Art of the Surrealists, the by Edmund Swinglehurst
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"[...] Surrealism would not offer a new and easier means of expression, nor was it to be a metaphysical kind of poetry; it would be a means to the total liberation of the mind and of everything that resembled it."
(Paraphrased by the author from André Breton's Surrealist manifesto.)

Here's an attempt to review an unusual book. Edmund Swinglehurst's The Art of the Surrealists (1995) has quite an unconventional structure: it contains a short, three-page essay on the origins, nature, and evolution of the Surrealist movement in the 20th century art. The rest of the book's content is provided in the form of text vignettes that accompany the reproductions of 49 works by Surrealist painters.

Here's the list of artists whose paintings appear more than once in the collection: René Magritte (7), Paul Delvaux (5), Salvador Dalí (4), Jean Miró (4), Yves Tanguy (4), Paul Klee (4), Giorgio de' Chirico (3), Max Ernst (3), Jean Arp (2), and Kurt Schwitters (2). I am happy to see René Magritte with the most works; it is his art that made me notice and love Surrealism, and made me reach for this book.

The individual vignettes are 100-150-word short essays that - in addition to basic biographical information about the artist - offer descriptions of the artist's main motifs, influences, techniques. and provide hints as to possible interpretations of the given painting. I find this last component unnecessary and limiting the reader's enjoyment of the artist's work. To me, any attempt to explain what a surrealist painting means is ridiculous. The mystery and the "unnaturalness" of a surrealist painting are essential parts of the contract between the artist and the viewer.

Here's a fragment of one of the vignettes:

"[Paul Delvaux] has something of Hieronymous Bosch in his urban landscapes peopled by somnambulists who appear to be living out their dream lives with the same anxiety as the medieval people of Bosch's world. [...] In this painting, the juxtaposition of a conventional businessman with the nude woman provides a sexual image disturbed by the tram and volcano seen in the distance."

And to end the review, here's a different type of a mystery. The vignette about René Magritte's painting La Memoire (shown on the book cover) contains the following sentence:

"The solitary leaf in this picture strikes a note of hope and comfort."

Maybe, but the problem is that there is no leaf in the reproduced picture. Googling the title of the painting provides images that contain the leaf. Mystery indeed! Or sloppy editing, perhaps.

Two-and-a-half stars.

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