Ida Shik
The State Hermitage Museum, Russia
“Leonardo’s lessons suggesting that the pupils should draw what they see on an old cracked wall — valid, but rather characteristic for everyone — are still not understood in all the depth”, — A. Breton wrote. The idea of an incidental image used in order to find inspiration or some replies to requests of the unconscious was actively applied in the surrealist art. In the surrealist photography the motif of “an old paranoid wall” (using A. Kamien-Kazhdan’s term) received various readings.
A photographer can snatch out complete pictures from the reality (some works from Brassai’s series “Graffiti” 1933–1956), showing how a wall texture participates in creation of the image, or easily read forms (E. Medkova “Eye” 1962, “Torso” 1965, K. J. Laughlin “The magic mountain” 1955). Thus, a title serves as a reference point for a viewer’s interpretation of the work.
The surface with a rich texture and incidental images can also be represented as an aesthetically valuable object, approximating abstraction. A viewer is frequently not given any obvious prompts — he is offered a chance to develop his own “talent of paranoid interpretation”, as A. Breton put it (F. Sommer “Found painting” 1949, works from A. Nozicka’s cycle “Complementary evidences” 1958–1961).
A picturesque texture of a wall can also be used by a photographer as an element of a work (for example, as a background) quite often acquiring historical and cultural references which a viewer should read (F. Sommer “Max Ernst” 1946, K. J. Laughlin “The head in the wall” 1945).
All these works are united by such key surrealist concepts as the found object, automatism and associations. Thus the application of “Leonardo’s lessons” allowed surrealist photographers to show that surreality is the immediate part of the reality which needs only to be uncovered and understood.