Milan, major exhibition on surrealism with masterpieces from Holland at Mudec

On view from March 22 to July 30, 2023 at Mudec - Museo delle Culture in Milan is the exhibition Dalí, Magritte, Man Ray and Surrealism. Masterpieces from the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, which presents more than 180 works including paintings, sculptures, drawings, documents and artifacts from the collection of one of the most important museums in the Netherlands, the Bojimans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, in dialogue with some works from the Permanent Collection of the Museum of Cultures.

The exhibition is curated by art historian Els Hoek, the museum’s curator, with the collaboration of Alessandro Nigro, professor of History of Art Criticism at the University of Florence, who is particularly entrusted with the exhibition’s common thread, dedicated to the relationship between Surrealism and native cultures.

It was Dec. 1, 1924, when poet André Breton published his collection of prose “Poisson Soluble” in Paris, the introduction to which would become the First Manifesto of Surrealism, officially inaugurating the most dreamlike of the 20th century avant-gardes. The Surrealists sought to explore the human psyche beyond the limits imposed by reason, to expand reality beyond its physical boundaries, to tap into a fuller dimension of existence that they called surreality. A vision - the one common to all surrealist manifestations - that strongly criticizes conscious rationality, liberates the imaginative potential of the unconscious for the attainment of a cognitive state of “sur-reality,” in which waking and dreaming are both present and harmoniously and profoundly reconciled, often creating sharp and real images but juxtaposing them with each other without any logical connection. In addition to the liberation of the individual, for which they mainly referred to the ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis, the Surrealists also pursued the ideal of a liberation of society in a political sense, taking progressive and anticolonialist positions.

It is well understood then how Surrealism was not just a style, an artistic movement, but rather an attitude, an alternative way of being and conceiving the world, a radically new way of thinking that transformed the existences of their members.

The Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum has a unique and world-famous collection of Surrealist art, which includes artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Man Ray; the museum chronicles an entire artistic movement not only by exhibiting its works but also by delving with vertical focus into the techniques, styles, and materials, thus reflecting the working methods and ideas of the artists associated with the movement. In addition to paintings, objects, and works on paper, the collection includes numerous rare books, periodicals, and posters by important Surrealist artists and writers.

The Boijmans began collecting Surrealist art from the early 1960s. From that time on, the collection has not only been limited to the historical period of the movement (spanning from the 1920s to the years immediately following World War II), but has gradually been enriched with works of contemporary art born from ideas inspired by the movement or created by artists with poetics that can be defined as Surrealist.

The decision to curate an exhibition for Mudec led to a selection of the collection, with a particular focus on theSurrealists’ interest in native cultures. Their critique of the

Western industrialized culture and society in fact led them to search for alternative models. This search led Breton and his people to study and collect ethnographic objects, which became part of the movement’s conceptual horizon. Particular attention is given to exploring the fundamental themes on which Surrealist research focused-dream, psyche, love and desire, a new model of beauty; through works by famous as well as lesser-known artists, publications and historical documents, the exhibition provides the public with a 360-degree view of the Surrealist universe.

The wide selection of masterpieces presented in the exhibition aims to tell the visitor what the main premises and motivations of the Surrealists were: using found objects, automatic techniques or game-like practices, the artists attempted to exclude the sphere of rationality, hoping to create a poetic shock that would change the world. The six sections present the world of Surrealism in the most diverse artistic fields: paintings, works on paper, publications and objects, and sculptures. Each section is introduced by a key sculpture or iconic object, which speaks to the visitor by evoking the theme of the section, and by a quotation, which tells and reminds the audience how Surrealism was also a philosophical manifesto, a poetic thought, an enchanted look at an ’other’ reality.

The first section, “A Surrealist Revolution,” contains a number of masterpieces that draw the viewer directly into the world of Surrealism. Surrealism is not a style, but an attitude. This is why we speak of a Surrealist “mentality,” which is expressed in different styles and artistic disciplines. An introductory moment to the world of Surrealism, where next to the original booklet of André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, published in Paris in 1924, one can admire Dalí’s iconic lip-shaped sofa (Mae West Lips Sofa, from 1938). The second section, “Dadaism and Surrealism,” shows the Dadaist origins of Surrealism-with works and publications by Kurt Schwitters, Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia. It features three Dada artists who played an important role in the Surrealist group-Max Ernst, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. On display among other works, Man Ray’s Cadeau (Bold) or Duchamp’s Box in a Suitcase (De ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Selavy) from 1952. The third section, “The Dreaming Mind,” recalls how the Surrealists were strongly influenced by the ideas of psychiatry and psychoanalysis of their time (Sigmund Freud, Pierre Janet, Carl Gustav Jung). The artists explored the unconscious and evoked dream worlds, in a perfect fusion of psychology and art. In this regard, the section particularly investigates the artistic vision of Salvador Dalí. Dalí was interested in Freud and also painted dreamscapes, but he realized over time that his painting technique was too slow and the images became conscious. As a result he developed his “paranoid-critical method,” which in fact led him to create multi-interpretable and ’layered’ images. On display in this section is his Venus de Milo with drawers, from 1936.

The fourth section, “Chance and the Irrational,” focuses on the various methods used by the Surrealists to gain access to the unconscious. From games of chance to collage, frottage, writing and drawing from the stream of consciousness. Some artists sought means and ways to hallucinate or used psychotic experiences in their work. One of the most important masterpieces in this section is Eileen Agar’s Sitting Figure. In 1928 Eileen Agar met André Breton and Paul Éluard in Paris. At the same time, the fossils and bones of prehistoric creatures in the Jardin des Plantes were fascinating her with their ingenious abstract design. From this point on, Agar would combine in her work structures of ancient animals, plants and seaweed with the aerial world of her imagination, seeking to bring Western culture closer to nature once again.

In the fifth section, “Desire,” are collected works that - more or less explicitly - deal with love and (sexual) desire. The Surrealists explored their sexuality to access areas that bourgeois society had long repressed. One example is Man Ray’s restored Venus , featured in the exhibition. Like many other surrealists, Man Ray immersed himself in an intoxicating world of love and desire, practicing free love and photographing women in the most sensual ways. Man Ray was also fascinated by the erotic fetishism and sadomasochistic novels of the Marquis de Sade, which he saw as a true expression of repressed desire. In his 1936 work, Man Ray “restored” the goddess of love to her true self.

The sixth and final section, “Strangely Familiar,” starts with The Songs of Maldoror: In this 19th-century Gothic novel, beauty is described as “the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.” Surrealist artists took this as their credo, creating beauty through unusual combinations comparable to each other. As Meret Oppenheim’s painting Under the Resede, presented in this section, among others, tells. Oppenheim moved to Paris at the age of eighteen and quickly became an important member of the group. This painting would not seem Surrealist per se, were it not for the fact that the title comes from the Surrealist cult book The Songs of Maldoror. It is in this book that it is told how resede, small plants that grow everywhere in Europe, are used to describe the kind of modesty behind which human beings hide their true and evil nature.

As part of the exhibition, a particular section explores the complex relationship between Surrealism and the cultures of the global south (a term used in postcolonial studies to refer to countries once identified as “developing”). This relationship constitutes a common thread running through many of the movement’s protagonists, starting with the leader André Breton, who discovered art at the time called “primitive” as a boy and later became a major collector of it.

For the Surrealists, that for native cultures was not merely an aesthetic or collecting interest, but constituted one of the movement’s defining themes.

In particular, the Surrealists had a predilection for oceanic and North American ethnographic objects, which appeared to their eyes more fantastic and poetic than those from Africa (already culturally connoted by their connection with earlier Cubism), as well as endowed with magical and ancestral valences that harmonized well with the poetics of the movement, which in addition to dreaming was interested in trance states and mediumistic powers. The artifacts of native cultures also came to be integrated into the concept of the “marvelous,” one of the movement’s founding categories that ensured access to the dimension of surreality, which was essential for the liberation of the individual and his enfranchisement from the conventions of society. Such artifacts, in their total imperviousness to Western mimetic conventions, also seemed to embody another key concept of the movement, that of “convulsive beauty,” thus understood not as balance and harmony but as dystopian tension between two contrasting energy-generating polarities.

The exhibition section will cover some highlights of the relationship between Surrealists and native cultures, from the 1920s exhibitions at the Galerie surréaliste to the condemnatory document of the 1931 Colonial Exposition, from thesubversive ethnography of George Bataille to the Exhibition of Surrealist Objects at the Galerie Charles Ratton (1936), which emphasized the affinity between “found objects,” Surrealist objects and ethnographic objects. And again, the role played by non-Western artifacts in the poetics of some of the movement’s protagonists, such as Max Ernst and Man Ray, will be analyzed. Finally, it will examine the relationship of the Surrealists with Mexico, a country that André Breton had already visited in 1938 and was fascinated by, and that from the years of World War II became a center of reference for Surrealism along with New York.

Mexico City hosted another major “International Exhibition of Surrealism” in 1940 (after those in Santa Cruz, London and Paris), in which the works on display, including Frida Kahlo’s famous painting The Two Fridas, were flanked by pre-Columbian artifacts by Mexican artist Diego Rivera. A colony of artists gravitating around surrealism and fantastic and visionary art settled in the Mexican capital, including Leonora Carrington, Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, Remedios Varo, Gordon Onslow Ford and César Moro. Proximity to indigenous culture played a very important role for these personalities. Finally, the visionary flair of one of the greatest collectors of surrealist works, Edward James, whose famous “portrait” painted by René Magritte, La reproduction interdite (1937), will be featured in the exhibition.

The section will be realized thanks to a number of surrealist artworks from the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, specially loaned for the focus on non-Western cultures, which will enter into dialogue with a selection of exhibits from the important collections of Mudec. It will thus be possible to recreate, also thanks to the presence of documentary and multimedia material, that direct exchange between works of art and ethnographic objects that had characterized many surrealist initiatives. Thanks to the richness and variety of Mudec’s collections, it will be possible to present artifacts from the native cultures of reference for the Surrealists, with particular attention to those of Oceania and the Americas. The focus will also make it possible to further enhance the collections of the Milanese museum, which will also lend for the occasion important artifacts currently kept in storage and not visible to the public, including a notable nucleus belonging to the Milanese collector Alessandro Passaré.

The sections of the exhibition are enriched by a multimedia apparatus that completes the framework of the narrative that characterizes each section. Excerpts of period films that revisited surrealist poetics and contributed to the formation in society of a new way of approaching reality will be shown: from masterpieces such as Entr’acte (1924), a short film by Rene Clair based on a screenplay by Francis Picabia with several Dadaists (who later became surrealists), to Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound , from 1945.

The exhibition opens Mondays from 2:30 to 7:30 p.m., Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays from 9:30 to 7:30 p.m., Thursdays and Saturdays from 9:30 to 10:30 p.m. Ticket: full 16 euros, reduced 14 euros. For infor: www.mudec.it

Image: Salvador Dalí, Couple aux têtes pleines de nuages (1936; oil on panel; Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen). Photo: Jannes Linders © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation by SIAE 2023

Milan, major exhibition on surrealism with masterpieces from Holland at Mudec

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