Surrealism's Fathers

Like all history, the history of art must be constantly rewritten, for even in the most obscure artist, now forsaken or forgotten, an ancestor with a message for the present might be found. In its current big show,* Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art spotlights three new candidates for ancestorhood, three 19th century symbolists who drew their inspiration from dreams and fantasy at a time when their more powerful contemporaries, the realists and the impressionists, were in their different ways exploring nature.

Of the three--Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau and Rodolphe Bresdin--only Redon is well known today, though more for his glowing flower pieces than for his excursions into eeriness. Moreau is a clouded memory, and if Bresdin is remembered at all, it is primarily as Redon's teacher. The exhibition links the three as fathers of surrealism.

La Belle Inertie. Unhappily, in the case of Moreau, the quest for ancestry gets a bit out of hand; his is a case in which a painter has been more ignored than unknown, since his work has long been embalmed in the musty, state-run Musee Gustave Moreau in Paris. Not until the Louvre, apparently at the instigation of Culture Minister Andre Malraux, put on a big Moreau show last summer (TIME, July 21) was the general public suddenly informed that Moreau should be remembered not only as the brilliant teacher of Matisse and Rouault but also as an artist with special pertinence today: alongside his stilted and sickly mythological scenes, Moreau also turned out years before anyone else color sketches that were abstract.

In the accompanying catalogue, one-time New York Times Critic Dore Ashton does her sympathetic best to sustain the Louvre thesis that Moreau was a kind of New Frontiersman of Abstraction. Like the thoroughgoing pro that he was, Moreau often did sketches before starting a large work, some being orchestrations of color without the trace of an image. These are Moreau's "abstractions," and much is made of the fact that he squeezed paint on canvas directly from the tube, used his palette knife instead of a brush, and left his fingerprints still visible. Was he the great "precursor" of 20th century abstraction? "There is no answer," says Dore Ashton, and a viewer may be tempted to wonder whether it really matters.

In the end Moreau still remains a mystery. His males are disconcertingly female; his females are almost invariably feline; the colors of his salon canvases--seasick green, hepatitis yellow, muddy brown--are faintly repellent. Moreau took as a principle something he called la belle inertie--a kind of suspended animation that seems less dreamlike than dead. Another Moreau doctrine was that of la richesse necessaire. His big scenes from mythology and the Bible almost choke to death on their own bejeweled detail.

Unseen Monsters. Far more important to the surrealists was Odilon Redon, who was born in Bordeaux in 1840. Probably no child lived in a world of such frantic fantasy, and almost all of his works in later life have their roots in his childhood. Shortly before he died, Redon visited the town where he grew up, and reported, "I have completely understood the origins of the sad art I have created. It is a site for a monastery, an enclosure in which one feels oneself alone--what abandon! It was necessary there to fill one's imagination with the unlikely, for into this exile one had to put something. After all, it may well be that in places most completely deprived of features pleasant to the eye, the spirit and the imagination must take their revenge."

While Moreau's centaurs, sphinxes and Cyclopes are conventional symbols, Redon created monsters seen only by himself. Eyes float like balloons, ears become wings, strange plants sprout out of human heads. Fantasy, said Redon, is "the messenger of the 'unconscious,' of the eminent and mysterious personage . . . who arrives in his own time, according to the moment, the place, even the season." Redon never could explain how the "mysterious personage" worked for him, but he had no real need to. As the show proves once again, seldom has one man's imagination disgorged such an astonishing array of apparitions and turned them into art.

Microscopic Eyes. Least known of all is Rodolphe Bresdin. Redon accepted him as a master, wrote that "his power lay in imagination alone. He never conceived anything beforehand. He improvised with joy." Victor Hugo and Baudelaire also admired him, but the public ignored him. He was found dead one day in 1885 in a cold garret in Sevres, almost as unknown as he was the day he was born.

If the current exhibition does nothing else, it will have served a useful purpose in reintroducing Bresdin. He had microscopes for eyes. In his Holy Family Beside a Rushing Stream, the three figures sit in a dense forest in which the smallest branch of the smallest tree can be seen. In the distance lies an entire city, and beyond that a mountain and beyond that the sky. The fastidiously constructed lithograph is less than 9 in. tall and 7 in. wide; yet the viewer can stay lost in it for minutes. It is not only the work of a gifted technician but of a hypnotist who has the power to hold the eye.

* Which will later travel to Chicago.

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