Global Reach or a Case for Provincialization? Coming to Terms with Surrealism Beyond Borders

Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale’s behemoth and sprawling 2021 Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition offered a peerless view of an expansive visual surrealism that has swelled across the globe, still extending its tentacles into ever more remote regions. In the catalogue to the exhibition they imply it could have been even larger had it included related art created in our present moment.1 To state the obvious, an exhibition with the ambition to survey this gargantuan global modern art movement across the 20th century could only be carried out by the likes of the Met and the Tate Modern, institutions with the resources required to take on such a project. Akin to impressionism in the preceding century but surpassing it in philosophical and political ambition, surrealism as a visual arts movement has become, like its predecessor, a proxy for modern art itself.

There was much to be learned from this erudite exhibition, and it is a great pleasure to be introduced to previously more marginalized artists associated with the movement, many though not all women—Maya Deren, Ted Joans, Jan Švankmajer, Tarsila do Amaral, Skunder Boghossian, Koga Harue, Richard Oelze, Grete Stern, Erna Rosenstein, Penelope Rosemont—as well as to virtually unknown modernists from Asia, Latin America, Syria, Mozambique, the Caribbean, Egypt—a short list must include Adnan Muyassar, Fateh al-Moudarres, Alfonso Ossorio, Cecilia Porras, Enrique Grau, Malangatana, Limb Eung-sik, and it certainly goes on from there. Surrealism Beyond Borders examined the range of emancipatory cultural and artistic tools surrealism offered to like-minded artists (who in turn revised that same umbrella’s components), as they too sought to overturn the oppression of rationalism and the remnants of colonialism, even within the history of art itself. Where Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley took on an expansive redefining of surrealist theory and practice in the volume Black, Brown, & Beige of 2009, Surrealism Beyond Borders is one of the first large-scale exhibitions to realize Rosemont’s earlier inclusive and postcolonial framework for the movement.

In the process, the exhibition rearticulated the main concerns and goals of surrealism, though with a light touch. These philosophical underpinnings are loosely though not comprehensively summarized in the catalogue’s final pages as “constellations” of ideas behind the movement. Some wall texts also made reference to these major philosophical underpinnings of the movement—the pursuit of the surrealist absolute, in part through various notions of automatism; collectivism; a questioning of what is commonly perceived as reality; a preference for analogical thought and its manifestations, tied to seeking out continual transformation. This framework is part of the exhibition’s revisionism, as its contributors explore the visual techniques and strategies of surrealism far beyond those of the iconic European men and women who first practiced it. Surrealism’s notion of animism and its interest in the cultural universe of magic and spirituality, shared by numerous global partners, seemed of lesser interest in the show. This may be why Indigenous art and artifacts were kept to its margins and were referenced by a lone object in Surrealism Beyond Borders, an Oceanic slit gong finial from Ambrym Island (Vanuatu) owned by the Met and that had been included in the 1960 “Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain” exhibition at the D’Arcy Galleries.

Dizzyingly far-reaching in a geographical sense, Surrealism Beyond Borders did however keep to the terrain of traditionally defined high art, film, and photography. It largely preserved the border between art and mass culture, avoiding surrealism’s infamous entwinement with mass marketing: it included Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone (1936), but not Hollywood film stills or the artistic traces of surrealists working in advertising. Even as a formalist strategy and certainly as an ideology, surrealism encountered numerous boundaries and cultural roadblocks that it could not transcend over the course of the 20th century. The Surrealism Beyond Borders catalogue and exhibition seemed to avoid confluences and moments of cultural conflict or aesthetic debate that might have complicated a view of surrealism spreading unchecked through continents and national cultures. The exhibition turned a blind eye to the considerable backlash that actually lived surrealism prompted over its lifespan, and not only in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Arguably this led to a decades-long delay in the study of the reception of surrealism that only now is coming into focus, as it did in the 2021 Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition.

These debates around surrealism seem to have crystallized most in Europe and the U.S., but parallel accounts likely remain to be researched on other continents and cultures. There was an American backlash to surrealism in exile, realized in the ever more nativist notions put forward about modern art in the U.S., as articulated by Clement Greenberg (likely impacted by McCarthyism, as David and Cecile Shapiro have shown), and independently by European intellectuals like Theodor Adorno. In Greenberg’s highly influential account, abstract expressionism was to be understood as unrelated to surrealist notions of automatism—a claim that might be seen as preposterous, given the impact that, for example, artists and art pedagogues related to surrealism from Mexico/Europe and Latin America, David Siquieros, Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, had on the developing New York School in these same years. Greenberg’s criticism (and following him, Motherwell’s) effectively wrote the surrealism connection out of the art history of 1950s New York. Surrealism Beyond Borders was largely silent on surrealism’s relationship to the local history of modernist abstraction in New York: with the exception of a short and excellent catalogue essay by Fabrice Flahutez, not much was explored about this direction of surrealist art. Though a single work by Arshile Gorky was included in the show, there was no significant discussion of where Pollock, Motherwell, or others in the New York School fit into the story of border-busting surrealism. Further, the Dynaton group (or in their language “The Dynaton”) in San Francisco of the early 1950s, Paalen’s role, and the surrealist-inflected abstractions of Luchita Hurtado, Lee Mullican, and Gordon Onslow-Ford in it, are not even mentioned. Thus New York debates around surrealism and abstraction, and the question of how abstraction inflected by surrealism was taken up in California, were again sidelined.2 Such art historical questions may have been of less interest in London, but they are arguably primary in the U.S.

As I’ve already intimated, another obstacle to consider in the story of surrealism’s rise is its (early) pursuit of what we now call cultural appropriation. In the U.S., Canada, France, and likely elsewhere, the surrealists widened their cultural horizons beyond Oceania to include Indigenous sacred objects from Native American tribes and First Nations. The exhibition skirted the topic of surrealism’s deep concern with Indigenous art; their problematic commodification of these artifacts; how surrealist artists were necessarily impacted as Native tribes gained jurisdiction and control over their own cultural patrimony (as I’ve argued in relation to Max Ernst’s work in Sedona, Arizona, of the 1940s); and the matter of repatriation. The intersection of surrealism’s global reach and Indigenous material cultures can also be tracked in the art of Native modernists George Morrison and David Chethlahe Paladin, both of whom were drawn to surrealism, and likely in other Indigenous artists as well, but no modern Native artists were included or discussed in Surrealism Beyond Borders.3 While other exhibitions of surrealism have taken on this complex historical issue (e.g. “The Colour of My Dreams,” Vancouver Art Gallery, 2011) surrealism’s tie to Indigenous cultures and artists should not be regarded as a minor or merely regional concern.

Moreso than any programmatic statement by the curators, a painting in the exhibition by the Romanian artist Victor Brauner, Prelude to a Civilization (1954), offers a fresh allegorical framework for the philosophical impulses and visual experimentations of surrealism that Surrealism Beyond Borders sought to illuminate. Brauner’s expansive view of painting as surface and alternative cartography distances us from the far more well-known quasi-mapping of The World in the Time of the Surrealists (Variétés, June 1929, prominently displayed in the first pages of the catalogue and in the exhibition). Even as it questions the usual rationalist dynamics of representation in cartography in 1929, the Variétés image still resonates with earlier notions of property, territoriality, and conquest—all of which were foreign to surrealism, the surrealists, and surrealist ideology. Brauner’s painting engages with a genuinely alternative systems of mapping, perhaps emulating or resonating with Indigenous representation systems more tied to knowing the expansiveness of the world and history through the animal beings and spirits that comprise it, including the organic surface of buffalo hide to which Brauner makes reference. Leaving the imperialist resonances of cartography behind him, Brauner builds his postwar Prelude to a Civilization on surrealism’s foundation of animist spirituality and magic, a territory that is beyond knowledge, proposing it as a compass toward a shared and egalitarian culture of the future.

Claudia Mesch is Professor of Art History at Arizona State University. Her books include Modern Art at the Berlin Wall (2009), Art and Politics: A Small History of Art for Social Change since 1945 (2013), and Joseph Beuys (2017). She is a founding editor of the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas.