Word: surrealist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...summary, such goings-on may sound hopelessly elfin, self-indulgent or absurd. But Jones' surrealist fragments produce in the reader's mind the same edgy excitement and slight disorientation that a suburban householder feels upon entering wild country. It is a delicately calculated trick, but it works. Easy slashes of cruelty cut the airy imagining. " Try this,' I told my son. I handed him a two-ounce, slightly chewed Yellow Cab with a treble hook mounted on the front bumper ... Inside a minute, he had three wiggling pedestrians on the hook ... One was a girl...
There was also generally in the surrealists a theatrical state of mind, which in the case of Paul Delvaux became virtually a stock in trade. Originally an expressionist, Delvaux was a latecomer to surrealism, converted by an exhibition of works by Chirico, Magritte and Dali that he saw in Brussels in 1934 when he was 37. And though he is one of the more durable surrealist artists, his imagery-as the selection of his work here indicates-constantly hovers on the edge of cliche. The Delvaux "look" is unmistakable: an empty street of neoclassical façades, a 19th century...
...with René Magritte. The 34 Magrittes on display here (some of which, like The Human Condition, 1935, with its painted landscape on an easel in front of a window and continuous with the "real" painted landscape seen beyond, have virtually become surrealist icons) remain unpredictable despite their familiarity. That is because Magritte was such a virtuoso of the insoluble, the contradictory, the locked. Unlike Delvaux (or for that matter Dali, Masson or Ernst), Magritte had absolutely no interest in what seemed romantic, chancy, theatrically mysterious or exotic. He called his paintings "material tokens of the freedom of thought...
...dealer visiting Magritte at his unremarkable suburban house in Brussels was met by the surrealist in his normal business-suit attire. At tea in the parlor, the visitor dropped something, bent down to pick it up, and experienced an agonizing kick in the backside. When he spun round, he saw Magritte imperturbably stirring his cup as though nothing whatever had happened. As in life...
Starkly and brutally realistic, but dreamlike in an intense emotional way, Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones) tells a story about juvenile delinquents growing up in slums outside Mexico City. Bunuel--the master film surrealist--made this movie in 1950. He formed the basis of his plot from a true story in police records, but no straight documentary could ever have the power of this film. The strength of the characters in Los Olvidados and the things that happen to them drive pins into your soul...