The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
You don’t have to be mad to be a surrealist… but it helps
From hair omelettes to custard-filled wellies – Sam Leith takes a funny turn through a new exhibition that celebrates the great eccentrics of British art
‘The rolling English drunkard,” wrote GK Chesterton, “made the rolling English road.” We could add that the bonkers British eccentric makes some bonkers British art. This country’s proud history of art and literature has been swelled both at the margins and, in some cases, right at the heart by the work of writers and artists who are not quite like the other ducks. And a new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery puts a welcome focus on one strand of that history – in the form of a celebration, 100 years on, of British Surrealism.
That, perhaps, should be surrealism with a small “s” as well as a capital one. For as much as the exhibition examines the self-declared Surrealists of the early 20th century, it also ranges back as far as the early modern period to trace the “ancestors” of their work, and finds a common sympathy between artists more usually kept in separate categories. We know the surreal when we see it.
Even the Surrealist movement, as the exhibition’s curator, David Boyd Haycock, notes, was somewhat amorphous. “To try to say today, this artist was a surrealist and that one was not is to play something of a guessing game,” he says. The Dulwich exhibition offers a cheeringly wide interpretation of the brief – including Francis Bacon, Henry Moore and Conroy Maddox, Edward Burra and Marion Adnams – and traces its roots right back to the beginning of the 17th century.
Surrealism, a term minted in 1917 by Apollinaire, was turned into a self-conscious movement in 1920 by the poet André Breton. It “burst from the continent on a Britain mired in conservatism and insularity,” the art historian Ariane Bankes has written, adding that the British group “advocated a new and disruptive visual language to reflect dangerous times, and to free art and expression from the obsolete ideals of the past … but for all its meetings, manifestos and exhibitions, it was never as cohesive and committed as the
mauve, filled the gardens of his stately home with paper flowers and outfitted his pet dogs with pearl necklaces.
Berners is not without rivals for the crown of Britain’s most eccentric aristocrat – the polygamous Marquess of Bath filled his stately home with “wifelets” and painted scenes from the Kama Sutra all over the walls, while the second Lord Rothschild was so busy riding giant tortoises and enjoying his zebra-drawn carriage that he never got around to making much art at all – but his epitaph could stand for that of many of the great English oddballs: “His great love of learning/ May earn him a burning/ But, Praise the Lord!/ He seldom was bored.”