In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris – review

In 1936, Méret Oppenheim, the German-born artist and photographer, ran into Picasso and his lover Dora Maar in Cafe Flore, Paris. Oppenheim, who was then only 23, was wearing a brass cuff covered in ocelot fur that she had designed for the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, and when Picasso noticed it, he was moved to remark teasingly that all sorts of things could surely be wrapped in fur. Oppenheim agreed: even this plate and cup, she offered, gesturing at the contents of her table. Soon after this encounter, she duly swathed a cup, saucer and spoon in the skin of a Chinese gazelle, a curiosity she titled Objet. Witty, erotic and subtly political – in the artistic circles in which Oppenheim moved, women were at best regarded only as muses – it was acquired, before the year was out, by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first surrealist piece to join its collection.

Oppenheim, brilliant and beautiful, has only a tiny walk-on part in Sue Roe’s In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dalí. By the time she appears, hell bent on repurposing the everyday the better to “hound the mad beast of function”, the movement has long since moved from the artistic fringes to the fashionable mainstream, a place where it will stay, in one form or another, for the rest of the century and beyond. Dalí has already painted The Persistence of Memory (1931), in which huge watches, stranded in a desert-like landscape, appear to melt like the wheels of camembert that inspired them; he has also made his Lobster Telephone (1936), an object commissioned by the English poet and collector Edward James, as a response to what the artist said of New York in a magazine (“I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone”).

These pieces may still, of course, have unsettled those seeing them for the first time; even now, Objet still turns the mind from lapsang souchong to sex in less time than it takes to boil a kettle. But the impulses that led to their creation were radically different to those involved in early surrealism. Here, the unconscious is deployed in, as Roe puts it, a highly strategic manner; it is not, as in the work of, say, Max Ernst, a thing bubbling up, unbidden and ungovernable. More significantly, this work, having been made by younger artists, is entirely detached from the impact of the first world war, surrealism’s single most important impetus.

Roe carefully lists the experiences of surrealism’s key figures in that war: the poet Guillaume Apollinaire was, for instance, wounded in action; his head, still bandaged, was just about the only thing to soften the hearts of the disgusted crowd when Diaghilev’s radical ballet Parade was finally staged in 1917 (written by Jean Cocteau, with designs by Picasso and music by Eric Satie; Apollinaire had written the programme notes, and could therefore be seen on the night in the audience). The poet Louis Aragon, who worked as a medic, was buried three times in one day by grenade explosions; André Breton, the writer who would give Objet its alternative title, Le Déjeuner en Fourrure, worked as an orderly among the shell-shocked; Cocteau was an ambulance driver. But such biographical details apart, Roe never quite takes the time fully to examine the relationship between their horror and consequent rage and their work; to show how, as Robert Hughes noted in The Shock of the New, what they had witnessed effectively separated them, by choice or not, from the social order (hence their powerful need for the Montparnasse cafes – Les Deux Magots, the Cafe de la Rotonde, La Closerie des Lilas – that became, in effect, their meeting places, their libraries, their bustling “theatres of the new”).

But then, Roe is not in the business of pausing for thought. Like her previous book, In Montmartre, this is a ceaselessly forward-moving narrative – she tells and tells and tells – and while highly colourful, it’s sometimes wearying to read. An almost month-by-month account of the activities of a quite large group of artists, most of whom worked in Montparnasse from 1910-11, they themselves are only sketchily drawn, arriving on the page without much context. Roe’s attention is, rather, on the exhibitions they stage, the manifestos they write, the people they sleep with, and the terrible rows they have – and the effect is oddly flattening. It’s as if you’re at a long and glamorous party, but are allowed to spend only a few minutes at a time with each guest. Meet Man Ray! she says, excitedly. But no sooner have you shaken the great photographer’s hand than she’s urging Marcel Duchamp on you. After a while, you start to sympathise with Kiki de Montparnasse, the artist’s model who would spend most of the 1920s with Man Ray, and who struggled to tell the difference between the various factions, whether dadaist or surrealist.

Still, they’re all here, the big names of the time – behaving badly and, at times, quite madly, too. At Max Ernst’s first Paris exhibition in 1921, Breton spent the evening making bestial noises, Aragon pretended to be a kangaroo, and Tristan Tzara could be seen playing hide and seek (Tzara was the Romanian poet who founded dada – the word means baby talk in German – at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich). Later, Ernst would become involved in a tortuous love triangle with the poet Paul Éluard and his wife Gala, the same Gala who would eventually leave them both for Dalí; the start of this relationship was, Dalí noted in his memoirs, marked by “a permanent character of diseased abnormality”, by which he meant a shared passion for certain sexual kinks. Surrealism, according to Breton, was “a cry of the mind”. But it also had to do with freedom: sometimes, one’s loins cried out, too. Desire evoked melancholia and disorder, that suspension of logic to which, Roe notes, all surrealist thinking aspired. “Love is a state of confusion between the real and the marvellous,” as Aragon put it.

Roe’s restive narrative, then, does at least reflect the wildly spinning, agitated lives of its subjects. On and on they go with their bicycle wheels and their unmade beds, their collages and their unrequited love affairs. No wonder that Breton was so disappointed when he met the elderly Sigmund Freud in Vienna three years after the end of the war. The good professor, it seemed, did not after all believe that his kind of psychiatry was just another form of artistic expression. As he would put it afterwards, the “little old man” simply had “no style”.

• In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dali by Sue Roe is published by Fig Tree (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99