On Art

...One of the principle legacies which both movements left to modem art was an inveterate and complex sexualism...

...With something approaching papal infallibility, Breton read out of the Surrealist party poets and painters, founders and friends?Aragon, Artaud, Philippe Soupault, Dali, Eluard, Giorgio de Chirico, Giacometti, Cocteau—for being too literary, too religious, too ostentatious, too political, too committed to one or another of those ideological havens that men will seek in times of trouble...

...As art, Dada and, to an even greater extent, Surrealism were dependent upon a highly evolved and precious erotic vocabulary...

...The calculated insults had turned into caresses...

...Wandering through the Cordier Gallery, with its fallopian tunnels upholstered in pink velvet, its vulval grottoes bedecked with the monuments of Surrealism, she found the experience reminiscent not only of an earlier Dada exhibition but of "an extraordinary moment in history, of a generation of gilded youth...

...The Gallic snails, however, in complete disdain of our hostile climate, gave up the ghost and gave off a bad smell...

...But considered in the light of present day expertise on sexual matters, the necessary explication for a Surrealist or Dadaist painting is likely to seem touchingly innocent and arcane...

...Attempting to bring art into the streets and into life, it nevertheless remained a protest of, by and for the vanguard intellectual establishment...

...Yet it is as art—Breton's own prose and poetry, the paintings and sculpture of Ernst, Miro, Kurt Schwitters and Giacometti, as well as the earlier exercises of Duchamp and Francis Picabia—that the two movements have survived to take their place in the history of esthetic ideas...

...The developmental history of these intentionally subversive movements is a curious and sometimes funny melange of artistic theories, political ambitions, psychological audacities...

...The manner in which the progression of works leads to the art of the moment—to Johns' targets, to Samaras' glistening and hostile pin-studded book—makes us aware of the strength of the anti-esthetic program that Dada and Surrealism instituted...

...Dali, curiously, has a little brown study all to himself among the Dada fraternity: his Venus de Milo as a chest of drawers is surrounded by a cluster of paintings...

...These parlor revolutions were condemned to alter what they had attempted to sublimate?art in general and, in particular, the purifying abstractionism of modern art...

...Actually, the Surrealist program was more ambitious and longer-lived...

...ON ART By James R. Mellow The 'Exquisite Corpses' The cultural revisionism that is such a noticeable feature of the current season has received additional impetus from the large Dada and Surrealist exhibition now installed at the Museum of Modern Art...

...As Rubin's analysis makes clear, these movements never quite freed themselves from the chains of art...

...It is also a history of famous excommunications...

...In 1959, the last extensive Surrealist Exposition (devoted to Eros) was assembled in Paris under the auspices of Breton and Duchamp...

...With considerable tact, the exhibition begins with Duchamp, Picabia and the Dadaists all seemingly represented in separate but equal installations...

...As has already been noted in this space ("Eyeing the Dots," NL, March 11), the Neo-Impressionists have just been rehabilitated at the Guggenheim Museum...

...Art, he agreed, was a "lamentable expedient," but one that must be sublimated to the cause of life...

...It was rather like looking at the toys of the Bourbon children at Versailles...

...The critic Annette Michelson, writing of that international event for Arts magazine (March 1960), has given us a charming account of the style as it stood at the moment when the New American Painting—itself considerably influenced by the Surrealist fraternity that had settled in New York during World War II—was beginning to dominate the European scene...

...The Modern's "Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage," which includes 330 works of painting, sculpture and collage, together with such once-shocking Surrealist objects as Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup, is the largest and most authoritative exposition of these dead-but-still-kicking movements we are likely to see...

...Dada, a protest movement by young intellectuals against art, militarism and the middle class, had multiple births in New York, Zurich, Berlin and Paris before, during and after World War I. In 1922, it was unofficially laid to rest by Andre Breton and his followers, only to be officially resurrected as Surrealism later the same year...

...Duchamp, Picabia, Ernst, Miro, Dali: There is an ironic significance in the fact that the boisterous, anti-esthetic, prodigal sons have now come home to rest on the great mothering breast of The Museum of Modern Art...

...Their effect upon the evolution of taste is undeniable...

...the changes they wrought upon the social structure of their age were minimal...

...Much of the complicated imagery of this work was authorized by Freud, whose researches into the seeming irrationality of dream imagery provided Surrealism with a useful bag of mixed metaphors...

...In Dali's paintings, the masturbatory and auto-sodomitic fantasies can be read as essential to Surrealism's urgently cultivated sexual elan...

...Duchamp's mustachioed Mona Lisa, for example, was both an insult to the old masters and a scatalogical pun involving that famous lady's hot pants...

...They had to be replaced by empty shells...

...At the Al-bright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, an exhibition of abstract art?Plus by Minus: Today's Half Century"—is joined with a large retrospective of the sculptor Naum Gabo in the second Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today (and the prevailing structuralism has revived interest in the old Constructivist mode...

...For Breton, Surrealism was a transcendent discipline whose purity had to be maintained...

...That other tour de force of window dressing, Dali's Rainy Taxi—a vintage cab fitted out with interior plumbing which rains drearily upon the mannequins, the greenery, the crawling French snails within—is installed in the garden...

...The historical approach ought to be generous...

...But Surrealism's disorderly conduct was not far-reaching enough...

...Shorn of ritual trappings, the works are exhibited strictly as art, from Duchamp's Large Glass (a second edition of the once-unique assemblage) to Oldenburg's erotically inspired oversized cigarette butts and ashtray...

...By any standards it is a mammoth exhibition, which reveals—in a way that smaller exhibitions could not?the relevance of these two movements to present art and their historical limits...

...For Breton, apparently, there was a certain decorum to be observed in such matters...

...The cultivation of automatic techniques in painting and poetry and the bizarre juxtaposition of images and objects, derived from the poet Lautreamont's example of "the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table," were intended to liberate art from the rules of the academy and the mortuary constraints of the museum...

...The Modern's exhibition foregoes such elaborate decor...

...The poet who could write: "Poetry, like love, is made in bed/It's rumpled sheets are the dawn of things," would also counsel young Lolitas to spend their time with Lewis Carroll and save themselves for Rimbaud later on...

...A particularly interesting and instructive sequence in the exhibition runs through the marvelous Miro paintings, through Picasso, through Masson and Matta, to the American painter Arshile Gorky—illuminating the influences upon his style and validating the kiss of peace bestowed upon him by Breton...

...By the time of Surrealism's demise, after World War II, its anti-esthetic stance was highly developed...

...Rubin marshals the two movements into an order that is tenable...

...Much of the interest in the Modern's exhibition is due not to the works themselves—Arp's sweet bio-morphic forms, Duchamp's bristling Readymades, the cryptic paintings of Miro, Max Ernst, Andre Masson —but to the checkered history of the movements as set forth in William S. Rubin's scholarly catalogue for the exhibition...

...Rubin, the Modern's new Curator of Painting and Sculpture, has brought an anatomist's skill to tracing out the esthetic maladies and the formal disorders of these two "exquisite corpses"—if one may borrow that title from the series of collaborative paintings and poems in which Breton and the Surrealist artists were engaged during the '20s and '30s...

...alert to the evidence for its own point of view and open to the contradictions...

...And it is as art that they have established ties with the new generation of painters and sculptors included in the Heritage section of Rubin's exhibition—the Pop-oriented and Happenings artists of the current scene: Robert Rauschen-berg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, Edward Kienholz...

...In a period when the young are teaching us the possibilities of turning moral positions into effective political action, movements like Dada and Surrealism are apt to appear old-fashioned and ineffectual...

...One way or another, then, these revisited styles and the shows devoted to them seem destined to alter the history of modern art...

...The main reason for this, I think, is that they set themselves to insult and provoke the hated middle class and its institutions—the very class, one would suppose, that might have provided the necessary political and social leverage for the revolution they sought...

...The zany transvestitism of his self-portraits as Rrose Selavy were part of a generalized sexual humor...

...For then-day (though this might not disqualify them now) they were probably too intellectual...

...By then the movement had become a period piece...

...Under Breton's guiding hand its anti-esthetic and anti-social ambitions were furthered by a host of functional devices—automatic writing and painting, a pervasive eroticism, a vocabulary of insult, the use of the dream state and dream imagery—or, as Breton once beautifully described it, "the pretty carpentry of sleep...