Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, is related to the history and development of design as a product of the Surrealist movement. This is an ambitious venture, which forms part of the museum's programme of exhibitions redefining great movements of the 20th century. The curators are at great pains to emphasise that the exhibition covers design rather than painting, and yet necessarily some Surrealist masterpieces are included. Surrealism cast lines into experimental photography, as exemplified by the work of Hoyningen-Huene and Man Ray. The movement, however, could only have begun and flourished in Paris. This city was the natural home of the objet trouvé and the fur cup and saucer. The latter was hardly a designed object, nor can the former category seriously be considered as 'prefigured' design. Arguably, the 'Lobster Telephone' (1936) by Salvador Dalí, for the British collector Edward James, would form a part of the range of facilities on offer to diners at Madame Prunier's former restaurant establishment in St James's Street, London. Ironically perhaps, it was not difficult to transfer Surreal Things to England where, ever since Edward Lear's limerick poems, humour has played a part in any art appraisal. Monckton, the family home of Edward James, which was designed by Edwin Lutyens, was turned into a receptacle for Surrealism by Hugh Casson (subsequently President of the Royal Academy, London) and the architect Christopher Nicholson. Here landed ten of the lobster telephones. Dalí's rather weak trump card here was to say, 'I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone'. Non sequitur, one might say.
Before the Second World War there was just time for Surrealism to abandon the fraught world of Freudian angst, and to apply various forms of such ideas to interior decoration. Dalí and James completed their extraordinary arched interior on the first floor landing at Monckton and Peggy Guggenheim, an erstwhile devotee of the movement, devised a shop window entitled 'Art of this Century', a showcase of all things surreal. Everyone was having a go. By 1939, the photographer, Hoyningen-Huen posed a beautiful female model in front of Max Ernst's 'The Fireside Angel' (1937) to great effect, and shock. But little of this was about design as such. It is not wise, as some critics have done, to dub Surrealism the most popular art movement of the 20th century; even less so was it instrumental in the history of design. Salvador Dalí, for all his skill and inventive talent, was often a laughing stock, and the overall focus was on the experiential, which is not the best criterion for the designed object intended for mass production. Surrealism sprang itself from the field of sophisticated urbanity, and out of metropolitan culture. Unlike parallel Russian movements, for example, it was essentially bourgeois, without rural linkage or connection with peasant culture.
Who came to be the greatest muse of the Surrealist movement? Undoubtedly this had to be Lee Miller, lover of Man Ray. Despite the window of opportunity provided for André Breton's ailing journal La Révolution Surréaliste by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's wartime windfall stock of cubist paintings sold by government auction, and André Breton's opportunity of the time to take the magazine from Pierre Naville, enabling Breton to incorporate photography and automatic writing, this was to no avail. There was the inability to anchor Joan Miró within, and to tie in as a result with mainstream modernism. The landmark effect of the movement was to spread hedonistic art forms gratifyingly into the niche fields of luxury arts, such as haute couture, jewellery, fashion accessory design and interior design. Clearly it could be in such corners that design and Surrealism legitimately came to be combined; perhaps this was never truer than of today, when the media impact and presentation of brand products become the top priority. But perhaps it was the uncanniness of Surrealism, especially in terms of the three-dimensional object, that confounded any serious venture into industrial design itself. Surrealist poetry and literature have formed a much sought-after intellectual field. An excellent collection, that acquired by the late Gabrielle Keiller, is now the property of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. It is on display at the Dean Gallery, where it is located next to the Eduardo Paolozzi collection. Paolozzi guided Keiller's acquisitions and was a close friend. It is this field that is extremely fruitful territory for prospectors exploring the depths of Surrealism, but scarcely that of design as such.
In the end, Surrealism can be said otherwise to have deflated itself, the leading exponents discredited as a result of their commercial ambitions. Today, Surrealism is best epitomised by the contemporary sculpture 'Ubermensch' (1995) by Jake and Dinos Chapman. In this sculpture of the disabled scientist Stephen Hawking, his wheelchair rests on top of a cliff, on a pile of refuse. It is on display at the Capital Museum, Beijing until 11 May 2007. Crowds of Chinese people surround what is perhaps the most recent Surrealist-inspired 20th century work. But then Surrealism always predicated tragedy. "So What!" is the only possible response.
This exhibition is a bold venture by the Victoria & Albert Museum which, after all, is the national repository for works of applied design and the decorative arts. But possibly it is a bridge too far. The exhibition is notable, despite the high quality of the production, for recording the inherent failure of the Surrealist movement to develop into a major design equivalent. Surreal Things cannot be mass produced.
Victorial & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London +44 (0)20 7942 2000
Michael Spens, Editor
