Magritte and Dalí

 

Art Collections Royal Museums of Fine Arts BelgiumCollections d’art des Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de BelgiqueKunstollecties Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België

[Images: LEFT: René Magritte, The Imp of the Perverse (1928), oil on canvas, 81.3 x 116 cm, inv. 7418, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. © SABAM 2018 / photo: J. Geleyns – Art Photography; RIGHT: Salvador Dalí, Fantasies Diurnes (1931), oil on canvas. 81.2 x 100.3 cm, Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL. ©Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, (Artists Rights Society), 2018]

A current exhibition explores the links between the two most iconic artists of the Surrealist movement. René Magritte (1898-1967) and Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) is on show at the Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida (15 December 2018-19 May 2019) and will tour to the Royal Museums of Fine Art of Belgium, Brussels, home of Musée Magritte. Curator of the exhibition, Dr William Jeffet, has assembled a group of paintings, objects, graphics and photographs that demonstrate the associations between the art of these two. Often this comes in the form of pairings of pieces by the painters; in the catalogue the direct personal interactions of the artists are discussed. This exhibition is reviewed from the catalogue.

The curation rests on the world’s two outstanding collections of these artists. The Dalí Museum has the world’s best collection of Dalí’s best paintings, better than even Dalí’s own museum in Figueras. The second venue on the tour, Musée Magritte, home of the world’s largest and best collection of the Belgian’s art, has loaned excellent paintings. There are some loans from other institutions and private collections. The selection is of top-drawer pieces from the classic periods of the two artists – all work is from 1925-48) and it is intelligently chosen and organised.

When Dalí became involved in Surrealism (in 1928), Magritte was already part of the Paris and Brussels groups. Although Magritte only moved to Paris in 1927, he was established as a serious painter among the followers of the new movement. Dalí knew of Magritte’s art and wrote about the Belgian’s painting in articles for the Spanish press before their first meeting in the late spring of 1929. Dalí was enthusiastic about Magritte’s painting in these early years and not slow to publicly praise his paintings.

They came to share the same dealer, Camille Goemans, who signed them both to contracts in 1929. A large part of Magritte’s decision to move to Paris (in September 1927) was that his Belgian dealer Goemans had relocated to Paris in April 1927. It was the failure of Goemans gallery (in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929) that caused Magritte to quit Paris and returning to Brussels, where he took up commercial work again, designing posters and adverts for the coming years. Dalí would stay on in Paris, though poor in his early years. There is one letter from Magritte to Dalí in the Teatro-Museo archives in Figueras. (Jeffet comments that Dalí’s correspondence is considerable but dispersed and only a minority of it has been published. Again, we find an absence – a book Dalí correspondence would be of great interest.)

René and Georgette Magritte would witness one of the key events in Dalí’s life. In August 1929, Goemans and the Magrittes went to visit Dalí in Cadaqués. This proved a fateful summer for Dalí. Gala and Paul Éluard joined the party. Gala and Dalí began an affair; come September Eluard left for Paris while his wife stayed on in Spain with her new lover Dalí. Gala was notorious for her many affairs and Éluard apparently expected her to return to him. He was distraught when she did not. She would go on to marry Dalí, while continuing extra-marital affairs even into old age. Magritte resented Dalí’s financial success and critical attention in the 1930s and 1940s. It was only in the 1950s that Magritte achieved a comfortable income from his sales to American collectors via Alexandre Iolas’s gallery in New York. It was in New York that Magritte and Dalí met in passing for the last time, when Magritte was there to attend his retrospective exhibition.

Jeffet and Michel Draguet, director of the Royal Museums of Fine Art of Belgium, write about the parallels and differences between the artists. Both Dalí and Magritte were well versed in art history and studied at highly regarded art schools in Brussels and Madrid. Both were part of the veristic or oneiric strand of Surrealism, which included realistic depictions of recognisable objects alongside the fantastic and impossible, as opposed to the automatist strand, which was developed by Ernst, Masson, Matta and Gorky, where forms were often abstract and generated by random factors. However, they differed in style. Magritte deployed a neutral and direct approach, akin to commercial illustration or the more stolid naturalism of Low Countries Realism of the Nineteenth Century. Dalí cultivated a virtuosic style, flamboyantly difficult derived from Italian Renaissance painting, with passages of microscopic detail and flashes of bravura brushwork, making a hyperreal but very personal style.

Various themes of the artists include dreams, the erotic, reality subverted, the symbolic portrait, the nostalgic ideal landscape, Surrealist still-lifes and the self-portrait. They drew on their home territories: the Ampurdan plain and bay of Port Lligat of Catalonia and the pastures and waterways of Brabant and suburbs of Brussels. They used a recurring set of images, which became associated with the artists. The artists developed repertoires of certain pictorial methods of achieving states of dislocation in viewers: change property (size, weight, strength, rigidity, flammability and so forth), transformation (bird into egg and so forth), replication, juxtaposition (including montage and actual collage), use of words, representation of unknown or impossible substances, titular contradiction and quotation of familiar Old Master art.

 

Art Collections Royal Museums of Fine Arts BelgiumCollections d’art des Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de BelgiqueKunstollecties Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België

[Images: LEFT: Salvador Dalí, The Invisible Man, 1932, oil on canvas, 16.5 x 23.8 cm, Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL. ©Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, (Artists Rights Society), 2018; RIGHT: René Magritte, The Unexpected Answer (1933), oil on canvas, 82 x 54.4 cm, inv. 7241, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. © SABAM 2018 / photo: J. Geleyns – Art Photography]

Magritte had pioneered the motif of the inflammable object on fire. His Discovery of Fire (1936) shows a tuba burning; Dalí next year drew people engaged in fine dining at night, illuminated by burning giraffes. (Magritte despised Dalí’s burning giraffes, finding them crass and comical.) Dalí also used another of Magritte’s signature motifs, the veiled form. This veiling of the face or body is often linked to the death of Magritte’s mother, whose face (it was claimed) was found shrouded by her nightdress. The sinister aspect of the veil as shroud is apparent in The Lovers (1928), where anonymous lovers kiss while their faces are hidden from the world – voluntarily or otherwise. In Dalí’s paintings of the early 1930s there are many fantastical, sinister and erotic forms concealed by sheets. The approach held psychosexual power and a nagging mystery for Dalí. Some of Dalí’s most effective compositions involve the theatricality and tactility of sheets partially revealing and concealing objects and figures. While Dalí was clearly the borrower, his uses of the motif differed from the originator’s usages.

Both artists engaged in the craze for object construction. While Dalí’s were assemblages of found and modified objects, Magritte’s were generally bottles or plaster casts painted.  There is the comparative display of the two artist’s variations of the Venus de Milo. Magritte’s is a colour painted plaster, while Dalí’s is a painted bronze including drawers with ermine-covered handles. Minor pieces but an appealing juxtaposition. Another point of exact intersection is the Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1869). While the Dalí Museum has a full set of the Spaniard’s etchings (1934) (apparently not executed by him but actually a master printmaker), it only has the title page of Magritte’s illustrations (1948, here dated “1934”). Could not examples of Magritte’s interior illustrations have been borrowed to expand this display? These illustrations aptly foreground Dalí’s immersion in his own fantasies to the detriment of the illustrative function of the prints, whereas Magritte’s showcase his flexibility and versatility, using images and technique nearly unique in his oeuvre.

They were political opposites, with Magritte a member of the Belgian Communist party and Dalí supporting the Fascists and Falangists, though for both these were sentimental attachments rather than ideological positions. There were tensions between the Belgian Surrealists and the Parisian group. In Paris, Magritte was decidedly a Walloon and both more subversive and more conventional than his Parisian colleagues. Magritte bridled at the domineering style of André Breton’s leadership, the cycles of tribunals and expulsions and the endless debates over the compatibility of self-determination and political commitment inherent in the Communist basis of Surrealist thought. In that respect Magritte and Dalí both distanced themselves from Louis Aragon’s demand that Surrealist’s adherence to Communist doctrine. Aragon specifically criticised an assemblage by Dalí which included a class of milk, asserting that glasses of milk must be given to the sickly children of workers rather than wasted in art. The exhibition includes a reconstruction of the very piece – Surrealist Object (1931/1973)) – that Aragon denounced. Dalí retorted that he was in the grip of his delirious unconscious and that he must follow its most extreme and inexplicable manifestations regardless of politics. This was a stance that led to his eventual expulsion from the group. While Magritte agreed with left-wing policies, he could never bring himself to follow the dictates of Socialist Realism or the incorporation of explicit political messages into art. Magritte also found himself frozen out of the official Paris group, having fallen out with Breton several times.

Both artists collaborated with their wives as models. Gala was celebrated as a muse for a number of artists and named as a subject in Dalí’s painting titles and public pronouncements. Gala Dalí appeared at events such as society balls, exhibition openings and audiences with prominent individuals. Georgette Magritte, however, appeared often in the paintings but is only occasionally named, mostly in private portraits. Her position as a model was not made explicit during Magritte’s lifetime, probably due to propriety and modesty. Gala was a cosmopolitan exhibitionist, whilst also being extremely private; Georgette was a middle-class Catholic Walloon. Georgette was a participant in her husband’s photographed japes and short films, but this seems in the spirit of play and mischief rather than fame-seeking, as these were not intended to be public.

The book includes two essays, a chronology for the two artists, illustrations of exhibited art (and related unexhibited art) and many photographs of the artists and their wives, colleagues and collaborators. There is much more to be said on this pair of artists, particularly on their sources. The pair drew on published sources and applied Surrealist ideas to work in the commercial sphere. There is a fruitful loop between commercial sources feeding fine art and fine-art ideas appearing in commercial art. There is little discussion of the artists’ separate correspondence, which is a shame. Magritte mentioned Dalí in passing a number of times, as quoted by Torczyner, and in this catalogue there are some quotes from Magritte’s letters in the Écrits complets. The references are cutting, denigrating Dalí for his sensationalism. The extent of Dalí’s letter-writing is unclear.

This is a fascinating and approachable book for anyone interested in Dalí, Magritte or Surrealism. The exhibition is sure to attract a lot of attention in Europe when it arrives in Brussels later this year.

 

William Jeffet, Michel Draguet, Magritte and Dalí, The Dalí Museum/Ludion, 2018, hardback, 144pp, 80 col./b&w illus., $19.95, ISBN 978 949 303 9001. Available from http://www.thedali.org

© 2019 Alexander Adams

See my art and books here: www.alexanderadams.art

The New Berlin, 1912-32

[Image: Dodo, Theatre Box Logic, for ULK magazine, (1929), watercolour and graphite, 40 x 30 cm, Krümmer Fine Art © Krümmer Fine Art]

The New Berlin, 1912-32 is a current exhibition which examines art that flourished in Berlin during the flowering of Modernism from 1912 to the end of the Weimar Republic in 1932 (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, 5 October 2018-27 January 2019). The exhibition (including more than 200 works of art in all media) focuses on advanced German art that made it to Belgium in those years and the art made by Belgians in response to that art. It features many names familiar to international visitors and figures from the Belgian art world who are lesser known internationally. This exhibition is reviewed from the catalogue.

The exhibition opens in 1912, which was when (in March 1912) the Der Sturm gallery opened in Berlin. The gallery would feature much of the era’s most ground-breaking art. In collaboration (and competition) with Galerie Georges Giroux in Brussels and dealer Alfred Flechtheim, Der Sturm allowed art to reach Berliners and – through loans and publications – international audiences, including those in Belgium. Futurism, Cubist, Blaue Reiter, Expressionism and abstract art began to be diffused via publications such as Die Aktion. The influence of Expressionist woodcuts – being the most accessible and accurately reproducible art of the time – became apparent in the art of Frans Masereel and Gustave De Smet. Their woodcuts are stylistically identical to those produced by the German Expressionists.

The year 1912 was when Belgian art’s influence began to dramatically wane. Art Nouveau, Aestheticism, Symbolism, Luminism and Neo-Divisionism all had leading practitioners in Belgium, not least in the fields of illustration and poster design, and were popular Europe-wide from roughly 1890 to 1910. Belgium (particularly Brussels) was one of the artistic hubs of the period. The outbreak of the Great War decisively extinguished these movements as vital strands.

[Image: Raoul Hausmann, The Art Critic (1919-20), lithograph and printed paper, 31.8 x 25.4 cm, Tate: Purchased 1974, Inv. T01918 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017]

Belgium was occupied by German forces from 1914 to 1918. At this point German art, through exhibition and publication, became dominant sources of new ideas in a Belgium isolated from the rest of Europe. Belgian artists exiled in the Netherlands found kinship with German Expressionists in artistic terms. Some of the Expressionists were anti-war, Socialist and internationalists, which struck a chord with foreign artists. During the war and into the 1920s and 1930s Expressionism became a distinct school in Belgium, influencing artists of École Laethem-Saint-Martin, Nervia and independent painters such as the young Paul Delvaux. Expressionism of Belgium (principally in Flanders) is characterised by its domestic subjects, muted coloration, emotional moderation and links to traditional subjects. The Belgian palette contrasts with the lurid aggression of the Germans. Belgians saw Expressionism as a way of connecting to an actual remembered past while the Germans wanted to connect to an imagined past of exotic savages. The exhibition includes paintings and prints by Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein, Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz. During the occupation many German artist-soldiers made the pilgrimage to the studio of James Ensor in Ostend. The elderly Ensor was considered a pioneer of Expressionism for his celebrated mask paintings, made decades earlier. While stationed in Belgium, Heckel made art and the exhibition includes one of his paintings of Bruges.

In aftermath of the war, the assertively Modern seemed the only adequate response to the horror of invasion, destruction and mass slaughter. In 1918 Art Nouveau seemed incomprehensibly archaic and Symbolism a feeble fantasy world. Art for a shattered world would have to break with tradition. Exposure to art of Germany led to many young Belgians looking East following liberation. They divided roughly into two camps: the angry Expressionists, Dadaists and satirists and the idealistic abstractionists. The former reacted to the social and emotional upheaval of the war; the latter decided to prevent suffering and disunity through the establishment of technical perfection, scientific social policy and aesthetic revolution. In Belgium over 1918-20 there was a burst of short-lived utopian artistic groups inspired by liberation and the Russian Revolution. With the ideals of pacificism, Modernism, Socialism and internationalism (advocating European unity), these groups espoused rejecting tradition rather than adapting or hybridising it. Much of the art that inspired Germans and Belgians was Russian: Naum Gabo, El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko and Kazimir Malevich.

[Image: Naum Gabo, Model for constructed Torso (1917), cardboard. 1917, reassembled 1981, 39,5 x 29 x 16 cm, Tate: Accepted by HM Government in lieu of tax and allocated to the Tate Gallery 1995, T06972, © Tate, London 2018]

Some of the leading Belgian abstract artists were Pierre-Louis Flouquet, Victor Servranckx and Marthe Donas. The radical ideas of Soviet architects found fertile ground with German architects and Bauhaus teachers. A number of uncompromisingly modern projections for redevelopment of Alexanderplatz, Berlin are shown here.

In the 1920s Berlin became a world metropolis, the third largest in the world (behind London and New York). Berlin was a city that was uniquely divided between the advanced and the regressive. It was home of the world-class pioneering technology, architecture and arts and was beset by widespread unemployment, hunger, prostitution, poverty, political violence and the persistent effects of wartime upon former soldiers, many severely crippled. This proved a stimulating environment for new art.

[Image: Otto Dix, Two Children (1920), oil on canvas, 95 x 76 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts Belgium, Brussels, inv. 7510, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn © SABAM Belgium]

Georg Simmel described the city dweller as free from traditional constraints of religion, morality and local political affiliations. The urban person had been liberated from the constraints of custom and – newly anonymous, mobile, freely associating – was able to develop his/her talents; these tastes might reach a state of extremity. Take a look at Hans Baluschek’s printed portraits of a drunk, carnival whore and cocaine addict – victims of urban degeneracy. Criminologists in Vienna and Berlin were engaged by the question of whether or not cities caused latent criminality and moral weakness to corrupt individuals. Two paradigms were at war: the utopian (cities allowed the fusion of individuals into superhuman forces of productivity, creativity and innovation) and the dystopian (cities allowed the moral and genetic dregs of society to spawn turpitude among the masses). As one looks through the art here, one cannot help but see the abstractionists, Bauhaus teachers and city planners as utopians and the political artists and Dadaists as dystopians.

The proclivity for people to seek out likeminded others led to the acceleration of tendencies and producing ever more extreme and specialised styles. In Modernism there has always been a craving for novelty. When the style of Weimar Berlin art was not Modernist, the subject matter was often contemporary. The Neue Sachlichkeit and Magic Realist artists painted modern places (such as cabaret clubs, cinemas, streets filled with automobiles) and modern people (drag artists, homosexuals, flappers, Communist and Nazi agitators). Dodo, Lotte Laserstein, Hannah Höch and others female artists were the so-called New Women, liberated from former constraints, and they portrayed New Women. Only Laserstein could be described as a Neue Sachlichkeit painter. (See my review of Laserstein’s current solo exhibition in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt in the next issue of The Jackdaw.)  Political satire often dictated the tone, especially in the work of George Grosz, Otto Dix, Raoul Hausmann and John Heartfield. This was the time when Heartfield made photomontage into a mass art and a political weapon. His attacks on Nazism featured on the covers of AIZ and other publications and are recognised as classics today. (Read my review of Heartfield’s photomontages here.)

Berlin was home to other leading creative figures, including filmmaker Fritz Lang, playwright Bertolt Brecht and novelist Alfred Döblin. The catalogue includes an informative essay on Expressionist cinema discussing the role of Nietzsche’s thought on the films by Robert Wiene and others. Other essays cover the changing character of Berlin, photomontage, the New Women of Berlin and political art. Groups of works are illustrated in sequences with brief written summaries. The texts (which are based on research rather than theory and are admirably free of jargon) ably map the importance of Berlin as a centre for the visual arts and explain links between Belgian artists and the capital of Germany during the period of High Modernism. The profuse illustrations of periodicals show what people were reading at the time and how they consumed art. This catalogue forms a good introduction to these subjects and will be of value to anyone wanting to understand the role of Berlin in European Modernism during its heyday.

 

Inga Rossi-Schrimpf et al, The New Berlin, 1912-32, Lannoo/Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 2018, hardback, 256pp, fully col. illus., €34.99, ISBN 978 2390 250 739

 

© 2018 Alexander Adams

View my art and books here: http://www.alexanderadams.art

Frans Hals: A Family Reunion

A current touring exhibition reunites fragments of a giant family portrait painted by one of the masters of the Golden Age of Dutch painting, Frans Hals (1582/3-1666) (Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, 13 October 2018-6 January 2019; touring to Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, 2 February-28 April 2019; Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris, 8 June-25 August 2019). This exhibition comprises nine paintings and one drawing. The exhibition is reviewed from the catalogue.
Hals was born in Antwerp and was taken to Haarlem by his family, who fled the Eighty Year War in the South Netherlands. We know little of his artistic training and early career. He was principally a portrait painter. Four of his sons followed their father in the painting trade. Hals was innovatory as a portraitist, being known for the development of complex expanded multi-figure compositions, capturing informal and lifelike facial expressions and body language and for portraying the individual characters of sitters. He made his trademark the wet-on-wet finish for his paintings, although the paintings were built up in different sessions and it was only the final layer that was painted so vigorously.
Around 1623 Hals was commissioned by a Catholic wool merchant called Gijsbert Claesz of Leiden and his wife van Maria Jorisdr van Campen of Haarlem, who moved to Haarlem after their marriage. The prosperous merchant had a large family of thirteen children and could afford the grand painting that the size of his family necessitated. Only in 2013 was the family securely identified as the van Campens. The book contains a family tree of the van Campen family, documenting the individuals portrayed in the picture. The portrait was apparently commissioned after the birth of the couple’s thirteenth child. When a fourteenth (and final) child was born, it was added to the painting in 1628 but this infant was painted not by Hals but Salomon de Bray, who signed the addition. The choice of artist was a good one, as the figure is painted in a style congruent with the original.

[Image: Frans Hals (Dutch, 1582/83–1666), The Van Campen Family in a Landscape (fragment) (ca. 1623–25), oil on canvas. 151 x 163.6 cm. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, inv. 2011.80]

The van Campen painting is the earliest surviving group portrait by Hals. It shows the couple Gijsbert Claesz and Maria Jorisdr van Campen and their children in an outdoor setting. One of the children is being pulled in a miniature cart by a goat. This caprice is seen in another painting of the era. The painting shows the children ranged across the painting, interacting with each other, playfully, attentively, considerately. Thus the family is seen as harmonious, achieving concert through interplay of the natural tendencies of members combining for the benefits of the group collectively. In some paintings of the time, nurses and servants were included but research shows that all of the figures here are related.
The painting shows Hals’s abilities at his best and clearest, also demonstrates the competence of the artist as a composer of complex multi-figure tableaux. The painting is full of observant touches and individuality without neglecting propriety. It is easy to see why Hals was so esteemed in his time and later. One wonders about the painter’s later poverty, whether this was down to changing fashion, financial incompetence or the effect of competition. This book does not discuss Hals career as a whole.
The principal reason the painting was dismembered was probably practicality. Originally, the canvas is estimated to have been 153.5 cm high and about 333 cm wide. Scrutiny reveals that there is also slight water damage. At some point before 1810, the canvas was cut into three or four pieces. The original group portrait was divided into at least three parts, namely The Van Campen Family in a Landscape (all c. 1623-5; Toledo Museum of Art), Children of the Van Campen Family with a Goat-Cart (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels) and Portrait of a Boy of the Van Campen Family (private collection). There may have been a further fourth section with two children but that remains unidentified or has been lost. The exhibition reunites the three parts for the first time in two centuries. It also includes six other portraits by Hals, including the large group portrait from the National Gallery, London. The catalogue illustrates examples of Dutch painted portraits, including Rubens’s wonderful double portrait of the artist and his wife, which fleshes out the genre that Hals’s paintings occupied.

[Image: composite of full painting using 3 fragments and adapted additions]

The catalogue illustrates composites of the complete painting. A fascinating sequence of reconstructions shows how other experts have previously conjectured the original painting would have been, each limited by the circumstances. It includes forensic details that help to reconstruct the exact size of the original canvas. The authors present the current state of knowledge about the van Campen painting, discussing provenance, technical analysis, the extent of historic repainting and suggestions about the content of the lost section. This book studies Hals as a portrait painter and the practice of Seventeenth Century Dutch portraiture, with good examples reproduced. This succinct but informative title would make a good introduction to Dutch portraiture for students, as well as being an approachable addition to the corpus of Hals scholarship.

Lawrence W. Nichols, Liesbeth De Belie & Pieter Biesboer, Frans Hals Portraits: A Family Reunion, 2018, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium/Hirmer, hardback, 112pp, 70 col., £20, illus., ISBN 978 3 7774 3007 2

© 2018 Alexander Adams
View my art and books at http://www.alexanderadams.art