Whereas dwelling on the English island of Jersey within the Nineteen Forties, a younger queer French couple—Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore—carried out a sly psyop on the Gestapo. They wrote notes taunting them to defect or commit sabotage and providing contagious complaints: I don’t need to spend my complete life in a uniform, signed SOLDAT OHNE NAMEN (soldier with no title).
These “paper bullets,” as Moore and Cahun referred to as them, are on view within the coronary heart of “Within the Very Bowels of Change: Surrealism and Antifascism” on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in Warsaw. The present is a model of an exhibition that first appeared at Lenbachhaus in Munich in 2024, the place it was titled “However Stay Right here? No Thanks: Surrealism and Antifascism”—marrying the 2 greatest -isms, for my cash, of the complete twentieth century.
Like too many Surrealists, Moore and Cahun acquired caught and sentenced, receiving six years on one cost and the demise penalty on one other. The sentences have been no match for Cahun’s wit: The artist replied by asking which must be carried out first. Ultimately, they have been among the many fortunate ones: The warfare ended earlier than both made it to demise row. The present features a picture of Cahun biting down defiantly on a defeated Gestapo officer’s badge: Whereas the duo’s different collaborative works on view see negatives lower up and collaged, this biting commentary required no such intervention.
Leonora Carrington: Noah’s Ark, ca. 1938.
Patrick Boulen
Whereas Surrealism is figured as a method in common creativeness—trippy, dreamy, and escapist, indifferent from actuality in each approach—“Within the Very Bowels of Change” reminds simply how a lot the motion was shaped in response to the politics of its time. Towards this present, faculty dorm room posters of melting clocks really feel completely denuded, with regrets to the angsty teenagers pinning them up.
Excerpts from Luis Buñuel’s movie Golden Age (1930) open the exhibition, marking the screening that radicalized Surrealism: In 1930, the shamelessly self-described Antisemitic League of France stormed a Parisian theater, the place additionally they destroyed works by Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Jean Miró, and Max Ernst. The act declared Surrealism an enemy of the Proper: The group had been outraged by Buñuel’s Marquis de Sade–impressed satire skewering the hypocritical sexual mores of each the Catholics and the bourgeoisie.
Quickly, in fact, a lot Surrealist artwork could be deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis: Fascists all over the place knew of the work’s subversive energy. However that screening—together with the group’s 1925 protest of the French warfare in opposition to the native individuals of Morocco—readied the artists for the rise of the Proper.
When the Spanish Civil Struggle broke out in 1936, the Surrealists mobilized rapidly: Cahun, together with André Breton and Georges Bataille, shaped Contre-Attaque to rally the working class. The alliance was impressed partly by Bataille’s 1933 essay “The Psychological Construction of Fascism,” which argued that fascists tooled the mass’s repressed psychic power towards a dynamic of authority and submission. For the Surrealists, followers of Marx and Freud, such energies might be extra healthily—and liberally—expressed. Free the thoughts, they wagered, and solely then can the remaining comply with.
Testifying to those concepts, one room in “Within the Very Bowels of Change” options memorable works on the erotics of fascism: If Susan Sontag shocked along with her 1975 essay on Riefenstahl’s intercourse enchantment, Surrealists like Bataille, Victor Brauner, and André Masson have been already onto fascism’s titillations within the ’30s.
That gallery is dedicated to Paris within the interwar interval, the very core of the motion; later, the present extends into the Fifties and takes an accordion-like strategy to capital “S” Surrealism, increasing its orbit however at all times contracting again to its central characters and considerations.
All through, gorgeously designed vitrines introduce images, misplaced artworks, and one of many Surrealists’ most important mediums: publications. The following gallery—devoted to the Spanish Civil Struggle—exhibits a photograph of Dalí in an aquanaut go well with on the first Surrealist exhibition to declare itself “Worldwide,” held in London in 1936: Dalí nearly suffocated in it, however his comrades got here to the rescue. Hanging close by is one other grave portrait of Surreal-ish solidarity: Picasso’s Monument to the Spaniards Who Died for France (1946–47). Surrealism would stay decidedly internationalist for many years (and galleries) to come back.
Certainly, after Surrealism was deemed degenerate artwork in 1937, Egyptian comrades penned their manifesto “Lengthy stay degenerate artwork!” The following galleries—one on degenerate artists and their Egyptian advocates, one other on artists in Germany—see Surrealism slowly refigured as not solely a type of psychic liberation, however because the visible language greatest suited to depicting the horrors of an completely irrational world. A Hans Bellmer drawing exhibits an odd, improbably undulating brick wall that he drew whereas imprisoned at Camp des Milles in France, a brickworks camp the place German nationals (together with Max Ernst) have been despatched—by no means thoughts that Bellmer had been a part of the Resistance, forging passports. Simply as he had refused to make his iconic dolls anatomically naturalistic—a flagrant protest of Nazi eugenics—his bricks don’t conform to order.
On the Germany gallery’s postwar aspect are work and photos by the Berlin Cabaret Die Badewanne (The Bathtub), named after its venue of origin—and rhyming brilliantly with Lee Miller’s iconic self-portrait by which she poses in Hitler’s bathtub the day after he dedicated suicide. Die Badewanne’s scenography borrowed from Surrealism’s dreamy landscapes, but the group wagered that they didn’t have to make new Surrealist artwork, as a result of destroyed Berlin was wilder than something they could think about. As a substitute, their devotion to Surrealism was reconstructive: They translated key Surrealist texts into German and recreated variations of the artwork that they had been starved of by enlisting cabaret—that quintessential Weimar medium the Nazis had focused—to carry out homages to degenerate artists.
A later postwar gallery, dedicated to Polish and Czech artists like Władysław Strzemiński and Holocaust survivors Erna Rosenstein and Emil Filla, consists of work that draw from the visible language of Surrealism to mirror the horrors such artists witnessed. This Warsaw model of the present emphasizes how, for artists within the East, Surrealism was an argument in opposition to the Socialist Realist mainstream. There was a stylistic stress on the Left: Was the aim of artwork to brighten social gathering buildings and monumentalize staff’ actions, because the Stalinists had it, or to emancipate the viewer, per the Surrealists and the Trotskyites? A later {photograph} exhibits Breton and Diego Rivera discussing, with Leon Trotsky, but another manifesto, demanding freedom for artwork in opposition to each censorship and propaganda.
Victor Brauner: The Encounter of two Bis Rue Perrel, 1946.
©ADAGP, Paris/Zakis, Warsaw
The Surrealists, in fact, extra simply embraced the liberty of some than of others: I counted no less than 5 sexualized bare ladies within the exhibition with out faces or heads, that a part of the physique the place individuality and free thought tends to get localized. Others, although—Cahun and Moore, but additionally Victor Brauner—noticed how fascism was inextricable from patriarchal energy, and sought to free themselves from the confines of gender altogether. Within the ’20s, Brauner painted King Ubu rising more and more repulsive as he takes extra faceless, inert ladies, and after the warfare, trapped in Marseilles with no cash for a visa as all his comrades have been fleeing, he drew androgynous figures, stiff-bodied and wide-eyed: free of their minds however trapped on the earth, very similar to himself.
There may be additionally loads of the same old exoticizing imagery borrowing from non-European cultures, however a memorable mission places this apply as a replacement. A gallery devoted to Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, and Eva Sulzer tells of the trio’s 1939 go to to the Pacific Northwest, whose Indigenous cultures that they had lengthy fantasized about. Upon lastly arriving, nevertheless, they have been disenchanted: The thriving society and “common artwork” they have been searching for had been wrecked by genocide and settler colonialism. As a substitute of inspiring Surrealist work, the dismaying panorama grew to become the topic of a documentary movie by Paalen and images by Sulzer, displaying deserted villages and totem poles being consumed by vegetation.
That trio by no means made it again to Europe: The warfare was worsening they usually lived the remainder of their lives in exile. Quickly, numerous comrades would comply with, heading for Mexico, New York, Martinique, and different locales. For a time, Marseilles was the one giant European port open to the world, in order that they gathered there collectively for one final hoorah as they waited for boats and visas, passing time by making beautiful corpses and taking part in playing cards, a few of that are on view. Their playing cards had one essential intervention: On their faces, liberatory thinkers, like Freud and de Sade, changed Kings and Queens.
