A Strong Element of Shock

2024, the centenary of the publication of André Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism, presents the perfect opportunity to reflect on the impact of Surrealism, originally a French avant-garde movement, on Australian art and culture.

Breton was fascinated with Freudian methods of exploring the unconscious, such as dream imagery and the free association of thoughts, having first been introduced to them during the First World War when he served in the French army as a medical intern in wards for soldiers suffering trauma (then called shell-shock). Postwar, he abandoned medicine for literature; a poet, he moved in avant-garde circles with fellow poet Louis Aragon. Ideas of reaching the truths buried in the unconscious through automatic writing fuelled their practice.

The word surréaliste was first used as early as 1917 by the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire to suggest a non-realist art form infused ‘with a strong element of shock and surprise’ and a truth beyond realism, ‘a kind of sur-realism’.¹

By 1924, in Manifesto Breton advocated for the spontaneous creation of art forms without accessing conscious thought as:

His initial focus was literary, but artists such as Max Ernst were already employing surrealist methods such as frottage to generate imagery that bypassed conscious creation.³ A key idea underpinning Surrealism is ‘the chance juxtaposition of two different realities’ in the unity of opposites so that the dream and reality come together to create new knowledge.⁴ Breton called it a ‘surreality’.

Against that background and with Surrealism a modern global movement with inflections in countries including America, Britain and Japan, we turn to its impact on Australian art with a focus on the National Gallery’s collection. The first European surrealist paintings shown in Australia in the 1939 Herald exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art included Salvador Dalí’s much-discussed La mêmoire de la femme-enfant (Memory of the woman-child) 1932.⁵ This was just one of three surrealist paintings in a large exhibition of 215 works, shown in most major galleries across the nation.⁶ Before that though, there was much interest in Surrealism by artists and writers in cities across the nation who were reading about it in publications such as Herbert Read’s widely circulated books of 1936, Art Now and Surrealism, which discussed the key ideas of automatism and the unconscious. Magazines featuring Surrealism, such as Breton’s own publication Minotaure and Gino Nibbi’s Stream, were available in Naarm/Narrm/Melbourne at the Leonardo Art Shop, a central meeting place for artists and intellectuals at the ‘Paris End’ of Collins Street; and in Gadigal Nura/Sydney at Carl Plate’s Notanda Gallery on Rowe Street from 1940. The Home magazine regularly featured surrealist content in the late 1930s, including photo coverage of work displayed at London’s 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, and Max Dupain’s photographs of fancy dress at a ‘Surrealist Party’ in 1937.⁷ From 1940, surrealist poetry by Max Harris and James Gleeson was published in the Angry Penguins magazine, and Art in Australia featured surrealist work too. This included an advertisement for Guinness beer titled ‘Pure Shellfishness’ showing a glass of Guinness in the claws of a lobster — clearly referencing the work of Salvador Dalí.⁸

James Gleeson was at the forefront of the surrealist trend. His initial ‘take’ on bypassing a rational logical approach to image creation manifested itself in poem drawings which fused image and text. Some were published in Angry Penguins, others in Comment, but his most outstanding work from this early period is My dream 1939, in which the text of a dream manifests itself over the woman’s face. The image, which has been described as ‘an inscription of the subconscious narrative across her features’, contains a poem in which the everyday moves to fear. It reads in part:

This image has been described as ‘an instance of psychic automatism’. But Gleeson, who worked continuously as a Surrealist since his poem drawings, observed that it is a mistake ‘to put all emphasis on the irrational and subconscious and to completely discard the rational … because the whole consists in both parts — the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the subconscious’.¹⁰

One method, however, of bypassing the conscious creation of artwork lay in turning to chance and collage in particular. Sidney Nolan’s collages of juxtaposed images taken from reproductions of steel engravings disrupt vision. Their grid-like formation fractures the image, space and perception itself as in his Collage 1939, which can be viewed from top, bottom or either side.¹¹ Ambiguity reigns. In later years, Surrealism continued to be integral to Nolan’s work — such as his dream-like Orphée 1948.

Max Dupain had a strong interest in Surrealism in the 1930s and was well informed about international trends, but it is his surreal photographs of the female form that have been the subject of much debate.¹² The bride 1936, the subject itself a surrealist trope, is one in which he portrays a naked woman on her wedding day, with eyes downcast, partially clad in an open-weave hooded mesh cloak opening provocatively at her pubic zone and holding an ever-so-phallic plant, known colloquially as a red-hot poker. It has been described as astonishing for its ‘candour, beauty and sense of ceremony’ and ‘simultaneously eroticised and chaste’.¹³ In a similar vein, Dart 1935 shows a naked athletic female form — indicative of Dupain’s wider interest in vitalism and body culture — reaching upwards to clasp a metal pole.¹⁴ Art historian Elena Taylor observes that ‘the implicit erotic content in these and other of his photographs … points to how Dupain was one of the few Australian artists who responded (albeit in a restrained manner) to Surrealism’s espousal of the liberation of sexual desire’.¹⁵

Olive Cotton, a studio assistant in Dupain’s studio, and similarly familiar with international modern trends in photography, produced two surrealist photographs, The shell 1935, in which light emits from within, and Surf’s edge c 1935, in which the sea’s foam meets the shore. In each, she employs a surrealist approach of making the familiar look strange, uncanny even. Their surreality lies in how she plays with time, and instead of producing a photographic image at a fixed point, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia, Shaune Lakin suggests that she is presenting ‘a moment that has somehow been stretched. Objects and images are suspended in an unfamiliar temporality that has no beginning or no end.’¹⁶

During the years of the Second World War, a differing strain of Australian Surrealism emerged — that of psychologically unsettling imagery which became a form of protest, such as James Cant’s eerily empty The deserted city 1939. Cant, who had been in London since 1934 was a member of the British Surrealist Group; his surrealist assemblages were exhibited at the London Gallery in 1936 in Surrealist Objects and Poems, and he exhibited with Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst and Paul Klee in 1937. His de Chirico-esque The deserted city, framed by ominous dark buildings leading to a shadow-filled square in a space devoid of people, was painted before he returned to Australia later that same year.

A similar sense of despair pervades Albert Tucker’s The futile city 1940. At the time, Tucker was reading TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and he identified with ‘the horror, despair, outrage and futility’ in the poetry when he was ‘thinking a lot about Surrealism’.¹⁷ He depicts an eerie and ruined landscape dominated by a large key leading to nowhere and littered with human remains and clouds dripping blood. Tucker described how he experienced ‘a relaxation of conscious thought and an unwitting sensory response in the immediate environment’ and how ‘under these conditions a brief image flashed involuntarily into my mind — an image of glaring white space, with a large key throwing a thin blue shadow across the bottom and, simultaneously, the word “futile”.’

Gleeson’s wartime painting Weeping head 1939, is an image of extreme distress at global events. It has an autobiographical feel of scissors attacking the artist’s mouth and insects clawing away at an eye. In a similar vein, Adelaide-based Ivor Francis turns up the volume on war-induced anxiety and the physical damage to humanity in Schizophrenia 1943, by overlaying sharp, pointed spears over body parts. Meanwhile, Jacqueline Hick confines her sense of despair to the ruined and burnt land around her in Landscape 1943, lit by brooding blood-red clouds. Interestingly, Breton, by now a refugee in New York, reminded readers of Art in Australia in late 1941 that despite enduring a ‘world convulsion, artists must still dream of the marvellous.’¹⁸

Postwar, Joy Hester, who more usually worked in an expressionist mode, completed her Fun Fair in 1946. What she portrays however, is anything but. The fair is set in an isolated and ominous landscape and by employing the surrealist method of placing opposing forms in the pictorial space, she creates a scene of terror in which a soft pliable human form of a woman lies abject before a hard black metallic and menacing monster. Interestingly, the woman seems to be holding a brush or pen in her extended left hand suggesting this is an authorial gesture of completing one’s self-portrait.¹⁹

From 1947–51 Australian sculptor Robert Klippel had an intense engagement with Surrealism, especially when he and his friend James Gleeson were based at an artists’ colony, The Abbey, in London. It was a hive of artistic influence with creative people from various nations living and working there. During this period they also spent time in Paris and met with Breton. Klippel’s drawings such as P19 1949, have a looseness about them, reflecting the surrealist dictum of spontaneous drawing and the power of the unconscious at work. He never called himself a Surrealist, and he wasn’t in the strict sense of the term, but the vitalism and energy he endowed on his forms suggest surrealist influences.²⁰

Adrian Feint’s surrealist seascapes such as Fantasy in pink and green — the poor relations 1949, differ markedly in tone. Feint draws on nature, seas shells, driftwood and Australian native flowers, but in juxtaposing elements that float in space, he evokes a sense of strangeness in nature. Shells becoming flying objects, others stand upright like plants, nature itself is inverted and marvellous.¹⁴²

Émigré artists and brothers Dusan and Voitre Marek, whose training in Czechoslovakia was of a more poetic Surrealism, arrived in Australia in 1948 with paintings completed aboard the SS Charlton Sovereign. These include Dusan’s Gibraltar 1948, viewed from a ‘ship’ rocking in the waves. This other-worldly image, showing snippets of life on the rocky island, including its tail-less apes and other dislocated objects such as sea creatures suspended in space, could be read as code for a journey to the other side of the world, the unknown. Their journey across the ocean was also to liberty and freedom, a key surrealist dictum, and it was the site of production of major paintings that also included Voitre Marek’s equally surreal My Gibraltar 1948.

From 1930–50, Surrealism was a constant thread in Australian art, including in the work of expatriates such as Peter Purves Smith’s other-worldly Outpost c 1936, but it was exhibitions, rather than art histories, that have reclaimed this history. The 1993 National Gallery of Australia exhibition Surrealism: Revolution by Night set the Australian variant within international and mostly French Surrealism and was followed that same year by a touring exhibition Surrealism in Australia. Both exhibitions revised the agenda for a strong visual element in local Surrealism, which Bernard Smith had assessed in his definitive Australian Painting (1991) as more influential in poetry than painting.²¹ But above all, it was two passionate collectors, James Agapitos and Ray Wilson who on acquiring Gleeson’s painting The attitude of lightening towards a lady mountain 1939 fell in love with surrealist art. Guided by their curatorial adviser Bruce James, they set about assembling a comprehensive surrealist collection of 285 artworks. Disappointedly, only six of their 42 artists are women, but then Australian Surrealism tended to attract fewer female artists than in Europe. The collection, accompanied by a new publication, was then gifted to the National Gallery where it was exhibited in 2008 as Australian Surrealism: The Agapitos Wilson Collection.²² It was a great demonstration of the breadth of surrealist practice in Australia across three decades from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Since then, artists continue to tap into Surrealism via the uncanny. Pat Brassington gestures towards Sigmund Freud and Breton by delving into repressed and sublimated memories while drawing on a surreal aesthetic. Her multimedia installation In my father’s house 1992–2019, plays on the idea of doors that both conceal and open, as portals to unconscious. In this compelling work, three sets of doors, slightly ajar, reveal photographic prints of acts/activities taking place behind closed doors; ‘secretive, closed off from general access, doors bar the way to the unknowable, possibly forbidden things’.²³ In true surreal fashion across all her work, and with a feminist edge, Brassington creates ‘strangeness in high relief’.²⁴

Surrealism is an open-ended approach which invites speculation on the part of viewers: its dictum of the unity of opposites to reveal new knowledge is well suited to the contemporary museum environment in which works of art invite multiple meanings. It is timely to recall the words of Breton: ‘the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful’²⁵ — words that are steeped in an avant-garde modernism that still live on.

This story was first published in The Annual 2024.