A tribute to and review of surrealism

One hundred years have passed since the Surrealist Manifesto, in which the French writer André Breton included his postulates and became the unifying force of the group of artists who formed it in Paris. 

The iron control he imposed from the French capital, which was also that of the artistic avant-garde, led to both the distancing of some and the reinterpretation of the movement. 

Cases such as Salvador Dalí or the Belgian surrealists are there to prove it, and they can be joined by the great artists overshadowed by Parisian ‘centralism’, including the galaxy of women, initially ‘beautiful but nameless’, whose talent is now gradually and belatedly recognised. 

All this is on display in the magnificent exhibition inaugurated at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of its existence. A major exhibition, which has only been possible thanks to the generous loan of works by seventy-five important institutions and private collections, from the Pompidou and Picasso museums in Paris, to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Latin American Museum in Buenos Aires, as well as the Peggy Guggenheim in Venice, the Tate in London and the MOMA in New York. And, above all, under the baton of the curator, the academic and professor Estrella de Diego. This undisputed authority on surrealism talks about the ‘canonical, that linked to one of the most extraordinary French writers, André Breton’, but also about ‘other surrealisms’, those born on the periphery of that focus that was Paris. And she points to Spain and Latin America as particular cases, which also have their own characteristics, as do the Belgian artists, the first to rebel against Breton's primacy. 

Throughout the exhibition, the work of the great artists who have always been linked to the movement (René Magritte, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux and Yves Tanguy) is on display, but also the work of other lesser-known creators, such as Nicolás de Lekuona, José Alemany, Maud Bonneaud, Ángel Planells, Joan Massanet, Delhy Tejero and Amparo Segarra. 

A similar case to that of Spain is that of much of Latin America, where after Mexico, countries such as Argentina or Brazil, in many cases centres for artists escaping the Spanish Civil War or Nazism, proposed interesting ‘surrealising’ readings. There are significant works by Raquel Forner, María Martins, Horacio Coppola, Antonio Berni, Lino Enea Spilimbergo and Grete Stern. 

Special mention should be made of the women furthest from Paris, the epicentre of surrealism, which the exhibition aims to vindicate: Gala, who took the surname of her partner, Salvador Dalí, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Jane Graverol, Toyen, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Ithell Colquhoun, and above all Maruja Mallo, ‘the name that would stand out as the most outstanding of the great long-forgotten women’, according to the categorical judgement of curator De Diego. 

The exhibition, which opens with Marcel Jean's ‘Surrealist Wardrobe’, is divided into three main thematic blocks. The first presents the thesis of the exhibition through the study of various readings of Surrealism, determined by the proximity or distance of André Breton's postulates. 

From here, a reflection is proposed on the major themes and strategies that preoccupied the group: dreams, desire, psychic automatism, relationships with nature, the new vision of the city, the cosmos and alchemy. These are some of the ingredients of this movement, literary in origin, which spread internationally to almost all fields of the visual arts: photography, film, painting, sculpture... 

An exhibition of this level deserved a catalogue to match, a work to be treasured and savoured, in which Estrella de Diego herself reflects on the key ideas of the project and on the reception of surrealism in Spain, together with other specialists such as Diana Weschler, from the University of Buenos Aires, and Isidro Hernández, chief curator of the TEA in Tenerife. A carefully produced publication, with contributions from the film director Isabel Coixet, and including faithful reproductions of all the works on display. 

It is the culmination of this homage to surrealism, while reviewing, with the clarity that the passage of time brings, the disparate reception and reinterpretation of Breton's postulates in different places and among the different artists who joined the movement. Diverse readings that gave rise, therefore, to ‘other surrealisms’. 

The exhibition, which can be visited until 11 May, will then travel to the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.