Exhibition Review: Twilight Visions

-The following is my own exhibition review written for 20th Century Art-

Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris, currently on view as the Jepson Center’s main exhibit, is a visual narrative on the gradual transformation of Parisian society into ambiguity between the old and new, male and female, truth and fantasy, and the erotic and the grotesque. The exhibit displays striking and profound examples of these dualities primarily through a body of achromatic photographs. The exhibit begins with grand photographic compositions of Paris in various arrondisements and a collection of photographs that interpret the Eiffel Tower as both significant and negligible. Beyond the first portion of the exhibit, the grandeur of the subject slowly melts, moving to the erotic grotesque of the surrealist feminine form, and lastly to the nightlife inside the bals musettes of Paris. Although the exhibit is presented in this order, the meaning of the exhibit is far richer if viewed from the end to the beginning. In this way, the exhibit may be discovered and understood initially on a personal level, and be slowly opened to the scope of the monumental city that the photographs reveal. To understand Paris in the early twentieth century, it is essential to conceive the mentally torn state of the people before beholding the façade of grandeur and modernity that they lived behind.

The sub-exhibit of photographs depicting the nightlife of Paris is entitled “Portraits After Hours,” and reveals the conflicts of expression and power. The featured artist, Brassaï, was himself conflicted about the nightlife in Montmartre and Montparnasse, having been crowded out along with his peers by flocks of tourists. Brassaï withdrew to the more reclusive, underground night scenes of Paris when his cafés and clubs became public attractions. What he found was a world of working-class men and women who were overthrowing conventional social expectations of contemporary Parisian society in the early twentieth century. Brassaï exposes this discovery subtly and decisively through his collection of silver gelatin prints. Many of his photographs play with reflections, often with underclass Parisians in the foreground whose countenance and expression contradict the expressions of the figures reflected in the mirror behind them. In using visual contradition, Brassaï exposes the sexual and emotional dualities of common people, which were gradually becoming vague in decreasing adherence to stereotype.
In Girl Playing Snooker[1], a young, attractively bold woman, possibly a prostitute, stands before a game table gripping her billiard stick and stares powerfully at the camera with dominant force. Her demeanor indisputably reflects the feminist empowerment that she possesses as she plays at a gentleman’s game. Her power is masculine, and perplexing. Behind her are two mirrors, one of which reflects a man seated in profile, seemingly alone. His repressed demeanor expresses a despondency and lethargy that contrasts with the prowess of the woman in the foreground. While she is acting like a man, he is expressing a repressed attitude commonly expected from a woman.

Another striking example of expressive duality is a photograph entitled Bal Musette[2], which masterfully captures a decisive moment in the faces of a group of young Parisians seated around a table. In the foreground a young man slouches despondently, flanked by two pretty women. All three faces stare glumly at the animated, wide-mouthed young man who is reflected just behind them. They personify the duality in the attitude of their class, both wary of modernity and excited by progress. The pretension and boredom also illustrates Brassaï’s dissatisfaction with the social scene in the bals musettes and cafès, which was quickly slipping into tourism in his time. The city was transforming, and displaced its own people. Brassaï soon looked deeper for inspiration, only to further uncover the ambiguity of his time.

Brassaï’s discovery of backstage life materialized in his work to expose the cold reality of modernization. Two photographs reveal this, presented in the exhibit as a diptych. The first, Backstage at the Folies-Bergère, Paris[3] is an obliquely-angled view of exhausted female performers, laying nude on a stage floor, slumped against the set of a show of which they are obviously a part. The viewer is looking from far above in the scaffolding, seeing in perspective the monstrosity of the curtain mechanisms, lights, and set pieces that dwarf the women. The second photograph, Sleeping Machinist at the Folies-Bergère, Paris[4] is a more immediate commentary on the dichotomy of human failing and machine power. The camera looks straight on to a machinist, head in hand, sleeping beneath a grimy, monstrous machine that leaves only a cramped area for the man to rest in. Brassaï uses these compositions to show the machine in terms of the human figure, in both cases dominating them in scale. These two photographs manifest the monstrosity of machinery, and the primary role that it had taken in Brassaï’s time in the wake of the mobilization of industry.

A film shown in the same room, L’Atalante[5], is a Poetic Realist piece directed by Jean Vigo in 1934. It is an observation of the trifles of affection in low-class life. The film is a story of the affliction in store for a young couple when a flirtatious street entertainer comes between them. The torn woman is left stranded after her conflicted feelings lead her to abandon her lover. In this moment, the director uses the opportunity to convey the cold monstrosity of the machine that Brassaï addressed. Looking for him along the banks of the Seine, she desperately wanders the cold landscape of bricks and metal structures rising hauntingly in the distance like the skeletons of industry. It is a strong contrast of human frailty and industrial strength. Vigo filmed L’Atalante at the same time that Brassaï photographed the photos mentioned above, and it is obvious that they felt ripples from the same wake. The rise of industry has a strong presence in the social context of these works, and is made obvious through the reflection of a despondent and confused underclass of people lost within the world of the machine.

The next exhibit swiftly shifts to examine the duality of the sexes as it moves into the surrealist movement in Paris. Following the exhibit still from end to beginning, the surrealist exhibit immediately presents a film directed collaboratively by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou[6]. It influenced Jean Vigo to insert hallucinatory shots into L’Atalante. It is a perpetually confusing and frequently disturbing surrealist film that involves a man dressed as a nun, and his death and resurrection as a possessed man with ants crawling out of his hand. He both harasses and attempts to abuse his lover, in whose irrational nightmare it seems the film is set. Such elite surrealist symbolism lends itself to confusion of a broader audience, and may be more understood, if not also more frustrated, by Luis Buñuel’s statement about their aim in Un Chien Andalou: “Our only one rule was very simple: no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.”[7] Though this may have been the object of the directors in creating the film, the feelings left in the viewer are clear enough: the aggressive sexual attitude of the male lead forces a reconsideration of what is erotic, and what is nauseatingly grotesque.

Mutable Mirrors is the photographic portion of the surrealist exhibit that focuses on the dualities of the erotic and the grotesque and of the sexes. André Kertész’ Distortion[8] triptych of 1933 is a hallucinatory, perverse, funhouse distortion of the female form.Photographed as though reflected in distorted mirrors, the women are all either embracing themselves or each other, and appear distant. They are almost anti-erotic to the point of asexuality. These works provoke reflection on society’s long-lived perception of the female body as an object. Accepted truth begins to lose form. By viewing the body so distorted, one can truly “see” the body without any perversity or distortion of preconceptions in the viewer’s mind, as though viewing an alien form. What was once erotic is so easily made grotesque.

Another unsettling series is one by Hans Bellmer, who photographed mannequins that he dismantled and reassembled, placing them in suggestive situations. He addresses abuse and rape, with an assembled form of two lower bodies, joined at the hip as a constructed full figure, standing nude in the forest with its dress strewn on the ground. Another photograph shows a mannequin of legs tied in rope to a staircase. Yet another shows a torso on a bed surrounded by black gauze, its head lying on its stomach, worn and apparently dead, with hollowed eyes. Objects that could formerly have been considered erotic are now disassembled to create new, disturbing forms. Surrealist imagery frequently used body part-substitution to convey meaning, and Bellmer multiplied parts of the human body to show how women are frequently abused.

Mutable Mirrors brings more surrealist interpretations of the female form by Man Ray and sexually ambiguous self-portraits by Lee Miller and Claude Cohun that reveal the public and private nature of the body. After this, the exhibit resurfaces to the streets of old Paris. The photographs begin with a compositionally rich, inspired collection by Eugene Atget. Atget was not alive to enjoy his recognition. He was a flâneur, and submitted his work anonymously when he was hired to photograph Paris former to its renovation. He was a great discovery for phototograhers previously mentioned who captured Paris in the spirit of the dichotomy of the old and new. The streets he photographed are haunting and deserted, with a peace that arises from a quieted revolutionary past.

André Kertész was one such artist who drew inspiration from Atget, photographing the rise of modern Paris. On the Quais, Paris[9] shows a bourgeois gentleman looking on two working class men. In the background a landscape of old Parisian architecture is intruded on by constructive equipment. In Rue Vavin, Paris[10], he photographed windowsills from a high angle, looking down at the façade of an old building that was not removed in modernization. Kertész was interested in contrasting old Paris with the signs of modernity that were rising in the city. Josef Breitenbach was inspired by the same notion to create Veiled Statue, Paris,[11] in which an anonymous statue stands shrouded in a street filled with cars of the early century. The statue represents the covered memory of the Paris of the past, contrasted against progress that was quickly becoming universal in the ancient city. There was a rising ambiguity in the state of the old city mingling with the new.

Finally, Paris is revealed fully. At the end, or rather the beginning, of the exhibit the Eiffel tower is presented as both monumental and inconsequential. The old city is contrasted with the new. The compositions widen to include more space, and consequently grander visions. The almost exclusive concern of these photographs is the contrast of simplicity with the complexities imposed by modernity. The exhibits of the Eiffel tower and old Paris reflect the Parisians’ perpetual accommodation to the rising architecture around them that pushed them into a new age. Their lives are rearranged through these accommodations, and have been shifted to a place of displacement in their own world. Though they are still Parisian, they are not at home.

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[1] Brassaï, Girl Playing Snooker, 1933.
[2] Brassaï, Bal Musette, 1932.
[3] Brassaï, Backstage at the Folies-Bergère, Paris, 1932.
[4] Brassaï, Sleeping Machinist at the Folies-Bergère, Paris, 1932.
[5] Jean Vigo, Director, L’Atalante, 1934.
[6] Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, Directors, Un Chien Andalou, 1929.
[7] Lichtenstein, Therese, Ph.D., Curator Notes, Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris.
[8] André Kertész, Distortion No.4, Distortion #40, and Distortion #5, 1933.
[9] André Kertész, On the Quais, Paris, 1928.
[10] André Kertész, Rue Vavin, Paris, 1925.
[11] Josef Breitenbach, Veiled Statue, Paris, 1933-39.