The dissident surrealist

Deceptive appearance: Pierre Prévert’s Beneath the Mask, 1930

Undercover Surrealism attempts animate the short-lived Documents magazine, edited and produced in Paris by George Bataille from 1929-30. Bataille, who is most famous for his pornographic novel The Story of the Eye, styled himself as an ‘enemy within’ the surrealist movement. Challenging the idealism he identified in the approach of André Breton and other leading figures, he urged surrealist artists to explore darker territory.

Described by Bataille as ‘a war machine against received ideas’, Documents was a suitably jarring collision of ethnography, archaeology, art, popular culture and assorted other concerns. Its focus on traditional art from non-European cultures reflects one of the era’s major preoccupations, though Bataille used juxtaposition of ‘primitive’ ideas with modern, Western content to discredit notions of cultural superiority.

The connection between non-Western and surrealist art is famously realised in the work of Picasso, who was the only artist to have an entire edition of Documents devoted to his work. The Hayward exhibition brings together ten of his drawings and paintings.

“The idea of the show is to immerse the visitor in the cultural climate of Paris in the late 20s through the subversive and troubling perspective offered by Georges Bataille,” comments co-curator Dr Simon Baker, of the University of Nottingham:

“Like Documents, the magazine on which it is based, Undercover Surrealism challenges both the works of art on show, and the viewer, through disarming visual juxtapositions. So in the first room, for example, Picasso’s three dancers, performers in the Hollywood Review of 1929, and a Cross-River mask all throw their arms in the air.”

A taste of how provocative the written contributions could be is provided by K Van Dongen, whose contribution to the magazine’s Dictionnaire Critique reads:

WORK: I have no idea what the meaning of work is in our epoch, but I believe virtuosity is an infirmity, knowledge a dangerous asset, and I am well content to have some genius and no talent, which allows me not to work and to play like a child: Work is an ostentatious thing, ugly and bogus as Justice.

Three Dancers: one issue of Documents was entirely devoted to Picasso

The Dictionnaire is a reminder that the widespread image of surrealism today magnifies only one facet of the movement as it existed around 1930. “Surrealism would have been perceived as an avant-garde movement not limited to the visual arts,” says co-curator Professor Dawn Ades, Director of the AHRC Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies.

“It would still have been relatively unknown outside France, and it would have been known as an intellectual movement aiming to explore Freudian ideas but also with a political dimension, and largely involving poets and writers,” she adds.

And while Documents may be relatively unknown, the work of Bataille continues to reverberate around the modern world. “Many contemporary artists have announced their allegiance to Bataille (Tomas Hirschhorn, the Chapman brothers, etc) while surrealism is not often explicitly acknowledged,” says Ades. “Bataille has been a huge influence intellectually - for example on Julia Kristeva – and influential thinkers like Foucault draw on the broader heritage of surrealism.”

Undercover Surrealism: Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of Georges Bataille runs until 30 July at the Hayward Gallery.

Images: Beneath the Mask, copyright Philippe Migeat; Three Dancers, copyright Succession Picasso, DACS 2006