As for one of those astral conjunctions that were so dear to the surrealists, lovers of magical thought and everything that goes beyond the rational dimension, in this early 2022, almost a century after its foundation, surrealism finds itself at the center of the international scene : while Cecilia Alemani gave her Biennale the same unsettling title (The milk of dreams) of a storybook by Leonora Carrington – the greatest of the surrealist artists – in London the Tate Modern has an encyclopedic exhibition on surrealism underway, created with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and since yesterday, after the postponements for the pandemic, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents a magnificent insight into the pervasive role that magic, in all its forms, played for that movement.
Art of This Century
The result of almost ten years of research conducted by the curator, Gražina Subelytė, the Venetian exhibition opens, moreover, in the house of Peggy, who was patron of the surrealists, companion in adventure (as well as wife, in the 40s, of Max Ernst) and who, at the outbreak of the Second World War, helped more than one (André Breton in the lead) to escape to safety in the United States. Not to mention that from 1942, in New York, with her Art of This Century gallery-museum, she would have pollinated the new American art with the works of the European avant-garde, which she presented in temporary exhibitions and, even more, in the rooms destined for the collection. private, where he exhibited his splendid abstract and surrealist works.
The mourning of the First World War had generated surrealism, founded in 1924 by Breton with the (first) Manifesto of Surrealism; those of the second conflict, although experienced by the United States, had made it grow enormously, in times ominously similar to ours. They, therefore, took refuge in the irrational, eagerly nourishing themselves on Freud’s research on the unconscious but drawing no less widely on occultism, esotericism, alchemy (and here Jung also comes into play), on necromancy. After all, they asked themselves, why believe in the rational thought of the Enlightenment and Positivism, which had generated two world wars?
The only antidote to the “madness” of reason, the only way to re-found the world with a revolution that was indeed social and political but even more “of the minds”, was to be sought, for them, on the one hand in the unfathomable regions of Freudian unconscious, on the other hand in the “omnipotence” of a magical thought which, in an ancestral connection between man and the universe, knew how to act on reality by transforming it according to their wishes.
The portrait of Max Ernst as a hermit-shaman
Here then the artists became alchemists, magicians, visionaries; the artists, goddesses, witches, enchantresses. The (unedited) juxtaposition between the portrait of Max Ernst as a hermit-shaman, painted in 1939 by Leonora Carrington (then his partner) and that of Leonora herself as an “alchemical bride”, painted in 1940 by Ernst, who imposed on her a head of a nocturnal bird of prey and a mantle of scarlet feathers (red, or “rubedo”, is the highest stage of the alchemical process), similar to that in which she had wrapped him a little earlier.