PRESENTATION: Surréalisme-Le Grand Jeu

In 1924, the first manifesto of Surrealism was published in Paris, laying the foundation for a revolution in art whose effects can still be felt today. Challenging the reign of reason following the disaster of the first worldwide armed conflict, André Breton ardently called for reconciling dreams and reality. Play was front and centre in this undertaking. Initially an informal activity that served as the glue holding together Surrealist sociability, play crystallised the birth of a collective mindset defined by a reversal of traditional values, putting the old rules in the dock and inventing new ways of making art.

By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: MCBA Archive

“Le Grand Jeu”, the title of the exhibition, was originally the title of a review published in the late 1920s by a splinter group of young French artists that broke with Surrealism and vehemently refused to rally to André Breton’s movement. The conflict was symptomatic of Surrealism, which fractured and reconfigured itself according to the passions, frictions, and friendships of the moment, making everyone alternately an adherent and a rebel. The first floor of the show, featuring a historical overview, focuses on multiple aspects of play, as much recreational as subversive or critical. It points up the extent to which play was both a way of being in the world and a means of negotiating between reality and the imagination, the communicable and the incommunicable. Play represents a space of liberty bound by certain constraints, and in that space the exhibition aims above all to measure the creative exaltation that the Surrealists put to artistic use. The show continues on the second floor where eight contemporary artists have tried to carry on the burst of creative energies coming from the Surrealists’ anarchistic spirit, which upended our way of imaging the body, language, and objects. In their work, these artists reaffirm at the same time their mistrust of language and their faith in the omnipotence of stories, express their fascination with the line separating the visible and the invisible, and celebrate the presence of eroticism everywhere. The themes of the exhibition in the first floor are: Creative Strategies: Chess is able to absorb its players to the point of rendering the world they are living in abstract. As such, chess played a significant role in the ideological and aesthetic revolutions that occurred in the early years of the 20th century. Much more than pure entertainment for the mind, chess pieces point to an ideal that reflects the real world, serving as allegory for a range of human activities, whether the workings of society, military strategy, or romantic skirmishes. Through the combination of random and predictable elements, chess becomes a metaphor of the Surrealist strategy. While Marcel Duchamp thought of it as a game played against the computer before computers existed, Man Ray tried out his automatism strategy of “disinterested thinking” on the chessboard. Chess is the starting point of this section of the exhibition which reflects Surrealism’s craze for creative strategies, from automatism to children’s games. Chess: The most passionate chess player in the Surrealist milieu was Marcel Duchamp. For him the beauty of chess can be found more in what he refers to as “the grey matter” than in the realm of the observable, leading the way to a conceptual approach to art. Based on a geometrical structure that points to an infinite number of combinations, chess becomes a metaphor of the quest for artistic perfection. Automatism: Just like the exploration of dreams, Surrealist automatism represents a way of freeing the mind and calling into question the rationalism of the modern world. Unconscious artmaking, like scribbling, was a catalyst for many artists who used the process of improvisation when working. While automatism had its emblematic incarnation in the exquisite corpse, it also generated many inventive practices beyond line drawing, including experimental film and photography techniques verging on pure reflex and hallucination. In their 1924 manifesto, the Surrealists described themselves as “modest recording devices”. Children’s games: The Surrealists thought that children, still spared the effects of society, possess a more direct access to the unconscious than adults. Maintaining the myth of naivety and spontaneity, these artists were fascinated by the figure of the prodigy and made going back to childhood one of their artmaking strategies. In the early 1930s, Gisèle Prassinos, who was then all of fourteen years old, stirred interest amongst the Surrealists for her poetic compositions that were done using automatic writing. With her brother, the painter Mario Prassinos, she became involved in an intense creative dialogue in which an often cruel sense of humour surfaces again and again. Starting in the 1940s, the Belgian painter Rachel Baes peopled her world with disturbing-looking little girls plunged in a phantasmagorical world. Le Grand Jeu: In 1923 in Reims, four sixth-formers searching for the absolute, René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Roger Vailland, and Robert Meyrat, formed a group they called “Phrères simplistes” (Simplistic Brodders). Their goal was to recapture the simplicity of childhood and its possibilities of intuitive, spontaneous knowledge, and they experimented with practices involving extrasensory artmaking and telepathic explorations through the use of drugs. Claiming to fashion their day and age, they saw themselves at first in Breton’s Surrealism before revealing their singularity in the short-lived publication “Le Grand Jeu”, which came out in three issues from 1928 to 1930. The Czech-born painter Joseph Sima, the draughtsman and poet Maurice Henry, and the photographer Artür Harfaux rallied to their cause.

The magic of the image: Fleeing Nazi occupation, a group of Surrealist artists took refuge in the hills overlooking Marseille at the Villa Air-Bel in the winter of 1940–1941. While waiting for visas to leave France for the United States, they invented a card game, known since then in French as the “Jeu de Marseille”. The traditional suits take on a symbolic dimension. Clubs become the black keyhole of Knowledge; diamonds, the red stain of blood of the Revolution; spades, the black star of Dreams; and hearts, the red flame of Love. The hierarchy is also turned upside down. The King, the Queen, and the Jack become the Genius, the Siren, and the Magician. The Surrealists often found inspiration in occult symbolism and cultivated the traditional image of the artist as magician, clairvoyant, and alchemist, viewing magic as both poetic discourse and deeply philosophical, linked to a form of individual emancipation. Substituting new images for the old ones, the Jeu de Marseille embodies the starting point of this section, which explores the central role esotericism played in the movement’s development. A changing world: The creation of new archetypes from ancient myths was a constant feature of Surrealist’s work. This imaginary world is peopled with hybrid beings, flowerinsects, and animal-plants, caught in a process of transformation. This reflects the intuited notion of a deep unity in nature, where forms and beings coexist and complement each other. Landscapes take on bodily shapes, portraits morph into landscapes, puppets come alive, flesh becomes stone, while in a play of fantastical reflections, a swan turns into an elephant. Esotericism: From the very first in Surrealism, anarchism and esotericism were closely linked. Challenging the established order involved the advent of magical forces that were directly connected with the unconscious. Many artists used this as their preferred way of perceiving the world, though without adhering to some sort of belief or transcendence. Creating enigmatic images drew on extreme contrasts of form and scale, or integrating elements — illustrations on the face of it — in compositions which are anything but rational. The mysteries of the occult: In 1930, the Second Manifesto of Surrealism summoned the legendary 14th century alchemist Nicolas Flamel. Calling for “the profound, the veritable occultation of Surrealism”, Breton reiterated in the manifesto his fascination with the mysterious and the incommunicable. Artists like Ithell Colquhoun and Kurt Seligmann took their experiments in the realm of the occult to the point of producing anthologies on the subject. Kabbalah, palmistry, tarot cards, even astrology saw a resurgence of interest, generating in their wake coded images that were meant to be deciphered. Endless play: Playing with dice led the Surrealists into the realm of chance. By imagining the blank face of a die they ventured into the limitless playing field of the white page, of the nothingness where everything ends and everything begins anew. Made up of twenty poem-collages, Georges Hugnet’s book  “La septième face du dé” (The Seventh Face of the Die, 1936) is emblematic of this speculative dimension in Surrealism, connecting eroticism and metaphysics. The cover of the book features a reproduction of Marcel Duchamp’s “Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy?” (1921). The latter, a fictional alter ego with a female sounding name akin to “Éros, c’est la vie” (Eros, that’s life), references Duchamp’s autoerotic play with his own work, eventually leading the artist to move beyond gender identities. Taking off from the central figure of Duchamp and his interest in randomness and non-retinal art, this section explores Surrealism’s ramifications in the fields of abstraction and eroticism to the point of imagining a possible end to playing and games. Beyond representation: Reacting to Breton’s injunction in 1942 calling for “absolute automatism”, some artists freed themselves from figurative verisimilitude and turned to abstraction. Resettled in the United States, the French painter Yves Tanguy began a new chapter, painting abstract landscapes suffused with a milky atmosphere, the image of a totally latent world. Designed to create the illusion of volume, Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs appear in motion in the experimental film “Dreams That Money Can Buy” (1947) by the visual artist and filmmaker Hans Richter. While Surrealism was a step toward abstraction for some, many artists never gave up shifting back and forth between the two, seeing nothing incompatible there. The voices from out of the silence: Sonja Sekula and Unica Zürn had an experience in common, both having suffered from mental illness which contributed to the marginalisation of their work’s recognition by the art world. Living and working in New York from 1936 to 1955, Sekula formed connections in the community of expatriate Surrealist artists, which included a rising generation of American Abstract Expressionists. Refusing to adhere to one style alone, she produced works that drew the attention of the critics, who detected the influence of gestural abstraction and Native American art. Zürn, a German artist who exiled herself to Paris in 1953 alongside her fellow artist Hans Bellmer, shifted between writing and drawing. Her spiderlike line gives rise to metamorphic creatures, reflections of her fantasies and fears. Ambivalence of desire: The exploration of the unconscious long enabled the Surrealist artists to question the forms of repression and exclusion dictated by the social conventions then in force. While one part of this output reflects the complex desires of heterosexual male artists and the way they viewed the female body, another addresses more fluid concepts surrounding gender and sexuality. For example, Pierre Molinier’s provocative staged photographs explore the mysteries of auto-eroticism, while the subversive performance of Barbette, a trapeze artist who passed himself off as a woman when doing his routine, questioned the fixed notions of gender. In Paris, Irène Zurkinden gave free rein to her female subjectivity in the expression of her intimacy. These images interrogate traditional ideas of privilege and power while representing the artists’ desires and fantasies.

In the second floor the exhibition has been conceived and laid out as a vast landscape in which works of art coexist, pieces that revitalise the exquisite corps. Playing on the codes of occultism and science fiction Tristan Bartolini’s, “Channeling Ancestors” (2022 – 2024), an installation designed to look like both a ritual space and a scene lifted from some space opera, aims to evoke a recollection of an earlier existence. Artefacts of monumental size are vestiges of an extinct civilisation and are infused with life and movement thanks to projections that show extra-terrestrial entities that speak in their own language, relating the history of their society. Drawing inspiration from the life and work of the Genevan medium Elise Müller, Tristan Bartolini fashions an alter ego from his own body through which he calls forth a queer genealogy in a retro-futurist approach. Gorge Bataille likes to “hack” literature to undermine its authority. Their poetry springs from the clash and subtle mix of different types of language. With “Fatal*e” (2024), they have developed a text that questions the loss of meaning and the quest for beauty. Reconnecting with the literary avant-garde, they have composed a strange object that has neither beginning nor end, like a score whose different sequences would be endlessly reproducible. Working with the graphic designer Roxanne Maillet, they have transcribed on a grand scale a poetry rich in images and steeped in a rebellious adolescent language that fills with emojis when it comes up short. An unruly postbinary typographic wave, “Fatal*e” is part of the research the author has been carrying out on the Langue Bâtarde (Bastard Language). The omnipotence of tales and the modification of narrative under the effects of the imagination are central to Matthias Garcia’s work. Through the figure of the mermaid, he is continuously reformulating the meaning of his paintings. While in Andersen’s cruel tale the little mermaid, learning that the human soul is eternal, rejects her hybrid nature, Garcia’s mermaid is seeking acceptance of her difference. As the characters and motifs rise from the setting, an inner landscape appears that is inhabited by fantastic creatures and children-flowers imbued with an intimate symbolism. A story with a very different moral begins to take shape, like a possible reconciliation between dream and reality. Interested in the history of witchcraft and its connection with feminism, Maëlle Gross has taken a fresh look at the figure of Elise Müller, whom the Surrealists likened to a lunatic clairvoyant, making her into a source of inspiration. In the late 19th century, the Genevan medium, who went by the name of Hélène Smith, experienced sleep-walking trances during which she had visions. In particular, she collected texts that were in Martian and which she transcribed in French, developing on her own a kind of automatic writing. In her installation, the artist appropriates this Martian alphabet to invent a new poetry while redoing episodes of apparitions, spirits, and ghosts by giving the “wicked beast of Astané” the concrete form of a low-tech robot that has arrived from an imaginary country. In her work, Anne Le Troter explores the plasticity of language and the way in which it is tainted by capitalist dictates about efficiency and output. Originating in a series of troubling dreams, “La Pornoplante” (2021 – 2024) is the story of a transmutation, from man to plant, through the colourful erotic account of an erection that grows in the sun and declines in autumn in keeping with nature’s cycle. The text is inspired by ASMR techniques (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response), a method for relaxing that has been in vogue for a dozen years now. Visitors to the show are invited to sit on the benches trimmed with audio cables and physically feel the sound piece that plays out in three chapters. Charlie Malgat invites us to stroll around her installation “Double Paysage” (2024), a soft abstract forest of burnt trees that has sprouted strange pinkish orifices. Covered by a latex envelope, the artist’s favoured material with its fleshy sensual dimension, these inert bodies demand to be caressed. The artist explores the murky areas on the fringes of inside and outside, skins that reveal on the surface what has been patiently constructed and assembled within. With her new video, she introduces a cartoonish character that is both dripping wet and likeable, a kind of farcical alter ego of the artist in a state of decomposition. In her installations, Lou Masduraud is interested in the supply systems ensuring the infrastructure that is essential to human activities, such as street lighting, sewers, and underground passageways. For “Spit Kiss from Earth: (2022), she was inspired by the fountain that Meret Oppenheim designed for Bern’s Waisenhausplatz, an ever-changing biotope. To this organic transformation, the artist has added an erotic dimension with the mouth issuing a stream of water. The presence of orifices, which can also be seen on the walls surrounding the fountain, is a recurring theme in the artist’s work. As an interface between the visible and the concealed, the social body and the private, intimate body, the hole serves as a metonymy that goes beyond the simple mechanics of desire. It also offers the possibility of a break, an invitation to explore the unknown.The imaginative universe of Jakob Rowlinson combines the natural world and medieval symbolism to question the representation of desire and masculinity over time. Fashioned from recycled materials, his masks reappropriate iconographic elements from the Tarot deck while also suggesting the masks used during Carnival or in sex games. The leather faces are hollow, but their perforations lend them a powerful fetishistic dimension. Using a complex technique of collage and assemblage, he employs motifs drawn from the decorative arts and medieval manuscripts, like fig leaves and ferns, to decorate his odd bestiary.

Works by: Flora Acker , Marion Adnams, Rachel Baes, Hans Bellmer, Denise Bellon, Victor Brauner, André Breton , Claude Cahun, Nicolas Calas, Leonora Carrington, René Clair, Ithell Colquhoun, Salvador Dalí, René Daumal, Lise Deharme, Maya Deren, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp, Marcel Duhamel, Germaine Dulac, Nusch Eluard,Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Esteban Frances, Wilhelm Freddie, Alberto Giacometti, Jane Graverol, Henriette Grindat, Vitaly Halberstadt, Artür Harfaux, Jacques Hérold, Violette Hérold, Gladys Hynes, Maurice Henry, Georges Hugnet, Valentine Hugo, Max Jacob, Wilfredo Lam, Willard Maas, Georgette Magritte, René Magritte, Marcel Mariën, Henri Martinie, Mayo, Pierre Molinier, Max von Moos, Max Morise, Meret Oppenheim, Benjamin Péret, Gisèle Prassinos, Mario Prassinos, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Robert Rius, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Sonja Sekula, Kurt Seligmann, Joseph Sima, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, Raoul Ubac, Remedios Varo, Marie Vassilieff, Irène Zurkinden, Unica Zürn, Tristan Bartolini, Gorge Bataille, Matthias Garcia, Maëlle Gross, Anne Le Troter, Charlie Malgat, Lou Masduraud, Jakob Rowlinson

Photo: Mario Prassinos, Sans titre [Étude d’oeil] [Untitled (Study of an eye)], 1937, Watercolour on paper, 19,3 × 29,3 cm, Estate Mario Prassinos, 2024, ProLitteris, Zürich, Photo credit: Thierry Rye, 2024

Info: Curators: Juri Steiner & Pierre-Henri Foulon, Assistant Curator: Paolo Baggi, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (MCBA), Place de la Gare, Lausanne, Switzerland, Duration: 12/4-25/8/2024, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, www.mcba.ch/