Surrealistic Sanity

For the crowded opening of its new show last week, Manhattan's D'Arcy Galleries had gone to all sorts of pains to set the right mood. Through loudspeakers came the false notes struck by a small child practicing the piano. In one nook were three white hens, in another a gypsy fortuneteller. A green hose snaked through the various rooms, a bicycle hung upside down from the ceiling, an old-fashioned time clock stood guard at the door. With such zany flourishes, surrealism came back to Manhattan in force for the first time in 18 years.

The show was organized by Poet Andre Breton, 64, who wrote the first surrealist manifesto in 1924 and still presides over a dogged group of followers in Paris. Breton chose the artists to be represented from all over Europe and the U.S. Gentle, 73-year-old Marcel (Nude Descending a Staircase) Duchamp, who 37 years ago gave up painting in favor of chess, helped hang the exhibition at the gallery. The paintings were anywhere from 44 years to a few months old. showing that there is life of a sort in the old movement yet.

Originally, the aim of the surrealists--aside from the aim to shock and to make publicity--was to open up the realm of hallucination, of legend, dreams, and even madness. "The marvelous is always beautiful; any facet of the marvelous is beautiful; indeed, only the marvelous is beautiful," wrote Breton. In one way, time has been kind to the movement, for the best of its members were good artists. But in a world so inured to artistic high jinks, much of the marvelous is gone.

Last week it was the old masters who stole the show--Yves Tanguy with his unearthly landscapes, Francis Picabia with a grotesque pair of spiky-chinned lovers, the German Richard Oelze with buildings and people that look as if they had been submerged in water for years. There were wooden moons and seas by Max Ernst, a geometric Anthony and Cleopatra by Philadelphia-born Man Ray, a couple of dreamy street scenes by Italy's Giorgio de Chirico. Among the younger artists, none were equal in quality, and some seemed to be more action painters than surreal. Robert Rauschenberg's Bed --sheets, pillow and quilt daubed with paint--and Jasper Johns's Target, with its anatomical sculptures, including a penis, were merely repulsive.

Some years ago, Marcel Duchamp himself said: "Movements begin as a group formation and end with the scattering of individuals." Yet the exhibit showed something else about the oldtimers. What once seemed sick now seems strangely sane: the surrealists were wild but seldom undisciplined, and with their hoses, their hens and their bicycles, they knew how to laugh at themselves.

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