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 …

René Crevel (1900-35) was a writer bitten by tuberculosis who put two and two together and came up with the novel “My Body and Me”. The surrealist classic “Putting My Foot in It” is also his, an assault on corrupt intellects and the Catholic Church, as well as books on Paul Klee and Dalí.

Crevel linked up with the surrealists in 1921, they chucked him out in 1925 and he got back in again in 1929, only to appoint himself marriage broker between surrealism and communism, with disastrous results. The TB became too much for him, though, and at age 35 he took his own life, using poison gas.

This is how Louis Aragon put Crevel in the picture in “A Wave of Dreams”: “The surrealist idea needed something - a circumstance like a ring on the finger of a woman just met, like a drawing on the wall of a waiting room — to take a new twist towards the unexpected. And this came about beside the sea when René Crevel met a lady who taught him how to get into an extraordinary hypnotic trance which was something like sleepwalking. In this condition he would utter the most beautiful, prolonged speeches. An outbreak of trances swamped the surrealists.”

Theodore Fraenkel (1896-1964), like so many of the others, came in from the cool cloisters of medicine via the dense dada woods to pull pictures out of his own psyche. He’d been among the Café Certa regulars — Breton, Aragon, Soupault, the Éluards and Jacques Rigaut — who welcomed Man Ray on his arrival in France at the invitation of Marcel Duchamp, and then they all started mimicking Man Ray’s attire of suit, tie and fedora.

Theodore Fraenkel had a role in a 1930 film called “Le Coeur à barbe”, playing a poet named Theodore Fraenkel, and he may well be le peuple polonais in Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi”.

Jean Paulhan (1884-1968) was a linguist and writer who took the helm of the surrealists’ house magazine, and then during the war churned out anti-Bosch articles for the French Resistance publication The New French Review.

The poet Benjamin Péret (1899-1959), seen here in a highly collectible autographed snapshot with Breton, Éluard and Tzara, fought in World War I and didn’t much like it. He too had a turn editing of La Révolution Surréaliste before carrying on abroad with life’s great adventure, first in Brazil, then in the Spanish Civil War, then in Mexico City, where he knew Trotsky, and finally back to France, where they threw him in jail for subversion.

Johannes Baargeld, above, was the nom de vie of Alfred Emanuel Ferdinand Gruenwald (1892-1927), who was with Ernst’s dada collection in Cologne and both painted and wrote. He ended up dying while attempting to reach the top of one of the Alps, specifically, in case anyone’s going mountain-climbing, the Aiguille de Bionnassay.

Surrealism’s prophet, in the eyes of Breton, Robert Desnos (1900-45) arrived on surrealism’s doorstep in the arms of Benjamin Péret and thoroughly enjoyed the automatic writing, to which he added the element of hypnosis. Automatically or not, he dedicated poems to the famed diva Yvonne George that everyone agreed were obscene, and then worked for the Resistance, which the Gestapo thought was obscene. They locked him up in Auschwitz and Theresienstadt and he soon died of typhoid.

Desnos appears to be sound asleep in this photo, and in fact he had a reputation for nodding off in restaurants and then coming forth with subconscious ramblings.

In his essay “A Wave of Dreams”, Aragon wrote: “Robert Desnos has only to close his eyes in a café and, regardless of the sound of voices, the bright light, being jostled by passers-by, he starts to speak; amid the beer glasses and saucers the whole Ocean collapses with its prophetic din and vapours decorated with long oriflammes. Those who consult this prodigious man of trances have only gently to prompt him for outpourings of prophecy, the voice of magic, revelation and Revolution, the voice of the fanatic and the apostle to burst forth. In other circumstances, even if he entered this delirium only rarely, Desnos would become the leader of a religion, the founder of a city, the tribune of a people in revolt. He speaks, he draws, he writes.”

Denos bears a remarkable appearance, I pointlessly note, to former Canadian prime minister Joe Clark, pictured with him above. In the 1930s he held weekly soirees at his place in Paris, where Theodore Fraenkel was a regular and Ernest Hemingway might pop in.

Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) was known in his day as the author of hernia-inspiring books of poetry and the novel “The Last Nights of Paris”. As a literary critic himself he brooked no flippancy, and felt that surrealism, of which he was a co-founder, ought to be political. To this end he dragged Aragon to the 1931 Soviet Kharkov writers’ conference where they signed up for Stalinism. The Nazis threw Soupault in jail too, but he managed to live to a very old age.

Strasbourg-born Jean Arp (1886-1966) first met Ernst in 1914, even before dada beclouded Cologne. The cubists had originally shaken Arp loose from Kandinsky’s abstract expressionism tree with a few other monkeys of Der Blaue Reiter, and Max found him shredding newspaper and allowing collages to build themselves (with glue).

With the surrealists since 1919, Arp was in their first show in Paris six years later and soon stood apart from the crowd with his choreographed metamorphisms. He’d seen enough of them by 1931, got geometric and co-founded abstract-creationism.

A dab hand at the exquisite corpse, Max Morise (1900-73) did a bit of acting in film and somehow still managed to be coaxed into the movement by his pals Desnos and Roger Vitrac. They got him scribbling for La Révolution Surréaliste and Breton cadged some of his bon mots for the manifestos.

“If the houses in Paris are mountains it’s because they’re reflected in Max Morise’s monocle: and didn’t he defile the great crucifix in the station at Argent?” Aragon wrote in “A Wave of Dreams”.

No point going into detail about Raphael here — Wikipedia is all over him.

Paul Éluard somehow has a better ring to it than the name he was born with: Eugène Grindel (1895-1952). Another of the great influencers who ran with the Resistance and was shot down early by TB, the poet and ex-dada loon met Breton and Aragon via his mentor Paulhan.

He had a daughter named Cecile with Gala before she met Dalí and fell in love with him for some reason, and then Éluard married Picasso’s model Maria “Nusch” Benz, who is wont to be characterised everywhere as “the surrealist mascot”. Éluard, the author of “The Capital of Pain”, was in turn the inspiration for Jean-Luc Godard’s movie “Alphaville”.

“I have seen Paul Eluard trampled by policemen and drivers on a piano and in shattered lightbulbs, there were 30 of them against this starburst,” Aragon wrote in “A Wave of Dreams”. “A little later I saw him in the foothills of Champagne in a land of ophite stones. Then he entered the darkness of earth where moral eclipses are chandeliers at a ball unbounded by the ocean, then he came back, he is looking at you.”

Louis Aragon (1897-1982) owned 200 neckties, a surefire ticket into the surrealist manor of mannerisms, in which good buddies had good laughs at bad dressers. He and Breton regarded Dalí and Luis Buñuel (let’s not mention the Romanian Jew Tzara) as downcountry bumpkins but tolerated them for a while on talent terms, only to see Salvador socially outclimb them and Buñuel nurse pure surrealism into old age while they, its parents, devolved into communists.

Having given the surreal movement a bible in 1928 entitled “Traite du Style”, Aragon had to leave his muse Elsa Triolet at home to fight the Hun in World War II. He was awarded for bravery, joined the Resistance, painted himself red, did a lot of raucous shouting in public and finally, in the 1970s, discovered another surrealist bone in his body and came halfway out as a homosexual, riding along in gay pride parades in a pink convertible.

A boy from Brittany obsessed by the colour green, Andre Breton (1896-1966) early on practised a bit of psychiatry and actually met Freud long, long before Dalí wangled an invite. Dadaism amused him for a while, but he came up with something more concrete in surrealism, and to the world he memorably bellowed, “Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears …”

The proposed alternative was, of course, an unguided tour of the mossy cranial wilderness and utter surrender of reason to the forces of “pure psychic automatism” and “the omnipotence of dream”.

Breton pursued Cinderella in his poem “Mad Love”, and then spotted more intriguing game in communism. Stalin soon put him off, but on Marxism’s crutch he made his was to Trotsky’s side in Mexico and together they came up with the “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art”, a put-down of authoritarian censorship. Breton too joined the surrealist war refugees in America, where he took Robert Motherwell on a junket round New York’s junk stores pointing out what was surreal and what wasn’t.

Though Italian, Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) was born in Greece and his paintings always seemed to have that ancient architecture in them. His own movement, the scuola metafisica, came out of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and mystical Turin, and Picasso and Apollinaire took careful note when he brought his wares to Paris. A pact with surrealism was coveted, if not signed. Tanguy claimed a Chirico painting got him painting.

De Chirico was in the Italian army in World War I, married a brace of Russians and ultimately, in his art, discovered realism, so everyone ignored him. In a snit, he produced a stack of backdated “self-forgeries” or his early work, forevermore insisting that it wasn’t him at all.

Gala Éluard, née Helena Deluvina Diarkinoff, later Gala Dalí, is of course one of the stars of Dali House’s “Dali Planet” biography. She was something else.

Below are a couple more great group portraits I robbed from the cyber-rich. The first, from 1924, has some familiar names among those listed in the caption as, standing, from left, the poets Jacques Baron (1905-86) and Raymond Queneau (1903-76), Breton, medico-surrealist Jacques-André Boiffard (1902-61), de Chirico, Vitrac, Éluard, Soupault, Desnos and Aragon, and, sitting, Pierre Naville (1904-93, the sex-mad surrealist publicist), Simone Collinet-Breton, Morise and Marie-Louise Soupault.

And here, enjoying themselves at a fun fair and definitely going places, are Morise on the bike, Ernst at the wheel, Simone Breton with Éluard towering over her, Joseph Delteil, Gala, Desnos and Breton.

Dali House has another Max Ernst post here