The legacy of Surrealism is massive and complex: It includes writing,
poetry, painting, sculpture, found objects, performances, art, film,
graphics, and graffiti. It developed ideas that influenced later movements
as varied as
Abstract Expressionism,
Art Brut, Performance, Neo-Dada,
Pop,
and Conceptual art. The thinking of modern philosophers, from Walter
Benjamin to Simone de Beauvoir and Jacques Derrida, as well as
psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, all came under the
Surrealist spell.
Marcel Duchamp—who by 1920 had turned to machines and motion—coined the
word most associated with the work of the American engineer-turned-artist,
Alexander Calder.
Duchamp christened the first 1932 exhibition of hand and
motor driven abstract pieces "mobiles." The balanced forms were eventually
engineered to move by the chance occurrence of wind, their biomorphic
pieces derived from the basic pictorial vocabulary of artists such as
Miro
and Arp. Whether in small or large form, the shapes revealed a primordial
level, marshaled into a suggested narrative—whether a lobster trap and
fish, a child's toy, or some equally real monster of the unconscious mind.
The gentle curves of
Claes Oldenburg's soft
Pop art sculptures from the
1960s and '70s evolved from a similar aesthetic in combination with
Dadaist ideas.
One of the most important legacies of the Surrealist aesthetic was the
abstract biomorph. As
Dali well knew, it could evoke nature and fear
simultaneously. And in the right minds and hands it could do far more. The English sculptor
Henry
Moore combined Surrealist ideas and abstraction with his love of the
figure and pre-Columbian art in a lifelong development. His organic
abstract figures of women and children are meant to resonate with an
earthiness that is both physical and psychological.
The French-born sculptor
Louise Bourgeois was exposed to Surrealist
theory early in her career. First attracted to abstract totemic shapes,
similar in inspiration to those of
Louise Nevelson,
Bourgeois always
incorporated an air of psychological disturbance in her work. Still master
of the biomorphic form into the 1980s, she turned more consistently in the
1990s to explorations of the psyche through powerfully evocative
installations. Her 1994 Red Room (The Parents) continues the
poignant rememberances of psychological states and primal moments. She
lays open the privacy of the psyche by reminding us of the psychological
resonance we share through everyday materials, scenes, and moments.
Ironically, she seems to provide a far more concrete formation of the
dream than the Surrealists could manage largely by what is suggested
rather than objectified.
Kenny Scharf, tagged as a member of the New York East Village punk-rock
scene of the 1980s along with
Keith Haring and
Jean-Michel Basquiat,
turned the Surrealist biomorph into "fun art." It is also a synthesis of
sophisticated art world theory and comic-book culture appropriation that,
since the 1960s, has reached into popular culture to challenge a number of
assumptions about the nature and experience of art.
The initial legacy of the Surrealists in the United States, however,
came during their expatriated status during World War II, where they
published articles, exhibited, and provided ideas. At the time when the
Abstract Expressionists were searching for new ways to express their
passions, Surrealist concerns for primitive mythology derived from the
unconscious pointed the way for painters such as
Mark Rothko,
Barnett
Newman,
Jackson Pollock,
Arshile Gorky, and others. Pollock's all-over
compositions after 1947 are unthinkable without the Surrealist impetus
behind automatism. Interestingly,
Allan Kaprow, the founder of the
spontaneous art events known as "Happenings," cited his shaping influence
as the automatic and liberating gestures of
Pollock.
Breton called
Gorky's
1944 The Liver is the Cock's Comb "marvelously unpremeditated" and "the great gateway open on to the
analogical world."
Simultaneously in Europe—the 1940s and '50s— Surrealism provided
England's
Francis Bacon with the basis for one of the most disturbing uses
of biomorphic imagery. His Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion, exhibited in the painter's first exhibition in over a
decade in 1945, gave full voice to human horror and repression. The same
impulse developed in another direction drove the influential theories of
Jean Dubuffet's
Art Brut or "raw art." His love, and famous collection, of
the art of untrained individuals, his repudiation of cultural values, and
his reliance on the unconscious and the primitive derived in part from his
friendships among the Surrealists.
Dubuffet developed a handling of
materials that paralleled World War II's destruction in Europe.
Yet another generation in America owed a less direct debt to the
Surrealists.
Robert
Rauschenberg, who, with his colleague
Jasper Johns,
was seen in opposition to
Abstract Expressionism and most associated with
a new
Dadaism, had been influenced directly by the tradition of the
Surrealist object.
Breton recognized the challenge they posed and asked
both artists to exhibit with the Surrealists.
Building on these new and old traditions, the 1960s "junk" and
"assemblage" artists reached back via Surrealism to the found object of
Duchamp and
Picasso. On occasion, with artists like
Lee Bontecou, one also
finds the echo of their powerful psychological concerns. In a series of
untitled assemblages in the 1960s
Bontecou turned the Freudian tables with
an obsessive image of a face-vagina transposition, whose frightening
zipper teeth held out the countervailing promise and independence of the
feminist movement.
