cuckoo clock, a garden enclosed by a wall. But then we notice that the figures in the picture are running away after an episode not shown. And the picture is actually painted on a small door, or the lid of a box, with a handle attached. If the door is opened what will be revealed? The unknown is naturally menacing.
The most unsettling of the surrealists was Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), the ‘painter of railway stations,’ as Picasso dubbed him. An Italian of Greekdescent, de Chirico was obsessed by the piazzas and arcades of north Italian towns: ‘I had just come out of a long and painful intestinal illness. I was in a nearly morbid state of sensitivity. The whole world, down to the marble of the buildings and the fountains, seemed to me to be convalescent…. The autumn sun, warm and unloving, lit the statue and the church façade. Then I had the strange impression that I was looking at these things for the first time.’ 71 These landscapes, these townscapes, are always depicted in the same way by de Chirico. The light is always the same (it is afternoon light, coming from the right or left, rather than from above); there are long, forbidding shallows; darkness is not far away. 72 Second, there are next to no people – these townscapes are deserted. Sometimes there is a tailor’s mannequin, or a sculpture, figures that resemble people but are blind, deaf, dumb, insensate, echoing, as Robert Hughes has said, the famous lines of Eliot: ‘These fragments have I shored against my ruins.’ There are often humanlike shallows just around the corner. De Chirico’s is a cold world; the mood is forbidding, with a feeling that this is perhaps the last day of all, that the universe is imploding, and the sun about to cease shining forever. Again something dreadful has either happened or is about to happen. 73
At first sight, Joan Miró (1893–1983) was a much more cheerful, playful painter than the other two. He never joined the political wing of the surrealists: he didn’t get involved in manifestos or campaigns. 74 But he did contribute to group shows, where his style contrasted strongly with the others. A Catalan by birth, he trained in Barcelona at a time when that city was a cosmopolitan capital, before it was cut off from the rest of Europe by the Spanish Civil War. He showed an early interest in cubism but turned against it; after a childhood spent on a farm, his interest in wildlife kept bubbling through. 75 This gave his paintings their biological lyricism, increasingly abstract as time went by. In
The Farm
1921–2, he painted scores of animals in scientific detail, to produce a work that pleases both children and adults. (He carried dried grasses all the way from Barcelona to Paris to be sure he got the details right.) In his later Constellation series, the myriad forms echo earlier artists such as Hieronymus Bosch but are joyful, more and more abstract, set in a nebulous sky where the stars have biological rather than physico-chemical forms. Miró met the surrealists through the painter André Masson, who lived next door to him in Paris. He took part in the first surrealist group show in 1924. But he was less a painter of dread than of the survival of the childlike in adult life, the ‘uncensored self,’ another confused concept drawn from psychoanalysis. 76
The wastelands of Salvador Dalí are famous. And they
are
wastelands: even where life appears, it corrupts and decays as soon as it blooms. After Picasso, Dalí is the most famous artist of the twentieth century, though this is not the same as saying he is the second best. It has more to do with his extraordinary technique, his profound fear of madness, and his personal appearance – his staring eyes and handlebar moustache, adapted from a Diego Velázquez portrait of Philip IV of Spain. 77 Discovering his facility with paint, Dalí found he was able to render crystal-clear landscapes that, given the themes he pursued, played with reality, again in
The most unsettling of the surrealists was Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), the ‘painter of railway stations,’ as Picasso dubbed him. An Italian of Greekdescent, de Chirico was obsessed by the piazzas and arcades of north Italian towns: ‘I had just come out of a long and painful intestinal illness. I was in a nearly morbid state of sensitivity. The whole world, down to the marble of the buildings and the fountains, seemed to me to be convalescent…. The autumn sun, warm and unloving, lit the statue and the church façade. Then I had the strange impression that I was looking at these things for the first time.’ 71 These landscapes, these townscapes, are always depicted in the same way by de Chirico. The light is always the same (it is afternoon light, coming from the right or left, rather than from above); there are long, forbidding shallows; darkness is not far away. 72 Second, there are next to no people – these townscapes are deserted. Sometimes there is a tailor’s mannequin, or a sculpture, figures that resemble people but are blind, deaf, dumb, insensate, echoing, as Robert Hughes has said, the famous lines of Eliot: ‘These fragments have I shored against my ruins.’ There are often humanlike shallows just around the corner. De Chirico’s is a cold world; the mood is forbidding, with a feeling that this is perhaps the last day of all, that the universe is imploding, and the sun about to cease shining forever. Again something dreadful has either happened or is about to happen. 73
At first sight, Joan Miró (1893–1983) was a much more cheerful, playful painter than the other two. He never joined the political wing of the surrealists: he didn’t get involved in manifestos or campaigns. 74 But he did contribute to group shows, where his style contrasted strongly with the others. A Catalan by birth, he trained in Barcelona at a time when that city was a cosmopolitan capital, before it was cut off from the rest of Europe by the Spanish Civil War. He showed an early interest in cubism but turned against it; after a childhood spent on a farm, his interest in wildlife kept bubbling through. 75 This gave his paintings their biological lyricism, increasingly abstract as time went by. In
The Farm
1921–2, he painted scores of animals in scientific detail, to produce a work that pleases both children and adults. (He carried dried grasses all the way from Barcelona to Paris to be sure he got the details right.) In his later Constellation series, the myriad forms echo earlier artists such as Hieronymus Bosch but are joyful, more and more abstract, set in a nebulous sky where the stars have biological rather than physico-chemical forms. Miró met the surrealists through the painter André Masson, who lived next door to him in Paris. He took part in the first surrealist group show in 1924. But he was less a painter of dread than of the survival of the childlike in adult life, the ‘uncensored self,’ another confused concept drawn from psychoanalysis. 76
The wastelands of Salvador Dalí are famous. And they
are
wastelands: even where life appears, it corrupts and decays as soon as it blooms. After Picasso, Dalí is the most famous artist of the twentieth century, though this is not the same as saying he is the second best. It has more to do with his extraordinary technique, his profound fear of madness, and his personal appearance – his staring eyes and handlebar moustache, adapted from a Diego Velázquez portrait of Philip IV of Spain. 77 Discovering his facility with paint, Dalí found he was able to render crystal-clear landscapes that, given the themes he pursued, played with reality, again in
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