Architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’s groundbreaking design for the Pompidou Centre in Paris felt shocking in 1977 when they exploded traditional architectural conventions by exposing the structural elements of the architecture with a vast escalator on the exterior. This ‘inside-out’ approach is like the unconventional ideology of the Surrealist movement, founded by ‘Father of Surrealism’ André Breton in the early 1920s, so it seems fitting that 100 years of Surrealism is celebrated with an epic exhibition at the Pompidou Centre.
My own experience of the Surrealism exhibition at Centre Pompidou was somewhat Surreal, as I was fortunate to be part of a guided after-hours tour, which involved ascending to the top floor galleries via the rollercoaster-like escalator, looking out through the glass at the rooftops of Paris. We entered the exhibition through the mouth of a giant grey head with demonic eyes, inspired by Cabaret de l’Enfer, a cabaret venue that André Breton lived above in Paris. Centre Pompidou collaborated with magician Abdul Alafrez to create an optical illusion which means that, viewed from the side, it appears that visitors entering the exhibition through the mouth disappear, an optical illusion echoing a black and white Surrealist film shown on a screen at the entrance to the exhibition, in which several men walk into a lamppost and disappear into thin air—a perfectly surreal way to start the journey through 100 years of Surrealism.
At the centre of the circular gallery, which acts as a starting point for the exhibition, is a display case holding the treasured original manuscript of Breton’s Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, which is on loan from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Breton wrote the Manifesto in 1924, initially intended as a preface to his poetry book Poisson Soluble. Yet, it turned into a 21-page manifesto that spawned a movement whose principles have endured for a century, influencing popular culture and ways of thinking to this day.
The Manifesto is narrated by an AI-generated recording of Breton’s voice, created through a collaboration between the curatorial team and the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music.
The Pompidou exhibition is organised in a spiralling labyrinth inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s staging of the 1947 international exhibition of Surrealism at Galerie Maeght in Paris. It is curated with 14 thematic chapters, following a journey through four decades of Surrealism from 1924 to 1969, when author Jean Schuster declared the movement’s dissolution in Le Monde.
Marie Sarré, curator of Modern collections at Centre Pompidou, says, “Surrealism wasn’t a formalism. It was a collective adventure, a philosophy, you might say, that lasted for 40 years if it ever ended. It was incredibly vibrant, constantly reinventing itself.”
What unfolds after the first gallery is the most comprehensive exhibition of Surrealist art and consequent subsidiary movements it inspired that I’ve ever seen. Featuring over 350 works by nearly 130 artists, organised into 14 thematic sections including film, paintings and sculpture, the exhibition explores literary influences and poetic principles central to Surrealism. Organised chronologically and thematically, the 14 sections evoke literary figures who inspired the movement, such as Lautréamont, Lewis Carroll and Sade and explore themes including the Artist as a medium, Dreams, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the Forest.
The original Surrealists led by André Breton, including Louis Aragon, Salvador Dali, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Man Ray, Joan Miro and Yves Tanguy, were a group of artists, poets and writers who came together in the early 1920s to explore the unconscious mind and create artworks reacting against convention and logic. Although at the beginning of the movement, it was dominated by men, who are all represented in this exhibition, with iconic paintings and sculptures by Dali, Magritte, Man Ray, Miro and more on display, many significant women Surrealists joined the movement, and their contributions are recognised here.
Women Surrealists, including Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Meret Oppenheim and Dora Maar, are featured. There are several enigmatic paintings by Mexican artist Remedios Varo (see Photo above) which were a personal highlight for me, my favourite being ‘Creacion de las aves’, 1957, which depicts a human-owl hybrid seated at a desk painting as three beautiful birds fly towards an arched window, in a scenography reminiscent of a Medieval painting. The creature holds a prism-refracting light and takes paint from a palette attached to a peculiar bagpipe-shaped device that recalls the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.
Bursting at the seams with some of the ‘Greatest Hits’ of Surrealism, including René Magritte’s “La durée Poignardée” (1938), Salvador Dalí’s “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening” and René Magritte’s “L’Empire des lumières”.
The exhibition curators acknowledge the fact that Surrealism began in part as a reaction to the horrors some of the artists experienced during ‘The Great War’, in which several of them fought and were wounded. This physical or psychological damage is reflected in several artworks, notably Giorgio de Chirico’s “Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire”, which features a target-like circle on the temple, symbolising Apollinaire’s wartime injury.
For Cinephiles, there are clips of iconic film noirs such as the Surrealist Masterpiece “Un Chien Andalou » (An Andalusian Dog), a 1929 silent short directed by Luis Buñuel’ and co-written by Salvador Dali, and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 movie “La Maison du Docteur Edwardes,” known in English as “‘Spellbound’,” which features a dream sequence created by Dali.
For lovers of Surrealism, dreamers and philosophers, this exhibition is unmissable.
Surrealism is at the Centre Pompidou until 13th January 2025.
Photos: Lee Sharrock © Artlyst 2024