Arizona Republic from Phoenix, Arizona • Page 70

E2 SUNDAY, JUNE 5, 2005 The Arizona Republic I in i TJF i Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery Untitled (Horse), 1938, by Federico Castellon, shows Salvador Dali's influence. MiT' Aji 1- Erosion No. 2 Mother Earth Laid Bare, 1936, by Alexandre Hogue. Courtesy of Phoenix Art Museum Surrealism takes many shapes 1 if i In America, Surrealism developed its own identity America put its own spin on European Surrealism, adding its imagery and processes to its own very non-European concerns. Quite a few artists simply imitated the style of Salvador Dali, but beyond that, American Surrealism took three distinct directions, all of which can be seen in the new Phoenix Art Museum show.

First, Surrealism's political aspect became more overt, as American painters, already painting social-commentary art, generally left wing, added Surrealism to their arsenal. Peter Blume's great painting The Eternal City, one of the stars of the show, features Mussolini's head, turned green, at the end of a jack-in-the-box, lording it over the ruins of Rome. It is a political cartoon as an oil painting. A second branch of American Surrealism used the dream imagery as a kind of shorthand symbolism, consciously manipulated, rather than randomly generated. They often made paintings, such as Alexandre Hogue's Erosion No.

2 Mother Earth Laid Bare, which depict archetypal images inspired by the work of psychologist Carl Jung. Before he developed his drip paintings, Jackson Pollock painted such gods and totems in thick impasto. A third thread of Surrealism that took hold was that of automatism: the idea that what you doodled with no controlling thought would mimic the very structure of the unconscious. You can see that in Arshile Gorky's Study for Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia from 1932. This last branch had the greatest impact in the fine arts, as these works tended to be abstract, and it later gave birth to Abstract Expressionism and the great shift in the center of the art world from Paris to New York.

Richard Nilsen Thus was ushered in the era of droopy watches and steam locomotives chugging out of the fireplace. The number of artists who signed on was impressive even Picasso himself, at least tangentially. No single thing But one can't talk about Surrealism as a single thing, because it was not. There were as many types of Surrealism as there were Surrealist artists. Their general was Breton, who attempted to maintain control of his theory but was, in truth, herding cats.

Everyone had his own version of Surrealism. Dali leapt into sexual fetishism; Ernst into automatism. Joan Miro imitated children's art; Man Ray made clever and useless objects. And just as French couture shows up in New York stores, Surrealism crossed the Atlantic, so in the 1930s and '40s, American artists who wished to remain au courant picked up the mantra. The '40s also saw many of the European Surrealists cross the Atlantic to escape the war.

Dali came over. Tanguy came over. Ernst even settled in Se-dona. Dali became a celebrity; he starred in Life magazine. SURREALISM from El The beginning 1 Surrealism began in Paris in 1924 with Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, an unreadable piece of bureaucratic writing that set forth the principles of the school.

It was yet one more attempt at epater le bourgeois. But it was also a Utopian art-and-political movement meant to liberate all humanity, to free civilization from its deadening habits. Primarily, Breton wanted to free the mind from the shackles of logic, to use the imagination as freely as children or madmen, with no constraints of taste or taboo. He believed that the unconscious mind was somehow more honest than the conscious mind, and to tap into that lower, darker level of the psyche, he prescribed dream imagery, Freudian symbolism, automatic writing and random juxtaposition. The Surrealists took as their motto a phrase from the 19th century French poet Lautr6a-mont, "As beautiful as the chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella." Surrealism began its metamorphosis into mass culture.

Hello, Dali Dali's particular style of Surrealism became the public model for the movement and was imitated by some artists, including Federico Castellon, Reuben Kadish, Harold Lehman, Helen Lundeberg all included in the excellent Phoenix Art Museum show. Flat horizons, empty spaces, body parts, puppets, shadows, eggs, skeletons a whole retinue of increasingly tired Surrealist iconography. In America, that iconography persists aggressively in the form of tattoo and prison art, and the work of untold high school students. But this wasn't the end: Two more generations of Surrealism in America followed, although they are not part of the show. First came Pop Art, which often had a Surreal component Robert Rauschenberg's Monogram, for instance, with its stuffed goat wearing a rubber tire cummerbund, or Claes Oldenburg's soft sculpture.

Even Andy Warhol's color-quilt celebrity portraits have a Surrealist edge. And then came psychedelia. r-mm r- mnn in a Jr In Study for Nighttime, Enigma Gorky attempts to express the It is through the drug-and-rock culture of the late 1960s that modern pop culture gets its Surreal DNA. Grateful Dead, Iron Butterfly, psychedelic posters, LSD and flower power. "I don't take drugs," Dali said.

"I am drugs." That was the difference. But to truly understand what the excitement was all about, you must understand something about art in general: One of its main duties is to refresh our perceptions. We live lives of deadening habit driving the same commuter route daily, watching the same TV shows, ritualizing our polit mi mr: 1 i ipiiwm 4 Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution and Nostalgia, 1932, Arshile unconscious. ical life so that it becomes no more thought through than a slogan on a T-shirt. Habit is the great deadener of life.

Art always needs to show us something that wakes us up, makes us see the world again as if for the first time. This is what Breton meant by Surreabsm. He means to grab us by the lapels and make us see the world as miraculous. "The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful," he said, "in fact, only the marvelous is beautiful." Reach the reporter at (602)444-8823. "9 f4i 1 vshitr-f units' ft Or 3 'mm into -Mr '-)ri-Kc.

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