André Breton (1896–1966), Jacqueline Lamba (1910–1993), Yves Tanguy (1900–1955), Exquisite Corpse, 1938; Collage. Gale and Ira Drukier. © 2012 Atists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. © 2012 Estate of Yves Tanguy / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In the mid-1930s artists developed new automatic techniques to bypass the rational mind in the creative process. One of the most popular was decalcomania, which involves applying a wet medium (ink or gouache) to a sheet of paper and then pressing it against another sheet. When the sheets are pulled apart unexpected patterns appear on the transfer image. Originally a decorative technique — used notably in nineteenth-century ceramic design — decalcomania was rediscovered in 1935 in the context of surrealism’s exploitation of chance effects by Spanish artist Oscar Dominguez. Nearly ten decalcomania drawings by Dominguez and other surrealists who employed the technique — including Yves Tanguy, Georges Hugnet, and Marcel Jean — are included in the exhibition.
Although collage was used earlier in the twentieth century by the cubist and dada artists, the technique took on particular importance with the surrealists. The odd juxtapositions and dislocated imagery it produced were particularly effective in conjuring a dream world or suggesting the irrationality of unconscious desire. Miró, Ernst, Ei-Kyu, Breton, and Arp are among the many artists whose works are featured in this section of the exhibition.
The 1930s marked surrealism’s growing internationalization. Artists outside of Paris approached and adapted surrealist drawing techniques to their respective cultural and political contexts, and active surrealist centers developed in London, Prague, Tokyo, and Mexico. Although surrealism was envisioned as an international movement, rarely have works by these artists been presented alongside their European cohorts centered in Paris.
On view are drawings by such masters as René Magritte of Belgium, Roland Penrose and Eileen Agar of England, Gunther Gerzso and Frida Kahlo of Mexico, Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský of the Czech Republic, Federico Castellón, Arshile Gorky, and Kay Sage of the United States, Cesar Moro of Peru, and Yamamoto Kansuke of Japan.
René Magritte (1898–1967)
La Tempête (The Storm), 1927, Graphite. © 2012 C. Herscovici, London / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Gale and Ira Drukier
In the 1940s automatism played a major role in the elaboration of new forms of lyrical abstraction. In Europe, Henri Michaux and Wols created fluid images in washes and watercolor in which barely recognizable shapes suggest a visionary world. In the United States, stimulated by the presence of European surrealists in exile during the war, artists such as Arshile Gorky, William Baziotes, and Jackson Pollock explored freer techniques to make drawings that fuse visions of nature and of an interior universe. These works on paper laid the groundwork for what would become abstract expressionism.
Arshile Gorky (1904–1948), Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia, 1931;
Ink on paper. © 2012 Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Bequest of Caroline Wiess Law
Although surrealism as a movement lost its vitality at the end of the forties, its tenets remained a springboard for several postwar developments, as can be seen in Ellsworth Kelly’s abstract compositions based on chance and Louise Bourgois’s expression of subconscious psychological states through symbolic imagery.
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