Art: Subconscious

Surréalisme is a complicated Freudian school of art which numbers among its aims an attempt to express the subconscious by portraying distortions of familiar objects. Its leaders are Joan Miro and Salvador Dali who this week in Manhattan’s Julien Levy Gallery exhibited his latest works. He had drawn people with roses for eyes, lamb chops for lips, an aged man with a lobster on his head, a melting grand piano. Claiming to be “obsessed” with Millet’s Angelus, he showed variants of the motif with wheel-headed gleaners picking up forks and a poached egg.

Also in Manhattan last week arrived a surrealist-edited issue of Minotaure ($2.50 a copy), a new artistic & literary French magazine, which one critic called a “public danger.” Its cover was by André Derain. It contained an article on ecstasy illustrated by sections of pornographic postcards, reproductions of Braque, Picasso, Matisse, Photographer Man Ray, a discussion of sex symbolism in hats.