Some centenaries come at the right time. André Breton wrote the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris has used the opportunity of commemorating the 100th anniversary to devote a vast exhibition to the movement.
There were more also serious reasons behind the decision for this new show: There hasn't been a major event on the subject at the Centre Pompidou since 2002 – the exhibition was then called "La Révolution Surréaliste" ("The Surrealist Revolution"). Since then, historical approaches have been largely updated and the increasingly numerous exhibitions in Europe and elsewhere over the last 10 years or so, as well as the constant rise in the art market prices of surrealist works, have shown that no avant-garde of the past is more present and admired today than this movement. With the Centre Pompidou set to remain closed for years to come due to renovations, it would have been regrettable if the Parisian institution had been the last to take note of this evolution. With the significant exhibition "Surréalisme," this has now been done.
And it has been done in a big way. Along a spiral path, 13 sections follow one another, each defined by a theme – forests, night – a name – Alice, Mélusin – or a notion – dream, eroticism, cosmos. In each section, two main types of objects are brought together: visual works and writings. The former are all material in nature: paintings, films, drawings, photography, collages, engravings and sculptures. The latter are in the form of manuscripts (drafts and letters) or printed materials (posters, magazines and books). They can be found in display cases, or on the wall for those deemed most important. This means that a comprehensive visit is likely to exceed visitors' attention spans and stamina, however passionate they may be, and that "Surréalisme" is therefore best seen in two or three visits.
That explains its general structure, but, before going into detail about its qualities, it has to be said that the exhibition gets off to a bad start. To evoke the Surrealists' taste for fairs and amusement parks, it seems ingenious to let visitors enter through a door inspired, without the slightest genius, by the monstrous jaws of Bomarzo's Mannerist park, followed by a dark corridor featuring photographic portraits of the group's first members, whose names are barely legible in the darkness.
This corridor leads to a round room, the center of the spiral, where pages and editions of the 1924 manifesto are displayed. But you can't look at them without hearing the soundtrack of a voice reading passages from the manifesto. The voice is Breton's, reconstructed by artificial intelligence. Breton abhorred machines, and Surrealism never ceased to condemn the relentless mechanization and industrialization of nature and mankind through technology. The presence of this digital gadget therefore betrays a complete ignorance of surrealist thought.
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