 1912, but it was Victorian women amateur artists who stewarded a collage craze in the 1860s and ’70s. Family photographs pasted into sketches of exotic locations, figures with oversized heads and fancy hats on the tennis court, a clerk at a counter in a milliner’s selling lambs — all strange, usually whimsical, and often inspired by Alice in Wonderland.
Surrealist collages — aligning with new, scientific theories about dreams from Freud, Jung, and others — have more bite than the Victorian ones. They’re subversive, too. I’d never heard of Max Bucaille (1906–1996), the French Surrealist painter, sculptor, and collagist. He’s very talented. His Irruption of Acute Tentacles in the Teacher’s Lounge, from 1946 is cryptic, funny, menacing, and always relevant. I thought about Harvard professors learning that they’ve lost their federal grants because they work for a hubristic, lawless, greedy, antisemitic employer.
Bucaille, French like Breton, believed in automatism, in which one creates art without conscious effort, motivation, or thought. “The Devil made me do it” might be one way of looking at it, or it could be art mirroring dreams. Coming from the subconscious, automatism is the link between Surrealism and aspects of Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock said his drips were spontaneous — they were and weren’t — while artists such as Miró, an inspiration for Ab Ex artists, said their forms were biomorphic.
Then there’s the untitled collage from 1926 by heavy hitter René Magritte. Magritte (1898–1967) was Belgian, not French, and Belgian art is its own thing. He rejected automatism and dream theory, visualizing instead uncanny juxtapositions, such as a man made from sheet music and a tree trunk shaped like a bilboquet — a toy made from a cup, a string, and a ball. A wrought-iron fence and abstract lawn add to the peculiarity. The tune on the sheet music is from The Girls of Gottenburg, an English musical comedy from 1907 about young German and English men, some soldiers, and young, available women, all on vacation. “Once in the window of a ham and beef shop, two little sausages sat,” began one of the love ditties. What was Magritte thinking? Who knows? It’s Surrealism. Nothing has to make sense. We do know that it’s in this collage that the man in a bowler hat, a Magritte calling card, first appears.
My favorite collage in the show is the randiest. I’d never heard of Jindřich Štyrský (1899–1942), a Czech artist and journal editor. Something’s different in the water that Czechs drink. William Tell, Štyrský’s collage from 1931, is naughty, daringly so, with a fly seducing a masked, masturbating woman, two chatting phalluses on a beach, a stalky plant that looks human and frantic, and, I suppose, William Tell, he of Rossini’s overture and a dozen associations, among them the Lone Ranger. It’s a fertile work of art.
Max Ernst (1891–1976) did Surrealist collages that are early graphic novels about a Carmelite nun, an indecent Amazon, and a might-have-been Immaculate Conception. Georges Hugnet (1906–1974) wrote poem-collages in phrases made from newsprint and then glued them to a sheet with collaged images. They’re weird and mere inches from an S&M look. Laurence Vail (1891–1968), like Ernst married to Peggy Guggenheim, collaged wine bottles. Each has work in the show.
On the subject of wine, Salvador Dalí’s Wines of Gala, from around 1976, was a revelation. I’d never thought about Surrealism and the 1970s, but those were unhinged years. Think malaise, Khomeini, Jonestown, and chucking the gold standard. And Dalí (1904–1989), a Surrealist superstar whose work, I thought, was mostly schlock, deserves a second look. His iconic work is The Persistence of Memory, from 1931, in which melting pocket watches challenge the authority of mechanical time in regulating modern life. Premonition of Civil War, from 1936, and his Christ of St. John of the Cross, from 1951, are famous, too, but he seemed to beclown himself for the last half of his life. Goodness, he did TV ads for Alka-Seltzer. His waxed mustache was so long and so arched that you could hang Christmas ornaments from it, if you had the courage to get near it.
The Wines of Gala, though, is very good. It’s the collage-and-watercolor composition created for the front cover of a book on wine that Dalí wrote and titled in honor of his badass wife and muse, the artist Gala Dalí, who’d been married to Paul Éluard before Dali. The lavish book treats what Dalí considered the world’s best wines, not by vintage or even palette but by emotional and sensory experience. There are wines of joy, such as Beaujolais, Swiss whites, and Chinon; wines of dawn, rosés mostly, that “evoke in our minds a summer morning, moist with dew”; and, among others, wines of frivolity, light, the color purple, veils, and “wines of the impossible,” mostly cooked wines. The book is absurdist, frothy, hedonistic, poetic, and instructive.
Dalí layers photos of painted portraits of Gala, first a nude waist-up view filling most of the collage, then nearly two dozen small, bubble-shaped portraits mixed with bunches of grapes. Metallic, embossed letters spelling DALÍ crown the multitude of Galas. The collage is fantastic and theatrical and proves that Surrealism isn’t a style or even much of a movement. It’s a way of thinking, or daydreaming. Another Dalí collage from his wine book depicts a Turkish angora with wine spilling from her whiskers into the cups and mouths of an arc of tiny nudes who could have glided from a painting by Bouguereau. The cat has heterochromia, one blue and one amber eye, which adds a quelque chose that’s not about purrs and cuddles.
Dalí believed that he was the ultimate Surrealist, but he might be too narcissistic and bombastic. His work is certainly disquieting enough. His two collages in the show alone persuaded me to cover the Dalí Museum when I’m in Florida for the William F. Buckley Jr. centennial bash in November. The museum’s in St. Petersburg. Why? Like Surrealism, it defies logic and reason, but that’s for my Dalí story.
Surrealist Collage isn’t arranged by chronology or theme but by what things look good together. How refreshing. The art’s happy. Surrealism doesn’t like classification forced on it. Most walls are robin’s-egg blue with coffee-brown accent walls for bigger things. Timothy Baum, the art dealer, writer, and Dada and Surrealism scholar, curated the show and wrote the very good essay in the catalogue. Surrealist Collage runs until June 27. Di Donna is open to the public, free, and an oasis.