"Something in surrealism, in the cult of the surrealist object, positively insisted that the thing should not have dwelled in experience before, and yet should be (mysteriously) a real thing in the real world, and preferably an old one (though not an antique). This meant either that it should have lost its context and even, if possible, the memory of that context, so that it appeared to the entranced eye of the spectator as something both filled with the ghosts of prior meanings and yet inexplicably new: an apparition of (urban) magic. It followed that most surrealist objects depended for their poetry on total uselessness. And how do you design something quite useless? You don't. You create it."
"[The surreal was] not a matter of newness (for looking new was of slight importance to surrealism), but rather of intensity and strangeness."
"People tended to assume that surrealism was mainly a Franco-Hispanic phenomenon, but nothing is quite so simple. There were English surrealists - indeed, you might say their appearance in the country of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll was ordained by fate. The most spectacular of them was, of course, James. He was one of the great English architectural extravagants, a reborn Walpole whose Strawberry Hill was a house in Sussex named Monkton. This startlingly idiosyncratic home had begun as a shooting lodge designed by Sir Edward Lutyens for James' father, William, in 1902. By the time James and his Catalan friend Dalí were through with it (not that it was ever "finished"), it had become one of the strangest houses in 20th-century England, its outside covered in purple stucco, with faux-bamboo downpipes and, inside, wall-to-wall carpet woven with the menacing paw-prints of James's pack of wolfhounds. Mother Nature made her appearance in such forms as a standing lamp made of a python, which James père had shot on one of his African safaris, and a fully grown, stuffed polar bear, which would later be dyed shocking pink and presented to Elsa Schiaparelli; it presided for a time over her Paris showroom, where it must have given her clients a certain frisson."
"Nature was not what surrealism wanted; it wasn't interested in the delights of the pastoral - in fact, it didn't think them particularly delightful. It was above all a city affair. Surrealism always had at the back of its mind the definition of beauty-as-incongruity proposed by the crazily eccentric writer Isidore Ducasse, who wrote under the name of the Comte de Lautréamont: 'Beautiful,' that worthy said, 'as the chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.'"
"One of the merits of this show is that it's the first...to take serious account of the relations between surrealism and the luxury arts - fashion design, interior decor, sales display, jewellery, and their various impresarios."
"Not so many years ago, liaisons between surrealism on one hand, and on the other the rich and chic and the businesses that served them, were almost always held by right-thinking, Marxist-leaning, avant-gardist people to be immoral affairs. They trivialised the very name of the artist. Fashion, particularly Paris couture, was by definition no part of proletarian Utopia; but come the revolution, which was, of course, right round the corner, giraffe-legged socialites from the 16th Arrondissement would not be tittuping about in gauzy taffetas and webs of gilded copper braid of the sort that Schiaparelli sent down her runway in 1949 - no, it would be the virtuous austerities of cotton denim for them, and maybe a spanner stuck in the belt for a chic accessory. It didn't happen like that, of course. Quite the reverse. 'I have seen a young woman on the boulevard,' wrote Apollinaire, a poor art critic but a great poet, and one of the hearth-gods of surrealism, 'dress in tiny mirrors that are appliquéd to the fabric. In sunlight the effect was dazzling. It was like a walking gold mine. Later it began to rain, and the lady looked like a silver mine ... Fashion becomes practical, scorns nothing and ennobles everything. It does for substances what the Romantics did for words.'"
"Fashion was sexy. So was surrealism. They were a natural fit. Nobody ever called cubism sexy, or constructivism, or any of the other movements of the early 20th century except German expressionism, which did have its sexy moments - though not so very many of them. But one of the core beliefs of the surrealists, as set forth by their leader, Andre Breton, was in l'amour fou, obsessional love, the kind of love that deranges the senses and tips those who feel it into a helpless vortex of appetite and feeling. Surrealism had its own cast of star women, seemingly imperishable love objects, all dead now, whose images nevertheless endure thanks to the photos of Man Ray, George Hoyningen-Huene and others."
"Surrealism itself was divided on the issue of what relation, if any, it should have to commerce. It was all very well to say, as some did, that the movement was born of a marriage of Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxist critiques of capitalism; certainly there had been a long flirtation with Trotsky on the part of some surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s, and others - including, disgracefully, Aragon in his over-the-top hymn of hate "The Red Front" - became outright Stalinists. But artists have to earn a living. In 1926, both Max Ernst and Joan Miró did backdrop designs for a production of Romeo and Juliet, by Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. This earned them furious denunciations from Breton, Aragon and Picasso. "The moment you see a cheque you collaborate with reactionary White Russians! So much for that famous rigor of yours!" But such expostulations were not, in the end, terribly convincing. Most of the surrealists, including Breton, made their living by dealing, "art advising", involvement in photography, advertising and the fashion industry. Indeed, without the patronage of fashion, it is hard to see how surrealism would have made its way in Paris at all.
Dalí, in particular, received a lot of flak for his relations with the rich. But he never made any pretence about this, unlike Picasso, whose communist sympathies were mostly wind. 'Picasso is a genius!' Dalí would later exclaim. 'Me too! Picasso is a Spaniard! Me too! Picasso is a communist! Me neither!'"
"One thing's for sure: 50 years from now, nobody is going to be comparably impressed by the mingy, dispiriting trinkets cranked out by Tiffany with the names of Frank Gehry and Paloma Picasso on them. Not that anyone could be today, come to that. One of the effects of this show is to make you realise how sharply the very idea of decadence itself has decayed since the end of surréalisme au service de la luxe. The pressure of style has gone out of it, deflating it, leaving it somehow formless, gross and squishy, like so much of our sad and brutishly noisy culture."
~W
