Inside the Surrealism Exhibit at the Centre Pompidou

One afternoon in September, when Paris was shimmering in 80-degree heat, I joined a queue to see Surrealism at the Centre Pompidou. It took over an hour to reach level six and by the time I entered the red-ribboned fairground ogre’s mouth (the entrance to the galleries), I had achieved the kind of trance-like state beloved of the Surrealists. Everything seemed a little unreal, yet one of the many discoveries of my visit was how vividly the realities of the world a century ago were expressed. I don’t think any exhibition has made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck in the way this one did.  

Surrealism is a touring show that changes from city to city. In Paris, the curators have chosen to disrupt the conventional notion of the movement as Parisian. True, 2024 marks the centennial of what is now considered its starting point, when French poet André Breton wrote its manifesto but, say Marie Sarré and Didier Ottinger, Surrealism was never purely Parisian nor even European: “We now know that it spread all over the world, to the USA, of course, but also to Latin America, North Africa and Asia.”  

In a similar way to Tate Modern’s Surrealism Beyond Borders in 2022, the priorities have been reshuffled to reflect this more complex picture; many more female artists are represented, alongside an exploration of the political context and concerns of the interwar years – the active opposition to colonialism by some members, the destructive potential of the machine following the bloodshed of the First World War, the rise of fascism – and in these you begin to find echoes in our own age. If such topics suggest a certain heaviness, think again. Surrealism is a glorious, trembling, life-affirming, entrancing experience, just be sure to allow plenty of time. 

Arranged in a rather poetic way, 13 rooms spiral off from a central chamber, each themed to allow a conversation between works from different nations across a forty-year period. The visit begins with André Breton’s Manifesto, which has its own dedicated space. The manuscript in a goldfish orange cover is displayed in a circular vitrine with 20 or so pages fanning out around it. Breton’s handwriting in long straight lines drives across cream, sometimes greyish sheets of paper in varying sizes. It comes as a surprise to see such copious quantities of words, a reminder that Surrealism began as a literary movement until its first visual artist, Max Ernst, joined the writers in 1921.  

From here, we enter the suite of galleries where I was struck by a number of repeating motifs. One of these is the eye, an emblem of poetic vision that encourages us to consider the act of seeing and what we see. For instance, Ithell Colquhoun’s painting Scylla can be read in several ways. Are the two rocky pillars emerging from the sea simply an imagined setting, or are they also two female legs with pubic seaweed, or indeed two phalluses? Or all three? 

Eyes proliferate, an unsettling provocation when disembodied, blindfolded or damaged.  

Edith Rimmington’s Museum (1951) depicts a limpid balloon glass flacon containing the classical bust of a primped-haired woman whose face retains its long elegant nose and full cupid lips, but whose eyes are carved blank. Instead, the eyes of different viewers are scattered across her forehead, cheeks and chin – those who have gazed at this head in Rimmington’s make-believe museum.  

In Victor Brauner’s fictional self-portrait, he paints himself with his right eye drooling blood, a disruption to how a face should look. This work was later celebrated by the Surrealists as a message from the unconscious because seven years after he had painted it, this very same eye was damaged when Brauner broke up a fight between two fellow artists.

Georgio De Chirico’s Portrait (prémonitoire) de Guillaume Apollinaire (1914) shares the same prophetic quality: in it, the poet Apollinaire lurks as a silhouette in the background of a slanting tipped-up world, with a tottering plank of jelly moulds and, in the foreground, a classical sculpture sporting a blind man’s specs. The white circle planted on Apollinaire’s forehead pinpoints the spot where the poet suffered a shrapnel wound, dying two years later at the age of 38. In both works, the artist who sees, becomes a seer, one who can foretell the future. 

Marcel Jean’s Le Spectre du Gardénia (1936/1971) comprises the bust of a woman whose features are blunted by the soft dark suede covering it. She has zips for eyes and a strip of camera film coiled round her neck, which is set on a pinkish velvet stand. The object’s base was found at a Paris flea market – a popular hunting ground for the Surrealists – and its strange title was suggested by an old movie reel on sale there. This surprising assemblage of parts makes Le Spectre du Gardénia a fully-fledged Surrealist object: it brings randomly sourced pieces together and seems to invite us to stroke the soft head and unzip the eyes to make her blink; we want to uncoil the film to find out what’s on it, but touching is an impossibility; the bust is chambered in a glass cylinder. 

Arresting footage runs on a loop amid these exotically strange artworks. Le Chien Andalou (1929) was intended by its makers, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, to “stab Paris in its spiritual elegant heart.” In the night sky, clouds like skeletal prehistoric fish cut across the moon, famously followed by the slicing of a woman’s eyeball by a man with a razor.  

The mirror as portal to another world but also as unreliable witness to distorted truths is another motif that recurs. Most memorable are a series of photographs taken by the Hungarian André Kertész. In 1933, coinciding with Hitler’s rise to power, Kertész photographed nudes in front of deforming mirrors, the sort you find in funfairs where you are stretched thin or squashed fat (it is never pretty). But in these pictures, the grotesque deformations of the human body presage the ugliness of the times to come and the atrocities inflicted on a people.  

One such victim was Sonia Mossé. Her ink drawing Trois Femmes (1937) is poignant because so little remains by her. We know she contributed a mannequin dressed in widow’s veil, its mouth stopped by a scarab beetle for the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in 1938 in Paris, but she died soon after in the Treblinka concentration camp. 

Assemblages using a combination of random everyday objects to create erotically charged juxtapositions were inspired by the text of a long-forgotten poet, Isidore Ducasse, aka the Count of Lautréamont. When his work was rediscovered and published in the journal Vers et Prose, in 1914, André Breton embraced its definition of beauty as “the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”. Drawings of this combination of apparatus – both capable of piercing – hang next to an open umbrella suspended in the corner of the gallery and casting the perfect shadow of a heart. I’ve always regarded umbrellas as slightly absurd portable shelters from the rain, but Wolfgang Paalen’s Nuage articulé (1937/2023) is covered in natural sponges and has acquired an additional layer of nonsense: it retains its shape, but it is fuzzy and slightly alive with its pulpy growth. In Surrealist vocabulary, a closed umbrella was phallic; Paalen’s umbrella, carpeted with a product associated with women’s bathing, is by contrast feminized.  

Perhaps the most famous of all surrealist objects were those created by the movement’s flamboyant showman, Salvador Dalí. For his British patron, Edward James, Dalí fashioned four lobster-telephones in a pleasingly graphic color combination of black and orange. The lobster-telephone at the Centre Pompidou is one of six produced in white and cream that monumentalizes its subject: the inert lobster becomes a statue on a telephone plinth.  

Dorothea Tanning’s life-size horror-movie installation Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot (1970) takes assemblages to a new level: in a dowdy hotel room soft-sculptures of fleshy pink torsos burst through the wall while the stove, armchair and table are shitting amorphous shapes that look part-serpent, part-beached whale, part-something else entirely. Tanning, who led a long and fantastically interesting life, was born in rural Illinois, which she described as a place where “nothing happened but the wallpaper”, and in this banal hotel room you feel her urge to stub out the boredom and let fantasy break through the woodwork. 

The gallery rooms with the titles, “Chimera”, “Political Monsters”, “Melusine” and “Forests” conjure up mythologies and psychoanalysis techniques to liberate the mind and delve into the unconscious. A series of bewitching femmes-arbres canvases is included here, the most specific of which is Paul Delvaux’s L’Aurore (1937). Refuting any reference to the classical myth of Apollo and Daphne, where the sun god pursues the nymph who transforms to a laurel tree to escape his lust, Delvaux paints a group of naked women morphing into tree trunks while in the distance a tiny female figure flees. Toyen’s La Voix de la Fôret (1934) looms with the disturbing presence of a faceless owl, while Max Ernst’s frottages of densely packed trees with bony embryonic birds complete the unease. 

The penultimate gallery goes deeper into the darkness. “The Tears of Eros” focuses on work that tends towards pornography and perversion. Hans Bellmer’s La Poupée (1935-6) takes center stage. Bellmer created dolls, which he used in his photographs. They are often mutated as a revolt against the Nazi cult of physical perfection. Here, a disturbingly pubescent life-sized jointed doll, naked and overtly sexual, with two pairs of legs, one set wearing Mary Jane shoes, occupies a central dais, while Paul Moliner’s photomontages of black fishnets on limbs (usually his own) and René Magritte’s troubling Les Jours Gigantesques (1920) are among the other disconcerting highlights.

Leaving the darkness behind, we enter the exhibition’s final room, “Cosmos”, and exit with André Masson’s quote ringing in our ears: “Nothing is inanimate in the world; there is correspondence between the virtues of minerals, plants, the stars and animal bodies.” It feels both awe-inspiring and prophetic, a truly surrealist note on which to end: on our war-torn climate-crazed planet, we need to be mindful: the minerals and the plants, the stars and the animals are watching.

DETAILS

Surrealism at the Centre Pompidou
Place Georges-Pompidou, 4th arrondissement
Showing until January 13, 2025
Open 11am – 9pm, every day except Tuesdays, when the museum is closed. Late closure on Thursday evenings at 11 pm.
Full-price ticket is 17 euros.
Advance booking is highly recommended.