MUNICH — The influence of Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious on Surrealism is widely known, but the common focus on inner drives and dreams in the artists’ work obscures the fact that Surrealist looked out at the world as much as in, at themselves. But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism and Anti-fascism, an archive-heavy exhibition at Lenbachhaus, addresses this oversight by meticulously tracing Surrealists’ multi-pronged political activism, particularly their resistance to colonialism and fascism.
That the exhibition takes place in Germany, where political expression is now being censored, and where the growing number of supporters for the nationalist party, AFD, evokes the somber specter of fascist ideology, is not accidental. If anything, it reminds viewers that artists have always held a mirror to society. More pointedly, it examines the ways in which, in times of political crises and war, they organized collaborative networks of resistance. Curators Stephanie Weber, Adrian Djukić, and Karin Althaus group these by region, starting with Europe (particularly France, the former Czechoslovakia, and Spain), then spreading to Egypt, Martinique, and the United States.
To underscore the theme of cross-national mobilization, the exhibition doesn’t center the artworks themselves — although plenty of paintings, drawings, films, and sculptures, most conveying stylistic and methodical affinities, are featured — as much as it employs them to trace artists’ lives, especially their prolific, politically engaged writing, and their wartime displacements. Copious art-political zines and pamphlets, such as the Surrealist Marxist journal Légitime défense, are presented in glass vitrines. Also included is antifascist agitprop by French artist Claude Cahun, who was sent, along with their partner, Marcel Moore, to a Nazi internment camp on the Channel Islands. One evocative photograph shows Cahun biting down on a pin in the shape of a swastika.
The curators make a salient point that many Surrealists’ insistence on exposing the oppression underlying most modern political systems rendered their art so useful as a political tool. Some of the artists and art groups highlighted in the curatorial texts, such as the French La Main à plume, joined the armed struggle against the Nazis. Others, like André Breton, established formal revolutionary associations. Breton’s meeting with the Mexican painter Diego Riviera and Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico City, where Breton and Trotsky founded the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (F.I.A.R.I.), is immortalized with a photograph by Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
Political and philosophical exposure advanced the artistic evolution of several artists as well. When Cuban Wifredo Lam, like Breton, exiled from France to Martinique, he came into contact with the prominent anti-colonialist thinkers and writers Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, who published the Surrealist journal Tropiques (1941–44). As the wall text notes, this propitious meeting advanced Lam’s syncretic Afro-Caribbean style. His macabre etching series, Annonciation (printed in 1969–71), which depicts entwined, tortured skeletal creatures, accompanied by Aimé Césaire’s poems, exemplifies Surrealism’s power to convey unspeakable horrors — as do many additional works, from Max Ernst’s allegorical “Angel of Hearth and Home” (1937), painted in response to Francisco Franco’s brutal victory over the Republican fighters in the Spanish Civil War, to the collectively made “The Grand tableau antifasciste collectif” (Great Collective Anti-Fascist Painting, 1960) — a sprawling, dense canvas teeming with convulsed limbs, devouring mandibles, and intimate, torn body parts, painted to protest the torture and rape of Djamila Boupacha, an activist of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN).
Despite its cheeky title, But to Live Here? No Thanks doesn’t advocate for exile or flight, but rather offers some measured hope in these darkening times, as an urgent study in the fluid yet meaningful art-political networks that stressed solidarity and unity over isolation.
But Live Here? No Thanks: Surrealism and Anti-fascism continues at Lenbachhaus (Luisenstraße 33, Munich, Germany) through March 30. The exhibition was curated by Stephanie Weber, Adrian Djukić, and Karin Althaus, with Assistant Curator Johannes Michael Stanislaus.