Exhibitions 1

Surrealism: Desire Unbound (Tate Modern, till 1 January 2002)

Disturbing pursuits

Martin Gayford

At the age of six, Salvador Dali committed one of his first outrages. 'While crossing the hall I caught sight of my little three-year-old sister crawling unobtrusively through a doorway. I stopped, hesitated a second, then gave her a terrible kick in the head, as though it had been a ball, and continued running, carried away with a delirious joy induced by this savage act.' A year earlier, 'suddenly, as most of my ideas occur', he had flung another little boy off a suspension bridge.

Both these incidents are brought up by George Orwell to Dalls discredit in his essay 'Benefit of Clergy'. And factors of a similar variety might give rise to occasional misgivings in the mind of visitors to Tate Modern's admirable exhibition Surrealism: Desire Unbound, Orwell was not bothered by the fact that Dali had actually done these things. It seems very probable that he did not, especially the second (one also wonders whether Dali really anointed himself with a mixture of fish glue and goat dung in preparation for his first night of love with his wife. Gala, another incident Orwell picks out from The Secret Life of Salvador Dali).

It is more the fact that Dali thought it smart to claim he had; that he thought, in his own words, that perversion and vice were 'the most revolutionary forms of thought and activity'. Orwell objected to this as 'a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency'. And he complained furthermore that Dali expected a special exemption from 'the bedrock decency of a human being' on the grounds that he was an artist.

In fact, the relationship between Surrealism and morality is problematic. Orwell was good at nosing out awkward facts, and then going on to make them more uncomfortable — in this case by pointing out that nothing he wrote suggested that Dali was a bad artist. Just that 'one ought to be able to hold in one's head the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being'.

The contemporary visitor probably won't think that — Dali, the old showman, was far too much of a charmer. But there is something almost equally disturbing about the earnestness with which the Surrealists pursued 'vice and perversion'. It can end up, after the frisson of shock has worn off — which it did, in most cases, over half a century ago — looking a little fatuous.

None of this is a criticism of the Tate Modern exhibition, which is excellent — well selected, well presented, and including outstanding loans of work by De Chirico, Duchamp, Mir6 and the American Joseph Cornell, among others. It suggests that Sir Nicholas Serota and his staff are beginning to find ways of making their colossal new premises subservient to the art they contain, rather than the other way round. The slight disquiet a visitor might feel are more to do with the project of Surrealism itself, and the scope of its ambition.

Unlike most 20th-century artistic movements, Surrealism did not begin with a new way of working among a few artists, which was then christened and analysed by critics. It was in origin an affiliation of Parisian poets, but it was more than a literary movement, too. It was nothing less than a revolutionary movement intended to change the world. Where Marx and Engels had proclaimed that man everywhere was in chains and must be set free, the Surrealists — led by the poet Andre Breton — felt that man's desires and imagination were fettered by bourgeois inhibitions, and must be liberated.

Surrealism was in fact the ultimate conclusion of romanticism, a declaration of the autonomy of the imagination against rationalism and materialism. As such it did indeed have a liberating effect on the imaginations of many artists. It was Surrealism that freed Joan Miro from any obligation to depict a rational world. Picasso's work was strongly affected by it, as is shown by this exhibition; so too was Giacometti's (also well represented). Its belief in the random and the accidental also lies behind Pollock's great drip paintings, which are not. And its heirs are still prominently with us; the investigations of the sexuality of consumer durables such as vacuum cleaners and telephones by Jeff Koons and Claes Oldenburg are obviously in the Surrealist tradition.

But the importance of Surrealist effect on art seems to have been in inverse proportion to the closeness of the association of the artist to Breton and Surrealist HQ. Of the artists mentioned above, Mir6 was the only real member of the movement, and a rather loosely attached one at that. The more closely linked painters — Max Ernst, Paul Delvaux, Rene Magritte and Dali — were not such important artists as Mini, Pollock, or Picasso.

Their work — consisting of fantastic imagery executed in a more or less deadpan realist manner — is more subject to the effect described above: once the first shock is over, it can look ordinary, even predictable. Delvaux's art, for example, turns on the fact that there are naked women in the same everyday world as trams and factory chimneys. That was probably a much more startling notion 70 years ago than it is now.

Admittedly, the early Ernst 'Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale' still casts a spell, and Dalf maintains a certain disturbing quality, not so much through his imagery as his nasty, glossy technique which is a sly attack on good taste in painting. But the Surrealists proper seemed to have fallen victim to an obvious paradox — a doctrinal attempt to liberate mankind is likely to result in a tyranny.

The tyranny of Andre Breton was mild indeed in comparison with that of Soviet communism (which the Surrealists made hopeless attempts to square with their own beliefs). But it explains the forced, effortful quality some surrealism has: the fantasy of De Chirico, for example, who was independent of the movement, seems more natural and spontaneous.

At times, it becomes camply preposterous — as for example the performance in which Jean Benoit, clad in pseudo witchdoctor garb including a massive phallus (on display) branded himself on the chest with the word `Sade' in honour of the Marquis, a Surrealist hero. At others — especially in the work of Hans Bellmer, whose manipulations of a dismembered female doll seem to re-enact the fantasies of a psychopath — it turns quite nasty.

Surrealism was a movement of great significance and — overall — enormous benefit to the arts. But there are moments, just moments, when one wonders whether it was such a good idea for artists and poets to try to liberate our desires. Those inhibitions may be there for good reasons. That, I think, was what Orwell was getting at.