Quotes of the Day

As the biennale unfolds across Sydney, mute and minimalist, it is refreshing to remember that artists once weren't so scared of making a noise. "The simplest Surrealist act consists in going down into the street, revolvers in one's hands, and firing at random, wilfully, into the crowd," André Breton, who founded the movement in Paris, famously declared in 1929.

There's no blood in the streets of Sydney. But audiences looking to flesh out the Biennale's treatise, "On Reason and Emotion," need go no further than the S. H. Ervin Gallery on Observatory Hill, where "Australian Surrealism: The Agapitos/Wilson Collection" opens this week. "In Surrealism the fire of art and the ice of science have met," said Australian Surrealist James Gleeson in 1940. Gleeson matched Breton for evangelical fervor, and his gobsmacking canvases lay the foundations for this exhibition, which later travels to Brisbane, Armidale and Hobart.

Central to the show is Gleeson's 1939 work The Attitude of Lightning Towards a Lady-Mountain. Bristling with fire and ice, its riveting depiction of a female-shaped peak of laval rock being forged by the hand of lightning suggests both the irrationality of creation and the immutability of physics. It came as a thunderbolt in more ways than one. Not only did its showing at the inaugural Contemporary Art Society exhibition in Melbourne galvanize a whole movement around the Down-Under Dalí, but its purchase 51 years later by Sydney art lovers James Agapitos and Ray Wilson began what would become the most comprehensive private collection of Australian Surrealism: some 300 works by 40 artists, a third of them on display in Sydney.

The revelation of the show, curated by Bruce James, is that artists like Gleeson, James Cant and Robert Klippel cut to the heart of European Surrealism, rubbing shoulders with Breton and Joan Miró in Paris, and exhibiting with Roland Penrose and Man Ray in London. "Surrealism was not nationalistic, it was an international movement," says James. "In fact it was rampantly global in its ambitions. The term revolution was entirely justified because these artists really wanted to change the world." A decade since the National Gallery of Australia's "Surrealism: Revolution by Night" reunited the Antipodeans with their contemporaries overseas, the Agapitos/Wilson Collection consolidates their place on the Surrealist world map. In 1936, the same year Dalí appeared on the cover of Time ("A blazing pine tree, an Archbishop, a giraffe and a cloud of feathers went out the window"), Melbourne-born Cant was busily assembling his wild lampshade and birdcage sculptures in London. Sadly, none survives, but Cant was at the epicenter of the movement's "chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table," to quote the Surrealists' literary hero Lautréamont, and exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim's London gallery.

What does survive is The Lonely Coast, 1939, painted around the time of Cant's return to Australia. With this seascape of roiling waves under ominous clouds, a generation's fear of war is made transparent. That is the true subject of a collection that begins in 1925 and ends in 1955. Here even the most whimsical of images, Eric Thake's Happy Landing, 1939, speaks of the turbines of warfare. It was war that brought German émigré Hein Heckroth to Australia. His brief detention in rural N.S.W. resulted in one of the show's loveliest works, Surreal Landscape, 1940, in which one of Max Ernst's birds seems to have settled on the sun-bleached scrub.

While Heckroth would return to England, the movement stayed. And the Agapitos/Wilson Collection makes marvellously clear how this "whore of the polymorphous," as James puts it, sunk its tentacles deep into the body of Australian art. Its spirit can be traced through the floating cow canvases of Sidney Nolan, the twisted tree trunks of Russell Drysdale's drawings, and the veil-like fish net that descends on Max Dupain's 1936 photo of a naked bride. What emerged was perhaps not pure Surrealism, but a psychological shift which was true to a movement that sought, above all, to liberate the mind.

Gleeson, nearing 90, continues to issue Surrealist thunderbolts from his Sydney studio; a retrospective due at the National Gallery of Victoria in October should confirm his Zeus-like status. "Do not commit suicide," Gleeson wrote in 1941, "for Surrealism has been born." It lives.

Australian Surrealism: The Agapitos/Wilson Collection
Exhibition until 8th August at National Trust S. H. Ervin Gallery
Watson Road, Observatory Hill, The Rocks. PH: 02 9258 0173

• Michael Fitzgerald
• The Surrealists' wake-up call traveled all the way to Australia, with riveting results