Matthias Mühling, Director of the Lenbachhaus, and the exhibition curators Stephanie Weber, Adrian Djukić and Karin Althaus present from 15 October 2024 the exhibition: But live here? No thanks.surrealism + antifascism.
Abb. oben: Victor Brauner, Totem de la subjectivité blessée II, 1948, Legs de Mme Jacqueline Victor Brauner en 1986. Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024. Foto / Photo: Image Centre Pompidou
‘The human soul is international’. (Bulletin international du surréalisme [Mezinárodní Bulletin Surrealismu], Prague, April 1935)
Surrealism was a politicised movement with an internationalist outlook. Its origins lay in art and literature, but it went far beyond that. For the Surrealists, reality was inadequate: they wanted to radically change society and rethink life.
Since they came together in the 1920s, the surrealists denounced European colonial policy, organised themselves against the fascists, fought in the Spanish Civil War, invited Wehrmacht soldiers to commit acts of sabotage, were interned and persecuted, fled Europe and fell in the war. They wrote poems, honed the deconstruction of a supposedly rational language in a supposedly rational world, worked on collective paintings and drawings, took photographs and collages and organised exhibitions. They denied the ‘pathetic’ imaginary world of daily politics access to their art.
Government and occupation by fascist parties in various European countries and the world and colonial wars characterised Surrealism and forced the lives of its protagonists into unpredictable paths. At the same time, this led to surprising encounters and international solidarity, whose lines of connection stretched from Prague via Coyoacán to Mexico City, from Cairo to Republican Spain, from Marseille to Fort-de-France on Martinique, from Puerto Rico and Paris to Chicago and back. Surrealist thought and action took place then and still takes place today in several places at the same time. Instead of a didactic and linear narrative, the exhibition is therefore organised into several episodes that are arranged like a map. The aim is to visualise Surrealism as the controversial and internationally networked movement that its representatives intended it to be.
In their art, the surrealists insisted on an absolute ‘freedom’ that would infect the rest of society. Surrealism understood freedom – a loaded term that was already being used as a pretext by the fascists at the time – as a form of coexistence that was not dictated by wage labour and in which there were common goals that were greater than the nation and profit. They criticised the atrophy of the imagination in a society for which art and poetry had become eccentric activities. When someone tells us that our present has more to do than write poetry, we reply: ‘So do we’,’ wrote a member of La Main à plume, a group that fought and wrote poetry in occupied Paris during the Resistance.
The exhibition is accompanied by the publication ‘Surrealism + Antifascism. Anthology’ in separate German and English editions.
Edited by Matthias Mühling, Karin Althaus, Adrian Djukić, Stephanie Weber, co-edited by Ara H. Merjian.
Hatje Cantz Verlag, 600 pages.
WHEN?
Exhibition dates: Tuesday, 15 October 2024 – Sunday, 02 March 2025
WHERE?
Lenbachhaus
Luisenstraße 33
80333 München
