Dada and surrealism Book

Giorgio de Chirico's airy metaphysical paintings (a misnomer), by isolating objects into the staged artificiality of his hollowed-out cityscapes, apparently wanted to depict the new status of objects after the death of God, how each and everyone of them interrogated the beholder - hence the recurrence of 'enigmas' in his titles. Here's an enigma for you: how did the Dali, the Tanguy, the Ernst of this world, managed to spend the next forty years perfecting this same approach, while being celebrated as the forefront of innovation?

If the sphinxes would allow me three guesses, I would venture first psychoanalysis as an answer. Or more accurately, that watered-down yet fanciful version of it propagated by Breton (and denigrated by Freud!), conveniently freezing the romantic 'unspeakable' into neat little nuggets of absurdity. When I flick through any catalogue of orthodox surrealist painting, I cannot help but feel some kind of inadequacy, because my own dreams (of which I anyway remember very little) fail to live to the concerted standard of meaningless depth established by this cabal: no endless landscapes, no isolated objects, no constructs... The absurd does not correlate with the unspeakable, and by trying to pass the one for the other, you end up closer to advertising than to fine-arts.

The second one is probably the best acknowledged: the wonderful skill of Breton as a publicist. Of course all avant-garde movements, to an extent, where mutual-aid societies trying to pass themselves as selfless militants - but Breton did better than anyone else, keep up the balancing act between the profitable mainstream popularity on the one hand, and the radical-chic (always more palatable when served with a side-order of sexual liberation) on the other, for nearly three decades! This might reveal my own biais: a succesful avant-garde is a failed one.

Lastly, figuration. Dali spoke of his own technique as a 'Return to Meissonier' - whatever anarchoid and revolutionary rhetoric they might flaunt, that was also a 'Return to Order' : the marketing success of surrealism was born of an awareness that the bourgeois can forgive and even cheer all kind of eccentricities if you give him objects he can tie back to his daily life. The more accurately and painstakingly you might depict them, if possible with transparent hints to old masters and other reservoirs of cultural capital, the more he or she will be willing to 'laugh it off' and to reach out for their wallet.

Anyway. Rant over. The book is not itself that bad, it covers two major movements in fifty pages, so you can't have too high expectations. There are a few interesting and unusual anecdotes, and the Dada section was of course significantly more enjoyable than the surrealism one. The second half of the book is a set of colour reproduction of the paintings mentioned in the text. All in all - you should avoid surrealism, but if really you must, then this is not a bad place to start.