Familiar Monsters

Daniel Barbiero
December 2018

Max Ernst, The Barbarians, 1937, Oil on cardboard. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998 (1999.363.21). © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

 

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Toward the end of his wartime exile in America, André Breton traveled to the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec. There, between August and November, 1944, he wrote Arcane 17, one of the late masterpieces of Surrealism. Arcane 17 is a strange book that’s lost little of its strangeness over time. Not quite an essay or prose poem, it is instead a rich text of reflections and outcry, a meditation on war and loss woven together by allusions to myth and myth-inspired exegesis. The title refers to the seventeenth card in the tarot deck’s trump suit: The Star. Breton’s elaboration of the supposed occult meaning of the card forms one of the major leitmotifs running throughout the work, along with his invocation of the myth of Melusine, a creature half woman and half fish that rhymes, metaphorically, with The Star’s image of a woman pouring water into a river. The book was written by the water, in view of the famous Roche Percé; its themes are framed by water: by water as an image of mythical import. In a way, Arcane 17 represents the culmination of a process that had been taking place within Surrealism since it crossed the Atlantic: the turn toward myth as a major source of inspiration and correlatively, a new understanding of automatism and its role in the creation of artworks.

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Monsters and Myths, a show of 64 works put together jointly by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, documents Surrealism’s mythic turn as it played out in the visual arts in the 1930s and 1940s. Many of these paintings, photographs, sculptures and other objects are populated by strange figures suggesting–some obliquely and some more directly—humanoid or hybrid life forms from invented mythologies or from nightmares or waking delusions. Others refer to recognizable figures from Classical and other mythology.

Max Ernst’s The Barbarians, an oil on cardboard painting of 1937, depicts two humanoid, bird-headed forms dominating pictorial space with menacing postures. Avian forms also turn up in Joan Miró’s A Drop of Dew Falling from the Wing of a Bird Awakens Rosalie Asleep in the Shade of a Cobweb (1939) as well as in Miró’s Seated Personages (1936), an oil on copper work. Victor Brauner’s 1934 Indicator of Space features a strange, cloaked mechanical figure with a long, trumpet-like beak standing in a sharp-cornered, nearly empty room. The figure of the Minotaur, which was of particular interest to Surrealism—one of its sleeker literary journals of the 1930s was named for creature—not surprisingly turns up in pictures like Picasso’s Minotauromachy, an etching from 1935, and in André Masson’s visceral painting, There Is No Finished World (1942).

Joan Miró, Seated Personages, 1936, Oil on copper. Private Collection. © Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris 2018.

Some of the disquieting images that appear in Monsters and Myths seem to reflect the state of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. From Spain to the Urals, the continent had been cleft by civil war and world war, circumstances that the Surrealists either endured or fled. Wolfgang Paalen’s 1939 Battle of the Saturnian Princes lll, a painting of two entwined figures fighting in midair, effectively allegorizes a Europe determined to tear itself apart. One of the show’s centerpieces is Ernst’s Europe After the Rain (1940-1942), a fantastic panoramic landscape of rot and ruin whose imagery and title both depict a civilization subjected to a metallic downpour of bombs, shells and bullets.

In its allusions to Europe’s willful self-destruction, Ernst’s painting is very much an emblem of its time, but like many of the other works in Monsters and Myths, it takes on a resonance beyond the circumstances of its creation by invoking the powerfully suggestive force of myth. But why myth? Because the crises of the 1930s and 1940s could be taken as historical evidence of the persistence of underlying, perennial patterns of human action and experience: aggression, the urge to violence, terror, the will to destruction as well as the will to survive and overcome. These patterns could find an appropriate expression in the symbolic languages of specific myths—such as the Minotaur, symbol of the unrestrained savagery lying just under the surface of human civilization–or in vague forms that nevertheless could convey or imply the content that historic myths conveyed.

Iconographically, Surrealist art’s engagement of myth tended to be Protean, its figures ambiguous and fantastic, their specific referents often undecidable. To see them can be similar to the experience of having a strong sense of what one wants to say—but without being able to find the word for it.  Not as a matter of forgetfulness, but of the futility of trying to express the ineffable within the bounds of language.

Consider, for example, Prescience, the 1939 work by Chilean-born painter Roberto Matta. The scene depicted is an ambiguous, possibly aquatic, possibly aerial background against which float jellyfish-like, transparent blobs—specimens of an intelligent, as-yet uncategorized form of life? Mark Rothko’s Syrian Bull (1943) is nearly as enigmatic, its central figure being vaguely biomorphic but bearing little resemblance to an actual bull. In a similar manner, Ernst’s paintings of the period often include apparently ontologically confused entities that seem to combine the characteristics of different orders of being, and thus appear to be fusions of animal, vegetable and mineral. These hybrids and ambiguous biomorphs are strange, but on closer consideration they seem to embody the classic mythic theme of metamorphosis or flux: the changing of one thing into another, the surpassing of boundaries through the universality of transience and ultimately, the rejection of differentiation between orders of being. Flux is itself symbolic of the rhythms of creation and destruction, the coming-into and going-out of being of all things; flux is the manifest or outer façade of the latent or underlying pattern, the paradoxically permanent pattern of cyclicality, of setting out and returning only to set out and return again. This perpetual rhythm both symbolizes and is symbolized in the life cycles of animals and vegetation, the movements of celestial bodies, the transformations of the seasons, and is allegorized in the mythic figure.

Because of the frequent—and deliberate–indeterminacy of what exactly is being signified, much of the Surrealist visual art of the 1930s and 1940s is particularly effective at reflecting back to the viewer whatever fears, anxieties and desires he or she might have. Even the figures we can identify, such as the Pan, Demeter and the Minotaur in There Is No Finished World, seem to function as ciphers representing unnamed and possibly unnamable yearnings, anxieties, and other intense psychological states. But they can do this to the extent that they hint at the visionary, at exstases that point beyond the individual psyche and toward the kinds of human universals or constants that Paalen described in terms of “memories of unfathomable ages” (Rushing, p. 275). To that extent, the mythic and quasi-mythic figures inhabiting Surrealist and Surrealist-related artworks of the 1930s and 1940s seem to serve as transcendent symbols or allegorical projections of the perennial human predicament in its various aspects and phases—primordial symbols of human drives and emotions, of phases of life and structures of collective experience. They are transcendent precisely to the degree that what they signify isn’t exhausted in the content of the historical myths they invoke or the psychological states they hint at; rather, they generalize beyond that and point toward the existential conundrum that is the human condition as such. Monsters they may be, but they are ours: they are familiar monsters.

André Masson, There Is No Finished World, 1942, Oil on canvas. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Bequest of Saidie A. May (BMA 1951.333).  © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

 

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In their iconography as well as their methods of realization, Surrealist and Surrealist-related works of the 1930s and 1940s give evidence of a new self-understanding on the part of the larger movement. This understanding wasn’t confined to the visual arts; at the same time that many of the paintings in Monsters and Myths were being created, Breton’s thinking was evolving in a direction that would refigure, in explicitly mythical terms, some of the foundational concepts and motifs that had been part of Surrealist theory from the beginning.

To be sure, Breton’s interest in myth wasn’t unprecedented. As Dore Ashton notes, from the beginning there had always been a fascination among the Surrealists with non-Western cultures, particularly those of Oceania and the aboriginal inhabitants of North America; the first Surrealist journals contained articles on topics in anthropology, ethnology and archaeology in addition to literary writing. If myth hadn’t yet taken on an important or even central role in Surrealism’s self-consciousness, the way certainly was being prepared for it to do so.

But in fact, Surrealism had long been engaged in creating its own version of a mythology. We can see this in the notion of objective chance. This was, to a large degree, the central myth of Surrealism. In the chance encounter, the juxtaposition of events from independent causal chains, the Surrealists saw instances of what Jung would later term synchronicity—the acausal but meaningful connection between unrelated things. For Surrealism, this acausal connection, or instance of objective chance, was thought to reveal something important about the underlying order of things, the order that defies the banal causality of the everyday. It revealed, in short, the breaking through of the marvelous into the mundane, and thus some kind of proof of their mutual interpenetration.

The encounter with the marvelous, in the guise of objective chance, is a disruption, a tear in the otherwise smooth fabric of the everyday. Things are no longer instruments or obstacles in relation to our projects and practical preoccupations but instead are portents or omens; they communicate with us as so many mute oracles.

But in order to see a meaningful, acausal connection in what would otherwise appear to be a simple coincidence, we have to take a particular interpretive stance toward them. We have to situate it within a more encompassing narrative in which the meaning of each element of the synchronic relationship is seen to derive from the other; meaning is in fact the third term that binds the two causally-independent events to each other.

To the extent that it rests on an understanding of the interpenetration of the marvelous and the mundane, this interpretive stance is a mythopoeic one. Consider that in mythic narrative the events and characters involved are in the world but with attributes or possibilities that transcend the limits of the world; mythic narrative just takes for granted the inner synthesis of the marvelous and the mundane. To take the mythic stance is to be receptive to the world of the marvelous, or better of the marvelous in the world—to sensing an overlay (or underlay) of the recurrent, meaning-conveying pattern coterminous with the perceived world. In a sense, the marvelous is the reverse side of a phenomenon of which myth is the obverse. The outlook capable of seeing objective chance in coincidence takes that inner synthesis no less for granted than does the mythic narrative. As a mythopoeic interpretive stance, the apprehension of objective chance necessarily breaks through the hermeneutic of the everyday—the mundane understanding of things and events–and in effect opens up a breach through which the uncanny can show itself. The upshot of this is that in objective chance, Surrealism seems to have created, without calling it such, a myth of meaning in the world.

Objective chance was a phenomenon afforded by what G. S. Kirk has characterized as myth’s “special imaginative power…provid[ing]…a wider perspective that that of ordinary life” (Kirk, p. 89). To the extent that myth stands as the source of structures of meaning—a repository of symbols saying something important about the recurring patterns of human life and experience—it lends a transformative power through which random-seeming events of the everyday acquire a certain intelligibility. But it is an intelligibility of a particular kind, one illuminated by a sense of the cosmic, which is to say an intelligibility that reveals a universal order underlying the superficially randomness of the everyday. For Surrealism, this revelation of mythic power resides in an awareness of that zone between the rational and the irrational, waking and dreaming; it is a zone in which these binary oppositions would be internally related rather than simply juxtaposed or senselessly mixed. Such an internal relation would represent a genuine synthesis, a convergence in which each constituent retains its own character even as it assimilates the character of the other. Only through the establishment—or better yet, recognition—of this internal relation would the boundary between them be abolished or acknowledged as a necessity’s illusory construct. In this zone, each would recognize itself in the other as an essential element of itself; there would be the revelation, again in Kirk’s phrase, of “the coexistence in human experience of the ordinary and the extraordinary” (Kirk, p. 90).

This mythic interpenetration of the everyday and the extraordinary just is the Surrealist project in sum; it is the deeper implication of objective chance and its disclosure of the acausal meaningfulness secreted in the unexpected coincidence or the improbable correspondence.

4

By 1942, Surrealism had taken an explicitly mythical turn. For the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in October-November of that year, Breton called for Surrealism to “rejoin the most durable traditions” of humankind (Tashjian, p. 232). A year later, in a combined second and third number the New York-based Surrealist review VVV ran a piece with the provocative title, “Concerning the Present-Day Relative Attractions of Various Creatures in Mythology and Legend.” Twenty-one Surrealists and others—these latter including Lionel Abel and Harold Rosenberg—were asked to rank fifteen mythical or fantastic figures in order of their “contemporary relative attraction.” (For those curious, the top three were, in order, Sphinx, Chimera and Minotaur.)

It was in 1942 that Surrealism saw one of its odder episodes when Breton announced the creation of a new myth. In the final section of his “Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Not,” published in June, 1942 in the first issue of VVV, Breton introduced his myth in the form of Les Grands Transparents.

Breton’s Great Transparents were “hypothetical beings” of immense scale and strangeness, compared to whom humans would appear as insignificant specks. The nature and existence of these beings, Breton suggests, might possibly be inferred from vast natural and human upheavals—he names cyclones and wars as two such—and may “mysteriously reveal themselves to us when we are afraid and when we are conscious of the workings of chance.” (This last point is particularly notable in that it seems to connect the new Surrealist myth of the Great Transparents with the old Surrealist myth of objective chance.)

As with many of Breton’s declarations this one is hedged with qualifications and couched in the language of counterfactuals and conditional auxiliary verbs, but what nevertheless comes through Breton’s habitual indirection is an almost palpable desire to believe in these imagined, if not imaginary, beings: they may “result from a mirage” but at the same time, should they not be “given a chance to show themselves?”

Although Breton cites Novalis, William James and Emile Duclaux as his sources or inspiration for the Great Transparents, it appears that he got the idea from Matta just before the outbreak of war, when the latter was in Paris (Sawin, p. 199; Tashjian, p. 211). For his part, Matta appears to have gotten the idea from P.D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, a book whose treatment of four-dimensional geometry exerted a significant influence on the painter’s developing aesthetic and metaphysic. Figures like the Great Transparents turn up in his paintings of the late 1930s and early 1940s; the floating forms in Prescience, for instance, appear to be transparent beings whose transparency may be an allusion to their four-dimensionality (since the four-dimensional perspective would reveal the interior and exterior of a figure simultaneously). Significantly, in Tertium Organum Ouspensky quotes the mathematician Charles Howard Hinton’s suggestion, from the latter’s 1888 book A New Era of Thought, that there are four-dimensional “high intelligences by whom we are surrounded; we feel them but do not realize them” (Ouspensky, p. 207). It seems likely that Breton’s Great Transparents represent a transposition into a deliberately mythological key of Hinton’s invisible “high intelligences.”

Joan Miró, Painting, 1933, Oil on canvas. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1934.40. © Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris 2018.

Breton was certainly aware of Matta’s enthusiasm for the fourth dimension. In his 1939 essay “The Most Recent Tendencies in Surrealist Painting,” Breton remarks on the interest among younger painters in seeing beyond the three-dimensional world and creating the “suggestive representation” of a four-dimensional world. In this connection he explicitly names Matta and the latter’s attempts to depict four-dimensional space through the use of multiple horizons (Surrealism and Painting, pp. 148-149).

Obligingly enough, some of the Surrealist and Surrealist-associated painters began to create works on the theme of the Great Transparents. Kurt Seligmann painted Melusine and the Great Transparents; Gerome Kamrowski did a picture with the cinematic title Script for an Impossible Documentary: The Great Invisibles; and Matta in the early 1940s was putting transparent figures he called “vitreuers” (roughly, “glassy ones) in his paintings of four-dimensional spaces (Sawin, p. 217). The Great Transparents also showed up in the catalogue to the First Papers of Surrealism show, appearing in a section Breton put together and titled “On the Survival of Certain Myths and on Some Other Myths in Growth and Formation.” There, Breton collected some images and texts on mythic or occult themes, ending with The Great Transparents, illustrated with a manipulated photograph by David Hare.

Although the Great Transparents did not become the new social myth Breton had hoped they would—in Kamrowski’s well-known remark, they were a “myth that didn’t fly” (Sawin, p. 217)—espousing them at least was a public demonstration of Breton’s seriousness in engaging the question of the need for myth in modern times. And it seems the Great Transparents didn’t fade away entirely; in a curious reprise they are obliquely alluded to in Breton’s repeating, in a 1963 essay on painter Enrico Baj, the suggestion that humans may be to greater creatures what lice are to humans: “irritants on the skin of far larger animals quite outside our scale of references” (Surrealism and Painting, p. 399).

Victor Brauner, The Indicator of Space, c. 1934, Oil on canvas. Collection of Andrew S. Teufel.

Read Familiar Monsters Part 2→

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Daniel Barbiero is an improvising double bassist who composes graphic scores and writes on music, art and related subjects. He is a regular contributor to Avant Music News and Perfect Sound Forever. His recent releases include Non-places, with Cristiano Bocci, and Fifteen Miniatures for Prepared Double Bass.

To read more by Daniel Barbiero on Arteidolia →

Works Cited:

Ferdinand Alquié, Philosophie du surréalisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1955)
Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (Berkeley: UCAL Press, 1972)
André Breton, Arcanum 17, tr. Zach Rogow (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 2000)
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, tr. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: U Michigan Press, 1972)
André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, tr. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper & Row/Icon, 1972)
André Breton, What Is Surrealism?: Selected Writings, edited and introduced by Franklin Rosemont (NY: Pathfinder, 1978)
C. G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, tr.  R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Bollingen/Princeton U Press, 1973)
G. S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths (NY: Penguin, 1964)
P.D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/to/index.htm
W. Jackson Rushing, “Ritual and Myth: Native American Culture and Abstract Expressionism,” in Maurice Tuchman, ed., The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), pp. 273-295.
Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1997)
Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde 1920-1950 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1995)