Artists Among Poets - Surrealism

Automatic drawing

Automatic drawing was developed by the surrealists, as a means of expressing the subconscious.

In automatic drawing, the hand is allowed to move 'randomly' across the paper. In applying chance and accident to mark-making, drawing is to a large extent freed of rational control. Hence the drawing produced may be attributed in part to the subconscious and may reveal something of the psyche, which would otherwise be repressed. Examples of automatic drawing were produced by mediums and practitioners of the psychic arts.

The technique had first been used by the poets of the movement, who invented 'automatic writing', allowing words to flow unbidden from the lower levels of the mind and creating verbal images that they found all the more compelling for being illogical.

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A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud

translated by Bertrand Mathieu

A while back, if I remember right, my life was one long party where all hearts were open wide, where all wines kept flowing.

One night, I sat Beauty down on my lap.—And I found her galling.—And I roughed her up.

I armed myself against justice.

I ran away. O witches, O misery, O hatred, my treasure's been turned over to you!

I managed to make every trace of human hope vanish from my mind. I pounced on every joy like a ferocious animal eager to strangle it.

I called for executioners so that, while dying, I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called for plagues to choke me with sand, with blood. Bad luck was my god. I stretched out in the muck. I dried myself in the air of crime. And I played tricks on insanity.

And Spring brought me the frightening laugh of the idiot.

So, just recently, when I found myself on the brink of the final squawk! it dawned on me to look again for the key to that ancient party where I might find my appetite once more.

Charity is that key.—This inspiration proves I was dreaming!

"You'll always be a hyena etc. . . ," yells the devil, who'd crowned me with such pretty poppies. "Deserve death with all your appetites, your selfishness, and all the capital sins!"

Ah! I've been through too much:-But, sweet Satan, I beg of you, a less blazing eye! and while waiting for the new little cowardly gestures yet to come, since you like an absence of descriptive or didactic skills in a writer, let me rip out these few ghastly pages from my notebook of the damned.

Ubu Imperator

Acquired by Paul Éluard together with two other large oil paintings on canvas, Ubu Imperator instantly marked Max Ernst's entry into the sphere of Surrealism. This work brilliantly illustrates the enjoyment of heterogeneous elements inherited from collage. Its power lies in the production of a unified image which still preserves the capacity to disturb as the viewer observes its individual elements: the tip of the spinning top, the red hulk with its wire armature showing through, the human hands expressing surprise.

Thus, Père Ubu, the grotesque symbol of authority invented by Alfred Jarry, is given visual shape in playful derision. What is more, in this guise there reappears the childhood of Max Ernst, a vision of "half-slumber", as he himself described it, in which all the prestige of paternal authority and likewise of artistic creation is de-sacralised. Behind the buffoonery of power alluded to by Ubu as a spinning top, the whole traditional aesthetic of rational construction and geometric perspective is also ridiculed.

The Village of the Mermaids - Lisel Mueller

Who is that man in black, walking
away from us into the distance?
The painter, they say, took a long time
finding his vision of the world.

The mermaids, if that is what they are
under their full-length skirts,
sit facing each other
all down the street, more of an alley,
in front of their gray row houses.
They all look the same, like a fair-haired
order of nuns, or like prostitutes
with chaste, identical faces.
How calm they are, with their vacant eyes,
their hands in laps that betray nothing.
Only one has scales on her dusky dress.

It is 1942; it is Europe,
and nothing fits. The one familiar figure
is the man in black approaching the sea,
and he is small and walking away from us.

The Disquieting Muses - Sylvia Plath

Mother, mother, what illbred aunt
Or what disfigured and unsightly
Cousin did you so unwisely keep
Unasked to my christening, that she
Sent these ladies in her stead
With heads like darning-eggs to nod
And nod and nod at foot and head
And at the left side of my crib?

Mother, who made to order stories
Of Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,
Mother, whose witches always, always,
Got baked into gingerbread, I wonder
Whether you saw them, whether you said
Words to rid me of those three ladies
Nodding by night around my bed,
Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald head.

In the hurricane, when father's twelve
Study windows bellied in
Like bubbles about to break, you fed
My brother and me cookies and Ovaltine
And helped the two of us to choir:
"Thor is angry: boom boom boom!
Thor is angry: we don't care!"
But those ladies broke the panes.

When on tiptoe the schoolgirls danced,
Blinking flashlights like fireflies
And singing the glowworm song, I could
Not lift a foot in the twinkle-dress
But, heavy-footed, stood aside
In the shadow cast by my dismal-headed
Godmothers, and you cried and cried:
And the shadow stretched, the lights went out.

Mother, you sent me to piano lessons
And praised my arabesques and trills
Although each teacher found my touch
Oddly wooden in spite of scales
And the hours of practicing, my ear
Tone-deaf and yes, unteachable.
I learned, I learned, I learned elsewhere,
From muses unhired by you, dear mother,

I woke one day to see you, mother,
Floating above me in bluest air
On a green balloon bright with a million
Flowers and bluebirds that never were
Never, never, found anywhere.
But the little planet bobbed away
Like a soap-bubble as you called: Come here!
And I faced my traveling companions.

Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,
They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,
Faces blank as the day I was born,
Their shadows long in the setting sun
That never brightens or goes down.
And this is the kingdom you bore me to,
Mother, mother. But no frown of mine
Will betray the company I keep.

Be Drunk by Charles Baudelaire

translated by Louis Simpson

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

ALL PARADISE IS NOT LOST

The stone cocks turn to crystal
They defend the dew with battering crests
And then the charming flash of lightning
Strikes the banner of ruins
The sand is no more than a phosphorescent clock
Murmuring midnight
Through the arms of a forgotten woman
No shelter revolving in the fields
Is prepared for Heaven's attacks and retreats
It is here
The house and its hard blue temples bathe in the night
that draws my images
Heads of hair, heads of hair
Evil gathers its strength quite near
But will it want us?

~ by André Breton
translated by Paul Auster

The Elephant Celebes attempts to apply Dada's collage effects to simulate different materials. Ernst's realistic portrayal of the constituent elements produces a hallucinatory effect that he associated with collage, and was trying to achieve in this painting. Regarding the art of collage, Ernst said, "It is the systematic exploitation of the coincidental or artificially provoked encounter of two of more unrelated realities on an apparently inappropriate plane and the spark of poetry created by the proximity of these realities.

Surrealist Techniques

Exquisite corpse
Exquisite corpse is the most famous of the surrealist games. It began to be played in 1925 and consists in the composition of poems or drawings by a number of people which is then folded so each of them in turn putting down a word or graphic element on a piece of paper that the other participants do not see. The outcomes of these procedures offer unexpected juxtapositions, like the sentence "the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine", to which the game owes its name.

Collage
Within Surrealism, the procedure of collage was employed chiefly by Max Ernst. From 1919, Ernst assembled images from a range of varied sources, with the aim of bringing about unexpected juxtapositions. From 1929, he produced collage-novels, series of images constructed from late-19th-century prints or illustrated catalogs and connected together through the simple repetition of visual motifs.
Unlike Cubist collage, whose scope was exclusively that of plastic experimentation, or the highly political photomontages of German Dadaism, surrealist collage suggests new visual, poetic and oneiric associations.

Decalcomania
This technique was first used in an artistic context by Oscar Dominguez in 1936. The artist presses a sheet of white paper over another sheet covered in black poster paint, then repeats the operation, so that the paint stains are transferred several times over. The final image allows the artist to free his or her imagination by interpreting the resulting shapes at will. After Oscar Dominguez, Max Ernst applied the principle of decalcomania to oil painting.

Automatic writing
Inspired by psychoanalysis, and in particular by the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and Lautréamont, automatic writing consists in writing so fast that rational and preconceived ideas do not have the time to exert any control. The first text produced by this method, Les Champs Magnétiques, in 1919, was composed alternately by André Breton and Philippe Soupault.

Frottage
The pictorial equivalent of automatic writing, the procedure of frottage was discovered by Max Ernst in 1925 in the course of a specific incident. When he was adjusting the rickety floor at an inn where he was staying in Brittany, he decided to take an impression of the wood by rubbing black lead over a piece of paper laid on the floorboards. He then extended this procedure to other textures and published his first collection of frottages, Histoire naturelle, in 1926. He continued these experiments with oil painting.

Fumage
In 1937, the Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen invented the procedure of fumage: he made drawings outlined by moving a candle flame over a sheet of paper. Later, he applied this technique to oil painting. Thus he prefigured the fire paintings of Yves Klein.

Grattage
Invented by Max Ernst in 1927 as an extension of frottage, grattage was chiefly taken up by Esteban Francès, a painter of Spanish origin, and brought into Surrealism in 1937. This technique consists in scratching superimposed layers of paint in different colours with a razor blade so that shapes emerge that are to varying degrees mottled and transparent.

Surrealist objects
After Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, in the mid 1920s André Breton proposed the construction of "some of those objects we only glimpse in dreams", and "whose fate seems infinitely problematic and disturbing". As with Duchamp, this meant bringing together already existing objects of little value. But unlike him, the Surrealists expected the new object to provoke an emotional reaction, even "a specific sexual feeling" in the words of Salvador Dalí.
The most famous surrealist objects were produced by Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, André Breton, Oscar Dominguez and Man Ray.

Paranoia-criticism
Developed by Salvador Dalí in 1929, the paranoia-criticism method consists in a delirious state of interpretation, applied not just to art, but also to reality. Its aim is to go beyond the impoverishment of habitual perceptions, and thereby achieve a distilled grasp of reality.

Rayograph
The rayograph procedure was invented by Man Ray in 1922. It involves producing photographs without a camera, by placing objects on a light-sensitive plate which is then exposed.

Artists Among Poets - Surrealism

Automatic Drawing

Automatic drawing

The Disquieting Muses - de Chiricio

Max Ernst - by Paul Eluard

A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud

Ubu Imperator - Max Ernst

Ubu Imperator

Surrealist objects

Decalcomania