Cruzeiro Seixas, Malangatana, Salvador Dalí at the Tate Modern
Works by artists such as Cruzeiro Seixas, Marcelino Vespeira It is Malangatana can be seen side by side with other Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, starting on Thursday at an exhibition on the surrealism at the Tate Modern Museum in London.
Covering 80 years and 50 countries such as Portugal, Argentina, Egypt, Mexico, Czech Republic, South Korea or Japan, the exhibition of more than 150 works intends to show the international dimension of the movement surrealist beyond a time or place.
In the context of the vanguards of the 1920s, surrealism emerges, an artistic and literary movement that expresses the thoughts of the unconscious. Strongly influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of the psychologist Sigmund Freud, in 1924, André Breton wrote the Manifesto surrealist. The irrational, dreams and madness become the main motto of artistic production surrealist. In the international context, this movement is marked by artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Frida Kahlo and Max Ernst. In Portugal, the movement follows the artistic aesthetics of Paris, with artists such as Mário Cesariny, Cruzeiro Seixas, Mário-Henrique Leiria, António Maria Lisboa, Mário-Henrique Leiria, Marcelino Vespeira, António Dacosta, among others. Since the emergence of surrealism, it has also been used by artists as a weapon in the struggle for political, social and personal freedom in times marked by oppressive and colonizing political regimes. the artists surrealist highlighted the unconscious and dreams rather than everyday images, the works are seen as poetic and even humorous, such as the Lobster phone, in Salvador Dalí, or René Magritte's train coming out of a fireplace.
The appearance of Surrealism in Portugal it is late, despite the artists being aware of this movement and the publication of the first Breton manifesto. Gomes Leal, Teixeira de Pascoaes or the Orpheu generation already had some surrealist characteristics in their works, although Surrealism in Portugal only came to be imposed in 1947. As in France, also in Portugal the development of Surrealism suffered some vicissitudes. Harmand recalled how the Lisbon Surrealist Group, formed by figures such as França, Mário Cesariny and Alexandre O'Neill, adhered to “the surrealist ideas of exploring the unconscious, freeing creativity, freeing the mind, but also the idea that the surrealism it was about political and social liberation. For them, surrealism was an anti-fascist stance, it was a way of challenging the conservatism of the Salazar regime.”
The poet and artist Cruzeiro Seixas (1920-2020) was one of the founders of Surrealism Portuguese, a movement to which he has always remained loyal, considering it "unique and revolutionary" in the history of art. His fine line drawings have always been faithful to this aesthetic language, which emerged in the early 1920s with the aim of transforming society and freeing the spirit. He dreamed and imagined, without aesthetic or moral impositions, in the world of plastic art, but also of poetry. His work is now on display at the Tate Modern. For Carine Harmand, assistant curator of international art at the museum, the sculpture of Cruzeiro Seixas “it fits completely in the surrealist vein”, unexpectedly joining a buffalo foot, a turtle bone, with Antonin Artaud's poem written around it.
The Portuguese Fernando Lemos, the Mozambican Malangatana Ngwenya and the Brazilian Tarsila do Amaral are other Portuguese speakers present at the exhibition, which has the merit of showing rarely seen works, such as photographs by Cecilia Porras and Enrique Grau, which challenged the social conventions of Colombia in the 1950s, or paintings by the Spanish artist exiled Eugenio Granell, target of censorship and persecution.
For the first time in the UK there is a weird corpse mode drawing, Long Distance, started by the American Ted Joans and created together with 132 collaborators from all over the world, including Mário Cesariny, Malangatana, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Octavio Paz. Exhibited in 2019, in Lisbon, the 11-metre-long work took almost 30 years to complete, between 1976 and 2005, bringing together artists from different countries.
The exhibition, which includes painting, photography, sculpture and video surrealists, opens to the public on Thursday at the Tate Modern museum, where it remains until August 29.