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Surrealism through Its Collectors and Collections
The Karpidas Collection brings Surrealism’s rich history into focus, uniting works by Dalí, Ernst, Magritte and more with storied provenances that shaped the movement.
S urrealism has had a complex, fascinating and paradoxical relationship with art and with the artists associated with the movement. To begin with, there is virtually no mention of the visual arts in the first Surrealist Manifesto (1924) by André Breton. This is surprising, given the background to its formation and the interests of its founders, who were themselves collectors. Secondly, despite the fact that Surrealism is probably best known internationally through its visual manifestations, it was never an art movement and cannot be identified through any particular style, unlike, say, Cubism or German Expressionism. It is different in kind from these “isms”.
Why, then, have so many artists been drawn to and lived with it? What attracted them?
Some were inherited from Dada – Max Ernst and Jean Arp, for example. Arp, whose miraculous Feuille se reposant is represented in The Karpidas Collection, explained that “I exhibited along with the Surrealists because their rebellious attitude towards ‘art’ and their direct attitude towards life were as wise as Dada…’’ For them, and for the many artists who followed, what seemed to pass as ‘art’ was worthless and had lost touch with lived experience. They were in revolt against modernism and sterile stylistic exercises. The appeal of Surrealism to artists lay outside any of the conventional paths through technique, style, subject, etc. It corresponded initially to a drastic sense of loss following the catastrophe of the First World War, after which it seemed as if the entire cultural and social landscape had been wiped out.
As Breton put it, “…in the eyes of the artist the exterior world had suddenly become empty… The model of yesterday, taken from the exterior world, no longer existed and could no longer exist. The model that was to succeed it, taken from the internal world, had not yet been discovered.”
That discovery was to be made by Surrealism.
Surrealism
Surrealism was launched, in the autumn of 1924, with Breton’s Manifesto, a Bureau for Surrealist Research where people were invited to come in off the street to tell their dreams, and a journal, La Révolution Surrealiste, the first great Surrealist review, which ran from 1924 to 1929.
In the Manifesto of Surrealism, painting is mentioned only in a footnote; the primary concerns of the movement in formation are with language, poetry, life, and an unknown region to be explored, such as the unconscious. The Manifesto’s definition of Surrealism, while not excluding a visual dimension, is concerned with the nature of thought and how to express it:
“Surrealism. Pure psychic automatism, by which we intend to express, either verbally, or in writing, or in any other way, the real functioning of thought. The dictation of thought in the absence of any control exerted by reason, and outside any aesthetic or moral preoccupations.”
So, it is not just rational, conscious thought, but the whole internal world that lies beyond this, including what Freud called the subconscious or unconscious, which may reveal its workings in dreams.
Unlike many manifestoes in the art world, the Surrealist Manifesto does not set out a programme or specific direction to follow, but proposes enquiry and exploration – Breton mentions as a precedent Columbus setting off for the New World, not knowing what he might find. The idea of automatism seemed to indicate a way forward. The Manifesto, in fact, started life as a preface to Breton’s latest experiments in automatic writing, which were published with it as “Soluble Fish.” It wasn’t easy: the state of mind to write automatically, which demanded the suspension of conscious control of thought but enough consciousness to write sentences, was hard to attain. When achieved, the results were wonderful – texts full of startling poetic images.
The possibilities for artists, given there being no prescribed method or practice, were virtually endless. The first issues of La Révolution Surrealiste are dominated by photographs, film stills, objects, popular art, sketches by Giorgio de Chirico and Ernst, and the free pen-and-ink drawings by André Masson. The most convincing example of visual automatism, Masson’s drawings start as unconsciously as any careless doodle and flower into fragments evoking bodies, breasts, architecture, leaves and fruit. Other experiments in automatic processes were to include Ernst’s invention of frottage and decalcomania, as well as the vast field of the “optical unconscious” in photography, stunningly represented by Man Ray. Hence the fact that there is no single identity to visual Surrealism.
Automatism was necessarily, in the view of the Surrealists, present in the creation of the startling image, the unexpected juxtaposition of unrelated things.
Max Ernst and the Surrealist Image
It was an exhibition of collages by the Cologne Dadaist Max Ernst in Paris in 1921 which provided the spark that lit the Surrealist fuse. This was still at the height of Dada in Paris, whose participants were the future Surrealists, but already they were looking beyond dada negation. In his introduction to the catalogue for Ernst’s exhibition, which included extraordinary photo-collages such as Nightingale (acquired immediately by Paul Éluard), Breton recognised that photography and film had fundamentally changed conventional modes of expression, and articulated a concept of the image that was to become fundamental for Surrealism: the juxtaposition of two or more distant realities to create a new image. “The marvellous ability to reach out, without leaving the field of our experience, to two distinct realities and bring them together to create a spark. … Doesn’t such an ability make the person who possesses it better than a poet…?”
Ernst – the poet-artist – had created the collages from a mixture of cut-up media – photographs, paint, wallpapers, whose juxtaposition created new images, unanticipatable associations and analogies. So the idea of the superior reality of images reached only in dream or some automatic process was there even before Surrealism was founded, and was embodied in the collages Ernst managed to send to Paris – though he was still stuck in post-war Germany. Ernst distinguished his collages/photo-montages, which he made in Cologne, from those of the Berlin Dadaists, such as Hannah Höch, whose work he regarded as too socio-political. Höch’s suggestive feminist photomontage Priesterin is in this collection.
There are collages by Ernst from a slightly later period in the Karpidas collection which pursue a similar idea in a different way – this time working not with photography but looking back to 19th-century engravings. Ernst made a number of collage-engravings, his ingenuity never flagging, and created three collage-novels with them, perhaps the first graphic novels: La femme 100 têtes, 1929, Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel, 1930, (translated by Dorothea Tanning, 1982) and Une semaine de Bonté, ou les sept éléments capitaux, 1934. The images in the novels have captions underlining their iconoclastic, erotic and witty character. The two collages here are the originals for two of the plates in Rêve d’une petite fille: the opening scene from the first chapter, with the caption Le Père: “ Votre baiser me semble adulte, mon enfant. Venu de Dieu, il ira loin. Allez, ma fille, allez en avant et…” (‘The Father: “Your kiss seems adult, my child, Coming from God, it will go far. Go, my daughter, go ahead and…”’), and another plate from the same chapter, …jusqu’à épuisement complet des beaux danseurs! (…until the beautiful dancers are completely exhausted). The two collages came from the collection of Julien Levy, the New York dealer, who put on ground-breaking shows of Surrealist artists in the 1930s, when they were virtually unknown outside France. They may well have been among the collages he showed in Ernst’s first solo show in the United States, Exhibition Surrealiste MAX ERNST, in November 1932.
Collections of Surrealism are a very interesting way of approaching the rich and varied work of the many artists who have aligned themselves at some point with the movement. Collections made by the Surrealists themselves and collections of Surrealism are not quite the same. The Surrealists – most notably Breton himself, his wife Simone and the poet Paul Éluard – collected the works of their friends and colleagues, wrote about them and organised exhibitions to display them. These activities were part of the lifeblood of the movement and their choices played an important role in the long evolution of visual Surrealism. What this could be, as we shall see, was much disputed.
Breton, Simone and Éluard shared the hunting instinct of the true collector. Among Breton’s earliest purchases, probably in 1922, was de Chirico’s The Child’s Brain, 1914, a key painting from de Chirico’s metaphysical period (1912-18), which he kept until 1964, two years before his death. He had glimpsed the painting, from a bus, in the window of Paul Guillaume’s Gallery and been transfixed. De Chirico was to be a central but controversial figure in the development of Surrealist painting.
Breton was also a passionate supporter of Picasso, and several Picassos passed through his hands. He had reluctantly taken a post in the early 1920s advising the couturier and collector Jacques Doucet, and managed to persuade Doucet to buy, and Picasso to sell, the Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, now in MoMA, which had remained rolled up in Picasso’s studio, for 25,000 francs.
The works he and Simone bought were never regarded as trophies, but objects with special kinds of power and expressive communication. Breton scrutinised the compulsion to possess behind his own collecting and speculated that it was not just ownership, having the painting or object in one’s power: caresser du regard ou les changer d’angle, being able to look at it, handle, move it about, but the hope of seizing its power for himself: “l’espoir de m’approprier certains pouvoirs qu’électivement à mes yeux ils détiennent.”
Obliged frequently to sell, Breton wrote movingly of this painful necessity:
“As, over the course of my life, I have been far from being able to keep all these paintings that I had managed to bring into my home, I distinguish quite well from those which it was not too cruel for me to part with, those that I have never ceased to regret, even that I find it difficult to forgive myself for having had to give up to another fate than mine. I limit myself to mentioning, among the latter, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, by de Chirico, Woman with a Mandolin, by Picasso, and above all The Bride by Duchamp.”
Paul Éluard, by contrast, had deeper resources and amassed large collections. Both he and Breton bought not only work by their contemporaries but non-Western art, a strong feature in the Surrealists’ collections. In 1931 the “Collection André Breton and Paul Éluard” of African, American and Oceanian sculpture, with over 300 pieces, was exhibited at the Ratton Gallery, then sold at the Hôtel Drouot. Both continued to collect in this field, notably North West Coast First Nations art.
While like all collectors, Éluard bought and sold occasionally, two of his Surrealist collections were sold en bloc. The first, at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris in 1924, on the eve of his dramatic departure to the Far East to start a new life (he was eventually persuaded home by his wife Gala and Max Ernst), had included Ernst’s Le Rossignol Chinois, eight de Chiricos and five Picassos. The second was a private sale to his friend Roland Penrose in 1938. Penrose bought Éluard’s entire collection for £1,600, as stipulated by Éluard; it contained “six de Chirico’s, ten Picasso’s, forty Ernst’s, eight Miró’s, three Tanguy’s, four Magritte’s, three Man Ray’s, three Dalí’s, three Arp’s, one Klee, one Chagall and various other paintings and objects.”
A number of works in the present sale have passed through these or other significant Surrealist collections. Among the “other paintings” in Éluard’s collection, for example, was Le Piano, 1934 by Óscar Dominguez, a prominent figure among the Surrealist group in Paris in the 1930s. Tanguy’s Titre Inconnu, 1928, and Masson’s La Femme paralytique, 1939, were in the collection of Simone Collinet, as she became after her divorce from Breton.
Collections of Surrealism assemble works according to the tastes and interests of the collector, sometimes emphasising one or other aspect of the movement, or focussing on the work of a particular group or artist. Lindy and Edwin Bergman built up an unrivalled collection of Cornells, for example, while their fellow Chicago collector Joseph Shapiro was drawn to Roberto Matta. There are often different connections, placing works in new contexts, and each collection has its own character. Four of the greatest were featured in the exhibition Surreal Encounters: Collecting the Marvellous. Works from the Collections of Roland Penrose, Edward James, Gabrielle Keiller, Ella und Heiner Pietzsch (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 2016). Of these only Roland Penrose was a member of the Surrealist movement.
I have always thought of Pauline Karpidas’s collection in the context of Surrealism. It contains a wide range of works by Surrealist artists, many with provenances from Surrealist collections. I first met Pauline through my research on Dalí, and benefited from her generosity with loans, for example Dalí’s 1936 painting Le Sommeil (formerly in the Karpidas collection).
Le Sommeil came from another of the great collections of work by Surrealist artists, built up by Edward James. Further works by Dalí in the Karpidas collection were also acquired from James’s collection, including the wonderful 1941 Portrait de Gala Galarina, the 1937 drawing Cannibalisme des objets, tête de femme avec soulier, and the ink drawing in a moulded frame, Message dans un paysage Palladien, dated circa 1936. This date is plausible, given that the two famous pairs of shaped panels, each titled Couple aux têtes pleines de nuages, also date from 1936. Dalí and James had met in early Spring 1935, and by this time were close friends. James bought Couple aux têtes pleines de nuages (now in the Boijmans Museum) from Dalí’s exhibition at the Reid and Lefevre Gallery in London in June 1936, which coincided with the International Surrealist Exhibition at Burlington Gardens, organised by Penrose and Herbert Read, who owned the Delvaux Femmes et lampes.
In December 1936 Dalí and James signed a contract in which James promised to buy all Dalí’s works produced between June 1937 and June 1938 for the sum of £2,400. The ink and tempera work Cannibalisme des objets probably entered the collection under this agreement. James was a somewhat unusual collector in that he tended to become not only close to the artists he admired, knew personally and collected but wished to engage creatively with them. He had a role in the creation of Dalí’s Surrealist object, Téléphone Aphrodisiaque, for example, and may have been involved, at least in the practical commissioning and construction, in the shaped frames.
Pauline Karpidas’ collection has a distinctive character, as revealed in photographs of the apartment. The predominant subject is the human body, usually female, often nude, frequently transformed or metamorphosed according to the desires or fears of the artist. They range from Magritte’s wonderful 1958 La Statue volante – almost monochrome, with an extraordinary illusion of physical presence in the torso – to the mysterious absence in Victor Brauner’s Nous sommes trahis, 1934, which belonged to Breton; or from Hans Bellmer’s untitled pen and gouache drawing on black paper of his jointed doll, unusually including the head of a girl gazing at the reconstructed limbs.
Interconnections and dialogues between the works come thick and fast: Höch’s Priesterin and Magritte’s brilliant take on the Venus de Milo in the unique painted plaster piece Les Menottes de cuivre remind us of the turn to the classical in the 1920s which erupted in many forms. In this context there is a fascinating strand of heads and portraits with unexpected resonances – a marble Roman head of the Greek hero Meleager forms an unexpected ally in Man Ray’s Autoportrait, which, looking in an entirely different direction, also invites comparisons with Claude Cahun’s photograph of an object assembled from found bits and pieces as a “portrait” of the Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, Portrait of André Gide after Benjamin Péret. The whole setting with the highly colourful furniture and decorations, amber, gold and scarlet, enhances this sense of a lively interaction between the works in a joyful environment. The rare collaborative painting between Max Ernst and Marie-Berthe Aurenche, Ballon-Cœur, floats aloft while Niki de Saint Phalle’s luminous green and pink elephant Ganesh trumpets beneath next to Lalanne’s sculpture, Caroline Enceinte, of a pregnant Caroline with a cabbage head.
Did Pauline set out to create a Surrealist collection? Whether or not, the collection has added its own approach, embracing the playful, erotic and spectacular side of Surrealism, going on to explore continuities in contemporary art and design.
The Problem and Triumph of Painting
Artists have continued to be attracted to Surrealism, its ideas, stance towards art and championing of the “interior model”, in which painting has played a major role, thereby establishing works of art as key components in the movement. But this nearly didn’t happen. There were strong views at the start about the future of any visual expressions of Surrealism; some held that the old methods – painting and sculpture – were not feasible, and turned their back on the art world altogether, arguing instead for new mediums like cinema, and the vibrancy of street culture.
“Automatism” in this context still had to be defined. In the first issue of La Révolution Surrealiste (1924) the article “Les yeux enchantés” (by Max Morise) attacked painting. The scapegoat was de Chirico, whose metaphysical paintings, in which interiors and haunted city squares were “beyond the real”, as if seen in a dream, were the epitome at the time of the Surrealist image. The argument was that, as Surrealist as the image may be, drawn from dream or hallucination, its expression could not be automatic, immediate, given the necessary intervention of a conscious translation and the demands of the medium. Painting requires too much conscious application ever to qualify as automatic.
The idea that painting could not qualify as Surrealist horrified Breton. Taking over editorship of La Révolution Surrealiste from issue 4 in July 1925, he wrote a series of texts on “Surrealism and Painting”, to defend the theoretical position of painting. To exemplify his argument, he reproduced a constellation of masterpieces by artists including Miró, Ernst and Masson, de Chirico and, unexpectedly, Picasso.
Breton’s perception of Picasso’s Cubism is quite different from the way it is normally understood – in formal terms and as the pathway towards abstraction (which Picasso himself never took). For Breton, Cubism, in fragmenting material forms and splintering perspective, challenged the narrow conception of imitation that governed painting and opened the way for the imagination. “L’Homme à la clarinette remains as a tangible proof of our unwavering proposition that the mind talks stubbornly to us of a future continent, and that everyone has the power to accompany an ever more beautiful Alice into Wonderland.”
This radical take on Cubism is refreshing and in the current sale there are interesting ambiguities where both responses are valid, for example with some of the Laurens sculptures.
When, after discussing Picasso and Braque, Breton comes to de Chirico, his reasons for not foregrounding him become clear. De Chirico is denounced for his current practices, not the “metaphysical paintings”: giving in to commercial pressures, repeating early works and embracing traditional techniques. Ernst, Man Ray and Masson were the only artists close to the movement included in the articles on Surrealism and painting in La Révolution Surrealiste. When Le Surrealisme et la peinture was published as a book, in 1928, Breton added Picabia, Miró, Tanguy and Arp, with lavish illustrations including fifteen de Chiricos.
The final issue of La Révolution Surrealiste (1929) reinforced painting as a Surrealist medium, with the introduction of two new recruits: Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. The illustrations opened, though, with de Chirico’s La Guerra (War), 1916, followed later by La Politique. These two works, with their commanding and unexpected titles, are among the most mysterious and least figurative of de Chirico’s metaphysical period, with their strong geometric shapes and abstract notations. A landscape by Tanguy from the same period as Titre inconnu, 1928, often known as Paysage au nuage rouge, places abstract forms in a land – or perhaps sea-scape with horizon and sky, simultaneously recognisable and uninterpretable. The contrast with Dalí and Magritte – who had their own different approaches – is striking. In Dalí’s Accommodations of Desire and Illumined Pleasures his new, illusionistic technique renders objectively his private worlds.
Magritte galvanised the ambiguous and treacherous relationship between word and image. The ink drawings in this collection, L’Usage de la parole, Dessin sans titre and Le Monde perdu, which belonged to Magritte’s fellow Belgian Surrealist E.L.T. Mesens, are marvellous examples of his dexterity and wit, from the same period as his contributions to La Révolution Surrealiste. Both the arbitrary nature of a word’s designation of something and the fact that a word is not itself the thing it designates – as in the famous painting La Trahison des images, (Ceci n’est pas une pipe – a painting of a pipe is not a pipe) – are the prompts for these careful, delightful philosophical speculations. In Le Monde perdu, each of the organically interlinked shapes contains a word or phrase indicating things different in kind: two of which could be conceived visually, the other two, for different reasons, not.
Dalí and Magritte were the strongest voices, in this important issue of La Révolution Surrealiste, for alternatives to the idea of automatism, which Dalí, for one, found too passive a process.
Automatism vs. the Dream Image
The tension between Automatism and the dream image was the theme of Breton’s essay for Peggy Guggenheim’s exhibition Art of This Century in New York in 1942. Definitively excluding Dalí was one of its intentions: Breton attacks his “ultra-retrograde technique” and cynical self-promotion, stating that since 1936 he “has had no interest whatsoever for Surrealism.” Rejecting the “setting up of dream images in the form of trompe-l’œil”, Breton re-asserts the “current of Automatism”. Acknowledging that a degree of premeditation may be necessary in the composition of a painting or a poem and that the current may flow underground, Automatism is nonetheless essential for artists to “embrace the whole psycho-physical field, of which consciousness is only a small fraction.”
The centrality of Automatism had been re-affirmed in the work of Roberto Matta, one of the last recruits to the movement just before the War. The spontaneity of his first paintings and drawings, encouraged by his friend the English Surrealist artist Gordon Onslow Ford, was to persist throughout his life. His first experiments with the free use of paint led to the “psychological morphologies”; the extraordinary worlds he created, ambiguous in terms of scale – cell-like forms that suggest both the minuteness of the brain and the vastness of the cosmos. After moving from Paris to New York in 1939, Matta continued his visions in paintings and drawings of great originality, as in The Modern Sphinx (L’Incomunicable), 1943, which suggest new dimensions in time and space.
One of the masterpieces in this sale, André Masson’s La femme paralytique, 1939, engages with the catastrophe engulfing Europe, the growth of Nazism and the coming war. Painted after an engraving by Géricault, Masson turns the passer-by into a fleeing, vulnerable woman. The interlocked and contrasting colours and shapes – the red of the woman’s hair, which bleeds into the bricks and echoes in the revolutionary bonnet on the Cock’s head, the horse, military and processional, who exists uncannily in different spaces – express forcibly the disintegration and threats faced by Europe. Curiously, this has the effect of a rhythmic unity that Breton described as being achieved through Automatism, although there are few obvious signs of spontaneity. “I maintain that [Automatism] is the only mode of expression which gives full satisfaction to both eye and ear by achieving rhythmic unity (just as recognisable in an automatic drawing or text as in a melody or a bird’s nest)…” Automatism, for Masson, was always present even if underground.
Surrealism was, from its inception, a kind of collective. The need for interaction, communal activity, daily attendance at the café was essential, and play was pursued seriously. The Cadavre exquis was one of many games the Surrealists played – based on the child’s game of Head, Body and Legs, a paper is folded after each intervention so that the previous ones are invisible. What fascinated the Surrealists were the strange coincidences within the imagery of the different participants. The example here, Cadavre exquis, with Breton, Valentine Hugo, Greta Knutson and Tristan Tzara – including artists and poets – demonstrates the principle that anyone can join in. Such collaborative and improvisational practices were integral to the movement’s efforts to subvert conventional modes of artistic production and to expand the possibilities of creative expression.
