“A Long Affair: Surrealism 1924 to Now”, the current exhibition at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, commemorates the centennial of André Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism,” the text that laid the foundation for one of the most significant – and, as curator Derin Tanyol argues – enduring – movements in modern art.
Ironically, the French poet’s 1924 manifesto treated the visual arts as little more than a convenient vector for the communication of his group’s ideas about automatism, dreams and the unconscious, but as “A Long Affair” makes abundantly clear, painting, drawing and sculpture are at the heart of surrealism.
“A Long Affair” also affirms a statement once made by the 20th century American poet John Ashbery that “surrealism has influenced us in so many ways we can hardly imagine the world without it.”
Ashbery seems to have made his remark in response to the thesis of William Rubin that surrealism “ceased to exist” once the world awoke to the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust and Stalinism – the products, some argue, of the transgressive power of the irrational that surrealism promiscuously, perhaps irresponsibly, championed.
Rubin was the scholar, collector and curator who oversaw the Museum of Modern Art’s big Dada and Surrealism survey in 1968 and for many years, his thesis was indeed the conventional wisdom. But as “A Long Affair” demonstrates, surrealism has not only persisted, its influence has expanded far beyond the borders of France and New York, where it lived in exile after the fall of Paris in 1940.
Among the works assembled by Tanyol for this exhibition, only a few were produced by artists who were actually active members of Breton’s Parisian circles.
(Breton reportedly had the nose of a Torquemada, sniffing out heresies among his cohort and expelling them from its ranks.) Still fewer were at work in the 1920s and 30s, supposedly the summit of surrealism’s achievements.
Nevertheless, Tanyol situates these diverse works within the ambit of Breton’s manifesto by displaying examples of the movement’s foundational texts near works of art completed as recently as this year.
The curator makes good use of, and perhaps draws inspiration from, The Hyde’s own Feibes & Schmitt Collection, the source of a 1964 bronze by Jean Arp, a 1970 bronze by Man Ray, a 1967 oil painting by Peter Dechar and a 1936 drawing by Yves Tanguy.
The Hyde’s own vaults contributed several works on paper, including a delightful engraving by Dorothy Dehner titled “Skaters,” created when she was working in the experimental New York print studio Atelier 17.
In fact, “A Long Affair: Surrealism 1924 to Now” could serve as a bookend to The Hyde’s 2023 exhibition, “Songs of the Horizon: David Smith, Music and Dance” which, of course, featured the work of Dehner’s first husband, the pre-eminent American sculptor of the 20th century.
Smith deployed the vocabulary of surrealism throughout much of the 1940s, a style heavily represented in that exhibition but which he is said to have decisively broken with by the early 1950s.
In fact, the influence of surrealism in general and of Andre Breton in particular are still present, however dimly, in Smith’s mature work, something that should be obvious once one recalls the essayist Walter Benjamin’s comment that Breton was “the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded’ – in the iron constructions, in the objects that have begun to be extinct.”
Surrealism is, indeed, the connecting link among many post-war styles thought to be mutually exclusive, from abstract expressionism to pop art – something brought home to us by Tanyol’s decision to include works by Richard Pousette-Dart, Phillip Guston and Peter Dechar, among others, in the exhibition.
One piece of pure surrealism is especially welcome, given that the artist, though born in Albany in 1898, is rarely exhibited in this region: Kay Sage.
Sage left Rome (where she worked with the American poet Ezra Pound until disgusted by his anti-semitism) in the 1930s, moving to Paris where she became acquainted with the surrealists, whose ideas came to influence her own work.
The oil painting included in this exhibition – “Margin of Silence,” on loan from the Albany Institute of History and Art, was completed in 1942.
We end where we began, with John Ashbery’s insight that “Surrealism has influenced us in so many ways we can hardly imagine the world without it.” The movement has not only influenced poetry, music, opera, ballet and films but television, advertising and graphic design.
“A Long Affair: Surrealism 1924 to Now” helps us to understand the movement’s origins and why its influence is still so pervasive, so much so that we are hardly aware of it.The Hyde Collection is located at 161 Warren Street in Glens Falls and is open to the public Thursday through Monday, 10 am to 5 pm. For information, call 518-792-1761.
