Exhibit of the week: Drawing Surrealism

Morgan Library & Museum, New York

Through April 21

In an age when amateurs can warp images with just the click of a mouse, the works of the surrealists “still pack a psychological punch,” said Peter Plagens in The Wall Street Journal. Drawing may in fact have been the movement’s ideal medium: It seems to have offered a more direct route than painting to the subconscious mind that artists like Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró were trying to access. So why no one previously mounted a major exhibition of the surrealists’ drawings is a bit of a mystery. This fine show remedies history’s oversight by creating a viewing experience that itself feels surreal. The Morgan Library is a beaux arts landmark; witnessing the juxtaposition of its “primly proper fustian ambiance” with “all that dream-like sex and death” is like “seeing a locomotive coming out of a fireplace.”

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Grouped by technique, the Morgan’s show offers “a variety and briskness unusual to exhibitions of drawings,” said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Few of the 165 works suggest that any of surrealism’s champions were able to turn off their conscious minds completely, though the source of the most convincing example is a surprise. In an untitled 1927 ink drawing, Dalí—that fussiest of artists—created “a superb tangle of lines and splatters that looks like nothing so much as an early Pollock.” Still, the movement’s foremost early innovator was probably Max Ernst, who pioneered the use of mass-market imagery in collage and also kick-started frottage (pencil rubbings on paper). As his inventions and those of others were taken up by like-minded artists in Britain, Japan, Spain and Mexico, a “fertile bedlam” was unleashed. Not surprisingly, this show’s second half “provides plenty to occupy the eye.”

To appreciate the power of surrealist drawing, look to Francis Picabia’s Olga, said Ed Voves in the California Literary Review. Part of a series of experimentations, this 1930 portrait superimposes a loose sketch of the subject’s face over a more finished likeness in which the model stares straight at the viewer. “In a brilliant stroke,” Picabia positioned one eye of the sketchy portrait in the middle of the other image’s forehead—invoking the “third eye” that several Eastern religions use as a symbol of heightened spirituality. Did Picabia plan that allusion—“or did this amazing detail grab his attention only as the creative process unfolded?” Either way, it “leaves us with a great deal to ponder,” and possibly, to dream about.