Max Ernst was one of the most exciting painters of his time. Dieter Wyss wrote in 1950:
Like no other painter before him, he illuminated the backdrop of human life… It would not be exaggerated to place him in the same row with the greats of painting like Hieronymus Bosch, Matthias Grünewald, and El Greco. He penetrated the riddle-like worlds of the creative and unconscious.
The Spaniard, Salvador Dali, mined the repertoire for his paintings from his readings of psychiatric and psychoanalytical literature. According to Bréton, he gave Surrealism ‘a wonderful weapon, his critical-paranoid method as a morning gift.’ Dali almost neurotically asserted sexuality in his paintings. He depicted monstrosities with a cold and precise exactitude. His themes were the sadistic, the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, the exaggerated and scenes of horrific fantasy. It is not clear what was intuition and what was calculated speculation with an eye towards to fashionable society. His countryman, Joan Miró, introduced him in 1928 to the circle of Parisian Surrealists. Influenced by his reading of The Intepretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, after 1930 he developed his ‘paranoid-critical activities.’
My method consists of spontaneously explaining the irrational ideas that grow out of mad associations by delivering a critical interpretation of the phenomenon. Sceptical clairvoyance assumes the role of a photographic developer.
Salvador Dalí, The Temptation of St Anthony, 1946.
Oil on canvas, 89.5 × 119.5 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.
René Magritte, Temps menaçant, 1929. Oil on canvas, 54 × 73 cm.
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
The Belgian, René Magritte did not look for his subjects in the unconscious. In his paintings, he depicted unreal situations involving objects and phenomenon. These assume the identity of the other. In this manner, a subject can become transparent. Bodies can dissolve in air. Proportions can be distorted, a cloud can be inside a doorframe, and a birdcage can become a part of the human body. Everything is interchangeable. The paintings of de Chirico inspired his first Surrealistic works. He lent the elements of his paintings the characteristics of a faithful copy. They are painted in a chilly distanced fashion. They are set in a scene and enter into absurd dialogues, as for instance, why should a statue not bleed? A window pane not be landscape and so on?
Yves Tanguy created dream landscapes, whose scenes seem unreal and monotonous. Things are strewn about as if following choreographic directions. With loud colours, he shows their contours and vividness in realistic terms. Their long shadows give the illusion of a silent cosmos. He creates a subjective world in his art, manifested by a feeling of emptiness, loneliness, and endlessness. Werner Schmalenbach reacted to the 1942 painting Absent Lady saying, ‘It is as if the relics of a long ago epoch on earth, the ossified remains of a long extinct life form, had survived in an eternity, empty and free of all human existence.’
Joan Miró, came to Paris in 1919 and became acquainted with Picasso, signing the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto. He worked together with Max Ernst on stage decorations for the ballet. He was strongly influenced by the paintings of Paul Klee.
Miró said, ‘[T]he poets that Masson introduced me to were of greater interest to me than the painters whom I met in Paris. I lost myself in them for nights on end… The result of this reading was that step-by-step I began to distance myself from Realism until after 1925, when I almost exclusively painted hallucinations. Hunger was a great source of hallucinations. For a long time I tried to sit there and look at the empty walls of my studio as I attempted to exorcise these faces onto paper and canvas.
Starting with automatic drawings, Miró developed a hieroglyphic style. His figuration displays its mastery in the abstract unintentional and in the interplay of the coincidental. At the beginning of the 1920s, he painted metamorphoses of objects, deformed them, and placed them in unusual relationships to one another. Space became a flat, two-dimensional painting surface in which all objects lived in harmony next to one another. In the middle of the 1920s, he invented a type of visual alphabet of emotions with his spontaneous splashes, stains, and flourishes. A painting style was created that had a compact expressive power and a balanced lyrical equilibrium between the symbols.
The American, Arshile Gorky, introduced Surrealist elements into the informal world of objects. He led the way to the psychological automatism of Action Painting among the young generation of American artists. Via Surrealism, the Frenchman, Henri Michaux, found his way to doing his drawings while in a state of intoxication.
Pierre Roy from France, Paul Delvaux from Belgium, and the Oscar Dominguez from Spain also developed a Surrealistic painting style. Among the Parisian Surrealists who exhibited together in 1925–1926 were, in addition to Max Ernst, Yves Tinguy, Joan Miró, André Masson, and Pablo Picasso. There was also Hans Arp, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia, who had, like Max Ernst, originally been Dada artists. Robert Sebastian Matta and Wilfredo Lam, from Chile and Cuba, respectively, were for some time close to Surrealism. Richard Oelze created landscapes with amorphic structures and utilised a technique that was similar to frottage. Among the younger generation, one notes Fantastic Painting in the works by Hans Bellmer.
Yves Tanguy, Absent Woman, 1942. Oil on canvas,
115 × 89.5 cm. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
Joan Miró, Portrait of a Spanish Dancer, 1921.
Oil on canvas, 65 × 56 cm. Musée National Picasso, Paris.
Paul Delvaux, Entry into Town, 1940.
Oil on canvas, 170 × 190 cm. Private collection.
Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, The Writer, 1920–1921.
Oil on canvas, 120 × 120 cm. Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf.
Magical Realism and the New Objectivity
World War I radically changed Europe politically and socially, and revolutionised the general mood in Germany. In many large cities, councils of workers and soldiers were created. A state of near civil war prevailed. The writer, Eduard Trautner, described the situation during 1919 in Munich in the magazine, The Way:
Recently, the rapid course of events has increased the political violence. Terror has appeared. Armed people are at every corner, barbed wire and firing lines are in the streets, and mass arrests of people who are, or appear to be, political opponents are taking place.
Specific questions of daily life, in particular, social problems came to the fore. ‘We want to change the world. We all want justice,’ wrote the poet René Schickele. ‘Radical’ became a magic word that was synonymous with truth, sincerity, and public spirit. The cultural conditions in Bavaria during the Soviet Republic of 1918–1919 differed from those in the rest of Germany only in as much as Prime Minister Kurt Eisner was in agreement with the artists. In contrast with Berlin, for example, the majority of the artists stood in unison with the cultural policies of those in power. After the Soviet Republic was put down in May 1919, all the members of the Aktionsausschusses revolutionärer Künstler München