Surrealists in Print: Surreal Biographies and Art Books
Valery Oisteanu
Surrealists in Print: Surreal Biographies and Art Books
Cover image of Ghost Ships: A Surrealist Love Triangle by Robert McNab.
From the vast ocean of books on the subject of Surrealism, three recent entries come floating to the top whether by virtue of their subject matter, scholarship or superior graphics. All three were published at the tail end of last year, two of them to coinciding with major New York City shows. Ghost Ships complements "Max Ernst: Retrospective" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through July 10); Surrealism appeared in tandem with the recent "Surrealism USA" exhibit at the National Academy of Arts Museum. The third volume, Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim, helps shed light upon the other two.
Ghost Ships: A Surrealist Love Triangle
by Robert McNab,
Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004
Travel and exploration fascinated the Surrealists, who crossed continents in search of exotic inspiration and marveled at the diversity of primitive cultures. This adventurous book, a docudrama, retraces one of the most exciting voyages made on the eve of the artistic movement’s birth. It describes a journey made by the extraordinary trio comprised of German painter Max Ernst, French poet Paul Eluard (co-founder of Surrealism with Andre Breton), and Eluard’s wife, Russian-born Gala (later to become Salvador Dali’s wife). From 1921 to 1924, the three were entangled in a relationship that began in Germany, continued in Paris and ended in Saigon. This ménage a trois took place against a background of unparalleled artistic activity, just as the Parisian arts circle of proto-Surrealists was fusing into a movement with the creation of the Manifesto of Surrealism in October 1924.
A documentary filmmaker by trade, author Robert McNab was attracted to this story with the initial intent of making a film about it. As his research piled up, he decided (with the help of Christopher Green of the Courtland Institute of Art) that an illustrated book would better tell the tale. The journey within this story begins in 1923, when Ernst painted Gala in a famous work entitled La Belle Jardinière. (The painting, which shows Gala’s dissected naked body with a pigeon in front of it, would later be confiscated by the Nazis to be presented in their infamous "Degenerate Art" show; Hitler was photographed next to the canvas, which was later burned in a public ritual.) Eluard felt that the work constituted Ernst’s public outing of the ménage and angrily left for Singapore. Max and Gala followed.
McNab traces the chase through old ships’ records, uncovering sailing dates, ports-of-call and much more. The journey took the tempestuous three, often on separate ships, to New Zealand, Borneo, Malaysia, Cambodia and Vietnam. The trip ended with Eluard and Gala returning to France together after abandoning Ernst in Saigon, which marked the end of their scandalous triangle. Alone, Ernst journeyed to Angkor Wat (four of his paintings of the temple are in the Ernst retrospective at the Met); he would later paint at least 100 portraits of Gala, and cause another scandal in 1927 by eloping with a teenager just out of convent school. Eluard published a collection of poems soon after the fateful trip, titled "Dying of Not Dying," with a cover portrait painted by Ernst. He divorced Gala, remarried twice and became a communist and leading poet of 20th-century France. Gala, of course, hooked up with Dali in 1929 and married him in 1934, becoming his muse for the rest of his long life.
Ghost Ships, fully illustrated with Ernst’s paintings and photographs, is a visual treasure of surrealist visions and the story of love truly gone wild.
Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim
by Mary V. Dearborn,
Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 2004
This scholarly survey into Peggy’s life and loves is a product of author Mary V. Dearborn’s unprecedented access to Guggenheim family, friends and papers. It contributes rich insight into Peggy’s difficult childhood in the German-Jewish upper-class ambience of New York. After the death of her father on the Titanic, the young woman inherited a small fortune and began a life of travel, art collecting and her legendary love affairs with famous artists such as Lawrence Vail (her first husband), Max Ernst (her second husband), Yves Tanguy (her third husband), Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett and even Jackson Pollock, to name just a few. In 1942, with the help of Frederick Kiesler, she curated the "Art of This Century" show by smuggling many "forbidden-degenerate" works out of Paris (then under German occupation) and into London before they could be confiscated by the Nazis. Peggy and Varian Fry also exported a large group of Surrealists from Marseilles to the safety of New York. In the 50s, she started her palazzo-gallery in Venice, a focal point for many artists, for whom Venice became an obligatory stop.
The book transcribes a slew of hilarious incidents: The first of the Beat writers to visit Peggy was William S. Burroughs. However, upon her second encounter with the Beats in 1958, poet Peter Orlovsky threw a sweaty towel at Allen Ginsberg and it landed on Peggy’s head. She made a scene, stormed out and withdrew their invitations to a party at her Palazzo in honor of surrealist critic Nicholas Callas. Burroughs commented, "It seems to me she’s being unreasonable to move in Bohemian circles and demand conventional behavior." As for Gregory Corso, he and Peggy got drunk together, and Corso confessed to her he had been in jail. Peggy brought up the topic of sex, but Corso had his eye on her daughter, 34-year-old Pegeen. He declined the older woman’s sexual advances and regretted it later, when he was barred from the palazzo supposedly on account of the disappearance of a sculpture of a phallus.
More reliable old friends, according to Mary Dearborn, also turn up in Venice in the late 50s. John Cage was a frequent visitor, as was dancer Merce Cunningham. Cage introduced Peggy to Yoko Ono and brought Peggy to one of Ono’s performances. The following summer, Cage and Ono invited her along on a tour of Japan, and Peggy and Ono were occasional roommates. These and many more characters came and went in Peggy’s eventful life.
This book is a must for students of contemporary art and a definitive biography of a woman whose passion and legacy promoted Surrealism and the avant-garde on American soil.
Surrealism
edited by Mary Ann Caws
Phaidon Press, Inc., New York, 2004
This art book is a lush anthology of works, original writings and documents by approximately 110 artists, avant-gardists and Dadaists and more–all of whom worked in the Surrealist sphere, as selected here by Mary Ann Caws. It’s the first volume in the new series published by Phaidon called, "Themes and Movements," which proposes to show how modern and contemporary art have been dominated by revolutionary movements. Caws, an academic scholar and translator of Surrealism texts, displays her own willing openness to the unexpected, writing in an avant-garde state of readiness resembling the Surrealist game of "One in the Other," in which something leads to something else that the rational mind might not have thought of, that the dreamer might not have dreamed of.
"Our Thought Is an Eye" is the title of the first section of Caws’ "Survey," where she notes how Surrealism aimed, above all, to preserve a sense of extraordinary, the unexplained and the inexplicable. Chasing down the unconscious, the dream and the Freudian symbolism, the young Surrealists perceived this glorious, uncontrollable openness. "Poetic Surrealism…has focused its effort up to this point on reestablishing dialogue in its absolute truth, by freeing both interlocutors from any obligation of politeness;" and later "the words, the images are only so many springboards for the mind of the listener," said Andre Breton in the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). Other chapters of Mary Ann Caws’ book analyze "Chance and Freedom," "Poetics of Vision," "Elusive Objects," "Desire and Delirium" and "Infinite Terrains." Readers are empowered to remain in discourse with Breton and many other voices of Surrealism.
The last third of the book is given to "Documents," or original writings from leading Surrealists and their short biographies. These pages offer direct access to the voices of artists and to primary texts by critics, historian, curators, philosophers and theorists, a unique archive of innovations, discourses and controversies that have shaped art today. I have to commend Mary Ann Caws for including such known and unknown surrealist women artist as Eileen Agar, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Suzanne Cesaire, Leonor Fini, Frida Kahlo, Simone Kahn, Greta Knutson-Tzara, Jacqueline Lamba, Annie Le Brun, Dora Maar, Bona De Mandiargues, Lee Miller, Suzanne Muzard, Dorothea Tanning, Toyen, Remedios Varo and Unica Zurn. Their legacy is still pervasive in American abstract expressionist art and among the younger generation of artists.
