Morgan Shows Basic Drafts of Surrealism: Disturbing Grotesquerie, Nightmarish Dreams, Varying Techniques Launched by LA Museum, A First for New York Since the Morgan Library is the supreme treasure house and exhibitor of the finest drawings in the US, it is surprising that Leslie Jones, curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was apparently the one to come up with the idea of an important show of the drawings of the surrealists, which played a major role in the development of the strikingly provocative movement of the early 20th Century. Whether that be the case or not, the Morgan's Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings, has brought the LACMA show (which ran from October to early January) to New York with only a few changes in what has to be a revelatory account of how the seeds of Surrealism sprang up in the minds of its major practitioners. Drawings took the lead in pushing the boundaries of conventional art and essaying new approaches and techniques in this Freudian, mystic, symbolic movement exploring the unseen mind. Love or loathe it, or at least find it on extended acquaintance, immensely provocative, intriguing and uncomfortable, the school is always fascinating in its attempt to let the unconscious speak first without controlling mediation, and this viewing is seminal. It is also more scary than sanguine, which is ironic - were these Parisians and others repressed? They seem rather censorious in publicly excavating their innermost responses. There are not many fetching images of eroticism or lust in this collection, with the famous exception of one of the Morgan's own possessions, Max Ernst's 1934 collage novel, Une Semaine de Bonte, ou Les Sept Elements Capitaux, un roman - A Week of Kindness, or The Seven Deadly Elements, a novel - see #161 below. One of its striking revelations is how far and wide the movement spread from Paris. Sheets from Eastern Europe, Tokyo, the US and Latin America are included. Works from the Morgan, LACMA, Tate Modern, the Pompidou Center and the Menil Collection join a number of works from private collections rarely accessible to the public. ========================================================================== The New York Times January 24, 2013 Squiggles From the Id or Straight From the Brain By ROBERTA SMITH Surrealism was very, very good to drawing. Or maybe it was the other way around. In any case, shortly after a young poet named André Breton issued his first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 the movement and the medium — aided and abetted by a large cohort of talented artists and writers — joined forces, to extraordinary mutual benefit. That art continues to reap the fruits of this union is one of the many lessons of “Drawing Surrealism,” a sensational exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum. Drawing was an ideal art form for the Surrealists, with their initial opposition to painting as bourgeois, cumbersome and requiring too much skill. (Nearly anyone, after all, could make a decent drawing, or a few; several by the writer Georges Bataille, possibly scratched out during therapy sessions around 1925, are among the show’s high points.) And being the art medium connected most directly to the brain, it also fit with and furthered the Surrealists’ wide-ranging interests in the id, dreams and language; chance, speed and fun; and disturbing juxtapositions. The Surrealists, like this show, defined drawing very broadly. They invented or breathed new life into drawing techniques like frottage (pencil rubbings) and the game of exquisite corpse. They commandeered collage and took it places the Cubists never dreamed of. They also tended to crossbreed such techniques (as well as photography) in all sorts of enriching ways. But despite drawing’s centrality to Surrealism’s many explorations, there have been very few exhibitions devoted exclusively to Surrealist drawings. The Morgan’s survey is the largest yet, and also the most international. Organized by Leslie Jones, curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it had its debut last fall, and Isabelle Dervaux at the Morgan, the show is somewhat smaller than the Los Angeles version, with several substitutions because of the fragility of paper. Even so, it contains 165 works by 70 artists from 15 countries, and is accompanied by a handsome catalog with an especially informative essay by Ms. Jones. If some of the inclusions on view serve historical clarity more than visual scintillation, the show as whole nevertheless provides plenty to occupy the eye. The stage is set with four works by important precursors of Surrealism, all from before 1920: a dreamlike drawing by Giorgio de Chirico, a poem-drawing by Apollinaire and two collages that Jean Arp arranged using chance. After these the largely chronological show is arranged according to techniques, which changed and expanded over time as more artists joined the cause and as Breton’s edicts endorsed, dismissed and reratified various methods. This approach makes “Drawing Surrealism” a great introduction to the movement and a valuable break with the fashion for thematic displays. It serves as a reminder that few things are more important to an artwork’s ultimate effect than the way it is made, while also giving the show a variety and briskness unusual to exhibitions of drawings. Breton’s first manifesto was directed at writers, but its call for “pure psychic automatism” whether “by writing, or any other means,” which would take expression beyond reason and “all aesthetic or moral preoccupation,” was general. Drawing, clearly, was another means, and within months André Masson, Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró were experimenting with automatic drawing. Still, the several works by them here suggest that absolute automatism was rarely achieved, if it was even desired. Surprisingly (or maybe not), the most convincing example here is by that epitome of fussy drawing, Salvador Dalí. An untitled ink drawing from 1927, three years before he descended on Paris, is a superb tangle of lines and splatters that looks like nothing so much as an early Pollock. Also good is the fusion of sense and nonsense achieved in two drawings of Henri Michaux, with their lettucy rows of illegible cursive and symbols. The show makes clear the importance of Max Ernst’s ingenuity to Surrealism. For example, he set in motion frottage, another way of introducing chance and avoiding conventional skill. Drawings were made by placing a paper on a textured surface — leaves, a wood floor — and rubbing it with graphite. Even before meeting Breton, in 1921, Ernst began using images from 19th-century store catalogs, medical textbooks and popular science magazines to fashion collages of Victorian interiors fraught with all kinds of disorienting warpings of space and behavior. Both these developments reverberate and mutate throughout the exhibition. (The show includes works by two early adapters of Ernst’s old-fashioned images, Joseph Cornell and the Peruvian artist César Moro.) The other echoing influence is the refined technique of Dalí, who single-handedly reversed the Surrealist aversion to meticulous realism and the old masters. His “Study for ‘The Image Disappears’ ” of 1938, in which the form of a beautiful woman doubles as the features of a bearded man, is echt Dalí. But the real gem is “Les 50 Secrets,” whose malformed creatures are seamlessly added to a page from a children’s reading manual. The game of exquisite corpse offered new ways to embrace chance, downplay skill and avoid a unified style. This show has a clutch of the aberrant figures produced by the game, in which two or more players take turns drawing on paper folded so that most of what came before is invisible. Especially striking is a pink elephant head with a highly sexualized torso, boxy feet and a wandering tail, contrived in 1926 by Breton, Marcel Duhamel, Max Morise and Tanguy. Soon collage was added, with more hard-edge, mechanistic results. A large 1930 charcoal by Miró merges aspects of the exquisite corpse and automatic drawing. Fringed with polyps, this gangly biomorphic creature concludes with a large toenail. It was inspired by the contention of Bataille (an early dissident, who disagreed with Breton’s idealization of the unconscious) that the big toe was the basest part of the body, farthest from the brain, closest to the dirt and often, as here, more than vaguely phallic. A fertile bedlam prevails in the second half of the show, as techniques continue to be discovered and grafted, and other countries are heard from. The British artist Eileen Agar adds an automatist figure to a large photograph of a nude woman in a 1939 work that presages Sigmar Polke. The Japanese photographer Kansuke Yamamoto riffs on Dalí with photographs from around 1938 that combine drawing, collage and rephotography. Jindrich Heisler, a Czech artist, does something similar in 1943, but with softer, charcoal-like results. In 1935 the Spaniard Oscar Dominguez started using decalcomania, which involves spreading ink over a sheet of paper that is then pressed with another sheet. When they are separated, strange, often geological textures result, inviting further fiddling. Proof positive of its rich potential comes in a beautiful, pink-spotted work from 1936 by Georges Hugnet, who also effectively merged frottage and collage. In the mid-1930s both the Chilean Roberto Matta and a little-known British artist-psychiatrist Grace Pailthorpe created hairy landscapes that are a little too solidly fleshy in ink. Nearby Frida Kahlo dashes off a dense constellation of her motifs in pencil. Soon we start seeing the early glimmerings of both Abstract Expressionism and its discontents: strong works by Pollock and Arshile Gorky; dissenting figuration by John Graham and Alfonso Ossorio (the latter presaging Mad magazine’s vehemence); and febrile strangeness from the delicate Wols, alone here in his debts to Klee and Bosch. Among the surprises is a maplike drawing by Leonora Carrington that evokes Ree Morton and a fluffy yet glowering orb of black lines by Lee Mullican. It brings us full circle, back to Dalí’s automatist outburst. “Drawing Surrealism” is on view through April 21 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org. ======================================================================== The Press Release (see end for Talks, Film, Dance program): =================================================================== SURREALISM AND THE ART OF DRAWING IS THE SUBJECT OF A MAJOR EXHIBITION AT THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM OVER 160 WORKS BY ARTISTS SUCH AS DALÍ, ERNST, MAGRITTE, AND MIRÓ OFFER EXCITING, NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE IMPORTANCE OF DRAWING TO THE SURREALIST MOVEMENT Drawing Surrealism January 25–April 21, 2013 **Press Preview: Thursday, January 24, 2013, 10–11:30 a.m.** RSVP: (212) 590-0393, media@themorgan.org New York, NY, December 14, 2012—Few artistic movements of the twentieth century are as celebrated and studied as surrealism. Many of the works of its best known practitioners—including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, and Leonora Carrington—have become touchstones of modern art and some of the most familiar images of the era. Critical to the development of surrealism was the art of drawing. For those involved in the movement, it was a vital means of expression and innovation, resulting in a rich array of graphic techniques that radically pushed conventional art historical boundaries. Yet the medium has been largely overlooked in visual arts studies and exhibitions as scholars and institutions have focused more on surrealist painting and sculpture. Now, for the first time in New York, the central role drawing played in surrealist art will be explored in a large-scale exhibition at The Morgan Library & Museum entitled Drawing Surrealism. The show will include more than 160 works on paper by 70 artists from 15 countries, offering important new understanding of surrealism’s emergence, evolution, and worldwide influence. The exhibition is co-organized with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and will be on view at the Morgan from January 25 through April 21, 2013. Occupying two of the Morgan’s largest galleries, Drawing Surrealism will be presented chronologically with interwoven thematic sections devoted to the surrealists’ principal drawing techniques and to international developments. Important drawings will be shown from countries beyond the movement’s Western European geographic roots, including sheets from Eastern Europe, Japan, the United States, and Latin America. Drawing Surrealism includes works from the Morgan, as well as from the collections of LACMA, Tate Modern, the Musée national d’art moderne at the Pompidou Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Menil Collection. It also includes drawings from a number of major private collections in the United States and abroad, which are rarely accessible to the public. “Because the Morgan’s collection of works on paper is of such international renown, one of the principal goals of our exhibition program is to present new insight and fresh perspectives on the medium of drawing,” said William M. Griswold, director of the Morgan. “Drawing Surrealism is an example of just such an exhibition. The show breaks new art historical ground by demonstrating the fundamental importance of drawing to the surrealist movement on the worldwide stage.” ORIGINS OF SURREALISM Surrealism emerged as a literary movement in Paris in 1924 with the publication of André Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism. Inspired by Freud’s theories of the unconscious, nineteenth-century mysticism, and Symbolist art and literature, surrealists sought to liberate the imagination through an art that involved chance, dreams, and the unconscious, as well as the play of thought itself. Almost at once, the movement’s proponents realized the potential of the visual arts for expressing the imagery of dreams and the unconscious mind. The practice of drawing, which offers the advantages of immediacy and spontaneity, became the most fertile medium of expression and innovation among the surrealists, allowing them to bypass the conscious mind and produce new ways of seeing. AUTOMATIC DRAWING Central to the exhibition will be examples of the diverse drawing techniques that the surrealists used in their efforts to bypass the conscious mind and access the subliminal realm. The first graphic process adopted by the surrealists was automatic drawing. In this technique, inspired by André Breton’s definition of surrealism as “pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express . . . the actual functioning of thought . . . in the absence of any control exercised by reason, beyond any aesthetic or moral concern,” the artist simply allows his hand to meander across the sheet. According to André Masson, who was the first to develop the process, “the hand must be fast enough, so that conscious thought cannot intervene and control the movement.” Afterwards, however, Masson would alter his drawings according to suggestions emanating from the original web of lines. Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and Yves Tanguy also practiced a form of automatism that combined chance with a more deliberate approach. DREAM IMAGERY Denouncing the passivity of automatism, a few surrealists relied on more traditional techniques to create dreamlike images and express their fantasy. Chief among them was Dalí, who sought to materialize his “delirious phenomena” and dream imagery with the utmost detail in the academic style of the old masters. This illusionistic mode was predominant in American surrealism of the 1930s, notably in the work of Federico Castellon, one of Dalí’s most successful followers. Artists seeking to express the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and World War II also often adopted this style to create images as disorienting and destabilizing as the atrocities they represented. FROTTAGE Max Ernst was the main surrealist to explore the technique of frottage, which consists of rubbing graphite or other drawing media on a sheet of paper placed over a textured surface, such as a wood floor, strings, or leaves, in order to reproduce that texture on the paper. For Ernst, frottage was equivalent to automatic writing because of the mechanical and unconscious way in which the imagery surfaces. Several frottage drawings by Ernst will be on view, including Le Start du Châtaigner (The Start of the Chestnut Tree), 1925, recently acquired by the Morgan, which belongs to the first series in which the artist systematically explored this technique. Ernst later adapted the frottage technique to canvas in what he called “grattage.” EXQUISITE CORPSE Some of the most striking surrealist drawings were exquisite corpses, a game that involved collaboration and chance. In the game—the name of which derives from a sentence created when the surrealists first used the process to write poetry: The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine—each participant made a drawing on a section of a folded sheet of paper without seeing the others’ drawings. The resulting hybrid creatures generated by the game influenced surrealist imagery, reappearing in artists’ individual works, as can be seen, for instance, in the strange anatomy of Victor Brauner’s figures on view. While the earliest exquisite corpses were drawn in graphite, ink, or colored pencil on ordinary writing paper, later examples could be in pastel or tempera on black paper. Beginning in the mid-1930s, collage was also used. DECALCOMANIA In the mid-1930s artists developed new automatic techniques to bypass the rational mind in the creative process. One of the most popular was decalcomania, which involves applying a wet medium (ink or gouache) to a sheet of paper and then pressing it against another sheet. When the sheets are pulled apart unexpected patterns appear on the transfer image. Originally a decorative technique—used notably in nineteenth-century ceramic design—decalcomania was rediscovered in 1935 in the context of surrealism’s exploitation of chance effects by Spanish artist Oscar Dominguez. Nearly ten decalcomania drawings by Dominguez and other surrealists who employed the technique—including Yves Tanguy, Georges Hugnet, and Marcel Jean—are included in the exhibition. COLLAGE Although collage was used earlier in the twentieth century by the cubist and dada artists, the technique took on particular importance with the surrealists. The odd juxtapositions and dislocated imagery it produced were particularly effective in conjuring a dream world or suggesting the irrationality of unconscious desire. Miró, Ernst, Ei-Kyu, Breton, and Arp are among the many artists whose works are featured in this section of the exhibition. INTERNATIONAL IMPACT The 1930s marked surrealism’s growing internationalization. Artists outside of Paris approached and adapted surrealist drawing techniques to their respective cultural and political contexts, and active surrealist centers developed in London, Prague, Tokyo, and Mexico. Although surrealism was envisioned as an international movement, rarely have works by these artists been presented alongside their European cohorts centered in Paris. On view will be drawings by such masters as René Magritte of Belgium, Roland Penrose and Eileen Agar of England, Gunther Gerzso and Frida Kahlo of Mexico, Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský of the Czech Republic, Federico Castellón, Arshile Gorky, and Kay Sage of the United States, Cesar Moro of Peru, and Yamamoto Kansuke of Japan. LATE SURREALISM In the 1940s automatism played a major role in the elaboration of new forms of lyrical abstraction. In Europe, Henri Michaux and Wols created fluid images in washes and watercolor in which barely recognizable shapes suggest a visionary world. In the United States, stimulated by the presence of European surrealists in exile during the war, artists such as Arshile Gorky, William Baziotes, and Jackson Pollock explored freer techniques to make drawings that fuse visions of nature and of an interior universe. These works on paper laid the groundwork for what would become abstract expressionism. Although surrealism as a movement lost its vitality at the end of the forties, its tenets remained a springboard for several postwar developments, as can be seen in Ellsworth Kelly’s abstract compositions based on chance and Louise Bourgois’s expression of subconscious psychological states through symbolic imagery. RELATED PROGRAMS DANCE Inner Landscape: Martha Graham and the Surreal Thursday, February 7, 7pm The Martha Graham Dance Company will perform three of Graham’s masterworks that touch on surrealism and demonstrate how the choreographer made the workings of the mind visible in dance. Every Soul is a Circus (with Katherine Crockett performing the lead), Satyric Festival Song, and “Moon” from Canticle for Innocent Comedians will be featured with commentary by the Company’s Artistic Director, Janet Eilber. Drawing Surrealism will be open at 6pm especially for program attendees. Tickets $20; $15 for Members www.themorgan.org/programs; 212-685-0008 x560 This program is supported in part by Alan M. and Joan Taub Ades. FILM L’Age D’Or Friday, February 22, 7pm (1930, 60 minutes) Director: Luis Buñuel Directed by a master of Surrealist cinema and co-written with Salvador Dalí, this avant-garde surrealist comedy is a gleeful fever dream of Freudian unease, bizarre humor, and shocking imagery. Starring Gaston Modot and Lya Lys, and the famed surrealist painter Max Ernst. Free FAMILY PROGRAM Leave It to Chance: Surrealism 101 for the Family Saturday, February 9, drop-in from 2–5pm In a combination of games and art projects, artists and educators Nicole Haroutunian and Lisa Libicki will introduce the entire family to the most playful side of surrealism. Families will explore automatic drawing, frottage, collage, decalcomania, and collaborative chance drawing, all techniques made famous by Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Salvador Dali, and many others represented in Drawing Surrealism. This workshop is limited to families with children. There is a limit of two adult tickets per family. Appropriate for ages 6 and up. Tickets $6; $4 for Members; $2 for Children www.themorgan.org/programs; 212-685-0008 x560 GALLERY TALK Drawing Surrealism Friday, February 1, 7pm Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings, leads this casual tour of the exhibition she co-curated. Free with admission TOURS Between the Lines Saturday, February 2, 11am 8 Saturday, March 2, 11am Written or drawn, lines are to be read and interpreted. In this new series of interactive gallery conversations, a museum educator will lead participants in a forty-minute discussion based on a selection of works from Drawing Surrealism. Free with admission Stroller Tours Wednesday, February 6, 10:30am On the first Wednesday of each month, docents lead lively one-hour tours of the museum and current exhibitions for new parents and family caregivers and their children. In February, participants will explore Drawing Surrealism. For parents and family caregivers with children 0–8 months. Single strollers, tandem strollers, and front carriers are welcome. Free with admission ORGANIZATION AND SPONSORSHIP Drawing Surrealism was organized at the Morgan by Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the organizing curator was Leslie Jones, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings. The exhibition was on view at LACMA from October 21, 2012–January 6, 2013. Lead funding for this exhibition is provided by the Ricciardi Family Exhibition Fund and by the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, with further generous support from the Sherman Fairchild Fund for Exhibitions. The programs of The Morgan Library & Museum are made possible with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. The Morgan Library & Museum The Morgan Library & Museum began as the private library of financier Pierpont Morgan, one of the preeminent collectors and cultural benefactors in the United States. Today, more than a century after its founding in 1906, the Morgan serves as a museum, independent research library, musical venue, architectural landmark, and historic site. In October 2010, the Morgan completed the first-ever restoration of its original McKim building, Pierpont Morgan’s private library, and the core of the institution. In tandem with the 2006 expansion project by architect Renzo Piano, the Morgan now provides visitors unprecedented access to its world-renowned collections of drawings, literary and historical manuscripts, musical scores, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, printed books, and ancient Near Eastern seals and tablets. General Information The Morgan Library & Museum 9 10 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016-3405 212.685.0008 www.themorgan.org Just a short walk from Grand Central and Penn Station Hours Tuesday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; extended Friday hours, 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; closed Mondays, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. The Morgan closes at 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. Admission $15 for adults; $10 for students, seniors (65 and over), and children (under 16); free to Members and children 12 and under accompanied by an adult. Admission is free on Fridays from 7 to 9 p.m. Admission is not required to visit the Morgan Shop. =================================================