Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Surrealism Beyond Borders

2022; The MIT Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/leon_r_02190

1530-9282

Allan Graubard,

Photography and Visual Culture

Recently, a unique exhibition, Surrealism Beyond Borders, opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, thence to the Tate in London. Unique, but why? Scholarship on surrealism has entered an expansive phase with new books and research articles. And while this exhibition and catalog chart the evolution of Surrealism from its beginnings to the late 1970s, excluding several groups that developed then or thereafter—whether defunct or active now—the taxonomy that the curators devised speaks to contemporary issues: the transnational character of the movement and how groups, specific to time and place, sustained themselves; the difficulties of exile, displacement and translation; the gendered portrayal of identity, sexuality and love; the inspiration drawn from indigenous cultures and the ambivalence of appropriation; contesting racism, colonialism and imperialism; violence and revolution; the influence of religion and myth in the twentieth century; the use of media, and more.The curators also have another purpose. By exploiting this expansion of discourse on surrealism, they analyze its radical arc across the decades in striking works, collective improvisations and provocations, and the consequences that apply. How well it’s all done is up to those who attend the exhibition and read the catalog. And while there are obvious lacunae and lapses, both in representation and critical coverage, the overall effect makes for an effort to come to grips with the most long-lasting movement of cultural expression and revolt in the twentieth century. This latter perspective, which the curators cite, seems apropos. What it means when facing our current malaise—fed by nationalism, poverty, repression, homogenization and global change phenomena—is a takeaway that raises its own concerns.From Paris, its birthplace, surrealism found ready ground elsewhere. In Europe, England, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, China, Japan, Columbia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Caribbean, the United States, etc., creators responded to surrealism, some individually, others in surrealist and allied groups. They did so in times of peace, political struggle and war, exhibiting, publishing and intervening for audiences large and small. When oppressive circumstances required it, they went underground to preserve their agendas despite the dangers at hand, from professional marginalization and silence to imprisonment and worse. Painters, photographers, writers, poets, sculptors, choreographers, theater artists, film makers and musicians—the majority of arts presented—found in surrealism a vehicle for the kind of creative élan that sparked discoveries and enriched experience.The full-bleed images on the catalog’s covers also frame the curator’s foci. Both artists represented, Eugenio F. Granell (front cover) and Toyen (back cover), however different their histories were, grappled with World War II, exile and its concomitants.Granell, a combatant and journalist defending Spain’s republican government against the fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco, fled to France shortly after the fascist victory. In 1940, with other political and Jewish refugees, he made his way to the Caribbean. There, he joined the surrealist group around Breton while becoming an axial presence in the Hispanic diaspora. From his time in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Puerto Rico, he enlivened the cultural scenes in each county while openly criticizing the twin sides of authoritarianism, fascism and Stalinism, which, in Guatemala, provoked reprisals from Stalinist agents, forcing Granell and family to find refuge in the Belgian and Italian embassies. In 1957, he moved to NYC, where he produced exceptional art and gained a professorship in Spanish Literature at Brooklyn College. With Franco’s death and the liberalization of Spain, Granell returned to his native country, recognized as a major artist, where he lived until his death in 2001. Several years later the Granell Foundation and Museum in Santiago de Compostella opened to preserve Granell’s legacy and promote research on him and Surrealism, with numerous exhibitions.Toyen, a founder of the Czech surrealist group in 1934, suffered the war years in Nazified Czechoslovakia. In her Prague apartment, she hid her surrealist colleague Jindrich Heisler for an extensive period of time. Heisler, half Jewish from his father’s side, already having received orders to report for deportation, the threat of arrest was ever present. In 1947, as the Iron Curtain descended and political conformities vitiated cultural freedoms, Toyen relocated to Paris with Heisler. There, Toyen made brilliant contributions to surrealism.Also fraught were the paths of other surrealists. This is especially the case in countries like Japan, where surrealism flourished prior to World War II but then, with the war and the general militarization of life, went underground. Post-World War II, particularly in Bucharest, surrealism saw a significant, if brief, resurgence until the aforesaid regressive Soviet bloc policies smothered it. In the U.S.A., where émigré surrealists informed the birth of abstract expressionism, for one, a distinctive group did not form until the 1960s in Chicago. Unfortunately, in this instance, the curators adumbrate their coverage, skewing the evolution of this group. Where are works by its leading artists and poets? And why is there no mention of a split in 1978 with a majority reforming elsewhere? At the same time, tracking surrealism in Egypt, Turkey, Syria and China is eye-opening.With nearly 300 works from 45 countries in the exhibition and catalog (with 50 short essays of varying quality), this is a moment to consider what it took and takes to identify sentient areas for exploration by image, word, gesture, object, critique, protest and rebellion; actions that can preserve our humanity and reveal how we configure and use our natural and constructed world. For the curators, surrealism, then as now, casts a distinctive light on this compact. Hopefully, creators and scholars drawn to this light will find it an ever-seductive and animating force.