For our 40th year, and after assembling our top 40 ads from those decades, we found it irresistible to take stock of Surrealism, the art movement that has had the biggest effect on advertising creativity. This spectacular exhibition gave us the perfect aid for our meditation.
A long review of this exhibition seemed an undeniable choice. After all, just consider the impact of Surrealism on the visual evolution of commercial creativity over the past decades. Not only the 40 years of Lürzer’s Archive but back into the time when the movement was in its heyday, the 1930s. At first it was a visual style, co-opted wholesale to devise eye-catching images that appropriated the idea of using odd juxtapositions languishing in some kind of dreamscape, half-filled incomplete worlds of the imagination. Commerce-driven replicants of the look of surrealist painters such as Dali, Ernst and Maar, quickly became highly collectable themselves. They still engage with underlying play with the mind and about the mind, selling everything from motor oil to nose drops. But they were just the beginning of the rich interplay of Surrealism and communication. So much more was to come. Right through to today, the visual techniques made popular by Surrealism permeate the basic possibilities of advertising communication in a way that simply did not really exist before the movement.
This exhibition is a terrific tribute on the centenary of the art movement. Surrealism could be said to formally begin with the manifesto drawn up by André Breton in 1924. This is a seminal work but also very hard going. It mostly fails to show great thinking (although a spark flares up here and there). It is far from great literature and much of it could very well be dismissed as utter nonsense. However, it does, in its painfully extended prose, set down basic reference points: Freud, dreams, aspirations to revolutionary nonconformism, and a few pointers to techniques implied by those references. The art and artists that followed, the great names we associate with surrealism, did their own thing, as artists do, and increasingly agreed on very little as to what they had in common. But with hindsight, they often seem to have a lot of connection: what binds them together chiefly is often a “look” that is derived from a small supply of well-used techniques.
Perhaps one of the most distinguishing of these was automatism. It involves the suppression of the conscious to allow the unconscious to take over in the making of art. The result of this is images that, at one level, might seem to make no sense but at the same time hint at a lot. We might today find connection with some brainstorming techniques used in creative work. It’s one way to shake us up, remove the familiar ways of thought, and see what ideas drop out. In the same way that brainstorming sessions can lead to a lot of bullshit and the occasional gem, so the same applies to Surrealist art. Fortunately this show has the gems.
Cut-up techniques, intuitive performance, improvisations, all this sat under that automatism breakthrough. These also get us to juxtaposition, which is clearly a key property of much of what is basically happening in many Surrealist works. That juxtaposition might come out of an automatism exercise although equally might come from very consciously, very rationally considering what things shouldn’t go together but might look good, be thought-provoking, if assembled in one image, or film, or one stage work, or one poem, and so on. It is a very effective tool for making a play at delivering the shock of the new, so vital to the evolution of art. It kind of looks cleverer than it is but when employed with good technique it can get you thinking.
So, yes, this is a great show. Great fun. Or perhaps was, depending on when you are reading this. But you don’t have to miss the works, which exist in a great catalogue too, as well as being traceable to many major national galleries around the world. Surrealism is kind of everywhere. It was fashionable and then rather uncool. And it is now having a moment again.
What it has never really disappeared from, is mass-communication, where it has become ever-more entrenched, its techniques taken up and constantly advanced through the digital age. Surrealist methods permeate every kind of creativity touched by advertising: billboards, print and film, to all kinds of experiential, through to the narratives of gaming and now the output of generative AI.
The dreams of the Surrealists are now the material of everyday creative processes and so are woven into the illusions that we construct our everyday reality around. It’s not the most intellectual art by any means, indeed it is a bit crass in many ways. Is that a reason why we can all do it, after a fashion?
Top image: René Magritte, Les Valeurs personnelles (Personal Values), 1957 © Adagp, Paris 2021.
