2024 marks 100 years since Andre Breton released his Surrealist Manifesto defining “this word [that] had no currency before we came along.” It was actually Apollinaire who first coined the term surrealism in 1917 when describing Jean Cocteau’s ballet Parade, and with its score by Erik Satie and costumes by Picasso it’s easy to assume he nailed it. But it’s still most associated with Breton and his crew of artsy misfits as they pondered: “Can’t the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life?”
As Breton defined it:
SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
But a hundred years later, I don’t think we see the same Surrealism with its big “S” energy today. It’s rarely presented with any sort of authority anymore, now an almost magnetic “ism” with a polarity to conjoin other isms when some oddity defies a rational fit. It was once avant-garde, its own provocateur, as proper as a noun can be. But today it seems more adjective or pronoun, a domain made common in the likes of google and xerox and sharpie. Has Breton’s (S)urrealism become a lost language for the painterly inclined?
Perhaps my favorite artist to emerge from this doctrine was Dorothea Tanning. Tanning married Max Ernst — one of Surrealism’s founding practitioners — in 1947 after he divorced Peggy Guggenheim, and they remained together until his death in 1976. Her art was clearly influenced by Ernst and the company they kept, and though she’s almost always thus christened a Surrealist, she’s been pretty clear on how she feels about that: “I have no label except artist.”
I think Tanning provided what could be a better blueprint for Breton’s Surrealism when she described what is probably her most recognized painting, Birthday: “One way to write a secret language is to employ familiar signs, obvious and unequivocal to the human eye. For this reason I chose a brilliant fidelity to the visual object as my method in painting Birthday. The result is a portrait of myself, precise and unmistakable to the onlooker. But what is a portrait? Is it mystery and revelation, conscious and unconscious, poetry and madness? Is it an angel, a demon, a hero, a child-eater, a ruin, a romantic, a monster, a whore? Is it a miracle or a poison? I believe that a portrait, particularly a self-portrait, should be somehow, all of these things and many more, recorded in a secret language clad in the honesty and innocence of paint.”
My favorite Tanning painting is Endgame, a smallish oil on canvas completed a couple of years after Birthday. It has all of the things I love to explore in a modernist work — cubism, trompe l’oeil, symbolism, imagism, even a sort of minimalism dialect with her wayward line and stenciled forms. It’s a story hidden in plain sight, a deeply personal “functioning of thought” as strategic as it is devotional. The brutalist shadow of a royal’s satin slipper bloodies and buries a sacred effigy, the surface made unnatural by a queen finishing the job in a way a king could not do. It seems more measured than automatic, more overt than aesthetically exempt, but it is expressly surreal. Tanning was a phenomenal artist, and I think her oeuvre is one of the best showcases to rediscover Surrealism in every parts of speech.
When I first encountered Sarah Jacob’s Screens, it was a Tanning moment for me. In a sort of Mondrian haze, a black mist is both shadow and cover blurring a formless hue to weave a deceptive surface. Dioramic butterflies are deathly vibrant, paired and boxed in an eternally fragile purgatory. A single flowered stem stretches to explore at a distance, its leaves in states of both decay and arousal, its position warping the navigation of an optical illusion. None of it is deftly sur-real. It is all very familiar, we know how each piece of it feels if taken out of the painting and set before us. But together it becomes a trigger for something personal, something we might be afraid to commit but we know we’ve felt before, “a secret language clad in the honesty and innocence of paint.”
Sarah’s paintings lend the same rediscovery of Surrealism’s language advanced in Tanning’s balance. She employs what she calls a maximalist style to “express the noise, complexity, and entanglements of being alive by depicting the things that make life good in overwhelmingly entangled compositions that suggest a state of existential unease.” What I see are paintings that tempt with an abundance to relieve the apprehension of what it might actually be telling us, a sum of jagged parts, a pure state to explore our impulses. They all feel like portraits, painted with the same “brilliant fidelity to the visual object” we seek in our own reflections. What makes them surreal are the lines and colors and borrowed materials that expose the boundaries of a rational thought, overtly sensuous and patterned to extract a surface you’re tempted to touch but still find too delicate or too distant to risk. It’s like a static that whitens the noise around you, a way to be held to your surroundings without having to commit a complete surrender. In this static, Sarah’s paintings tether the periphery and grant us a space to be impunely automatic.
Breton's Manifesto expressed a need for what he called a “sleeping philosopher” to address: “why should I not grant to dreams what I occasionally refuse reality?” Sarah is an incredible artist who paints a dream to grant, no sleep required.
Definitely check out more from Sarah at https://www.sarahjacobsart.com/ and @sarahjacobsart