Triumph of Surrealism

A beautiful sky. A lonely landscape. A gleaming mountain on the horizon. A cartoonish monster with ogre hands, one spiked foot ready to shake the ground. One brown pant-leg and work boot seem familiar enough, but the other thigh looks skinned to reveal muscle fibers (close up they look like feathers). Old clothes are peeling off the arms. One shoulder lifts like a bat wing.

The stance is off-balance, in motion: a stomp, a pantomime, a dance. Look at me! I'm doing it! Am I scaring you? You should be scared. One shin has taken on a life of its own sprouting a pet demon-and a 7-fingered hand.  Yes master! We are the best. We can crush them. Interesting that this guy needed a sidekick.

I saw this painting, by Max Ernst about a year ago, just as our new administration started churning out executive orders to end refugee resettlement and pause USAID programs in the poorest countries. I was visiting my step-mom in Basel, Switzerland. She's an artist, a terrific storyteller, an incorrigible host who can't not cook multiple course meals with wine from Tuscany and entertain me every day when I'm visiting. She is also 95 so I try to keep my visits short. My routine is to stop in twice a day and spend the rest of the time hiking with my step-sister, or walking along the Rhine, visiting museums, riding trams, reading, and giving my thoughts some room to go any direction they want. Which is how I ended up at the Beyeler Foundation--a small museum on the border of Germany that had just opened an exhibition of of 19th century surrealists.

I don't always resonate with the surrealists. I know confusion is part of the point, but I'm not always sure if I'm supposed to laugh or cry or enter some dream state. I do remember liking the Dali museum in Paris, especially a long-haired figure full of drawers (Cabinet Anthropomorphique). Though you don't need to be super psychologically astute to get the meaning of a body with a cabinet of drawers.

The Ernst painting isn't small--I looked it up: 57 and 1/2 inches across, almost 5 feet--so I felt pretty small looking at it. The Beyeler used this painting as the exhibit poster, so I kept a card stock copy. I've carried it around in my backpack ever since. I don't hang it on the wall. I don't look at it very often. I shared it with my staff team a couple weeks ago, but was a little tongue tied about what to say.  Ernst titled it L'Ange du foyer (The Fireside Angel or in some translations Angel of the Hearth and Home) and later renamed it The Triumph of Surrealism. The titles sound ironic for 1937 when Ernst and his fellow surrealists were starting to flee their homelands as Franco took over Spain and fascism spread in Europe. Or maybe he was saying unironically that the Surreal was surreally coming to life all around him. I think a lot of us feel that way these days. Ernst said the painting "was my impression in those days of the things that might happen in the world. And I was right.” 

Pink and white fabric drape the body like bits of shredded flag. The neck is protect by a horse's mane. The birdlike head has a chicken mouth (apparently Ernst painted birds as his alter ego) with shark teeth. The perspective around the head is a bit wonky so it's hard for me to identify what are eyes or nose or skull or mask or which way the angel is looking if it can even see. It seems deadly serious, but also clumsy. Maybe it's angry, or in pain, or flailing in a lost identity. Kind of like the Frankenstein in the recent movie who needs help but for now is instinctive movement.

I don't think Ernst was trying to picture Franco so much as what Franco was a part of and the direction countries can go. Why not be heavy and powerful and outrageous? Why waste money on infectious disease and malnutrition programs in poor countries around the world? Why settle refugees?

One troubling survey I read recently was asking how people felt about ICE's actions in Minneapolis. Most felt afraid, but some felt pride. I'm not sure how pride feels to most people, but if it's a type of joy then that scares me. Exhilaration isn't an emotion you can reason with. 

I'm sure we all have hidden "drawers" in our psyches that feel like part our own bodies. I grew up between cultures. At some point a realization opened about how much I valued the connections between people who are very different. These connections help reveal the value of life and what it means to be human. It's become part of our mission at Beautiful Day to create a place for people to experience and appreciate those connections. Maybe most of us also have a Pandora's box type of drawer in us that, when opened, can make us drunk on our own power.  You might have seen Stephen Miller's interview on CNN last month. "We live in a world, the real world... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power," he said. "These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time." Clearly that drawer is getting opened in our country. A Harvard study calculates the number of children dying from cancelled USAID malnutrition and infectious disease programs in the hundreds of thousands. This clumsy monster has been around a long time. My guess is that nearly every person in our training program recognizes it.

Thanks for reading. I'm not used to writing this way.  Despite everything going on, this last year has been joyful time in my life. I've appreciated my work and my team. On most days I feel the purpose and importance of our work. I keep trying to figure out how and when to engage with this blog; when to speak up or when to stay in the background and keep focused on maintaining a safe place for former refugees in our state. 

As I'm starting to pack my backpack to go see my Mom in Switzerland again (96 this year!) and putting my copy of Le Ange du foyer aside. I've appreciated the moment to look back and forward. When there aren't easy answers, it can be really helpful to have a painting or poem or piece of music to help make sense of the moments we're living in. We take turns at our weekly staff meeting to share something like this. This week someone shared the hyper-realistic fruit box paintings of a Palestinian artist. If you want to refresh your soul for a moment check him out on Instagram here. I'm curious if there is something nourishing you or helping you reflect during these troubled times. (We've started reviewing comments on this blog, so there's a bit of a lag, but if you want to share a link here or email something, we can pass it along.)