“Surreal Things”
Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
March 29, 2007-July 22, 2007
“Surreal Things” is a capitalist success story. Surrealism began as a radical ideology with inputs from Marx and Freud. Its originators, men like André Breton and Louis Aragon (Andrieux), saw distortions of the real as a way to transform and undermine a capitalist society they hated. In the period after World War I, the radical surrealists issued proclamations and manifestos about art full of revolutionary sound and fury.
But, then, in 1926 two of their leading artists, Max Ernst and Joan Miró, accepted commissions from Sergei Diaghilev to design sets and costumes for a Ballets Russes production of Romeo and Juliet in Paris; the exhibition at the V&Abegins with a display of this work. Aragon and Breton, goaded by sneers from Picasso, got up a gang to disrupt the premiere. They shouted, blew hideous whistles, and handed out leaflets heading “Protestation.” The leaflet began (in French), “It is unacceptable that ideas should be at the command of money.” Ernst and Miró, however, went on designing their much admired sets, as did the Surrealists’ predecessor Giorgio de Chirico. There is nothing crass about their work. In the modern world, “selling out” is far more a characteristic of societies commanded from the center than of those where there are a great variety of purchasers, some with taste, some not. If anyone ever sold out, it was those who provided socialist realist art for Stalin or