L'amour fou
The Victoria and Albert's big show for this year, Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, is - well, maybe we don't much like the word "definitive". But it's certainly the first of its kind. Everyone knows something about surrealism, the most popular art movement of the 20th century. The word has spread so far that people now say "surreal" when all they mean is "odd", "totally weird" or "unexpected". No doubt this would give heartburn to André Breton, the pope of the movement nearly a century ago, who took the title from his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had called his play The Breasts of Tiresias, "a surrealist drama". But too late now. The term is many years out of its box and, through imprecision, has achieved something akin to eternal life. Surrealist painting and film, that is. In fact, some surrealist images have imprinted themselves so deeply and brightly on our ideas of visual imagery that we can't imagine modern art (or, in fact, the idea of modernity itself) without them. Think Salvador Dalí and his soft watches in The Persistence of Memory. Think Dalí again, in cahoots with Luis Buñuel, and the cut-throat razor slicing through the girl's eye, as a sliver of cloud crosses the moon (actually, the eye belongs to a dead cow, but you never think this when you see their now venerable but forever fresh movie An Andalusian Dog, 1929). Think of photographer Man Ray's fabulous Cadeau Audace ("Risky Present", 1921), the flatiron to whose sole a row of tacks was soldered, guaranteeing the destruction of any dress it would be used on. Think of Rene Magritte's The Rape, that hauntingly concise pubic face, with nipples for eyes and the hairy triangle where the mouth should be. Think of the shock, the horniness, the rebellion, the unwavering focus on creative freedom, the obsessive efforts to discover the new in the old by disclosure of the hidden. But surrealist design? It seems almost a contradiction in terms. "Design" for us is strongly identified with industrial process, with modules, with the rationalisation of process into clear repeatability. To "design" something implies that it can be made not just once, but again and again and again, without loss of quality and intensity, like a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair or the old Parker 51 fountain pen. That an object is "designed" implies, or seems to, that every aspect of it from the first pencil scribble to the finishing touch and on to its intended use by the proposed consumer has been thought about and brought into full consciousness. It would therefore seem so remote from the spirit, the modus operandi, of surrealism as to have nothing to do with it. And to a great extent, it is. Something in surrealism, in the cult of the surrealist object, positively insisted that the thing should not have dwelled in experience before, and yet should be (mysteriously) a real thing in the real world, and preferably an old one (though not an antique). This meant either that it should have lost its context and even, if possible, the memory of that context, so that it appeared to the entranced eye of the spectator as something both filled with the ghosts of prior meanings and yet inexplicably new: an apparition of (urban) magic. It followed that most surrealist objects depended for their poetry on total uselessness. And how do you design something quite useless? You don't. You create it. Hence the complete opposition between this show and the display of "Modernism" presented at the V&A last year, surveying the track of classical modernist design. Surreal Things is an inspired but logically necessary sequel: the rest of the apple. "Classical" modernist design - of furniture, rooms, and things in general - was usually done with one eye on the possibility of serial production. Surrealist design was most emphatically not. Practically everything called surrealist was one-off, even when it didn't absolutely have to be. I'm not sure the word "design" really applies to some of the objects in the show, such as Marcel Jean's Spectre of the Gardenia, 1933. This was a fusion of junk-shop resurrections. The head, though hardly recognisable as such, was a plaster cast of the 18th-century French sculptor Houdon's portrait of the royal mistress, Madame Dubarry. Jean then turned her into a negress by covering the head with glued-on cloth, painted black. The eyelids became small zip-fasteners, opening horizontally to reveal tiny photos (a star, a face) where the pupils might have been. This fetishistic mask would have later echoes, such as the black leather S&M masks produced by the now almost forgotten American sculptor Nancy Grossman, whose work caused a brief sensation in New York in the 1970s. But on "design" as generally understood, such things as Marcel Jean's head had no effect at all. When it came to trying to decide the surreality of a thing or an image, the only question was: does this detach itself, stand out, from the world of common things around it? Does its oddity and apartness so distinguish it from the contents of the rest of the world that it promises access to a different sort of reality? Not a matter of newness (for looking new was of slight importance to surrealism), but rather of intensity and strangeness. Some surrealists fantasised about creating a canon of things that could, and just as importantly could not, be called surrealist. Man Ray toyed with the thought that "some kind of stamp or seal" might be invented to distinguish "the poem, the book, the drawing, the canvas, the sculpture, or the new construction" from all other things that were not certifiably surrealist. Naturally, this could not be done. Any effort to establish such copyrights was bound to fail. In fact, the only surrealist object that might, conceivably, have found a market niche for itself was the sofa designed by the English collector Edward James in tandem with Dalí: the justly famous pink sofa in the shape of Mae West's lips. One could imagine a few takers for that hilariously voluptuous parody-object back in 1938, when the prototype was made, and it seems likely that more people would want one today. People tended to assume that surrealism was mainly a Franco-Hispanic phenomenon, but nothing is quite so simple. There were English surrealists - indeed, you might say their appearance in the country of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll was ordained by fate. The most spectacular of them was, of course, James. He was one of the great English architectural extravagants, a reborn Walpole whose Strawberry Hill was a house in Sussex named Monkton. This startlingly idiosyncratic home had begun as a shooting lodge designed by Sir Edward Lutyens for James' father, William, in 1902. By the time James and his Catalan friend Dalí were through with it (not that it was ever "finished"), it had become one of the strangest houses in 20th-century England, its outside covered in purple stucco, with faux-bamboo downpipes and, inside, wall-to-wall carpet woven with the menacing paw-prints of James's pack of wolfhounds. Mother Nature made her appearance in such forms as a standing lamp made of a python, which James père had shot on one of his African safaris, and a fully grown, stuffed polar bear, which would later be dyed shocking pink and presented to Elsa Schiaparelli; it presided for a time over her Paris showroom, where it must have given her clients a certain frisson. Where was the dreaming mind, always open to suggestion, to find the strange objects that could find and deserve a place in a surrealist scenario? Where but in the city, that great condenser of memory and experience? Nature was not what surrealism wanted; it wasn't interested in the delights of the pastoral - in fact, it didn't think them particularly delightful. It was above all a city affair. Surrealism always had at the back of its mind the definition of beauty-as-incongruity proposed by the crazily eccentric writer Isidore Ducasse, who wrote under the name of the Comte de Lautréamont: "Beautiful," that worthy said, "as the chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella." The true surrealist city, the ground of all the movement's imaginings, was of course Paris, that limitless and incomparable collage of things abutted in all their multitude of undeclared, secret, enigmatic relations. Not for nothing did the surrealist poet Louis Aragon call a book Le Paysan de Paris, implying that he had come to know the million and one images accumulated by the city, and that he tilled and fertilised them laboriously as a farmer works his soil. Paris was still a much stranger place in the 1920s than it could ever be today. Much of the old pre-Haussmann mystery still clung to its intestinal alleys and the glass-roofed arcades, where rejected things shrank from view behind grimy windows and then, scrutinised with a new eye, suddenly burst into a second life. To preserve the shock of that eyeblink transformation - that was the aim of the surrealist thing-maker. The "palette of objects" available to him (or her) was enormously variegated and rich, not least because junk was junk a hundred years ago - not potential "antiques". One of the merits of this show is that it's the first (at any rate, the only one I've seen in more than four decades of reviewing) to take serious account of the relations between surrealism and the luxury arts - fashion design, interior decor, sales display, jewellery, and their various impresarios. By shifting the angle of view a little, as this show does, it is possible to see that these activities, if not intrinsically as important to surrealism as the painting or sculpture, certainly made big additions to the movement's spirit, and that they did so through people not always included among the creators of surrealist work. One was the great designer Jean-Michel Frank, mainly known for his ultra-refined art deco furniture executed in such exotic materials as palisander, zebra wood and ivory inlays, but who turns out to have been, through his friendship with the poet René Crevel, a considerable surrealist "animator" in his own right. Moreover, it wasn't the designers alone who created the various surrealist "looks" - a large part was played by their often highly receptive and creative clients, such as Charles de Beistegui. Not all of them, however, went along with the designers' proposals. Who could? Dalí came up with what still sounds like a fairly repellent proposal for an animated armchair - "It will have life. It will breathe. There will be a mechanism which will follow the breathing of the human body." There is no record that one of these gizmos was ever built - fortunately, perhaps, since one would not wish to be relaxing in it when the machinery went cuckoo, as it surely would have done after a few hours' use. Not so many years ago, liaisons between surrealism on one hand, and on the other the rich and chic and the businesses that served them, were almost always held by right-thinking, Marxist-leaning, avant-gardist people to be immoral affairs. They trivialised the very name of the artist. Fashion, particularly Paris couture, was by definition no part of proletarian Utopia; but come the revolution, which was, of course, right round the corner, giraffe-legged socialites from the 16th Arrondissement would not be tut-tutting about in gauzy taffetas and webs of gilded copper braid of the sort that Schiaparelli sent down her runway in 1949 - no, it would be the virtuous austerities of cotton denim for them, and maybe a spanner stuck in the belt for a chic accessory. It didn't happen like that, of course. Quite the reverse. "I have seen a young woman on the boulevard," wrote Apollinaire, a poor art critic but a great poet, and one of the hearth-gods of surrealism, "dress in tiny mirrors that are appliquéd to the fabric. In sunlight the effect was dazzling. It was like a walking gold mine. Later it began to rain, and the lady looked like a silver mine ... Fashion becomes practical, scorns nothing and ennobles everything. It does for substances what the Romantics did for words." Fashion was sexy. So was surrealism. They were a natural fit. Nobody ever called cubism sexy, or constructivism, or any of the other movements of the early 20th century except German expressionism, which did have its sexy moments - though not so very many of them. But one of the core beliefs of the surrealists, as set forth by their leader, Andre Breton, was in l'amour fou, obsessional love, the kind of love that deranges the senses and tips those who feel it into a helpless vortex of appetite and feeling. Surrealism had its own cast of star women, seemingly imperishable love objects, all dead now, whose images nevertheless endure thanks to the photos of Man Ray, George Hoyningen-Huene and others. The most beautiful and desirable of them all was a first-rate photographer herself: the blonde American Lee Miller, who lived with Man Ray for a time in Paris and was one of the chief muses of surrealism. Her lips can be seen floating in the sky like some wondrous UFO above the breast-like domes of the Paris Observatory in Man Ray's painting A l'heure de l'observateur. Sometimes it can be difficult to share the past's enthusiasm for the sex-bombs of yesteryear, and Mae West, less a sex object than a parody of sexuality, is (at least for me) a case in point. But Miller, one of the most gorgeous American beauties of the 20th or any other century, was a wholly different matter. When not gazing raptly on such Heloises, the yearning Abelards of surrealism invested a lot of energy in creating all sorts of sexual images, some of which - despite the huge expansion of pornography in modern life - have never been surpassed for conciseness and intensity. The young Jewish artist Meret Oppenheim made several. One was a startling re-use of a pair of white women's shoes, which, bound tightly together and presented upside-down on a silver platter with paper chef's frills on the high heels, became a sort of erotic chicken. But the most famous of Oppenheim's works was Object, 1936, which grew out of an accessory design she had done for that principal patron of surrealist "thing-making", Elsa Schiaparelli. For the brilliant couturier, Oppenheim had done a gold metal bracelet covered (on the outside) with beaver fur. She wore it to meet Picasso for drinks at the Café de Flore, and Picasso remarked that if you could have a fur bracelet then practically anything else could also be covered with fur, and so transformed. Why not a coffee cup, for instance? So Oppenheim went right ahead, with cup, spoon and saucer, and the result was one of the few really sublime sexual images of the 20th century. It compels you to imagine raising this furry cup, wet with hot fluid, to your lips; it offers no possible meaning other than cunnilingus; it is exquisitely graceful and inescapably direct, both at once, and if ever a single work was enough for one artist's career, it is Oppenheim's cup. The romantic sexuality of surrealism expressed itself most frequently in one of its key images, the fashion dummy - not a statue, not a person, but a curiously haunting thing that carried reminiscences of high art - Giorgio de Chirico, whose piazzas and slanting shadows were haunted by these ambiguous manikins, was another of surrealism's adopted ancestors. The use of mannequins covered a lot of territory, and a startling variety of moods. Sometimes they could be replaced by human models, particularly when some transgressive point needed to be made; the artist Oscar Dominguez installed one of these girls, passively reclining like some inordinately pretty creature who was nevertheless doomed to be rejected and thrown out, lying in a wooden wheelbarrow, which, in deference to her chic, was comfortably padded and lined with purple satin. But this use of the live human body favoured incongruities. One was a fashion shot for Harper's Bazaar, in 1939, by Hoyningen-Huene, which showed a slender, beautiful model posed in front of Max Ernst's The Fireside Angel. The creature one saw looming over her was one of Ernst's most diabolic inventions - a ravening foretaste of nazism, a monster whose body is twisted into the unmistakable form of a hackenkreuz, or swastika, and not by any means (or so one might have thought) the sort of image that would make the magazine's readers think "couture". It was, however, the inanimate model - its status shifted towards that of a mere doll - that contained the most sinister possibilities of debasement and disturbance. The maestro here was Hans Bellmer, a somewhat bizarre sexual obsessive who loved mulling over themes of child rape, dismemberment, and general sexual nastiness behind the psychic woodpile. Like Oskar Kokoschka before him, Bellmer made himself a human-sized doll. Unlike Kokoschka's rag-and-stuffing effigy of Alma Mahler, however, Belmer's doll represented not a grown-up woman but a prepubescent child. It did not commemorate anyone in particular, at least nobody whose name we know, but it was filled with the most intense significance for him. Jointed, modular, endowed with intricately modeled, hairless genitals, Mary Jane shoes and more than the ordinary number of limbs, capable of being twisted into all manner of postures and configurations, it was (literally) a parent's nightmare and a sadist's dream. Bellmer would set it up in various places, mostly threatening ones - corners of a wood, dark patches of grass. Then he would take photos of it. The images were apt to look like police evidence shots of crime scenes: plain, frank, not arty, not cleaned up. They spoke of dislocation, torment, violation and abandonment. This was, by the standards of the day, fairly sinister stuff, and its suggestion was far stronger than what it actually represented. Surrealism itself was divided on the issue of what relation, if any, it should have to commerce. It was all very well to say, as some did, that the movement was born of a marriage of Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxist critiques of capitalism; certainly there had been a long flirtation with Trotsky on the part of some surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s, and others - including, disgracefully, Aragon in his over-the-top hymn of hate "The Red Front" - became outright Stalinists. But artists have to earn a living. In 1926, both Max Ernst and Joan Miró did backdrop designs for a production of Romeo and Juliet, by Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. This earned them furious denunciations from Breton, Aragon and Picasso. "The moment you see a cheque you collaborate with reactionary White Russians! So much for that famous rigor of yours!" But such expostulations were not, in the end, terribly convincing. Most of the surrealists, including Breton, made their living by dealing, "art advising", involvement in photography, advertising and the fashion industry. Indeed, without the patronage of fashion, it is hard to see how surrealism would have made its way in Paris at all. Dalí, in particular, received a lot of flak for his relations with the rich. But he never made any pretence about this, unlike Picasso, whose communist sympathies were mostly wind. "Picasso is a genius!" Dalí would later exclaim. "Me too! Picasso is a Spaniard! Me too! Picasso is a communist! Me neither!" At least old Avida Dollars (Breton's clever anagrammatic nickname for him) tried to deceive no one, but his attitudes to filthy lucre were still misunderstood, sometimes willfully. Why would Dalí have turned to designing jewellery in the 1950s, collaborating with such jewellers as Fulco di Verdura and the Argentinian Carlos Alemany? Because, the received wisdom went, he was under the thumb of his mercenary harpy of a wife, Gala, whose demands for cash were so unrelenting and, in the end, so debilitating; because he had run out of ideas, and so was compelled to repeat his old ones (which were cliches by now, anyway) in different and grander materials than mere oil paint; and so on. There was some truth to this. Gala was indeed a bullying ogress; practically nothing in the last half-century of Dalí's painting life compares to the achievements of his genius up to, say, 1930, and the worst of late Dalí is unredeemable garbage. And yet, there was still some fire behind the moustache, and it flared up in such Dalí-designed jewels as the 1949 brooch in the form of a woman's mouth made of pavé rubies, the lips slightly parted to reveal two rows of pearl teeth; or, better yet, the astonishing starfish he made in 1950 for a mid-western multimillionairess, an ultra-toy with five articulated arms made of rubies, diamonds, pearls, emeralds and gold, which has some claim to be the most impressive luxury object made in the 20th century. (You could bend its arms any way you liked, and they would stay in place; the catalog includes a photo of its owner, one Rebecca Harkness of Minnesota, wearing it on her breast, clinging there like a parasite for plutocrats, as if in possession of its host.) But the most impressive jewel in the show is not by Dalí or any other "name" surrealist artist. It was designed and made by the Paris firm of Maison Boivin, through whose portals there strode one day in 1938 a rootin'-tootin' Texas lady bearing the skull of a longhorn ox, picked up on her ranch. This, she declared, was to be the model for a brooch. And so Boivin made it: pavé diamonds all over, a wreath of emerald leaves cascading from one eye socket, a purple sapphire ribbon, polished gold horns. The whole thing more than four inches high. Just the objet to wear behind the wheel of your solid-gold Cadillac, with a couple of granite-jawed Texas Rangers riding shotgun. "Private collection", the catalog says chastely. No bloody wonder. One thing's for sure: 50 years from now, nobody is going to be comparably impressed by the mingy, dispiriting trinkets cranked out by Tiffany with the names of Frank Gehry and Paloma Picasso on them. Not that anyone could be today, come to that. One of the effects of this show is to make you realise how sharply the very idea of decadence itself has decayed since the end of surréalisme au service de la luxe. The pressure of style has gone out of it, deflating it, leaving it somehow formless, gross and squishy, like so much of our sad and brutishly noisy culture. · Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design is at the V&A, London SW7, from March 29 to July 22. Details: 0870 906 3883 or vam.ac.uk/surrealthings |