Dalí. Centre Pompidou

I somewhat reluctantly went to the Dali exhibition at the Centre Pompidou on Friday night. Although I am a fan of Dali’s film collaborations, I have never been that taken with his surrealist creations. But I went with an open mind and also so I could have an opinion when the subject of the exhibition comes up at dinner parties!

Salvador Dali, Les Montres Molles ou la Persistance de la Mémoire,  1931

With the exception of some early figurative paintings, it is striking to notice how little Dali’s preoccupations change across the course of his lifetime. From very early on, the works are sexual, they concoct wildly imaginative nightmares of anxiety and trauma. As an aesthetic, the works tend to be fairly consistent, with the major point of connection being illustration. Dali’s skill as a painter varies: there’s a swiftness to the paintings, but there are also paintings, particularly landscapes, in which the technique appears somehow virtuosic, creating a luminosity that verges onto transparency. The living and breathing sky in The True Painting of the "Isle of the Dead" by Arnold Böcklin at the Hour of the Angelus, 1932 for example demonstrates a clarity of vision that is not always present in more drafted works.

Salvador Dali, The Aprodisiac Telephone, 1936

My friend Anne remarked that while the works were, at times, intellectually challenging and provocative, they often left her cold, offering no opportunity for emotional connection. It’s true that there is something alienating about these paintings, something that made them emotionally inaccessible, but it’s difficult to put my finger on what. I want to say it’s the relentless repetition, the almost obsessively meticulous detail, the psychological disorder of an artist that leaves no trace of the canvas, paper or wood support untouched and unworked. It is as though Dali’s psychological freneticism and obsessiveness forms a wall between the paintings and their viewer.

Salvador Dali, The True Painting of the "Isle of the  Dead"
by Arnold Böcklin at the Hour of the Angelus, 1932

There is no medium that Dali does not touch: he paints using water colours, oils, draws, films, makes sculptures as well as conceives readymade environments, and even ventures into the theatre. This reach is impressive. And as if that’s not enough, the works take inspiration from and often repeat overwhelmingly their tribute to the history of art. Velasquez Millet, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Böcklin, and others all become, at some point, his obsessive, yet creative, focus. Perhaps the most touching paintings in the exhibition are those which interpret through reworking Jean-François Millet’s The Angelus (1857-59). Dali’s interpretations radically transform this otherwise quiet and humble scene of two peasants at the end of their day, the sun’s last light gently bathing the scene in a variety of ways. In Dali’s interpretations, the figures are abstracted and repeated, the man and the woman oversized and in the process of morphing into unknown forms, nakedness, violence, death and uncertainty, always soaked in sexual perversion. Clearly, like all of Dali’s works, these visions represent Millet seen through the eyes of Salvador Dali rather than an excavation of any hidden meaning in Millet’s French genre painting.

Salvador Dali, Archaelogical Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus, 1933-35

In addition to the works inspired by the history of art, I enjoyed some of the drawings and smaller scale sketches on display. There was a meticulousness to the detail that becomes mesmerizing, and the sketches reveal the painstaking process of his art, a process that is otherwise elusive in the bigger paintings. In addition, once Dali turns to larger scale, especially when they are not re-interpreting paintings from the history of art, the works become like cartoons that remind more of the illustrations of Robert Crumb than they reveal any kind of artistic genius.

Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, Un Chien Andalou, 1929

Of course it was fun to see all of the images and objects which have been canonized by popular cultural reproduction: the melting clocks, the lobster telephone, the man with his moustache in portrait after portrait. And I never tire of seeing the scene in Un Chien Andalou where the razor slices open the eye. But ultimately, I was left wondering how to take this massive body of work seriously. There’s no arguing that Dali was prolific. But I did come away with the question of whether or not the self-obsessed paranoia gives anything to anyone other than Salvador Dali. In the end, there’s a lot of fun to be had going around this massive exhibition, but I am not convinced that we need to rethink twentieth century art in light of Salvador Dali’s contribution. 

The Master and Margarita, dir Simon McBurney & Complicité

It was such a treat to see Simon McBurney/Complicité’s production of Bulgakov’s masterpiece The Master and Margarita in Paris last week. The trek out to Bobigny and the not exactly congenial experience of theatre MC93 was quickly forgotten by what was, I thought, a riveting and masterful production.

I was mesmerized for three hours by the vivacity of the production, and especially in its capturing of the complexity of Bulgakov’s narrative. The weaving together of  literary references, German philosophy, the asceticism and oppression of Stalinist 1930s Moscow, Soviet and Russian history, Goethe’s Faust and particularly when Margarita makes a pact with the devil who has come to visit Moscow. And McBurney does not stop there, the centrality of the variety theatre where the devil stages his show revels in the evil and excess that befits Satan, while Biblical Jerusalem is pervaded by the solemnity that befits Pontius Pilate’s trial of Jesus. In a post-World War II world, it would be difficult not to also note the frequent references to the Holocaust in McBurney’s production.  And with it, necessarily, comes to mind the contemporary conflict of Israel and Palestine. While the Jewish pogroms were in full force not long before Bulgakov wrote his book, it's the contemporary resonances that are often most striking.  In other instances, McBurney's production makes the connection between eras for us: the narrative thread about Julius Cesar and his arrest of criminals ricochets through Soviet Russia’s twentieth century of dictatorships and oppressive violent regimes. This is a work of immense reach.

As theatre McBurney and Complicité bring a masterful use of light and sound to the text. The set, the spaces it defined, the changing dimensions of these spaces, the changing perspectives from which the audience looks at the worlds created on stage — at times for the briefest of periods — were all entirely articulated by light and sound. My friend Anne thought that it bore certain resemblances to the Expressionist cinema's use of light. It’s true that Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita engages the confusion between the internal world of the mind and the external historical world, but I am not convinced that the dramatic use of light and sound was expressionist. Rather, if it is to be compared to any of the interwar German art forms, it has to be Erwin Piscator’s political theatre of the 1920s. Piscator begins the conversation that Complicité takes to overwhelming ends with the use of film and video images to extend the narrative space and thematic concerns. For Piscator, the use of film images politicized the individual’s thoughts and actions, carrying them into the public sphere beyond the literal and metaphysical prison walls. Moving images created new spaces and places both real and imaginary in the 1920s. McBurney uses lighting – which includes the video images that saturate the backdrop to open up new spaces, new perspectives, new dreams — as a way of moving between scenes as well as to confound the narrative threads. So, for example, in The Master and Margarita, the video images enable what can only be described as a cinematic edit between the poet’s imagination and the asceticism of everyday bureaucratic life in Stalinist Russia in a split second.

The reviewer in The Guardian bemoaned the coldness of the production, a coldness he identified as deriving from the video images and projection. While I didn't experience this coldness, if the use of the moving images and sounds are seen in the tradition of the great political theatres of Europe in the 1920s, I wonder if it’s a coldness that serves the purpose of provocation? Is it a coldness of the order that would become known as Brechtian distanciation?

Another element of McBurney’s production that I enjoyed was its focus on Moscow, indeed the visual and textual use of Moscow to enable the unpredictable geography of the mind. Moscow is, at the same time, very real: its spatial organization and the fact that, as it is pointed out over and over again in the play, it was the first city with electricity, are also the stage for a wonderful modernist drama. Thus, I would argue that this production has a much stronger grounding in political reality than the German Expressionist films of the 1920s. The very compelling narrative about the poet or writer, who is really a historian, incarcerated for a novel he wrote about Pontius Pilate, in an atheist, communist world opens up to the real politics of centuries, as they pervade the streets and fill the air of a very real city. 

Lastly, it has to be acknowledged that the piece is given its brains by Bulgakov, its complex narrative, its layer upon layer of politics, literature, oppression, dictatorship, history, and imagination. But what McBurney gives the play is an intense visual life that does what all good staged theatre should: it compliments and complements Bulgakov’s literary expertise. 

Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943) L'Ordre du Chaos, Musée de l'Orangerie

Chaïm Soutine, Self-Portrait, 1918

My first impression of the Soutine exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie was: colour. For an artist working during and in between two world wars, Soutine’s palette was unbelieveably vital and sumptuous. The greens and blues of the trees and the skies, the intense red that colours everything from clothes to the bloody flesh of meat, even the unusual baby blue backgrounds against which portraits are painted, fill the rooms of the Orangerie with an energy and excitement. I can’t think of a more appropriate place for these paintings to be hung than in the environs of Monet’s Water Lilies.

Chaïm Soutine, Arbre Couché, vers. 1923-24

Soutine’s paintings are about the medium of paint as much as they are about the world that he paints. Working in the three classical genres of landscape, portraiture and still life, Soutine was as seduced by painting as representation as he was  by the painted representation. I am not really in a position to say whether Soutine’s indulgence in the sensuous qualities of the image made critical developments in the genres in which he painted. It’s true that there is nothing quite like Soutine’s paintings in his contemporary Europe. However, one could argue that Monet’s richness of colour and erasure of the horizon line, Ludwig Kirchner’s distorted bodies and the Germans' expression of internal turmoil on the picture plane, their penchant for the dissolution of figuration through a simultaneous colourist exploration, is everywhere on Soutine’s canvases. Similarly, we might want to locate the presence of surrealism in the sinuous, tortuous houses that resemble buildings blowing in the wind. Alternatively, we could argue that the still life sliding off both their table and the picture plane speaks to the surrealist exploration through abstraction of the painterly in a desire to create dream worlds. But this said, I do not get the sense that Soutine’s style contributes to the forward motion of the history of art. Of course, there is a deep commitment to the pursuit of the questions plaguing modernism, but Soutine’s response is apparently singular.

Chaïm Soutine, Boeuf écorché, 1924

What I love most about the paintings is their instability, an instability that is in direct contrast to the vivacity and forthrightness of colour. The idea of endless turmoil painted in bright blue and rich green is so impossible to conceive of that we are left with no other option than to celebrate the contradiction. Moreover, the paintings are filled with uncertainty and anxiety, and yet they are clearly structured, with a background for the portraits, a sky for the landscapes, a table for the still lifes. And they each have a  frame, a clear separation from us as they sit inside their own world on the wall of l’Orangerie; there is no sense in which the insecurities and instability of the world depicted ever spills over into ours. And yet, simultaneously, the still lives are anything but dead: the rabbit screams out for attention, the meat and the wine of La Table (c. 1919) slide off the table in a grand gesture of dissention, and the bloody red flesh fills the room with its odour, as though the carcass has a personality, a personality that it is revealed through its insides.  

Chaïm Soutine, Portrait d'un Homme, vers 1922-23

My favorites of all the paintings are still the portraits. And their most intriguing moment is always the moment of the dissolution of the face, that moment on the canvas where the identity becomes unstable, the self melts into the world around it, in this case the background. In the example of the Portrait of a Man (1922-23) this moment is surprising because it is not the misshapen right side of the face that causes the most trouble on the otherwise peaceful canvas. Rather, it is the moment where the face melts into the sky blue background, the moment where everything is thrown into question. 

Chaïm Soutine, Enfant de choeur, vers 1927-28

Ultimately, the density of the paint makes these works lush and seductive. They are filled with emotion, sensuousness, they are physical, masculine, but not angry or grotesque. In fact, one of the things that makes the portraits so compelling is that the faces are all soft, self-reflecting in the way we imagine a Rembrandt sitter might be. If the sill lives are loud, and their decomposing flesh repels us, the portraits are  quietly troubled because their emotions are internalized, even as the face, and with it the identity, slides off the canvas. Soutine’s style and technique is as suited to decomposing flesh as it is to sitters who simultaneously bare and bear their own disintegration.