There’s no realism like Surrealism — especially when it comes to that most pervasive and compelling of realities, sex. As we’re talking about a major Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, I suppose I should use the loftier term, “desire.”
The exhibition is in fact titled, “Surrealism: Desire Unbound.”
It is exceedingly unbound, so much so that Metropolitan Director Philippe de Montebello was moved to warn: “This is a groundbreaking exhibition that may both challenge and delight the visitor by the breadth, richness and frankness of its images.”
They are (in large part) as frank as some lesser museums are frank when they festoon their exhibition halls with provocatively artistic forms of genitalia usually in the hope of drawing a bigger crowd.
Loftier voice
But the Met and the Tate Modern in London, which put the show together, are in pursuit of something loftier here, as were the Surrealists themselves. As Tate Director Sir Nicholas Serota, described it, “the idea that man is a creature who is driven by desire.”
“For the Surrealists, desire was the authentic voice of the inner self and at the same time a path to self-discovery,” Serota explained. “It was also an expression of the sexual instinct and, in sublimated form, the impulse behind love. The many different aspects of Surrealism — its art, its literature, its politics — were inspired by this vision of man as desirous of love, poetry and liberty.”
In other words, as Truman Capote once more or less said, the meaning of life is sex.
The Surrealists — an artistic, literary and political movement of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s — were not a chaste lot.
Marcel Duchamps, the Surrealist scamp who once famously exhibited a urinal at a New York art show under the title of “Fountain,” created a female persona for himself called Rrose Selavy.
His American expatriate chum Man Ray took Surrealist nude photos of his mistress, Kiki, also known as the Queen of Montparnasse and a lady who often dined at Paris restaurants in the nude.
Another Ray mistress, American photographer and beauty Lee Miller, famously snapped in the nude by her father (the Art Institute has her 1931 photo, “Nude Bent Forward”), went on to take a famous photo of Hitler’s bathtub.
Surrealist poet Paul Eluard’s wife, Nusch, posed in the nude with pretty much everyone, but dared reject the advances of Pablo Picasso, inspiring him to depict her in a painting as a jagged-toothed, salivating, devouring, snarling beast.
If in accord with Capote, the Surrealists differed with the late author Mary McCarthy, who once said that observing sex was either comic or grotesque. The Surrealists thought it a wide variety of things — violent, poetic, insane, industrial, whimsical, frightening, nonsensical, lethal and profound.
Rene Magritte’s 1934 “The Rape” creates a woman’s impish face out of a woman’s naked torso. Salvador Dali’s 1937 “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” posits the self-absorbed one in a pool in what could be the American Southwest, making him oblivious to a naked frolic on the sands behind him and rendering him a rock-like part of the landscape. Andre Masson’s 1928 “Drawing for Justine” presents sex with machetes and blood.
Erotic images
Max Ernst’s 1923 painting “Man Shall Know Nothing of This” treats sex as something cosmic. His 1940 “The Robing of the Bride” — two naked beauties adorned as great, feathery bird goddesses — is one of the most defining pieces of the show. Dorothea Tanning’s 1943 “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” — two women and a sunflower in a shadowy hotel corridor — contains only marginal nudity but may be the most erotic image in the exhibition. And Leonora Carrington’s 1945 “The Pleasures of Dagobert” blends sex with fairy tale.
There is poetry. In “Poem Written in the Toilets with a Knife on the Wall,” Surrealist grandmaster Louis Aragon wrote:
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“The night is nude,
Where there murmurs,
An unknown tongue,
In my ear.
My orange oh,
Foreign woman,
You my madness,
And my woods.
I am the wolf,
Devouring you.
The dogs who,
Lick your feet,
Listen from the bottom of me,
My tempest,
Rising towards you.”
Surrealism died after World War II, giving way to utterly sexless Abstract Expressionism. “Desire Unbound” closes May 12. Sex goes on.