This Surreal World

John Haber
in New York City

Surrealism Beyond Borders

Leonora Carrington and Surrealism in Mexico

When I was a child, I delighted in what was then a quieter, stranger Central Park. My father took me exploring, as he called it, although he must have known the park like the back of his hand, as you may today.

At almost the same time, a visitor from Paris was exploring the park, too, and claiming it for Surrealism. Almost my father's age, Pierre Alechinsky painted what might be the Great Lawn, a bit schematic but as welcoming as the one I knew. And then he framed it with coarse black sketches of indecipherable struggles. Had I seen it at the time, would I have called myself a Surrealist, too? "Surrealism Beyond Borders" at the Met claims the movement for the world. More focused shows of Leonora Carrington and Surrealism in Mexico have done much the same, but are they right? New York will always be a bit surreal, but not like this.

Carrington painted Down Under in 1940, the very year of her stay in a mental institution in Spain. Both took her into psychic depths, and she used the same title three years later for an account of her journey. By then, she had moved to New York, where a painted landscape has its own underworld, in brown beneath the lushness of a formal garden. Yet it has nothing on the strangeness of the inhabitants above, in both works. They include a bird woman and a woman between a Madonna and a harlequin, a green prancing horse and a bright red dog leashed to a tree, stag heads emerging from a purple cauldron, and distant towers in a chilling but visionary white. For Carrington, daylight had nightmares to spare.

Methods to their madness

Surrealism as the world is not a preposterous claim. Museums everywhere are searching for global diversity and finding it. It includes a diversity of cultural traditions—and diverse views of western traditions as well. Modernism saw itself from the first as an international movement in art and design, and New York, it turns out, did not have a monopoly on abstract art after World War II. Minimalism, too, had many beginnings, such as Mono-ha in Japan. So why not Surrealism as well?

Surrealism has a particularly strong claim at that. The standard narrative of modern art has long traced everything to Cubism's reassembly of reality, but people still had their dreams. Artists unleashed unconscious desires so that they could shape, consciously, the future. They identified with national liberation movements from Latin America to the Arab world. For some, that meant liberation from colonialism and racism. For Joan Miró in Spain under Franco, it had a still greater urgency.

The last century had its nightmares as well. Like German Expressionism, Surrealism arose from the horrors of World War I, and the terrors only intensified with the Holocaust and Hiroshima. The movement offered new ways of making art as well, such as collaboration. In cadavre exquis, participants fold over all but their own contribution before passing the sheet on to the next. The practice found new resonance in the groundswell of the 1960s, and the results are much like an accordion book today. Automatism took on new life with random processes for John Cage and algorithms in new media.

The show, then, has no shortage of past models or of new beginnings. It opens with papers and publications—essentials not just to collaboration but to a movement as well. They belong to De Schone Zakdoek (or "the clean handkerchief") in Utrecht. (There will be many more documents to come.) A long wall then teems with paintings, in no obvious order and with no obvious beginning. They leap forward and backward in time and every which way in place.

They introduce the methods in the madness of the entire show. Max Ernst in Paris had his Deux Enfants Sont Menacés par un Rossignal (or "two children are menaced by a nightingale") from 1924, the painted wood relief, Yves Tanguy his more fluid but conventional realism. These have, though, a torrent of competition, from names that you are unlikely to know. One country after another appears as well, in Eastern Europe and beyond. This art really does break boundaries, and it does so to this day. But is it still Surrealism?

André Breton limited membership in the original group, although Simone Breton, his first wife, was more tolerant. Besides, their circle extended more widely. Still, every movement burns out in time. Many in the show were not in the least joining a work in progress. Rather, they discovered Surrealism long after in museums, much like artists today. The curator, Stephanie D'Alessandro, cuts off around 1970, she could just as well try gallery hopping now.

Breaking with the movement

A show of Surrealism's continued influence would work just fine, on its own terms. Who would not want to learn of vital art from around the world? Who would not want to know how artists have painted their desires and their fears? An Egyptian who called himself simply Mayo brings gentle colors to a frenzy of cudgels for the exhibition's cover image. Artists kept crossing borders, too, driven by Fascism and their fears. Carrington, after her affair with Ernst, did indeed bring Surrealism to Mexico.

Yet they were also breaking with Surrealism. For some in Japan, the movement was a decent enough start, but not yet a science. For some in Cairo, it was too premeditated instead. The Met includes Arshile Gorky—although not, oddly enough, the home-grown American Surrealism of Philip Evergood and George Tooker. And his Water of the Flowery Mill does indeed have the air of a dream, but it announced a breakthrough, to Abstract Expressionism. In fact, Surrealism long held Jackson Pollock back.

The problems run deeper than a label for what came next. For starters, what is all that leaping around? A few sections focus on a technique, a person, or a place, others on a theme—like "Sensation of Strangeness," "Beyond Reason," and "Alternate Orders." Yet the individuals with their own section contribute the least, and the themes are downright interchangeable. At the very least, they have to account for more than they can handle. Some three hundred works from nearly fifty countries are simply too much.

There are also too few women, although they could justify the show all by themselves. The horses in Carrington's self-portrait and the enormous yellow flower from Dorothea Tanning at the top of mysterious hotel stairs embody someone's desires and someone's freedom, but whose? Tarsila do Amara in Brazil has her steamy local color and a comic but potent urban scene. Yayoi Kusama slips in as well, although not in the world of dreams. More generally, the show is at its best not in altogether distant places, but on the margins of a standard history. For Remedios Varo in Mexico, the earth itself is sensitive to her subjects' shame and unease, in narratives that still surpass understanding.

Still, even they cannot outshine the Surrealism you know. Ernst still conveys deeper fears, as does a mysterious body bound and wrapped in black by Man Ray. René Magritte brings a sense of humor to his mind games, while photos by Hans Bellmer and Dora Maar bring their transgressive desires. A cage of seeming sugar cubes by Marcel Duchamp or a lobster claw atop a telephone by Salvador Dalí encompasses them all. For artists like these, art was a matter of life and death, but never simply in earnest. For all the their good intentions, later movements were just too wrapped up in revolution and their own fantasies to see beyond their limits.

The show ends closer to home—not in Central Park, but in Chicago in 1968, when revolution was once again in the air. Ted Joans, an artist and jazz poet, revived collaboration with dozens of pages for leaders on the left, many of them African American. Others were gathering in protest outside the Democratic National Convention. It was certainly a movement, for many at the time the movement, but was it still Surrealism? Joans thought so, but that underestimates just how much it felt like a new beginning. It also forgets the wilder dreams of Surrealism's past.

Magic in Mexico

Born in England in 1927, Leonora Carrington had moved to Paris, where she fell in love with Surrealism and Max Ernst. His wartime incarceration triggered her breakdown, but not because of dependency on men. She exhibited in New York with Pierre Matisse and Peggy Guggenheim, before heading off to Mexico City—where she shared a run-down mansion with Remedios Varo, another woman immigrant from Spain, and got to know Frida Kahlo. Carrington's women are as wild as her animals and star in much the same circus, and either one can become the other. Her Mujeres Concencia (or "female awareness") from 1972 recasts the temptation in Eden with two women. A red owl might stand for a woman's wisdom.

As early as 1937, a horse pauses before an open doorway flanked by pillars that rise up into living women. Carrington called it Fear, but whose and of what? Could it be male fears of female sexuality? No doubt, but she, too, had her lusts and fears, the kind that sent her to the sanatorium. Her mythology and feminism also have ample room for men. An elk costumed as royalty shares a stage set with his grown daughter and a child. They seem well aware of a wintry landscape to all sides.

Another horned creature and robed being presides over a magician's table, with two children in black robes as apprentices. It could represent a woman's magic or that of a male sage comfortable in evoking a woman's. Regardless, Surrealism for Carrington was always first and foremost a "magic realism." A small but luxuriant survey centers on long-handled fans that could equally be masks, shields, or entire bodies. They convert the space into an enchanted forest. The San Francisco dealer also brings twenty paintings to its pop-up exhibition on Madison Avenue, and you never know who may pop up.

It carries her into the 1970s, although she lived into her nineties, when Rosa Loy was already bringing Surrealism into contemporary art. Over time, the hard edges and formal gardens give way to softer and more fiery colors. A young male alter ego takes up a quill to decorate an enormous egg because, as she wrote in Down Under, "The Egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm." Her mystic universe had room for both. Was Carrington old-fashioned in clinging to Surrealism after "action painting" and its counterparts overseas had outgrown it? A concurrent exhibition places her amid a bustling wartime and postwar circle, as "Surrealism in Mexico."

She was hardly alone in forced exile. Mexico was affordable, too, and Latin America had a history of exchanges with Modernism in Europe—like that of Tarsila do Amara, Wilfredo Lam, and remnants of the Bauhaus in Brazil. Ernst turns up with a collage, along with Man Ray and Roberto Matta on his way from Chile to Abstract Expressionist New York. They could join Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, whose terse drawing gives André Breton an incisive gaze and a block-like head. They could also find a common style and imagery. Carrington's mix of humans and animals, costumes and carnivals, or land and sea journeys appears again and again.

Kahlo brings her head to a hunted deer, and the shared obsessions humanize her pose with parrots and a cigarette. She also adopts in native dress for her most flattering photographer, Nickolas Muray, but others had little time for local customs or themselves. They lurk behind veils, like The Surrealists for Bridget Bate Tichenor, and they achieve a collective deepening of color, for what Walfgang Paalen calls Tropical Night and Gordon Onslow Ford The Luminous Land. The greatest share of work, though, belongs to Carrington and Varo, whose slyness steals the show. Varo stars as herself—letting her hair down as white fur, sailing into a coral jungle, exploring a dark river in a leather bucket, and spoon feeding a caged crescent moon. When two eyes face empty spectacles on a bare table, Surrealism in Mexico has found its inner vision.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Surrealism Beyond Borders" ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 30, 2022. Leonora Carrington ran at Wendi Norris through June 29, 2019, and "Surrealism in Mexico: at Di Donna, also through June 29. Related reviews look at Surrealism as "Desire Unbound" and Surrealist drawings.