At the Centre Pompidou, a spiral dive into surrealism

There are centenarians who come at a good time. André Breton having written the first in 1924 Manifesto of Surrealismthe Pompidou Center in Paris took the commemoration of the event as a pretext to devote a very large exhibition to the movement.

Pretext because more serious reasons explain the decision: there has not been a major event on the subject at Beaubourg since 2002 – the exhibition was then called “The Surrealist Revolution”; since that date, historical approaches have been very largely renewed; and the multiplication of exhibitions in Europe and elsewhere over the last ten years as well as the constant rise in the prices of surrealist works on the art market have made it obvious that no avant-garde of the past is more present and admired today than this movement. With the Centre Pompidou being doomed to years of closure for renovations, it would have been regrettable if the Parisian institution were the last to acknowledge this development, in five or six years. With “Surrealism”, this is now a done deal.

Bomarzo’s Monstrous Maws

And done on a grand scale: along a spiral path, thirteen chapters follow one another, each defined by a theme (forests, night, etc.), a name (Alice, Mélusine, etc.) – or a notion (dream, eroticism, cosmos, etc.). In each, two types of objects are mainly brought together: visual works and writings. The former are of all material natures: painting, film, drawing, photo, collage, engraving, sculpture, etc. The latter are in the state of manuscripts (drafts, letters) or printed matter (posters, magazines and books). They are either in display cases or on the wall for those of them that have been judged the most important. This means that an exhaustive visit probably exceeds the attention span and endurance of visitors, however passionate they may be, and that “Surrealism” is therefore to be seen in two or three times.

This is its general structure. Before detailing its qualities, however, it must be said that the exhibition begins badly. To evoke, it seems, the surrealists’ taste for fairs and amusement parks, it seemed ingenious to enter through a door inspired, without the slightest genius, by the monstrous mugs of the Mannerist park of Bomarzo and followed by a dark corridor where are placed photographic portraits of the first members of the group, whose names are barely legible in the darkness.

This corridor opens into a round room, the center of the spiral, where pages and editions of the 1924 manifesto are shown. But one cannot look at them without being subjected to, as a soundtrack, a voice reading passages from the manifesto. Which voice is given as that of Breton, reconstituted by an artificial intelligence. Breton had a horror of machines and surrealism never ceased to denounce the frenzied mechanization and industrialization of nature and men by technology. The presence of this digital gadget therefore betrays a complete ignorance of surrealist thought.

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