Surrealism Beyond Borders

This is the finial of a large vertical slit gong carved from the trunk of a breadfruit tree. Slit gongs are hollowed cylinders of wood with a narrow longitudinal opening, or slit, whose edges are struck to produce a deep, sonorous tone. Planted upright in the ground, these gongs tower over their percussionists who, seated or standing, animate and bring them to life by striking the lip of the gong with mallets. Played at all major social and religious events, such as grade initiations, funerals and dances, the slit-gongs are more than simply musical instruments, they are considered to be portraits of ancestors so that when played, it is the voices of awakened ancestors which resonates from their interior chamber. Large oval eyes, often painted so as to animate, sit above a prominent, pierced nose through which sprays of leaves are inserted as a means of enlivening further. The forehead is raised and surrounded by rows of concentric toothlike projections, representing the hair (hingiye), and small arms and spiral motifs depicting sacred pigs’ tusks rest on either side of the top of the vertical slit or mouth (tute).


Sources
Eric Kjellgren, Oceania: Art of the Pacific Islands in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007.

Born in 1900 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Lionel Wendt hailed from the Burgher community, a mixed race, prominent elite minority. Trained as a lawyer and concert pianist in England, Wendt only took up the medium of photography formally in the 1930s. A considered and well-researched photographer, Wendt eagerly kept abreast of technical developments in the field, and would gradually apply them to his work, at times combining a number of different techniques in a single photograph. Most popular amongst the techniques he experimented with are photograms, photomontage, double printing and solarization, the latter of which he encountered in reproductions of photographs by the American surrealist Man Ray. The subject of Wendt’s photographic output runs the gamut from a range of documentary images, to studio portraits, to more experimental photos.

Bachelor Cruising South is among Wendt's more enigmatic images. The image depicts a hand, presumably male, reaching towards an electric light source to cover or obfuscate partially its intensity. Considering the title of the photograph, there might be an evocation of the nocturnal activity of ‘cruising,’ loosely regarded as the search for casual, anonymous sex. Sexually provocative or suggestive imagery is not uncommon in Wendt’s oeuvre, mostly taking the form of carefully composed nude studio portraits of male and female bodies. However, such suggestive instances, with a coded allusion to homosexuality as is the case with Bachelor Cruising South are rarer.

Télémaque, whose family was involved in the Black consciousness movement in Haiti, encountered Surrealism when he left Haiti at the age of twenty to study at the Art Students League in New York. Rejecting the endemic racism of the U.S., he went to Paris in 1961, where he befriended André Breton and a younger generation of Surrealists. While the artist later developed a style of representational painting associated with Pop and the leftist politics of the Narrative Figuration group, Télémaque found in Surrealism a means to negotiate his creative identity in relation to his Caribbean roots.


Éclaireur was made at that significant point in his career. Against a brilliant blue background that suggests sea and sky, organic forms undergo metamorphosis; some seem to stretch and twist with gaping black holes like wounds or mouths filled with teeth. The painting’s shifting imagery may suggest the artist’s articulation of his new artistic path: its French title Éclaireur can mean guide or scout, as in something that helps inform in advance.

The Popol-Vuh is a sacred Maya text written in the Quiché (K'iche) language that is an account of creation. It was first recorded in the sixteenth century. Each print in the portfolio is accompanied by a thin sheet of paper that contains a translated text from the Popol-Vuh in Spanish and English. Mérida referred to the biomorphic forms seen in these prints as 'free poetic versions of mythological wonders' that he combined with bright colours and abstract elements to reflect the poetic quality of the text. The group was printed and published in Mexico in 1943, and this set is 156 from an edition of 1000.

Born in Cuba as a descendant of formerly enslaved people from Senegal and the Congo, Cárdenas moved from Havana to France in 1955 and, at the invitation of André Breton, joined the Surrealist group in Paris. His encounter with West African culture through Pan-Africanist circles there transformed his work and provided inspiration for his dynamic, totemic sculptures that fall between abstraction and figuration. Breton saw magic in the sculptor’s hands that he described as clever "as a dragonfly."[1] For Cárdenas, Surrealism offered artistic freedom and personal rediscovery. "In Paris," he said, "I discovered what a man is…what African culture is...what a Black man is."[2] Directly carved and shaped from wood, Jucambe draws on the visual traditions of international modernism, African art, and Cuban Santería.

[1] André Breton, Cárdenas: Sculpture, dessins. Exh. cat. Paris: Galerie la Cour d’Ingres, 1959, unpaginated.

[2] Quoted in José Pierre, La Sculpture de Cárdenas, Brussels, 1971, p. 11.

Prelude to a Civilization represents a giant white animal in profile against a blue-and-green ground, within whose body are stylized renderings of some forty animals, figures, masks, and abstract symbols. Brauner may have based this composition on the pictographic robes of the Plains Indians. Such a robe—fashioned of animal hide—records its warrior-owner's exploits in decorative inscriptions covering the surface. Although the creatures Brauner depicts resemble Mexican codex illustrations, they also seem to be purely imaginative, and evoke the art of both Paul Klee and Max Ernst. Brauner executed this work in encaustic, a technique in which paint is mixed with molten wax. Into the resulting hardened surface, the artist incised the figures with pen and ink. He had first employed this medium after he was forced to take refuge from World War II in the Pyrenees and was unable to obtain his usual working materials. Here, the overall effect suggests an ancient cave painting.

The Surrealist artist Dora Maar is better known as Picasso's dark-haired model and companion in the late 1930s than for her astonishing works. Her incarnation of the bestial nature of man is titled after the infamous and absurd dictatorial antihero of Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi (1896). Maar's imaginative evocation of the pear-shaped, breast-plated Ubu in the monstrous reality of a baby armadillo is one of the most compelling and repellent of Surrealist photographs.

Born in Budapest, Horna was a deeply cosmopolitan photographer whose work straddles politically engaged photojournalism and Surrealist poetics. In the early 1930s, she left Budapest for Berlin and Paris, honing her skills alongside other avant-garde artists of her generation. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she relocated to Spain, where she documented the war's effect on the lives of ordinary citizens, publishing her photographs in anarchist magazines. In 1938 she fled Spain for Mexico, joining a circle of left-wing artists and intellectuals who cultivated their own idiosyncratic versions of European Surrealism. This phantasmagorical photograph of a woman's face obscured by a large glass water bottle belongs to a series of images titled "Artificial Paradises" that Horna produced for the short-lived avant-garde magazine, S.nob, published in Mexico City from June to October 1962.