Super

Paris' exhibition of L'Art Cruel (TIME, Jan. 24) had not long closed its doors on a willing world before there opened last fortnight in a small, select Galerie Beaux-Arts an exhibition with a broader appeal. This was the first international show of Surrealism (superrealism) ever held in the city where that movement was born.* Critics who have been forgetting about this weird school's pristine vigors were reminded of them forcibly when the opening night turned into a near riot, with 2,000 chittering Frenchmen milling around the gates and a troop of police in the courtyard.

Cynosure of all eyes was an improvised sculptural group at the entrance, consisting of a broken-down closed car in which a skeleton sat, warm and dry, at the driver's wheel while in the back seat a semi-nude manikin was planted among flourishing weeds, a heavy shower pouring down on her golden hair. Once past this cryptic collection, visitors entered a long corridor lined with completely nude manikins, masked with bird cages, sprouting electric light bulbs, spotted here and there with snails, pins, bats and magnets. Then each visitor was handed a free flashlight and ushered into the darkness of a big, square room.

Seen thus by dim and bobbling light were 229 objets d'art by 60 artists of 14 different nations, many of them expressive of war and spiritual suffering, many more bearing out the abstruse eroticism of the entrance hall. To Surrealists sex and horror are indescribable and somewhat confused; therefore they merely express themselves on these matters through a calculated but capricious symbolism. At least one exhibit was animated (see cut). One of the objects displayed was a suitcase containing a neatly packed skull and gas mask stuffed with newspapers headlined The Menace of Fascism. Another was an enameled phonograph with an old-fashioned horn from which a manikin's legs protruded at one end, at the other a plaster hand stretched over a revolving disc shaped to suggest the curve of flesh. In the dim light there was an optical illusion of the hand approaching but never quite reaching the flesh-curve of the disc. Title: Jamais.

Organized by chief Surrealist apologists

Andre Breton and Paul Eluard, the exhibition gave ample evidence of the continuing fertility of such Surrealists as Photographer Man Ray, Sculptor Hans Arp. Painters Max Ernst, Andre Masson, Rene Magritte, Yves Tanguy, and especially Salvador Dali. That dapper master of mystification was represented not only by the flivver group at the entrance but by paintings ranging from Le grand masturbateur (1929)10 Telephone aphrodisiaque(1937).

*Previous exhibitions were held in London (TIME, June 29, 1936), and Manhattan (TIME, Dec. 14, 1936).

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