Surreal Things

V&A

A set of stage curtains swags the entrance of the latest V&A show. The spectator slips through them into a strange theatrical land. This is the world of Surrealism. It is a place where the studiedly weird, the deliberately warped and the effortfully idiosyncratic can all flourish. Surrealism may be one of a cluster of movements embraced by Modernism, but the look of this exhibition could hardly be further from that of the Modernist retrospective that the V&A put on last summer.

In place of the rational, the streamlined, the functional, comes an anarchic efflorescence of all that is fantastical, surprising, bizarre and disturbing, dreamlike, shocking and funny – and sometimes downright ridiculous.

Of course, at its inception Surrealism was about a mind-set, not material artefacts. The word “Surrealist”, coined by Apollinaire in 1917, was used six years later by André Breton to describe a philosophically, politically and poetically radical movement that set out to play with perceptions of the world. Its prime concern, declared Arthur Rimbaud, was quite simply “to change life”.

It has often been said that there is no Surrealist art. And yet, paradoxically, it is through objects that the movement has become known. “It is inadmissible that ideas should be at the behest of money,” ranted Breton. And yet a movement that started out as a critique of consumer culture was discovered to have lucrative commercial possibilities.

It is these that the new V&A show explores. From the Ballets Russes set designs of Max Ernst and Joan Miró that goaded Breton and his gang into a whistle-blowing protest at the premiere to a poster for the Shell oil company that pinches René Magritte’s imagery, this show explores how, over a period of two decades, the Surrealist aesthetic was to infiltrate and affect everything from fashion to film, from theatre to interior design, from architecture to advertising.

Sometimes the connections (which this show stresses) between the artist’s aesthetic and its design “spin-off” are surprising. One of Miró’s great paintings of the Thirties, it turns out, was actually first conceived as a tapestry design. The two now hang side by side.

This show is immediately striking. How could it not be? It displays some of the most exotic and erotic, extravagant and alluring, surprising and sometimes instantly recognisable artefacts of the 20th century. Here is Salvador DalÍ’s Mae West Lips Sofa, for instance, its cushiony pout covered at DalÍ’s insistence in “the glossiest possible” satin to resemble lipstick in the “shocking pink” made so chic at the time by the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Right next to it is his lobster telephone, a quintessentially Surrealist combination of ridiculous contrasts.

Here is Eileen Agar’s Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouilla-baisse, a wearable sculpture confected from assorted beach combings. And there is Schiaperelli’s Skeleton evening dress. Inspired by a circus freak, it is quilted with a ribcage of “bones”. Here is the upholstered wheelbarrow by Oscar Dominguez and beside it a photograph of a model lounging in its red satin interior. On display here, too, is the Eugene Berman wardrobe, a trompe l’oeil classical ruin whose discovery somewhere in the bowels of the V&A intrigued this show’s curator, Ghislaine Wood, and first set her on the path to creating the exhibition.

But it is less the family resemblances than the self-conscious differences between the artefacts that are most noticeable as you stroll through this show. Surrealism is emphatically not a “style”. It is more like a force. Slowly it colonises the world of design, seeking escape routes from strict Modernist orders, warping established patterns to create an innovative new visual language.

Nonetheless this show traces the development of certain lines of thought. The marvels of nature, for instance – from unscrolling fern crosiers to tentacled sea anemones – be come a source of inspirational motifs for artists from Max Ernst, who sets about painting stones, to Picasso who creates a necklace (the one his lover Françoise Gilot wears in that famous photograph in which the artist walks behind her holding a parasol as she sashays along the beach).

Biomorphic forms flourish in the field of design. They become an evocative alternative to Modernist rationality in the ceramics of Miró or the table of Carlo Mollino (one of several items wheedled out of private collectors for the purposes of this exhibition), which was the most expensive piece of 20th-century design yet sold when it fetched £3.5 million last year.

This is an atmospheric show. Landmark moments and events, installations and collaborations of the era are recreated and explored. There is a cabinet, for instance, which captures the essence of the first show of Surrealist objects – at the Galerie Drouin in Paris in 1939, containing iconic creations of Man Ray and Duchamp among several other pieces. The spectator can stand and look into a miniature model of Peggy Guggen-heim’s Art of this Century Gallery, which opened in New York in 1942. This was a not a place for solemn contemplation. It was intended to astonish and discombobulate. The lights would flicker on and off, focusing on different artworks; pulsating, supposedly, like the beat of the blood. And every now and then the spectator would be plunged into darkness and the noise of a train would tear through the space.

The fertile collaboration between DalÍ and Edward James, the eccentric Englishman whose portrait was painted by Magritte (though, with typical Surrealist subversion, only from the back), is explored. Jones, according to the story at least, rescued DalÍ from the diving suit in which he had chosen to deliver a lecture. When a spanner failed to free the asphyxiating artist Jones apparently prised open his helmet with a billiard cue.

The spectator watches Surrealism padding like an escaped leopard all over Monkton, his quintessentially English, Lutyens-designed country house – though their plan for a red fur-lined room that would resemble the inside of a retching dog’s stomach was, probably happily, never realised.

Later the visitor finds himself strolling past an intriguing shop window. Commercial designers were quick to appropriate the arresting tricks of Surrealism to capture consumer attention and Schiaparelli – whose Place Vendôme premises are recreated – understood the power of the theatrical tableau better than most. Her perfumes look as mysteriously tempting as poisons in this setting.

As you find yourself drawing towards the end of this show – it has an uncluttered and leisurely layout that lures you easily onwards – it is not so much the physical that you notice, it is the psychological mood that starts to possess you. Starting off with Surrealism’s fetishistic and decidedly spooky fascination with the mannequin, the show looks at the body as it is scrutinised as an artistic site.

There are some pretty queasy objects, including Méret Oppenheim’s “artery gloves”, the venous system outlined on their soft kid, or the DalÍ-designed “tear” evening dress with its motif of ripped flesh. Fashion, ostensibly that most superficial of art forms, is probing the Freudian with a sometimes disconcerting directness. The primal material of fur, particularly, has a powerful and often repulsive role to play.

Breton may have deplored the commodification of Surrealism. But through the commercialisation that made it a global brand it seeped into and subverted the Modernist imagination. It turned everything inside out so that it could move from the outside in. Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design is at the V&A, London SW7 (www.vam.ac.uk 020-7942 2000) from Thursday until July 22

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