Museums: The Hobbyhorse Rides Again

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Prophetic Approaches. In the long run, the other technique of "automatist" surrealism proved more revolutionary and durable. As practiced by Joan Miro, André Masson, Max Ernst and Roberto Matta, automatism relied on the unconscious to direct the pen, pencil, brush or tube of glue. "Rather than setting out to paint something," said Miró, "I begin, and as I paint, the picture begins to assert itself." Landscape with Rooster, one of a dozen outsize, uninhibited Mirós on display, illustrates the antic, fanciful contours that result.

Masson's approach was even more prophetic. Because he found the constant reloading of a brush impeded his "psychic impulses," he took to ladling glue onto a canvas, wiggling his fingers over it in patterns, then pouring sand into the glue to capture them. In addition, he squeezed color directly onto his canvases from a special tube, thereby antedating the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock by 20 years.

Automatist surrealism migrated to the U.S. during World War II. It deeply impressed a generation of younger American artists who were shortly to become celebrated innovators themselves, such as Pollock, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb.

Nonetheless, as examples of early work by these abstract expressionists and the pop artists on display at the Modern suggest, more was assimilated from the surrealists and Dadaists than mere assemblage and drip. Common to all of the work in the exhibit is a poetry and passion, gaiety and humanism totally foreign to the dry logic of cubism and to the pure, impersonal geometric abstractions that developed directly out of it in Europe. The camera may well have deprived painting of its reason for being by surpassing it in the portrayal of objective reality. Dada and surrealism, however, made up for that loss by showing that another, still more engrossing vision lay within the fantastic recesses of man's mind.