Q_ 11
That Old Black Magic
By FRANCIS WATSON
TN all excellent beauty, Bacon long ago bade us 'consider, there is some element of strangeness. Nearer to our own day we have Baudelaire's con- clusion that Tetrange est le condiment du beau.' No doubt it was carrying things too far to assert, as did Andre Breton in the first Surrealist Mani- festo of 1924, that the marvellous itself —indeed, the marvellous alone—is always beauti- ful. But the function of the manifesto—Futurist, Vorticist, Dadaist or Surrealist—was always to disturb, whether it was hurled like a home-made bomb at a cabaret audience avid for scandal, or set up in type for a wider distribution. The very typography in which the movements of forty or fifty years ago gambolled so capriciously has become as much a part of our inheritance as the Surrealist film, the Surrealist iconography of the dream, the nostalgic perspectives, the lan- guage of fear and desire, the alchemy of collage and the whole extension, for painters and poets and ad-men, of the techniques of violent impact.
The pervasiveness of recognisably Surrealist ideas and influences tends to obstruct, at the same time as it tempts, an approach to the hard core of the matter. This may be only one reason why the promised 'revival'—in the sense appropriate to today's brisk turnover in the art trade—fell somewhat flat in the Paris exhibitions of 1960 and 1964. That immediacy which was poetically extolled and deliberately cultivated is as irre- coverable as a cafe conversation, as unrepeatable as a 'happening.' Individual retrospectives on a large scale, such as New York has already given this year to Magritte and Dali, can hardly sug- gest the ferment in which creations of a durable nature emerged above a surface bubbling with enchanting or merely curious ephemera. The 'found object' may preserve something of its first magic, but nothing so quickly gets tatty as the 'contrived object.' As a work of art it has a built-in obsolescence. The object that I remem- ber best from the 1936 Surrealist Exhibition in London was not even there, except in a British Museum photograph and a label: Trap for Catching Souls. Danger Islands, Polynesia.
Her Majesty the Queen may not have mur- mured 'we are all Surrealists now' as Roland Penrose knelt recently for his accolade where Herbert Read had knelt a dozen years earlier. Yet the mind goes back to that brief summer of her uncle's reign when these two had so much to do with the rather odd choice of London to stage the first International Surrealist Ex- hibition. `Do not judge this movement kindly,' begged Read, introducing the catalogue. 'It is defiant,' he went on, 'the desperate act of men too profoundly convinced of the rottenness of our civilisation to want to save a shred of its respectability.'
This was to stress the revolutionary challenge of a group of writers and artists who cited Marx, as well as Rimbaud, on the necessity for a radi- cal transformation. If that aspect of the matter seems now to be unduly neglected, as the Amen-
can ex-Surrealist Patrick Waldberg suggests,* it is partly because the political service to the Communist party was wholly ineffectual. The in- congruities of the alliance between two forms of hostility to bourgeois values can now be traced far enough back to point up Hans Richter's memories of Surrealism's Dadaist predecessors in the Zurich Spiegelgassel For across the narrow street, in the same neutral claustrophobia of 1916, lived Lenin, Radek and Zinoviev: 'It seemed to me that the Swiss authorities were much more suspicious of the Dadaists, who were after all capable of perpetrating some new enor- mity at any moment, than of those quiet, studious Russians.'
What nobody foresaw in 1916 were the sterile enormities of Social Realism as the art of a Marxist bureaucracy. By 1930, in any case, the second Surrealist Manifesto was lamenting the betrayal of the revolution by official Commun- ism. And when at last Surrealism added its pre- pared effects to the already painful confusion of the British avant-garde, the Trap for Catch- ing Souls was too patently Trotskyist to lure the committed Left. Among the uncommitted, the search for new directions in art was certainly enlivened by the invasion of Surrealism, and for a time the London Bulletin, on the one hand, and Axis, on the other, exchanged vigorous polemics. Yet the markedly literary associations of a movement sponsored and led by poets— the very thing that seemed to offer a passport to the land of Blake and Coleridge, Lear and Carroll—proved something of an embarrassment where so much of the debate was still between the 'figurative' and the 'non-figurative' impera- tives of art. Eclectic as ever, and poorly enough served with opportunities to exhibit, the artists themselves were in many cases prepared to show their work in Surrealist or Abstractionist com- pany as the opportunity offered.
The one reaction that could be counted upon was perhaps the old one, the bourgeois rising to the bait, the unselective suspicion of a sub- versive Modernismus. For Surrealism was, after all, defiant. It was J. B. Priestley, presumably speaking for the Common Man, who duly glimpsed behind it 'the deepening twilight of barbarism that may soon blot out the sky, until at last humanity finds itself in another long night.' Though his prescience was quickly answered in the Spanish Civil War, it was not in fact the Surrealists who bombed Guernica. But the point is that whether Mr. Priestley was discovering 'effeminate or epicene young men,' greedy and slobbering sensation-seekers' or 'strong sexual impulses, that they soon contrive to misuse or pervert,' he was following the invitation to be interested or provoked, not so much by art, as by artists. 'Painting,' I read somewhere the other day, 'is how a painter behaves.' To illustrate * SURREALISM. By Patrick Waldberg. (Thames and Hudson, 35s.) t DADA: ART AND ANTi-ART. By Hans Richter. (Thames and Hudson, 35s.) Dada and Surrealism in the 'World of Art' series, it has been found appropriate to include in these two new volumes eighty or ninety photographs of the artists themselves, alone, in pairs, in groups, inhabiting their own worlds and each other's compositions.
It would be possible, I suppose, to see this as the consummation of that development of self- consciousness which has been traced from another period of alienation in the sixteenth cen- tury (and where else, if not among the genial neurotics of Vasari's company or of the Rudol- phine court, could we wish to anticipate the intimate connivance of the camera?). But it could also be seen in terms of the artist's func- tion, his gradual rejection as a maker, his re- appearance as a seer (or agitator), triumphant in our own day in the remarkable career of Marcel Duchamp. As he approaches his eightieth year, the survivor of a gifted and productive family, Duchamp seems poised to rival Titian or Picasso in longevity, success and influence, but with a conscience for the most part clear of any addi- tion to the world's burden of art. Painting? Our servants can do that for us.
The relation of art to anti-art has been treated by many critics, and for obvious reasons, as a dialectical exercise. But the empirical test is still worth applying. If the historical function of Dada was to produce a state of mind (which Brancusi said was more difficult than producing an object), we shall then want to investigate what art that state of mind produced in its turn. The immediate answer is 'very little,' since the par- ticular early works of de Chirico, Arp or Giacometti which we associate with Dada were external props rather than internal shoots. Very little, that is, until Dada was taken over by Andre Breton, digested, disciplined, repudiated, canni- balised if you like, as Surrealism. It is the cen- tral affirmation of Surrealism, not its superficial appearance of destructiveness, which claims attention still.
Neither the polemics nor the public outrages of the explosive movement were essential to the production of Surrealist art. Odilon Redon, who died in 1916, had accepted the dream, 'gently submitting myself to the coming of the uncon- scious,' placing 'the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible,' nourished by Delacroix and Baudelaire with no assistance from Freud or Marx, and living as quietly and unconvul- sively as any bourgeois. Yet without Surrealism and its techniques of revolution, Redon's repu- tation might not have attracted the critical en- thusiasm of which Dr. Berger's study is the latest evidence .4 Only in retrospect have the critics come to see Surrealism as a kind of lens, collecting from what seemed the chaotic sunset of Cubism the rays which could be focused on the future. As a movement, its literary predilections were, after all, a source of strength, vastly enhancing its title to attention, its claim to be seeking a synthesis, and—since words are even now lighter on their feet than objects—promoting its uniquely inter- national status. Yet if it were only in the lines that can be drawn towards American action- painting or abstract-expression, or in the fringe of great painters who felt its force, we should still not have reached the significance of Surrealism for our own moment. In the end this lies in the demonstration that an artist's business is to create as well as to comment. Neo-Dada is not enough.
ODILON REDON. By Klaus Berger. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £66s.)
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