Totally Surreal

Bryan Appleyard bemoans the lack of interest in Britain for surrealist art:

Of all the 20th-century art movements, only surrealism really sticks in the popular imagination. In Britain, this is further reinforced by the way surrealism itself, not just the name, has always been a native form of fun. From Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, via the Goons, Monty Python, the films of Terry Gilliam, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, to the current Channel 4 series Green Wing, the British have always laughed at — and, I think, felt freed by — the apparently capricious subversion of dull reality. Surrealism is in our blood.

But not in our heads. Go to any important gallery and the impressionist rooms will be packed, the surrealist rooms — apart from the odd Salvador Dali or Magritte — ignored.

As a high art movement, as an intellectual programme, surrealism exists as a kind of afterthought, perhaps as a minor tributary of modernism, but not much more.

It's an interesting - not to say symptomatic - contrast between the English and French, this surrealism business. As Appleyard rightly notes, British culture is steeped in surrealism, though we never bothered to give it a name, or form a movement, or write books about it. It's just an aspect of our lives, from whimsy at one end to out-and-out weird at the other. It just comes naturally.

Then along come the French and go all high-culture and philosophical about it. They've invented a new movement! It's revolutionary! It's going to change the world! It's a whole new mode of being!

What it is, it's culture from the top down: as though something only exists when some intellectual's written a manifesto about it. It's what you get when you combine the kind of anti-clericalism of naughty boys rebelling against their Catholic upbringing with a lot of Freud and a little bit of Marx. It ends up with the absurdly self-important and humourless Andre Breton - the Pope of surrealism, a movement supposedly dedicated to liberty of the imagination - excommunicating heretics with all the ruthlessness of a Stalin.

And it's kind of annoying that any kind of weirdness now gets described as "surreal", and we're meant to thank the bloody French for it.

Comments

[Bryan Appleyard]

Thanks for referring to my piece. You may be a bit hard on the French, but, in principle, I couldn't agree more
Bryan