| 19 July 2010
A new exhibition at the Dean Gallery sets out to prove that Surrealism isn’t just Dalí.Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Joan Miró we think we know. But what about Ithell Colquhoun, Marion Adnams and John Armstrong? Those are three of the names chief curator Patrick Elliott is hoping will turn heads at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art this summer, even as they share wall space with their more famous peers.
On the one hand, Another World: Dalí, Magritte, Miró and the Surrealists is one of the blockbuster exhibitions for which the National Galleries is famous. A lot of people will want to get a good look at the in-house collection of these world-renowned surrealists as well as work by Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and Alberto Giacometti. But on the other hand, Elliot has seen his chance to present many overlooked figures from the British surrealist movement who, he argues, are also worthy of attention.
“It’s very fresh to find this whole seam of artists who were really quite important in the 30s and 40s and have been pretty much forgotten about,” he says. “People will be happy with the Dalís, the Magrittes and the Mirós, but will get an extra bonus when they see all this British surrealism which, to me, is the kernel of the show.”
For that show, he had two ambitions. The first was to avoid giving it an intellectual theme, such as “surrealism and sex”; the second was to highlight the British work. “I just wanted to put on a big show with lots of really good surrealist pictures and sculptures,” he says. “The second thing was to dig out a lot of British surrealism, which isn’t well known at all – even the names of the artists are pretty obscure – and put them alongside their European counterparts to show how good they are.”
Another World brings together over 300 paintings, books and etchings that date from 1910 – with the Dadaist precursors to surrealism – to the post-war period when surrealism was replaced by abstract expressionism. Conveniently, the surrealists believed in filling as much wall space as possible, so Elliott can justify doing the same. “They liked hanging in a higgledy-piggledy, dense fashion, often with very small works next to very big works to manipulate the viewer,” he says.
As well as rehabilitating some forgotten names, he hopes the display will create a renewed awareness of the importance of surrealism. “In the 70s and even the 80s, surrealism was treated as a bit of a jokey thing,” he says. “There’s a Monty Python naughtiness to it and I don’t think it was taken all that seriously. But if you look at the auction prices now, Magritte is in the top half-dozen. Philosophically, it’s got more depth to it than it lets on at first. Dalí is technically brilliant and he’s getting to be seen a bit more like Duchamp in that his strategies for mucking people around and signing empty pieces of paper before they’d even put prints on them – acting like a business – is now seen as a radical way of doing things.”
Another World: Dalí, Magritte, Miró and the Surrealists, Dean Gallery, 10 Jul - 9 Jan, daily, 10am-6pm, £7 (£5), Tel: 0131 624 6200
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