Surrealism, Taste and Coco Chanel

[Fidgeteer]

How the hell is everyone here at Style Forum? I don't feel sufficiently emboldened to introduce myself just yet, nor confident enough to discuss fashion, so I thought I'd begin by talking about something I've loved since I was a kid: surrealism. §§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§ By this time, most people have heard about Anne Fontaine’s recent bioflick, Coco before Chanel, and the large-pupiled star, Audrey Tatou, who plays the great fashion innovator. (I'd link to a few sites for reference, but some forums don't allow that for first-time posters.) What they might have heard less about was Coco Chanel's relationship to the surrealists. She and Elsa Schiaparelli seem to have received a great deal of fashion inspiration from their surrealist friends. Of the two, Schiaparelli was the most obvious in terms of surrealist influence: she became good friends with Dadaists Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Edward Steichen before ever contemplating becoming a designer. (Some have said that her era-leaping use of denim and rayon had its lineage in Duchamp's readymades.) And in the 30s, she began collaborating with some of the most famous surrealists, notably, Paul Delvaux and Jean Cocteau (as well as the seemingly unavoidable Salvador Dali). Coco Chanel, too, was friends with Cocteau and Dali. And at the end of the 1930s, she, too, began collaborating with prominent surrealists (like Marcel VertÃ

). And the great American surrealist, Man Ray, made an early living as a fashion photographer (one of the best, too). All of these connections can seem odd to the casual reader because of one unfortunate fact: Unlike great designers, the surrealists have never been known for having good taste. Dali, in particular, is considered so garish that the mention of his name causes some people to leave the table. I've met successful artists who were so disgusted with Dali's aesthetic and bad technique that anyone who brought him up was dismissed as a twit. Yet Dali is perhaps the Surrealist whose work influenced fashion the most. It is a problem that has perplexed me for rather a long time: being interested in artists who, despite their influence on fashion, are almost universally dismissed as tasteless. Of course, I'm not talking about Dali, whom I have always disliked apart from any social pressure to do so. The surrealists I love are the ones who maintain a sense of delicacy and fragility in their exploration of the unconscious: Surrealist writers like Robert Desnos, Max Jacob and Paul Eluard. The surrealist painters I love most are these: Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Varo, Hans Bellmer, Max Ernst and Meret Oppenheimer. I'd link to paintings by Tanning and Varo if I could, but, again, I'm not certain I'm allowed without posting more. Thoughts, anyone? Surrealists with taste -- an oxymoron?

 

[cheessus]

I like surrealists because they were really counter feminist.

Not sure if this was spam or what, but now I am actually interested in seeing this movie. Good job.

 

[Fidgeteer]

How could "it be spam" when discussion of the movie is only devoted to one sentence, and the rest of the post is about fashion, taste and the surrealists? The beats were at least as sexist as the surrealists (feminism didn't really exist yet except as a prototype, which meant one couldn't "counter" it). The difference is that the few surviving women writers identified as beats either had to sleep their way into semi-recognition (Diane DiPrima recounts an instance in which she was double-teamed by both Jack Kerouac and the frighteningly obese Allen Ginsburg, who was apparently not gay enough to restrain himself from exploiting a female understudy as he would his male students later)) or weren't encouraged at all. Whereas Remedios Varos, Dorothea Tanning and Meret Oppenheimer were recognized apart from all that, and were treated as equals rather than mistresses. Tanning married Max Ernst after she was established as a painter. Ditto for Remedios Varo and her marriage to poet, Benjamin Peret. In fact, Tanning is the only founding surrealist who's still alive -- and she lives in New York (if I were less polite, I'd have tried to get an interview). Here's an example of one of her paintings, a picture of her, and a few shots of her with with then-husband, Ernst:

Here is a photo of the incredibly gifted and prolific Remedios Varo, and here are a few of her enigmatic paintings:

Meret Oppenheim was not beholden to any male in the surrealist group. One of her famous quotes: "Nobody will give you freedom. You have to take it." One of the many photographs of her by Man Ray:

From the bio that accompanies the film about her in the Roland Series (hardly "counter feminist"):

For many younger women artists Meret Oppenheim is a rôle-model, because of the way she lived her life and realized her creative freedom. She won early fame in the thirties with her Fur-lined Teacup, but then experienced a long creative crisis. In the middle of the 1950s she regained her self-confidence and quietly began a new phase of productivity. At the end of the sixties her work was rediscovered, and she gained new recognition. Meret Oppenheim considered herself a seismograph of the spiritual landscape - one who, being rooted in the past and future, kept the passage to the unconscious open. She had a deep trust in the unconscious and throughout her life she recorded her dreams, which she used as a source of guidance and self-knowledge. She also strongly believed that art has no gender, and strove to balance and unite the opposite sides of her psyche, the spiritual-female and spiritual-male, an effort that was reflected in her appearance and in the dreams of her last years. She felt that, ever since the establishment of patriarchy, the female principle had been devalued and projected on to women. Because of this disturbed balance, she felt that a new direction in the evolution of mankind is needed, where the female principle is not devalued and humanity arrives at wholeness.

One of her objects, "My Nursemaid (1936)":

Hans Bellmer is often associated with a Sadean view of women, but his male gaze was tempered with a kind of helpless awe. He encouraged but ultimately failed to help the great German surrealist writer, Unica Zurn, with whom he lived and, long after her suicide, was buried. Their shared grave is marked with a plaque inscribed with the words he wrote for her funeral wreath roughly five years before: "My love will follow you into Eternity." (Zurn herself was a talented artist as well as a journalist and novelist. I own a collection of her drawings as well as most of her books.) Unica Zürn:

Bellmer and Zürn together: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_bq6_cE4BJJ...oup%C3%A9e.jpg Drawing by Bellmer:

Drawing by Zürn (already in the late stages of schizophrenia):

Their shared tomb: