Stop making sense: Why a new Art Institute show on Dalí revisits surrealism at exactly the right time

How’s your day been?

“Surreal?”

Probably. Before I left the house to visit the new Salvador Dalí exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, I noticed a headline that described President Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine as “surreal.” Also, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot called a $68 million West Side redevelopment project “surreal.” Kansas City Chiefs coach Matt Nagy thought the team’s Super Bowl victory was “surreal.” I saw an article about the “surreal” designs of Björk’s favorite nail stylist and another that featured students at Michigan State University describing the school’s mass shooting as “surreal.” Paramore’s latest music video is being called “surreal.” So is teaching children of the super-rich. The weather’s “surreal,” and to judge by how often the word is used by actors and actresses this time of year, an Oscar nomination is the most “surreal” thing that could happen to you.

But you know what seems normal?

A modest Salvador Dalí exhibition in 2023.

Decades after Dalí popularized it, surrealism is everywhere — and nowhere. Surrealism is our air, our daily news, our everyday culture, our shared existence. As I strolled through the two galleries of ominous paintings and sculptures in “Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears,” I heard visitors saying “funny,” “insane,” “disturbing.” A teenage girl told her mother one sculpture was so dumb it “should receive, like, negative two-and-a-half stars.” An elderly man joked the extremely phallic building in a painting was “Jeff Bezos’ spaceship.”

But I never heard anyone say “surreal.”

Perhaps because, after a century among us, surrealism has evolved into a catchall, removed from its political origins, less a movement than an adjective, a go-to description for any break from the usual. In fact, one of the surprises of the Art Institute show is how rational Dalí seemed — satirically so. Among the paintings is 1937′s “Inventions of the Monsters,” a typically barren landscape cluttered with grotesqueries that appear to have fallen out of orbit. Yet there’s nothing random. In a letter to the Art Institute after it acquired the painting in 1943, Dalí wrote: “Horse women equal maternal river monsters. Flaming giraffe equals masculine apocalyptic monster. Cat angel equals divine heterosexual monster. Hourglass equals metaphysical monster. Gala (his wife) and Dalí equal sentimental monster. The little blue dog is not a true monster.”

A sculpture in the exhibit, a red high-heeled woman’s shoe attached to a pendulum-like mechanism, augmented with sugar cubes and erotic images, is titled: “Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically.” Like other surrealists, Dalí was steeped in Sigmund Freud and the subconscious. That shoe symbolized Dalí’s foot fetish.

Surrealism itself, however rooted in the popular imagination as an art world freak show, arrived with a very specific origin: the 1924 publication of the “Surrealist Manifesto” by French poet André Breton, who was responding to World War I, a calamity brought on by the “rational” minds in power. Surrealism would give the irrational as much weight and respect as the rational. It would be fundamentally more than an art movement; it would challenge the very structure of the world and offer alternatives. It would lend figurative naturalism to a fever dream. It had similarities to the Dada movement of a decade earlier — namely, its thing for disparate found objects — but with an emphasis on Freud’s theories of dreams and the subconscious.

Dalí called his own surrealism “paranoiac,” formed by “irrational knowledge” culled from the “delirium of interpretation.” He also relished the role of a haughty eccentric genius. With his whiplash mustache, googly eyes and collaborators like Alfred Hitchcock, he became the face of surrealism — but also an overexposed media clown and one-note peddler of melting clocks, both surrealism’s center of gravity and ball and chain.

Like surrealist René Magritte’s paintings of apple-faced men and steam trains emerging from fireplaces, Dalí gathered an air of kitsch. Still, Breton was on to something not easily dismissed. That manifesto nearly predicted life in the 21st century: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.”

Sounds like 2023.

As Joe Stanfield, vice president and senior specialist of fine art at Chicago’s Hindman Auctions, put it: “I guess it goes without saying that we are living in surreal times.” What are the “augmented” realities of uncanny digital landscapes but a kind of interactive surrealism? When someone is so dumbfounded by the state of the world that they post on Instagram an exasperated “Is This Life?,” they are reframing Breton’s mashup of “dream and reality.” So, Hindman, like other auction houses, have seen a surge in sales of surrealist paintings. Earlier this month, a Hindman auction of surrealist paintings, including works once owned by Chicago collector Florence Arquin (herself a surrealist), brought in more than $1.4 million — about double what they expected.

There have been more than two dozen major surrealist exhibitions in the past year alone. The recent Venice Biennale, an art world benchmark, was awash in surrealism. The fashion world, long associated with surrealism, has referenced surrealism so much lately that Elle magazine dubbed this “the second coming of surrealism.” Michelle Obama is wearing Maison Schiaparelli, an Italian label founded by frequent Dalí collaborator Elsa Schiaparelli. Even an event once as blandly innocuous as the Miss Universe pageant is now becoming a parade of costumes so incongruous, it seems to be drifting knowingly into surrealism.

The dream state that informed early surrealism is firmly of a piece with new works as disparate as the folk-pop of Maggie Rogers; the microscopic universes of Marvel’s “Ant-Man and Wasp: Quantumania”; the existential bleakness of “Evanston Salt Costs Climbing,” Pulitzer finalist Will Arbery’s acclaimed play about North Shore salting crews. “Atlanta,” Donald Glover’s FX series, was about the surrealism of being Black in America, and HBO’s “Severance” nailed Kafkaesque corporate life. There’s a painting in the new Dalí exhibit in which women sprout bouquets of flowers from their heads: If you’re watching HBO’s “The Last of Us,” it’s hard to look at those paintings and not think of the fungus monsters stalking Pedro Pascal and co.

Malleable, unsettling, messy, surrealism has found a home in contemporary existential fears. A 2021 Psychology Today article noted the “prolific” uptick of patients claiming life feels less real these days.

Considering how much we notice the surrealism of our world, Stanfield noted it was even “surreal” that this Dalí show is the first Dalí show at the Art Institute, ever. Caitlin Haskell, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, who organized the show with Jennifer Cohen, curator of provenance and research, said she wouldn’t speculate on why they had never staged a Dalí show before. But after years of Parisian painters, “it felt interesting to turn the page to a Dalí, in which the Art Institute’s holdings are extensive.”

Indeed, of the 50 works in the exhibit, only 11 are on loan from other institutions. Early surrealism left a legacy far more complicated than often recognized, Cohen said. Their Dalí show will be the second of three surrealism projects from the museum, including a recent focus on Joseph Cornell boxes and an upcoming show on the Mexican surrealist Remedios Varo (opening in July). “There’s increasingly a sense among scholars that surrealism still has so many artists and works needing to be discovered,” Haskell said.

As Ionit Behar, associate curator at the DePaul Art Museum, said, “surrealism is moving away from the usual suspects.” The energy animating it now is emanating off of artists of color and women. Earlier this winter, Behar curated two shows about surrealism at DePaul, one on contemporary women of color working in surrealism, and a solo show on Chicago surrealist Krista Franklin. “As much as surrealism has been a political movement,” Behar said, “it just seems clearer when it comes from brown and Black communities.”

Franklin, a Dayton,Ohio, native who settled in Chicago, is becoming known for collages mashing together Black America and dreams, colonialism and pop culture. Pun intended, she consciously thinks of herself as a surrealist. “For me, it’s like a framework,” she said, “but I also think of myself as a surrealist in the way I move through the world, the way I see things. I was raised in the Pentecostal church, which is a strange way to come to surrealism, which is historically opposed to dogma or being connected to an institution. I loved Dalí as a teenager because he seemed to be about anti-oppression. But the youth of Chicago, right now, they are the biggest surrealists I know. They resist old ideas about gender, the police state. They are actively opposed to any infringement on their freedoms. You just can’t get any more surrealist than that.”

Chicago has long been a hub for surrealist thought. Leonora Carrington, among the bestselling surrealists in the world right now, worked out of Oak Park. The Arts Club of Chicago, which hosted Dalí and other surrealists during the 1920s, was among the first galleries showing surrealism in this country. In 2018, Janine Mileaf, the Arts Club’s executive director, staged “A Home For Surrealism,” arguing for the influence of European artists on Chicago surrealists, “but that was a surrealism redefined, again and again. Here (artists) worked as receivers of a set of surrealist strategies, but lost the political edge. It wasn’t friendly. Just comfortable.” She calls the Chicago surrealists’ focus on homes and the interiority of the mind as “a domesticated surrealism.” Her show included Chicago surrealists such as Gertrude Abercrombie and Julia Thecla, two of the artists now experiencing a reassessment, commanding blockbuster prices at auction.

Same with Ted Joans, a poet and artist from Cairo, Illinois, whose overlooked work was a focus of “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” a popular recent show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. That exhibit argued surrealism away from its French origins toward more global roots. It ended with a 30-foot-long accordion of a collective drawing (known as an exquisite corpse) created by Joans, who traveled the world, inviting artists in various countries to contribute a panel. He was a surrealist of the old school, determinedly uncompromising sort: In 2000, as a protest of the killing of Amadou Diallo (a Guinean immigrant shot 41 times by New York police when he reached for his wallet), he moved to Canada.

Penelope Rosemont remembers him well.

She contributed to his exquisite corpse. He was often part of the Chicago Surrealist Group, which she cofounded in 1966, after she and her husband, Franklin, left Roosevelt University, visited Paris and met with André Breton. When she talks about the Chicago Surrealists today, she’s speaking fondly, less about an ideology than a community. At 81, she still lives in Chicago, and decades later, has never lost the faith.

“Surrealism transformed my life philosophically,” she said. “I expect the reassessment of it to continue at least through the 100th anniversary (of the Surrealist Manifesto, next year). I do still believe surrealism can transform this world.” Then like a true surrealist opposed to institutions of any form, she pointed out that Dalí had a fascination with Nazism and seemed to have fascist sympathies. She called him a pretender and “a darling of a ruling class of cynical morons.” She said the last thing the Art Institute should show is Dalí.

“But then, surrealism has always been about more than one man.”

“Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears” runs through June 12 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.; 312-443-3600 and artic.edu

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com