100 years of Surrealism
Is it just us or does Dorothea Tanning’s family patriarch from 1954 look eerily familiar? The monstrosities of the world that precipitated and sustained the Surrealist movement are perhaps not that far off from the political predicaments we find ourselves in today. In the spiral labyrinth of the @centrepompidou ‘s Surrealist centenary exhibition, we were struck by the loneliness of Caspar David Friedrich’s landscape and the verve of Victor Hugo’s ‘automatic’ drawing, as Max Ernst and André Breton would have been too.
From these earlier examples to works created in the last two decades, the retrospective carried a progressively egalitarian message: far from being an exclusive club for a few familiar men, the Surrealist movement embraced women and ‘foreigners’ from Bucharest to Buenos Aires. Alongside some of the most iconic Surrealist masterpieces, I was heartened to see that a work previously in our collection, Eileen Agar’s 1936 sculpture made of shells, feathers, rocks and other objects gathered in Dorset, was installed in a climactic spot (with the arguably the best view!).