Surrealism

It’s a great shame that Elsa Schiaparelli is less widely known than her rival Chanel. Perhaps that’s down to how difficult her name is to pronounce. Is it ‘shap’, ‘skap’ or ‘skyap’? Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, answers with a quip from Schiaparelli herself: ‘No one knows how to say it, but everyone knows what it means.’ The V&A’s new exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art traces the web of influences around one of the great couture houses of the 20th century. Like Coco Chanel (I hate to compare them), Elsa Schiaparelli created clothes for the modern, independent woman – it is now conventional to say so but they ‘pushed boundaries’.

Pity the security guard at the Guggenheim who must patrol the gallery in which Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped is installed. Mounted in commemoration of the artist’s centennial – Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in October 1925 – Life Can’t Be Stopped includes “Revolver II” (1967), a set of plexiglass discs with images overlaid. A cord leads from the back of this contraption to a pedestal on which there is a control panel – a set of buttons placed in proximity to the viewer. These switches set the plexiglass discs in motion, and they beg to be pushed. On my trip to the museum, visitor after visitor was shushed away from “Revolver II” with the age-old plaint: “Please don’t touch the art.

The Whitney’s Sixties Surreal is not about Surrealism. I spent about a week trying to figure out what it might actually be about, before I gave up. The show claims to seek to answer a simple question: what if Surrealism, rather than Cubism, had been the dominant thread in modern American art? This is funny to me, as Dalí’s melting clocks are far better known in America than any Cubist painting. Regardless, the museum never provides an answer. Instead, the Whitney jumps right to its agenda: reviving what it deems an overlooked thread of countercultural art. Ah, yes, the woefully neglected subject of… counterculture in the 1960s.

‘When you’re not offensive in life, you obtain absolutely nothing,’ declares a twinkly-eyed Pierre Boulez in one of the archive films that the Barbican were screening to celebrate the composer’s centenary. What a joy to be reminded of the young Boulez – the unashamed elitist, the unbeatable snob. Not even allies such as Schoenberg (too trad) and Messiaen (‘vulgar’) were safe from his tongue. To Boulez, pop music wasn’t good or bad; it didn’t exist. Ditto his own life. ‘I will be the first composer without a biography’, he proclaimed. Forget that Boulez was entangled in a love triangle with Camus’s mistress and for most of his time on earth screwing his valet, Hans… The music was everything.

Ithell Colquhoun was always a bit of a mystery surrealist. Her greatest hit is the unsettling, dream-like ‘Scylla’ (1938), a painting of two towering cliffs, which could equally be thighs in the bath. The prow of Odysseus’s Argo peeps through them. The pubic hair is seaweed, and there are shells, but, as far as discernible, no crabs. The point of view of the painting is that of the titular monster Scylla, lying in wait. It’s witty and disturbing; mythic and domestic. A British surrealist high point, frequently anthologised. This aside, her name was relegated to lists.

When Max Ernst was asked by an American artist to define surrealism at a New York gathering of exiles in the early 1940s, he pointed across the room at André Breton and said: ‘That is surrealism.’ Even today it can seem as if no other answer is available, so tenacious was his grip. A former student of neurology and psychiatry, with no qualifications other than an instinct for the coming thing (‘an astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms’, as he later described his fellow conspirator Louis Aragon), Breton encountered the early writings of Freud as a medical orderly on a trauma ward, during the first world war, and immediately recognised the significance of his work.

In October 1964, a young man was driving to a dance in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, when his radio began to pick up a strange frequency. At first he thought it was just tuning in to a local channel, but then voices came through discussing some kind of nuclear war – and issuing bomb reports. Recalling the incident decades later, the driver described the simultaneous appearance of a star overhead followed by the sudden realisation that he could see through the floor of his car. ‘I hadn’t done any dope, I wasn’t doing any beer,’ he adds so casually that you feel inclined to believe him. And yet his body felt like jelly.

‘It had nothing to endow it with the title of studio at all,’ was Edward James’s first impression of Leonora Carrington’s Mexico City workspace in 1946. ‘The place was combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, kennel and junk store. The disorder was apocalyptic: the appurtenances of the poorest. My hopes and expectations began to swell.’ Carrington blended Egpytian, Mayan, Mesopotamian and Celtic legends learned at her nanny’s knee Over six decades in the creative chaos of this house on Calle Chihuahua, Carrington would paint some of her best-known works and write her quirky serio-comic novella The Hearing Trumpet, which is narrated by a 92-year-old woman.

When the 15-year-old Maggi Hambling arrived at Benton End in Hadleigh, Suffolk – home of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing – with two paintings to show the school’s founders, Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, she was ushered into the dining room where Morris was having dinner. He made some criticisms but was very encouraging, then Lett-Haines came in and made the opposite criticisms but was encouraging too. As teachers, both believed in bringing out a student’s native talent – but as artists and characters, says Hambling: ‘They were polar opposites.

On 24 April 1937 Marguerite Guggenheim – known as Peggy – of Yew Tree Cottage, Hurst was booked by a certain PC Dore for driving an unlicensed vehicle through nearby Petersfield. What was the founder of the famous Venice museum doing in a market town in Hampshire? It’s a long story, vividly told in an exhibition marking the 25th anniversary of the opening of Petersfield Museum on the site of the former police station and courthouse where she paid her £1 fine. ‘Peggy,’ said a friend, ‘is absolutely revolting about sex. Delicacy is unknown to her’ In the 1930s the Jewish-American heiress, who had lost her father Benjamin on the Titanic, was rattling around Europe with a fast crowd of writers and artists.

"It’s the belief that nothing is ordinary, that everything in life is extraordinary. And being old is no more, no less, extraordinary than being young.” When the artist and writer Leonora Carrington was asked in 2006 what “Surrealism” meant to her, this was her reply. It was a remarkably frank statement from an artist who had, at other points in her career, declared that she “was never a Surrealist,” even memorably asserting that the Surrealist link between women (the femme-enfant) and the muse was “bullshit.” Perhaps it owes its frankness to the interviewer: sitting across the kitchen in Carrington’s house in Mexico City was her cousin, the journalist and author Joanna Moorhead.