In 1924, the French writer André Breton put his name to a document he called “The Surrealist Manifesto”. In it, he argued that European culture had suppressed “everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition”, and called on fellow writers and artists “to explore all that fell beyond rational and the conscious thought”: dreams, hallucinations and “unedited streams of thought”. Breton’s text was the catalyst for what would become one of 20th century art’s most recognisable movements, said Hettie Judah in The Guardian, inspiring artists including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Man Ray.
Opened late last year, this show at the Hepworth Wakefield – subtitled “100 Years of Surreal Landscapes” – is one of several celebrating surrealism’s centenary. It brings together 160 paintings, photographs and sculptures to explore the surrealists’ approach to landscape and the natural world, demonstrating how they used them as a prism through which to explore “the unconscious and the realm of feeling”. Featuring pieces by surrealists both famous and obscure, it is an “extravaganza” of an exhibition that casts an “appropriately irreverent” look at its subject.
The photography here is particularly strong, said Lou Selfridge in Frieze. At first glance, a 1935 shot by Dora Maar appears to show a jumble of grey lines, “gathering into tight clusters like manic cross-hatching”. It takes a while to register that it is in fact “a craggy cliff face, viewed from a boat just offshore”. Through framing alone, Maar takes a “radical” approach to looking at nature, rendering a relatively ordinary phenomenon strange and “unrecognisable”. There’s a lot of “filler”, however, notably a large section given over to little-known artist, poet and nun Mary Wykeham. If her “middle-of-the-road paintings and prints” here are anything to go on, her obscurity is well deserved. And the contemporary pieces scattered around pale in comparison to authentic surrealist works like Max Ernst’s compelling woodland scene.
“It’s sometimes tempting to dismiss surrealism as modern art’s silliest movement,” said Alastair Sooke in the Daily Telegraph – all “trite, sub-Freudian motifs”: melting watches, furry teaware, lobster telephones. This show makes a good case for “considering it seriously”. Landscape, for these explorers of the unconscious mind, could be a manifestation of veiled urges: the sea here is often associated “with sexual desire”; another section plunges us into the “primal forest”. Nicolas Party’s “imposing” mural, a new commission, “depicts trees like gigantic deciduous leaves or dyed cross-sections of a human lung”. There are also brilliant pieces by Magritte, Jean Arp and “local boy” Henry Moore – represented by a “suggestively swelling” “Reclining Figure” from 1936. This is an “ambitious and ingenious” show – “a cavern that’s worth exploring”.
The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire. Until 21 April