At first it was a shock. “It’s beautiful… like the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella!” Taken from canto VI de The Chants of Maldoror by Isidore Lucine Ducasse, comte de Lautréamont, this description of a boy “as handsome as the chance encounter between a sewing machine and a rain cover on an operating table” certainly had an enlightening effect on André Breton’s mind.
From here on, unexpected associations, in words as in images, will always have a central role for the Surrealists, and if it is true that they placed themselves “within a long genealogy of fantastic thought”, finding antecedents and cues in medieval art , in the paintings by Jheronimus Bosch and Giuseppe Arcimboldo, in the descriptions of the Marquis De Sade or in the fascinations for Victor Hugo, Edgar Allan Poe and Sigmund Freud, it is in Ducasse’s text that they found the lunge to launch their “feral blow” at the dominant “univocal reality rationally and morally understood”.
First Manifesto of Surrealism, December 1, 1924
It was therefore December 1, 1924 when the poet André Breton published his collection of prose in Paris “Poisson Soluble”, the introduction of which would become the First Manifesto of Surrealism, officially inaugurating the more Freudian dreamlike twentieth-century avant-garde. From then on, the human psyche would be plumbed beyond its limits and the boundaries imposed by reason, along the lines of that fuller dimension of existence which they defined surrealta. For Breton, Surrealism is in fact the means of expression of an unconscious inner self: “a psychic automatism in its pure state, with which we propose to express verbally, in writing or in any other way the real functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, free from any aesthetic or moral concern”. Freudianly liberated, devoutly progressive, convinced (…and contradictory) anti-colonialist, under the wing of Breton, Dalí, Max Ernst, Magritte, Man Ray and others, with their alternative way of being and conceiving the world, they launched the their dream challenge to the twentieth century, marked by watchwords such as “dream, irrationality, psyche, unconscious, wonderful, drives, love, sex”.
MUDEC, Museum of Cultures, Milan
The exhibition at MUDEC in Milan is dedicated to them, “Dalí, Magritte, Man Ray and Surrealism. Masterpieces from the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum”. Divided into six sections, the exhibition presents 180 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, documents, artifacts, all from the collection of the Boijmans Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam, closed until 2029 due to renovation works, in dialogue with some works from the Permanent Collection of the Museum of Cultures. The Milanese exhibition is curated by Els Hoek with the collaboration of Alessandro Nigro, who developed the complex relationship between Surrealism and native cultures.
Some of the major master pieces of the museum are in Milan, among which – first of all – The enigma of Isidore Ducasse by Man Ray and that emblematic play on words to point out how much language affects the perception of the world that is The Living Mirror by René Magritte , beyond Youth illustrated and to Venus restored also by the Belgian painter. And again by Salvador Dalí, le Impressions of Africa, Venus de Milo with drawers, and the beautiful Couple with heads full of clouds. “The fact that I myself do not understand the meaning of my paintings, when I paint them, does not mean that the paintings have no meaning: on the contrary, their meaning is so deep, complex, coherent, involuntary that it escapes the simple analysis of logical thinking” will explain the Marquis of Pùbol, the brilliant and cumbersome associate of the movement, even before being transformed into the outcast”avida dollars” of Bretonnian memory, of which the red is also present in the exhibition Mae West Lips Sofa. And again, I’m at Mudec Box in suitcase by Marcel Duchamp, and the Seated figure di Eileen Agar.