Volume 49, Number 9 · May 23, 2002
Shock Absorbed
By James Fenton
Surrealist Love Poems
edited by Mary Ann Caws
University of Chicago Press, 120 pp., $22.50
Surrealism: Desire Unbound
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Jennifer Mundy
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 6–May 12, 2002. Princeton University Press, 349 pp., $65.00; $55.00 (paper)
La Révolution Surréaliste
Catalog of the exhibition by Werner Spies
an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, March 6–June 24, 2002. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 440 pp., $56.00
What stands between us and the wholehearted enjoyment of Surrealism today? For it was surely once more enjoyable than it is now—more shocking, more absorbing, less shock-absorbed. That an art might fall victim to its own success is a familiar possibility, yet we do not turn away from all painting that has been cursed with immense popularity. Rembrandt remains unprofaned. Botticelli, seen whole, turns spikey and unfamiliar. Impressionism, as a subject of inquiry, proves abundantly fruitful: it 'returns our calls' and it accedes to our various requests. We ask it to be realism. It becomes realism: it documents a society. We ask it, per contra, to herald that moment when the artist self-consciously applies his paint to the canvas in such a way as to emphasize the two-dimensional picture plane. Very well, it replies, I will herald that moment. We ask it to prophesy abstraction, and sure enough Monet's Haystacks, seen the wrong way up, set Kandinsky's thoughts racing. All in all, taken as a movement, it is most obliging.
Review, 3018 words
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