Even Better Than the Surreal Thing

Hop on a train into London and get off near St Paul’s Cathedral, trot across the Millennium Bridge over the Thames and into the Tate Modern and take the lift to Level Three. There you’ll find an exhibition entitled Poetry And Dream. Consult your programme: “The large room at the heart of the wing is devoted to Surrealism, while the surrounding displays look at other artists who, in different ways, have responded to or diverged from Surrealism, or explored related themes such as the world of dreams, the unconscious and archetypal myth. These displays also show how characteristically Surrealist techniques such as free association, the use of chance, biomorphic form and bizarre symbolism have been reinvigorated in new contexts and through new media, often at far remove from the intentions of their pioneers.”

You’ll see a crow and a jackdaw pinned to the wall by arrows, an untitled 1979 work by the Italian artist Jannis Kounellis. You’ll see tiny schoolchildren sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of Picasso’s Three Dancers, sketching in their notepads. You’ll see an early work by Jackson Pollock, Naked Man With Knife, a wartime allegory bulging with muscle and violence. You’ll see paintings by Dali and Bacon and Ernst and Duchamp and Man Ray. And in a room entitled Realisms, you’ll see works of portraiture by Diego Rivera, Max Beckman and Meredith Frampton, which on the face of it have little to do with Surrealism, such is their uncanny fidelity to the laws of light and form.
It may seem like a rudimentary observation, but the most striking thing about witnessing a Picasso or a Dali close up, is how even the smallest stroke is a choice, the product of inner debate transformed by physical effort. Nothing arrives on the canvas by accident, even if it’s an accident.
Sometimes the paintings are enhanced by biographical context. Picasso’s Nude Woman With Necklace might not be considered one of his major works, but the circumstances of its creation make it extraordinary – completed in a single day when the painter was 87 years old, it both depicts and defies the artist’s struggle with old age. Like Yeats’s late poetry, it pits the virile forces of imagination against physical decay, a rage against the dying of the light.
“Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”