Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood by David Hopkins (review)

The 59th Venice Biennale, which opened in April 2022, announced that its title, The Milk of Dreams, was taken from a notebook of children's stories and drawings called Leche del sueño made in Mexico by the surrealist Leonora Carrington. "Carrington's stories describe a world set free, brimming with possibilities," said Biennale curator Cecilia Alemani, referring to the metamorphosed characters that Carrington created during the second half of the 1950s, such as the boy "Headless John," who has wings in place of ears and a head that detaches and gleefully flies away.¹ However, Biennale organizers also clarified that they selected Carrington's notebook, made as a gift for her own children, because it is an "allegory of a century that imposed intolerable pressure on the individual" (da Silva, "Venice Biennale").

If the Venice Biennale's embrace of surrealism (via Carrington) as somehow emblematic of both the past and present can be seen as an indication of surrealism's growing cultural currency in the years leading up to its centenary in 2024, then a new and expansively erudite study by art historian David Hopkins can help us get to the bottom of what exactly such cultural ascendancy for surrealism means. Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood insightfully confronts surrealism's insistent pairing of the promise of youth and childhood with the various struggles and compromises that besiege adulthood, just as surrealism itself predicated the transformative power of the marvelous upon the need to overcome the limitations of modern life.

The photograph on the cover of Dark Toys evokes something of the fraught nature of surrealism's investment in childhood that Hopkins unflinchingly addresses in his account. In a snapshot taken in Paris in 1938, Max Ernst faces us, thrusting one leg over an enormous antique rocking horse belonging to his lover, Leonora Carrington, who owned it as a child. This was the same rocking horse that found its way into paintings such as Carrington's Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse), also from this period. Just a year later, Ernst and Carrington would be torn apart by the outbreak of World War II, and following a series of horrific traumas, Carrington eventually settled in Mexico, where she would create the children's notebook, Leche del sueño, some fifteen years later.

Yet, these examples from Carrington's life and oeuvre tell just part of the story of surrealism's fixation on the kinds of childish things that often bespeak profound loss or troubling memories. Dark Toys, on the contrary, unleashes an armada of compelling queries related to this subject. Hopkins doesn't shy away from the mixed emotions of melancholy, joy, inhibition, and desire that besiege the surrealist attraction to childhood and its baubles, nor from the complex individual and collective histories that underpin the movement's valorization of the juvenile. In seven chapters investigating an abundant array of subjects related to surrealism and childhood in Europe, Britain, and the United States, Hopkins adroitly establishes the historical and theoretical foundations for surrealism's obsession, and reveals its parameters in the works of surrealist or surrealist-adjacent artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Bellmer, Joseph Cornell, and Helen Levitt, as well as a number of countercultural and what he calls "late surrealist" manifestations in Pop and contemporary art since the 1960s (239).

The final three chapters and a concluding coda break away from the history of the surrealist movement to assess post-1945 extensions of themes that preoccupy Hopkins throughout the book, such as nostalgia, historicity, miniaturization, collecting, and traumas of violence or abuse, in the work of artists Eduardo Paolozzi, Louise Bourgeois, Martin Sharp, Claes Oldenburg, Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Helen Chadwick, Mike Kelley, Susan Hiller, Wendy McMurdo, and others. Given that Dark Toys consists of a series of surrealist case studies spanning from the 1920s to the mid–1940s, followed by a comparative exploration of the explicit...