Word: surrealists
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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...
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...
...specific works are less important than the atmosphere Disney created. Art, or some kinds of it (visionary, surrealist, erotic), has the power to expand the limits of fantasy. Disney could not push those too far without ceasing to be Mr. Clean, the celluloid geneticist who ingeniously bred the anus and genitals out of the animal kingdom, the trusted entertainer whose mandate was to give children the dreams adults like them to have. And so his achievement became a large shift in the limits of unreality, which is not by any means the same thing as art. The shows and puppetry...
...Chien Andalou (1928), at the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, was the first film made by Luis Bunuel. A silent short partly planned by Salvador Dali, it was the first surrealist film and is probably the most powerful short film ever made. Bunuel's surrealism was abstract in the 20s, became a savage vehicle for social criticism in the 40s and 50s, and mellowed into a means for joking about the upper class in last year's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeousie. Un Chien Andalou was its first expression...