Surrealism

• The Masters of Surrealism

The Human Condition Magritte

Bosch's work made such an impact on people, and was kept very much alive by Pieter Bruegel (1525 - 1569) who followed fairly soon after him and used several ideas and motifs of Bosch's in his own work, that for a few decades Surrealism continued to exist, but only mildly compared to other main styles of the Northern Renaissance, and eventually it disappeared altogether. For two or three hundred years, images became once again recognisable, with much genius but little fantasy. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries however, a renewed interest in Surrealism was sparked by a band of men who formed a group much as had those marvellous men formed the band of Impressionists, and yet another group the Pre-Raphaelites. Who knows what sparks off different movements? Perhaps it is like the first heart beat and there is no explanation. Or perhaps, in the case of Surrealism, dreaming becomes preferable, at least visually, to the horrors surrounding everyone as they become ever more conscious. From poverty and hunger to wars and disease, all of which had existed from time immemorial but which was now being really noticed, and questioned, perhaps an escape into a dream-world of imagery is really quite understandable.

This group of artists, to name a few of the better known ones, included de Chirico, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamps (who later founded "Dadaism") Giacometti and Hans Bellmer, a phenomenal draughtsman but whose work is so sexually graphic that unfortunately it stays within the genre of Erotic Art and so is only known to those whose interests include that genre. One cannot discuss Surrealism without mentioning Magritte, who was the wittiest and most humorous of them all, and expressed himself with often technical excellence and always marvellously sharp humour. Finally there is of course, the one whose name became virtually synonymous with the genre, Salvador Dali. Picasso and Mattise both toyed with Surrealism during their youthful and experimental periods, but each moved on to further experimenting which took them into realms far from the figurative, which is an essential part of Surrealism. Finally, it fascinates me as I am surprised by it, that even in this day and age of incredible world-wide communication, it is still possible for an artist to be great but remain virtually unknown. A technician very nearly as sophisticated as Dali, and with a marvellous sense of innovation and imaginativeness was Claude Verlinde, who I doubt if many people reading this article have ever even heard of. In spite of that, I personally consider him one of the Surrealists par excellence, really up there with the best of them.

It must be remembered that these articles are subjective. They are merely my opinions, but based not just on knowledge alone, they include a great deal of experience, within the heart and Soul of Art; and experience, at least for Leonardo da Vinci, was as essential to art as oxygen is to breathing. In my subjective opinion, since taste is such a personal and subjective (and fickle!) thing, I have always felt that if an artist manages to paint at least one work in his lifetime that becomes well known and loved by all who know it, then he has justified his existence as an artist. Your immediate reaction may be one of surprise, thinking that just one work is surely far too little. I'm sure you could think of at least three paintings by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rubens or Rembrandt. Yes, but not everyone could possibly aspire to those heights of genius, but still they can produce a winner - even just one. I bet in conversation with you I could find several paintings you like enough to know perhaps their title, perhaps not even the name of the artist, but you've just always "seen it around" and loved it. Well that's what I mean. If an artist has caused that reaction at least once he is redeemed. Of course, most artists hope to achieve many more than a single work that hits the cultural spot. But one is OK, in my view.

Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity Dali

I explain that above to introduce the subject of my next paragraph, Salvador Dali. (1904 - 1989) . Having established the personal/subjective basis of these articles I can tell you that I knew Dali and didn't like him at all. However, I have never allowed my opinion of a person to influence my feelings about his or her work. This is true to the degree that if Fanny, my wife, had started drawing and it hadn't been particularly extraordinary, even though I love her to distraction, had she asked me I would have simply said that I thought it was "fine" as long as it gave her pleasure to do it, but that I personally didn't find it extraordinary in any way. Nothing would make me lie about any reaction I may feel towards any work of art. In fact, ironically, when I first saw even just the doodles Fanny had done I went around like a lunatic trying to convince her of the degree to which I believed that she was gifted. Much as she respects my knowledge and opinion, she didn't really believe me until she started showing her work publicly. Happily, a universally positive reaction (to say the least) convinced her, and she just goes on and on, reaching forever greater heights. But I will write about her in more detail in another article. I just wanted you to understand the degree to which I am honest as to my opinions, for what they might be worth.

So, I didn't like Dali. I don't think an artist has to be a clown or take advantage of peoples' ignorance, or even of peoples' celebrity worship. Dali did all those things, all the time, often to the point of insulting people in unimaginable ways. For me that is intolerable. Dali was rude, ill-mannered and egotistical to a degree repulsive to me. However, I believe that he painted just enough work of the quality I was talking about earlier to have justified his (artistic) existence. I agree for example with all those who claim that his "Christ of St. John of the Cross" was the greatest religious painting of the 20th Century, as I believe that Honey Potter's "Crucifixion of the Female Principle" is the greatest painting of the twenty first century, thus far. There are another half dozen - at the most - paintings by Dali which I think brilliant, and his ingenuity in inventing the melted watch or the multi-drawered figure was sheer magic. But for me, the rest was all just hyperbole, publicity - most of which he unfortunately believed, even though he had created it!

Self Portrait with Bananas Christian

My personal experience of Dali was that he admired my drawings and so asked me to draw his portrait. (The full story is in the book "A.Christian," with a reproduction of the drawing I did.) At our sitting, I found Dali so obnoxious that I abandoned the work and returned to my studio (in New York.) On reflection, the idea that one artist should treat another with disrespect made me feel so angry that I ended up drawing a self-portrait, giving Dali the V-sign with my fingers. A poem about him spilt out of me as I drew and so I wrote it in mirror script on the left hand side of the drawing when I had finished it. I felt completely redeemed, and I enjoy that drawing (and sell many prints of it) even to this day; had he not behaved so badly I would never have done it, and so I end up actually thanking Dali - for being such an ill-mannered-clown.

Two things to end this article: First of all let me say that my favourite Surrealist will always be Hieronymus Bosch. Because of the degree to which I love and admire those half dozen Dali greats I would put him second on my list, with various others following closely on his heels, including Claude Verlinde. But in the end I would also say that Surrealism is my favourite genre in Art, especially when it is mixed with my other favourite genre, that of Erotic Art.

Secondly, as far as my own forays into Surrealism is concerned, before I became completely committed to the genre from the beginning of 1994, the first ever Surrealist work I painted was "Dancing Bananas." I was living in Bali a the time, and preparing for the birth of one of my children, Melodi in fact. I was planning to paint "Ms.B," a work based on the famous Caravaggio painting of Bacchus, and for that reason had a large basket of fruit in my studio. At one particular moment, the bunch of bananas seemed to leap out of the basket, I just couldn't stop looking at them and finding them marvellous in every way. Colour, form and volume. Since I was still painting occasional works to add to my "Worship Series" at that time, I took a little "Worship" panel and sketch in my bunch of bananas. The view from my studio window interfered with my concentration and so I quickly painted it in the background, rather than the more conventional plain background I might have given it. I then painted the bananas, and found an emptiness which didn't please me in the bottom left hand corner of the panel. Awaiting the birth of Melodi, prams and nannies were in my mind, and so I quickly added that image in the too-empty corner. I was thrilled by the work and couldn't stop looking at it for the rest of the day. It took altogether two and a half hours to paint.

Dancing Bananas Christian	Lilly Island Christian	Melodi Roses Christian

My second foray into Surrealism was when I painted, later that year or perhaps the following year, a large bunch of Lillies. Loathe to fill my canvas with the usual plain muted background and still in love with the view from my studio, I incorporated parts of that view and simply let my imagination run wild until the composition and feeling of the work satisfied me. I then titled it "Lilly Island."

When Melodi was born, in London in May of 1989, during a brief visit back to the UK for the first time in many years, I was amazed at the beauty I found in so many London gardens. So much so I went through a period of a few weeks, around Melodi's birth, of painting flowers. When I found these dark red ones in a florist I couldn't resist them, and painted them the day after Melodi was born, in celebration of the event. Of course the painting was far too sentimental to sell, and I lived with it for the next few years, by which time I had moved to India. Ten years had passed since Melodi's birthday when I really became conscious of Hieronymus Bosch, and driven wild with excitement by his work. By that time I was finding my "Black Roses" a little too plain and so I found a Bosch landscape that I loved and painted it into the background of the "Melodi Roses." To balance a too empty area in the left foreground I then added the rolled over nude for good measure; at last the painting pleased me totally.

It seems that no matter what my personal opinion of Dali as a person, my art can't escape him. At the end of 1990 I was living in Bali. There I met an extraordinary man who was half Argentinian and half German. He was very tall and built like a hero of old, a magnificent specimen whom I often thought would make a perfect model for a "Samson" I always had at the back of my mind to paint. However, instead of using him as a model I discovered that he made the most amazing and highly original frames, and I commissioned him to make some for me, which he did brilliantly. During the months he was working on those frames we became friends, and I dropped round to his house periodically, both to check on the frames' progress and just to visit him for tea and chat, as I found him such a unique individual. One day on such a visit, I noticed an amazing little "object" sitting on his terrace. I asked him about it, and he told me he had been beachcombing that morning and found lots of small useless objects thrown away that had caught his eye. He had brought them all back to his house and stuck them together to create the "thing" I was seeing, and by which I was so fascinated. I asked him if I could borrow it to paint and, laughing at such an idea, he said of course.

Guernica Christian	Persistence of Memory Dali

The more I examined the object the more I felt a strange kind of malevolence in it, some deep symbolism that I didn't understand but connected to war in some way. At that time, in January of 1991, the Gulf War took place and I was deeply depressed by it, and wanted to express my feelings in paint. Somehow the painting of "War and Peace" evolved from those feelings, and I put the little object borrowed from my friend Pedro in the background, symbolising war no matter how personally or obscurely. That painting was started on the first day of a war which happily didn't escalate and was over far more quickly than many people believed it would be. The day I completed the painting, some kind soul passed by our property to inform us that the war had come to an end. Still touched by the object, I painted it again, this time in the exact reverse position of "War and Peace," making it the main subject of the composition with the robed mannequin in the background. Finally, still so fascinated by it, I painted this small "Worship Series" version of it. Since I had come to attach it so strongly to war, and the most famous name that sprang to my mind in connection to war was "Guernica" I titled it thus. With this work however, I unconsciously invited two thorns in my side to exist. The first was that the name "Guernica" is given to one of what I have always considered to be the worst of Picasso's (to me) extremely dubious oeuvre, and so I became quite irritated later when people kept asking me if the painting was indeed a tribute to Picasso. And even more irritating was that people kept looking at my little painting - which I so loved simply because I so loved the object I had portrayed - and saying knowingly, even with an occasional "I understand" wink, "Ah yes, Salvador Dali." I must say that until this began happening I had been so carried away by my delight in this object I hadn't even noticed its similarity to the kind of forms Dali often created, and the last thing I was thinking of when I painted it was him. However, over the years I have become a little more tolerant of him as a person as my admiration of him as an artist tempers the aggravation, so anyone seeing a "Dali" influence will not be shot at dawn - but they would be wrong.

Detail from Self Portrait with Ballerina Christian

I have always had a particular interest in ballerinas, since attending many ballet classes as a child to accompany someone I was close to who was studying ballet at that time (see "God's Brush Vol. 1" soon available on this website.) And so over a period of about a year I worked a self portrait into a composition which included various areas of Bosch and others of Pieter Bruegel. The detail from this work shows the Bosch area, and I love the way our work blends so well together.

Finally, in 1994, I was painting a self portrait to celebrate my recent permanent commitment to Surrealism. In the background is the just-finished first building on my estate in India, which now comprises five houses and a half completed castle/studio. Dali came to mind in that moment and I couldn't resist poking a bit of fun at him; as explained above, our relationship only inspired such an attitude in me, and so I painted him as the prick I thought he was. Alright I admit it, a prick who created a few marvellous paintings and ideas. I still love this painting (it's Fanny's favourite self-portrait to date,) and I am presently still totally committed to Surrealism and enjoying all its aspects more than any previous period in my painting life.

Anthony Christian

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