Avant-garde of the 20th century – Surrealism in the Lenbachhaus Munich: Alarm! ALARM! ALARM!!!

It would be nice if fascism could simply be bitten into pieces. As casual and elegant as the woman in the photo demonstrates: leaning offensively in a doorway, a headscarf loosely wrapped around her blonde hair, her hands buried in the pockets of her wide coat and a Nazi emblem between her teeth.

The Jewish writer and photographer Claude Cahun, part of the group of French Surrealists who overturned the laws of art and the prevailing ideology in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, was a determined activist. Together with her partner Suzanne Malherbe (stage name: Marcel Moore), she wrote leaflets with calls for desertion (“Alarm! ALARM! ALARM!!!”) on the Channel island of Jersey, which was occupied by the Nazis, which she placed in toilet paper rolls, telephone books and on church pews. In 1944 she was sentenced to death by the Gestapo for “troop-destroying activities” and was released in May 1945.

The photo that is prominently displayed at the beginning of the exhibition “But Live Here? No thanks! – Surrealism + Antifascism” hangs in the art building of the Lenbachhaus in Munich, dates from that May and shows two important aspects of the show in quiet elegance: Surrealism, with its flowing forms, shrill colors and strange figures, is often used as a pop culture source for various record covers (Beatles ) and sci-fi films (“Star Wars”) was a decidedly political, i.e. anti-fascist movement. And: This was repeatedly led by women in central places.

It has been 100 years since the French surrealist André Breton had his “Manifeste du Surréalisme” printed on October 15, 1924. An act of reproduction that brought the essayistically meandering thoughts of one of the most exciting art movements of the 20th century into the world in this founding text. The original of the document can currently be seen in the large exhibition “Surréalisme” at the Center Pompidou in Paris. Unlike there, however, the Munich exhibition does not focus on the aesthetic revolution that the painters, writers and playwrights triggered in their rejection of materialism and realism by giving space to the unconscious, the dream, the absurd, without being constrained by rules, principles or reason.

Instead, the curators Stephanie Weber, Adrian Djukić and Karin Althaus work out the political nature of the movement – an approach that leads to a tension-filled situation directly on Königsplatz, the area once occupied by the Nazis on which the Lenbachhaus is located.

The result is that as a visitor, in contrast to the Paris show, you have to work your way through all sorts of documents. Surrealist work concentrated not only on paintings – some of them large format – but also on texts, leaflets, sketches, manifestos and books. Flanked by selected works of surrealism, such as Max Ernst’s famous “House Angel” (1937), Victor Brauner’s “Totem of Wounded Subjectivity II (1948)” or René Magritte’s “The Shadow of the World” (1928), the viewer is reconstructed on these An exciting interplay between aesthetics, life and politics that radiated far beyond the borders of Europe.

In addition to the sections »But live here? No thanks: Empty Germany”, “Ghosts in Prague” or “The Spanish Civil War”, which trace the fight against European fascism and also address the breaks in the circle of surrealist anti-fascists after the Stalin terror, expand the “Crossing Marseille” sections → Martinique”, “Tropiques” and “Ted Joans – Jazz is my religion” look at the international dimension of the movement, which, sometimes in collaboration with local and exiled artists, was also linked to anti-colonial themes.

The threat that the artists were constantly exposed to becomes movingly vivid in one work: In the center of the exhibition you will encounter the 20 square meter “Grand tableau antifasciste collectif”, the “Large collective anti-fascist painting”, a joint work by the artists Antonio Recalcati, Enrico Baj, Erró, Gianni Giancarlo Dova, Jean-Jacques Lebel and Roberto Crippa from 1960, which deals with the torture and gang rape of the young Algerian freedom fighter Djamila Boupacha by French soldiers. Presented for the first time in Milan in 1961, the picture was immediately confiscated by the police and locked away, contemptuously folded, for 27 years. The traces of this contempt are still visible today.

Although a separate section is dedicated to the so-called “paper bullets” by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, the Munich exhibition fails to seriously analyze the position of women in Surrealism. “And after all, isn’t it the most important thing,” says Breton’s manifesto, “that we are masters of ourselves and also of women who love?” What could be said about a sentence like that! The inconsistency of a movement that proclaimed all-encompassing freedom while declaring half of the population to be the property of men should have been an issue, as patriarchal structures still shape much activism that calls itself “equal rights” today.

»But live here? No thanks! – Surrealism + Antifascism”, until March 2, 2025, Lenbachhaus, Munich.