Familiar Monsters, Part 2

Daniel Barbiero
December 2018

André Masson, The Metaphysical Wall, 1940, Watercolor with pen and black ink over traces of graphite on wove paper. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Bequest of Saidie A. May (BMA 1951.331).  © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

 

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To some extent, Breton’s thinking about the role of myth in Surrealism was formulated in dialogue with Paalen’s counter-thinking. Although lesser-known today than many of the other artists in Monsters and Myths, Paalen in the late 1930s-early 1940s played a pivotal role in developing Surrealist and Surrealist-inspired visual arts on both the theoretical and practical levels. An Austrian by birth, Paalen had settled in Mexico in late 1939 after leaving Paris in May for the North American Pacific Northwest, where he studied native cultures. While in Paris in the mid-1930s he had met Breton and began associating with the Surrealist group. His invention of fumage—a method of creating images by using the smoke and ash of a burning candle to produce visual patterns on a canvas or other surface—was one of his contributions to the technical innovations that were then being introduced into Surrealist art-making.

Beyond his influence on the extension of Surrealism’s technical resources, it was Paalen’s interest in totemism, already evident in his series of Totemic Landscape paintings of 1937, that would have an impact on Surrealism, particularly in regard to its mythic turn. In fact, it was this interest that had led him to the Pacific Northwest and ultimately to Mexico. His anthropological research there helped him to formulate an understanding of myth and its role in recovering a hypothesized primordial past; he drew on this understanding when articulating his aesthetic theories in DYN, the journal he published between 1942 and 1944 in Mexico. For example, in his editorial preface to the special Amerindian double number, published in December, 1943, Paalen, in what amounts to a programmatic statement, declared that art could “reunite us with our prehistoric past and thus…enable us to grasp the memories of unfathomable ages.” He further called for a “universal art” that would help shape a new “world-consciousness.” In “Totem Art,” from the same issue, Paalen held up the sculpture of the Pacific Northwest Coast natives as exemplary of an art that was created for the emblematic realization of a communal or collective experience of life and not simply for personal consumption. (Rushing, p. 275). Paalen was striving for a similar goal of primordial, collective universality with his own art, and felt that the values embodied in totemic art could somehow be translated into contemporary art.

It was in the first number of DYN that he declared his “Farewell to Surrealism,” setting the stage for him to play an independent role in influencing the younger generation of Surrealist-allied artists, among them Matta and most importantly, the American Robert Motherwell, both of whom spent time in Mexico with Paalen. Motherwell in particular played an important role in bringing Paalen’s ideas back to New York. Thus it is possible to see Paalen as a challenger to Breton for intellectual leadership of the artists interested in myth and the unconscious, and to an extent he was; at the same time, it’s also possible to see Paalen and Breton as engaged in a surreptitious dialogue of mutual interest and mutual influence during the war years. Their disagreements may at the time have seemed significant, but on the crucial matter of the role of myth in modern life, they now appear to have been in basic agreement.

For both Paalen and Breton, myth offered a still-indispensable way of orienting oneself in the world, an interpretive stance belonging to a fundamental stratum of the human psyche. Thus for both, myth was a largely psychological phenomenon. But it’s possible to see their engagement of myth as carrying an existential implication going beyond psychology. The mythic stance is an existential one precisely to the degree that it confronts the world as a set of given meaningful possibilities in relation to which one must act. What gives it a peculiarly mythical force is its recognition of the marvelous or the extraordinary as being among these possibilities. More than that, the mythic stance sees possibility itself as being underwritten by the extraordinary: in its permeation of the world as such, the marvelous is the sine qua non of the mundane; it is the touchstone in relation to which meaning arises as meaning. It only remains for the marvelous to be disclosed as the ground of meaning. The interpretive stance encoded in myth is, from the existential point of view, a way of finding one’s bearings and grasping the world as a meaningful environment latent with signs and associations that, in revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary, speak directly or indirectly to the perennial human predicament.

Mark Rothko, The Syrian Bull, 1943, Oil and graphite on canvas. Allen Memorial Art Museum,Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, Gift of Annalee Newman in honor of Ellen H. Johnson (1991.41.1). © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

 

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At about the same time that Paalen’s and Breton’s positions were converging on myth, the path the younger painters were exploring diverged from Surrealism. Surrealist art had already undergone a transformation; what is striking about Surrealist painting during the years covered by Monsters and Myths is its shift from an earlier aesthetic that often relied on the juxtaposition of unrelated objects—a kind of visual realization of objective chance or of Lautréamont’s encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table—to a portrayal of ambiguous spaces and strange life forms. Surrealist art was in transition, both stylistically and methodologically. One of these transitions concerned the conception of psychic automatism, the role and function of which would be substantially altered during Surrealism’s American exile.

Psychic automatism was, from the beginning, one of the fundamental principles of Surrealism. In the First Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton defined Surrealism simply as “pure psychic automatism.” For the original Surrealists this meant, in practical terms, the unconstrained disclosure of the unconscious through automatic writing or other methods using language as a medium. As Surrealist activity expanded into the visual arts, the question of transposing psychic automatism from a linguistic to a plastic medium arose. It was a question with two parts: what would a visualized unconscious look like, and how—by what method—could it be conveyed? The solutions to the problem of transposition were multiple, varying from, at one extreme, Dali’s transcriptions of dream images in an academic style, and at the other extreme, Masson’s automatic drawings of the early 1920s. Masson left the Surrealist movement in 1929 and abandoned automatic methods for consciously-controlled imagery, but shortly after reconciling with Breton in 1937 he had once again begun to practice visual automatism with a method that explicitly renounced the constraints of conscious control. As he described the process in “Painting as a Wager”: “Seize your inspiration in that state of ecstasy and paroxysm in which mind and body coincide and regain their lost unity. Let execution be a lightning-swift and automatic act” (Sawin, p. 175). In theory, at least, this comes close to a programmatic statement for a psychic automatism at its purest; it testifies to a renewed interest in returning to Surrealism’s first principles.

By 1941, Breton could assert, with a marked tone of triumphalism, that the “very latest examples of surrealist painting…show a marked return to automatism…we have had to wait until fifteen years after the Surrealist Manifesto called for it to be put into practice enthusiastically for absolute automatism to make its appearance on the level of plastic creation” (Breton, Surrealism and Painting, p. 145). This return to automatism had been facilitated by the development of new techniques, among them decalcomania, frottage, and fumage.

Among the new automatist techniques developed during the late 1930s-early 1940s was a kind of proto-gestural painting introduced by Matta. Matta had trained as an architect and was a self-taught painter; perhaps for this reason he felt freer to explore unorthodox methods than would someone with a more conventional background. During a visit to Gordon Onslow-Ford in Switzerland, Matta experimented with applying paint directly to the canvas with a palette knife and then spreading it around rapidly with his fingers (Onslow-Ford). In the Surrealist review Minotaure in 1939, Breton described Matta’s direct application of paint as “divination through color”; certainly, it was a way for Matta to achieve his project of creating a psychic automatism that could depict what he called “morphologie psychologique”—psychological morphology, or the ongoing transformations of the psyche. By his definition, automatism was “a method of reading ‘live’ the actual function of thinking at the same speed as the matter we are thinking of, to read at the speed of events, to grasp unconscious material functioning in our memory with the tools at our disposal. Automatism means that the irrational and the rational are running parallel and can send sparks into each other and light the common road” (Hobbs, p. 59).

Roberto Matta, Prescience, 1939, Oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund (1941.389). © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Matta’s proto-gestural automatism can be seen in Prescience. The streaks of green seeming to make up the viscera of the transparent figures at the center are splayed as if frozen in movement. The ambiguity of these suspended forms is such as to suggest the undulations and shape-shifting of invertebrate creatures in perpetual metamorphosis. Whether or not this represents the painterly transposition of thought in motion, it is a virtuoso demonstration of plastic values.

Matta’s psychological morphology was as much a challenge to the orthodox Surrealist group as it was a breakthrough for his own aesthetic. After moving to New York in November, 1939, Matta made contact with some of the younger American painters there. According to Motherwell’s recollection, Matta intended to carry Surrealist theory further than had the orthodox Surrealists, with whom he had what Motherwell described as a “love-hate relationship” (Shapiro and Shapiro, pp. 37-38). To that end, Matta around 1942 gathered about him a small circle that included, in addition to Motherwell, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Gerome Kamrowski and Peter Busa, and planned a show at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery that would serve notice to the older Surrealists that they’d been outdone by the younger, less compromising artists. The show never took place—Matta apparently lost interest or had second thoughts about potentially provoking a break with Breton—but his longer-term influence on the American painters would prove to be profound.

While Matta was revivifying automatism in New York, Paalen was himself laying the intellectual foundations of a rethinking of automatism and its place in the expressive economy of painting. It was in this regard that Paalen was particularly influential on the new generation of artists; the path he laid out in addressing the Surrealist problem of what psychic automatism could mean, and how it could be effectively implemented in the visual arts was, like Matta’s brief alliance with the younger New York painters, to have a lasting effect on the development of postwar painting.

Paalen set out his basic principles in the essay “The New Image,” written in summer, 1941 and published in DYN’s inaugural number in April/May, 1942. Paalen’s essential point was that the “relevant aspects of automatism” were to be found in “techniques of divination, whose function is to sense unexpected images in aesthetically amorphous material” (Paalen, p. 41). Automatism would be a mode of seeing if not of seership, a way of diving form in the originally formless material it made its object. Paalen further described it as “incantatory technique” rather than a mode of “creative expression” (Paalen, p. 41); it was, in other words, a means of setting out rather than a point of arrival. Although not simply a vehicle of expression, neither was the new image a means of replicating or interpreting external reality; rather, the “true raw material” of the new automatism would consist in the “kaleidoscopic flow” of the painter’s inner world (Paalen, p. 42). Above all, the new image would not represent but instead would prefigure or project “potentialities of existence” (Paalen, p. 53).

Fumage was one of the methods Paalen developed to facilitate the new image. Like some of the other automatist methods developed in 1930s and 1940s—frottage and decalcomania, for instance—fumage produced random, aesthetically indeterminate shapes and patterns on a surface. From there, images would emerge through an interpretive act on the part of the artist; the imagination would project itself onto the material, as it were, and form it into meaningful forms. At that point conscious craft kicked in and the artist finished the piece according to his or her own aesthetic judgment. Paalen’s Battle of the Saturnian Princes lll was the result of that process; after the smoke and flame from the candle had marked the canvas and given him a starting point, Paalen painted over and created the images we see now.

The critical point of this kind of automatism is that cessation of conscious control only represented the first stage; after that, choice once again asserted itself, and the material of the work once again became the site of possibilities to be realized according to the specific project the artist brought to it. Automatism thus involved the meeting of chance and project, of accident and intention. In the most significant break with the orthodox Surrealist project, it also was divorced from any pretense of seeking the marvelous. It is a break in particular that marks the turn from the “pure psychic automatism” of the original surrealism to what Motherwell called “plastic automatism.” Plastic automatism recognized the enabling constraint of the medium in forming the painting, and while many of the younger painters, particularly those under the influence of Jung, considered the subject matter of their paintings to consist in the signification of universal, inner patterns of experience, their automatism was plastic precisely to the extent that it recognized the constructive role that formal and material elements had in the creation of that content. If the unconscious showed itself it was in the initial, free gesture; as Peter Busa put it when describing the automatist sessions with Matta, “one didn’t have an image to begin with, but rather a hand and a motor ability” (Sawin, p. 241). The image emerged from the meeting of imagination and material. And, in perhaps the most significant deviation from Surrealist orthodoxy, for the American painters it no longer bore the trace of the marvelous.

That Paalen’s essay on the new image influenced Motherwell is virtually certain; not only had Motherwell spent considerable time in Mexico with Paalen, getting what he called his “postgraduate education in Surrealism” (Shapiro and Shapiro, p. 36), but he had also translated “The New Image” from the original French into English for publication in Paalen’s journal DYN. Paalen’s idea of the new image provides the kernel of the program Motherwell set out in an August, 1944 lecture which Paalen published under the title “The Modern Painter’s World” in the final issue of DYN. In Motherwell’s formulation, Paalen’s divination becomes refigured as the mind “realizing itself in color and space” through the medium of the painting, whose content is rooted in “the interplay of a sentient being and the external world” (Motherwell, p. 32). This notion of mind disclosing itself through the plastic values of the medium is recognizable in the intellectual substrate of the Abstract Expressionist painting that became the dominant mode of American visual art after the war.

Both Matta and Paalen helped construct the bridge that led from Surrealist notions of automatism to the gestural abstraction that followed. The Americans’ work of the early 1940s represented a crossing of that bridge; some of that work is represented in the closing sections of Monsters and Myths. From it and from the exhibition as a whole, one can conclude that Surrealism’s American exile was, in the end, a period of transition, not only for the older European Surrealists, but for the younger American artists they helped inspire.

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Despite the hyperbole to which he was prone, Breton in praising “The Most Recent Tendencies in Surrealist Painting” did describe a real phenomenon of long-term significance to painting: the adoption by many younger painters of new methods for realizing an art derived from psychic automatism. The irony is that some of these painters, joined later by those they met in America, adopted automatist methods with ends in mind that would differ significantly from those of Breton and orthodox Surrealism. But like a Cadmus of the marvelous, Breton and the ideas he had helped to inspire—some in agreement, some in opposition—would turn out to be so many dragon’s teeth from which that new generation of painting could spring. The American turn to automatism would become, in effect, a turn away from Surrealism and its visions of the marvelous and instead would represent a reorientation toward what would eventually be an independent school of abstract painting. It would be the turn from psychic automatism per se to what Motherwell called “plastic automatism” and through it, to the gestural painting of the New York School.

Joan Miró, A Drop of Dew Falling from the Wing of a Bird Awakens Rosalie Asleep in the Shade of a Cobweb, 1939, Oil on basketweave fabric. University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, Purchase, Mark Ranney Memorial Fund (1948.3). © Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris 2018.

←back to Familiar Monsters Part I

Monsters & Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT
October 20, 2018–January 13, 2019

Works Cited:

André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, tr. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper & Row/Icon, 1972)
Robert Hobbs, “Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism: From Psychic Automatism to Plastic Automatism,” in Isabelle Dervaux, Surrealism USA (New York: National Academy Museum in conjunction with Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005), pp. 56-65.
Robert Motherwell, “The Modern Painter’s World,” in The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (Oxford: Oxford U Press, 1992), pp. 27-35.
Gordon Onslow-Ford, “Notes sur Matta et le peinture, 1937-1941,” in exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée national d’art modern, 1985, as quoted in http://www.artnet.com/artists/roberto-matta/morphologie-psychologique-de-lattente-a-WEJ6gupj0jZhSQbwcH4Pmg2
Wolfgang Paalen, Form and Sense (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2013)
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)
Sidney Simon, “Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School 1939-1943: An Interview with Robert Motherwell Conducted by Sidney Simon in New York in January, 1967,” in David and Cecile Shapiro, eds., Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record (Cambridge U Press, 1990).