Miro and the Surrealists

Abstract

If we may pretend to sever form and content in order to indicate the relative importance of each in specific cases, then the paintings of surrealists will be seen to fall, roughly, into two classes. The pictures of the first type may be called “poems to be hung upon the wall”; this class includes the works of Salvador Dali, of Pierre Roy, and, perhaps, of Yves Tanguy. It is characterized by a “literary” manner; the poetry of the picture arises from what is represented. Dali describes his painting as “snap-shot photographs in color of subconscious images, surrealist, extravagant, paranoiac hypnological, extra-pictorial, phenomenal, super abundant, super sensitive, etc. … . of concrete irrationality.” The technique employed is one of pure literalism, of exact transcription of the personal hallucination. Superficially it resembles that of the Neue Sachlichkeit group, and it may be a heritage from the heroic days of Dadaism, when it was used successfully by Otto Dix and his German followers. Its sources, Mr. Alfred H. Barr explains, are two: “the early nineteenth century, with its similar mixture of polished realism, pseudo-classicism, and primitivism, and the fifteenth century, both in Italy and the North.” The painting of Dali follows closely after the minute descriptive style of Meissonier, Gérôme, and Gérard Dou. What both groups have in common is the desire for complete objectivity: in the Neue Sachlichkeit for precise description of the external world, in Surrealism for the precise description of the internal world. The fact that the images are made concrete through painting is of only secondary importance: space, line, and color function primarily to augment and enhance the emotive effect of the things described, and to view them as elements combined merely for the creation of a plastic whole is to return to the criticism of 1910. This use of color and line is analogous to the way in which a poet makes rhythm and rhyme and metre subservient to what he wishes to express.