This week, I'm talking about her trip to security surrealism in Latin America.
The surrealists have often been described as the latest in a long line of European invaders.
Since Columbus, who have invented an America in the service of our own desires and interests,
there has also been a very wide move to reclaim artists who have been absorbed into their general histories of 20th century art,
such as metal Frida Kahlo from those present and replace them in their own contexts in Latin America,
in a way trying to sideline the surrealist connexions.
What I decided to do today is to take two people who are both from within Latin
America and who represent very different kinds of involvement with surrealism.
One is a poet would have like to be a painter, but really wasn't.
And the other is a painter. The first is, says Armourer and the other is Frida Kahlo.
Their paths do cross at one point, and I'm hardly going to be telling the story of how they finally came to meet.
Says on Mauro was the only Hispanic poet to contribute to the Paris surrealist
magazines and to the movement's manifestos and pamphlets in the 1920s and early 30s,
says Mauro is a pseudonym. He was born Alfredo. Is this a scene in Lima in 1984 and died there in 1956.
In 1955, he went to Paris, where he hoped to be a painter.
And he took part in two group shows in 1926 and 1927.
But so nothing at all.
In 1928, he discovered surrealism and joined little and the group coming quite fierce, contributing to factors like Violette Moiseyev.
He eventually became important. It's solitary figure in the internationalisation of the movement.
The scandalous life of says Amahoro, which is the title of this small collection of his poems in English.
It's not an autobiographical confection. It is the title of a poem.
The scandal is The Fate of the poet in a flood of vivid surrealist images figuring disbursal darkness and illicit love.
And I quote,
The smirk dispersed me in the rain or in the stream of cloudbursts pulsing at the edge of the night in which we see ourselves through the clouds,
which appear to the eyes of lovers who leave their mighty castles, blood turreted.
I started standing the ice, whipping the lead of late returns when I made them more.
Yes. OK. Sorry. I was just going to flash up a slide of Frida Kahlo to whom I will return as the as the other the the contrast to tomorrow.
But I'm going to be talking about the Lammermoor, which is the poem with Silma left here as it was published in this surrealist journal,
Survivalism, serious stuff of Rousseau in 1933 was written in French.
As with most of his poetry and even the letters to his closest friend and collaborator,
the Peruvian poet Emilia Best Farm, I think not Spanish, distancing himself from his family, his language and his country.
Horror was a multiple outsider, and his sexuality also marginalised him.
That is only with Wittels Book of 1944. Khandi set that this led to a break with the movement.
I think that I would just like to say that attitudes to non normative sexualities within surrealism are
actually more open than the often repeated accusations of homophobia against Pluto would indicate.
It's no coincidence that surrealists, serious adherents around the world were often outsiders in their own communities, socially,
sexually and politically for now, especially after the second manifested 1929, which clearly spelt out the rejection of Pat Papon Pepsi.
Father Balsom country surrealism was a liberating international collective.
But when I make a move and I put up the manuscript for another poem called it the first one Sexual Sexual Perversions,
which is about nothing of the kind of war of 1932, are we?
The more that Jason Wilson, in his essay on Morreau, called it a passionate, courtly love in 20th century guys.
The poem is like Britain's famous union will leave Will Free Union 1931, an incantation to desire.
And you can see the rest of the repetitions of two to two as he addresses.
He addresses love to. But unlike its magnetic incantation to design like with, you'll need.
But unlike graphics, celebrates the woman's body in detail.
Bit by bit, Mauro's poem pursues a much darker vision of love.
Passionate but desperate, dedicated. And I quote to that unique love.
Without regret, without happiness, without turning back to the harrowing mornings of those who love rejects the mornings.
Sadder than all else, the better to face my name, to shake off the dust and return to dust.
Moreover, more did promote surrealism across Latin American continent.
But he was not a self promoter. Other things poetry, love and rebellion were more important than individual fame and success.
Yet he struggles to make a living. Throughout his life, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa remembered, didn't you?
He said he remembered being taught French by Moore in Lima in the 1950s at his military academy in the face of the hostility of the students.
Mauro remained impassive, polite, distant, apparently impervious to the taunts.
A rumour that he was a homosexual and a poet fuelled their insolence.
By then, he was no longer promoting surrealism but still writing poetry.
The most only became available after his death in 1956.
So following his tragic trip between Europe, Peru, Mexico, which I shall do through the lecture, threading it through,
give us some idea of the complexity of surrealism, the reception and dissemination in Latin America.
The tension between the pressures of cultural nationalism and symbolisms.
Internationalism between Bolivia. Political commitment and individual freedom.
Mauro remained through a turbulent nonconformist.
In this famous socialist map of the world from graffiti in the early thirties, the map is redrawn, as you can see,
according to the value, cultural or political, that can be accorded countries, territories or cities.
You can see that England has basically disappeared. The island is larger.
Paris is just the city. And then there's Germany, very large Russia.
And then in the American continent, only Mexico and Peru have survived the reworking.
Alaska and capital are there, as I think, probably because it makes them cool.
And that is Alaska because of the pre conquest civilisations.
And also possibly because they still had extensive indigenous populations. And both reasons for this really special interest.
The independent American states of the late 80s and early 19th century differed markedly from the mid 19th century nationalisms of Europe,
which have dominated provincial European thinking about nationalism even before the
negative cost given nationalism by the rise of fascism and the Second World War.
The differences, for example, that language is not a distinguishing element in the Spanish speaking continents,
and there is a different, in a sense, a different role for a class.
I think I'm not going to get into this in any detail, but there is, I think what one has done in a different kind of cultural nationalism,
a different kind of imaginary community, which is a very powerful force in Latin America.
The Latin American on Gob's mushrooming in the 1920s took their cue in many ways from European isms, futurism, data and then surrealism.
But the question I would ask was how compatible this eclectic cosmopolitanism was with the powerful cultural nationalism within American nations.
The attitudes of on surrealism in particular were set against national interests and ideas.
And I quote from Hans Richter, he was a to who? A very good study of the movement that are also anti art.
I quit Rickter. We wanted to bring forward a new kind of human being free from the tyranny, irrationality of banality,
of generals, fatherlands nations, art dealers, microbe's resident permits in the past.
And this subversive anarchist attitude which sets the artist against his or her society, appears in Latin America.
And in a sense, I think is is quite shuls tomorrow. Such I mean, one, I hope I quote.
The Salvadorian writer said, either way, his notorious statement in the Costa Rican Journal reportorial, I'm very kind of, you know, tomato Petrea.
I do not have a country, but elsewhere. The story is very different.
And I think this relationship between the cosmopolitanism and nationalism, the new form, for example, with the anthropology movement in Brazil,
which I will be coming back to later on in the series,
I'm just showing you now a painting called Anthropology that is cannibalism by Castellitto MRL from 1928.
And the page of the manifesto of anthropology from university.
And people thought, yeah, but as valid and rather.
And he suggests that anthropology cannibalism allows the new world to ingest, absorb and transform its colonisers and their traditions.
This is a kind of solution, and I quote from the manifesto, It only ends.
Poverty unites us socially, economically, philosophically.
We want the Charamba Revolution bigger than the French Revolution.
Natural man Rousseau from the French Revolution to Romanticism to the Bolshevik Revolution to the surrealist revolution.
We continue on our path. We made Christ be born in Bayah anthropology, the permanent transformation of taboo into.
We already had communism. We already had serious language, the golden age and quote.
So the ability to draw European as well as on their own traditions could be an advantage rather than weakness.
As the Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes said about the new civilisation that he believed would follow in Mexico after the revolution,
we have a practise of international living. Not possessed by Europeans.
This was a real internationalism. Those who were able to travel decide which the Europeans appeared provincial.
And I've gotten that I've just I was just going to note that the travel of people like Placita Demerol also done graduate to Europe,
began to be paralleled in reverse. That became for more two way traffic with the Swiss who were amongst the first not just to look beyond Europe,
but actually to go beyond it, set up a to a two way traffic.
And the bottom, as is a lecture that he gave in the 1920s on surrealism in some Paolo.
The Germans, such as saw when Assad is a martyr and less contemporaneous, had a policy of joining European achievement to American promise.
They publish translations of English and French writers and introduced artists and filmmakers such as man Ray Eisenstein to an American audience.
The Groove in the review A Matter put up the editorial page here was founded in 1926,
and it was interested in surrealism as part of a broad network of leftist artists and intellectuals.
Senator Murray Atsugi founded Grubin Socialist Party, for which he took his model, not the USSR,
but the end in communism, or ILU, based on pre concrete social and economic structures.
Marta, welcome the contact between the homeless and survivors and Lufti in the in the mid 30s, hoping for a merger in a new refuge.
People like our city as in 1958.
So it is must seem not just as a symptom of the decadence of capitalist civilisation evident in the atomisation dissolution of its art,
but as an active rejection of bourgeois culture.
Mauriac to be published a poem of Mauro's in 1928 and Good Tom was one of the few contributors to be honoured for the full page portrait,
which you see. But when Murrow returned to Lima, he was already dead and he didn't seem to have had so much contact with the Amato Group.
He returned penniless to Lima in 1933, where he met Emilio Westphalen and put up here.
And then if you can read it, but this is from a notebook of poems that he wrote in 1934, which illustrated with his drawings.
Very, very strange, kind of slightly biomorphic figures that could be animal, could be vegetable, could be people.
And they're that they're quite sexualised. But they are also fairly abstract.
And the poems he dedicates on the Afghan side to operate, put on and to pull anywhere with the endless admiration of says are Mauro.
That 34, he wrote a text book, Lost and Helpless Stares, Helfrich, soulful Gogol's, which is not published until 1958 after his death here.
Morrow attacks these stultified provincial, often poetry of Peru read a vicious attack.
He was very, very good at politics. And he says the only poetry that was worthy of the name was by the inmates of the mental asylum,
the hospital Lacco Arada, where he worked as a librarian and also organised a museum of the inmates paintings.
He encouraged them to paint. These are two examples from his collection of paintings by patients in the in the hospital.
One of them is actually dedicated tomorrow.
And I think it would be very interesting to do more work on these on these paintings and how how he was actually influential in what
is reproduced that the one on the left very curiously resembles a 16th century Allyson's interim manuscript by Golman Paul Begala.
And I didn't whether the person who did it knew about this, but they are quite, quite interesting.
I put on the first sort of exhibition in Lima in 1935 and the majority of the paintings, drawings and collages raptured by Moreau himself.
There was a strongly dardar flavour to this is a collage by Mora on the right here.
A strong flavour to the catalogue.
There are ticks by falsies be Kabeer former deadest and Moro included an extremely insulting commentary on the Chilean writer Santic Middlebrook,
who was a major figure in the avant garde. More calls with Dobra.
An activist who accuses him of plagiarising Goodwill's poem and giraffe and sums him up as a medium for cockiest, nauseating literary rotten puppets.
So you, me. We don't bring it back because of a magazine.
Battal June 1935 calling for a cure for homosexual.
Homosexual, Luss says certain surrealism.
And it continues this, this, this, this battle between them more than published of a magazine called The Embattled Bishop,
which was dedicated to Rigoberta and Rigoberta fought back against that.
And that Morreau really, in a sense,
carried on quite a lot of kind of wars with other avant garde groups in Latin America and even against the surrealist group in Chile.
Well, there were inscriptions to the story.
This put Konnikova in Morrows copy of the catalogue of the 1935 Lima exhibition,
who suicided that June 1935 probably related as much to his homosexuality as the split between the surrealists and the Communist Party.
And these are very poignant. Model was fallen, joined a cell of intellectuals, including Manuel Moreno, humane.
And in 1936 founded the committee demigods did.
There was different stories still at a as Vanilla or Kavre.
They produced five members of a bulletin attacking fascism in Peru and in Spain.
The situation in Peru is oppressive. The dictator, General Oscar Benevides,
supported Franco's fascist rebellion in Spain and had invited Italian fascist advisers to stop the Peruvian police force on how to suppress dissent.
In 1936, the national elections were annulled and Moro wrote in one of the cars the second cars were bulletin to help distribute.
This pamphlet is a cultural duty. In the face of the barbarism and oppression that blind our country, intellectuals,
workers, students join a united front against the murderous fascism of Spain,
conquest of Ethiopia, Ethiopia, persecutors of the Jews, an enemy to the death of culture and democracy.
As a result of the card, this phone was arrested.
A moral fled to Mexico, where he remained until nineteen forty eight.
So. I'm not going to move and look briefly at the context in Mexico and of how surrealism in the personal book,
as well as it more arrive then coincide with that cultural nationalism in Mexico was a different order, that of other Latin American countries.
The Mexican Revolution in 10 to 20 had done more independence from Spain, 1828, found to do it revealed in Mexico.
That was never identified just for the Creole landowning classes that included indigenous peoples, many of whom still speak their own languages.
The mighty and perhaps impossible task of creating a modern nation was not just political but social and cultural.
Artists, writers and poets disputed territory with Rivera and the muralists more prominently occupying the public eye.
Other books included those contemporaneous at the magazine, that name, which lasted from 1928 31 and also claimed a Mexican.
This inflicted by modernism.
One of the poets associated with that group, and who became really my closest friend in Mexico was Soviet Gulag Rukia and his other close friend,
who was close to his companions, Agustin Liuzzo. And I put up on screen two pages from the Journal format, which ran from 1956 to 28 with losses.
Oh, very particular brand of slightly slightly odd realism here.
Also, it was a very close friend of of Mauro's.
Well, and actually tried to continue teaching to paint in the in the 1940s.
And I can't go into detail into into the other artists associated with this group, but one I would like to just mention is Maria is Cango,
who is very often overlooked because partly of Frida Koller's enormous fame popularity.
But she she also has her links with surrealism.
She was a friend of until after when he visited Cereal's, visited Mexico in 1926.
And I think her paintings show a kind of a very interesting meld of of surrealism, new objectivity and Mexican ism.
The building here that very typical ruins warned on the open window.
This is very Mexican.
But the other elements, in a sense, belong to Robert about games, about playing, and they belongs equally to Europe and to Mexico.
She she's a very, very impressive painter. She plays the contemporaneous flute.
And what this exhibit was, was shown in a number of exhibitions, but not in the big 1940 surrealist exhibition in Mexico City.
Now, in 1938, Andre Brown visited Mexico and he was, in a sense, immediately annexed by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
Although we did meet the other groups, he met Villarrubia. He certainly he saw Moreau again.
Rivera tried to stamp his own mark on this visit by returning to Mexico.
And this is a poster that Rivera made for a lecture of reforms in Mexico City.
And I think it's extremely interesting because of the way that it it refers back to Breton's book, the communicating vessels.
And he makes of the the eyes and the vases the notion of something that that is one is flowing into the other.
The face that is reduced when open, one closed on the brain.
But he is also. Referencing pre conquest images, particularly the God Clarke, who had ring rings around his eyes.
And I think this is the way that various is is referring back to pre climate images is extremely interesting and is one of the I
think one of the the important factors that that actually helped to charm button so completely in his in his visit to Mexico.
Is that the only country that Britain, that greatest leader ever wrote about as such?
It's the one exception to his anti nationalism. This is the front page of his essay, Memory of Mexican Souvenir.
Itzik with a photograph by others, brother of an assassinated worker during the strike it to one to pick above it.
And he said in this essay published in Minitel on his return to Paris, he said,
this has one country in the world where the wind of liberation still blows.
I quit again. I know nothing more exalting than the photographic documents that restore the light of the era of the revolution.
He's talking about the cost of selling photographs of the head of the barefoot soldiers.
But it also talks about pyramids and tombs, the inexhaustible interplay of life and death in Mexico.
He talks of the Indian markets and the very human army he visited in Monterrey.
He was very impressed by the way that the soldiers were picnicking and playing with children.
He pointed this out to agencies companion. Is it?
Yes. If you needed that army, what good would it be? So there are a sequence of pieces of photographs illustrating the essay on Mexico.
This extraordinary sugar skull on the right, which is also reversible.
It usually turned up the other way as well. It's a grinning, grinning face.
So it's a face and a skull on the left. Two photographs.
Which is simply called Modern Voda View.
And these were found apparently by Moro and put on in one of their expeditions to to the free markets of Mexico City.
And here it is, the the trio that that came together on Britain's visit to Mexico.
Rivera was then looking if had offered asylum to Trotsky as Trotsky on the right.
Rivera in the middle. And Bret on the left. And on the left.
There are two photographs from Britain's collection of snapshots of this trip to Mexico.
Of the top one showing a picnic with Frida Kahlo and Trotsky and Blewitt, Breton and Trotsky apparently fishing for Xolo falls in in a river.
Now, the while they were there, while they were together in Mexico, Reptile and Trotsky drew up a manifesto for a new movement.
This is 1938. War is obviously on the horizon in Europe.
The Communist Party in Soviet Union has, in their view, betrayed the betrayed the movement.
And Trotsky in Britain wrote a manifesto for the new independent federation for an Independent Revolutionary Art.
It was very widely published then in pamphlets and in journals.
It was actually, I think, really drawn up by Britain and then substantially revised by Watsky.
But it was published over the signatures of Gretl and Rivera.
And I quote, It goes without saying, We do not identify ourselves with the currently fashionable catchword.
Neither fascism nor communism, a shibboleth which suits the temperament, the philistine,
conservative and frightened, clinging to the tattered remnants of the Democratic Party's true art,
which is not content to play variations on ready-Made models, but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind at this time.
True art is unable not to be revolutionary, not just to compete and radical reconstruction society.
We recognise that only the social revolution can sweep clean the park in your culture.
If, however, we reject all solidarity with bureaucracy and uncontrolled Soviet Union, it is precisely because in our eyes it represents not communism.
It's most dangerous and treacherous enemy. So they were searching for common ground to defend the independence of art.
But the movement was very short lived and didn't actually survive.
The outbreak of all the two issues of the journal play were published, which Mauro was trying to to actually get going.
Also in Mexico, after Britain's departure to come back for a moment to the photographs accompanying the essay on Mexico.
This is by Manuel album Quanto Brother, amongst others.
Bravo. And it is one of the examples for use of the of the many registers in which death exists in Mexico.
Death and life and death. In this case, it's a coffin maker for children's coffins.
And he there's a tiny coffin, as you can see, which is the advertisement on a plane.
You see the coffins stacked up inside and behind comments that I don't know whether this is true,
this this statistic, but that infant mortality had reached something like 70 percent in Mexico at the time.
And then this is great thing by Posada of sorrow of Zapata,
who also celebrated by by Brett on this pier and really to to Mexico the Mexican Revolution.
And this is another great episode of Posada was one of those artists who was played by
the postrevolutionary Meurice and by the other groups of artists as a sort of precursor.
This particular woodcut shows as as a skeleton's as Calaveras writing bicycle's the
different newspapers representing different political and social sectors of society.
And you can see that the revolutionary had as a bowler hat of those top hat for the capitalists, there's a feather hat for the dandy.
And so on. This the facade of engravings are absolutely extraordinary and highly promised by the by the muralists.
This is the cover of Clay with Puzder. Pepe on the on the front.
This is the monthly bulletin of Fiore. Now, I want to go want to look at Frida Kahlo.
But before I can say I just very briefly, as a sort of context and background that the.
And tomorrow and to the Bretons, extraordinarily beautiful visit to Mexico to look at just a couple of Rivera's murals in,
because these really were the they did establish,
I think, the power of the artists in postrevolutionary Mexico to give a face to a country that, in essence discovered itself with the revolution.
And so they're not very good images on the left.
This these are the bottom two or two of the panels from the Secretariat of Education in Mexico City by Rivera.
They are very, very vivid images in black and gold with the figures standing up against them.
But what Rivera has done is to borrow figures from jotters frescoes at the Arena Chapel in Padua.
You can see jokin three down here. He similarly embeds his presence within the landscape.
And here is a couple embracing outside the gates.
And that is like the the embrace here.
And Rivera had visited Jota had visited Italy, and he, as it were,
brought some of the lessons that he learnt to these major extraordinary schemes that he completed in the 1920s in Mexico City.
This is a chapel. It was originally originally a chapel.
And he turns it into, as it were, a chapel to materialism and the revolution with this great figure,
the fertile earth instead of Christ at the end above the altar.
And this is another of the panels from the secretary of education showing the entrance to the mine.
And we're very, very skilfully draws on religious imagery, though, in a completely secular context.
So this looks a little bit like the stations of the Cross.
People carrying a cross on their shoulders. Although the context is very much that of the proletarian in Mexico.
And these these paintings, even if they were much later criticised for, as it were, implying that the revolution had successfully,
successfully transformed people's lives in in Mexico, it remained a kind of a kind of promise for Mexico as a revolution nation.
And that's how it was. I think one could see it through the 20s and 30s.
It also celebrates popular life and popular art. This is another of the panels and these are more or less lifesize.
So if you stand in front of it, you look as if you're part of the crowd admiring these.
These Calderas were dancing up and down on the screen behind.
Really one of the points I would make is that the the Mexican.
Miss, if you like, of all of the millions of years ago,
there was only one aspect of the cultural nationalism that powered so much of the of the art and the writing in the 20s and the other,
as it were, it was revered in rural aside. And then the the more of those who wanted to meld that with a more modernist approach.
So Frida Kahlo, in the sense this is a unique figure here.
I want to talk about her in relation to to surrealism.
This is a painting. This is a self-portrait on the borderline. And as you can see, she's standing on, as it were.
She's saying a little pedestal, which is attached to a motor. The idea that she's like the kind of doll which could be turned to move on.
She could turn round.
She's between the industrial nation states on the right with the flag amongst the clouds and Mexico as the as a land of myth and ruin,
but also of nature. The. Fruit and flowers down here and the kind of machinery on the right hand side.
She's. She held a Mexican flag with the other hand, is not a cigarette.
So it's a kind of isn't all that ambiguous in age.
Now even say this company. A Mexican art historian.
In her essay on surrealism and Mexican fantasy, the exhibition appeared on Sue Ulster's in Mexico in 1986,
wrote, There is no doubt that little is hypnotised by our country.
But he did not understand that what he was postulating surreality Amar's functions in a different way as real reality,
fertilised by a peculiar fantasy. But not like unreal reality, which is what he was after.
The deliberate misconception that surrealism intendant compete to overwrite reality is
drawn into a specious argument primarily intended to distance Frida Kahlo from surrealism.
I quote again in Mexico I can't extend this surrealism to pre Hispanic production to the popular and dub surrealist,
probably the most realist of our painters, Frida Kahlo.
This is now repeated in most accounts of Collo, underpinned by her own late statement.
They thought I was a surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted greens.
I painted my own reality. I raised this not from a desert pigeonholed colour again, but to a store, to surrealism,
some of the meaning it had, which is not incompatible with his much quoted statement.
Come as early as paintings actually show her this. This site is an old nouveau manor, very elegant and rather beautifully painted.
And she subsequently adopted a much more sort of rudimentary style.
This is, again, a self-portrait of Carlo thing, nursed by Mexico.
This is this is Mother Mexico, whose breast is is feeding Collo curiously,
not unlike one of these Margarete paintings in which a grown up body is attached to Charles Gernot head attached to a child's body.
And the mother is wearing a stone mask from the pre conquest civilisation, from terror to AKAM.
Although Karlo denied that she thought she was a surrealist, it's always interesting, Susan,
that's a very late statement and there's plenty of evidence that she isn't aware of it,
but actually played some of the games on the right is a cadaver for excrete.
That is a game that the sport is very much enjoyed playing.
When a group people hand a piece of paper round to one another, the first person draws a head that sand and turns that paper over.
Next person draws the body, turns the paper over. The next person blows the legs, head, body, legs and the exquisite corpse.
And this is the exquisite corpse of my colleague and one of her friends with the unmistakeable head of Diego Rivera on it right hand side.
And on the left is a drawing which clearly indicates that that she is drawing a dream.
But the model that she adopts really most strikingly in her paintings is that of the of the popular ex Loto or or Ricardo as some as Rivera called it.
And this is some this is what Rivera wrote about colour in a 1943 article.
So in her RETAVASE, Frida always paints her own life.
Now, this is a painting that was commissioned from Collo to commemorate the suicide of Dorothy Hale,
who jumped from the top of a wall of new skyscrapers wearing a ball gown.
And understandably, the person who commissioned it thought it was so horrifying that she refused to buy it.
And the frame is stained with blood. And underneath, as you can see this inscription, which explains who it is.
And this is taken from the kind of tableau that Rivera is talking about.
This is one from 1920. These are little anonymous paintings, very traditional,
made as offerings to a particular saint or virgin or Christ who has interceded when the person who is praying is in some great danger,
either from sickness or from violence or something else. Praise the saint the same thing to seeds.
And then as as a thanks for offering,
these little paintings were were produced by often professional republic painters or sometimes by person, him or herself.
As you can see this. This one is dedicated to the central meaning of Salvador, who is shown in a frame above the scene.
It's a it's a the person can be seen on the bottom right hand side who almost
got caught up in a violent incident towards the very end of the civil war.
Kolo uses this this model of the red blue, but also transforms it.
She sort of subverts it in this painting, tiny little painting called My Birth.
She uses the Wiccan land to break blow with the scroll at the bottom for the inscription.
But there is no inscription because in this case, there wasn't a miracle.
It was painted just off. She had a miscarriage and her own mother had died.
And the version of the Sorrow's, which is the framed image of the head of the bed, was very precise memory of an object her devout mother cherish.
So the I think the directness of the image underlines a conundrum that cannot actually be put into words.
Another example of the of the republic that colour is using here self portrait on the right, painting myself in the mirror.
I'm thirty seven month of July in Quia Come and I put up an example of this, this quite primitive painting that she was, but she was copying that.
I think it's it's interesting that these, these little icons or images,
offerings with a quite widespread in America, you also find them in Europe and they are a European tradition.
I think they've really flowered in Mexico. They are a significant aspect of Mexican identity.
And I quote from Hobsbawm, As head of nationalism,
holy icons represent the symbols and rituals or common galette practises which give a culpable reality to an otherwise imaginary community.
And it's very interesting how often the the the the figure of the saint or the Christ is named in relation to a territory.
And this particular one here is the Virgin as our lady of some quangos, logger's.
And I think another another instance of the caller using very simple interior that you often find in the tableau paintings.
Now with instead of a saint or Christ, her doctor in a painting on the easel, and she suffered physically a great deal throughout her life.
She went she underwent numerous operations.
And you can see here that she's holding in her hand a pellet, which is also an interior organ, a kind of wound or heart.
And it's as though she's a painting with her own blood. This painting is called What The Water Gave Me.
And as you can see, it's it's as it were. It's her lying in the bath, looking at her feet at the far end.
One of which is horribly cracked. And in between herself and the feet, there's entire landscape of little incidents of narratives,
including an encounter between two women on a raft on the right hand side,
which I which quite often revere coloured paints, female bodies and encounters between two females.
This is the two freedoms. Let's dos Frida's.
So Fifita doubled Freeda as as as a kind of split image with, as you can see,
a vein that runs through right round and down to the to the scissors that she's
holding her hand trying to stem the blood that's flowing onto a white dress.
This painting is exhibited at the international sort of exhibition in Mexico City.
And I was in Walmart in New York 20 centuries, a model of Mexico in 1948.
The catalogue of New York show colours friend Covarrubias wrote, Almost all Frida Kahlo paintings are autobiographical,
expressed in dream language, which is true who is motivated by the psychological states of the artist's mind?
Kind of the self said. I never knew I was a surrealist until Andre Braugher came to Mexico and told me I was.
The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to and I paint always whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.
I think that she was unaware, as she says of surrealism before, is neither here nor there.
I think it's questionable even that she was. I'll have it.
But it doesn't matter because surrealism was built on a recognition of like spirits from the past and the present,
regardless of their awareness of the movement itself.
And Kahlo was one of many artists like Manuel and Lola over his brother, whose work was recognised as cognate with surrealism.
My quote Button's essay on call at this present point in the development of Mexican painting,
which since the beginning of the 19th century has remained largely free from foreign influence and profoundly attached to its own sources.
I was witnessing here at the other end of the Earth a spontaneous outpouring of our own questioning spirit.
It was not about on real reality, but a thoroughly grounded, real resistance to pure fantasy.
The colours, paintings and brother's photographs were so highly valued by the surrealists.
The fact that colours subsequently in her diary experiment, automatic writing and drawing suggests that you find more sources and stories.
And then she subsequently admitted opening. In 1940, Monroe and Colin organised the international exhibition surrealism at the gallery.
The ultimate Hicken in Mexico City was many years. It was the only commercial gallery in Mexico City.
This is a photograph reversed by Obama's brother on the cover.
The exhibition opened on the 17th of Jan 1940, and at the Venice Sash More I wrote.
There was a ridiculous imbecile mad crowd.
Diego and Carlo were in the exhibition with enormous paintings,
coller with the two Frida's and D'Rivera with decorative female portrait entitled Maham Reveller.
Mauro, who was who organised the show and had to deal with with colour, and Frida,
who both wanted the most prominent places in the show and painted the largest pictures,
said that Degas titles were common in typical Latin American genius.
He said an extraordinary ability to see people. Rivera was very sweet to him, Morreau, he said, but no one believes in his surrealism.
Revetted surrealism is his father's attempt to revive his reputation, which his ticket unnecessary as he ends masses in United States.
Mississippi, a genius and more went on.
It hasn't worked for him in Paris. Despite the promotion in Minitel, people there have a refined instinct.
The new painting and the catalogue with footwork by Bravo was denounced by the Mexican mill painter Siqueiros for the aesthetic cretinism.
It was it was censored by the gallery. And that will actually cut out the final paragraph from, says armourers preface.
And then a copy preserved in the Getty Research Institute. Mora has added in his handwriting the last paragraph that was that was censored.
And I quote, At this precise moment, the Christian era ends.
A great wind has been unleashed that whose origin we see the moral poignant support of of Sigmund Freud, which is just discussed forever.
The plots of Golgotha and death loving Ivy devours the crosses where birds would never live.
Civils clairvoyant situated the end of the Christian era in 1925 1929.
We need to remember this. So Mauro's attempt at an antique, an anti Christian message in the catalogue failed.
And that, I think is quite interesting because it shows how how delicate and how touchy this subject of religion still was in Mexico at the time.
And this is more of himself standing in the exhibition of the painting by Polin on the wall for many years.
In the latter part of this five years, more of this fallen have penned a reviewer called Elton Cedella Palabra, which is finally published in 1939.
And it included an essay by this farm on Purt Free and the critics in Peru, which, as Morris said, is absolutely terrific.
Very brave making many enemies. And it also included a photograph specially commissioned by Mora from the Salt,
sir, of a statue in a park in Mexico City, which she said is utterly scandalous.
And this is the photograph of the of the behind of this of this statue.
I also had one criticism of an essay by this forelimbs essay on Freud talking about desire in all its forms.
This Farhood listed artistic, scientific and political but moral, Wexton says.
What about sexual? Surely this is as important.
Is. He also wrote for this fall in 1940, at the height of his active engagement with surrealism.
This exhibition that he wished he could probably somewhere prominent socialism's watchwords or slogans such as down with book about a cover,
which he said I particularly like, which was the basic reason for my joining surrealism.
Now I'm I'm just drawing to a close. I just want to finish by.
Talking a little bit about more disillusion with surrealism. It was quite gradual.
This is a photograph, by the way, of him on the beach in Lima.
After your turn there in 1948 is one of the series of of quite, quite strange pose performed photographs of him.
Now, I think he grew away from surrealism during the early 40s as much because the movement changed just because he changed.
One factor was his friendship with Wolfgang Palme, the painter and founder of the review down in Mexico.
Described scribed in the success of his realism.
And he also actually published the ending very few of the two publications of memoirs, poems that came out in in Mexico.
One in addition to harder than the other condition of any 50.
And I can be talking more about Mora in relation to pre Colombian and ethnographic questions next week
in relation to dinn privately more expected to best form his doubts that could ever replace surrealism.
Really, he said, I have nothing very definite to offer. Instead, the times too cataclysmic to see anything.
Clearly, he became more more critical of surrealism and I'm quoting now always from the letters to rest form.
I've been thinking about the great fuss surrealism made about psychoanalysis,
and I realise that this fuss was purely lyrical in the Traffic Tree Green,
an anthology of writings about bringing the unconscious put together by little.
The only good things, Mauro says, are those where the dream is treated politically.
Look at the comment. Investigations into sexuality. And tell me it doesn't resemble old films.
I still hugely admires realism for the positive things it has done in the realm of poetry.
But there is a dogmatic side that really pisses me off. It's interesting.
I think that Mauro and Kiawah, both of whom were early Pseudolus adherents in Paris,
both were active in Latin American album Gods took utterly divergent paths in their respective critiques of surrealism,
while tomorrow what still mattered was the practise of poetry and the pretensions of
scientifical pseudo scientific experiment or investigation seemed increasingly redundant.
Kiawah objected. The lyrical, imperfect treatment of the mind of the world better, Kovalchuk protected.
Roldan's sought to unmask the mysterious and the marvellous Kibale taking refuge in blinis hours
different from the war and was a regular contributor to Victorio compares important John saw.
He refused to publish a review of more his book of poems, the Shefford decrees and moral comments.
I wouldn't be surprised had I not Longdon. Mr. Kiawah is a declared enemy of poetry and a patent Saifi plebe Brione Emelda Pneumonia.
His own initiative, Purt from Now had changed. He no longer insisted on automatism.
Is Purtell automatic? What a joke. One works and chooses the elements provide about one TISM and not that's it.
Not outside or moral or aesthetic occupations. That is the misunderstanding.
Surrealism perpetuates his disappointment with putting.
His latest book I've Come to Sit in 1944 was intense,
as he spelt out in a long and highly critical review in the Mexican Journal Article Prodigals in 1945.
There were two reasons for this. The first was that he felt the celebration of love had become formulaic and Breton's seductive lyricism rhetorical.
The second was its limited recognition of human desire. The insistence in the book that every human being seeks the unique being of the opposite sex.
The complementary fine motor says if this is meant allegorical, but it is not here.
The affirmation of every human being seeks another of the opposite sex seems to us circuitries us so obscurantists that this is if the study of sexual
psychology had not made the progress it has Morrises his failure to recognise the diversity of human drives as a political as well as personal issues.
As long as man does not have complete consciousness of his or her own intimate problems of his or her sexuality,
a good or bad orientation, he cannot pretend to lead nor to resolve collective conflicts.
More refers again of a chefs to sexuality, this time to regret that serialism had not had the courage to continue and profit.
Investigate that simple line of questioning human sexuality.
There had been twelve sessions investigating sex undertaken by the group between 1928 and 1932, the end of the first two accomplished.
Have you seen surveillance in 1928? And they're often cited for bottles,
also authorities refusal to tolerate the direction the conversation can take them towards a debate about same sex desire.
The conversations are, with this one exception. Extraordinarily free.
If at times, rather, burlesque is evident from Maura's own work,
as well as that many of the surrealists that are pulling more for sexuality is not just compatible,
but often at the core of its poetry and visual arts.
And I just want to end with a little part of the poem from the collection called Liquid More or Love Letter.
The cover, which you can see here with with of the inscriptions by a lot of his friends in many different languages, just saying love letter.
And that's in the centre, he said, was written by his own lover, although his own lover would never read the poems dedicated to him.
And I quote. I think of your body, which made our bed, the sky and supreme mountains of the only reality with its valleys and its shadows,
with the moisture and the marble and Blackwater reflecting all the stars in each of your.