Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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'The wish for absolute freedom is one of the constants of intellectual life.
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'And in France, it amounts to a tradition.
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'This tradition is more anarchist than Marxist.
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'It wants to reform reality and the shape of desire,
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'and by uniting people with their desires, it wants to change all life.'
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SIREN WAILS
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'It is ironic and scarcely ideological at all.'
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SIREN WAILS
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'It boasts of its absolute modernity, but its roots lie in the 18th century.
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'It seeks spontaneity but it's doomed to failure when it runs up against the real
world.
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'Its enemies are priest, cop, bureaucrat, boss and censor.
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'But it's too highbrow to have a broad base.
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'It breathes the air of privilege and is self-indulgent.
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'Generally workers don't like it
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'and socialists reject it as impractical, which it is.
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'It is the product of young, middle-class people fed up with their own assigned
social role.'
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GUNSHOTS
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'The last time it surfaced in France was in May 1968,
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'but the time before that,
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'it took a more complicated and aesthetic form and called itself Surrealism.'
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SIREN WAILS
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Of all art movements of our century, Surrealism was the one most concerned with the
question,
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"how shall I be free?"
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Now, many works of art are metaphors of freedom,
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they show us the free play of the mind and the senses
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and their models of choice.
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But Surrealism aspired to be the instrument of liberty.
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It wanted to set people free to save them,
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in the way that revolutionaries and evangelists promise salvation through an act of
faith.
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Consequently, there was a good deal more to Surrealism
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than simply a solemn parody of revolutionary threats.
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It had something in common with a religion.
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It had dogmas and rituals,
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it had martyrs and holy saints,
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it had a circle of faithful, and it had a Pope.
37
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'He was a young medical student turned poet.
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'His name was Andre Breton
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'and in the 20s he developed into one of the great fascinators of modern art.
40
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'He inspired, as one of his disciples put it, a dog-like devotion,
41
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'largely because he was very inventive, very perceptive and very moral.
42
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'Not a combination one gets very often in French or any other cultural circles.
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'So this evangelist believed that both art and life could renew themselves
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'by contacting forbidden areas of the mind, the unconscious.
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'That, in turn, would refresh our sense of the world
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'by disclosing a whole network of hidden relationships,
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'chance, memory, desire, coincidence,
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'a new reality, a surreality, in the word that he borrowed from Apollinaire.
49
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'The dream was the instrument for this.
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'In dreams, the id spoke.
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'The dreaming mind was unlegislated truth.
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'And so was neurosis, the permanent, involuntary form of dreams.
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'In this, Breton and his circle were part of the great movement of thought
54
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'whose motor was the work of Sigmund Freud.
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'But they were not really Freudians
56
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'and there is no evidence that Freud took them seriously
57
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'any more than Stalin would have taken notice of the Surrealists' masochistic
efforts
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'to put themselves at the service of Communism in the 1930s.
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'Breton was a natural clan leader
60
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'and he soon acquired the devotion of a group,
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'gently caricatured here by Max Ernst in 1922.
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'In these early years, Surrealism was mainly a literary group.
63
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'But the presiding spirit of Surrealist painting is over there.
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'His name was Giorgio De Chirico
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'and his work was the link between Romantic art and Surrealism.
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'Below the rational surface of 19th century art
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'there ran a fascination with dreams, with mystery, melancholy, fear.
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'It was a world of pre-Freudian phantoms.
69
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'Its main influence on De Chirico came through Arnold Bocklin,
70
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'a late 19th century German.
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'Bocklin specialised in images of death and melancholy
72
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'set among the ruins and the sea coasts of Italy.
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'One thing that he extracted from Italy
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'was the idea of historical places as condensers of memory.
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'And this fascinated De Chirico, too.
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'What he discovered in the squares and arcades of Italy
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'was not their solid architectural reality
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'but their staginess.'
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De Chirico was 23 and on his way from Florence to Paris in 1911
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when he stopped off for a few days here in Turin.
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The city that afforded him more images than any other,
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with its bronze paternal monuments and its vast, melancholy, 19th century squares,
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grandiose and provincial, and to him, extraordinarily new.
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Later he remarked that this novelty "has a strange and profound poetry,
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"which is based upon the atmosphere of an Autumn afternoon,
86
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"when the sky is clear, and the shadows are longer than in mid-summer.
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"And there is no Italian city," he said,
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"in which this extraordinary phenomenon more displays itself than in Turin."
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So there it was, the verbal blueprint for the paintings
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with which De Chirico was going to have such an enormous influence upon Surrealism.
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'As theatre replaces life, so nostalgia replaces history.
92
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'And its emblems are the sunlit square, the tiny dark figures,
93
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'the tower, the stopped clock and the train.
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'De Chirico was still in his early 20s
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'when he was captivated by what he called the metaphysics of these scenes.'
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HE SPEAKS ITALIAN
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TRANSLATOR: The special quality about the city of Turin which Nietzsche talks
about,
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revealed a spiritual phenomenon to me which I didn't know about before.
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I understood, in fact, that what he saw in Turin,
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especially in its arcades, was something deeply poetic.
101
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I realised the value of this discovery of Nietzsche's.
102
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'De Chirico's Italy is a brooding place.
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'Its perspective suggests that reality is very far away, perhaps unattainable.
104
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'Human society has ceased to exist.
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'The main figures in his squares are statues.
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'And in the most disturbing of all his paintings,
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'called The Mystery And Melancholy Of A Street,
108
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'the statue does not appear at all,
109
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'it just announces itself with the tip of its long shadow,
110
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'drawing the girl towards it.
111
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'His favourite image became the mannequin,
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'neither a man nor a sculpture, halfway between,
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'a sketch for a man made up of tools and mementos, parts and emblems,
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'a metaphor of fragmented Modernist consciousness.
115
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'That tilted space came more from Cubism than real Italian squares.
116
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'But it wasn't the Cubist scaffolding that Surrealism admired,
117
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'it was the strange encounters between objects,
118
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'and the clarity, which later Surrealist painters would imitate because it made the
dream look real.
119
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'De Chirico's space became the norm for Surrealist art,
120
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'a neutral place, an ideal plain on which odd things met in full light.
121
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'The root of this idea lay in the work of Isidore Ducasse,
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'who wrote under the name of the Comte de Lautreamont
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'a long, unreadable prose poem called The Songs Of Maldoror.
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'It contained the phrase,
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'"Beautiful is the encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating
table."
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'This summed up the Surrealist ideal of beauty.
127
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'A beauty of strangeness, of incompatibility and secret correspondences,
128
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'which was the beauty of De Chirico's pre-war paintings.
129
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'By 1921, Surrealism, a poet's movement,
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'had got its first major artist in Paris,
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'the young German, Max Ernst.
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'He arrived with a packet of his strange collages
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'and their incongruous meetings of images cut from catalogues and magazines
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'struck Breton and his circle as Lautreamont applied to art.
135
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'They seemed to subvert the world.
136
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'They seemed revolutionary, an edgy poetry distilled from the most ordinary
materials.
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'They were the view through the gap in middle-class reality.
138
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'Much later, in the 60s,
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'Ernst was interviewed by his old friend Roland Penrose,
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'once the leader of the English Surrealists.'
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I was born with a very strong feeling
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- of a need of freedom, liberty.
- Mm-hm.
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And that means also with a very strong feeling of revolt.
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Revolt and revolution is not the same thing.
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But when you have this very strong feeling
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of this need of revolt, need of freedom,
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and you are born into a period
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where so many events invite you to get revolted,
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through what is going on in the world, and be disgusted with it and so on,
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it is absolutely natural that the work you produce
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is revolutionary work.
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'In Paris, Ernst grafted his collage technique onto De Chirico.
153
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'This monster is called The Elephant Celebes.
154
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'Its shape was inspired by a photo of an African corn bin.
155
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'Its topknot comes from De Chirico's mannequins.
156
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'But for most of Ernst's images there is no rational explanation.
157
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'They come from a parallel world,
158
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'a place of lucid dread akin to the powerlessness that children sometimes feel.
159
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'Ernst could compress a lot of psychic violence into a small space
160
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'the size of a booby-trapped toy.
161
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'One of the Surrealists' favourite ways of evoking what they called the
"Marvellous"
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'was by chance association, like seeing faces in the fire.
163
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'Our minds prefer order to chaos,
164
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'and so we read coherent images into random sights.
165
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'The fact that these images are not willed but spontaneous
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'was what interested Ernst and his friends.
167
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'How could one set up meetings with the unexpected?
168
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'In 1925, Ernst found a way.
169
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'He made crayon rubbings from wood grain or stone
170
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'and then he altered them to isolate the images they suggested,
171
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'and he called these drawings his natural history.
172
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'But the strongest illusion of a parallel world in Ernst's work
173
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'came from the collages that he began to make around 1930.
174
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'He used Victorian steel engravings cut and reassembled.
175
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'For us today, their effect has changed a bit.
176
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'They're still sinister, still disturbing
177
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'and still marvellous in their power of suggestion.
178
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'The peculiarity of Ernst's world never lets up.
179
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'It's always suddenly there, as though stumbled upon.
180
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'But what we don't get is the sense of an immediate vicious past
181
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'upon which Ernst's work depended.
182
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'This Edwardian world looks very remote to us.
183
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'But it was the world in which Max Ernst grew up,
184
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'and to subvert it was, for him, akin to an act of terrorism,
185
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'the irrational attacking the world of ordered structures.'
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It is important in a time when those who run the world,
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but then they can do it only with reason, rational.
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- HE COUGHS
- And they are not even noticing
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that...
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..reason has almost nothing to do.
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- Look what is going on in the world right now.
- Yes.
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What has gone on in the world in the last 20 years, anyhow.
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Who make... made world history?
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Not the most reasonable people, the mad men did.
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So if a painting is the mirror...
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..of a time,
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it must be mad...
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..to have the true image of what the time is.
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- That sounds a very dangerous parallel...
- Everything is dangerous.
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..because if art is to be mad as the politicians are mad...
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No, no, no. We are mad in a very different way.
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- Yes. I suppose so.
- Exactly the opposite.
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- That is the great difference, isn't it?
- Yes.
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- To one madness we oppose another madness.
- Yes. Yes.
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We do not pretend that this madness that we oppose to the other madness
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can heal these people and keep them from doing what they are doing.
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But the artist is only
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somebody who... makes a statement.
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Yes. So the irrational in art is an absolutely essential ingredient,
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- do you think?
- It is essential.
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'Irrationality has no given form, and in their pursuit of it,
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'the Surrealists had to mimic the conventions of art in which it appeared.
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'There was, for instance, the art of children.
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'Now, children have always drawn and painted,
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'but not until the 18th century did child art seem a special cultural form
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'with something to tell us about the growth and the life of the mind.
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'The Surrealists passionately believed that it was.
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'They believed in the innocent eye,
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'since young kids were not repressed, as their parents are.
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'Madness was another culture in itself.
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'To the Surrealists, it was the highest form of revolt,
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'the mind's big no to an intolerable world. The poet Paul Eluard,
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'who knew nothing about the sufferings of mental patients who made paintings like
these,
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'praised mental illness as "the earthly paradise."
225
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'And he added that, "We who love the insane know that they refuse to be cured."
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'The first clinical studies of mad people's art
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'were beginning to appear in France in the 20s.
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'To the Surrealists, they were a fertile source,
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'images that were truly obsessive, spontaneous
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'and not censored by the conscious mind.
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'The third source of the irrational was primitive art,
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'the work of self-taught men and women, the Sunday painters, the amateurs and
hobbyists.
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'Their compulsion to make images was pure,
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'and thus seemed more valuable to the Surrealists than any amount of professional
painting.
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'The greatest of them was Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier, or the Customs Man,
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'with his tight, patiently-rendered visions of a jungle that he had never seen.
237
00:18:27,600 --> 00:18:32,120
'These, to Surrealism, were the Marvellous made concrete.'
238
00:19:00,400 --> 00:19:06,600
In 1879, a French country postman in the village of Hauterives picked up a stone.
239
00:19:06,600 --> 00:19:11,920
He was then 43 years old and his name was Joseph Ferdinand Cheval.
240
00:19:11,920 --> 00:19:14,600
He had absolutely no training as an architect.
241
00:19:14,600 --> 00:19:17,440
But he did have a very strong sense of immortality.
242
00:19:17,440 --> 00:19:21,880
And for the next 33 years, he laboured incessantly here in his own backyard,
243
00:19:21,880 --> 00:19:25,560
93,000 working hours by his own count,
244
00:19:25,560 --> 00:19:27,920
to construct this.
245
00:19:33,440 --> 00:19:37,360
'He made it out of stones and cement and iron bars and bits of wire
246
00:19:37,360 --> 00:19:40,160
'and oyster shells salvaged from the local restaurants
247
00:19:40,160 --> 00:19:42,560
'and anything else that came to hand.
248
00:19:50,360 --> 00:19:53,840
'It was his ideal palace, his testament to the future.
249
00:19:58,080 --> 00:20:01,520
'It was also the greatest single unofficial work of art
250
00:20:01,520 --> 00:20:04,120
'that has come down to us since the 19th century.
251
00:20:05,200 --> 00:20:07,720
'A cathedral of the unconscious mind.
252
00:21:01,480 --> 00:21:04,040
'The Surrealists drew their own map of the world
253
00:21:04,040 --> 00:21:07,880
'with the countries redone to their scale of Surrealist interest.
254
00:21:07,880 --> 00:21:13,600
'No England, but Ireland, which they saw as a place of myth, twilight, and
revolution, is huge.
255
00:21:14,720 --> 00:21:17,160
'The United States don't exist at all.
256
00:21:17,160 --> 00:21:19,440
'Mexico and Labrador have swallowed them.
257
00:21:21,160 --> 00:21:25,800
'Australia just gets in, I'm glad to say, but it's dwarfed by New Guinea.
258
00:21:26,880 --> 00:21:30,240
'Africa is small because the Cubists had discovered it.
259
00:21:30,240 --> 00:21:33,960
'Germany dominates Europe and the only city is Paris.
260
00:21:33,960 --> 00:21:36,360
'And no Spain, which is odd,
261
00:21:36,360 --> 00:21:40,400
'because two of the lynchpins of Surrealist art were born there.
262
00:21:49,800 --> 00:21:54,520
'The best painter among the Surrealists grew up in this landscape south of
Barcelona.
263
00:21:56,600 --> 00:22:02,000
'His name was Joan Miro and he has outlived most of his fellow artists.
264
00:22:04,520 --> 00:22:06,840
'In a sense, Miro didn't join the movement.
265
00:22:06,840 --> 00:22:10,160
'Surrealism joined him. It needed his art.
266
00:22:10,160 --> 00:22:16,120
'A free lyrical mixture of folk tales, eroticism, sardonic humour and absurdity.
267
00:22:18,280 --> 00:22:22,880
'As a young man, before 1920, one sees him becoming a Modern painter.
268
00:22:26,160 --> 00:22:30,240
'First the bright Mediterranean colour derived from Matisse.
269
00:22:32,360 --> 00:22:35,240
'And then looking to Cubism for the geometry.
270
00:22:36,920 --> 00:22:41,200
'At this stage, his art is a vision of detail, like a biblical counting of
blessings,
271
00:22:41,200 --> 00:22:45,200
'the folds of ploughed earth, the sharp edges of barn and house.
272
00:22:45,200 --> 00:22:49,320
'The creatures are laid out flat and bright, one by one,
273
00:22:49,320 --> 00:22:52,480
'as in one of the Romanesque frescos of northern Spain.
274
00:22:57,600 --> 00:23:02,160
'Miro broke loose from Cubism with this painting, The Tilled Field.
275
00:23:02,160 --> 00:23:07,480
'There are the furrows of the plough, a house and a piebald mare in front, suckling
her foal.
276
00:23:07,480 --> 00:23:09,680
'But then that tree has grown an ear.
277
00:23:11,040 --> 00:23:14,720
'And that lizard is chatting with a snail while reading a French newspaper,
278
00:23:14,720 --> 00:23:17,160
'a sort of ironical wave to Cubism.
279
00:23:20,600 --> 00:23:23,520
'And up in the air, a rooster leaning from a tree, crowing,
280
00:23:23,520 --> 00:23:26,360
'while the cloud behind it becomes its feathers.
281
00:23:27,520 --> 00:23:29,640
'This is a metamorphic landscape,
282
00:23:29,640 --> 00:23:32,680
'everything in it can become something else.
283
00:23:38,480 --> 00:23:41,640
'In this image, a child is feeding at the breast.
284
00:23:41,640 --> 00:23:44,560
'In the 20s, with such works as Maternity,
285
00:23:44,560 --> 00:23:47,520
'Miro became the modern heir to the medieval Illuminators,
286
00:23:47,520 --> 00:23:50,880
'to the Romanesque sculptors with their bestiaries and demons,
287
00:23:50,880 --> 00:23:53,440
'and to Hieronymus Bosch himself.
288
00:23:53,440 --> 00:23:57,080
'100 years before, William Blake had urged his readers to,
289
00:23:57,080 --> 00:24:00,120
'"Seek those images that constitute the wild,
290
00:24:00,120 --> 00:24:03,840
"the lion and the virgin, the harlot and the child."
291
00:24:05,280 --> 00:24:09,520
'Which is what Miro did for us in paintings like The Harlequins Carnival.
292
00:24:09,520 --> 00:24:14,400
'He had the range of a man who owns all his sensations and is ashamed of none of
them.
293
00:24:17,440 --> 00:24:22,480
'And he set forth his immense vitality with a diction of pure, flat colour
294
00:24:22,480 --> 00:24:26,920
'that almost no other modern artist except Matisse had used with such mastery.
295
00:24:30,320 --> 00:24:32,360
'In the twilight of his work,
296
00:24:32,360 --> 00:24:35,360
Miro is probably the last great national painter of the 20th century,
297
00:24:35,360 --> 00:24:38,600
'a Catalan to the fingertips.
298
00:24:38,600 --> 00:24:42,000
'And nobody is more certain of that than the people of Barcelona.
299
00:24:43,160 --> 00:24:46,040
'For their city had a much deeper connection with Surrealism
300
00:24:46,040 --> 00:24:48,760
than the Miro mosaic in its main street,
301
00:24:48,760 --> 00:24:51,120
'and it goes back to the turn of the century
302
00:24:51,120 --> 00:24:54,360
'when Barcelona was a cultural capital.
303
00:24:54,360 --> 00:24:57,680
'Art Nouveau, the luxury style of 1900,
304
00:24:57,680 --> 00:25:01,440
'still marks Barcelona deeper than any other city.
305
00:25:05,400 --> 00:25:08,760
'Its master was a Catalan architect named Antoni Gaudi,
306
00:25:08,760 --> 00:25:11,360
'who was still at work when Miro was a young man.
307
00:25:12,320 --> 00:25:16,800
'But Gaudi's main work was only just begun when he died in 1927.
308
00:25:16,800 --> 00:25:20,000
'This is the unfinished temple, the Sagrada Familia,
309
00:25:20,000 --> 00:25:22,520
'or Cathedral of the Holy Family.
310
00:25:22,520 --> 00:25:26,520
'He started it in 1903, and it's still going up, but very slowly.
311
00:25:26,520 --> 00:25:29,880
'Probably they'll never finish it, but in any case,
312
00:25:29,880 --> 00:25:33,440
'this is the last delirious monument of Catholic Spain.'
313
00:25:35,280 --> 00:25:39,320
In this case you can say that form really does follow function.
314
00:25:39,320 --> 00:25:43,640
Sliding, rippling, dissolving, reforming, changing colour.
315
00:25:43,640 --> 00:25:45,880
Juicy architecture.
316
00:25:45,880 --> 00:25:48,600
Soft architecture.
317
00:25:48,600 --> 00:25:51,560
The architecture of ecstasy.
318
00:25:51,560 --> 00:25:54,000
GRAND ORGAN MUSIC
319
00:26:44,800 --> 00:26:47,040
'Above the city is the Park Guell,
320
00:26:47,040 --> 00:26:50,760
'which Gaudi designed for his main patrons, the Guell family.
321
00:26:50,760 --> 00:26:54,120
'It was going to be a housing estate, but the houses weren't finished,
322
00:26:54,120 --> 00:26:56,840
'and only the extraordinary park is left,
323
00:26:56,840 --> 00:26:59,160
'with its mosaics and undulating seats,
324
00:26:59,160 --> 00:27:01,560
'its fountains and arcades.
325
00:27:02,880 --> 00:27:05,200
'To the Classical eye, this is madness.
326
00:27:05,200 --> 00:27:07,400
'Not a straight line in the place.
327
00:27:07,400 --> 00:27:09,800
'To purist advanced taste to the 20s and 30s,
328
00:27:09,800 --> 00:27:13,160
'Art Nouveau was really no better than garbage deluxe.
329
00:27:13,160 --> 00:27:15,960
'But to the Surrealists, it was Marvellous.'
330
00:27:17,520 --> 00:27:19,680
It was desire made concrete.
331
00:27:19,680 --> 00:27:22,160
And at the extreme end of the style,
332
00:27:22,160 --> 00:27:25,760
you get a kind of nervous irritability, a tropical growth,
333
00:27:25,760 --> 00:27:30,120
a feeling of substance continuously melting into metaphor
334
00:27:30,120 --> 00:27:33,600
that was very congenial to them and it provided the legacy
335
00:27:33,600 --> 00:27:38,520
for another and slightly more dubious Catalan genius, Salvador Dali.
336
00:27:59,840 --> 00:28:04,560
'For almost 40 years, Dali has been one of the two most famous painters alive.
337
00:28:04,560 --> 00:28:09,560
'His moustache was the only rival to Van Gogh's ear and Picasso's potency.'
338
00:28:09,560 --> 00:28:13,400
Do you have any trouble with it at night? Do you have to peg it?
339
00:28:13,400 --> 00:28:19,560
- Or does it stand up at night?
- No. In the night, clean every night, it becoming soft.
340
00:28:19,560 --> 00:28:22,240
- So at night it droops down.
- Completely.
341
00:28:22,240 --> 00:28:26,200
- And then in the morning, up she goes again?
- Three minutes. In three minutes fix my moustache.
342
00:28:26,200 --> 00:28:30,200
And then you feel you can face the world with that wonderful moustache standing up.
343
00:28:30,200 --> 00:28:35,240
Yes, because every day becoming much more practical for my inspiration.
344
00:28:35,240 --> 00:28:37,480
Well, I'm fascinated to know that.
345
00:28:47,320 --> 00:28:49,680
'He has also been a great embarrassment,
346
00:28:49,680 --> 00:28:52,880
'with the political views of Torquemada, the greed of a barracuda
347
00:28:52,880 --> 00:28:55,800
'and the vanity of an old drag queen.'
348
00:28:55,800 --> 00:28:58,920
Everybody talk about eccentricity.
349
00:28:58,920 --> 00:29:01,440
Is a little true but I am
350
00:29:01,440 --> 00:29:07,440
total and absolutely paradoxical man.
351
00:29:07,440 --> 00:29:09,600
Yeah, it's true, I am eccentric
352
00:29:09,600 --> 00:29:14,120
but in this time, I am concentric.
353
00:29:14,120 --> 00:29:16,480
Eccentric and concentric.
354
00:29:17,800 --> 00:29:21,640
'He started tamely enough as an art student in Madrid in the early 20s.
355
00:29:22,920 --> 00:29:26,840
'But around 1925, he discovered what Realism could do.
356
00:29:26,840 --> 00:29:29,640
'It could subvert one's sense of reality.
357
00:29:29,640 --> 00:29:33,320
'Instead of a Modernist surface, Dali went in for what he called,
358
00:29:33,320 --> 00:29:36,520
'"all the most paralysing tricks of eye fooling."
359
00:29:36,520 --> 00:29:41,040
'Photographic accuracy, masses of detail and smooth paint.
360
00:29:41,040 --> 00:29:45,160
'To this he added what he called his paranoiac critical method.
361
00:29:45,160 --> 00:29:48,320
'Basically this meant looking at one thing and seeing another,
362
00:29:48,320 --> 00:29:51,120
'as these figures make up a face.
363
00:29:55,600 --> 00:29:59,440
'Dali used this trick again and again in his paintings.
364
00:29:59,440 --> 00:30:03,200
'This one is called The Metamorphosis Of Narcissus.
365
00:30:03,200 --> 00:30:08,160
'There he squats on the left, head on his knee, staring at his reflection in the
pool.
366
00:30:08,160 --> 00:30:10,240
'And the giant hand on the right,
367
00:30:10,240 --> 00:30:12,680
'holding an egg from which a narcissus sprouts,
368
00:30:12,680 --> 00:30:15,080
'exactly mimics his body.
369
00:30:18,280 --> 00:30:22,680
'Dali's own considerable narcissism produced many self-portraits.
370
00:30:22,680 --> 00:30:25,480
'Some quite open, like this.
371
00:30:27,440 --> 00:30:32,960
'Others were concealed, as in this painting called The Great Masturbator.
372
00:30:32,960 --> 00:30:35,800
'A grasshopper clings to the soft, yellow shape,
373
00:30:35,800 --> 00:30:38,760
'which is Dali's profile, boned, as it were,
374
00:30:38,760 --> 00:30:41,240
'and laid nose down on its side.
375
00:30:43,240 --> 00:30:46,440
'And that same profile, by now as runny as wax,
376
00:30:46,440 --> 00:30:50,880
'turns up on the beach in his most famous image, The Persistence Of Memory.
377
00:30:53,880 --> 00:30:56,880
'Dali had a brilliant sense of provocation.
378
00:30:56,880 --> 00:30:59,280
'He even managed to alarm Breton with this one
379
00:30:59,280 --> 00:31:01,880
'and provoke a solemn argument among his fellow Surrealists
380
00:31:01,880 --> 00:31:04,800
'upon whether a pair of pants spattered with faeces
381
00:31:04,800 --> 00:31:07,480
'was an acceptable dream image or not.
382
00:31:09,080 --> 00:31:11,960
'Like a gland irritated by constant scratching,
383
00:31:11,960 --> 00:31:15,080
'his mind threw off many such images before the end of the 30s,
384
00:31:15,080 --> 00:31:17,840
'when they began to get rather tedious and predictable.
385
00:31:17,840 --> 00:31:21,880
'And most of them had to do with sex, blood, dung and putrefaction
386
00:31:21,880 --> 00:31:24,920
'mixed with declarations of impotence and guilt.
387
00:31:27,520 --> 00:31:30,560
'For Dali loved anything that spoke of flaccidity,
388
00:31:30,560 --> 00:31:34,280
'runny cheese, flesh held up by crutches,
389
00:31:34,280 --> 00:31:36,640
'soft watches.
390
00:31:38,760 --> 00:31:42,360
'Dali inherited a lot from Spanish religious art.
391
00:31:42,360 --> 00:31:45,400
'An almost paralysing morbidity about flesh.
392
00:31:45,400 --> 00:31:49,840
'It is phosphorescent, always on the point of dissolution and rot.
393
00:31:49,840 --> 00:31:54,120
'In Dali, there is no such thing as the confident body of Classicism.
394
00:31:54,120 --> 00:31:57,240
'But there is no spiritual transcendence either.
395
00:31:57,240 --> 00:32:00,520
'He locked himself up in the prison of the narcissistic self
396
00:32:00,520 --> 00:32:03,480
'and then threw away the key.
397
00:32:03,480 --> 00:32:07,000
'Eventually the dreams weren't real at all.
398
00:32:07,000 --> 00:32:11,200
'Just Dali being Dali, the nickelodeon of the id.
399
00:32:13,920 --> 00:32:18,240
'He had not reached his 40th birthday when Sigmund Freud had the last word on him.
400
00:32:19,640 --> 00:32:24,400
'"It is not the unconscious that I seek in your pictures," he wrote, '"but the
conscious."
401
00:32:24,400 --> 00:32:30,080
"Your mystery is manifested outright. The picture is only a mechanism to reveal
it."
402
00:32:33,000 --> 00:32:38,000
'So there he is. Not great enough for marble, but just right for wax.
403
00:32:38,000 --> 00:32:43,160
'It's proper that Dali should have found his place here in the Paris Wax Museum,
The Musee Grevin,
404
00:32:43,160 --> 00:32:46,720
'representing culture along with the novelist Francoise Sagan
405
00:32:46,720 --> 00:32:49,280
'and the clothes designer Pierre Cardin.
406
00:32:50,520 --> 00:32:54,240
'For the wax museum was one of the favourite spots of Surrealism.
407
00:32:54,240 --> 00:32:57,520
'It was a house of bizarre but second-hand illusion.'
408
00:32:59,080 --> 00:33:01,720
Wax works are neither art nor life.
409
00:33:01,720 --> 00:33:03,960
They're failures, they're sinister hybrids,
410
00:33:03,960 --> 00:33:07,520
and from that point of view, the cruder they are, the more potent they get.
411
00:33:07,520 --> 00:33:11,360
They mock the powers of art and offer none of the consolations of nature.
412
00:33:11,360 --> 00:33:13,920
No wonder the Surrealists liked them.
413
00:33:15,160 --> 00:33:19,440
'This place was one of several that made up a Surrealist itinerary of Paris.
414
00:33:19,440 --> 00:33:23,520
'A city of monuments and gates, passageways and parks,
415
00:33:23,520 --> 00:33:26,480
'where the Surrealists would meet at dawn or at midnight
416
00:33:26,480 --> 00:33:29,280
'in the hope setting up encounters with the unexpected,
417
00:33:29,280 --> 00:33:31,760
'with the secret history of Paris.
418
00:35:15,080 --> 00:35:19,520
'One of the most potent spots in Paris was the flea market.'
419
00:35:25,000 --> 00:35:29,280
Except as a backdrop, landscape was of no interest to Surrealism.
420
00:35:29,280 --> 00:35:33,080
They probably found it disagreeably bucolic.
421
00:35:33,080 --> 00:35:37,600
It was a city movement, made by pale, aggressive young eggheads
422
00:35:37,600 --> 00:35:41,800
whose natural lair was the cafe and whose essential city was Paris.
423
00:35:41,800 --> 00:35:46,520
In fact, it's impossible to imagine Surrealism without Paris.
424
00:35:46,520 --> 00:35:50,920
And their equivalent to the endless variety of nature
425
00:35:50,920 --> 00:35:56,160
was the endless profusion of baffling objects which washed up here in the flea
market.
426
00:35:57,400 --> 00:36:02,160
Of course, that was in the good old days before they started calling junk antiques,
427
00:36:02,160 --> 00:36:05,400
but even so, you never knew what you might find here.
428
00:36:08,040 --> 00:36:12,000
The flea market was like the unconscious mind of capitalism,
429
00:36:12,000 --> 00:36:14,520
it contained the repressed surplus.
430
00:36:14,520 --> 00:36:19,080
This is where the sewing machine met the umbrella on the operating table,
431
00:36:19,080 --> 00:36:22,400
and in due course gave birth to a whole flock of progeny,
432
00:36:22,400 --> 00:36:25,360
a new art form, the Surrealist object.
433
00:36:26,480 --> 00:36:30,200
'The object was collage in three dimensions.
434
00:36:30,200 --> 00:36:33,680
'The Surrealists thought that it made secret affinities visible.
435
00:36:33,680 --> 00:36:35,920
'It was a way of declassifying the world
436
00:36:35,920 --> 00:36:38,880
'and rendering it permeable to imagination.
437
00:36:38,880 --> 00:36:41,680
'A head with the eyes closed with zippers
438
00:36:41,680 --> 00:36:46,880
'became Marcel Jean's quietly sadistic image, The Spirit Of The Gardenia.
439
00:36:46,880 --> 00:36:49,400
'Victor Brauner made a wolf table.
440
00:36:51,000 --> 00:36:54,360
'Dali made a whole compendium of his fetishes.
441
00:36:56,320 --> 00:37:00,160
'Wolfgang Paalen called this Articulated Cloud,
442
00:37:00,160 --> 00:37:05,240
'the source of rain and the protection against it fused into one image.
443
00:37:05,240 --> 00:37:10,480
'And Meret Oppenheim produced the most famous and contradictory Surrealist object
of all,
444
00:37:10,480 --> 00:37:14,440
'her fur cup and spoon, the very essence of uselessness.
445
00:37:16,600 --> 00:37:19,320
'One particularly good object maker
446
00:37:19,320 --> 00:37:23,200
was the American photographer Man Ray, a veteran of Dadaism.'
447
00:37:23,200 --> 00:37:27,360
An object is a result of looking at something
448
00:37:27,360 --> 00:37:31,280
which in itself has no quality or charm.
449
00:37:31,280 --> 00:37:36,440
I pick something which in itself has no meaning at all.
450
00:37:37,840 --> 00:37:43,640
I disregard completely the aesthetic quality of the object.
451
00:37:43,640 --> 00:37:46,200
I'm against craftsmanship.
452
00:37:46,200 --> 00:37:49,400
I say the world is full of wonderful craftsmen,
453
00:37:49,400 --> 00:37:52,560
but there are very few practical dreamers.
454
00:37:52,560 --> 00:37:55,880
In the early days in Paris, when I first came over
455
00:37:55,880 --> 00:38:01,160
and I passed by a hardware shop and I saw a flat iron in the window,
456
00:38:01,160 --> 00:38:06,560
I said, "There's an object which is almost invisible. Maybe I could do something
with that."
457
00:38:06,560 --> 00:38:10,480
What could I do to add something in it that was provocative?
458
00:38:10,480 --> 00:38:12,720
And so I got a box of tacks,
459
00:38:12,720 --> 00:38:17,520
I glued on a row of tacks to it to make it useless, as I thought.
460
00:38:17,520 --> 00:38:20,040
But nothing is really useless.
461
00:38:20,040 --> 00:38:24,480
You can always find a use even for the most extravagant object.
462
00:38:24,480 --> 00:38:27,680
'The iron, entitled Gift, was pure malice.
463
00:38:27,680 --> 00:38:31,280
'This one he called Object To Be Destroyed.'
464
00:38:31,280 --> 00:38:34,240
SLOW TICKING
465
00:38:37,440 --> 00:38:41,120
'The cult of objects underlined another aspect of the Surrealist imagination,
466
00:38:41,120 --> 00:38:43,440
'the belief that the Marvellous,
467
00:38:43,440 --> 00:38:47,800
'that state of almost sexual excitement that Breton called "convulsive beauty,"
468
00:38:47,800 --> 00:38:51,720
'was always available, hidden just below the skin of reality.
469
00:38:53,320 --> 00:38:56,000
'The artist who produced the best evidence for this idea
470
00:38:56,000 --> 00:39:00,400
'lived in a modest house in a Belgian suburb and his name was Rene Magritte.
471
00:39:01,600 --> 00:39:06,480
'Magritte was Monsieur Bourgeois to the letter, stocky, taciturn, suburban.
472
00:39:06,480 --> 00:39:10,760
'He died in 1968 but his work continues to serve its audience
473
00:39:10,760 --> 00:39:14,280
'rather as Victorian story painters serve theirs.
474
00:39:15,320 --> 00:39:20,040
'People like stories. But modern art doesn't tell many and Magritte did.
475
00:39:21,400 --> 00:39:25,920
'However, his stories weren't narratives. They were snapshots of the impossible.
476
00:39:30,360 --> 00:39:33,200
'In 1923, the architect Le Corbusier
477
00:39:33,200 --> 00:39:36,360
'put this photo in his tract on the new machine architecture
478
00:39:36,360 --> 00:39:40,920
'as an example of plain, rational design, a pipe.
479
00:39:40,920 --> 00:39:44,880
'Five years later, Magritte contradicted him with this painting.
480
00:39:44,880 --> 00:39:47,120
'"This is not a pipe."
481
00:39:47,120 --> 00:39:49,760
'It became one of the most famous phrases in modern art.
482
00:39:49,760 --> 00:39:55,080
'A manifesto about language, the way meaning is conveyed or frustrated by symbols.
483
00:39:55,080 --> 00:39:57,560
'Because this, indeed, is not a pipe.
484
00:39:57,560 --> 00:39:59,960
'It is a painting, a work of art,
485
00:39:59,960 --> 00:40:03,440
'a sign that denotes an object and triggers memory.
486
00:40:03,440 --> 00:40:07,840
'No painter had ever isolated that basic fact about art so clearly before.
487
00:40:08,840 --> 00:40:13,760
'Denying the names of things took you through the mirror of illusion into a quite
different world,
488
00:40:13,760 --> 00:40:17,480
'where things change their names and lose their meanings.
489
00:40:17,480 --> 00:40:21,800
'A candle equals a ceiling, and the moon, a shoe.
490
00:40:25,760 --> 00:40:28,840
'The first characteristic of this world is dread.
491
00:40:28,840 --> 00:40:33,760
'Sometimes at the crude, dramatic level of the silent movies that Magritte used to
watch,
492
00:40:33,760 --> 00:40:37,360
'which is echoed here in his painting, The Menaced Assassin.
493
00:40:40,600 --> 00:40:45,880
'Magritte has given us some of the most vivid images of alienation in the whole
lexicon of art.
494
00:40:45,880 --> 00:40:48,960
'This one is entitled The Lovers.
495
00:40:50,800 --> 00:40:55,360
'This, a painting of the most piercing sadness and sexual pungency,
496
00:40:55,360 --> 00:40:57,600
is called The Rape.
497
00:40:59,280 --> 00:41:04,760
'The usual tone of Magritte's work was of a world both matter of fact and slightly
out of control.
498
00:41:04,760 --> 00:41:08,680
'Magritte painted things so ordinary that they might have come from a phrase book.
499
00:41:08,680 --> 00:41:10,640
'An apple.
500
00:41:11,880 --> 00:41:13,880
'A glass.
501
00:41:15,080 --> 00:41:17,640
'A stolid Belgian nude.
502
00:41:18,760 --> 00:41:21,000
'Or a human eye.'
503
00:41:22,920 --> 00:41:26,680
There wasn't much on that list that an average Belgian clerk, circa 1935,
504
00:41:26,680 --> 00:41:30,680
might not have seen in the course of an average Belgian day.
505
00:41:30,680 --> 00:41:34,560
But then, that clerk was one of Magritte's favourite images, too.
506
00:41:35,640 --> 00:41:38,720
'Here the clerk's descent like rain on the roofs of Belgium
507
00:41:38,720 --> 00:41:41,040
as though they were commuting from Heaven.
508
00:41:44,640 --> 00:41:49,000
'In a painting, you have a canvass on an easel in front of a view.
509
00:41:49,000 --> 00:41:51,440
'The canvass bears a picture of the view.
510
00:41:51,440 --> 00:41:54,600
'This picture exactly overlaps the real view.
511
00:41:56,000 --> 00:42:01,800
'And so the play between image and reality suggests that the real world is only a
construction of mind
512
00:42:01,800 --> 00:42:06,000
'and that somewhere among the infinite number of ways of experiencing that world,
513
00:42:06,000 --> 00:42:11,960
'there is one ideal angle, from which art and reality overlap, match and fuse.
514
00:42:11,960 --> 00:42:15,040
'That is the moment of Surrealist vision.'
515
00:42:16,400 --> 00:42:19,000
Magritte's best images don't look like fantasy.
516
00:42:19,000 --> 00:42:22,960
They are dry, tightly painted, matter of fact, and even pedestrian.
517
00:42:22,960 --> 00:42:26,880
They seem to have more in common with reporting than with imagination.
518
00:42:26,880 --> 00:42:29,800
And so the proper response to them is the double-take.
519
00:42:29,800 --> 00:42:33,640
Magritte loved paradox. And he was its absolute master.
520
00:42:33,640 --> 00:42:37,040
And his paradoxes needed the context of real life.
521
00:42:40,160 --> 00:42:43,000
'His paintings are not so much about the world
522
00:42:43,000 --> 00:42:45,600
'as about the ways we find to describe it.
523
00:42:50,720 --> 00:42:55,520
'Magritte was obsessed by the weak hold that language has on what it describes.
524
00:42:55,520 --> 00:42:59,560
'That sense of slippage between word and thing, image and object,
525
00:42:59,560 --> 00:43:02,240
'is one of the sources of Modernist disquiet.
526
00:43:02,240 --> 00:43:05,360
'And in making it his subject, Magritte became one of the artists
527
00:43:05,360 --> 00:43:09,400
'without whom Modernist culture can't be understood.
528
00:43:09,400 --> 00:43:12,560
'His visual booby-traps go off again and again
529
00:43:12,560 --> 00:43:15,240
'because their trigger is thought itself.
530
00:43:15,240 --> 00:43:19,040
'When the cannon fires, the walls of familiar images go down
531
00:43:19,040 --> 00:43:22,360
'and we stand, as the title of this painting tells us,
532
00:43:22,360 --> 00:43:24,760
'on The Threshold Of Liberty.'
533
00:43:32,160 --> 00:43:36,320
The Surrealists had no heroes among politicians, dead or alive,
534
00:43:36,320 --> 00:43:38,400
but they did have a gallery of saints,
535
00:43:38,400 --> 00:43:42,960
of men and women who were considered to have lived out the ideals of the movement
before its time.
536
00:43:42,960 --> 00:43:46,400
And of these, the greatest was the Marquis De Sade,
537
00:43:46,400 --> 00:43:48,640
whose castle here at Lacoste in Provence
538
00:43:48,640 --> 00:43:51,800
was considered one of the sacred sites of the Surrealist movement.
539
00:43:51,800 --> 00:43:56,680
The Divine Marquis was the one 18th century man whom the Surrealists respected,
540
00:43:56,680 --> 00:44:00,480
because it was he who had preached the supremacy of desire.
541
00:44:00,480 --> 00:44:04,600
And it was he who had shown what has become a commonplace in our century,
542
00:44:04,600 --> 00:44:07,840
that in order to establish the rule of reason,
543
00:44:07,840 --> 00:44:11,080
the imagination must be censored and repressed.
544
00:44:11,080 --> 00:44:15,840
Sade was the first writer to understand the relationship between sex and politics.
545
00:44:15,840 --> 00:44:20,320
He did most of his writing in prison, which is a good place for thinking about the
unthinkable.
546
00:44:20,320 --> 00:44:24,600
He became the unspeakable answer to Rousseau and his milky doctrine
547
00:44:24,600 --> 00:44:28,920
of the natural goodness of man when left in a state of nature.
548
00:44:28,920 --> 00:44:32,320
Not so, said Sade. We don't know what our natures are,
549
00:44:32,320 --> 00:44:37,480
and moreover, we can't find out what they are unless we follow our desires to the
absolute limit,
550
00:44:37,480 --> 00:44:40,480
no matter how appalling the disclosures may be.
551
00:44:41,520 --> 00:44:46,040
'Sade was a blasphemer, an atheist, and a traitor to his class, the aristocracy.
552
00:44:46,040 --> 00:44:48,840
'No wonder, then, that he had such an appeal to the Surrealists,
553
00:44:48,840 --> 00:44:53,800
'who were also atheists, blasphemers, and traitors to their class, the Bourgeoisie.
554
00:44:55,280 --> 00:44:57,320
'The Surrealists' tributes to Sade,
555
00:44:57,320 --> 00:44:59,800
'like this proposed monument to him by Man Ray,
556
00:44:59,800 --> 00:45:03,560
'often had a blasphemous tone which may seem a little dated today.
557
00:45:03,560 --> 00:45:06,840
'But the Surrealists were almost all baptised Catholics,
558
00:45:06,840 --> 00:45:10,000
'living in France when the church still had a great deal of power.
559
00:45:11,040 --> 00:45:13,560
'The best crack was by Max Ernst.
560
00:45:13,560 --> 00:45:15,840
'The Virgin Mary spanking the infant Jesus,
561
00:45:15,840 --> 00:45:17,920
'watched by the three wise men,
562
00:45:17,920 --> 00:45:21,080
'Eluard, Breton and Ernst himself.
563
00:45:25,600 --> 00:45:30,400
'Sex, being loaded with taboo, was one of the great Surrealist themes.
564
00:45:30,400 --> 00:45:33,600
'But the Surrealists only stood for one kind of sexual freedom,
565
00:45:33,600 --> 00:45:39,760
'which insisted that imagination could only be set free by single-minded devotion
to one woman.
566
00:45:39,760 --> 00:45:42,720
'Yet this romantic spirit did not translate into their art.
567
00:45:42,720 --> 00:45:45,960
'There, the idea of woman was a thing,
568
00:45:45,960 --> 00:45:48,280
'a mannequin or a piece of furniture.
569
00:45:49,280 --> 00:45:54,200
'In Hans Bellmer's sculpture, the woman is no more than a sexual doll,
570
00:45:54,200 --> 00:45:58,000
'abused, manipulated, intensely pornographic.'
571
00:46:00,200 --> 00:46:03,000
WOMAN LAUGHS
572
00:47:22,040 --> 00:47:26,880
'As the 30s wore on, through the Spanish Civil War towards 1939,
573
00:47:26,880 --> 00:47:30,160
'their tone was less frustration than apocalypse.
574
00:47:30,160 --> 00:47:34,200
'Max Ernst summed up the sense of foreboding in one prophetic painting
575
00:47:34,200 --> 00:47:36,720
'called Europe After The Rain,
576
00:47:36,720 --> 00:47:39,160
'a place reduced to creepy namelessness,
577
00:47:39,160 --> 00:47:42,880
'a vacated planet, all ruins and jungle and decay.
578
00:47:45,880 --> 00:47:50,160
'And when the rain, in fact, did come, and the German army rolled into France,
579
00:47:50,160 --> 00:47:52,680
'the Surrealists prudently ran.
580
00:47:55,960 --> 00:47:58,080
'Many of them went to America.
581
00:47:58,080 --> 00:48:02,760
'And so it was in New York that the remains of Surrealism took root and mutated.
582
00:48:02,760 --> 00:48:06,680
'But the greatest American artist of the irrational was already living there,
583
00:48:06,680 --> 00:48:11,200
'in a frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens outside Manhattan.
584
00:48:11,200 --> 00:48:15,120
'His name was Joseph Cornell and he made boxes.
585
00:48:17,000 --> 00:48:21,600
'In one sense, the box was a metaphor of Cornell's own shyness.
586
00:48:21,600 --> 00:48:27,200
'Very few American artists have ever so banished their outward lives to preserve
their inward one.
587
00:48:27,200 --> 00:48:30,360
'And there were its emblems, preserved under glass,
588
00:48:30,360 --> 00:48:33,800
'filed away inside the wooden walls.
589
00:48:36,520 --> 00:48:38,920
'They represent a distant reality.
590
00:48:38,920 --> 00:48:41,120
'Not a historical reality, exactly,
591
00:48:41,120 --> 00:48:45,840
'more like a theatre of memory whose images keep crossing and recombining.
592
00:48:45,840 --> 00:48:48,520
'The birds, the planets,
593
00:48:48,520 --> 00:48:51,400
'the charms, the provincial hotels
594
00:48:51,400 --> 00:48:55,520
'and ballerinas and foreign postage stamps.
595
00:48:55,520 --> 00:48:58,320
'It could have looked precious, like Victoriana,
596
00:48:58,320 --> 00:49:01,760
'but it didn't, because Cornell had such a rigorous sense of form,
597
00:49:01,760 --> 00:49:05,600
'strict and spare like good New England carpentry.
598
00:49:05,600 --> 00:49:09,240
'De Chirico's paintings were full of nostalgia for lost experience,
599
00:49:09,240 --> 00:49:12,160
'but in Cornell, there is much less sense of loss.
600
00:49:12,160 --> 00:49:16,760
'Everything is there and possessed, as memories are in the mind.
601
00:49:22,520 --> 00:49:25,400
'Some of the boxes were very elaborate.
602
00:49:25,400 --> 00:49:29,200
'This one he called The Egypt of Mademoiselle Cleo de Merode.
603
00:49:30,560 --> 00:49:34,000
'She was a famous French courtesan of the 1890s,
604
00:49:34,000 --> 00:49:36,800
'renowned equally for her greed and her beauty.
605
00:49:36,800 --> 00:49:39,680
'In effect, Cornell compares her to Cleopatra
606
00:49:39,680 --> 00:49:42,880
'and makes a casket for her with the emblems of Egypt in it.
607
00:49:43,880 --> 00:49:48,640
'A sphinx, sand, pearls, serpents of the Nile, and so on.
608
00:49:48,640 --> 00:49:51,560
'Cornell was already a developed artist, though unknown,
609
00:49:51,560 --> 00:49:53,720
'before the Surrealists came to America.
610
00:49:53,720 --> 00:49:57,560
'The side of the American irrational that got most from Surrealism in the 40s,
611
00:49:57,560 --> 00:50:02,520
'was the work of painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Arshile Gorky,
612
00:50:02,520 --> 00:50:06,000
'later to be numbered among the Abstract Expressionists.
613
00:50:06,000 --> 00:50:09,400
'And among them, the main bridge was Gorky.
614
00:50:09,400 --> 00:50:12,440
'He had a peculiar career, this Armenian refugee,
615
00:50:12,440 --> 00:50:15,600
'with his florid imagination, deep insecurities
616
00:50:15,600 --> 00:50:18,520
'and eventual suicide at 44.
617
00:50:18,520 --> 00:50:20,680
'For the best part of 20 years,
618
00:50:20,680 --> 00:50:24,480
'he turned out pastiches of the artists that he wanted to become.
619
00:50:24,480 --> 00:50:26,880
'Of Picasso, and then of Miro,
620
00:50:26,880 --> 00:50:29,720
'imitating him in paintings like this.
621
00:50:33,680 --> 00:50:36,520
'And then, quite suddenly, Gorky found himself.
622
00:50:36,520 --> 00:50:39,120
'The spidery fluent line that he had got from Miro
623
00:50:39,120 --> 00:50:42,720
'began to describe landscapes of not quite abstract form.
624
00:50:42,720 --> 00:50:48,080
'Shapes like flower stems, tendons, sexual organs, livers and feathers.
625
00:50:50,200 --> 00:50:52,200
'The canvas pulsates.
626
00:50:52,200 --> 00:50:56,000
'It's filled with a kind of glowing, sweaty, pre-conscious life.
627
00:50:56,000 --> 00:50:59,400
'It looks into the body, and not out from it.
628
00:51:02,480 --> 00:51:06,160
'A great issue among the New York painters was myth.
629
00:51:06,160 --> 00:51:10,560
'Like the Surrealists, they felt rational civilisation had let them down.
630
00:51:10,560 --> 00:51:15,320
'They wanted painting to return its audience to what they imagined was primitive
reality,
631
00:51:15,320 --> 00:51:17,760
'to art as a magical sign.
632
00:51:17,760 --> 00:51:22,360
'And so Jackson Pollock, in the years before he began to drip paint directly on the
canvas,
633
00:51:22,360 --> 00:51:25,400
'used these charged, meaty squiggles of paint
634
00:51:25,400 --> 00:51:28,480
'to translate the shapes of southwest Indian art,
635
00:51:28,480 --> 00:51:30,960
'of rock pictographs and sand paintings,
636
00:51:30,960 --> 00:51:35,600
'into images like this one, The Key, done in 1946.
637
00:51:39,200 --> 00:51:42,800
'Or Male And Female, painted four years before.
638
00:51:45,080 --> 00:51:49,080
'Painting accumulated resonance by appealing to myth.
639
00:51:49,080 --> 00:51:52,960
'But the myths were in decline and the painters were not Indians or cavemen,
640
00:51:52,960 --> 00:51:56,200
'but New Yorkers living in the age of psychoanalysis.
641
00:51:56,200 --> 00:51:59,000
'They were like religious artists without a context.
642
00:51:59,000 --> 00:52:01,560
'And like the Surrealists, they concluded that
643
00:52:01,560 --> 00:52:04,440
'the only unpolluted areas left to the modern imagination
644
00:52:04,440 --> 00:52:07,280
'were the unconscious and the distant past.
645
00:52:09,960 --> 00:52:13,920
'With their tiny audience, and their exalted sense of the artist's role,
646
00:52:13,920 --> 00:52:19,480
'American painters like Mark Rothko or, here, Hans Hoffman in the 1940s, were the
last Romantics,
647
00:52:19,480 --> 00:52:25,480
'the last artists to paint as though art had the power to change the objective
conditions of life.
648
00:52:25,480 --> 00:52:29,080
'For them, the Surrealist ideal still held true,
649
00:52:29,080 --> 00:52:32,120
'although there was no chance that it would come true.
650
00:52:33,440 --> 00:52:35,640
'And no promised liberation of the mind
651
00:52:35,640 --> 00:52:40,160
'could compare to the real liberation of Europe in 1945.
652
00:52:40,160 --> 00:52:43,360
'The fact that so many of the Surrealists had gone to America
653
00:52:43,360 --> 00:52:48,200
'guaranteed that Surrealism would be a dead issue in France after the war was won.
654
00:52:48,200 --> 00:52:50,400
'After all, they had run away
655
00:52:50,400 --> 00:52:53,440
'and they could no longer command the respect earned by writers
656
00:52:53,440 --> 00:52:57,240
'like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus who had stayed and resisted.
657
00:52:57,240 --> 00:53:00,040
'So as a movement, Surrealism faded,
658
00:53:00,040 --> 00:53:03,120
'and its absorption into chic, which had begun in the late 30s,
659
00:53:03,120 --> 00:53:05,000
'became almost complete.
660
00:53:05,000 --> 00:53:08,360
'The movement that had hoped to reshape the mind of Western man
661
00:53:08,360 --> 00:53:11,440
'ended by advertising booze and cigarettes.'
662
00:53:11,440 --> 00:53:14,080
CHEERING
663
00:53:16,160 --> 00:53:19,040
'But was that all? Not quite.
664
00:53:19,040 --> 00:53:21,680
'For the memory of Surrealism, its deposit of ideas,
665
00:53:21,680 --> 00:53:25,880
'was strip-mined by artist after artist in the 60s and 70s.
666
00:53:25,880 --> 00:53:30,040
'As a proposition about freedom, it still remained infinitely intriguing.
667
00:53:31,160 --> 00:53:34,160
'In 1969, the Romanian artist Christo
668
00:53:34,160 --> 00:53:38,200
'wrapped a whole section of Australian coastline in plastic and rope.
669
00:53:38,200 --> 00:53:40,360
'This harked back to 1920
670
00:53:40,360 --> 00:53:43,000
'when Man Ray wrapped a sewing machine in blanket
671
00:53:43,000 --> 00:53:46,200
'and called it The Enigma Of Isidore Ducasse.
672
00:53:48,720 --> 00:53:52,640
'By the same token, Breton wrote that the simplest Surrealist act,
673
00:53:52,640 --> 00:53:58,640
'the most gratuitous one, would be to walk into the street shooting a revolver at
random into the crowd.
674
00:53:58,640 --> 00:54:01,080
'Again, almost 50 years later,
675
00:54:01,080 --> 00:54:06,760
'a Californian named Chris Burden fired a revolver at an airliner taking off over
Los Angeles.
676
00:54:06,760 --> 00:54:10,080
'He missed, and this action he called art.
677
00:54:18,200 --> 00:54:20,560
'It is surprising when you look back on the 60s
678
00:54:20,560 --> 00:54:24,800
'to see how much of their cultural surface was affected by Surrealism.
679
00:54:24,800 --> 00:54:30,480
'A lot of the time, the kids who were enacting their pantomimes of desire and
revolt didn't know this.
680
00:54:30,480 --> 00:54:33,160
'There was the illusion that the world was being born again,
681
00:54:33,160 --> 00:54:37,280
'the innocence renewed, the old contracts torn up in a new way.
682
00:54:37,280 --> 00:54:42,200
'And the key to this was simply being yourself, whatever that self might be.
683
00:54:43,240 --> 00:54:47,480
'From love-ins to the living theatre to the caterwaulings of stoned poets,
684
00:54:47,480 --> 00:54:50,960
'the word went out that art is me, me, me.
685
00:54:50,960 --> 00:54:54,200
'Art is anything made by anyone called an artist.
686
00:54:54,200 --> 00:54:56,920
'Quite so, but the question that such art begs
687
00:54:56,920 --> 00:55:00,800
'is the same question that a lot of Surrealist activity also skimmed.
688
00:55:00,800 --> 00:55:06,040
'Is the self, that great sacred cow of our culture, automatically interesting?'
689
00:55:07,240 --> 00:55:10,040
ROCK MUSIC
690
00:55:11,720 --> 00:55:17,800
'Or can it only hold our interest as art to the extent that it produces ordered
structures?
691
00:55:17,800 --> 00:55:20,960
'Looking back, I don't think there's much choice.
692
00:55:20,960 --> 00:55:25,120
'But in the 60s there was, because then diffused through the West, as in the 20s,
693
00:55:25,120 --> 00:55:29,760
'you had a dandyistic, theatrical revolt based upon a cult of youth,
694
00:55:29,760 --> 00:55:32,880
which, like Surrealism, was a Romantic revival.
695
00:55:35,320 --> 00:55:37,960
'Ecstasy, irrationality,
696
00:55:37,960 --> 00:55:40,920
'old Dionysus trying to assert himself again,
697
00:55:40,920 --> 00:55:45,440
'dressed like a pantomime wizard and nattering about hobbits and cosmic
consciousness.
698
00:55:45,440 --> 00:55:49,160
'If there was one link between Surrealism and the 60s,
699
00:55:49,160 --> 00:55:51,480
'it was the illusion that youth was truth.
700
00:55:51,480 --> 00:55:54,680
'By being born, one surpassed history.
701
00:55:54,680 --> 00:55:58,160
'By finding reality intolerable, one became a prophet.
702
00:56:02,080 --> 00:56:04,400
'There was another war, in Vietnam this time,
703
00:56:04,400 --> 00:56:07,720
'to help create an idea of class based on age.
704
00:56:07,720 --> 00:56:11,440
'So it was thought, or rather felt.
705
00:56:11,440 --> 00:56:15,520
'But all this fabric of illusion came apart in the 70s.'
706
00:56:15,520 --> 00:56:18,800
POLICE SIRENS
707
00:56:41,080 --> 00:56:44,640
So what remains of Surrealism? Not much.
708
00:56:44,640 --> 00:56:47,960
It became exactly what it set out not to be, a style.
709
00:56:47,960 --> 00:56:50,240
And not a very durable style at that.
710
00:56:50,240 --> 00:56:53,040
It took European artists the best part of 200 years
711
00:56:53,040 --> 00:56:55,920
to digest the implications of Michelangelo's nudes,
712
00:56:55,920 --> 00:56:58,280
but Surrealism was completely digested
713
00:56:58,280 --> 00:57:02,080
within a matter of 50 years, a quarter of the time.
714
00:57:02,080 --> 00:57:06,400
And in the meantime, its devices have come to look more nostalgic than
revolutionary.
715
00:57:06,400 --> 00:57:10,240
The Magrittes and Ernsts that were once the hard nuggets of contradiction
716
00:57:10,240 --> 00:57:13,000
now end up in the salerooms fetching enormous prices,
717
00:57:13,000 --> 00:57:16,400
just more units in the smooth flow of exchange
718
00:57:16,400 --> 00:57:19,360
that blurs the meanings of all art.
719
00:57:19,360 --> 00:57:21,600
But there is another side to it,
720
00:57:21,600 --> 00:57:24,080
because Surrealism was less an art movement
721
00:57:24,080 --> 00:57:27,800
than a rebellion of the mind that chose painting as its vehicle.
722
00:57:27,800 --> 00:57:30,480
It may not choose not to inhabit painting again.
723
00:57:30,480 --> 00:57:33,520
Yesterday the poltergeist was throwing plates in the kitchen,
724
00:57:33,520 --> 00:57:37,000
tomorrow it may turn up in the hall. You don't know.
725
00:57:37,000 --> 00:57:41,040
It's a very durable spirit and it's hard to exorcise.
726
00:57:41,040 --> 00:57:44,600
But it loves everything that is contrary, extravagant and free.
727
00:57:44,600 --> 00:57:48,240
And its very cussedness, its perversity, is a form of innocence,
728
00:57:48,240 --> 00:57:50,280
a declaration of hope.
729
00:57:50,280 --> 00:57:53,280
TRAIN RUMBLES
730
00:58:15,640 --> 00:58:19,680
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
731
00:58:19,680 --> 00:58:19,760
.