SUPERREALISM IN LONDON
By ANTHONY BLUNT
/FAKE Blake's anti-rationalism, add Lamartine's belief in the individual, stir in some of Coleridge's faith in inspiration, lard with Vigny's ivory-tower doctrines, flavour with Rimbaud's nostalgia, cover the whole with a thick Freudian sauce, serve cold, stone-cold (dead, stone- dead), and you will have before you roughly the Super- realist dish, varieties of which are now thrilling, horrifying, puzzling, scandalising or just boring London in the exhibition of Superrealism at the New Burlington Galleries. For Superrealism is only an extreme assertion of the romantic principle in art, as Mr. Herbert Read says in his preface to the catalogue, though he thinks lit to double this with the astonishingly unhistorical statement that all classical art is " dusty and dead, and for ever unappreciated."
The fundamental claim in the Superrealist doctrine is for complete freedom of the imagination in the artist. Imagination is not responsible to anything else. It recognises no standards outside itself. It refuses all control, and in particular it rejects the control of reason. The original definition of Superrealism given by Breton includes the statement that it is " the dictation of thought, free from all control exercised by reason and remote from all aesthetic or moral considerations." And else- where the same writer says that he " can abandon himself to imagination without fear of making a mistake." To these views conies as a corollary the next important prin- ciple of Superrealism "the astonishing (le nwrveilleux) is always beautiful, anything astonishing is beautiful, in fact nothing but the astonishing is beautiful." This is really only a deduction from the belief in the supremacy of the imagination, since it is the unexpected; the peculiar, the super-normal and the exceptional that appeal to the imagination, whereas the reason delights more in the general, the usual, the typical. It is perhaps this emphasis on the element of surprise which is most striking in the present exhibition of Superrealist works, in which human beings grow into animals, legs join on to heads, cups and saucers are made of fur, and funguses grow out of high-heeled shoes.
Considered from another point of view the aim of the Superrealists is simply to let loose the forces which exist in the subconscious and to express repressed desires by means of symbols in works of art. This attitude again is only an extreme statement of a common Romantic doctrine, that the poet writes in order to express himself. For the poet then writes because he has some- thing to say and not because he wants to convey some- thing to an audience (which would be the classical point of view). That is to say, the poet writes to get something off his chest, simply because he can't help it. Or, to put it in terms of psychology, he writes in an attempt to bring some repressed desire to the level of consciousness and so dispose of it.
So the Superrealists rely entirely on the subconscious. They have turned their eyes entirely away from the external world and directed them inwards on themselves, on their own processes of thought, and particularly on the mysterious dreams and phantoms which emerge from their subconscious. They claim for there a reality at least equal to that of the outside world, from the depiction of which painting has been forced by the invention of photography. Not being able to compete with the latter in accuracy of representation painting has had " to entrench itself behind the necessity of expressing internal perception visually." Artists, there- fore, instead of exploring the outside world and estab- lishing relations between it and themselves, have dug further and further into themselves, reaching deeper and deeper layers of their subconscious selves.
These appear to be the main tenets of the Super- realists, and those whose- liking is in general for the Romantics will probably find their works sympathetic and stimulating. But certain implications of their theories are worthy of notice and development.
Superrealism is simply the last stage of an individual- istic and subjective attitude towards art. It is subjective in that it demands the complete submission of the artist to whatever impressions may come into his mind, which he must in no way tamper with, control or alter. The recipe for writing a Superrealist poem begins : " Put yourself into the most passive or reeeptivestate possible," and later gives careful directions for excluding any intrusion of the conscious mind into the direct flow of words from the subconscious. The system is intensely and wholeheartedly individualistic, since it cuts the artist off completely from the outside world, makes him believe that the only events that matter are -those that take place inside his mind, and in particular those which spring most immediately from his subconscious. The Superrealist can admit of no standard outside himself. Provided his work achieves its particular and private aim of purging his subconscious, it is a good work.
This limitation of the purpose of art to bringing repression to the level of consciousness means that Superrealists have really moved from the field of art into the field of psychology. What they produce is not works of art, but works of medicine. For their products, apart from their immediate private effect on the artist himself, may have a secondary effect in helping, by their organisation of symbols, to clarify the subconscious of the spectator. How far they have gone away from art into psychiatry is shown by the inclusion in the present exhibition of " found objects " (freak branches or stones) which in their natural state happen to perform the therapeutic function which the Superrealists demand from their paintings.
Further, it is hard to defend the view put forward by Breton that the mechanical perfection of photography has forced the painter back on the inner vision. Even if this explanation applied to the case of painting. it would hardly account for the exactly parallel developments which have taken place in literature. But it is not even relevant in painting. Photography may have killed a particular kind of painting like Impressionism. which sought just those chance visual effects that the camera can most easily render, but it is certainly not yet fully enough developed in subtlety to kill the kind of realistic painting which involves making elaborate statements about the outside world. Even if it is ultimately so deve- loped, the conclusion will be not that art must take to the inner vision, but that painting ceases to be important as an art and is replaced as an art by photography. When that stage is reached painting can safely go Superrealist. At present it has more important things to do.
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