Dali House

“A Reunion of Friends” by Max Ernst.

I have no idea why it’s called a “reunion”. Tristan Tzara, Yves Tanguy and Man Ray are nowhere in sight (not to forget André Masson, Michel Leiris and Antonin Artaud), Ernst (pictured here) had just arrived on the scene in Paris, and Dalí, to name another prominent member, wouldn’t be joining for another six years. But I’ve also seen the painting referred to as “At the Rendezvous of Friends”, which is a somewhat more meaningful place to drop anchor in surrealism’s tossing shoals.

“At that time we used to meet in the evenings like hunters, comparing what we’d bagged that day, the tally of beasts we’d invented, the fantastic plants, the images we’d shot down,” Louis Aragon wrote in his 1924 essay “A Wave of Dreams”, as translated by Susan de Muth.

“In the grip of a tremendous momentum, we spent more and more time on the practices which led us into our strange inner lands. We delighted in observing the curve of our own exhaustion, and the derangement which followed. For then the marvellous would appear. At first each one of us thought himself subject to some peculiar mental disorder and struggled against it. Then it revealed its true nature. It was as if the mind, having reached a turning point in the subconscious, lost all control over where it was drifting. Images which existed in the mind took physical forms, became tangible reality.

“Once we were in touch with them they expressed themselves in a perceptible form, taking on the characteristics of visual, auditory and tactile hallucinations. We experienced the full force of these images. We could no longer control them. We had become their domain, a setting for them. In bed, at the moment of falling asleep, in the street with eyes wide open, with the full apparatus of dread, we held out our hands to phantoms.

“Rest, abstention from surrealism made these phenomena disappear, gave us space to comprehend how close they were to the phenomena induced by chemical preparations, and at first we suspended our experiments through fear, but they gradually reclaimed their rights over our curiosity.”

The scene of hunters tallying their day’s kill is a curious assemblage even for surrealists, pictorially a counterpoint to Max Ernst’s glue-free collages that hung in Dali House the other day. He must have been anal-retentive because he was always amassing bits and bolts and marshalling them into assigned spaces.

So, who is reuniting/rendezvousing? According to the always informative Olga’s Gallery, Ernst is in the front row on the left, sitting on Dostoyevsky’s knee for purely aesthetic reasons. Then down the row to the right, making Masonic-Star Trek hand signals, are Theodor Fraenkel, Jean Paulhan and Benjamin Péret, followed by Johannes Th Baargeld and Robert Desnos.

In the back row, standing, you can see Philippe Soupault, Hans Arp, Max Morise, a shady character in the background who cannot be identified because he works for the CIA, and, looking a lot like Columbus, Raffaele Sanzio, known to posterity as Raphael, against whose prying eyes Morise is trying to hide his heart.

Raphael would have been the evening’s guest of honour because by then he’d been dead 400 years. Clearly there was some warmth in the surrealists’ hearts for the old boy. Certainly Dalí would much later find his way to God with Raffa’s help, leaning heavily on “The Transfiguration” and “La Fornarina”.

Next come Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, André Breton, the statuesque Giorgio de Chirico and finally Mrs Paul Éluard, Gala, who still hasn’t met and run off with Dalí. (The gossip on that is here.)

The surrealists seem to be holding their annual convention at Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, if not on the moon. Refreshments are meagre: That looks like a cubist snack tray that Ernst is keeping Doestoyevsky away from. Bit of cheese and an apple. The knife could be trouble in this mob, though.

And what about the mystery figure on the left with his back turned, playing with a doll house? Arp is trying to get him to pay attention. Hmm — doll house … Dali House … it’s not …? No, it couldn’t be. And it’s not, it’s supposedly René Crevel. We’ll meet all these folks personally in a moment.

Soon after painting this police line-up Ernst got busy turning his twee collages into large-scale paintings like “The Teetering Woman”, aka “The Equivocal Woman”, seen here, dreamed up frottage and grattage and, in 1924, enjoyed a trip to the French colonies in Southeast Asia with the Éluards. It was a pleasant decade all round, but things do have a way of changing.

The surrealists all turned out to be communists, for starters, so in 1938 Ernst withdrew stealthily to the balmy south of France, where first the French authorities arrested him as a “hostile alien” and then the Gestapo came to see him and compare notes on communism.

Despite sharing a loathing for it, the Nazis threw him in prison, but he managed to escape with the help of Loplop (pictured) and good old Peggy Guggenheim got him on a boat to New York. The rest is modern American art history.

Louis Aragon’s take on Ernst in his essay “A Wave of Dreams”: “Earthquakes are where Max Ernst, painter of cataclysms as others of battles, feels most at ease and contented. He finds it strange that the earth isn’t constantly quaking. René Crevel has never noticed that this planet is solidly fixed with help from meridians and latitudes: he is more of a sleepwalker than anyone.”

Meanwhile, back at the reunion, dada was being called awful names and much fresh manifesto’ing was about to commence. Surrealism was a newborn babe, a snobs’ club of rebellious dandies seducing one another with every meaning-laden tick of the clock and every coincidental bark of an Andalusian dog, and then turning to the next person, launching intrigues against glimpsed realities.

Here are Max’s models … See the rest.