Joan Miró – { feuilleton }

Minotaure, 1933–1939

Art by Diego Rivera for the Mexican supplement in Minotaure no. 13.

I was tempted to title this one Minotaure! since I’ve been searching for copies of the magazine in question for many years. I’m certain I went looking in all the usual sources last year in the run-up to the Surrealist centenary, without success. Anyway, here they all are at last, a complete run of one of the major Surrealist periodicals.

Minotaure was notable for a number of reasons, first among them the publisher, Albert Skira, whose resources enabled the production of a very desirable item, with good design, colour prints in each issue, and plenty of photos and other artwork throughout. The Surrealist publications of the 1920s had been historically important but all of them were monochrome documents with few pictures and few pages. Minotaure had the production values of a quality magazine and an impressive roster of artists and writers to fill each issue. Skira and editor E. Tériade originally intended their periodical to cover a wide range of art, past and present, but with most of the early contributors being members of André Breton’s Surrealist circle the magazine quickly became a showcase for Surrealist art and theorising. The first issue featured a cover by Pablo Picasso, with more Picasso artwork inside. Subsequent issues had covers by leading Surrealist artists–Dalí, Ernst, Magritte, Masson–which captured the movement at a time before Breton’s persistent expulsions hollowed out the original group. Breton writes in nearly all the issues but was forbidden from using Minotaure as a political platform (the previous Surrealist journal had been the very political Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution), a restriction he kept to. His manner was often dictatorial but he always had an eye for the main chance, or the bonne chance in this case.

The written contents of Minotaure are mostly in French but the pictorial matter is worth seeing even if much of it is very familiar today. Among the written highlights are two essays by Salvador Dalí, the first on the “edible” nature of Art Nouveau architecture, with an emphasis on the work of Gaudí; the second about Pre-Raphaelite painting. It’s understandable that Dalí would be attracted by the meticulous realism of early Millais and William Holman Hunt but I didn’t know his essay included an analysis of Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd, a painting I look at every time I’m in the Manchester Art Gallery. Elsewhere there are articles about automatism, mediumship, the decalcomania technique in painting, the esoteric symbolism of the alchemists, naive or untutored art, and plenty of single-page items and visual novelties. Photography by Man Ray and Brassaï is a recurrent feature. Skira’s magazine established a template which the two American Surrealist periodicals of the 1940s, View and VVV, did their best to follow. Now that Minotaure is freely available I’ll be waiting impatiently for complete runs of its followers to turn up somewhere.

(Note: some of the copies linked below have had their colour prints removed.)

Minotaure no. 1 (1933)

Cover art by Pablo Picasso.

Minotaure no. 2 (1933)

Cover art by Gaston-Louis Roux.

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The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine

From One Dough (1996) by Martin Stejskal, Jan Svankmajer, Eva Svankmajerová.

From A Dictionary of Surrealism by José Pierre (Eyre Methuen, 1974):

Exquisite corpse. The most famous of the surrealist games takes its name from the opening sentence that materialized: “Le cadavre—exquis—boira—le vin—nouveau” (1925) (The exquisite corpse—will drink—the new wine). It was produced by five players writing in turn subject, adjective, verb, object, complement, each folding over the paper so that the next player could not see what had been already written. The violent whiff of strangeness and the droll effects obtained by these verbal collages reappeared in the drawn “exquisite corpses” in which Surrealist poets and painters often combined. Despite the fact that each contribution—especially in the case of painters—is relatively identifiable, the total effect (mostly in the form of a “personage”) results from the combined elements. In this, the “exquisite corpse” can claim to have scored a victory for collective invention over individual invention and over the “signature”.

Nude (1926–27) by Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, Man Ray.

Exquisite Corpse (1927) by André Masson, Max Ernst, Max Morise.

Exquisite Corpse (1928) by Man Ray, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Max Morise.

Exquisite Corpse (1928) by Man Ray, Max Morise, André Breton, Yves Tanguy.

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Miró: Theatre of Dreams

More old TV, and something you might call Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man. Miró: Theatre of Dreams is a documentary about the Spanish (or as he might have preferred, Catalan) artist Joan Miró. This was broadcast by the BBC in 1978, and again in 1984, but it’s one I hadn’t seen until now. Robin Lough’s film was the first television profile of the artist in which Miró talks at length with his British friend, Roland Penrose, an artist and writer who did much to champion Surrealism in its early years. Penrose also narrates the film, describing Miró, who he’d known since the 1930s, as “the last of the great Surrealists”. I can imagine another Catalonian artist, Salvador Dalí, who was still very much alive in 1978, having something to say about this opinion. Between the conversations we see rehearsals for a Miró-designed theatrical performance centred around a monstrous Ubu-like tyrant whose character is part folk-figure, part analogue for Francisco Franco. The latter had only been dead for three years after being in power since the 1930s so performances like these were acts of exorcism as much as entertainment.

Penrose was a good writer who enjoyed demystifying modern art; I always recommend his book on Picasso as the one to go for if you’re only going to read a single account of Picasso’s life and work. The observations he makes here about Miró’s early love of the amorphous constructions that Antoni Gaudí created for the Parque Güell in Barcelona are reinforced later when Penrose and Miró are examining some of the objects in the artist’s studio. Miró suggests that the spiral form of an eroded seashell might be used as a model for skyscrapers to replace what he calls the matchboxes of New York City, a proposal which doesn’t seem as fanciful today as it did in 1978. We also see Miró painting on the rough side of a sheet of hardboard while enthusing about the textured surface of the material. This is unusual—most artists, if they use hardboard at all, paint on the smooth side—and, for me, a little surprising. There’s no such thing as right or wrong when it comes to art materials, but I’ve painted on the rough side of hardboard on a couple of occasions, and felt guilty about doing so when it always seemed like a cheap and rather crude alternative to using primed canvas. This is the first example I’ve seen of another artist doing the same. That it happens to be Joan Miró makes me feel better about the whole business.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Televisual art
• Max Ernst by Peter Schamoni
• Leonora Carrington and the House of Fear

Weekend links 456

A Mrs Radcliffe Called Today (1944) by Dorothea Tanning.

• Darran Anderson on how the Bauhaus kept things weird. “Many imitators of the famous art school’s output have missed the surreal, sensual, irrational, and instinctual spirit that drove its creativity.”

• Notes on the Fourth Dimension: Hyperspace, ghosts, and colourful cubes—Jon Crabb on the work of Charles Howard Hinton and the cultural history of higher dimensions.

• “[Edward] Gorey is slowly emerging as one of the more unclubbable American greats, like Lovecraft or Joseph Cornell,” says Phil Baker.

The label “homosexual writer” stuck for the rest of his career, with Purdy confined to what Gore Vidal called “the large cemetery of gay literature…where unalike writers are thrown together in a lot, well off the beaten track of family values”. In later years, Purdy moved further off the beaten track, as much by intention as circumstance. “I’m not a gay writer,” he would tell interviewers. “I’m a monster. Gay writers are too conservative.”

Speaking to Penthouse magazine in 1978, Purdy said being published was like “throwing a party for friends and all these coarse wicked people come instead, and break the furniture and vomit all over the house”. He added that, in order to protect oneself, “a writer needs to be completely unavailable”.

Andrew Male on writer James Purdy

• The Necessity of Being Judgmental: Roger Luckhurst on k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher.

• Faunus: The Decorative Imagination of Arthur Machen, edited by James Machin with an introduction by Stewart Lee.

• More James Purdy: “His poetry displays a softness that readers of his fiction might not expect,” says Daniel Green.

• Drag Star! is a 150,000-word interactive novel/text adventure by Evan J. Peterson.

• At Dangerous Minds: Dave Ball discusses his years as the other half of Soft Cell.

• Daisy Woodward on the story of radical female Surrealist Dorothea Tanning.

• Inside the bascule chamber: photos of Tower Bridge, inside and out.

• Tim Smith-Laing on the meaning of Miró’s doodles.

• Galerie Dennis Cooper presents…Emma Kunz.

• rarecinema: a shop at Redbubble.

• Apollo Press Kits

• The Fourth Dimension (1964) by The Ventures | Dimension Soleils (1983) by Gilles Tremblay | Into The Fourth Dimension (1991) by The Orb