The surrealist revolution, which sprang up in the mid-1920s, was intended to reach far beyond writing and art. Under the surrealist programme, the manacles of bourgeois mentality were to be shattered, leading to a utopia of universal happiness. But though they thought like a seditionist cell, the surrealists behaved more like a religious cult. Their central idea - the conjuring and release of the unconscious mind, often through automatic writing and drawing and seance-like group activities - was almost a parody of spiritualism. And, ultimately the surrealist doctrine was incoherent: the cult that grew up around it had virtually exhausted itself by 1950.
But in one sphere - the visual arts - it lives on. From the Chapman Brothers to Francesco Clemente, from Christo to Sarah Lucas, artists continue to grow rich and successful by aping or adapting surrealist modes, though they are not ostensibly card-carrying surrealists. There is a particularly distinguished precedent for adopting aspects of surrealism without subscribing to it: Pablo Picasso was himself a surrealist fellow traveller and did very well out of it.
The links between Picasso and surrealism should be better known than they are. He was represented in the first exhibition of surrealist art, held at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925, and is routinely represented in the big surrealism shows that bring in crowds today. He was seen in Desire Unbound, Tate Modern’s 2001 survey of surrealist eroticism, as well as in the Pompidou Centre’s La Revolution surrealiste in 2002, a wide survey of the official wing of the movement that was led by its “pope”, the poet Andre Breton. Now the Hayward Gallery in London has mounted Undercover Surrealism, which aims to explore another side of the movement, the opposition to Breton that arose in Documents, an intellectual journal whose dominant voice was that of the writer, philosopher and poet of filth and excrement Georges Bataille. And here too, with a Hayward room all to himself, we find Picasso enlisted into the dissident camp.
From the outset surrealism tended to suck in anything Breton considered a revolutionary influence. One of these, alongside the anti-bourgeois nihilism of Dada, the dream images of Giorgio de Chirico, the ill-digested pronouncements of Freud and Marx and the dissolute romanticism of Gerard de Nerval and Arthur Rimbaud, was cubism. This was the startling new way of painting, and of seeing, that Picasso had evolved with Georges Braque before the first world war.
Breton may not have much understood cubism, but he professed to adore Picasso. Writing with the typical windy elan of the surrealists’ “moral conduct”, he claimed the group had “but to pass where Picasso has already passed, and where he will pass in the future”. As early as 1923 he attended a Dadaist play in which one performer took a verbal swipe at Picasso in an aside. Breton, in the stalls, was incensed. Leaping on to the stage, he attacked the offender with such violence that the actor’s arm was broken. Picasso, also in the audience, was suitably impressed, as he was meant to be.
Picasso always enjoyed flattery and, nudged by Breton’s attentions, he began to pursue his own quasi-surreal essays. But he doggedly refused to give a formal endorsement to, or claim membership of, the group as a whole. He valued his artistic sovereignty too highly (and he detested Freud).
Even some of the paintings that Breton acclaimed, and then tried to appropriate to his cult, look an uncomfortable fit today. “The Three Dancers” of 1925, on show in Undercover Surrealism, was so personal to the artist that he refused to sell it for 40 years. It shows a room in which three females dance a ronde in front of the dark silhouette of Picasso’s friend and compatriot the painter Ramon Pichot who had recently died. This was not among the works Picasso sent to the Galerie Pierre exhibition that same year but, as a result of Breton’s pleas, he did permit its illustration in the fourth edition of the journal La Revolution surrealiste. Consequently it is often said to be Picasso’s earliest significant surrealist piece, as well as being one in which he casts aside cubist control to unleash his own brand of ecstatic violence.
But, while there is truth in the second assertion, the first is dubious. However regarded by Breton, the painting now looks hardly surrealist at all. While remaining quintessentially Picasso’s, it relates more closely to Poussin’s “A Dance to the Music of Time”, and Matisse’s “Dance” - both of which explore the same idea of rapt, circling, hand-clasped figures. The piece has little about it of the automatic, the anti-rational, the hallucinatory and dreamlike, or any of the other qualities properly associated with mainstream surrealism. Its reminiscence, in the central dancer, of the crucified Christ looks more like a metaphor than, as it might be in Salvador Dali, a willed paradox. Surrealism, which loved impossibilities and enigmas, was never interested in metaphor.
Picasso’s own rare statements on the subject don’t suggest that he was much interested in getting to the bottom of Bretonian theory. “For me surreality is nothing else, never has been anything else, than that deep likeness far beyond the shapes and colours of immediate experience,” he once said. But surrealism was not about “deep likeness”; deep unlikeness would be nearer the mark, a different order of being altogether.
In the later 1920s, Picasso’s work does in some ways resemble an important strand of surrealism. In a succession of generally female figure-studies, the artist was driven to mangle and depersonalise the human shape much more than he had as a cubist, or even when painting the strongly distorted left-hand figure in “The Three Dancers”. These new forms began to appear from 1925 and, while not the only strand of his work at this stage, they continued to interest him. They are comparable to those enigmatic biomorphs that swim, writhe, dissolve or dangle across the canvasses of several prominent surrealist painters, such as Tanguy, Masson, Miro and Dali.
Yet there is a pronounced difference between Picasso and the biomorphic strand of surrealist painting. Dali’s “Bather” (1928), possibly conceived in homage to Picasso’s own obsession with this subject in the same period, underlines the point. Dali reduced the beach-lounging figure to a grossly deformed big toe that is both rock-like and flesh-like. But in Picasso’s own bathers, represented at the Hayward by “Design for a Monument (Bather)” also of 1928, the figures are quite differently imagined: solid, geometrical, incongruent shapes that look scarcely organic at all. While Dali’s toe seems capable of being palpated, even squashed, these bathers are uncompromisingly hard and geological: they can only be taken apart or smashed - which, in many instances, they have been. Picasso, whose reluctance to explain his work was legendary, would later claim that “in my case a picture is a sum of destructions”.
This espousal of violent rupture, fragmentation and distortion that appeared in Picasso’s work after 1925 may contain the key to why it became such a battleground in the surrealists’ squabbles. A string of Documents essays by Bataille laid out the fundamental ground of his disagreement with Breton, in which the latter is seen as a foolish idealist with his head in the clouds. Bataille, himself a most idiosyncratic materialist, believed that ultimate truth lay in the other direction, in a plunge down from airborne ideas into mud, blood, shit, decomposition, amputation and dirty sex, each of which for him prefigured the ultimate ugly reality of death. In the new increasingly angry direction Picasso was taking, Bataille thought he recognised an endorsement of these views.
Accordingly for Bataille Picasso was not, as Breton imagined, a beam of light illuminating a heaven of surrealist beauty. He was an escape-artist from the hellish prison of the intellect, a liberator of the ugly, a slaughterer of Mithraic bulls. In one essay, Bataille espouses an art of “ghastly, satiating ugliness” and singles out Picasso as a painter of just the right “hideous” works, in which “the dislocation of forms leads to that of thought”. This process, characterised as an abortion of intellectually conceived ideas, earned Bataille’s thorough approval since, for him, an idea “has over man the same degrading power that a harness has over a horse”.
The Hayward Gallery exhibition reveals, among other things, Bataille’s attempt to wrest Picasso away from Breton and incorporate him into its own brand of dirty materialism. In this contest Picasso did not take sides. He allowed Bataille to publish his works, just as he had Breton, while remaining at a distance from the quarrel. But that the tussle of these two writers was over the soul of an artist suggests both could perceive the destiny of surrealism. As literature, as politics and as cult it would dwindle away; but in the visual arts, where Picasso’s stamp was already indelibly impressed, it was set to persist well into the future.
“Undercover Surrealism” is at the Hayward Gallery to July 30.
