Surreal Lives

Universal History Archive / UIG / Getty

British zoologist Desmond Morris is another example of talent overflow. He is known primarily for his bestselling book The Naked Ape (1967) and for such BBC nature shows as Zoo Time and Life in the Animal World. But Morris is also a painter who identifies himself as one of the last of the Surrealists. He held his first solo exhibition of Surrealist paintings in 1948, when the movement was nearly finished. Morris was 20 and, in the aftermath of World War II, was attracted to Surrealism’s idea of art as a subconscious and intuitive response to experience.

It has taken Morris 70 more years to focus his conscious thoughts into organized shape, and the result is The Lives of the Surrealists. He has structured the book around the 32 Surrealist painters that he finds most interesting, beginning with Eileen Agar and including such luminaries as Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Man Ray. He arranges their stories in alphabetical order and provides illuminating and lively details for each. It is a personal perspective rather than a historical treatise, and focuses on the Surrealists’ lives rather than on their work. “What were their personalities, their predilections, their character strengths and character weaknesses?” These are not Wikipedia-style capsules; they are provocative biographical essays exploring the Surrealists’ daily habits, eccentricities, and sexual proclivities.

Morris begins with André Breton, the French poet whose 1924 manifesto set forth rigid rules defining Surrealism. Breton is far from a warm and embracing figure, and many artists rejected his rigidity. His manifesto announced that Surrealism was “Psychic automatism in its pure state,” as expressed “in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” That his manifesto became as influential as it did was odd, since Surrealism had evolved out of the rebellious, no-rules Dada movement.

Public domain photograph by Alfred Stieglitz

The essay on Marcel Duchamp is particularly fascinating because of what Morris argues about Duchamp’s most famous “readymade”—that it wasn’t actually Duchamp’s own work. Morris quotes a letter Duchamp wrote to his sister admitting that “one of my women friends, using a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, submitted [to a 1917 exhibition] a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.” This infamous readymade, Morris suggests, was actually the creation of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a German acquaintance of Duchamp’s. Morris concedes that “some scholars of surrealism” think Duchamp may have been referring to a different woman friend—but Morris then goes a step further and wonders “whether, perhaps, the whole idea of readymades was Elsa’s rather than his.” She was certainly a character: Morris describes the baroness as “a work of living Dada,” replete with black-painted lips, yellow face powder, shaved head, and coal-scuttle hat.

In another biography, Morris writes about taking Joan Miró in 1964 on a personal tour of the London Zoo, where Morris was then working. Miró, then in his early seventies, was especially interested in meeting “brightly coloured birds and creatures of the night.” The tour’s high point came when Morris arranged for a giant python to be wrapped around Miró’s body: Morris remembered a 1908 drawing by Miró of a giant serpent coiling itself, and thought the python would give the artist a true sense of the creature’s enormous power. Miró “stood smiling triumphantly holding the coils of the monster he had depicted so lovingly over half a century earlier.”

Another Surrealist fared less well with fauna. Austrian-Mexican surrealist Wolfgang Paalen “has the dubious distinction,” Morris writes, “of being the only surrealist to have been eaten by wild animals.” Depressed, Paalen committed suicide in a remote location “and was not discovered for some days other than, reputedly, by a group of hungry pigs.”

Morris celebrates Pablo Picasso as a founding member of Surrealism. The artist designed the curtain, sets, and costumes of the 1917 ballet Parade, and it was in the program notes for this ballet that the term surrealism was coined: Guillaume Apollinaire used the word there, Morris writes, “as a way of describing Picasso’s art.” Picasso himself believed that “the source of all painting lies in a subjectively organized vision,” and that what he valued most is a “profound resemblance, realer than real, attaining the surreal.”

Morris also delves into Picasso’s love life. He married the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova while he was working on the sets for Parade. At the same time, he embarked on passionate affairs with Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar; all three women would appear in his paintings for years. In 1943 Picasso fell in love with Françoise Gilot, and they had two children. Picasso was still married to Olga, but when she died in 1955, he married Jacqueline Roque. Roque and the artist stayed together until Picasso’s death in 1973. His “treatment of women sometimes makes him look like a monster,” Morris writes, but Picasso was also “capable of great tenderness and kindness”—and Morris suggests that it was “this mixture that helped make his paintings so great.”

Morris’s final essay, on the American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, opens with the remark that she “broke two records. She lived longer than any of the other surrealists”—she died in 2012 at the age of 101—“and of all the many sexual partnerships enjoyed by [fellow Surrealist] Max Ernst, hers was by far the longest.”

The Lives of the Surrealists is highly readable and filled with attention-grabbing observations. At 90, Morris isn’t interested in boring personalities, and his essays reveal why the artists he has selected are worth the bother. Ever the zoologist, he studies them like the exotic species they were, and the reader will come away tantalized, exasperated, and enthralled.