A recent visit to the Prado, Reina Sofia and the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid became a handy excuse to read two books on seemingly disparate artists separated by over a century. Desmond Morris, more famous for The Naked Ape, casts his beady, zoologist’s eye on the lives of the surrealists in the book of the same name.
More a philosophical concept than an art movement, surrealism was a response to the horrors of World War I and waned by the time the second World War ended in 1945. But some of the greatest art in the modern world was created by the surrealists in that intervening period under the leadership of the often-dictatorial Andre Breton — his run-ins with Salvadore Dali are among the many delights of the book. Morris profiles 32 artists, and it’s a testament to his talents that other than being a zoologist and a minor surrealist painter himself, he is a superbly observant and entertaining writer, reflecting the surrealist ethos of treating the tragedies of the world as a joke.
About Rene Magritte he writes, for instance: “He spent his whole adult life trying to think up of novel ways of insulting the commonsense values of everyday existence.” Little surprise then that whenever Magritte fell short of money he would cheerfully dash off fakes of works by Picasso, Braq, Paul Klee and even the old master, Titian.
Francisco Goya is known as the last of the old masters and the first of the modern greats. Robert Hughes’s biography, simply called Goya, is written with great brio and unabashed admiration. A former court painter, Goya, like the surrealists, was changed by a war, in his case, by Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. Goya’s Los Disparates, a series of etchings in black and white and aquatint, evoke the horrors of war such that they have been called “the greatest interpreters of anguish the West has known.” In the winter of his life, Goya, rendered completely deaf, painted a series of works directly onto the walls of his house, now known as the black paintings. The grotesque imagery of goblins and witches and tortured folk seem like the works of a fevered subconscious. And while he was never classified as such, who is to say that Goya’s interpretation of Saturn Devouring His Son — that allegory of the cannibalizing tendencies of societies and nations – is not one of the great surrealist paintings?
{{/usCountry}}Francisco Goya is known as the last of the old masters and the first of the modern greats. Robert Hughes’s biography, simply called Goya, is written with great brio and unabashed admiration. A former court painter, Goya, like the surrealists, was changed by a war, in his case, by Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. Goya’s Los Disparates, a series of etchings in black and white and aquatint, evoke the horrors of war such that they have been called “the greatest interpreters of anguish the West has known.” In the winter of his life, Goya, rendered completely deaf, painted a series of works directly onto the walls of his house, now known as the black paintings. The grotesque imagery of goblins and witches and tortured folk seem like the works of a fevered subconscious. And while he was never classified as such, who is to say that Goya’s interpretation of Saturn Devouring His Son — that allegory of the cannibalizing tendencies of societies and nations – is not one of the great surrealist paintings?
{{/usCountry}}READ MORE: HT editors pick their best reads of 2023