"Drawing Surrealism' at the Morgan in New York

The late Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart once remarked, a propos the difficulty of defining pornography, that he knew it when he saw it. The same might be said of Surrealism, a broad art movement that took wing around World War I and petered out mid-century, but remained as a persistent strain in modern art and a permanent resource for it.

Its leading theoretician was André Breton, a poet with a touch of the literary Stalinist in him, who tried to impose orthodoxy on a quintessentially anarchist impulse, and to read various artists in or out of the movement based on his personal standards.

It's easier, to be sure, to define the ingredients of Surrealism than to provide the recipe. Part of the Surrealist impulse came from physics and philosophy, part from Freudian psychology, and part from the trauma of the Great War. In that sense, it embraced more of the modern experience than any other movement of its time.

Communists and fascists

Einstein's physics had dissolved the traditional coordinates of space and time; Nietzsche had proclaimed a new freedom that rejected the forms of the past; Bergson had spiritualized the material universe; Freud had splintered the mind and sexualized the body. Anything was possible, and therefore everything was necessary.

World War I added its trauma, overturning states and empires and bringing in its train both communism and fascism— the former embraced by many Surrealists, at least at the beginning, and the latter almost uniformly opposed by them.

In the plastic arts, the antecedents to Surrealism included Cubism and Expressionism; but the Surrealists, while borrowing from both, rejected their predecessors as excessively formulaic. Analytic Cubism was indeed highly intellectualized, but Expressionism too struck the Surrealists as a form of domination, with the emotional will substituting for the rational one.

Artist as dreamer

The Surrealists meant to relax the mechanisms of censorship associated with the conscious mind, thereby liberating the spontaneous impulses of the libido. These alone, the argument ran, were truly authentic, and therefore truly creative.

For Surrealism, the ideal consciousness of the artist was that of the dreamer, where successive images and states of being succeeded one another without rational control. Freud had cautioned that dreams were themselves highly mediated mental products that had to be decoded by scrutiny and analysis. For the Surrealists, though, the dream was, in Breton's phrase, the channel between the "communicating vessels" of the conscious and the unconscious. We had no more direct access to the instinctual core of our being, and therefore to our own most essential selves.

Dreamers do sometimes talk in their sleep, but they don't paint or sculpt. What was needed, therefore, to capture the messages of the dream was a medium as immediately responsive to impulse as possible.

Poetic consciousness

For the plastic arts, this was drawing. As the Surrealist poet should cultivate an "automatic writing" in which he opened himself to whatever images emerged from liminal states of consciousness, so the artist should allow his pen to guide him without preconceived intention or design.

There are, of course, highly wrought Surrealist paintings, photographs, and artifacts— think of Dali, Miro, Max Ernst and Man Ray. But drawing was to be the preeminent medium of Surrealism, to an extent unique among the many movements in the history of art. Fine art drawing had become an independent idiom in the Renaissance, but drawing had never been the primary vehicle of a general artistic movement before.

This being the case, and Surrealism itself being so indissolubly bound up with the history of 20th-Century art, you may wonder why it has taken so long to mount a large-scale retrospective exhibit of Surrealist drawing. Whatever the reason, it is here now at the Morgan Library in New York, although the Morgan's show is notably smaller than the one mounted at its first venue, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from last October to early January.

Familiar objects, deformed

In some respects, less is more; the L.A. show seemed to go on forever, but it also contained some terrific things omitted in the Morgan's more constrained space.

The basic principles of Surrealist practice seemed to be metamorphosis and juxtaposition. Familiar objects were deformed or transformed, and the space they occupied was reframed— Dali shooting a tiger out of a cannon into a desert would be one well-known example.

Metamorphosis— the combining of disparate and often distorted elements— is probably as old as the human imagination, as the roster of fabulous beasts from the Sphinx to Bigfoot attests. In that sense, Surrealism may be seen as an extension of the Romantic reaction against 18th-Century rationalism, and a return to medieval traditions of the grotesque.

Tiger in the desert

Spatial displacement also played its part; putting a tiger in a desert (or a parlor) had the same effect of stimulating the sense of the uncanny, just as placing a nude on a chaise longue in the midst of a jungle had done for Surrealism's great precursor, Henri Rousseau. Of course, one could also create an abstract space defined by the shape and arrangement of fantastic images alone, as Miro and others did.

In theory, there was no reason why Surrealism couldn't have entailed abstraction as such; Miro and the later Kandinsky used space in much the same way, and the transformation of objects into novel forms certainly suggested the abandonment of all referentiality. André Masson came close to this in his "automatic" drawings, as did Henri Michaux, but the Surrealists remained in this way faithful to the model of the dream, in which objects may be distorted or displaced but are never completely unrecognizable. One does not dream in the abstract, and true abstraction in art requires a very high degree of conscious discipline—precisely the opposite of the spontaneity the Surrealists wished to cultivate.

Defining Picasso

Surrealism naturally spilled over into other media, such as collage and film, and of course produced much painting as well as some sculpture. It had a profoundly cross-fertilizing effect, and the boundary between Surrealist and non-Surrealist art is often difficult to define.

Was Picasso a Surrealist? A couple of his drawings are included in the Morgan show, and the many studies of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter sleeping and "dreaming" certainly refer to the Surrealist ethos. I'd have to say, though, that Picasso is too rooted in the materiality of the world to qualify as a true Surrealist, just as, for the same reason, he can't be called an Abstract Expressionist, no matter how close he apparently came at times to complete abstraction.

On the other hand, Arshile Gorky's great graphic series, Nighttime, Enigma, Nostalgia, one of which is displayed in the Morgan show, is clearly Surrealist in spirit and atmosphere despite its evident derivation from Picasso.

What about Pollock?

Surrealism's last major success, perhaps, was in paving the way for the emergence of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s, particularly Gorky and Pollock. Both of them are represented in this show by work they did in that decade, along with Richard Pousette-Dart, who took his own road into abstraction.

Was Pollock, then, a Surrealist, even if briefly? Perhaps we should leave these distinctions to Breton after all. As Surrealism derived from many sources, so it flowed into many channels: its nature, above all, was Protean.

Perhaps for this reason, Surrealism petered out as a specific movement after 1950, although Breton kept the flame alive until his death in 1966, and self-identified Surrealists would persist long after. Our present, eclectic moment is in any case averse to labels and typologies, and perhaps at this point an elastic definition will do.

Hitler's bathtub

The core Surrealists thrived in the 1920s and 1930s; World War II dispersed and to a degree dispirited them. The career of Lee Miller, Man Ray's quondam mistress and muse and herself a significant Surrealist photographer, is emblematic in that regard.

Miller became an army photographer during World War II, and her work, which appeared in Vogue (itself a nice Surrealistic touch) was strictly reportorial; in a world of bombed-out cities and dazed refugees, Surrealism had little to add to reality. Lee did photograph herself washing in Hitler's bathtub (not a stunt, she said; she was very dirty). That was perhaps the last true Surrealist gesture: the dream of a liberated art meeting the reality of the ultimate political nightmare. There really wasn't anywhere to go after that.