7 April 2009 - 6:24Surrealism and Design

Surrealism arose at the end of the First World War as a politically radical avant-guard artistic movement that traced its intellectual influences to both Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. Its founders saw it as an artistic vehicle for both exploring unconscious desires and providing a radical critique of capitalism and bourgeois lifestyles.  So radical was it in those early years that it was closely linked in the public mind to the Communist Party!  However, it soon lost what little political bite ever it had and by the 1930s was simply an influential artistic movement that ironically catered to the type of bourgeois collectors it was supposedly critical of.  Having said this, there is no question that from the 1930s onward, surrealism had a profound effect on visual culture.  While it began primarily as a literary movement, today, we associate it most with art, the fantastic canvases of Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico, and Rene Magritte; or the iconic photographs of Man Ray.  But surrealism also impacted interior design in important and lasting ways. It set itself up against a reductive modernism that valued simplicity, clarity, rationality and representational honesty.  Surrealist design, like its postmodern child a half century later, was to be complex, obscure, irrational and fantastic.  Nothing was what it appeared to be.  That was the point.  The great Dali himself dabbled in interior design . Iconic designers of the 1930s like Jean Michel Frank incorporated the work of Dali and Alberto Giacometti into his projects (Image Dali,  Mae West sofa), as did  Syrie Maugham.  (Image: Syrie Maugham  dining room for the Pavillion, Waddesdon Manor, 1935.  The plaster fire place surrounds are by Jean Michel Frank based on a Giacometti design).  Isamu Noguchi was also greatly influenced by the surrealist aesthetic. 

            Turning to the post-war period, Piero Fornasetti is nothing if not a surrealist designer, although he was loathe to acknowledge influences, He is perhaps best known for his 500 variations on a woman’s face, which decorate everything from plates, to lamps to a Vespa, One could hardly ask for a more direct allusion to the original surrealist goal of uncovering dreams and unconscious desires!. Fornasetti’s furniture design also harkens back to some of the classical allusions of an earlier generation of surrealists.   For example, his incredibly witty modernist chair with a Corinthian capital back is pure surrealism, as is his bureau, as seventeenth century palazzo.
One can see continuity with these themes in the work of 1980s postmodernist architects and designers, such as Stanley Tigerman  and Charles Moore. 

            Among contemporary designers, perhaps the best known surrealist is Philippe Starck whose Eros chair pays homage to Fornasetti’s famous faces. While there is widespread agreement that surrealism died as a serious movement in art by the 1940s, (many claim that Dali’s blatant commercialism killed it off); it nevertheless has survived, transmogrified in popular culture as an influence that pervaded everything from advertising to fashion design.  And so the ghost of high art surrealism haunts virtually all cultural production at present. Salvador Dali would have approved.

IMAGES:

Image:  Dali, lobster phone

Image:  Dali, Mae West sofa

Image:  Syrie Maugham  dining room for the Pavillion, Waddesdon Manor, 1935.  The plaster fire place surrounds are by Jean Michel Frank based on a Giacometti design). 

Image:  Isamu Noguchi Table for Anson Conger Goodyear, Wood and Glass, 1939).

 Image:  Fornasetti Plates

Image:  Fornasetti Chair; bureau

Image:  Stanley Tigerman (Image: rocking chair for Knoll)

Image:  Charles Moore (Image: corner cupboard).  

Image: Starck Eros chair

Image: Duncan.  Wings Mirror.  Homage to Dali’s angels