Surreally Real

Surreally Real

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There’s so much Surrealist art in the sprawling Surrealism show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris that you’re unable to take it all in. When you reel back out into the daylight of the tubular walkway on level 6, high above the square below, you’ll struggle to recall everything you’ve seen. Like a half-remembered dream…. 

Yes, dreams, forests, monsters, alchemy, the occult, genesis, Alice in Wonderland, all those stimuli on which the Surrealists drew are examined in detail, in a show marking the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto. It’s overwhelming, an assault on the senses, right from the start. And it’s crowded, even more so than the Caillebotte exhibition just across the Seine at the Musée d’Orsay, and that’s saying something.

We really can’t pretend that we took in more than a fraction of the explanations as to why the Surrealists were moved to produce what they did, but what we do recollect are some astonishing works of art. Because when Surrealism is at its best, it surprises you, shocks you, makes you laugh, sticks in your brain.

And surely nobody did it better than René Magritte, the creator of a battery of paintings that have become among the most recognisable, most quotable images in art. What is it about Magritte? Is it the fact that so many of his creations look so nearly real, so almost perfect, in spite of their absurdity, in the way that the most biting satire, perhaps, is so close to the truth?

Magritte reprised The Empire of Light on numerous occasions, and surely we’ve all experienced, at dusk, as the streetlights come on but the sun has not quite set, a surreal moment such as this, when night and day come together. 

But then again, we’ve never experienced a steam engine bursting out of our fireplace. Time Transfixed, we learn, was not the result of any dream by Magritte, any chance association, but came from the idea that a fireplace and a locomotive were intrinsically linked because both produced smoke. 

This picture, one of the most memorable of any among Magritte’s oeuvre, is by the way on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, which seems to be very free-handed with its star attractions at the moment — we’ve recently also seen both Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day and van Gogh’s The Bedroom in Paris and London. 

Magritte, though, was a bit of an outsider among the Surrealists, so if you want to find out what was behind so much of their work, you have to look elsewhere. Early on, much is made of Giorgio De Chirico. In 1916, André Breton, later to be the author of the Manifesto, was so irresistibly drawn by the sight in a gallery window of De Chirico’s The Child’s Brain that he got off a moving bus to see it. This painting of a man with his eyes closed would come to symbolise the inner world for the Surrealists. 

And they also saw much in this painting by De Chirico, a 1914 portrait of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Those dark glasses evoked poetic vision (as well as looking extremely cool), but what fascinated the Surrealists was the white ring on the silhouette, marking the exact spot where Apollinaire would suffer a shrapnel wound two years later. Spooky or what?  

Premonition…. which takes us on to Salvador Dalí and Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) from early 1936.   

Dalí’s mind-boggling bizarre visual mix merges recognisable (if contorted) bits of human forms placed in front of a rather normal cloudy sky. Below is a weird landscape which appears dotted with cannellini beans. Dalí, we learn from the wall caption, interpreted the approaching conflict in his homeland not in political terms, but as a psychological phenomenon, superimposing his memories of an overpowering father on the whole concept.

Dalí’s unconscious world challenges our boring normality again in the Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Waking. You’ve been there, of course, at night: a bizarre or weird animal (in this case a very long-legged elephant), a couple of tigers (one emerging from the mouth of a fish), a loaded rifle pointed at you. And then your alarm goes off.  

If there’s a trio of most prominent Surrealists, the third man is Max Ernst, who abandoned his psychiatry studies at the University of Bonn to become an artist. We’ve never been that drawn to Ernst’s work, to be honest, but he’s quite a towering presence in this show, and his most striking paintings are stunning. The Angel of Hearth and Home (The Triumph of Surrealism) is the poster image of the exhibition, a nightmarish vision from 1937 of a multi-coloured, spiky-edged creature with massive claws and fangs, seemingly on the rampage across the countryside. “This was my impression at the time, of what was going to happen in the world,” Ernst said.
We’ve come across Max rather a lot recently — as the first artistic and romantic partner of Leonora Carrington and then as the husband of Peggy Guggenheim. From the Guggenheim collection comes Attirement of the Bride, painted during his time with Carrington,   
What on earth is going on? And if those are the bridal robes, what will the cake look like?
Ernst was constantly moving on: Peggy Guggenheim was soon succeeded by Dorothea Tanning. But before that, Tanning was already creating some of the most intriguing Surrealist images; her outfit may not be as flamboyant as that of Ernst’s bride, but what else is lurking in her subconscious, with that pert little devil at her bare feet and the disconcerting row of doors receding apparently into infinity?
And on the subject of numerous doors, how about this row of different-sized wooden doors and shutters complete with handles, metal hinges and keyholes and keys. Marcel Jean’s Surrealist Wardrobe opens to reveal bits of the two painted hilly landscapes in the background. A band of fluffy white clouds cuts across the middle to separate the two scenes.

Where, though, is there to hang your coat when your perceptions are challenged in such a way?

There are many more paintings to puzzle over in this show; much to see, much to ponder. Strange and surprising sculptures, installations and objects too, such as Victor Brauner’s Wolf-Table (which is indeed what the name suggests). It’s not probable that you’ll like everything, and some of the 13 themed sections are not as interesting as others. You’ll tire towards the end. It is, when all’s said and done, a surreal experience….  

Practicalities

Surrealism is on at the Centre Pompidou in Paris until January 13. It’s open daily except Tuesdays, from 1100 to 2100, well after most conventional museums’ bedtimes, and even later on Thursdays, until 2300! Full-price tickets are 17 euros, and booking is strongly recommended; you can buy tickets here. We spent more than two hours in the exhibition; you could easily spend a lot longer. The Pompidou could hardly be more centrally located; the RER suburban-rail interchange at Châtelet Les Halles and Châtelet, Hôtel de Ville and Rambuteau stations on various lines of the Metro are all within a few minutes walk.  

Versions of this exhibition will be on at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid from February 6 to May 11, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg from June 13 to October 12 and the Philadelphia Museum of Art from November 2025. 

Images

René Magritte (1898-1967), The Empire of Light, 1954, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels 
René Magritte, Time Transfixed, 1938, The Art Institute of Chicago 
Giorgio De Chirico (1888-1978), Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire, 1914, Pompidou Centre, Paris 
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), 1936, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Max Ernst (1891-1976), Attirement of the Bride, 1940, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York)
Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), Birthday, 1942, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Marcel Jean (1900-1993), Surrealist Wardrobe, 1941, Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris 

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