Art critic and blogger Andrew Frost visits the Gallery of Modern Art's exhibition Surrealism: Poetry of Dreams for Art Nation

Back in the 1970s TimeLife Books published a series of titles on art movements, periods and styles. It was one of those handsome, quarto-sized “collect the set” series that are “lavishly illustrated” with “many plates in colour”. As a teenager they were the sorts of books I wished that my parents would buy for me, but, since we already had a set of Collier’s encyclopaedias from 1962 [purchased the year of my birth as a celebratory investment in my future education], what need was there for anything else? So when a friend loaned me a book from the series on Surrealism I was wrapt – I pored over its pages spending hours looking at the reproductions of paintings and fascinated by the black and white images of the movement’s founders; so serious, young and determined.

René Magritte's Les marches de l'été 1938. © Rene Magritte/ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2011

When you’re 17 years old Surrealism is the kind of art movement that’s exciting and easily accessible. Paintings by Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Max Ernst are almost ageless in their appeal and, with their emphasis on an illustrative aesthetic featuring hard black edges on shapes and objects, painterly skills eagerly copied but hard to master, and with a patina of historical respectability, Surrealism was and perhaps remains an art movement that attracts people looking for serious but fun art.

Visiting the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Brisbane for Surrealism: Poetry of Dreams exhibition for a story for Art Nation I was nostalgically reminded of that old TimeLife book and the effect it had had my appreciation of art. Looking at large photos of Surrealism’s founder Andre Breton and his pals Dali, Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Louis Aragon, Man Ray and all the others, I was also reminded that Surrealism retains a remarkable connection to contemporary art.

Andrew Frost views René Magritte's Le modèle rouge (The red model) 1935. Photo: Louise Turley.

Where other movements of the early 20th century had very limited aesthetic and/or political positions Surrealism was a broad church. Everything was possible as far as form was concerned and encompassed photography and sculpture to painting, film, performance and installation. Painting could be the mind altering figuration exemplified by Dali and Magritte, where object and symbol, sign and signifier are jumbled in a melange of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Or Surrealism could be that gentle and lovely abstraction by artists such as Andre Masson and Marcel Jean, an approach to painting that proved far more influential to subsequent generations of artists than Surrealism’s high style.

Ordered by period starting with the transition from Dada to Surrealism in the teens and early '20s, through its golden decade of the late 1920s and 1930s, and on to the post-war period, Poetry of Dreams demonstrated that what had been unique to Surrealism was also its ultimate liability. Surrealist art became repetitive as third and fourth generation followers produced faint copies of works made two or more decades before while its still-living founders experimented with new styles such as Magritte’s brilliant late '40s 'Cow Period' – or produced terrible rehashes of their early work – Dali, and Magritte again.

Andrew Frost watches surrealist film Un Chien Andalou by Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí. Photo: Louise Turley

So what is it about Surrealism that remains relevant? The last few rooms of the exhibition were particularly interesting since the work didn’t look like classic Surrealism at all but was instead indistinguishable from modern art in general. When you visit a museum and walk through the various galleries of a general historical collection you get the official version of art of the last 50 years of the 20th century – abstraction, realism, photography, film and video, American, European, perhaps something from Asia. As Surrealism became generic and its artists and theorists were superseded by younger men in newer couture fashions its influence had already become diffuse, spreading across all media and into every corner of art making. In essence Surrealism became contemporary art just as a germ invades a body, slowly taking over the host, until it cannot be considered separate from the body, it is the body... From Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades to Francis Picabia’s appropriations to Masson’s abstractions to Dali’s maniacal egocentric brilliance – not to mention the long wave influence of Surrealism in cinema - all the ways of making art and ideas about being an artist that form the backbone of contemporary practice were seeded by Surrealism in the early 1920s.

Victor Brauner's Sur le motif, 1937. © Victor Brauner/ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2011.

But perhaps more important than the techniques and approaches to making art [which at any rate come to us from a number of sources besides Surrealism] the thing that seems so familiar in Surrealism is how the movement was driven by a combination of poetry, politics and a belief in the avant garde. Most of these ideas about the function of art have become quaintly historical. No one writes manifestos anymore, not even political parties, and there are no art movements after the sun set of post modernism. The avant garde too is an historical category. Contemporary art may valorise its critical distance from mainstream culture but it’s still debatable whether it really is separate from it at all. Critical theory meanwhile has to a large extent taken the place of pure poetics within art making, but a belief in the idea that art is a transformative experience is the thing that still unites art making today.

In the 1920s Paris was enjoying its autumnal years as the centre of world intellectual culture, La Belle Époque slowly fading into memory, droves of tourists and lost generation bohemians heading there to enjoy the afterglow. We look to that period and to Surrealism in particular as the laying of the foundations that support the ideas, myths and romantic notions our own time. When the centenary of the founding of Surrealism rolls around in about 15 years that foundation period will have already fallen over the event horizon of our collective ability to appreciate it for what it was in its own time, let alone fully comprehend how it connects to today. Exhibitions such as Poetry of Dreams are a way to look back and understand where we’ve come from.