The Threshold of Liberty The Shock of the New

CROWD CHEERS

'The wish for absolute freedom is one of the constants of intellectual life.

'And in France, it amounts to a tradition.

'This tradition is more anarchist than Marxist.

'It wants to reform reality and the shape of desire,

'and by uniting people with their desires, it wants to change all life.'

SIREN WAILS

'It is ironic and scarcely ideological at all.'

SIREN WAILS

'It boasts of its absolute modernity, but its roots lie in the 18th century.

'It seeks spontaneity but it's doomed to failure when it runs up against the real world.

'Its enemies are priest, cop, bureaucrat, boss and censor.

'But it's too highbrow to have a broad base.

'It breathes the air of privilege and is self-indulgent.

'Generally workers don't like it

'and socialists reject it as impractical, which it is.

'It is the product of young, middle-class people fed up with their own assigned social role.'

GUNSHOTS

'The last time it surfaced in France was in May 1968,

'but the time before that,

'it took a more complicated and aesthetic form and called itself Surrealism.'

SIREN WAILS

Of all art movements of our century, Surrealism was the one most concerned with the question,

"how shall I be free?"

Now, many works of art are metaphors of freedom,

they show us the free play of the mind and the senses

and their models of choice.

But Surrealism aspired to be the instrument of liberty.

It wanted to set people free to save them,

in the way that revolutionaries and evangelists promise salvation through an act of faith.

Consequently, there was a good deal more to Surrealism

than simply a solemn parody of revolutionary threats.

It had something in common with a religion.

It had dogmas and rituals,

it had martyrs and holy saints,

it had a circle of faithful, and it had a Pope.

'He was a young medical student turned poet.

'His name was Andre Breton

'and in the 20s he developed into one of the great fascinators of modern art.

'He inspired, as one of his disciples put it, a dog-like devotion,

'largely because he was very inventive, very perceptive and very moral.

'Not a combination one gets very often in French or any other cultural circles.

'So this evangelist believed that both art and life could renew themselves

'by contacting forbidden areas of the mind, the unconscious.

'That, in turn, would refresh our sense of the world

'by disclosing a whole network of hidden relationships,

'chance, memory, desire, coincidence,

'a new reality, a surreality, in the word that he borrowed from Apollinaire.

'The dream was the instrument for this.

'In dreams, the id spoke.

'The dreaming mind was unlegislated truth.

'And so was neurosis, the permanent, involuntary form of dreams.

'In this, Breton and his circle were part of the great movement of thought

'whose motor was the work of Sigmund Freud.

'But they were not really Freudians

'and there is no evidence that Freud took them seriously

'any more than Stalin would have taken notice of the Surrealists' masochistic efforts

'to put themselves at the service of Communism in the 1930s.

'Breton was a natural clan leader

'and he soon acquired the devotion of a group,

'gently caricatured here by Max Ernst in 1922.

'In these early years, Surrealism was mainly a literary group.

'But the presiding spirit of Surrealist painting is over there.

'His name was Giorgio De Chirico

'and his work was the link between Romantic art and Surrealism.

'Below the rational surface of 19th century art

'there ran a fascination with dreams, with mystery, melancholy, fear.

'It was a world of pre-Freudian phantoms.

'Its main influence on De Chirico came through Arnold Bocklin,

'a late 19th century German.

'Bocklin specialised in images of death and melancholy

'set among the ruins and the sea coasts of Italy.

'One thing that he extracted from Italy

'was the idea of historical places as condensers of memory.

'And this fascinated De Chirico, too.

'What he discovered in the squares and arcades of Italy

'was not their solid architectural reality

'but their staginess.'

De Chirico was 23 and on his way from Florence to Paris in 1911

when he stopped off for a few days here in Turin.

The city that afforded him more images than any other,

with its bronze paternal monuments and its vast, melancholy, 19th century squares,

grandiose and provincial, and to him, extraordinarily new.

Later he remarked that this novelty "has a strange and profound poetry,

"which is based upon the atmosphere of an Autumn afternoon,

"when the sky is clear, and the shadows are longer than in mid-summer.

"And there is no Italian city," he said,

"in which this extraordinary phenomenon more displays itself than in Turin."

So there it was, the verbal blueprint for the paintings

with which De Chirico was going to have such an enormous influence upon Surrealism.

'As theatre replaces life, so nostalgia replaces history.

'And its emblems are the sunlit square, the tiny dark figures,

'the tower, the stopped clock and the train.

'De Chirico was still in his early 20s

'when he was captivated by what he called the metaphysics of these scenes.'

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

TRANSLATOR: The special quality about the city of Turin which Nietzsche talks about,

revealed a spiritual phenomenon to me which I didn't know about before.

I understood, in fact, that what he saw in Turin,

especially in its arcades, was something deeply poetic.

I realised the value of this discovery of Nietzsche's.

'De Chirico's Italy is a brooding place.

'Its perspective suggests that reality is very far away, perhaps unattainable.

'Human society has ceased to exist.

'The main figures in his squares are statues.

'And in the most disturbing of all his paintings,

'called The Mystery And Melancholy Of A Street,

'the statue does not appear at all,

'it just announces itself with the tip of its long shadow,

'drawing the girl towards it.

'His favourite image became the mannequin,

'neither a man nor a sculpture, halfway between,

'a sketch for a man made up of tools and mementos, parts and emblems,

'a metaphor of fragmented Modernist consciousness.

'That tilted space came more from Cubism than real Italian squares.

'But it wasn't the Cubist scaffolding that Surrealism admired,

'it was the strange encounters between objects,

'and the clarity, which later Surrealist painters would imitate because it made the dream look real.

'De Chirico's space became the norm for Surrealist art,

'a neutral place, an ideal plain on which odd things met in full light.

'The root of this idea lay in the work of Isidore Ducasse,

'who wrote under the name of the Comte de Lautreamont

'a long, unreadable prose poem called The Songs Of Maldoror.

'It contained the phrase,

'"Beautiful is the encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table."

'This summed up the Surrealist ideal of beauty.

'A beauty of strangeness, of incompatibility and secret correspondences,

'which was the beauty of De Chirico's pre-war paintings.

'By 1921, Surrealism, a poet's movement,

'had got its first major artist in Paris,

'the young German, Max Ernst.

'He arrived with a packet of his strange collages

'and their incongruous meetings of images cut from catalogues and magazines

'struck Breton and his circle as Lautreamont applied to art.

'They seemed to subvert the world.

'They seemed revolutionary, an edgy poetry distilled from the most ordinary materials.

'They were the view through the gap in middle-class reality.

'Much later, in the 60s,

'Ernst was interviewed by his old friend Roland Penrose,

'once the leader of the English Surrealists.'

I was born with a very strong feeling

-of a need of freedom, liberty.

-Mm-hm.

And that means also with a very strong feeling of revolt.

Revolt and revolution is not the same thing.

But when you have this very strong feeling

of this need of revolt, need of freedom,

and you are born into a period

where so many events invite you to get revolted,

through what is going on in the world, and be disgusted with it and so on,

it is absolutely natural that the work you produce

is revolutionary work.

'In Paris, Ernst grafted his collage technique onto De Chirico.

'This monster is called The Elephant Celebes.

'Its shape was inspired by a photo of an African corn bin.

'Its topknot comes from De Chirico's mannequins.

'But for most of Ernst's images there is no rational explanation.

'They come from a parallel world,

'a place of lucid dread akin to the powerlessness that children sometimes feel.

'Ernst could compress a lot of psychic violence into a small space

'the size of a booby-trapped toy.

'One of the Surrealists' favourite ways of evoking what they called the "Marvellous"

'was by chance association, like seeing faces in the fire.

'Our minds prefer order to chaos,

'and so we read coherent images into random sights.

'The fact that these images are not willed but spontaneous

'was what interested Ernst and his friends.

'How could one set up meetings with the unexpected?

'In 1925, Ernst found a way.

'He made crayon rubbings from wood grain or stone

'and then he altered them to isolate the images they suggested,

'and he called these drawings his natural history.

'But the strongest illusion of a parallel world in Ernst's work

'came from the collages that he began to make around 1930.

'He used Victorian steel engravings cut and reassembled.

'For us today, their effect has changed a bit.

'They're still sinister, still disturbing

'and still marvellous in their power of suggestion.

'The peculiarity of Ernst's world never lets up.

'It's always suddenly there, as though stumbled upon.

'But what we don't get is the sense of an immediate vicious past

'upon which Ernst's work depended.

'This Edwardian world looks very remote to us.

'But it was the world in which Max Ernst grew up,

'and to subvert it was, for him, akin to an act of terrorism,

'the irrational attacking the world of ordered structures.'

It is important in a time when those who run the world,

but then they can do it only with reason, rational.

-HE COUGHS

-And they are not even noticing

that...

..reason has almost nothing to do.

-Look what is going on in the world right now.

-Yes.

What has gone on in the world in the last 20 years, anyhow.

Who make... made world history?

Not the most reasonable people, the mad men did.

So if a painting is the mirror...

..of a time,

it must be mad...

..to have the true image of what the time is.

-That sounds a very dangerous parallel...

-Everything is dangerous.

..because if art is to be mad as the politicians are mad...

No, no, no. We are mad in a very different way.

-Yes. I suppose so.

-Exactly the opposite.

-That is the great difference, isn't it?

-Yes.

-To one madness we oppose another madness.

-Yes. Yes.

We do not pretend that this madness that we oppose to the other madness

can heal these people and keep them from doing what they are doing.

But the artist is only

somebody who... makes a statement.

Yes. So the irrational in art is an absolutely essential ingredient,

-do you think?

-It is essential.

'Irrationality has no given form, and in their pursuit of it,

'the Surrealists had to mimic the conventions of art in which it appeared.

'There was, for instance, the art of children.

'Now, children have always drawn and painted,

'but not until the 18th century did child art seem a special cultural form

'with something to tell us about the growth and the life of the mind.

'The Surrealists passionately believed that it was.

'They believed in the innocent eye,

'since young kids were not repressed, as their parents are.

'Madness was another culture in itself.

'To the Surrealists, it was the highest form of revolt,

'the mind's big no to an intolerable world. The poet Paul Eluard,

'who knew nothing about the sufferings of mental patients who made paintings like these,

'praised mental illness as "the earthly paradise."

'And he added that, "We who love the insane know that they refuse to be cured."

'The first clinical studies of mad people's art

'were beginning to appear in France in the 20s.

'To the Surrealists, they were a fertile source,

'images that were truly obsessive, spontaneous

'and not censored by the conscious mind.

'The third source of the irrational was primitive art,

'the work of self-taught men and women, the Sunday painters, the amateurs and hobbyists.

'Their compulsion to make images was pure,

'and thus seemed more valuable to the Surrealists than any amount of professional painting.

'The greatest of them was Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier, or the Customs Man,

'with his tight, patiently-rendered visions of a jungle that he had never seen.

'These, to Surrealism, were the Marvellous made concrete.'

In 1879, a French country postman in the village of Hauterives picked up a stone.

He was then 43 years old and his name was Joseph Ferdinand Cheval.

He had absolutely no training as an architect.

But he did have a very strong sense of immortality.

And for the next 33 years, he laboured incessantly here in his own backyard,

93,000 working hours by his own count,

to construct this.

'He made it out of stones and cement and iron bars and bits of wire

'and oyster shells salvaged from the local restaurants

'and anything else that came to hand.

'It was his ideal palace, his testament to the future.

'It was also the greatest single unofficial work of art

'that has come down to us since the 19th century.

'A cathedral of the unconscious mind.

'The Surrealists drew their own map of the world

'with the countries redone to their scale of Surrealist interest.

'No England, but Ireland, which they saw as a place of myth, twilight, and revolution, is huge.

'The United States don't exist at all.

'Mexico and Labrador have swallowed them.

'Australia just gets in, I'm glad to say, but it's dwarfed by New Guinea.

'Africa is small because the Cubists had discovered it.

'Germany dominates Europe and the only city is Paris.

'And no Spain, which is odd,

'because two of the lynchpins of Surrealist art were born there.

'The best painter among the Surrealists grew up in this landscape south of Barcelona.

'His name was Joan Miro and he has outlived most of his fellow artists.

'In a sense, Miro didn't join the movement.

'Surrealism joined him. It needed his art.

'A free lyrical mixture of folk tales, eroticism, sardonic humour and absurdity.

'As a young man, before 1920, one sees him becoming a Modern painter.

'First the bright Mediterranean colour derived from Matisse.

'And then looking to Cubism for the geometry.

'At this stage, his art is a vision of detail, like a biblical counting of blessings,

'the folds of ploughed earth, the sharp edges of barn and house.

'The creatures are laid out flat and bright, one by one,

'as in one of the Romanesque frescos of northern Spain.

'Miro broke loose from Cubism with this painting, The Tilled Field.

'There are the furrows of the plough, a house and a piebald mare in front, suckling her foal.

'But then that tree has grown an ear.

'And that lizard is chatting with a snail while reading a French newspaper,

'a sort of ironical wave to Cubism.

'And up in the air, a rooster leaning from a tree, crowing,

'while the cloud behind it becomes its feathers.

'This is a metamorphic landscape,

'everything in it can become something else.

'In this image, a child is feeding at the breast.

'In the 20s, with such works as Maternity,

'Miro became the modern heir to the medieval Illuminators,

'to the Romanesque sculptors with their bestiaries and demons,

'and to Hieronymus Bosch himself.

'100 years before, William Blake had urged his readers to,

'"Seek those images that constitute the wild,

"the lion and the virgin, the harlot and the child."

'Which is what Miro did for us in paintings like The Harlequins Carnival.

'He had the range of a man who owns all his sensations and is ashamed of none of them.

'And he set forth his immense vitality with a diction of pure, flat colour

'that almost no other modern artist except Matisse had used with such mastery.

'In the twilight of his work,

Miro is probably the last great national painter of the 20th century,

'a Catalan to the fingertips.

'And nobody is more certain of that than the people of Barcelona.

'For their city had a much deeper connection with Surrealism

than the Miro mosaic in its main street,

'and it goes back to the turn of the century

'when Barcelona was a cultural capital.

'Art Nouveau, the luxury style of 1900,

'still marks Barcelona deeper than any other city.

'Its master was a Catalan architect named Antoni Gaudi,

'who was still at work when Miro was a young man.

'But Gaudi's main work was only just begun when he died in 1927.

'This is the unfinished temple, the Sagrada Familia,

'or Cathedral of the Holy Family.

'He started it in 1903, and it's still going up, but very slowly.

'Probably they'll never finish it, but in any case,

'this is the last delirious monument of Catholic Spain.'

In this case you can say that form really does follow function.

Sliding, rippling, dissolving, reforming, changing colour.

Juicy architecture.

Soft architecture.

The architecture of ecstasy.

GRAND ORGAN MUSIC

'Above the city is the Park Guell,

'which Gaudi designed for his main patrons, the Guell family.

'It was going to be a housing estate, but the houses weren't finished,

'and only the extraordinary park is left,

'with its mosaics and undulating seats,

'its fountains and arcades.

'To the Classical eye, this is madness.

'Not a straight line in the place.

'To purist advanced taste to the 20s and 30s,

'Art Nouveau was really no better than garbage deluxe.

'But to the Surrealists, it was Marvellous.'

It was desire made concrete.

And at the extreme end of the style,

you get a kind of nervous irritability, a tropical growth,

a feeling of substance continuously melting into metaphor

that was very congenial to them and it provided the legacy

for another and slightly more dubious Catalan genius, Salvador Dali.

'For almost 40 years, Dali has been one of the two most famous painters alive.

'His moustache was the only rival to Van Gogh's ear and Picasso's potency.'

Do you have any trouble with it at night? Do you have to peg it?

-Or does it stand up at night?

-No. In the night, clean every night, it becoming soft.

-So at night it droops down.

-Completely.

-And then in the morning, up she goes again?

-Three minutes. In three minutes fix my moustache.

And then you feel you can face the world with that wonderful moustache standing up.

Yes, because every day becoming much more practical for my inspiration.

Well, I'm fascinated to know that.

'He has also been a great embarrassment,

'with the political views of Torquemada, the greed of a barracuda

'and the vanity of an old drag queen.'

Everybody talk about eccentricity.

Is a little true but I am

total and absolutely paradoxical man.

Yeah, it's true, I am eccentric

but in this time, I am concentric.

Eccentric and concentric.

'He started tamely enough as an art student in Madrid in the early 20s.

'But around 1925, he discovered what Realism could do.

'It could subvert one's sense of reality.

'Instead of a Modernist surface, Dali went in for what he called,

'"all the most paralysing tricks of eye fooling."

'Photographic accuracy, masses of detail and smooth paint.

'To this he added what he called his paranoiac critical method.

'Basically this meant looking at one thing and seeing another,

'as these figures make up a face.

'Dali used this trick again and again in his paintings.

'This one is called The Metamorphosis Of Narcissus.

'There he squats on the left, head on his knee, staring at his reflection in the pool.

'And the giant hand on the right,

'holding an egg from which a narcissus sprouts,

'exactly mimics his body.

'Dali's own considerable narcissism produced many self-portraits.

'Some quite open, like this.

'Others were concealed, as in this painting called The Great Masturbator.

'A grasshopper clings to the soft, yellow shape,

'which is Dali's profile, boned, as it were,

'and laid nose down on its side.

'And that same profile, by now as runny as wax,

'turns up on the beach in his most famous image, The Persistence Of Memory.

'Dali had a brilliant sense of provocation.

'He even managed to alarm Breton with this one

'and provoke a solemn argument among his fellow Surrealists

'upon whether a pair of pants spattered with faeces

'was an acceptable dream image or not.

'Like a gland irritated by constant scratching,

'his mind threw off many such images before the end of the 30s,

'when they began to get rather tedious and predictable.

'And most of them had to do with sex, blood, dung and putrefaction

'mixed with declarations of impotence and guilt.

'For Dali loved anything that spoke of flaccidity,

'runny cheese, flesh held up by crutches,

'soft watches.

'Dali inherited a lot from Spanish religious art.

'An almost paralysing morbidity about flesh.

'It is phosphorescent, always on the point of dissolution and rot.

'In Dali, there is no such thing as the confident body of Classicism.

'But there is no spiritual transcendence either.

'He locked himself up in the prison of the narcissistic self

'and then threw away the key.

'Eventually the dreams weren't real at all.

'Just Dali being Dali, the nickelodeon of the id.

'He had not reached his 40th birthday when Sigmund Freud had the last word on him.

'"It is not the unconscious that I seek in your pictures," he wrote, '"but the conscious."

"Your mystery is manifested outright. The picture is only a mechanism to reveal it."

'So there he is. Not great enough for marble, but just right for wax.

'It's proper that Dali should have found his place here in the Paris Wax Museum, The Musee Grevin,

'representing culture along with the novelist Francoise Sagan

'and the clothes designer Pierre Cardin.

'For the wax museum was one of the favourite spots of Surrealism.

'It was a house of bizarre but second-hand illusion.'

Wax works are neither art nor life.

They're failures, they're sinister hybrids,

and from that point of view, the cruder they are, the more potent they get.

They mock the powers of art and offer none of the consolations of nature.

No wonder the Surrealists liked them.

'This place was one of several that made up a Surrealist itinerary of Paris.

'A city of monuments and gates, passageways and parks,

'where the Surrealists would meet at dawn or at midnight

'in the hope setting up encounters with the unexpected,

'with the secret history of Paris.

'One of the most potent spots in Paris was the flea market.'

Except as a backdrop, landscape was of no interest to Surrealism.

They probably found it disagreeably bucolic.

It was a city movement, made by pale, aggressive young eggheads

whose natural lair was the cafe and whose essential city was Paris.

In fact, it's impossible to imagine Surrealism without Paris.

And their equivalent to the endless variety of nature

was the endless profusion of baffling objects which washed up here in the flea market.

Of course, that was in the good old days before they started calling junk antiques,

but even so, you never knew what you might find here.

The flea market was like the unconscious mind of capitalism,

it contained the repressed surplus.

This is where the sewing machine met the umbrella on the operating table,

and in due course gave birth to a whole flock of progeny,

a new art form, the Surrealist object.

'The object was collage in three dimensions.

'The Surrealists thought that it made secret affinities visible.

'It was a way of declassifying the world

'and rendering it permeable to imagination.

'A head with the eyes closed with zippers

'became Marcel Jean's quietly sadistic image, The Spirit Of The Gardenia.

'Victor Brauner made a wolf table.

'Dali made a whole compendium of his fetishes.

'Wolfgang Paalen called this Articulated Cloud,

'the source of rain and the protection against it fused into one image.

'And Meret Oppenheim produced the most famous and contradictory Surrealist object of all,

'her fur cup and spoon, the very essence of uselessness.

'One particularly good object maker

was the American photographer Man Ray, a veteran of Dadaism.'

An object is a result of looking at something

which in itself has no quality or charm.

I pick something which in itself has no meaning at all.

I disregard completely the aesthetic quality of the object.

I'm against craftsmanship.

I say the world is full of wonderful craftsmen,

but there are very few practical dreamers.

In the early days in Paris, when I first came over

and I passed by a hardware shop and I saw a flat iron in the window,

I said, "There's an object which is almost invisible. Maybe I could do something with that."

What could I do to add something in it that was provocative?

And so I got a box of tacks,

I glued on a row of tacks to it to make it useless, as I thought.

But nothing is really useless.

You can always find a use even for the most extravagant object.

'The iron, entitled Gift, was pure malice.

'This one he called Object To Be Destroyed.'

SLOW TICKING

'The cult of objects underlined another aspect of the Surrealist imagination,

'the belief that the Marvellous,

'that state of almost sexual excitement that Breton called "convulsive beauty,"

'was always available, hidden just below the skin of reality.

'The artist who produced the best evidence for this idea

'lived in a modest house in a Belgian suburb and his name was Rene Magritte.

'Magritte was Monsieur Bourgeois to the letter, stocky, taciturn, suburban.

'He died in 1968 but his work continues to serve its audience

'rather as Victorian story painters serve theirs.

'People like stories. But modern art doesn't tell many and Magritte did.

'However, his stories weren't narratives. They were snapshots of the impossible.

'In 1923, the architect Le Corbusier

'put this photo in his tract on the new machine architecture

'as an example of plain, rational design, a pipe.

'Five years later, Magritte contradicted him with this painting.

'"This is not a pipe."

'It became one of the most famous phrases in modern art.

'A manifesto about language, the way meaning is conveyed or frustrated by symbols.

'Because this, indeed, is not a pipe.

'It is a painting, a work of art,

'a sign that denotes an object and triggers memory.

'No painter had ever isolated that basic fact about art so clearly before.

'Denying the names of things took you through the mirror of illusion into a quite different world,

'where things change their names and lose their meanings.

'A candle equals a ceiling, and the moon, a shoe.

'The first characteristic of this world is dread.

'Sometimes at the crude, dramatic level of the silent movies that Magritte used to watch,

'which is echoed here in his painting, The Menaced Assassin.

'Magritte has given us some of the most vivid images of alienation in the whole lexicon of art.

'This one is entitled The Lovers.

'This, a painting of the most piercing sadness and sexual pungency,

is called The Rape.

'The usual tone of Magritte's work was of a world both matter of fact and slightly out of control.

'Magritte painted things so ordinary that they might have come from a phrase book.

'An apple.

'A glass.

'A stolid Belgian nude.

'Or a human eye.'

There wasn't much on that list that an average Belgian clerk, circa 1935,

might not have seen in the course of an average Belgian day.

But then, that clerk was one of Magritte's favourite images, too.

'Here the clerk's descent like rain on the roofs of Belgium

as though they were commuting from Heaven.

'In a painting, you have a canvass on an easel in front of a view.

'The canvass bears a picture of the view.

'This picture exactly overlaps the real view.

'And so the play between image and reality suggests that the real world is only a construction of mind

'and that somewhere among the infinite number of ways of experiencing that world,

'there is one ideal angle, from which art and reality overlap, match and fuse.

'That is the moment of Surrealist vision.'

Magritte's best images don't look like fantasy.

They are dry, tightly painted, matter of fact, and even pedestrian.

They seem to have more in common with reporting than with imagination.

And so the proper response to them is the double-take.

Magritte loved paradox. And he was its absolute master.

And his paradoxes needed the context of real life.

'His paintings are not so much about the world

'as about the ways we find to describe it.

'Magritte was obsessed by the weak hold that language has on what it describes.

'That sense of slippage between word and thing, image and object,

'is one of the sources of Modernist disquiet.

'And in making it his subject, Magritte became one of the artists

'without whom Modernist culture can't be understood.

'His visual booby-traps go off again and again

'because their trigger is thought itself.

'When the cannon fires, the walls of familiar images go down

'and we stand, as the title of this painting tells us,

'on The Threshold Of Liberty.'

The Surrealists had no heroes among politicians, dead or alive,

but they did have a gallery of saints,

of men and women who were considered to have lived out the ideals of the movement before its time.

And of these, the greatest was the Marquis De Sade,

whose castle here at Lacoste in Provence

was considered one of the sacred sites of the Surrealist movement.

The Divine Marquis was the one 18th century man whom the Surrealists respected,

because it was he who had preached the supremacy of desire.

And it was he who had shown what has become a commonplace in our century,

that in order to establish the rule of reason,

the imagination must be censored and repressed.

Sade was the first writer to understand the relationship between sex and politics.

He did most of his writing in prison, which is a good place for thinking about the unthinkable.

He became the unspeakable answer to Rousseau and his milky doctrine

of the natural goodness of man when left in a state of nature.

Not so, said Sade. We don't know what our natures are,

and moreover, we can't find out what they are unless we follow our desires to the absolute limit,

no matter how appalling the disclosures may be.

'Sade was a blasphemer, an atheist, and a traitor to his class, the aristocracy.

'No wonder, then, that he had such an appeal to the Surrealists,

'who were also atheists, blasphemers, and traitors to their class, the Bourgeoisie.

'The Surrealists' tributes to Sade,

'like this proposed monument to him by Man Ray,

'often had a blasphemous tone which may seem a little dated today.

'But the Surrealists were almost all baptised Catholics,

'living in France when the church still had a great deal of power.

'The best crack was by Max Ernst.

'The Virgin Mary spanking the infant Jesus,

'watched by the three wise men,

'Eluard, Breton and Ernst himself.

'Sex, being loaded with taboo, was one of the great Surrealist themes.

'But the Surrealists only stood for one kind of sexual freedom,

'which insisted that imagination could only be set free by single-minded devotion to one woman.

'Yet this romantic spirit did not translate into their art.

'There, the idea of woman was a thing,

'a mannequin or a piece of furniture.

'In Hans Bellmer's sculpture, the woman is no more than a sexual doll,

'abused, manipulated, intensely pornographic.'

WOMAN LAUGHS

'As the 30s wore on, through the Spanish Civil War towards 1939,

'their tone was less frustration than apocalypse.

'Max Ernst summed up the sense of foreboding in one prophetic painting

'called Europe After The Rain,

'a place reduced to creepy namelessness,

'a vacated planet, all ruins and jungle and decay.

'And when the rain, in fact, did come, and the German army rolled into France,

'the Surrealists prudently ran.

'Many of them went to America.

'And so it was in New York that the remains of Surrealism took root and mutated.

'But the greatest American artist of the irrational was already living there,

'in a frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens outside Manhattan.

'His name was Joseph Cornell and he made boxes.

'In one sense, the box was a metaphor of Cornell's own shyness.

'Very few American artists have ever so banished their outward lives to preserve their inward one.

'And there were its emblems, preserved under glass,

'filed away inside the wooden walls.

'They represent a distant reality.

'Not a historical reality, exactly,

'more like a theatre of memory whose images keep crossing and recombining.

'The birds, the planets,

'the charms, the provincial hotels

'and ballerinas and foreign postage stamps.

'It could have looked precious, like Victoriana,

'but it didn't, because Cornell had such a rigorous sense of form,

'strict and spare like good New England carpentry.

'De Chirico's paintings were full of nostalgia for lost experience,

'but in Cornell, there is much less sense of loss.

'Everything is there and possessed, as memories are in the mind.

'Some of the boxes were very elaborate.

'This one he called The Egypt of Mademoiselle Cleo de Merode.

'She was a famous French courtesan of the 1890s,

'renowned equally for her greed and her beauty.

'In effect, Cornell compares her to Cleopatra

'and makes a casket for her with the emblems of Egypt in it.

'A sphinx, sand, pearls, serpents of the Nile, and so on.

'Cornell was already a developed artist, though unknown,

'before the Surrealists came to America.

'The side of the American irrational that got most from Surrealism in the 40s,

'was the work of painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Arshile Gorky,

'later to be numbered among the Abstract Expressionists.

'And among them, the main bridge was Gorky.

'He had a peculiar career, this Armenian refugee,

'with his florid imagination, deep insecurities

'and eventual suicide at 44.

'For the best part of 20 years,

'he turned out pastiches of the artists that he wanted to become.

'Of Picasso, and then of Miro,

'imitating him in paintings like this.

'And then, quite suddenly, Gorky found himself.

'The spidery fluent line that he had got from Miro

'began to describe landscapes of not quite abstract form.

'Shapes like flower stems, tendons, sexual organs, livers and feathers.

'The canvas pulsates.

'It's filled with a kind of glowing, sweaty, pre-conscious life.

'It looks into the body, and not out from it.

'A great issue among the New York painters was myth.

'Like the Surrealists, they felt rational civilisation had let them down.

'They wanted painting to return its audience to what they imagined was primitive reality,

'to art as a magical sign.

'And so Jackson Pollock, in the years before he began to drip paint directly on the canvas,

'used these charged, meaty squiggles of paint

'to translate the shapes of southwest Indian art,

'of rock pictographs and sand paintings,

'into images like this one, The Key, done in 1946.

'Or Male And Female, painted four years before.

'Painting accumulated resonance by appealing to myth.

'But the myths were in decline and the painters were not Indians or cavemen,

'but New Yorkers living in the age of psychoanalysis.

'They were like religious artists without a context.

'And like the Surrealists, they concluded that

'the only unpolluted areas left to the modern imagination

'were the unconscious and the distant past.

'With their tiny audience, and their exalted sense of the artist's role,

'American painters like Mark Rothko or, here, Hans Hoffman in the 1940s, were the last Romantics,

'the last artists to paint as though art had the power to change the objective conditions of life.

'For them, the Surrealist ideal still held true,

'although there was no chance that it would come true.

'And no promised liberation of the mind

'could compare to the real liberation of Europe in 1945.

'The fact that so many of the Surrealists had gone to America

'guaranteed that Surrealism would be a dead issue in France after the war was won.

'After all, they had run away

'and they could no longer command the respect earned by writers

'like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus who had stayed and resisted.

'So as a movement, Surrealism faded,

'and its absorption into chic, which had begun in the late 30s,

'became almost complete.

'The movement that had hoped to reshape the mind of Western man

'ended by advertising booze and cigarettes.'

CHEERING

'But was that all? Not quite.

'For the memory of Surrealism, its deposit of ideas,

'was strip-mined by artist after artist in the 60s and 70s.

'As a proposition about freedom, it still remained infinitely intriguing.

'In 1969, the Romanian artist Christo

'wrapped a whole section of Australian coastline in plastic and rope.

'This harked back to 1920

'when Man Ray wrapped a sewing machine in blanket

'and called it The Enigma Of Isidore Ducasse.

'By the same token, Breton wrote that the simplest Surrealist act,

'the most gratuitous one, would be to walk into the street shooting a revolver at random into the crowd.

'Again, almost 50 years later,

'a Californian named Chris Burden fired a revolver at an airliner taking off over Los Angeles.

'He missed, and this action he called art.

'It is surprising when you look back on the 60s

'to see how much of their cultural surface was affected by Surrealism.

'A lot of the time, the kids who were enacting their pantomimes of desire and revolt didn't know this.

'There was the illusion that the world was being born again,

'the innocence renewed, the old contracts torn up in a new way.

'And the key to this was simply being yourself, whatever that self might be.

'From love-ins to the living theatre to the caterwaulings of stoned poets,

'the word went out that art is me, me, me.

'Art is anything made by anyone called an artist.

'Quite so, but the question that such art begs

'is the same question that a lot of Surrealist activity also skimmed.

'Is the self, that great sacred cow of our culture, automatically interesting?'

ROCK MUSIC

'Or can it only hold our interest as art to the extent that it produces ordered structures?

'Looking back, I don't think there's much choice.

'But in the 60s there was, because then diffused through the West, as in the 20s,

'you had a dandyistic, theatrical revolt based upon a cult of youth,

which, like Surrealism, was a Romantic revival.

'Ecstasy, irrationality,

'old Dionysus trying to assert himself again,

'dressed like a pantomime wizard and nattering about hobbits and cosmic consciousness.

'If there was one link between Surrealism and the 60s,

'it was the illusion that youth was truth.

'By being born, one surpassed history.

'By finding reality intolerable, one became a prophet.

'There was another war, in Vietnam this time,

'to help create an idea of class based on age.

'So it was thought, or rather felt.

'But all this fabric of illusion came apart in the 70s.'

POLICE SIRENS

So what remains of Surrealism? Not much.

It became exactly what it set out not to be, a style.

And not a very durable style at that.

It took European artists the best part of 200 years

to digest the implications of Michelangelo's nudes,

but Surrealism was completely digested

within a matter of 50 years, a quarter of the time.

And in the meantime, its devices have come to look more nostalgic than revolutionary.

The Magrittes and Ernsts that were once the hard nuggets of contradiction

now end up in the salerooms fetching enormous prices,

just more units in the smooth flow of exchange

that blurs the meanings of all art.

But there is another side to it,

because Surrealism was less an art movement

than a rebellion of the mind that chose painting as its vehicle.

It may not choose not to inhabit painting again.

Yesterday the poltergeist was throwing plates in the kitchen,

tomorrow it may turn up in the hall. You don't know.

It's a very durable spirit and it's hard to exorcise.

But it loves everything that is contrary, extravagant and free.

And its very cussedness, its perversity, is a form of innocence,

a declaration of hope.

TRAIN RUMBLES

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