So, this is the Dada and Surrealism collection at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern
Art. It’s world-famous and it’s world-class, we’ve got fabulous things here.
We’ve got paintings by Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, we’ve got three paintings by Joan Miró,
we’ve got 20 pictures by Max Ernst, we’ve got works by René Magritte, sculptures by
Giacometti, paintings by Picasso, we’ve got the lot really.
Dada starts in the First World War, it’s very much a rebellion against the ethos of
the artist’s parents, really the people that gave them the First World War. No one
actually knows who came up with the name Dada, but it was a sort of nonsense, childish, silly
word that really represented what they wanted, to go back to zero.
We can start with works by Man Ray, he’s an American artist, he got to know a number
of the artists who went over from Paris to New York, just before the First World War,
so Duchamp and Picabia. Man Ray is doing something extraordinary here, it looks like an abstract
picture. In fact, all he’s done is paint his own name ‘Man Ray’ and then the date
above it. But it’s a sort of exemplary picture which represents what Dada is about. It’s
a very much anti-art. It’s against, sort of, the traditional idea of history painting
and landscape painting and so on, it just reduces painting to a signature and a date.
Now, Dada had a certain, sort of, lifespan you can rebel for a certain amount of times
and then it gets boring and repetitive. So, what happened after the First World War, particularly
in the early 20’s in Paris, is that people started to take a more constructive view.
They took the sort of anti-ness of Dada and brought it forward and they investigate in
particular dreams, the unconscious, the subconscious.
You can see this in particular in the work of Joan Miró who was a fabulous artist. Spanish
artist born in 1893, this is a work of 1924 it’s called ‘Maternity’ and it’s one
of the sort of signature pieces, the earliest pieces of Surrealist art. Surrealism means
beyond realism ‘sur-realism’ and they wanted to go beyond the world of ordinary
reality into the world of dreams and the unconscious.
It’s a really, sort of, key work. It’s completely original thing to do in painting.
I’ve got some Salvador Dalí, probably the most famous of all the Surrealist artists,
this work is of 1928, it’s called ‘Bird’. Dalí was born in 1904, he comes to Paris
in 1926 when he’s just 22 years old, he meets Picasso, he knows Miró, he’s done
his homework, he sees the right people, he’s been expelled from art college in Spain, but
he’s a fabulous technician. He’s already been through a Cubism phase by this time and
he starts to see what’s going on in the world of Surrealism and he locks onto it and
he is brilliant at it. And this is a work he’s done in Cadaqués on the Costa Brava
where his family had a home. What’s amazing about it is instead of painting the sand and
the shingle, he’s actually taken the sand and the shingle and stuck it on the wet paint
or glue. It’s a very novel idea.
Then we’ve got a later work by Salvador Dalí from the 1950’s. Surrealism continues
on, it doesn’t just sort of stop in 1939 as one might think. All the Surrealist artists
continue being Surrealists after the Second World War. This is a work from 1951, it’s
based on a painting by Raphael of the Virgin looking down at the Child, and what a master
draftsman he is. This is just after the atomic explosion at Hiroshima, which splintered everything
into billions of different bits, and he’s starting to visualise the world in terms of
the kind of nuclear reaction, and also atoms. So, it’s been sort of split into all these
sort of exploding little atoms, little sort of rhino horns almost. And her head you can
see is based on the Patheon building in Rome where in fact Raphael is buried, an exquisite
drawing.
This macabre bronze sculpture is by Alberto Giacometti. You can see how a painter can
realise dreams by painting them. He had some amazing dreams obviously; in the morning he
would take notes about his dreams and then make a sculpture that exactly represented
it.
He didn’t ask what the dream meant to him. In fact, that’s one of the big differences,
Freud was interested in dreams and what they could explain about the person's psyche, but
Surrealists liked the fact that it couldn’t be explained. They liked the mystery rather
than trying to solve the mystery.
So, this is Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone, 1938, what a fantastic thing. Viewers might
have seen other copies, there are 11 of these in other museums, there’s one or two in
America and there are some in Europe, this was the last one that was going to be available
and we bought it just two years ago.
So, a lot of the artists involved in the Surrealist movement were painters, they hadn’t done
any sculpture. But if they wanted to do a 3D work, instead of learning how to carve
marble, or carve wood, or whatever, they came up with a brilliant idea called ‘Object
Sculpture’. It’s like a 3D version of collage, so rather than create something from
new, they’d take two completely different things and put them together. Here, Dalí’s
taken a plaster lobster and stuck it on a phone.
There’s one famous phrase which is often applied to the Surrealists, it’s taken from
19th century literature, that they like the idea of a sewing machine and an umbrella meeting
on a dissecting table. The most irrational things that you can think of happening in
the most irrational way, in the most irrational space, but it’s that kind of logic that
really tickled the fancy of the Surrealists and is embodied in these object sculptures
in the 30’s.
We’ve got great works by René Magritte, the Belgian artist. I don’t think you’d
see, anywhere in the world, five better Magritte’s than those, ranging from 1929 through the
30’s, 1937 – that’s his only shaped canvas with this sort of ‘body’ frame
around it, probably inspired by Dalí. And recently we were given this work of 1950 by
the Drue Heinz estate.
And let me talk a little bit about this one, it’s 1929, we’ve already seen that amazing
Dalí ‘Bird’ - 1928, which was of the beach at Cadaqués in Spain, and this actually
includes the beach. Well, Magritte and Dalí met in March 1929, they got on very, very
well, similar kind of artists, Dalí may be a bit darker, more to do with sex and so on,
but both very technical, both were painting their dreams. So, Magritte goes down to see
Dalí in summer, in August, they go with some other people, Buñuel who’s just made that
film ‘Un Chien Andalou’ with Dalí, it creates a sensation, they’re the sort of
hot-ticket of the summer of 1929 and they’re all together, there’s seven or eight of
them down in Cadaqués and it’s the very beach that we’ve seen included in Dalí’s
painting just now. That’s the same beach.
Magritte is all about trying to make things that look right, but when you think about
it are impossible, you don’t have to think too hard about that being impossible, with
this torso, tuba and chair.
But, a cracking work of 1929 which compliments the other works of the 30’s.
So this is a work by the great German artist Max Ernst, who was involved with the Dada
group, then the surrealist group, lived a very long and rich life, one of was the most
famous of the surrealist artists. He was German, he studied philosophy at University, didn’t
have any specific art training which almost enabled him to create new techniques, he wasn’t
lumbered with art school training. And he had two of the techniques that the surrealists
liked which he combined in single works, one of the few who did this. You’ve got this
sort of photo-realist almost, heads that look like this, but very sort of traditional realist
technique for portraying the two figures. The title is ‘Max Ernst Showing a Young
Girl the Head of his Father’ or her father depending on your understanding of the French.
This is done in a realist technique. This is done in a technique known as 'grattage'.
He would have painted it, put it on the ground, over rough wooden blocks and then scraped
away so that you get that amazing sort of rough texture in there.
So, we’ve got many works by Max Ernst but a fabulous new acquisition that we bought
just two years ago is this painting by Leonora Carrington and it’s a painting of Max Ernst,
you can see why it fits perfectly here. Leonora Carrington was an English woman she was born
in 1917, she didn’t die that long ago, in 2011, an amazing long life.
She was 20 years old when she met Max Ernst in London, he was over for a show in 1937,
they got on terrifically well. He was 25 years older, fell in love, went across to Paris,
war is just starting, go down to the south of France, and that’s where she paints him
in the sort of guise of a bird, with a sort of feathery cloak, there’s a funny kind
of fishtail, and that’s actually her in the background, she depicted herself very
often in her paintings as a horse. So, you’ve got her a sort of frozen horse
in the background, and here she is again in this lantern sort of leading him on into the
next chapter in his life.