Forget about Paris: according to Tate Modern’s visionary and surprising new exhibition, there was no single centre of Surrealism, which, it suggests, was a “transnational” phenomenon, but many. Buenos Aires, Tokyo, and Seoul are just three of its locations; in-depth sections of the show document outbreaks of Surrealism in Cairo and Mexico City. At one stage, the curators even hoped to evoke Aleppo’s vigorous Surrealist scene during the Forties. But the civil war never let up.
At the exhibition’s threshold, Marcel Jean’s trompe-l’oeil “Armoire surréaliste”, painted upon the hinged remnants of an old wardrobe in 1941, prepares us for the prevailing atmosphere of wanderlust. In it, plain wooden doors of varying sizes appear ajar, offering unexpected glimpses of another, sunlit dimension beyond: the promised land, perhaps, of the imagination, simultaneously faraway and within reach. Time to get travelling.
If all this international hopping-about sounds bewildering, isn’t that appropriate? From the start, disorientation was an essential Surrealist concern: this “revolution of the mind”, as the curators describe the movement, was always about championing dreams, the irrational, those unfettered shadow-thoughts of the unconscious.
Its co-founder, Andre Breton, who wrote the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, strove for, as he put it, a “derangement of the senses”; inspired by the many artists associated with Surrealism who worked in exile, Tate emphasises the French concept of “dépaysement”, which roughly translates as feeling displaced.
Happily, I achieved this scrambled Surrealist nirvana within minutes: with more than 150 hallucinatory exhibits from all four corners of the Earth, including paintings, photographs, Surrealist objects and journals, film clips, and even snatches of radio, it’s one hell of a crazy trip.
Surrealism Beyond Borders also illustrates how exhibitions, these days, get made. Its curators are at pains not to replicate the tired, textbook story of the movement’s development, which, they believe, privileges a white male Western European perspective, bound up with “power” and “imperialism”. Instead, they’ve spent seven years looking mostly for, as they put it, “women artists” and “artists of colour” who, from the Twenties to the Seventies, exhibited as Surrealists, but whom, for whatever reason, art historians have forgotten – or, worse, written out.
The show isn’t, they say, about toppling famous figures – although, in the catalogue, poor old Breton, traditionally considered the movement’s autocratic leader, is basically defenestrated; if he were a statue, he’d now be at the bottom of the Seine.
Rather, the exhibition’s organisers suggest, it’s about expanding the canon: this is a postcolonial take on Surrealism, in which the islands of the Caribbean get as much airtime as the French capital. A Surrealist map, reproduced at the entrance, centres on the archipelagos of the Pacific, while diminishing Britain to a speck: across the board, what used to be considered peripheral is given prominence.
Has Tate opened another front in the culture war? Actually, I don’t think so. Lots of the show’s exhibits feel familiar: Dali’s lobster telephone, say (which, here, suddenly looks decidedly glib), or Magritte’s painting of a phantom-like locomotive emerging from a fireplace.
Thus, nothing has been “cancelled”; it’s just that celebrated artworks here co-exist with things that may seem esoteric. Picasso’s frenzied “Three Dancers” of 1925, for instance, appears beside a slight work by a documented member of the Parisian Surrealists, Dédé Sunbeam, about whom nothing is known.
Open your mind, and there are wonderful, albeit disturbing, discoveries to be made. A bloodshot, disembodied eye, painted in 1944 by the Egyptian-born French artist Laurent Marcel Salinas, peers out from a squirming tangle of pink tentacles; I doubt I’ll ever order calamari on holiday again.
Reunited for the first time in six decades, a triptych by the Mexican artist Remedios Varo looks like the storyboard for Tim Burton’s next gothic movie. Blobby green-eyed creatures, emerging from oversized red boots, hop along a sunny street, in a winning and comical painting by the Brazilian modernist Tarsila do Amaral.
Too often, museums demonstrate a weakness for repetitive “blockbusters” devoted to the same handful of names. It’s brave and original to try something different. This is Surrealism reanimated, unleashed.
Not everything is brilliant, by any means. For a show about Surrealism, it’s also curiously chaste. (There is a section about desire, with work by Hans Bellmer and Claude Cahun, but it’s brief.) Still, everything contributes to the overall feverish effect – and, I should warn you, you may find the state of Surrealist delirium it will induce impossible to shake.
From Feb 24 until Aug 29; information: tate.org.uk
