Art: The Psychic Roots of the Surreal

The surrealists, the most determinedly shocking of the early modern artists, wanted to abolish tradition. They prided themselves on being revolution aries with no past, no precedents beyond the immortal, irrational desires of the human psyche. But one of the rules-of-thumb of art experience is that very little is wholly new. Witness, for example, the current exhibition at the New York Cultural Center entitled "Painters of the Mind's Eye: Belgian Symbolists and Surrealists." It offers, as well as 51 major works by Paul Delvaux and the late Rene Magritte, a tour of such virtually forgotten talents as Fernand Khnopff, William Degouve de Nuncques, Jean Delville and Xavier Mellery. Delvaux and Magritte are of course 20th century surrealists. The less-known artists were involved in the poetic and artistic movement known as symbolism, which flourished in France and flickered briefly in Belgium at the end of the 19th century. It had enough in common with surrealism, which it predated by 30 years, to be regarded as its precursor. For though the surrealists took Freud for their patron saint, whereas the symbolists resorted to the cabala and the mystical gobbledygook of the Rosicrucians, both wanted to make painting abandon what Magritte called "that dreary part people would have the real world play." Both were fascinated by dream and ambiguity, the duality of sex and death, perversity and contradiction and mystery. This show makes one realize that surrealism was no revolution but a final knotting-up of the 19th century romantic tradition, whose decadent or fin-de-siècle form was symbolism.

Fictive Avatars. The phrase fin-de-siècle has long stood for a filleted sort of consciousness: the epicine, misty, dandified transcendentalism and café demonolatry whose sturdier ancestors were men like Baudelaire and Poe. There is a certain truth to this, as evidenced by a work like Jean Delville's Orpheus. A member of the symbolist circle, Delville (1867-1953) was a devoted admirer of Joséphin Péladan, leader of the Rosicrucians in France. Yet it probably does not help us much now to know that the sickly greenish-blue radiance in which Orpheus swims was intended to represent the astral light. This illustration of the androgyne as supreme human type may not be the most sentimental piece of faggotry painted in the '90s, but it is a likely contender for the honor: a buttery and phosphorescent boy's head, all ringlets and swooning lips, served up on its jeweled lyre like a parody of John the Baptist's head on a plate. Nevertheless, the fact that the head is seen turning into, or materializing out of the lyre seems to predict the metamorphoses that Magritte would impose on the homelier physical world half a century later.