We first compare Nougé’s writings with electoral posters, both having the same verbal force. Then the route evokes “coquettes” and the influence of the world of fashion and its advertising. Magritte designed for the Norine fashion house and the painter Jane Graverol, one of the stars of this exhibition, made her self-portrait as a model.
Then we evoke the surrealists’ interest in “fairground people”, fairgrounds,entertainment which will also feed their imagination. Finally, we show the impact on the surrealists of commercial advertising such as that for a Soroléa motorcycle which takes off in an already Magritteian blue sky.
If advertising influenced the Surrealists, it was then the opposite, the creatives of advertising drawing heavily on the imagination of the Surrealists, often to the great dismay of the latter.
The great dive into the century-old history of surrealism
The Jesus brand
Then it’s time for the surrealist object with in a window alongside objects by Man Ray such as the iron with nails, a version of the famous object by Marcel Mariën The unfound (1937): glasses with temples, for just one eye! Marien (1920-1993), the youngest of the great Belgian surrealists with a vast, coherent work, a rebel loving above all freedom. Xavier Canonne, a specialist in Belgian surrealism, sees it as a “putative son of Magritte and Nougé”.
If Magritte is of course very present at the exhibition, it is the funny and iconoclastic objects of Marcel Mariën which emerge as The vicious where a kitchen whisk encloses an egg or Registered trademark, a bust of Jesus pointing at “his” crucifix.
Two female surrealist artists are especially in the spotlight: Jane Graverol whose paintings are, she said, like “conscious dreams” and Rachel Baes who expresses childhood trauma so strongly.
The surrealist object is also the death masks by Magritte of Napoleon and (with a photo of the missing object) of Pascal serving as a target for darts!
The exhibition intends to show that if, in France, André Breton prefers strange, inexplicable objects, Paul Nougé and Belgian surrealism favor the subversion of everyday objects.
The war years were very difficult for surrealism. At the exhibition, you can see the 1942 film by Magritte and Nougé, “Meeting René Magritte”. In the middle of the war, the two artists let loose a little and we see a newspaper with an article on a sexist camp catch fire, a statue start to bleed, a gas mask rubs shoulders with old masks, and this astonishing scene of Magritte opening an oven where a skull is baked. Of course, we did not yet know about the crematorium ovens of the extermination camps, but this image appears like an involuntary and chilling premonition.
After the war, surrealism was in crisis but at the same time it extended to many artists that the “pure” surrealists often refused. The very word surrealism has spread in Belgium to the whole of society. The exhibition shows as possible heirs of surrealism, artists from New Realism, as well as Pop art (with Evelyne Axell), Folon and Broodthaers. Artists incorporate references to Magritte into their works and his personal items such as his bowler hat are sold at auction.
The exhibition closes with a final reminder of what a truly moving object can remain: Painted Graverol The Storming of the Bastille with a prison wall where a bar has become a file, a detail that turns everything upside down, and, next to it, this slogan from Tom Gutt: “Vote Sade”.
“Surrealism, disrupting reality”, Museum of Fine Arts of Mons, until February 16
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