Surrealist? He's just a very naught boy

Mould-breaking geniuses, sex-mad misfits... or both? Veteran people watcher Desmond Morris paints one of the most vivid pictures yet of Dalí, Magritte and their very peculiar posse

These days, the adjective ‘surreal’ is applied to anything and everything. If someone on Made In Chelsea takes a sip of still water thinking it will be sparkling, or bumps into a next-door neighbour on the street, she is more than likely to describe both experiences as ‘surreal’.

But in the Twenties, when the word was first coined, it was intended to mean something infinitely more rarefied. In the Surrealist Manifesto, André Breton, the bossy-boots of the movement, defined Surrealism as ‘psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express… the actual functioning of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern’.

In the visual arts, it gave us impossible objects, such as Dalí’s melting clocks and Magritte’s apple the size of a room. It was, if you like, an assault on the whole notion of common sense, on the idea that anything can be taken for granted. Desmond Morris, the author of this lively, gossipy run-down of its key exponents, describes it as ‘not in origin an art movement but a philosophical concept – a rebellion against the establishment that had given the world the hideous slaughter of World War I’.

Others have been less high-minded in describing its origins. An early Surrealist, the Spanish film-maker Luis Buñuel, said: ‘We were nothing, just a small

group of insolent intellectuals who argued interminably in cafés and published a journal.’ One of a handful of female Surrealists, Méret Oppenheim, described her fellow members simply as ‘a bunch of bastards’. The rebellious Giorgio de Chirico was even more direct, calling them ‘that group of degenerates, hooligans, childish layabouts, onanists and spineless people who had pompously styled themselves surrealists’.

It’s hard to read this book without wondering whether de Chirico may have been on to something. Quite a number of the major artists roped in by Morris for his survey – Picasso, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Giacometti – were only tangential surrealists, who put their heads around the surreal door while on their way to something bigger. For them, it was less a radical movement than a youthful phase, like acne.

Many of the others were more notable for the craziness of their lifestyles than for the excellence of their art. Méret Oppenheim used to enjoy walking on the ledges of high buildings. Leonor Fini’s hobby was visiting mortuaries to look at corpses.

She attended her introductory surrealist meeting dressed as a cardinal, explaining that she wanted to find out how it felt to wear the clothes of a man who would never know a woman’s body.

They were as much pranksters as artists. Salvador Dalí famously arrived at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London leading two Russian wolfhounds, carrying a billiard cue and dressed in a deepsea diver’s suit. He was booked to give a talk, but his diver’s helmet made him inaudible. This meant it was not immediately apparent that he was starting to suffocate. When he collapsed, no one could manage to turn the bolts of his helmet. A spanner arrived just in time to prevent him from dying. The book might just as aptly have been titled ‘The Sex Lives Of The Surrealists’. Desmond Morris makes no apology for devoting so much attention to the extraordinary range and voracity of their sexual pursuits. ‘Knowledge of Picasso’s amorous activities is of more than passing interest because they provide the explanation for the subject matter of many of his works of art,’ he writes, but he doesn’t hold back on any of the others, either. According to her husband, Eileen Agar was always ‘trying to do something that cannot be done, such as making love standing up in a hammock’. E L T Mesens liked to watch while his wife had sex with younger men, and so too did Salvador Dalí. The English grandee Sir Roland Penrose could only get going if handcuffs were involved. And so on.

A diagram of who was having sex with whom would end up looking like a great tangle of rubber bands, with Max Ernst in the middle, linked to virtually everyone. The German surrealist had a ménage à trois with Paul Eluard and his wife Gala. Gala then went off with Dalí, and Ernst went off with Leonora Carrington, before marrying the wealthy collector Peggy Guggenheim, who had a bet with her sister Hazel as to who would be the first to bed 1,000 men.

While married to Peggy, Ernst enjoyed a ménage à trois with Peggy’s daughter Pegeen and the Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta. Keep up at the back! Matta in turn had an affair with Agnes, the wife of the Armenian surrealist Arshile Gorky, as a consequence of which Gorky chased Matta around Central Park with a stick. After Gorky committed suicide, André Breton summoned a meeting of the Surrealists, who voted to expel Matta from their group on the rather old-fashioned grounds of ‘moral turpitude’. It is striking how many of the Surrealists were the rebellious children of strict disciplinarians. Perhaps it was inevitable that the naughtyschoolboy side of the Surrealists, dedicated to thumbing their noses at conventional art and morality, required a headmaster.

He came in the shape of André Breton, himself the son of a policeman. Breton existed in a self-important flurry of rules and punishments and threats of expulsion. He was, says Morris, ‘a pompous bore, a ruthless dictator, an extreme homophobe and a devious hypocrite’. At one point, Morris includes a handy list of artists Breton expelled from the movement. It’s 20-strong, and includes virtually all the most illustrious names, including Picasso, Ernst, Dalí and Giacometti.

Breton even managed to fall out with René Magritte, who remains by far the most impressive of the Surrealists. Breton had invited René and his wife Georgette to dinner, along with Luis Buñuel and his fiancée. Before the meal was over, Breton had lost his temper. ‘He suddenly pointed at a small cross that Madame Magritte was wearing around her neck,’ recalled Buñuel, ‘and announced that this cross was an outrageous provocation.’

One of Breton’s rules, you see, was that religion had no place in the Surrealist movement. When he returned home to Belgium, Magritte spent an evening burning every document he had that related to the French Surrealists, and for the next eight years he refused to speak to Breton. The Lives Of The Surrealists is an exceptionally lively, crisply written, independentminded survey of one of the most bizarre groups of misfits who ever lived. Remarkably, its author is now 90. Though still best known from his days as a prolific TV presenter, he has also been a lifelong Surrealist painter. Understandably, Morris introduces himself (‘On a personal note…’) into quite a few chapters. ‘I once made Francis Bacon laugh when I told him that he was the only artist whose work had made me physically sick’ is the way one chapter opens. ‘When you shook hands with Alexander Calder it did not feel like the clasp of a highly refined artist, but more like the grip of a bearlike steel-worker,’ begins another.

Morris’s most illuminating personal anecdotes concern his days as the curator of London Zoo, when he became fascinated by the paintings produced by a chimp called Congo. They were not random splashes, he says, but ‘visually controlled abstract compositions’. Picasso owned one, and Miró wanted one too.

When Miró came to see the zoo, Morris let him watch a chameleon as it shot out its unbelievably long tongue to catch a large insect. ‘Miró’s response was that of an excited child, his eyes lighting up as the chameleon struck.’ He then arranged for a huge python to be wrapped around Miró’s body, before presenting him with a painting by Congo. In return, Miró gave Morris two of his own sketches, one for him, and one for his wife. ‘Two Mirós for one Congo struck me as amazingly generous,’ he observes.

Miró once said: ‘When I stand in front of a canvas, I never know what I am going to do – and nobody is more surprised than I at what comes out.’ Presumably, this is what Congo felt, too, but it was his great good fortune that he was never obliged to sign up to an artistic movement, with its hectic schedule of showing-off and falling-out. Instead, this dedicated chimp just got on with his work.