Art review: Another World: Dali, Magritte, Miro and the Surrealists

Published on Monday 19 July 2010 16:58

ANOTHER WORLD: DALI, MAGRITTE, MIRO AND THE SURREALISTS **** DEAN GALLERY, EDINBURGH

• The subject of Picasso's Portrait of Lee Miller features in the exhibition as both muse and artist in her own right. Picture: Complimentary/National Galleries of Scotland

TWELVE hundred coal sacks hang from the ceiling and there is a bed in each of the four corners of the room. Although the walls are hung with art and bizarrely dressed mannequins stand around, the only light is from a brazier and visitors have to carry torches. It sounds like a proposal for next year's Turner Prize. In fact, it is a description of the Exposition Internationale du Surralisme in Paris in 1938. Contemporary art has not moved on much, it seems.

Indeed, in 1938 Surrealism itself had been around for a while. Launched in 1924 with Andr Breton's First Surrealist Manifesto, even then Breton was articulating radical ideas already expressed in wildly anarchic form by the Dadaists, but his particular focus on Freud and giving expression to the unconscious mind – especially through what he called "pure psychic automatism" – was profoundly influential. He opened up to artistic exploration areas of experience hitherto shut firmly away behind social taboos.

In consequence, the impact of the movement reached far beyond the shifting confines of its membership and had a profound effect on the way art was to evolve. Indeed, by the determined assault on our taboos and conventions, Surrealism had a profound impact on our wider culture, too. Although artists such as Magritte, Mir and Dal created some of the most memorable images of the time, it was through multifarious other forms of expression – many of them then highly unconventional, though now mainstream – that Surrealist ideas really penetrated the collective consciousness. To understand what it was all about, the documents, the photographs and the ephemera that record all this activity are vital.

That extraordinary Exposition Internationale du Surralisme in 1938 is a good example. Little if anything survives of what was actually shown there – it was in fact what we have come to call an installation. The mis-en-scne was by Marcel Duchamp and the show included work by all the major surrealist artists. Dal created Rainy Taxi, a taxi with two mannequins sitting in it constantly drenched with water: inside it rains, outside it is dry, a typical Surrealist inversion of normality.

Other mannequins were bizarrely attired by artists like Mir. The only record, however, is in a series of photographs, principally by Denise Bellon and Man Ray. A set is held in the Scottish National Gallery's rich collection of Surrealist art and archive material and is on view in Another World: Dal, Mir, Magritte and the Surrealists.

Taking over the whole of the Dean Gallery, for the first time this exhibition gives us a proper idea of the wealth of this collection.

Although supplemented by some major loans, the bulk of what is on display belongs to the SNGMA. There are important works here that were acquired early in the history of the gallery – Giacometti's Woman with her Throat Cut, a savage bronze of a brutally dismembered figure, was bought in 1970, for instance. Magritte's Black Flag, a mysterious painting of sinister aeroplanes circling in the night sky which was perhaps the artist's response to the bombing of Guernica, was bought in 1972.

But the main part of the collections which make the SNGMA a world centre for the study of Surrealism came from two acquisitions: Roland Penrose's archive and library was bought in 1994 and Gabrielle Keiller's collection came by bequest the following year. The purchase of the Penrose library was also supplemented by a number of important individual purchases from his collection before and after 1994 – Picasso's Guitar, Gas-Jet and Bottle was bought in 1982, for instance; Mir's magnificent Head of a Catalan Peasant was bought jointly with the Tate in 1999. The acquisition of the Picasso indicates what a lengthy process of courtship and negotiation preceded the eventual acquisition of the library. Credit must go to both Douglas Hall and Richard Calvacoressi for their diplomacy, tact and patience in bringing this about. The same is true of Keiller's bequest – Hall's first contact with her was as early as 1976.

Penrose was an artist who inherited a fortune. Early friendship with Max Ernst in Paris led him towards Surrealism and when he came into his fortune he used it to support his Surrealist friends by collecting their art and also to promote Surrealism – he played a central role in the first International Surrealist exhibition in London in 1936, for instance. There is a room here devoted both to that exhibition and to the work of British artists including Paul Nash, Eileen Agar and Henry Moore who took up Surrealist ideas. Most surprising among them perhaps is Desmond Morris. Better known as author of The Naked Ape, Morris is a considerable artist, but also in 1957 he organised an exhibition of chimpanzees' painting. Were they Surrealist apes?

Keiller was an heiress (and a golf champion) whose third marriage was to Alexander Keiller of the Dundee marmalade family. Her interest in art, and in particular in Surrealism, was stimulated by meeting Peggy Guggenheim in Venice and fostered by her friendship with Eduardo Paolozzi, whose work she encountered at the Venice Biennale in 1960.

Guggenheim was uniquely qualified as a guide: she collected the artists as well as their art and, like a true Surrealist, spared no blushes in her autobiography.

Later Keiller also became a friend of Penrose. Indeed, one of the most remarkable works in the collection, Magritte's Representation, a naked woman's pelvic region in a fitted frame, was bought by Keiller from Penrose.

This is a work which also epitomises the Surrealist attitude to women.

Although there were a number of important women artists in the movement, as Patrick Elliott puts it in the catalogue, women on the whole were looked upon either as "muse or decorative object". Sometimes it is worse: Hans Bellmer's Dolls, for instance, are deeply disturbing. At other times it is all just a bit smutty.

The intention of Breton's central idea of "pure psychic automatism" which loosely unites all this was to bypass the conscious mind and so allow the subconscious freely to express itself. Breton first imagined it as a literary form and certainly it did not translate easily into painting. Mir's beautiful Peinture of 1925 mimics the wandering line of automatic drawing, but could hardly have been spontaneous. It also reflects the influence of Paul Klee, who was pursuing similar ideas independently and is represented by several works here.

Collage proved a more successful vehicle for the spontaneous creation of images. Max Ernst was master of the form and is represented here not only by major paintings, but by his extraordinary collage novel, Une Semaine de Bont. The apparent randomness of his images is dreamlike and the representation of the unconscious world of dreams was a gift to painters. Like Magritte's Threatening Weather, for instance, or Paul Delvaux's Street of Trams, Dal's beautiful little picture, The Signal of Anguish, manages to capture their mysterious quality: the paradox of an enigma clearly perceived.

There are other great works here, Mir's Maternit, for instance, Picasso's Portrait of Lee Miller – Penrose's wife, who figures here both as muse and as artist – or Dal's Bird of 1928.

The last room is devoted principally to Paolozzi, Alan Davie and William Turnbull, artists who in the years after the war took the Surrealist inspiration in new directions. Their work does look very grand, but on the whole this is an exhibition to enjoy browsing cases of scrapbooks, photographs, ephemeral publications and suchlike, and so get a feeling of the vivid excitement and apparently inexhaustible invention of a cultural earthquake whose aftershocks we still feel.

• Until 9 January