Through the upstairs floor of the Walker Art Museum, voices of sixth-graders echoed off cavernous halls. Coed groups zipped between two Assyrian reliefs that flank the main entrance hall and a few imposing, dark Old Master paintings.
Having trekked an hour south from the Oxford Elementary School, the class went as far down into the belly of the museum as the first room of the newly opened Surrealist Drawings exhibit.
Entitled "The Invisible Revealed," the show is an excellent exposure to the surreal genre as it does not neglect to include the more graphic aspects of this highly psychosexual mode of art.
The exhibition also provides much fodder for preadolescent imaginations to thrive on-even in the presence of authoritarian homeroom teachers.
As the abstract child of the Dada movement, surrealism began as a reaction to society. Drawing from such wells of psychoanalytic culture as Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, the movement is deeply invested in the subconscious, incorporating what would later be called the "exquisite corpse" sequence, or automatic drawing.
The collection focuses primarily on this mode of unconscious expression, an idea originally derived from a word game that gave rise to the famous exclamation "The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine." To compose an exquisite corpse, a piece of paper is folded in quarters, physically obstructing the artist from peeking at each other's work. The collaboration involves four separate individuals.
Kathy Klein, the director of the exhibit, with the assistance of its curator Alison Ferris, revived the mode of automatic drawing by asking nearly 30 contemporary artists to contribute their own exquisite corpses.
In a room tucked behind a wall, showcasing a series of Max Ernst collages from the early 1920s, new automatic drawing is displayed in full idiosyncrasy. Ferris was "happily surprised" about the volume of return of this large-scaled collaboration between contemporaries. Artists closer to home include Bowdoin graduate Wade Kavanaugh '01 and art professor Mark Wethli.
"We have obtained works from all over the country including Chicago, California, and New York," said Ferris.
Suzanne McClelland and David Humphrey are among the contemporary artists in New York who have contributed to the project. Ferris explained that the preceding artist was to leave a "little hint of a line to indicate where the drawing was intended," a feat of the unconscious imagination that is astonishing and bypasses the viewer's belief.
The two oldest and most impressive of the automatic drawings, both entitled "Cadavre Exquisite" and composed in 1926 and 1928, feature Andr? Breton, Marcel Duhamel, Max Morise, and Yves Tanguy, composed in pen, ink, and gouache, a solid opaque watercolor.
The first picture employs a sharp movement which veers off to the bottom right of the yellow parchment. On the two folds, legs jarringly kick the edge of the paper. The third fold depicts the oblique-angled leg of a seemingly aspiring adolescent athlete, kicking an orange striped volleyball in lime green socks that would make the Wicked Witch of the East feel crushing envy. The exquisite surprise happens when the viewer's eye falls down to the last panel of the androgynous leg. A parallel movement occurs between the two folds, with the lower leg cracking through a birdcage to set a yellow mangled bird in motion, stage left. The telepathy between collaborating artists is hard to imagine as a viewer, appearing at times unreal.
Another early exquisite corpse shows a Br?ton orange elephant bust with two upending tusks and a trunk in a semi-coil. Again, there is a mental-miming as the subsequent artist draws a long trunk-like phallus in the same motion and direction. The phallus blows three numbers out its round end. Breasts and female genitalia offset the piece by rising out the other end of the creature. The level of mirroring varies in the pieces at times affecting a non-sequitor-like status, while during others, almost appearing to subscribe to telepathy.
There are other sections of the angled room downstairs that appear opaque in comparison to the former mind games. The Spanish painter Oscar Dominguez (1906-1956) is featured in a series that uses decalcomania, a process of art that transfers pictures from prepared surfaces, such as glass and porcelain, onto paper. In an untitled piece from 1936, thick blotches of black watercolor seep through random passages of the surface. The deltas of black create an effect that is aesthetically disturbing and devoid of subtlety.
Another work by Dominguez stages a surreal night scene through the black veins of a charred backdrop where a lion enters, complacent beneath a brilliant white star. The piece, entitled "Le Grisou" or "The Firedamp," is unfortunately one of the small, overlooked works in the exhibit.
The various drawings in the room range from swathes of beige and khaki interrupted by the infrequent lines, which follow a surrealist tendency to affect only minimal space, to the bright non-naturalistic colors contrasting flagrantly along the walls. This brightness adds to an unexpected tone of the often-homogenous setting.
The upper portion of the collection contain works by some of the superstars of modern art. The room includes paintings by Magritte, Matta, and the gracefully abstract Giorgio De Chirico, whose metaphysical figures in a Piazza square allude directly to Classical sculpture. Whatever one's philosophical stance towards Surrealism is, the current show offers much to argue over.