Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (review)

L'Esprit Créateur In his art he increasingly mixed the animate and inanimate and developed a "body language of hysterics" (159), mutilation, decomposition, cannibalism, ingestion and excretion . His Paranoia-Criticism involved the process of paranoiac delirium controlled and directed by the artist "to systematize confusion and thus contribute to discrediting completely the world of reality" (Oui 1 155; cited 181). It served as an alternative to automatism , a transcription of fantasies and obsessions (psychotic delusions) conjuring images in the imagination. The multiple artistic figuration conveyed "a symbolic representation of the paranoic process" (193). In applying the technique of PC to canvas, DaIi in the mid-30s experimented with anthropomorphic landscapes involving the Gestalt phenomenon of figure and ground reversal that led the viewer to perceive a changing tableau, where, for instance, a landscape became a human or animal figure. Breton likened this activity to the concoction of parlor games, "mere entertainments on the level oÃ- crossword puzzles" (Surrealism and Painting 147; cited 206). Finkelstein clearly documents the slackening in the late '30s in Dali's art/ writing of his aesthetic and formal preoccupations and a turn to commercialism. His abandonment of the "aesthetics of libidinal gratification as the mainspring of his theoretical system" implied a change in his stance vis-à -vis surrealism and "a declaration of liberation " from Bretonian and Freudian thought (241-42). The quasi-autobiographical Secret Life of Salvador DaIi shows DaIi, in the early '40s, moving away from psychoanalysis towards mythology, metaphysics, and mysticism (under the aegis of Gala, whom he associated with the Gradiva myth, suggesting that Dali's art represents the return of the repressed effected by Gala herself, who replaced the paternal super-ego figure of the father). Finkelstein's work is one of the few that fully and clearly account for the radical changes occurring in Dali's art and writing during the formative years of the late '20s through the early '40s. He leads the reader ultimately to pose the question of Dali's importance to modern art and thought. As Finkelstein's subtitle, "The Metamorphoses of Narcissus ," alludes, few artists have so unfetteredly explored their private passions and obsessions , for better or for worse. Dali's art and aesthetics, in their supreme (least commercialized ) moments enriched surrealism by their "masterly visual sophistication" (xiii, Francesco Pellizzi, in his Foreword). Finally, Dali's anti-formalist iconoclasm contributed significantly to exploding the notion of "high art" that underlay modernist theory, leaving a legacy that has helped to carry modern art and thought into the present time of critical scrutiny and artistic-writerly liberation to which many have given the term postmodernism. John Erickson University of Kentucky Martica Sawin. Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press, 1995. Pp. xv + 466. $45. In this valuable study Martica Sawin evokes a creative and tragic epoch through a rich and often personal documentation. She reports in vivid detail the daily routines in studios and at social gatherings of artists in the Surrealist movements in Europe and the U.S. Through her admirable evocation of aspects of the artistic context we can from close up experience the unfolding of interest and interaction between the European Surrealists and certain of the young talents emerging in New York. One must admit however that she works selectively, emphasizing the roles of artists like Motherwell and Gorky and practically ignoring the second generation of the New York School. Her greatest contribution is to present the reader with the complexity of the interaction between Old World modernism and the New York modenists: the one side committed to 98 Winter 1996 Book Reviews literary concerns, occult gestures, and mythological devices, the other—inhabitants of a "land without myth"—more pragmatic, interested in technique, and in theory insofar as it develops or sustains technique. This is true despite the early interest in myth displayed by Pollock, Gottlieb, Rothko, Newman and others, which served them as a way out of the regionalist manners and parochialism of U.S. art in the thirties. Yet, as their characteristic styles matured, they all dropped the literary baggage: in divesting themselves of mythology they were aided especially by automatism, the...