Surrealism was an artistic movement that delved into the unconscious and expressed things that weren’t commonly seen in paintings during the more traditional artistic periods that preceded it. Knowing this prior to my trip to MoMA, I had no idea of what to expect from the works of art that I would see. In my experience, most of the time the creations that I’d seen in museums hadn’t made much sense anyway. So my question even before my visit was, what would make these surrealist works of art any different just because they claimed to be psychological and not just “abstract” and illogical?
After reflecting on all of the surrealist paintings and sculptures that I saw, one of them stuck out to me. All of the paintings were very unusual but through all of the abstract ideas and images, there was only one that really stood out to me as what I think surrealism is. Nothing was clear and even though it was apparent that there were different concepts and intentions present in the painting, they all seemed to blur together just as thoughts do in your mind. In my opinion this painting embodied its artistic movement. It seemed to pinpoint all of the ideas that surrealism represented.
The name of the painting is “The Vertigo of Eros” by Roberto Matta (1944). From one perspective it looks like nothing, just shapes, lines and shadings all combined into one piece of “art”, similar to most of the other paintings I saw of this period. However, when I took a second look at the painting as a whole and not just as the ambiguous figures floating in space I realized that this painting was actually what I would expect the inside of an artist’s mind to look like. The more I looked at it the more I felt as if I were standing in the unconscious of Matta himself. Coincidentally I later found out that this was a painting that Matta called an Inscape, which in his words was the “interior landscape of the artist’s mind interconnected with his external reality”. It was captivating how he had recreated an internal vision through a medium as simple as paint and a canvas and that even though it was his interpretation I could almost see the world he was trying to express.
The second piece that I chose was from a period called Dadaism. It was one of the artistic movements that almost directly preceded surrealism and had a great influence on its formation. One of the main things that separate Dadaism and Surrealism is their intention. Dadaism purposely strived to go against tradition while Surrealism was supposed to be an honest expression of what the artists felt subconsciously. Even though it did break the conventional rules of art, it wasn’t intentional. The name of the second painting I chose was M’Amenez-y or in English “Take Me There” by Francis Picabia. The reason I chose this was because of its bold and deliberate effort to go against the grain. The words painted into it literally made fun of artists and art itself. I thought it was interesting to see the progression from works like this to that of Roberto Matta and the other surrealists.
Reading Berger and Barnett did change my experience at the museum the way I thought it would. I appreciated seeing the original works and made myself more open to think about more than the typical assumptions made about things labeled as art. One of the most important things I realized was that even the most aesthetically pleasing things are just shapes, lines and colors so its up to the people enjoying the art to find beauty and meaning in it even if its not what you would normal conceive as beautiful. “Works of art have nothing to say except what we say to them.” (James Elkins)
-Yasmin Jones
