I’d only seen one or two of Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland before but you can see the complete (?) set here. These date from 1969 when Dalí was well past his prime as an artist but they’re still worth a look to see how he tackled each chapter, using the skipping girl motif from earlier paintings as his Alice figure. The attraction of the Alice books for the Surrealists is no surprise; Max Ernst produced a rather enigmatic series of Alice-themed lithographs while André Breton had earlier made Alice the “Siren of Stars” in the set of Surrealist playing cards he designed in the 1940 (below). I’d imagine there are other connections I’ve missed; leave a comment if you know of any. (Thanks to Charity for the tip!)

For more Dalí, here’s something I neglected to link to a while ago, the legendary Dalí meets Disney short, Destino.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Virtual Alice
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• Dalí and Film
• The Illustrators of Alice
• Surrealist cartomancy

L’Oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l’infini from A Edgar Poe (1882).

Another decently thorough Symbolist website covers the life and work of Odilon Redon (1840–1916), an artist whose pastels and prints were strange even by the standards of his contemporaries. His giant eyeballs and other floating figures are always startling and point the way inevitably to Surrealism, especially in dream lithographs like the one below.

Vision from Dans le Rêve (1879).

I compounded that Symbolist/Surrealist association when I was drawing The Call of Cthulhu in 1987 by showing Ardois-Boonot’s Dream Landscape (which Lovecraft doesn’t describe beyond the word “blasphemous”) as being a Max Ernst-style frottage canvas with a Redon eye rising from the murk. Cthulhu’s presence reduced to a single ocular motif like the eye of Sauron.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

And while we’re on the subject there’s Guy Maddin’s typically phantasmic short, Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity made for the BBC in 1995. Ostensibly based on the balloon picture above, this manages to reference a host of other Redon lithographs and charcoal drawings in the space of four-and-a-half minutes. Sublimely weird and weirdly sublime.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arthur Zaidenberg’s À Rebours
• The Heart of the World

Max (The Birdman) Ernst (1967).

Psychedelia is never far away here at { feuilleton }. Yesterday’s film poster reminded me of this work from the psychedelic era by Martin Sharp, an Australian artist who moved to London and became closely-associated with Oz magazine and London’s other leading psych poster designers, Michael English and Nigel Waymouth, aka Hapshash & the Coloured Coat. Sharp’s homage to the great Max was one of a number of his designs produced on metallic foil sheets, the reflective nature of which often presents difficulties for reproduction in other media.

Performance (1970).

I wonder how many people who admired Sharp’s poster puzzled over the meaning of the image, one of twenty-eight similar collages from the fourth chapter of Ernst’s 1934 “collage novel” Une Semaine de Bonté. Chapter four—Wednesday; Blood—concerns the criminal travails of a series of bird-headed individuals (or possibly the same individual in different guises) which end in abduction, possible rape/murder, and suicide. This picture of Ernst’s has always struck me as a very obvious rape metaphor with the woman stretched over the birdman’s lap and the knife piercing her foot. Ernst’s dark imagination—informed by Freudian concerns, as were most of his fellow Surrealists—separates the picture from the more lightweight Art Nouveau/Beardsleyesque stylings of the other London artists. Martin Sharp was producing collages of his own during this period so it’s easy to see why he was attracted to Ernst. And the popularity of his poster may explain why the birdman turns up in a painted version in Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, seen when Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) goes to pick mushrooms in the greenhouse. Ernst’s sinister birdman suits Performance very well, a token of the film’s atmosphere of weirdness and violence. (”A heavy evil film, don’t see it on acid” warned underground newspaper International Times.)

Bob Dylan: Blowing in the Mind (1967).

And to compound the connections a little more, Sharp’s famous Bob Dylan collage portrait (another foil sheet production) also turns up in Performance as part of the collage-covered screen in one of Turner’s rooms. Unlike his fellow Hapshash artists, Sharp’s work is under-documented on the web beyond pages such as this one. The same goes for Ernst’s collage novel but then the best way to experience that is to buy the Dover book edition.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Robing of The Birds
• Gandharva by Beaver & Krause
• The Look presents Nigel Waymouth
• The New Love Poetry
• Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
• Further back and faster
• Quite a performance
• Borges in Performance

Yet another of those curious Eastern European film posters which, to our Hollywood-colonised eyes, seem to violate all the conventions of cinema marketing. This example is a painting by Josef Vyletal for a 1970 Czech release of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Surrealist art enthusiasts will immediately identify the floating figures as being cut loose from Max Ernst’s The Robing of the Bride (1940). Compared to some Czech and Polish posters, the associations here aren’t so surprising; Ernst identified his alter-ego as a bird-headed individual named Loplop. Birds and bird-headed humans recur throughout his work. Hitchcock, meanwhile, famously commissioned Salvador Dalí to design the dream sequences in Spellbound (1945). One of Ernst’s few appearances as an actor is in Hans Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) a very Surrealist film which also features scenes informed by Ernst’s work. It’s a shame more directors didn’t take the opportunity to employ these talents while they were still alive.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballard and the painters
• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
• Czech film posters
• Hitchcock on film
• Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Dalí and Film

Unveiling another new piece of work, this is a T-shirt design for metal band Cyaegha whose Steps of Descent album I illustrated and designed last year. They asked for something based on HP Lovecraft’s god Nyarlathotep so I thought I’d take the opportunity to rework from scratch the version of this I created in 1999 for the first edition of The Haunter of the Dark. I always felt the earlier piece was going in the right direction but lacked somewhat in execution; this makes up for that. Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep is one of his most curious creations, in part because the conception of the character changed over many years. In various stories, letters and dream fragments the god/entity is variously described as an Egyptian pharaoh, an itinerant showman with electrical apparatus, the “black man” of European witch cults and the more typically Lovecraftian squamous alien monstrosity. The challenge, then, is to try and represent a little of each of these elements without overly favouring one or the other.

This is one of two illustrations I’ve produced in recent months which use Photoshop to imitate the engraving collage style of Wilfried Sätty, an artist whose work I discussed in an essay for Strange Attractor #2 in 2005. Sätty’s style was derived from Max Ernst’s famous collage “novels” of the 1930s and Photoshop is the ideal tool for this, far better than the old method of scissors, paper and glue. Sätty expanded Ernst’s technique by using reverse printing and the duplication of images; Photoshop extends the technique even further, making it possible to scale images up or down instead of being limited to the size of the original reproduction. The other illustration I’ve done in this style is for a short story and I’ll reveal that closer to publication. In the meantime I should be making a slightly different version of the new Nyarlathotep suitable for the usual range of CafePress products. More about those when they’re done.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Haunted Palace
• The art of Stephen Aldrich

Jours de Lenteur (1937) by Yves Tanguy.

Behind it, the ark of his covenant, stood two photographs in a hinged blackwood frame. On the left was a snapshot of himself at the age of four, sitting on a lawn between his parents before their divorce. On the right, exorcizing this memory, was a faded reproduction of a small painting he had clipped from a magazine, ‘Jours de Lenteur’ by Yves Tanguy. With its smooth, pebble-like objects, drained of all associations, suspended on a washed tidal floor, this painting had helped to free him from the tiresome repetitions of everyday life. The rounded milky forms were isolated on their ocean bed like the houseboat on the exposed bank of the river.

The Drought (1965).

Following my observations yesterday about Ballard’s Surrealist influences, this post seems inevitable. By no means a comprehensive listing, these are merely some of Ballard’s many art references retrieved after a quick browse through the bookshelves earlier. I’d forgotten about the Böcklin reference in The Crystal World. The Surrealist influence in Ballard’s fiction is obvious to even a casual reader, less obvious is the subtle influence of the Surrealist’s precursors, the Symbolists. André Breton frequently enthused over Gustave Moreau’s airless impasto visions and many of Ballard’s remote femmes fatales owe as much to Moreau’s paintings as they do to Paul Delvaux. The Symbolist connection was finally confirmed for me when RE/Search published their landmark JG Ballard in 1984; there among the list of books on his library shelves was that cult volume of mine, Dreamers of Decadence by Philippe Jullian.

The Robing of the Bride (1940) by Max Ernst.

The ‘Soft’ Death of Marilyn Monroe. Standing in front of him as she dressed, Karen Novotny’s body seemed as smooth and annealed as those frozen planes. Yet a displacement of time would drain away the soft interstices, leaving walls like scraped clinkers. He remembered Ernst’s ‘Robing’: Marilyn’s pitted skin, breasts of carved pumice, volcanic thighs, a face of ash. The widowed bride of Vesuvius.

You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe (1966).

The Isle of the Dead (second version; 1880) by Arnold Böcklin.

In the sudden flares of light over the water, reflected off the sharp points of his cheeks and jaw, a harder profile for a moment showed itself. Conscious of Sanders’s critical eye, Father Balthus added as an afterthought, to reassure the doctor: ‘The light at Port Matarre is always like this, very heavy and penumbral – do you know Böcklin’s painting, “Island of the Dead”, where the cypresses stand guard above a cliff pierced by a hypogeum, while a storm hovers over the sea? It’s in the Kunstmuseum in my native Basel –’

The Crystal World (1966).

The Echo (1943) by Paul Delvaux.

In the students’ gallery hung the fading reproductions of a dozen schools of painting, for the most part images of worlds without meaning. However, grouped together in a small alcove Halliday found the surrealists Delvaux, Chirico and Ernst. These strange landscapes, inspired by dreams that his own could no longer echo, filled Halliday with a profound sense of nostalgia. One above all, Delvaux’s ‘The Echo’, which depicted a naked Junoesque woman walking among immaculate ruins under a midnight sky, reminded Um of his own recurrent fantasy. The infinite longing contained in the picture, the synthetic time created by the receding images of the woman, belonged to the landscape of his unseen night.

The Day of Forever (1967).

The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dalí.

Franklin opened the centre drawer of his desk and stared at the assemblage laid out like a corpse on its bier of surgical cotton. There was a labelled fragment of lunar rock stolen from the NASA museum in Houston; a photograph taken with a zoom lens of Marion in a hotel bathroom, her white body almost merging into the tiles of the shower stall; a faded reproduction of Dali’s ‘Persistence of Memory’, with its soft watches and expiring embryo; a set of leucotomes whose points were masked by metal peas; and an emergency organ-donor card bequeathing to anyone in need his own brain.

News from the Sun (1982).

• How JG Ballard cast his shadow right across the arts

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dirty Dalí
• Ballard on Dalí
• Penguin Surrealism
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
• Surrealist women
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Arnold Böcklin and The Isle of the Dead

Panther Books paperback edition, 1968; cover painting: The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst.

If I can’t remember when I first encountered JG Ballard’s work, it’s not because I was reading him at a very early age, more that a childhood enthusiasm for science fiction made his books as omnipresent in my early life as any other writer on the sf, fantasy and horror shelves. I know that when I started to read the New Wave sf writers his work immediately stood out, not only for its originality but also for the numerous references to Surrealist painting which litter his early fiction, references which meant a great deal to this Surrealism-obsessed youth. Ballard was a lifelong and unrepentant enthusiast for the Surrealists, with repaintings by Brigid Marlin of two lost Paul Delvaux pictures prominent in one of his rooms (often featured in photo portraits). I always admired the way he never felt the need to apologise for Salvador Dalí’s excesses, unlike the majority of art critics who dismiss Dalí after he went to America. The paintings of Dalí, Delvaux, Tanguy and Max Ernst became stage sets which Ballard could populate with his affectless characters.

Once I’d encountered the New Worlds writers—Ballard, Michael Moorcock, M John Harrison, Brian Aldiss and company—and their American counterparts, especially Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delany and Norman Spinrad, there was no returning to the meagre thrills of hard sf with its techno-nerdery and bad writing. Ballard and Moorcock were the gateway drug to William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges and countless others, and I thought enough of his work in 1984 to attempt a series of unsuccessful illustrations based on The Atrocity Exhibition. It’s been an axiom during the twenty years I’ve worked at Savoy Books that Ballard, Moorcock and Harrison were (to borrow a phrase from Julian Cope) the Crucial Three of British letters, not Rushdie, Amis and McEwan. One of the books I designed for Savoy, The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson, was a Ballard and Moorcock favourite, and included appreciations of Richardson by both writers. I wish Ballard could have seen the new (and still delayed) edition of Engelbrecht but he got a copy of the earlier book. Sometimes once in a lifetime is more than enough.

• Ballardian.com
• Pages of obits and MM comment at Moorock’s Miscellany
• Ballard interview by V Vale at Arthur with an special intro by Moorcock
• Jeff VanderMeer at Omnivoracious
• Guardian | Times | Independent | Telegraph

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballard in Barcelona
• 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• JG Ballard book covers

Parsifal by Jean Delville (1890).

Continuing the occasional series of posts examining the evolution of a particular design or image, this one begins with a mystical charcoal drawing by Belgian Symbolist, Jean Delville (1867–1953), our object of concern being that entranced or dreaming face.

My first encounter with Delville’s image wasn’t via the original but came with this Seventies’ version produced for a Charles Williams paperback cover by illustrator Jim Lamb. (And this copy is the only one I can find, reused on a recent audiobook of Williams’ novel. If anyone has a link to a larger copy of the paperback cover then please post it in the comments.) Yes, this is tenuous but when I eventually got to see Delville’s picture it made me think immediately of Lamb’s illustration. Many Dimensions is one of my favourite books by Williams and unusually for him it deals with Islamic rather than Christian mysticism; in that case if Lamb was borrowing from Parsifal then it’s a case of the right image for the wrong book.

Jim Lamb is another illustrator from this period who now works mainly as a landscape artist.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

In 1987 I plundered Delville myself for The Call of Cthulhu as a means of showing dreaming artist Henry Wilcox whose visions of R’lyeh are one of the key events in the story. The Symbolist reference also connects him to that school of art although the sole example I showed of his painting owed more to Max Ernst. This is just one of many examples of intertextuality (or outright thievery) in my Cthulhu adaptation. I suppose one day I ought to list the others.

25th Human Be-In by Stanley Mouse (1991).

The inevitable psychedelic appropriation comes rather late with this poster by Stanley Mouse which not only lifts the face but reworks the whole drawing. I noted earlier Mouse’s fondness for fin de siècle imagery so the use of Delville comes as no surprise; the psychedelic artists enjoyed borrowing Symbolist and Art Nouveau motifs. And I’m sure this isn’t the last word on the use of Delville’s Parsifal. If there are other examples out there, post a comment.

Update: Mike suggests the Barney Bubbles painting of Miss Stacia on the sleeve of Space Ritual by Hawkwind. Barney’s Hawkwind art of this period owed a great deal to Alphonse Mucha but, given his considerable knowledge of art history, there could well be some Delville in there as well. So here it is.

Space Ritual (detail) by Barney Bubbles (1973).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Willy Pogàny’s Parsifal
• William Rimmer’s Evening Swan Song
• San Francisco angels

The Fencing Team by Bruce Sargeant.

Artists in the 20th century used to be multifarious in their activities, often taking their work through different stages or periods of evolution; Picasso and Max Ernst are two good examples of this. In today’s inflated art market this is no longer a wise move. As Brian Eno has noted in the case of the polymathic Tom Phillips, the pressure is there to establish yourself as a person who does one thing only, to turn yourself into a brand.

American artist Mark Beard isn’t happy with that situation. In order to satisfy a desire to create in whatever styles he chooses, he’s developed a number of distinct artist personalities, each with their own detailed biographies and even photographs (below). This isn’t entirely unprecedented, Marcel Duchamp famously had a female alter-ego named Rrose Sélavy, and was photographed by Man Ray in feminine attire, but offhand I can’t think of another artist going as far as creating six distinct personas. The painting above is one of a homoerotic sports-themed series by artist Bruce Sargeant who died, we’re told, in 1938 as a result of a wrestling accident. Examples of Beard’s other influences follow. For the complete artist biographies, see the Mark Beard pages at the John Stevenson gallery.

The artists

top left: Mark Beard (b. 1956); right: Bruce Sargeant and model (1898-1938)
middle left: Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon (1849-1930); right: Brechtolt Steeruwitz (1890-1973)
bottom left: Edith Thayer Cromwell (1993-1962); right: Peter Coulter (b. 1948)

Their works

Ideology: The Politically Correct Disdain the Frivolous by Mark Beard (1989).

Avant la Fuite by Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon (1894).

Swimmer Drying Himself, Berlin Olympics (1936), Young Athlete by Bruce Sargeant.

On the Strand by Edith Thayer Cromwell.

Das Krakenhaus by Brechtolt Steeruwitz (At the Hospital) (1923).

Cabinet by Peter Coulter.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

left: Morgan Le Fay by Roche Pierre (1904).
right: The Rock Drill by Jacob Epstein (1913–14).

An exhibition of ‘fantastic’ sculpture opened at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds last week with some fascinating juxtapositions, ranging from Fernand Khnopff’s Mask to Jacob Epstein’s marvellous Rock Drill which is more commonly one of the landmarks of the Tate Britain collection. Also on display is some work by a Romanian artist I hadn’t come across before, Dimitrie Paciurea (1873–1932), whose chimeras might seem influenced by Symbolism but which look a lot stranger than the usual Symbolist statuary.

Against Nature runs until May 4th, 2008.

Sculpture has frequently been used as a medium of metamorphosis. Its malleable materials allow fantastic forms to become real as it mixes human, animal and vegetal components. This was never more so than during the late 19th century when many sculptors turned their back on classical notions of anatomy and used sculpture as a vehicle for the imagination. This exhibition begins in the late 19th century and presents a common fascination with the world of the hybrid across the various art movements of the 20th century right up to recent years with the work of Louise Bourgeois.

Figures drawn from classical mythology—sphinxes, chimeras and centaurs—were the stock subjects of late 19th century Salon exhibitions. Meanwhile, outside the gallery, the pressures of industrialisation and of Darwin’s theory of evolution provided compelling new contexts for the hybrid. To say that sculpture was ‘against nature’ at this time is to suggest two lines of enquiry: firstly that sculpture could create impossible beings that went beyond the natural order, but which evolution could potentially deliver; secondly, that sculpture presents absurd fantasy creatures by means of realistic modelling so as to suggest their ‘real life’ existence.

Despite the various positions of each successive avant-garde movement—symbolism, futurism, vorticism, constructivism, surrealism—fantasy sculpture and anatomical reinvention run across them all. Sculptors soon moved from taking on mythological subjects to inventing their own modern monsters, drawing on the machine as much as on myth, as with Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill (1913-14).

This exhibition introduces little known sculptors from across Europe and the Americas and places them in a freakish family tree which also includes some of the ‘iconic’ images of modern sculpture. Thus the exhibition includes works by Hans Arp, Umberto Boccioni, Max Ernst, Julio González and Germaine Richier alongside Thomas Theodor Heine and Dimitrie Paciurea. It suggests a new way of looking at the emergence of modern sculpture and at its underlying continuities c.1890s-1980s.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bruges-la-Morte
• The Cult of Antinous

Monsieur Wiley in yesterday’s comments reminded me of George Franju’s seldom seen Judex, a 1963 film based on the Feuillade serials of the same name. Louis Feuillade (1873–1925), as you really ought to know by now, was the director of the original Fantômas serials (1913–14) and also Les Vampires (1915–16), obvious forerunners of Diabolik with all their black-clad nocturnal prowling. Feuillade’s criminals made fans of the Surrealists, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau and others but the director received stern reviews from less liberal critics for apparently promoting immorality:

“That a man of talent, an artist, as the director of most of the great films which have been the success and glory of Gaumont, starts again to deal with this unhealthy genre (the crime film), obsolete and condemned by all people of taste, remains for me a real problem.”

Hence the arrival in 1917 of Judex (The Judge), possibly the first costumed avenger in cinema, with his broad-brimmed hat and cloak, secret lair and network of helpful circus performers. Fictional immorality is less of a concern these days which perhaps explains why Fantômas and Les Vampires were resurrected on DVD first while Judex only appeared recently. I must admit that it’s Feuillade’s criminals which have always interested me for the most part, even if (as with many silent films) the romance of the concept is often more attractive than the actual work. (There are exceptions, of course; the Lon Cheney Phantom of the Opera is far better than the book.) Feuillade and his writer, Arthur Bernède, produced a series of spin-off novels while the films were being made (you thought novelizations were a recent thing?) and this page has some nice reproductions of the covers.

Judex turned up again in 1934, in a film directed by Maurice Champreux before Franju gave his own twist to the character. Franju is most famous for his exceptional horror film, Les Yeux sans Visage (1960) which still packs a punch today; I saw it at a cinema several years ago and one notorious scene drew gasps from an unprepared audience. Nearly everything else of his, Judex included, appears to be out of circulation. Franju began his career as a maker of documentary shorts whose approach to the medium was inspired by the juxtapositions of the Surrealists. In the celebrated Le Sang des bêtes (1949), he contrasted scenes of day-to-day life in Paris with film of animals being killed in the city’s slaughterhouses. This attitude was carried over into his dramas—Les Yeux manages to be lyrical as well as horrifying—and was impressive enough for Jean Cocteau to declare he’d happily entrust his work to Franju. This perhaps explains why Franju’s work has been so overlooked since his death in 1987, both he and Cocteau were mavericks who don’t easily fit the usual narrative of French cinema history.

left: Une Semaine de Bonté (1934) by Max Ernst; right Channing Pollock as Judex.

Franju’s Judex was portrayed by an American stage magician, Channing Pollock, whose act with doves was put to use in the film. There’s a great scene of a masked ball (the only part of the film I’ve yet seen) with all the characters wearing bird masks that looks like a page from Max Ernst’s collage novel, Une Semaine de Bonté, brought to life. Senses of Cinema compares the remake with the original:

Franju sought in particular to recapture Feuillade’s sense of documentary and his playfulness. He reproduced with as much exactitude as possible the costumes and settings which Feuillade filmed in scrupulous detail. Feuillade’s street-scapes are now an invaluable documentary record, but Franju also paid particular attention to reproducing the elaborate interior designs and furnishings of the day, resulting in settings of quite extraordinary detail and clutter. Franju also sought, despite the playfulness, to avoid any camp satire of these elements by over-emphasis or any special attention being paid to them.

In the title role, Franju pulled off his most brilliant coup by casting the master prestidigitator of his day, near godlike in his handsomeness, Channing Pollock. Pollock’s skills as a magician were employed to produce a dazzling array of apparent magical occurrences involving, most particularly, disappearing doves, a plot device that Feuillade uses to enable the regular rescue of the heroine and others by Judex. Franju’s Judex is a far livelier, less sombre, more inventive and more mysterious character than that of Feuillade.

Francine Bergé as the villainous Diana Monti in Franju’s Judex (1963).

Edith Scob (the faceless girl in Les Yeux) played Jacqueline, the imperilled heroine, while Francine Bergé incarnates yet another cat-suited Feuilladesque villain. The cat-suits returned, along with the masks, in a further Feuillade homage, Nuits Rouges (1974), a feature film cobbled together from a French TV series. This page has stills from all of these and this site concerning French pulp characters (from which much of the information above was swiped) goes into more detail about the creation of Judex. There you can also read about other fascinating personages such as Belphegor, Phantom of the Louvre (another creation of Arthur Bernède), Ferocias and the Mysterious Doctor Cornelius.

And so to the inevitable question: how long do we have to wait for a Judex DVD?

See also:
• Fantastic, Mysterious, and Adventurous Victoriana by Jess Nevins
• Les Vampires at archive.org

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Danger Diabolik
• Boys Own Books
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé
• Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren
• Fantômas
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau

Fantastic Art (1973).
Cover: Earth by Arcimboldo.

I’d thought of writing something about this book series even before I started this weblog since there’s very little information to be found about it online. I can’t compete with the serious Penguin-heads—and I’m not much of a dedicated book collector anyway—but I do have a decent collection of the art books that Pan/Ballantine published in the UK throughout the 1970s. These were published simultaneously by Ballantine/Peacock Press in the US and nearly all were edited by David Larkin, with Betty Ballantine overseeing the American editions. Two of the series, the Dalí and Magritte, were among the first art books I owned. Over the years I’ve gradually accumulated almost the full set and I always look for their distinctive white spines in secondhand shops.

The Pan books were a uniform size, approximately A4 (297 x 210 mm), with a single picture on each recto page and generous margins. The reproductions were excellent, printed on quality paper, and all featured specially-commissioned introductions (Ballard for the Dali book) with those pages printed on textured sheets. Each book was beautifully designed, with the opening pages and introductions often featuring black and white vignettes if the artists in question produced line drawings. Editor Larkin’s focus was on art that tended to the fantastic, visionary or imaginative, something that was in vogue throughout the Seventies after psychedelic art had ransacked the Victorian and Edwardian eras for inspiration a few years earlier. Aubrey Beardsley had been rediscovered in the mid-Sixties (ending up on the cover of Sgt. Pepper) and underground magazines such as Oz and IT helped create a renewed interest in art that would look good when you were stoned or tripping. The Pan books weren’t “head books” as such but its probably fair to say that the series was supported and made possible by that spirit.

Magritte (1972).
Cover: The Son of Man.

As the series developed, the format evolved away from fine art towards contemporary fantasy art, and as a result became less interesting for me, although the success of the Frazetta books undoubtedly meant that this was the way the sales were going. The demand for the Ernst and Rousseau titles can be gauged by the remainder cut-outs on their covers. The final volumes (which I’ve never bought) featured artists such as Brian Froud (The Dark Crystal), Alan Lee (The Lord of the Rings) and others, with their Faeries, Giants, Castles and Gnomes books. I’m still missing a couple of the earlier numbers which I could now order online but that would spoil the game of letting chance deliver the goods, wouldn’t it?

Fantastic Art is easily my favourite, a great collection of visionary work through the ages beginning with Bosch and proceeding through Goya, John Martin, Richard Dadd, the Symbolists and the Surrealists to what was then contemporary work by artists such as Hundertwasser. This was one of the first of the series and seems to be the key volume in the way it provides an overview of the art that would follow.

Dali (1974).
Cover: Raphaelesque Head Exploding.

A great introduction by JG Ballard in this one, replete with the usual phrases about “the dark causeways of our spinal columns”.

Innocent Art (1974).
Cover: Cat by André Duranton.

A collection of what used to be called naive painting, ie: work by unschooled “Sunday painters” such as Rousseau. Outsider art is the preferred term these days even though the work itself hasn’t always changed.

Max Ernst (1975).
Cover: Euclid.

Ernst’s later work in this book was the most abstract and experimental of the series. Europe After the Rain was printed across a fold-out sheet so that its full width could be displayed.

Rousseau (1975).
Cover: The Merry Jesters.

The English Dreamers (1975).
Cover: The Bridesmaid by John Everett Millais.

Arthur Rackham (1975).
Cover: Clerk Colville (from Some British Ballads).

Temptation (1975).
Cover: Ferdinand Lured by Ariel by John Everett Millais.

An unusual collection with a wide range of pictures (Bosch, Alma-Tadema, Balthus). Mainly concerns sexual temptation for female bodies but also includes Biblical and other temptations.

The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta (1975).
Cover: Egyptian Queen.

The book that launched a thousand metal albums. Volume One here was the first attempt to collect Frazetta’s work and was easily the most popular title of the series, going through many reprintings and inspiring three more volumes to follow. Many of the reproductions are superior to their equivalents in the later Icon retrospective collection. This was the first one I bought after the Surrealist books and, while I’ve never been a muscle fan, I couldn’t help but notice all the male flesh on display.

The Fantastic Creatures of Edward Julius Detmold (1976).
Cover: Shere Khan in the jungle (from The Jungle Book).

Charles and William Heath Robinson (1976).
Cover: Elfin Mount (from Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales).

A collection of the Robinsons’ fairy tale paintings. A break from the format with a blue cover.

The Paintings of Carl Larsson (1976).
Cover: The Kitchen.

Another break with the format as the book is printed landscape to suit Larsson’s drawings and paintings. As with the Ernst book, a fold-out page was a special feature.

The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen (1977).
Cover: The Tale of the Third Dervish.

A collection of Nielsen’s work modelled after Turkish and Persian miniatures.

Frank Frazetta, Book Two (1977).
Cover: Dark Kingdom.

Frank Frazetta, Book Three (1978).
Cover painting: Nightwinds.

The Fantastic Art of Sulamith Wülfing (1978).
Cover: The Big Dragon.

Part of the series but published by Fontana/Collins, not Pan.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Design by Germano Facetti with a detail from Europe after the Rain by Max Ernst.

Is this the start of a new meme? Ace Jet 170 features a number of posts about the history of Penguin and Pelican book cover design. (I won’t link to any specific page as the site is full of other good stuff which you really ought to go and look at.) Now Dan Hill at City of Sound has followed suit, inspiring me to dig out a few choice volumes connected by theme, in this case the use of Surrealist paintings for cover art.

See also:
• The Penguin Collectors’ Society
• The Penguin Paperback Spotters’ Guild (Flickr pool)

Detail from La Ville Pétrifiée by Max Ernst.

Detail from Landscape from a Dream by Paul Nash.

The Triangular Hour by Salvador Dalí.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

The first question has to be “Bertrand who?” but you won’t receive an answer here since information is scarce (see below). Bertrand’s erotic surrealism first appeared in the late Sixties, going by the dates in collections of his work. Some of his paintings and drawings crept into the underground mags of the period then turned up in odd places throughout the Seventies. The first I saw of any Bertrand art was on the cover of the pre-Savoy publication, Wordworks #6, and a music paper ad for the Chrome 12″, Inworlds.

French porn publisher Eric Losfeld produced a couple of large, limited edition collections of Bertrand’s work in the early Seventies. All the drawings reproduced here are from the battered 1971 volume shown above. If it seems surprising that these haven’t been reprinted it may be that Bertrand’s concerns are too weird or simply too unpleasant for contemporary tastes. Many of his ink drawings, and some of his paintings, seem to have begun life as decalcomania splotches, a Surrealist technique invented by Oscar Dominguez as a means of injecting chance into the creative process. Decalcomania produces random patterns which the artist then elaborates upon. Max Ernst’s famous Europe After the Rain, and a number of his other paintings from the 1940s, began life as a field of vaguely organic marks created by pressing thickly applied paint to the canvas with a sheet of glass or paper. Bertrand used ink stains in a similar way, with the result that most of his doe-eyed female figures (and his figures are nearly always women) are fringed by leafy or fungal growths. Many of his scenes are a kind of lesbian equivalent of the human/alien entanglements one finds in William Burroughs’ more elaborate flights of fancy. If his women aren’t being absorbed into some organic mass, they’re often being subject to investigation (even impalement) by spikes or claws, and here we perhaps find the reason his work remains out of print. Feminists then and now would have taken a dim view of Bertrand’s more violent works; even if Taschen did produce a Bertrand collection, it’s unlikely that many of the more grotesque pictures would be included.

All the pictures in the Losfeld books were produced in a short period from 1967–69. What happened to Bertrand afterwards remains a mystery. Did he decide to do pursue a different, more commercial direction? Is he still alive? The books offer no clue but maybe someone out there has the answer.

Update: Nathalie discovers that the artist in question is Raymond Bertrand, and more of his work can be seen here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Chrome: Perfumed Metal
• Oz magazine, 1967–73

Cadeau Audace by Man Ray (1921).

L’amour fou
Fur teacups, wheelbarrow chairs, lip-shaped sofas … the fashion, furniture and jewellery created by the Surrealists were useless, unique, decadent and, above all, very sexy.

Robert Hughes
The Guardian, Saturday March 24th, 2007

THE VICTORIA AND Albert’s big show for this year, Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, is—well, maybe we don’t much like the word “definitive”. But it’s certainly the first of its kind.

Everyone knows something about surrealism, the most popular art movement of the 20th century. The word has spread so far that people now say “surreal” when all they mean is “odd”, “totally weird” or “unexpected”. No doubt this would give heartburn to André Breton, the pope of the movement nearly a century ago, who took the title from his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had called his play The Breasts of Tiresias, “a surrealist drama”. But too late now. The term is many years out of its box and, through imprecision, has achieved something akin to eternal life. Surrealist painting and film, that is. In fact, some surrealist images have imprinted themselves so deeply and brightly on our ideas of visual imagery that we can’t imagine modern art (or, in fact, the idea of modernity itself) without them.

Think Salvador Dalí and his soft watches in The Persistence of Memory. Think Dalí again, in cahoots with Luis Buñuel, and the cut-throat razor slicing through the girl’s eye, as a sliver of cloud crosses the moon (actually, the eye belongs to a dead cow, but you never think this when you see their now venerable but forever fresh movie An Andalusian Dog, 1929). Think of photographer Man Ray’s fabulous Cadeau Audace (’Risky Present’, 1921), the flatiron to whose sole a row of tacks was soldered, guaranteeing the destruction of any dress it would be used on. Think of Rene Magritte’s The Rape, that hauntingly concise pubic face, with nipples for eyes and the hairy triangle where the mouth should be. Think of the shock, the horniness, the rebellion, the unwavering focus on creative freedom, the obsessive efforts to discover the new in the old by disclosure of the hidden.

But surrealist design? It seems almost a contradiction in terms. “Design” for us is strongly identified with industrial process, with modules, with the rationalisation of process into clear repeatability. To “design” something implies that it can be made not just once, but again and again and again, without loss of quality and intensity, like a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair or the old Parker 51 fountain pen. That an object is “designed” implies, or seems to, that every aspect of it from the first pencil scribble to the finishing touch and on to its intended use by the proposed consumer has been thought about and brought into full consciousness. It would therefore seem so remote from the spirit, the modus operandi, of surrealism as to have nothing to do with it. And to a great extent, it is. Something in surrealism, in the cult of the surrealist object, positively insisted that the thing should not have dwelled in experience before, and yet should be (mysteriously) a real thing in the real world, and preferably an old one (though not an antique). This meant either that it should have lost its context and even, if possible, the memory of that context, so that it appeared to the entranced eye of the spectator as something both filled with the ghosts of prior meanings and yet inexplicably new: an apparition of (urban) magic. It followed that most surrealist objects depended for their poetry on total uselessness. And how do you design something quite useless? You don’t. You create it. Hence the complete opposition between this show and the display of “Modernism” presented at the V&A last year, surveying the track of classical modernist design. Surreal Things is an inspired but logically necessary sequel: the rest of the apple.

Spectre of the Gardenia (1933) by Marcel Jean.

“Classical” modernist design—of furniture, rooms, and things in general—was usually done with one eye on the possibility of serial production. Surrealist design was most emphatically not. Practically everything called surrealist was one-off, even when it didn’t absolutely have to be. I’m not sure the word “design” really applies to some of the objects in the show, such as Marcel Jean’s Spectre of the Gardenia, 1933. This was a fusion of junk-shop resurrections. The head, though hardly recognisable as such, was a plaster cast of the 18th-century French sculptor Houdon’s portrait of the royal mistress, Madame Dubarry. Jean then turned her into a negress by covering the head with glued-on cloth, painted black. The eyelids became small zip-fasteners, opening horizontally to reveal tiny photos (a star, a face) where the pupils might have been. This fetishistic mask would have later echoes, such as the black leather S&M masks produced by the now almost forgotten American sculptor Nancy Grossman, whose work caused a brief sensation in New York in the 1970s. But on “design” as generally understood, such things as Marcel Jean’s head had no effect at all.

When it came to trying to decide the surreality of a thing or an image, the only question was: does this detach itself, stand out, from the world of common things around it? Does its oddity and apartness so distinguish it from the contents of the rest of the world that it promises access to a different sort of reality? Not a matter of newness (for looking new was of slight importance to surrealism), but rather of intensity and strangeness. Some surrealists fantasised about creating a canon of things that could, and just as importantly could not, be called surrealist. Man Ray toyed with the thought that “some kind of stamp or seal” might be invented to distinguish “the poem, the book, the drawing, the canvas, the sculpture, or the new construction” from all other things that were not certifiably surrealist. Naturally, this could not be done. Any effort to establish such copyrights was bound to fail. In fact, the only surrealist object that might, conceivably, have found a market niche for itself was the sofa designed by the English collector Edward James in tandem with Dalí: the justly famous pink sofa in the shape of Mae West’s lips. One could imagine a few takers for that hilariously voluptuous parody-object back in 1938, when the prototype was made, and it seems likely that more people would want one today.

People tended to assume that surrealism was mainly a Franco-Hispanic phenomenon, but nothing is quite so simple. There were English surrealists—indeed, you might say their appearance in the country of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll was ordained by fate. The most spectacular of them was, of course, James. He was one of the great English architectural extravagants, a reborn Walpole whose Strawberry Hill was a house in Sussex named Monkton. This startlingly idiosyncratic home had begun as a shooting lodge designed by Sir Edward Lutyens for James’ father, William, in 1902. By the time James and his Catalan friend Dalí were through with it (not that it was ever “finished”), it had become one of the strangest houses in 20th-century England, its outside covered in purple stucco, with faux-bamboo downpipes and, inside, wall-to-wall carpet woven with the menacing paw-prints of James’s pack of wolfhounds. Mother Nature made her appearance in such forms as a standing lamp made of a python, which James père had shot on one of his African safaris, and a fully grown, stuffed polar bear, which would later be dyed shocking pink and presented to Elsa Schiaparelli; it presided for a time over her Paris showroom, where it must have given her clients a certain frisson.

Where was the dreaming mind, always open to suggestion, to find the strange objects that could find and deserve a place in a surrealist scenario? Where but in the city, that great condenser of memory and experience? Nature was not what surrealism wanted; it wasn’t interested in the delights of the pastoral—in fact, it didn’t think them particularly delightful. It was above all a city affair. Surrealism always had at the back of its mind the definition of beauty-as-incongruity proposed by the crazily eccentric writer Isidore Ducasse, who wrote under the name of the Comte de Lautréamont: “Beautiful,” that worthy said, “as the chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”

Still Life (1933) by Man Ray.

The true surrealist city, the ground of all the movement’s imaginings, was of course Paris, that limitless and incomparable collage of things abutted in all their multitude of undeclared, secret, enigmatic relations. Not for nothing did the surrealist poet Louis Aragon call a book Le Paysan de Paris, implying that he had come to know the million and one images accumulated by the city, and that he tilled and fertilised them laboriously as a farmer works his soil. Paris was still a much stranger place in the 1920s than it could ever be today. Much of the old pre-Haussmann mystery still clung to its intestinal alleys and the glass-roofed arcades, where rejected things shrank from view behind grimy windows and then, scrutinised with a new eye, suddenly burst into a second life. To preserve the shock of that eyeblink transformation—that was the aim of the surrealist thing-maker. The “palette of objects” available to him (or her) was enormously variegated and rich, not least because junk was junk a hundred years ago—not potential “antiques”.

One of the merits of this show is that it’s the first (at any rate, the only one I’ve seen in more than four decades of reviewing) to take serious account of the relations between surrealism and the luxury arts—fashion design, interior decor, sales display, jewellery, and their various impresarios. By shifting the angle of view a little, as this show does, it is possible to see that these activities, if not intrinsically as important to surrealism as the painting or sculpture, certainly made big additions to the movement’s spirit, and that they did so through people not always included among the creators of surrealist work. One was the great designer Jean-Michel Frank, mainly known for his ultra-refined art deco furniture executed in such exotic materials as palisander, zebra wood and ivory inlays, but who turns out to have been, through his friendship with the poet René Crevel, a considerable surrealist “animator” in his own right. Moreover, it wasn’t the designers alone who created the various surrealist “looks”—a large part was played by their often highly receptive and creative clients, such as Charles de Beistegui. Not all of them, however, went along with the designers’ proposals. Who could? Dalí came up with what still sounds like a fairly repellent proposal for an animated armchair—”It will have life. It will breathe. There will be a mechanism which will follow the breathing of the human body.” There is no record that one of these gizmos was ever built—fortunately, perhaps, since one would not wish to be relaxing in it when the machinery went cuckoo, as it surely would have done after a few hours’ use.

Not so many years ago, liaisons between surrealism on one hand, and on the other the rich and chic and the businesses that served them, were almost always held by right-thinking, Marxist-leaning, avant-gardist people to be immoral affairs. They trivialised the very name of the artist. Fashion, particularly Paris couture, was by definition no part of proletarian Utopia; but come the revolution, which was, of course, right round the corner, giraffe-legged socialites from the 16th Arrondissement would not be tittuping about in gauzy taffetas and webs of gilded copper braid of the sort that Schiaparelli sent down her runway in 1949—no, it would be the virtuous austerities of cotton denim for them, and maybe a spanner stuck in the belt for a chic accessory. It didn’t happen like that, of course. Quite the reverse. “I have seen a young woman on the boulevard,” wrote Apollinaire, a poor art critic but a great poet, and one of the hearth-gods of surrealism, “dress in tiny mirrors that are appliquéd to the fabric. In sunlight the effect was dazzling. It was like a walking gold mine. Later it began to rain, and the lady looked like a silver mine … Fashion becomes practical, scorns nothing and ennobles everything. It does for substances what the Romantics did for words.”

Lee Miller photographed by Man Ray.

Fashion was sexy. So was surrealism. They were a natural fit. Nobody ever called cubism sexy, or constructivism, or any of the other movements of the early 20th century except German expressionism, which did have its sexy moments—though not so very many of them. But one of the core beliefs of the surrealists, as set forth by their leader, Andre Breton, was in l’amour fou, obsessional love, the kind of love that deranges the senses and tips those who feel it into a helpless vortex of appetite and feeling. Surrealism had its own cast of star women, seemingly imperishable love objects, all dead now, whose images nevertheless endure thanks to the photos of Man Ray, George Hoyningen-Huene and others. The most beautiful and desirable of them all was a first-rate photographer herself: the blonde American Lee Miller, who lived with Man Ray for a time in Paris and was one of the chief muses of surrealism. Her lips can be seen floating in the sky like some wondrous UFO above the breast-like domes of the Paris Observatory in Man Ray’s painting A l’heure de l’observateur. Sometimes it can be difficult to share the past’s enthusiasm for the sex-bombs of yesteryear, and Mae West, less a sex object than a parody of sexuality, is (at least for me) a case in point. But Miller, one of the most gorgeous American beauties of the 20th or any other century, was a wholly different matter.

When not gazing raptly on such Heloises, the yearning Abelards of surrealism invested a lot of energy in creating all sorts of sexual images, some of which—despite the huge expansion of pornography in modern life—have never been surpassed for conciseness and intensity. The young Jewish artist Meret Oppenheim made several. One was a startling re-use of a pair of white women’s shoes, which, bound tightly together and presented upside-down on a silver platter with paper chef’s frills on the high heels, became a sort of erotic chicken. But the most famous of Oppenheim’s works was Object, 1936, which grew out of an accessory design she had done for that principal patron of surrealist “thing-making”, Elsa Schiaparelli. For the brilliant couturier, Oppenheim had done a gold metal bracelet covered (on the outside) with beaver fur. She wore it to meet Picasso for drinks at the Café de Flore, and Picasso remarked that if you could have a fur bracelet then practically anything else could also be covered with fur, and so transformed. Why not a coffee cup, for instance? So Oppenheim went right ahead, with cup, spoon and saucer, and the result was one of the few really sublime sexual images of the 20th century. It compels you to imagine raising this furry cup, wet with hot fluid, to your lips; it offers no possible meaning other than cunnilingus; it is exquisitely graceful and inescapably direct, both at once, and if ever a single work was enough for one artist’s career, it is Oppenheim’s cup.

Object (1936) by Meret Oppenheim.

The romantic sexuality of surrealism expressed itself most frequently in one of its key images, the fashion dummy—not a statue, not a person, but a curiously haunting thing that carried reminiscences of high art—Giorgio de Chirico, whose piazzas and slanting shadows were haunted by these ambiguous manikins, was another of surrealism’s adopted ancestors. The use of mannequins covered a lot of territory, and a startling variety of moods. Sometimes they could be replaced by human models, particularly when some transgressive point needed to be made; the artist Oscar Dominguez installed one of these girls, passively reclining like some inordinately pretty creature who was nevertheless doomed to be rejected and thrown out, lying in a wooden wheelbarrow, which, in deference to her chic, was comfortably padded and lined with purple satin. But this use of the live human body favoured incongruities. One was a fashion shot for Harper’s Bazaar, in 1939, by Hoyningen-Huene, which showed a slender, beautiful model posed in front of Max Ernst’s The Fireside Angel. The creature one saw looming over her was one of Ernst’s most diabolic inventions—a ravening foretaste of nazism, a monster whose body is twisted into the unmistakable form of a hackenkreuz, or swastika, and not by any means (or so one might have thought) the sort of image that would make the magazine’s readers think “couture”. It was, however, the inanimate model—its status shifted towards that of a mere doll—that contained the most sinister possibilities of debasement and disturbance. The maestro here was Hans Bellmer, a somewhat bizarre sexual obsessive who loved mulling over themes of child rape, dismemberment, and general sexual nastiness behind the psychic woodpile.

Doll (1936) by Hans Bellmer.

Like Oskar Kokoschka before him, Bellmer made himself a human-sized doll. Unlike Kokoschka’s rag-and-stuffing effigy of Alma Mahler, however, Belmer’s doll represented not a grown-up woman but a prepubescent child. It did not commemorate anyone in particular, at least nobody whose name we know, but it was filled with the most intense significance for him. Jointed, modular, endowed with intricately modeled, hairless genitals, Mary Jane shoes and more than the ordinary number of limbs, capable of being twisted into all manner of postures and configurations, it was (literally) a parent’s nightmare and a sadist’s dream. Bellmer would set it up in various places, mostly threatening ones—corners of a wood, dark patches of grass. Then he would take photos of it. The images were apt to look like police evidence shots of crime scenes: plain, frank, not arty, not cleaned up. They spoke of dislocation, torment, violation and abandonment. This was, by the standards of the day, fairly sinister stuff, and its suggestion was far stronger than what it actually represented.

Surrealism itself was divided on the issue of what relation, if any, it should have to commerce. It was all very well to say, as some did, that the movement was born of a marriage of Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxist critiques of capitalism; certainly there had been a long flirtation with Trotsky on the part of some surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s, and others—including, disgracefully, Aragon in his over-the-top hymn of hate “The Red Front”—became outright Stalinists. But artists have to earn a living. In 1926, both Max Ernst and Joan Miró did backdrop designs for a production of Romeo and Juliet, by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. This earned them furious denunciations from Breton, Aragon and Picasso. “The moment you see a cheque you collaborate with reactionary White Russians! So much for that famous rigor of yours!” But such expostulations were not, in the end, terribly convincing. Most of the surrealists, including Breton, made their living by dealing, “art advising”, involvement in photography, advertising and the fashion industry. Indeed, without the patronage of fashion, it is hard to see how surrealism would have made its way in Paris at all.

Dalí, in particular, received a lot of flak for his relations with the rich. But he never made any pretence about this, unlike Picasso, whose communist sympathies were mostly wind. “Picasso is a genius!” Dalí would later exclaim. “Me too! Picasso is a Spaniard! Me too! Picasso is a communist! Me neither!”

At least old Avida Dollars (Breton’s clever anagrammatic nickname for him) tried to deceive no one, but his attitudes to filthy lucre were still misunderstood, sometimes willfully. Why would Dalí have turned to designing jewellery in the 1950s, collaborating with such jewellers as Fulco di Verdura and the Argentinian Carlos Alemany? Because, the received wisdom went, he was under the thumb of his mercenary harpy of a wife, Gala, whose demands for cash were so unrelenting and, in the end, so debilitating; because he had run out of ideas, and so was compelled to repeat his old ones (which were cliches by now, anyway) in different and grander materials than mere oil paint; and so on.

There was some truth to this. Gala was indeed a bullying ogress; practically nothing in the last half-century of Dalí’s painting life compares to the achievements of his genius up to, say, 1930, and the worst of late Dalí is unredeemable garbage. And yet, there was still some fire behind the moustache, and it flared up in such Dalí-designed jewels as the 1949 brooch in the form of a woman’s mouth made of pavé rubies, the lips slightly parted to reveal two rows of pearl teeth; or, better yet, the astonishing starfish he made in 1950 for a mid-western multimillionairess, an ultra-toy with five articulated arms made of rubies, diamonds, pearls, emeralds and gold, which has some claim to be the most impressive luxury object made in the 20th century. (You could bend its arms any way you liked, and they would stay in place; the catalog includes a photo of its owner, one Rebecca Harkness of Minnesota, wearing it on her breast, clinging there like a parasite for plutocrats, as if in possession of its host.)

But the most impressive jewel in the show is not by Dalí or any other “name” surrealist artist. It was designed and made by the Paris firm of Maison Boivin, through whose portals there strode one day in 1938 a rootin’-tootin’ Texas lady bearing the skull of a longhorn ox, picked up on her ranch. This, she declared, was to be the model for a brooch. And so Boivin made it: pavé diamonds all over, a wreath of emerald leaves cascading from one eye socket, a purple sapphire ribbon, polished gold horns. The whole thing more than four inches high. Just the objet to wear behind the wheel of your solid-gold Cadillac, with a couple of granite-jawed Texas Rangers riding shotgun. “Private collection”, the catalog says chastely. No bloody wonder.

One thing’s for sure: 50 years from now, nobody is going to be comparably impressed by the mingy, dispiriting trinkets cranked out by Tiffany with the names of Frank Gehry and Paloma Picasso on them. Not that anyone could be today, come to that. One of the effects of this show is to make you realise how sharply the very idea of decadence itself has decayed since the end of surréalisme au service de la luxe. The pressure of style has gone out of it, deflating it, leaving it somehow formless, gross and squishy, like so much of our sad and brutishly noisy culture.

• Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design is at the V&A, London SW7, from March 29 to July 22. Details: 0870 906 3883.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealist Revolution
• Surrealist Women
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Surrealist cartomancy

Latest book purchase is this large format volume from 1972, one of a number of interesting art books produced by Academy Editions in the early seventies. I also have their monographs on Odilon Redon, “insane” painter Richard Dadd, and their collection of Félicien Rops‘ pornographic and “Satanist” drawings which remains one of the few Rops books published in English.

Through the Looking-Glass by Mervyn Peake (Allen Wingate, London, 1954).

This collection is worth seeking out if you’re interested in minor Victorian and Edwardian illustrators. The book goes through each chapter of the Alice stories showing examples of illustrated editions by a wide range of illustrators and artists, from Lewis Carroll’s original drawings, Tenniel’s inimitable renderings, then on through the twentieth century, featuring artists such as Peter Blake, Ralph Steadman and even a picture by Max Ernst. The cover drawing is one of my favourites, from Charles Robinson, brother of the more famous William Heath. I also like the pictures by the great Mervyn Peake, one of the few illustrators who seemed able to overcome Tenniel’s dominance and show us something new.

The Alice books are one of the great “standards” (in the jazz sense) of illustration although I can’t say I’ve ever felt the temptation to approach them myself. Loathsome monstrosities from hideously-angled dimensions beyond space and time, yes; small Victorian girls and white rabbits, no.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

The riddle of the rocks
It was the art movement that shocked the world. It was sexy, weird and dangerous—and it’s still hugely influential today. Jonathan Jones travels to the coast of Spain to explore the landscape that inspired Salvador Dalí, the greatest surrealist of them all.

Jonathan Jones
Monday March 5, 2007
The Guardian

I AM SCRAMBLING over the rocks that dominate the coastline of Cadaqués in north-east Spain. They look like crumbling chunks of bread floating on a soup of seawater. Surreal is a word we throw about easily today, almost a century after it was coined by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Yet if there is anywhere on earth you can still hope to put a precise and historical meaning on the “surreal” and “surrealism”, it is among these rocks. To scramble over them is to enter a world of distorted scale inhabited by tiny monsters. Armoured invertebrates crawl about on barely submerged formations. I reach into the water for a shell and the orange pincers of a hermit crab flick my fingers away.

The entire history of surrealism—from the collages of Max Ernst to Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone—can be read in these igneous formations, just as surely as they unfold the geological history of Catalonia.

I sit down on a jagged ridge. What if I fell? Would they find a skeleton looking just like the bones of the four dead bishops in L’Age d’Or, the surrealist film Luis Buñuel shot here in 1930?

Buñuel had been shown these rocks by his college friend Dalí years earlier. It was here they had scripted their infamous film Un Chien Andalou. Dalí came from Figueras, on the Ampurdán plain beyond the mountains that enclose Cadaqués, and spent his childhood summers here, exploring the rock pools and being cruel to the sea creatures. In most people’s eyes, this is a beautiful Mediterranean setting. It certainly looked lovely to Dalí’s close friend, the poet Federico García Lorca, when Dalí brought him here in the 1920s: in his Ode to Salvador Dalí, Lorca lyrically praises the moon reflected in the calm, wide bay.

Buñuel and Dalí shared a baser sensibility. When they composed that screenplay here, they remembered Lorca’s poem—and sneered at it. The opening sequence they devised shows a thin band of cloud crossing a full moon, a beautiful nocturne. Cut to a razorblade slicing an eyeball. Sitting on these rocks, you can just picture Dalí and Buñuel over there on the beach, watching the moon over the water, and sniggering at their hideous travesty of Lorca’s poetry.

Dalí and Buñuel filmed Un Chien Andalou in Paris, and it is admired to this day as the most outrageous 17 minutes in cinema history. More to the point, from its opening image of an eye being destroyed, to its scenes of a man with his lover’s underarm hair in place of his mouth, its priests, and that cyclist dressed as a Dutch girl, it is funny; not drily amusing in an avant-garde way, but laugh-out-loud funny. “Irreverent” doesn’t do it justice; this is blackhearted cynicism.

When we speak of something being surreal, we mean something between funny peculiar and funny ha-ha. It is undoubtedly this comic dimension that made surrealism so popular in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and still does today. It survives as living culture, not as museum art. You would strain to discern the influence of, say, cubism in contemporary creativity, but it is entirely accurate to call the fiction of JG Ballard, the comic books of Alan Moore, the cinema of David Lynch and the fashion designs of Alexander McQueen surrealist. It’s equally valid to call TV’s Green Wing or Black Books surreal; after all, the surrealists adored the comedy of their day, especially Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers. Dalí even collaborated on a film idea with Harpo Marx.

Surrealism had brutal humour at its core: the movement’s leader, the French poet André Breton, published an Anthology of Black Humour. And Buñuel said he was drawn to surrealism by a grotesque joke: “I was fascinated by a photo in Le Révolution Surréaliste [the movement's journal] entitled Benjamin Péret Insulting a Priest.” That photograph still fascinates. The bespectacled Péret is shouting at a black-robed priest who turns in fury and shock; what is funny is the priest’s rage, the bad temper of someone not used to being addressed in that way.

Péret was a poet, and it was a group of poets in Paris in the early 1920s who invented surrealism. André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos and their friends had been involved with the Dada movement that sprang up in protest at the first world war. The aggressive humour so integral to surrealism is a continuation of Dada; nothing could be more Dadaist than insulting a priest. Started by German draft-dodgers in Zurich in 1916, Dada was a manifestation of contempt for a civilisation whose logic led to the Somme and Verdun. It fought against this by being chaotic, childish and irrational.

The terrible massacre of European youth made people want to rediscover Eros, to assert they were still alive: skirts got shorter, flappers flapped. The surrealists were at the forefront of this 1920s sexual revolution. They also took from Dada the belief that art is dead. Dada replaced art with readymade objects such as a urinal or a bike wheel. Surrealism added its own special intensity to the idea of the “found object” by emphasising the act of finding. A surrealist object cannot be just anything: it must be something that in the finder’s eyes is magical for reasons that can’t quite be put into words. “Only the marvellous is beautiful,” says the Manifesto of Surrealism, written by Breton in 1924. You see this appetite for the marvellous, as well as sex and black humour, in Man Ray’s iron with nails stuck in it, Meret Oppenheim’s furry cup, and Joseph Cornell’s dolls preserved in fetishistic boxes; work by all three artists will be on show at the V&A’s Surreal Things exhibition later this month.

The French poets and intellectuals who dominated the surrealist movement acted like an elite revolutionary organisation that met in cafes and apartments for long, bitter debates and miniature show trials. Breton’s Manifesto cites an amazing cast of surrealist predecessors, from Dante to Poe, but most of all Sigmund Freud. It might seem that what drew the surrealists to Freud was his insistence that sexuality is the driving force of personality. Yet what intrigued them equally were the Viennese doctor’s analyses of how dream images are formed and how the subconscious causes slips of the tongue.

The surrealists were inspired by Freud to try to tap into the unconscious, to find a new kind of image. Breton called this “psychic automatism”. He was amazed to encounter the work of the artist Max Ernst, believing that, working independently in Cologne, the German had discovered through collage a new “automatist” way of making visual art. And so Ernst became the first “surrealist artist”.

So many artists followed Ernst into the movement that surrealism is now remembered essentially as an art movement. Joan Miró, in the 1920s, made paintings according to automatist principles; their perfect sense of space gave depth and reality to an amoebic creature that’s just a couple of black lines and blobs in blue space. Belgian René Magritte painted in a deliberately flat, conventional style that makes images such as 1928’s The Lovers, with its veiled, suffocating faces, all the more obscene. And yet surrealism had yet to discover its full potential. It had yet to encounter Dalí.

The reason I am at Cadaqués is, ultimately, to try to understand the most famous surrealist of all, the artist who became its moustached icon. In the hard, clear paintings that followed Un Chien Andalou, Dalí turns his unconscious into grand opera, confessing to every deviation mentioned in Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality. His paintings, objects and cinema are lurid and excessive, their Freudianism so explicit it can seem a cheap put-on.

It is strange to stand here watching boys throw pebbles into the sea at Cadaqués. In Dalí’s painting The Spectre of Sex Appeal, he portrays himself as a child in a sailor suit on this same beach, looking up at a monstrous mutilated body whose pink rounded flesh is his remembered introduction to the world of adult desire. There is nothing wholesome about any of Dalí’s memories, or his vision of this landscape. One peculiarly shaped rock near Cadaqués lent its silhouette to his perverse composition The Great Masturbator.

Dalí saw no difference between the avant-garde and popular culture, and excelled at the art of sensation: when a surrealist exhibition was staged at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936, it was Dalí who made the papers by giving a lecture wearing a deep-sea diving suit complete with brass helmet—and collapsing.

Dalí projected his dreams so clearly they fascinated fashion designers and Hollywood, where he worked with Alfred Hitchcock and even Walt Disney. He happily designed the lip sofas that feature in the V&A show and, in his one-man museum in Figueras, created an entire room whose furniture forms itself into Mae West’s face, with sofa lips. None of this was the betrayal of surrealism that Breton and his comrades accused him of after they threw him out of the movement in 1936, for confessing to a fascination with Hitler. Surrealism was an attempt to release “the marvellous” into everyday existence. Dalí, a clever man, saw that this connected it with architecture, which shapes our everyday environment.

His hero was the Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí. At Figueras, you see Dalí’s desire to create a total environment of fantasy such as Gaudí’s rapturous house Casa Batlló. This is what Dalí’s Mae West room, lip sofa and telephone with a lobster for a receiver try to do: replace reality with fantasy, as Gaudí’s architecture does. Nothing could be more surreal. Dalí did it in a way anyone could respond to. Soon designers were making surrealist dresses, Cecil Beaton taking surrealist fashion photos. Dalí travelled far from home and, some say, lost his soul painting portraits of rich Americans. To track him back to his childhood haunts among the Catalan rocks is to discover his authentic surrealist soul.

As soon as you hit the Ampurdán plain, you start to sense how honest, how intense, an artist Dalí is. The obsessions that fill his art are all too real. Take Vermeer’s painting, The Lacemaker; when Dalí was old and rich and widely seen as a hack, he sat down to copy it in the Louvre and drew a rhino horn. Yet his fascination with this image of a woman working was perfectly real. In Figueras, there is an early painting, Woman at the Window in Figueras. Made in 1926, it portrays a girl working with her needle in front of a view of the Ampurdán hills. Vermeer’s Lacemaker itself appears in Un Chien Andalou.

The journey east from Figueras to Cadaqués takes you across an immense open space that, with its tall sky and fringe of hills, is instantly recognisable from Dalí’s 1930s paintings Spain and Soft Construction With Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War). For Dalí, this becomes the plain of La Mancha across which Don Quixote wandered in his madness, a dry and dusty space in which he sees Spain’s tragedy. But it is only when you descend to Cadaqués that you realise something crucial. Whatever else he is, Dalí is Spain’s landscape artist. Like John Constable, he was in thrall to his “early scenes”. It is the persistent reappearance, endlessly metamorphosised, of the rocks and cliffs of this unique coast that anchors his art in a real, physical context of memory and longing. I collected a horny crab shell in a rock pool at Cadaqués; looking at Dalí’s portrait of the surrealist Paul Eluard, I realised a lion’s head in the painting is based directly on the shape of this crab.

Freud liked to compare his method with that of an archaeologist who digs down to expose layer upon layer of buried pasts all existing in the same mind. This image of textured depth could easily be a description of surrealist art. In Ernst’s paintings of swarms of barbarians, savage forests and lost cities, you get that archaeological sense of texture, just as you do in Giorgio di Chirico’s melancholy classical cities, where it is always a dead moment in a Mediterranean afternoon.

Surrealism is about time. It is about the tantalising and unreliable nature of memory, about the melting fabric of experience. The rocks at Cadaqués are remarkable not only for their biomorphic shapes at a distance, but even more, their layered, crumpled texture up close. These rocks are remains of a vast lava flow from an ancient volcano. Flowing between north and south, the white hot river settled in a series of layers that were then blasted, eroded and exposed along the seashore. The rocks are not only fractured in strata but perforated by huge gas bubbles made when the stone was hot and flowing. Telling the earth’s time in their apparent fluidity, they are Dalí’s soft watches.

I took that horny Dalínian crab shell from the sea at Cadaqués, along with a sea urchin, perhaps related to the one on Dalí’s shaved head, in a photograph that makes him look like the inventor of the mohican; but by the time I got them home, they were just a pile of dust in my bag. Surrealism as we experience it today—when we speak of a surreal advert, a surreal sitcom—is just the dust, the shards of Europe’s last great revolutionary art.

• Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design is at the V&A, London SW7, from March 29 to July 22. Details: 0870 906 3883 and www.vam.ac.uk. Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or will feature in Dali & Film, at Tate Modern, London SW1, from June 1 to September 9. Details: 020-7887 8888 and www.tate.org.uk.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The persistence of DNA
• Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
• The music of Igor Wakhévitch
• Dalí Atomicus
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie

Die Arche des Odysseus (1948–1956).

Adam Bei Sich (1969).

A major Austrian painter and printmaker, Rudolf Hausner studied art at the Academy in Vienna from 1931 to 1936, under Fahringer and Sterrer. Many of his early paintings were confiscated and branded as ‘degenerate’ by the ruling Nazi party in 1938. In 1941 Hausner was drafted by the German army and remained a soldier until the war’s end in 1945. After the war he returned to Vienna and immersed himself in studies dealing with the unconscious and with the art of Surrealists, particularly that of Max Ernst. Along with Wolfgang Hutter and Anton Lehmden, Rudolf Hausner founded the Viennese School of Fantastic Realism in 1947. During the 1950s and 1960s this became one of Austria’s most important movements and Hausner was its most influential artist. During this time he also held principal teaching posts at the academies of Vienna and Hamburg.

Equally gifted as a painter, lithographer and etcher, Hausner’s complex art is based upon potent symbols and imagery. Primary among these is the constantly recurring image of the first man, Adam, who is part autobiographical and part archetype. Another compelling image is that of the man or boy in a sailor’s cap. Hausner claimed that this image symbolized the myth of Odysseus and his epic voyages on the seas. It also, however, is representative of the artist’s own boyhood and the integrated relationships of youth and age within the self.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Birthday by Dorothea Tanning (b.1910).
My personal favourite, a very accomplished painter who married Max Ernst.

Cazadora de Astros by Remedios Varo (1908–1963).
Mexican artist and a friend of Leonora Carrington.

I Saw Three Cities by Kay Sage (1898–1961).
The wife of Yves Tanguy.

The Shooting Gallery by Toyen (Marie Cermínová) (1902–1980).
A Czech artist who rejected her given name. Poorly represented on the web.

Illustration (title unknown) by Valentine Hugo (1887–1968).
Another painter and illustrator with few examples on websites.

Little Hermit Sphinx by Leonor Fini (1908–1996).
Not always classed among the Surrealists but all her early paintings show a Surrealist influence.

Tendreams.org has a great selection of galleries for Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Leonor Fini. A shame that their way of presenting the pictures has to be so annoying. Leonor Fini also has an official site.

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• Leonora Carrington

The Guardian profiles the wonderful Leonora Carrington, one of the last of the original Surrealists. There’s little excuse for the Tate’s neglect as recounted below, Marina Warner has championed her work for years and she was the subject of a TV documentary in the BBC’s Omnibus strand in the 1990s. Maybe the Tate curators should watch more television.

Leonora and me

Leonora Carrington ran off with Max Ernst, hung out with Picasso, fled the Nazis and escaped from a psychiatric hospital. Joanna Moorhead travels to Mexico to track down her long-lost cousin, one of Britain’s finest—and neglected—surrealists.

Joanna Moorhead
Tuesday January 2, 2007
The Guardian

A few months ago, I found myself next to a Mexican woman at a dinner party. I told her that my father’s cousin, whom I’d never met and knew little about, was an artist in Mexico City. “I don’t expect you’ve heard of her, though,” I said. “Her name is Leonora Carrington.”
The woman was taken aback. “Heard of her? My goodness, everyone in Mexico has heard of her. Leonora Carrington! She’s hugely famous. How can she be your cousin, and yet you know nothing about her?”

How indeed? At home, I looked her up, and found myself plunged into a world of mysterious and magical paintings. Dark canvases dominated by a large, sinister-looking house; strange and slightly menacing women, mostly tall and wearing big cloaks; ethereal figures, often captured in the process of changing from one form to another; faces within bodies; long, spindly fingers; horses, dogs and birds.

I remembered from childhood hearing stories about a cousin who had disappeared “to be an artist’s model”. But the truth was infinitely richer and more thrilling. Leonora Carrington, born into a bourgeois family, eloped at the age of 20 to live with the surrealist artist, Max Ernst (married, and some 20 years her senior). The couple fled across war-torn Europe in the late 1930s, and she later settled in Mexico, where she continued to paint, write and sculpt.

Most excitingly, though, Leonora was still alive – aged nearly 90 and living in a suburb of Mexico City with her husband, a Hungarian photographer. I contacted my Carrington cousins and discovered that one of them had visited her a couple of years ago: she was, he reported, on amazing form, and still working. I wrote to ask whether she’d be prepared to meet. Word came back that she would, and a few weeks later I flew to Mexico City.

Leonora Carrington looks eerily like my father – the same piercing eyes, the same trace of an upper-class English accent. We met at her house, and she led me through her dark dining room, crammed with her sculptures, to the kitchen where we were to spend most of the next three days, chatting endlessly over cups of Lipton’s tea (”I hardly touch alcohol,” she told me. “Enough people in our family have died of drink. Anyway I smoke, and it’s too much to drink and smoke.”)

Leonora was born in 1917, the only daughter (she had three brothers) of textile magnate Harold Carrington and his Irish wife, Maurie Moorhead, my grandfather’s older sister. Harold and Maurie were very different characters: where he was entrepreneurial, Protestant and a workaholic, Maurie was easy-going, Catholic and open-minded. The family home was an imposing mansion in Lancashire, Crookhey Hall – the sinister house that features in many of her paintings.

Leonora was expelled from three or four schools, but the one thing she did learn was a love of art. Her father was not keen on her going to art college, but her mother intervened and she was allowed to go and study in Florence. There, she was exposed to the Italian masters, whose love of gold, vermilion and earth colours were to inspire her later work.

She returned to England brimming with enthusiasm for the artist’s life, but her father had other ideas. As far as he was concerned, she had sown her wild oats and now needed to come back to earth. This meant launching her as a debutante: a ball was held in her honour at the Ritz, and she was presented to George V. A few years later, in a surreal short story The Debutante, she poured out her loathing of “the season”, with a witty description of sending a hyena along to take her place at her coming-out ball.

In 1936, the first surrealist exhibition opened in London – for Leonora, something of an epiphany. “I fell in love with Max [Ernst]’s paintings before I fell in love with Max,” she says. She met Ernst at a dinner party. “Our family weren’t cultured or intellectual – we were the good old bourgeoisie, after all,” she says. “From Max I had my education: I learned about art and literature. He taught me everything.”

Leonora and Ernst left London and settled in an apartment in Paris. Their life was complicated – he was still spending time with his wife – but for Leonora there was a sense of freedom after the claustrophobia of London, and she plunged dizzily into Picasso’s Paris.

Picasso is just one of the artists she came to know. “A typical Spaniard – he thought all women were in love with him,” she remembers. And were they? “Well, I certainly wasn’t. Though I liked his art.” And then there was Salvador Dalí: “I met him by chance one day in André Breton’s shop. He certainly wasn’t extraordinary then: he looked like everyone else. It was only when he went to America that he started looking extraordinary.” Dalí liked her – “a most important woman artist,” he called her. She didn’t much like Man Ray, “though I liked his girlfriend Ady Fidelin. What she saw in him, I’ll never know – it certainly wasn’t his looks.” The couple knew Joan Miró – “He gave me some money one day and told me to get him some cigarettes. I gave it back and said if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself. I wasn’t daunted by any of them.” In Paris, Leonora found her real family, an artistic community she felt connected with, and equal to.

In 1938, Ernst finally left his wife, and he and Leonora moved to Provence. The photographer Lee Miller was a frequent guest, and we look at some of Miller’s pictures together: I tell her that Ernst has an impish look about him. She smiles warmly: “But remember, I was much younger than him. I could out-imp even him!” They had become one another’s muses – though she laughs when she hears I was told she had run off to become an artist’s model. “I was never his model!” she snorts. She painted him, and he painted her: it was a time of great creativity for them both and, with Ernst’s encouragement, Leonora began to write as well as paint.

Their idyll was brought to a shattering conclusion with the arrival of the Nazis, and Ernst’s subsequent internment as an enemy alien. In her memoir, Down Below (Virago, 1989), Leonora describes her suffering after Ernst was taken away. She fled to Spain, had a breakdown and ended up in a psychiatric hospital in Santander.

Back home in Lancashire, my father remembers the worried conferences about what had happened to her. Eventually, Leonora’s father sent a business contact to get Leonora out of hospital in Santander, put her on a ship to South Africa, and have her admitted to a sanatorium there, instead. But waiting for the boat in Lisbon, Leonora gave her father’s minders the slip and escaped through the back door of a cafe. She jumped into a taxi and said the first thing that came into her head: “Take me to the Mexican embassy!”

One of her friends in Paris had been a Mexican diplomat, Renato Leduc, a friend of Picasso’s, who was now in Lisbon. His solution to her predicament was to marry her, to get her away from the clutches of her family, and from Europe.

While they were waiting in Lisbon for the boat to the US, Ernst arrived in town, now liberated and with the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, who had fallen hopelessly in love with him. Also in their entourage were Peggy’s ex-husband, Ernst’s ex-wife and a collection of children. A master of understatement, Leonora described those weeks as they waited to go to New York as “very weird”. Her own affair with Ernst was not reignited.

After a few months in New York, Leonora and Leduc dissolved their marriage of convenience and she moved to Mexico, where, a few years later, she met and married her husband, Csizi (”Chiki”) Weisz. Six decades on, they are still together. “How old is he?” I asked her. “Goodness knows,” she fired back, with her usual quick wit. “He’s been saying he’s 95 for about eight years. I haven’t the faintest idea.” The couple have two sons, Gabriel and Pablo.

Mexico gave Leonora the space and opportunity to sculpt and to paint, and – with its Aztec and Mayan history and its cult of the dead – a fresh and rich seam of inspiration. There were new artists to share ideas with: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (she liked her better than him, she says); and the artist to whom, apart from Ernst, she has been closest in her life, Remedios Varo.

Today, Leonora’s life combines the domestic concerns of an elderly wife with the preoccupations of the international artist. One minute she is dispatching the nurse for Chiki’s drugs: the next deciding whether to use acrylic or wax for the model of her next big sculpture, commissioned by a multinational bank (her commissions come mainly from Mexico and north America). She doesn’t enjoy sculpting as much as painting: sculpting, she says, is inevitably corrupted by all the other people who need to be involved, and made tedious by endless hassles with the foundry. “With painting it’s just you and the canvas.” Still, she frets about whether she will be able to go on painting: she seems to both long for and dread the moment when she will pick up her paintbrush again. When I ask her how a painting comes about, what the impetus is, she fixes me with the Moorhead stare. “You don’t decide to paint. It’s like getting hungry and going to the kitchen to eat. It’s a need, not a choice.”

Over the years, she has had to sell most of her paintings, and now regrets that she has only two. She takes me to a locked room off her roof garden and puts them on an easel; but as soon as I ask her about them, she whisks them away and ushers me back downstairs. She refuses to be drawn into any analysis of why she has painted what she has.

Back in England, I talk to Matthew Gale, a curator at Tate Modern, about Leonora’s significance as an artist, and detect an embarrassment that the Tate owns only two of her works, both pen and ink drawings. “In many ways, Britain has acted in the same way as your family,” he says. “She has been neglected: apart from the collector Edward James, who bought many of her paintings, and an exhibition at the Serpentine in the 1980s, she’s had very little exposure here. But all the time, she’s been building up a massive international reputation, so suddenly we’re scrabbling around to catch up, to put her in her rightful place in her native country.”

Her importance, he says, lies partly in that she – along with artists such as Leonor Fini and Remedios Varo – opened up a new, and more female, strand of surrealism: in Mexico, Leonora and Varo dabbled in alchemy and the occult, and the work of both was rooted for a time in the magical and domestic elements of women’s lives. “One of the extraordinary aspects of Leonora’s work is how she draws on so many different inspirations, from the Celtic legends she learned from her nanny, through the constraints of her upper-class upbringing, to the surrealism of Paris in the 1930s – and then to the magic of Mexico,” Gale says. “Her work is evocative of so many things, and it’s enormously complex: she hasn’t had a massive output because her technique is so meticulous and the work so detailed. She certainly wasn’t a Picasso who could churn out several pictures a day; her work would take many months, even years.”

When I tell Leonora about my conversation with Gale, she is thrilled. I hear the mischievous note in her voice that once so infuriated her father, and delighted Max Ernst. “So, they think they should have more of my work, do they?” she says. “Good! That’s made my day!”

We say goodbye, and I imagine her heading back to the kitchen for another cup of tea and a cigarette. Maybe, as she sits there, she will allow herself a few moments back in 1930s Paris, or one of those long, hot days in Provence with Ernst. Maybe she will go back further, to the family she felt first suffocated her ambitions, and then shunned her. And maybe, just maybe, she will find it in her heart to forgive them. She was, after all, the best of us; it is going to be Leonora whom history remembers.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Las Pozas and Edward James
• Surrealist cartomancy

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

(left) “Mechanical Head (Spirit of Our Age)” by Raoul Hausmann.

‘Dada’ at MoMA: The Moment When Artists Took Over the Asylum

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: June 16, 2006

NOW is as good a time as any for a big museum to take another crack at Dada, which arose in the poisoned climate of World War I, when governments were lying, and soldiers were dying, and society looked like it was going bananas. Not unreasonably the Dadaists figured that art’s only sane option, in its impotence, was to go nuts too.

“Total pandemonium” was how the sculptor Hans Arp reported the situation in 1916 at the great Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where Dada was born. “Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost.”

I’m sure you had to be there.

The Dada show, opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is pretty much an official survey (an oxymoron), and, this being MoMA, nearly all 450 or so objects in it look elegant, which they were certainly never intended to look. Interpret that as you will. The buttoned-down museum, which in many ways seems to have lost its bearings, returns to its roots.

The exhibition arrives after stops in Paris (where, papered with hundreds of documents and arranged like a chessboard of small rooms, it was by all accounts superbly eccentric) and in Washington, where it was pared down and didactic.

Splitting the difference, MoMA’s curator, Anne Umland, has added Dada touches like two separate entrances. (You choose.) She knows the Dadaists were actually closet aesthetes. After Marcel Duchamp waltzed into a plumbing equipment manufacturer on lower Fifth Avenue, acquired a porcelain urinal, signed it “R. Mutt” and submitted the now notorious “Fountain” to an art show, he claimed to be horrified when people found his readymade beautiful.

Art by declaration had replaced art by discrimination. A urinal, a snow shovel, a hat rack and a bicycle wheel fastened to a stool were art because he said so, and who was to say they weren’t? Except that, by the same token, if someone decided the urinal or snow shovel looked aesthetically pleasing, who was he to deny it?

Such became the world of modern art, and either you are the sort of skeptic who thinks that art went to hell in a handbasket, or you see that Dada opened art up to the everyday and we are its beneficiaries. That hat rack looks awfully stylish now, and so does the mobile fashioned out of clothes hangers by Man Ray, never mind if it’s still a little hard to love the silvered plumbing trap that Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Livingston Schamberg titled “God.” (I wonder if they noticed that the curlicue of the trap spells each of those letters in lowercase?)

In any event, it’s good to be reacquainted with a generation that had no market to speak of and for whom society’s corruption and exhaustion seemed a golden opportunity to make themselves useful. Politicians were responsible for mass murder, advertisers were conmen, the press self-censoring.

So Dadaists figured it was time to throw away the rules, and you can tell they had a ball doing so. Out with jingoism and the clichés of romanticism and Expressionism, whose self-centeredness they particularly despised, and in with a new spirit of internationalism, collaboration, serendipity and transparency. (Duchamp’s cracked glass was the operative symbol.) Dada stood for freedom. Art may be useless but it is also indispensable.

The show is organized by cities, different artists having come to the same notion of Dada around the same time in different places. Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Arp and his wife, Sophie Taeuber, settled in neutral Zurich. Ball, seeing corpses on the battlefield, had contemplated suicide. Marcel Janco said that he could still hear the bombardments in faraway Verdun while he slept.

Out of this came antiwar happenings and lyrical abstractions. Arp and Taeuber, separately and together, made collages, jig-sawed reliefs, chalices and bowls in earthen colors, and marionettes with faces like Oceanic masks for retelling an 18th-century play, “The King Stag,” as an allegory of psychoanalysis. “Kill me, kill me. I have not analyzed myself and can’t stand it anymore!” was the king’s minister’s big line.

In Cologne, Max Ernst, who fought in an artillery brigade, turned to montages of human biplanes and other nightmare creatures, while Johannes Baargeld delved into gender-bending, a Dada obsession, escaping into the uncanny from a catastrophe that in Berlin provoked Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann and Georg Grosz to produce the most overtly political art. They devised nonsense texts, photomontages of dismembered and reconfigured bodies and of the Kaiser as a war machine excreting Dada artists, and mannequins with prostheses.

Höch and Hausmann dreamed of a populist revolution. Their works were sublime: anti-art advertisements, slapstick assemblages of ingenious designs, exploiting the implicit veracity of photographs. Cut apart, like the war wounded, the photographs reconfigured truth and proposed a new form of mass media. They teemed with half-mechanical men, de Chirico’s tailor dummies transformed into Hausmann’s “Spirit of Our Age,” a sculpture made out of a hairdresser’s wig-making dummy to which are attached a crocodile wallet, a ruler, a collapsible cup and a tape measure, as if in lieu of a brain: the essence of nullity.

In Hanover, Kurt Schwitters was transposing trolley stubs and other bits of junk into constructions whose compression was a metaphor of urban life, and he was conceiving his own castle of Dada, his “Merzbau.”

As for Duchamp, who had left his first readymade behind in Paris, with Man Ray and Francis Picabia in New York he made mischief entailing photographs and machine parts and cross-dressing and girls. Consumer culture was an obvious target. A show at Francis Naumann’s gallery on the Upper East Side spotlights the female artists who were also in town, whom the Modern leaves out, like Katherine Dreier and Florine Stettheimer. Between the two exhibitions, it’s obvious how early and crazy New York was with Dada.

After the war everybody gravitated to Paris, which turned out to be Dada’s Waterloo, a hothouse salon scene of bloviating nihilists who loved to fight. The show, like the movement, nearly peters out at this point on the Seine.

“It is the loss of community,” writes Leah Dickerman, the Washington curator, in the show’s catalog, “that haunts Dada.” She meant the loss of the prewar communities in Europe. The Dadaists themselves basically split up by the mid-20’s, succeeded by Surrealism, whose lunacy was strictly regimented by its leaders. Hitched to Surrealism in history books, Dada has suffered by association, a fate this landmark show rectifies.

It is curious to see how some artists hold up in it. Schwitters, minus the Merzbau, looks marginal; Picabia and Ernst, deft but often galling in their fastidiousness; Grosz, separated from his late work, like a major player. His watercolor-collage of a whore and suitor, a fat tart and a tin man with hollow eyes fed numbers by a pair of disembodied hands, is the classic Weimar image.

“Kindhearted malice” was Hausmann’s phrase. Cynical and traumatized, the Dadaists were tireless young optimists at heart. Despairing of the war and the effects of technology, they nevertheless discovered a world full of wonders in machines and the modern cityscape. In Viking Eggeling’s film, “Symphonie Diagonale,” abstract blips dance across the screen, aspiring to the ecstasies of music. In René Clair’s and Picabia’s “Entr’acte,” two men prance around a cannon, a ballerina turns into a bearded man and a funeral procession becomes a chase scene.

In Hans Richter’s “Ghosts Before Breakfast,” eight gloriously loopy minutes of bowler hats flying through the sky like a flock of birds, fire hoses winding and unwinding themselves, and men wearing fake beards and disappearing behind lampposts, the rudimentary tricks of film are used to replace real-world anarchy with a new, exhilarating madness.

The next German regime didn’t miss the point. The Nazis deemed Richter’s film degenerate, and Hindemith’s soundtrack for it is lost.

Dada, it turned out, was never really as impotent as it feared. It still isn’t.

“Dada” opens Sunday and continues through Sept. 11 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; (212) 708-9400.

Ask anyone for a definition of this term and most people would immediately mention Leonardo Da Vinci (can his reputation survive Dan Brown?) or Michelangelo, the two most highly-regarded geniuses of the Italian Renaissance. While Leonardo’s numerous achievments are well-documented, Michelangelo’s work as a painter and sculptor tends to overshadow his other talents as an architect (most notably for the dome of St. Peter’s basilica in Rome) and writer of over three hundred homoerotic sonnets and madrigals dedicated to Tommaso dei Cavalieri.

A lesser known figure of the period who perhaps exemplifies the full range of the polymathic Renaissance ideal is Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472). In an era over-stuffed with geniuses, Alberti tends to be overlooked but his achievements in a variety of fields still seem staggering today.

One of Alberti’s earliest works was Philodoxeus (’Lover of Glory’, 1424), written when he was 20, a Latin comedy that was convincing enough as a parody of Classical style to pass for an original work of the Roman era. Other works followed, among them De commodis litterarum atque incommodis (’On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literary Studies’, 1429), Intercoenales (’Table Talk’, ca. 1429), Della famiglia (’On the Family’, begun 1432), Vita S. Potiti (’Life of St. Potitus’, 1433), De iure (’On Law’, 1437), Theogenius (’The Origin of the Gods’, ca. 1440), Profugorium ab aerumna (’Refuge from Mental Anguish’, 1442-43), Momus (another Classical comedy, 1450) and De Iciarchia (’On the Prince’, 1468). More significant than all of these was Della Pittura from 1436, the first ever study of perspective construction. Alberti’s friend Filippo Brunelleschi had earlier devised his own system of perspective but Alberti was the first to set the principles in book form for other artists.

Brunelleschi was an architect and Alberti also produced his own architectural designs, including the Rucellai Palace in Florence, the first Renaissance building using a system of Classical pilasters, and the facade of the Santa Maria Novella church. His monumental study De re aedificatoria (’On the Art of Building’) was begun in 1450 and occupied him for the rest of his life, a ten-volume work and the first of its kind to address modern architecture based on Classical principles. This was also the first work of architecture to be printed in 1485 and remained an essential working text up to the 18th century. The book’s recommendations for fortification and siege defence were in use for hundreds of years.

Alberti’s restless talents also encompassed music (he was an accomplished organist), map-making and cryptography. The polyalphabetic cypher he created in 1467 was the first significant cypher of its kind since Julius Caesar’s and has since earned him the title “Father of Western Cryptography.” Alberti has also been proposed as the author of the enigmatic Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499. The jury is still out on this but this is a book whose creation would certainly require someone of Alberti’s breadth of knowledge.

The Renaissance ideal rather fell out of favour in the 20th century, even though there were more than enough polymaths to go around (Harry Smith comes to mind). No one in Quattrocento Italy would accuse any of the great men of the period of being a “jack of all trades, master of none”, the familiar dismissal of a culture that makes a virtue of aiming low. Artists today have to compete in an art market saturated with mediocre work which means they need to find a single gimmick that distinguishes them from the crowd then plug it for all it’s worth. As Robert Hughes memorably says in The Shock of the New, “More artists came out of American art schools in a single year in the 1980s than there were people living in Florence during the Renaissance.” Artists like Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Tom Phillips let their curiosity and creativity carry them forward, producing work that ranges over a variety of styles and media. Phillips is a good example of the contemporary Renaissance man, a painter, sculptor, writer, composer and creator of the extraordinary artwork/experimental novel A Humument. The fact that most people are unfamiliar with his name says more about our world than it does about the value of Phillips’ work. Robert Heinlein isn’t a writer I usually have much time for but he had the perfect riposte to this situation, and to the philistine assertion of “jack of all trades, master of none”. “Specialisation,” Heinlein said, “is for insects.”

Portrait of Charles Henri Ford in Poppy Field by Pavel Tchelitchew (1933).

View magazine was an American periodical of art and literature, published quarterly from 1940 to 1947 with heavy emphasis on the Surrealist art of the period. The jaw-dropping list of contributors included: Pavel Tchelitchew, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, André Masson, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Paul Klee, Albert Camus, Lawrence Durrell, Georgia O’Keefe, Man Ray, Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Jean Genet, René Magritte, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, and Edouard Roditi.

The editor was Charles Henri Ford, one of those mercurial polymaths who seemed to know everybody of significance in the world of arts and letters which explains how he could summon such an extraordinary roster of contributors. Ford made a splash initially in 1933 when he co-wrote what’s generally regarded as the first gay novel, The Young and Evil, with Parker Tyler. This received guarded praise from Gertrude Stein (Ford’s writing was influenced by Stein and Joyce) who later said it was “the novel that beat the Beat Generation by a generation”, and the book was sufficiently frank about the lives of its Greenwich Village characters to be banned in the US until the 1960s.

The tragedy of all magazines is that they flourish for a period then are quickly forgotten, no matter how much impact they may have made in the general culture. View was published in limited runs which means individual copies now command high prices. At a time when other forms of media are being continually resurrected, magazines fall by the wayside; museums and libraries collect them but they remain out of view of the world at large. The web has been slowly alleviating this problem: editions of Oz are now available for online browsing and there’s a complete copy of the “Americana Fantastica” issue of View here. You can also see the incredible Aspen magazine over at the wonderful Ubuweb. Fingers crossed that somebody eventually gives us the rest of View.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – JANUARY 1943 (SERIES II, NO.4)
Cover by Joseph Cornell.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 1943 (SERIES III, NO.3)
Cover by Andre Masson.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1943 (SERIES III, NO.4)
Cover by Pavel Tchelitchew.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MAY / SUMMER 1944 (SERIES IV, NO.2)
Cover by Georgia O’Keeffe.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – FALL 1944 (SERIES IV, NO.3)
Cover by Fernand Leger.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – FALL 1944 (SERIES IV, No.4)
Cover by Esteban Frances.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH 1945 (SERIES V, NO.1)
Cover by Marcel Duchamp.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MAY 1945 (SERIES V, NO.2)
Cover by Wilfredo Lam.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.3)
Cover by Morris Hirshfield.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – NOVEMBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.4)
Cover by Leon Kelly.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1945 (SERIES V, NO.5)
Cover by Andre Masson.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH 1946 (SERIES VI, No. 1)
Cover: Brancussi’s studio.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 1946 (SERIES VI, No. 2)
Cover by Rene Magritte.

VIEW: THE MODERN MAGAZINE – MARCH / SPRING 1947 (SERIES VI, NO.3)
Cover by Pavel Tchelitchew.

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The Jeu de Marseilles was named after the city of its creation, and it’s no coincidence that one of the most well-known medieval Tarot designs is the Marseilles deck. Breton and his artist friends—Wifredo Lam, Max Ernst, Jacqueline Lamba, Oscar Dominguez, Victor Brauner, Jacques Hérold, André Masson and Frédéric Delanglade—were stranded in the French port along with many other artists, writers and intellectuals attempting to escape Nazi-occupied Europe and gain passage to the America. The creation of the card deck became a way of passing the time during several months of anxious waiting.

Typically for a group that had already spent a decade analysing and deconstructing all available artistic media, it wasn’t enough to merely redecorate an existing pack of cards, Breton wanted a thorough reinvention along Surrealist principles. So the traditional suits were renamed accordingly: Flames (red) for love and desire, Stars (black) for dreams, Wheels (red) for revolution, and Locks (black) for knowledge. Even though the number of cards was kept at fifty-two, this highly symbolic structure places the deck closer to the Tarot arrangement of Wands, Cups, Swords and Discs, rather than the usual Clubs, Hearts, Spades and Diamonds. Breton was a committed Communist so having a royal hierarchy of King and Queen lording it over a humble Jack was quite unacceptable; these were subsequently re-named Genius, Siren and Magus. Again, the name Magus here is interesting for the added occult reference it gives to the design. Alfred Jarry’s grotesque Pa Ubu (above) was nominated as the Joker.

Flames: Ace; Genius: Baudelaire; Siren: Mariana Alcofardo; Magus: Novalis.

Stars: Ace; Genius: Lautréamont; Siren: Alice (from Lewis Carroll); Magus: Freud.

Wheels: Ace; Genius: De Sade; Siren: Lamiel (from Stendhal); Magus: Pancho Villa.

Locks: Ace; Genius: Hegel; Siren: Hélène Smith; Magus: Paracelcus.

The Jeu de Marseilles was eventually produced as a proper deck of cards (with the original sketches being reworked slightly) and has been reprinted several times since. Copies can still be found at reasonable prices from specialist card dealers.

Thanks to Eroom Nala for research assistance!

Metamorphosis of Hitler’s Face into a Moonlit Landscape with Accompaniment (1958).

Impressions de la Haute Mongolie (1976/Salvador Dali/José Montes-Baquer/Germany)

In any list of films I’d currently most like to see but can’t due to lack of availability, this bizarre “documentary” collaboration between Salvador Dalí and José Montes-Baquer would be near the top of the list. I saw it once, probably shortly after it had been made, when the BBC screened it as part of their Omnibus arts series in the late seventies. By this time I was already very familiar with the Surrealists, Dalí, Magritte and Max Ernst especially, so it was great to see Dalí himself declaring a supposed mission to explore Upper Mongolia in a search for giant hallucinogenic mushrooms. This premise aside, I remember few other details, the whole film was as delightfully confusing as might be expected. The most distinct memory was of the painting above being shown, then the camera pulling back some distance to reveal the full extent of Hitler’s face which is only hinted at in the original. Happily, a web review now provides us with some more details:

Homage to Impressions d’Afrique (1909), is a free-associative poem written by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), even though he never visited Africa. The film is dedicated to this French author, forefather of the Surrealists, who developed a formal constraint system to generate inspiration from dislocative puns.

Dalí does the very same thing with this chimerical pseudocumentary leading us to the mysterious realm of High Mongolia where a gigantic white soft mushroom grows, many times more hallucinogenic than LSD! From his studio-museum in Cadacès (Spain), he proceeds to report on the alleged scientific expedition sent out by himself to retrieve this precious treasure, with newspaper clips and newsreel. Childhood memories (like the picture above) are the opportunity to explain more thoroughly the source of his inspiration. This bucolic landscape is in fact a close up of Hitler’s portrait (his nose and moustache) turned to the side!

Wholly Dalíesque, this film experiment pieces together astonishing combinations of superimposed images, fading in and out, switching scale with odd perspectives. Dalí invents a filmmaking process and applies his very language to cinematic purposes, bending the rules to serve his desperate need for originality. Travelling through a microscopic close up of paintings or rough surfaces, his voiceover commentary gives sense to the landscapes taking form under his eyes.

Impressions of Africa was also the title of a Dalí painting from 1938, of course:

It’s probably too much to hope that this will turn up on TV again, so for now I suppose I’ll have to look forward to it appearing on DVD at some point in the future. How about it José?

Update: Ubuweb has a copy!