The Darker Side of Magritte, the Kinder, Gentler Surrealist

Is any artist linked inseparably with an article of clothing as René Magritte and the bowler hat? Whether raining down from the sky or with faces obscured by apples, Magritte’s bowler-hatted men have found a home in mainstream visual culture even if Magritte’s own name always hasn’t. Over the years, Magritte’s become the kinder, gentler Surrealist—the anti-Dali who doesn’t roam nightmare landscapes of the psyche full of sex and madness. We know and almost want to know a Magritte as gentle as the Paul Simon song about him, but the reality (like the reality of the song, if you listen closely) is much stranger and darker. The Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition, Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938, goes back to the beginning of Magritte’s career, before widespread acceptance and Magritte’s own public image making smoothed the rough edges of his Surrealism, which was just as sharp and disturbing as that of Dali, but less obvious for looking so ordinary. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Darker Side of Magritte, the Kinder, Gentler Surrealist."

Leonora Carrington: Last of the Surrealists

Surrealism never served its women well. Lee Miller basically seduced Man Ray to gain entry into what was predominantly a men’s club. Leonora Carrington met Max Ernst at a party. Ernst left his wife for the striking art student 25 years his junior and introduced her to Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Yves Tanguy. Joan Miró once asked Carrington to go out and pick her up some cigarettes. Carrington refused, unable to accept second-class status as a Surrealist. This past week Carrington passed away at the age of 94, the last of the legendary Surrealists and a reminder of how difficult it once was (and in many ways still is) for women to break into the ranks of art. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Leonora Carrington: Last of the Surrealists."

[Leonora Carrington (Mexican, born England, 1917). The Inn of the Dawn Horse (Self-Portrait), ca. 1937–1938. Oil on canvas; 25 5/8 x 32 in. (65 x 81.3 cm.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, 2002 (2002.456.1). © 2004 Leonora Carrington/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.]

Mother of Invention

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the origin of big, bad, brawny Jackson Pollock’s drip and splatter paintings was a wifely homemaker, mother, and grandmother from Brooklyn? And wouldn’t it be true? Gary Snyder Fine Art in New York City presents the work of Janet Sobel, whose early 1940s drip paintings inspired Pollock to explore the possibilities of that style and essentially found the Abstract Expressionist school. Rather than rise likewise into fame and fortune, Sobel moved with her husband and family to Plainfield, New Jersey, and enduring obscurity. Gary Snyder brings Sobel back to the big city and the big stage she deserves. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Mother of Invention."

[Image: Janet Sobel, Untitled (JS-032), c. 1944, oil on caning]

[Many thanks to Gary Snyder Fine Art for providing me with the image above and press materials for Janet Sobel at Gary Snyder Project Space: Drip Paintings and Selected Works on Paper, running now through February 27, 2010.]

Stop Making Sense

If Salvador Dali is the king of Surrealism, Max Ernst is the court jester. Born April 2, 1891, Ernst took the absurdity of Surrealism and Dada and emphasized the humor of the joke of reality over the existential angst accompanying the loss of rationality. In Aquis Submersus (above, from 1919), a doll-like figure with a handlebar mustache stands at the edge of a swimming pool surrounded by buildings. The buildings, however, seem more like two-dimensional stage backdrops. Their shadows appear behind as if projected onto a wall. The moon reflected in the water turns out to be a clock hung high above the scene. It is as if one of Giorgio de Chirico’s ominously unpopulated towns had been recreated by a grade school class for the school play. Ernst certainly knew of de Chirico’s art and is playing off of him here. de Chirico actually resisted the label of Surrealist, so Ernst may be trying to help him out here by showing how a little absurdity could be injected into de Chirico’s surreal seriousness.

For Ernst and other Surrealists and Dadaists, every scrap of the world around them was fodder for foolishness. In The Hat Makes the Man (above, from 1920), Ernst cut out pictures of hats from catalogues, pasted them to a page, and linked them with lines of color to “make” living creatures roaming across the page. Always the clown, Ernst puns visually on the idea of “the hat makes the man” and literally constructs a “man” out of hats. Ernst claimed that the pictures of the hats and other bourgeois items for sale “provoked” him to action. Freud, in many ways the Surrealist’s best friend, saw hats as symbolizing repressed desire, literally keeping a lid on the id. Ernst runs with that idea and creates phallic columns of writhing hats struggling to keep things tidy. Just as Rene Magritte would later use bowler hats to stand in for the erasure of the modern man’s sense of self, Ernst uses hats to signify the fruitless struggle to cover up human urges.

Ernst’s Ubu Imperator (above, from 1923) pays homage to the father of Dadaism, Alfred Jarry. Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi inspired generations of European artists to “stop making sense” and thus deny the conditions of society presented by authority. Jarry founded the fake science of 'Pataphysics, or "the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments," as Jarry unhelpfully described it. Like The Hat Makes the Man, Ubu Imperator is an individual made up entirely of accoutrements. Whatever animates the clothing might be human, but we’re not sure. All we know is that the clothing, which represents the commercialism and standards of a society, however vain and cruel, is coming our way. The great paradox of Ernst’s work is that while it almost never depicts a recognizable human, it contains a great deal of humanism. I look at some of Dali’s paintings and feel only sadness and horror at how they tear open the inhumanity of the world. When I look at Ernst and his covered-up characters, I laugh and feel hopeful that there’s something still worthwhile deep inside.

Tripping Down Under

When James Gleeson, Australia’s leading Surrealist painter died just last month at 92 years of age, on October 20th, he left behind a long legacy of artistic achievement as well as art scholarship. Born November 21, 1915, Gleeson traveled through Europe from 1947 through 1949 drinking in the lessons of not only the Old Masters but also newer artists such as Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst. Gleeson’s We Inhabit the Corrosive Littoral of Habit (above, from 1940) shows the influence of Dali by copying the Spanish Surrealist’s technique of ripping away parts of the figure to reveal a hollowness inside, like chocolate Easter bunnies. Gleeson believes that habit, namely the rational autopilot we all use on a daily basis, corrodes our imagination the way that the ocean erodes the littoral or shoreline. Coming from Australia, an island nation surrounded by corroding seas, Gleeson sought to break out from those confining boundaries both physically and imaginatively through the use of Surrealism. Coming in the second wave of Surrealism, however, Gleeson benefitted from the psychedelic sixties in a way that his older models could not.

Many of Gleeson’s titles sound like they would make great titles for a Pink Floyd song or album. I can hear David Gilmour’s guitar work on Sky Technotronics (above) right now. The colors that Gleeson used and the way he modeled them are truly “tripping.” Beneath that trippy exterior, however, Gleeson studied hard the ideas of Carl Jung, specifically the collective unconscious. Whereas earlier Surrealists tended to lean heavier towards Sigmund Freud’s more sex-driven psychology, Gleeson taps Jung’s collective unconscious in a freer, more interesting way. However, Gleeson does bring up sexuality in his art. You can see here a collection of more of Gleeson’s work, including startlingly frank male nudes through which Gleeson asserted his homosexuality in a fine arts setting. Gleeson truly allowed his fantasy life free rein in all his works. By using the surrealist technique of decalcomania, in which paint is pressed on to the surface of the canvas using a piece of paper and allowed to go where it wishes, Gleeson allowed his materials to let go and, therefore, freed himself to let go and follow the “accidents” wherever they led.


Of course, Gleeson’s art can’t be considered a complete “accident.” Too much thought and imagination goes into a work such as Keeper of Used Shadows (above, from 1986). Again, the title alone draws you into the work. At first glance, Gleeson’s Keeper of Used Shadows resembles the fantasy art of someone like Frank Frazetta, but Gleeson’s deep knowledge of art history elevates it beyond pure science fiction and fantasy. Gleeson actually painted a series of works he called “psychoscapes” in which he attempted to paint liquid, solid, and air coming together to symbolize the unconscious and conscious parts of the human mind uniting. You can say that Gleeson asked for the impossible, but he made it possible, at least in his art. Gleeson’s appreciation for art history instilled in him the desire to create new ways of seeing appropriate to modern human existence, just as the old ways served the olden days. As they used to say in the Sixties, “Feed your head.” James Gleeson’s art gives us more than enough to chew on.

Born Again

When Max Ernst joined the German army to serve in World War I he felt like his life had ended, writing later that "Max Ernst died the 1st of August, 1914." Born April 2, 1891, Ernst’s rebirth as an artist took place in the wake of the Great War as the madness of a generation’s self-destruction called for the Dadaism and Surrealism that flourished where reason failed. In Pietà or Revolution by Night (above, from 1923), Ernst addresses his father issues by mimicking the familiar image of the pieta, replacing the Virgin Mary with his cold, distant father and Christ with himself as cold, hard marble. A figure resembling Sigmund Freud lurks in the background just to clear up any doubts that a psychodrama’s playing out here.


Ernst learned from every artist he encountered in his travels, from Paul Klee to Giorgio de Chirico. The Elephant Celebes (above, from 1921) pays homage to de Chirico in creating a monstrous machine-elephant set to rumble down the ominous streets of an unpopulated de Chirico town. The Elephant Celebes also confounds nature and technology in a way that anyone intimately familiar with the mechanized murder of World War I would still have nightmares about. Ernst’s Elephant could easily share a surrealist zoo habitat with the bizarre creations of Salvador Dali.

When fascism began to spread across Europe in the run-up to World War II, Ernst responded with Une Semaine de Bonté (one image from which appears above, from 1934), a series of collages made from cutting apart Victorian Era magazines and books and building bizarre images set in deceivingly tranquil, homey situations. Joseph Cornell saw these images and borrowed the technique and the spirit of Ernst for many of his own “boxes.” Ernst himself never found a truly stable home. He left his lover, the artist Leonora Carrington, behind when he fled France after the German occupation of World War II. Once in America, he wed art patron Peggy Guggenheim, only to divorce her and marry fellow surrealist Dorothea Tanning in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browner—perhaps the only double wedding in art history. Ernst’s work puzzles me, but in a good way. The instability of his life and his artistic vision match the instability of the world crumbling around him. In his second life, the surreal had truly become the real.

More Than Just a Pretty Face

Self Portrait in Headband, New York, 1932 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2008. All rights reserved.

A high fashion model beginning in the 1920s, Lee Miller starred first in front of the camera and later behind it—sometimes even both, as in Self Portrait in Headband, New York (above). Miller’s legendary beauty beguiled fellow artists such as Man Ray and Picasso, earning her the title of “muse of the Surrealist movement.” Behind that beauty, however, hid great pain. Raped by a family friend at just seven years of age, and contracting gonorrhea from the experience, Lee became, in the words of fellow Surrealist Eileen Agar, “a remarkable woman, completely unsentimental and sometimes ruthless.” Miller’s “ruthlessness” served her well in first carving out a niche in the all-male club of Surrealist art and later in pursuing the most horrific corners of World War II as one of the first female photojournalists in battle. The PMA’s current exhibition, The Art of Lee Miller, commemorates the centennial of her birth and displays the depth of artistry behind that artful exterior.

Lee Miller was literally born in front of a camera, the child of devoted amateur photographer father in Poughkeepsie, New York. Theodore photographed his precious daughter at eight years of age, just one year after the tragic rape, nude in the snow in a work he called “December Morn.” He continued to photograph his daughter in artistic nudes up through her early twenties, honing her modeling skills. When Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue, discovered Lee in 1927, her modeling career as the quintessential flapper began. Mark Haworth-Booth, in the catalogue to the exhibition, describes Miller’s appearance in these photographs as “an elegant woman accustomed to command.” Even when appearing in a Kotex feminine product ad, the first to feature a woman, Miller seems in cool command and serenely sexual.

Miller’s ability to command helped gain her entry into the world of art when she moved to Paris in 1929. “My name is Lee Miller and I’m your new student,” she legendarily told Man Ray upon finally meeting him. Despite Man Ray’s protest that he didn’t take students, he took Miller on as a student, assistant, and lover for the next three years. “Lee learned Man Ray’s techniques so well, including solarization, which required very careful adjustments of lighting, exposure and development,” Haworth-Booth writes, “that many of her portraits can stand comparison with his.” Her relationship with Man Ray opens a whole new world for Miller, leading to an appearance in the 1931 Surreal film The Blood of a Poet by Jean Cocteau, and friendships with Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and other artists. Paris itself became her Surrealist subject, influenced heavily by the photography of Eugene Atget, a precursor to the Surrealist movement that they adopted posthumously as one of their own. Miller believed that her female intuition gave her, and all female photographers, an advantage over her male counterparts in “understand[ing] personalities more quickly than men,” which comes across in the many portraits she did around this time of actor Charles Chaplin, poet Mina Loy, and others.

Portrait of Space, Nr Siwa, Egypt, 1937 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2008. All rights reserved

After her relationship with Man Ray ends in 1932, Miller meets and marries an Egyptian government official named Aziz Eloui Bey in 1934. Living in Egypt, Miller photographs street scenes in Cairo as well as landscapes during expeditions into the surrounding desert. The stark landscape becomes the subject of works such as her beautiful Portrait of Space, Nr Siwa, Egypt (above), which looks through a broken screen onto the desert and mountains in the distance. The catalogue reproduces the series of photographs Miller shot before arriving at the final version of Portrait of Space, allowing you to see the mental process Miller performed in cropping and editing the image and choosing just the right angle to achieve the exact effect she wanted. The aridity of the Egyptian terrain provided the perfect subject matter for Lee’s dry humor and no-nonsense personality. By 1937, Miller’s marriage was failing and she spent the summer in Paris with Picasso, Man (no hard feelings) Ray, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, and her next husband, Roland Penrose, reestablishing her position in Surrealist and art circles.

Dead SS Guard in the Canal, Dachau, Germany, 1945 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2008. All rights reserved.

Summer of 1937 provided one last idyll before the war swept across Europe. In England with Penrose, Miller found work photographing the war effort, publishing Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain under Fire in 1941 to document the Blitz. Photo essays on women manning searchlights and nurses in the theater of war allowed Miller to gain entry into wartime photojournalism while also promoting the role of women in the war effort. After D-Day, Miller followed Allied forces with her camera and pen as they liberated Europe. Flying over freshly liberated France, Miller writes, “My self-conscious analysis was forgotten in greedily studying the soft, grey-skied panorama of nearly a thousand square miles of France… of freed France.” Miller’s unashamed emotion, along with her customary steely, controlled eye, brought the war in Europe back to American and England vibrantly. When the Allies liberated the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, Miller is there, documenting the atrocities. “BELIEVE IT!” one piece shouts, accompanied with grim photos such as her Dead SS Guard in the Canal, Dachau, Germany (above), which simultaneously depicts the absurdity of war while employing Surrealist sensibilities. “No question that German civilians knew what went on,” Miller writes indictingly, never accepting their claims of ignorance. (It would be entertaining to know what Miller would think of today’s Holocaust deniers.) Unfortunately, many of Miller’s more caustic comments were removed and more graphic photos suppressed by her American editors, who, like the American public, longed to put the war behind them as quickly as possible.


Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bath, Munich, Germany 1945 (Lee Miller with David E. Scherman) © Lee Miller Archives, England 2008. All rights reserved.

Miller, unfortunately, could not put the war behind her. While traveling through liberated Munich, Miller and fellow correspondent David E. Scherman visited Adolf Hitler’s apartment there. Scherman photographed Miller bathing in Hitler’s bathtub (above), her heavy army-issue boots—still caked with mud—sitting on the tile floor. Miller could never wash away the trauma of seeing the death camps, becoming an alcoholic in response to what we would call post-traumatic stress disorder today. Her photography career gradually faded away as she settled into domesticity on a farm in Sussex, England, with Penrose and their son, Antony, who knew little of his mother’s work while growing up and, since her death, has dedicated his life to her legacy. Miller’s photographs stand on a par not only with those of Man Ray but also with those of Edward Weston and other giants of twentieth century photography. If there is a ruthlessness to her beauty and the beauty of images, it is understandable in response not only to her childhood trauma but also to the barriers both contributed to and transcended by her sexuality. If standing before the lens allowed her time behind it, Lee Miller seemed comfortable with the transaction. Like Frida Kahlo, the subject of another centennial celebration at the PMA, Miller never allowed her vulnerability to show on her face, expressing it instead in her art.


[Many thanks to the PMA for providing me with a review copy of Mark Haworth-Booth’s The Art of Lee Miller and for the images from the exhibition.]