Francis Picabia, Olga (1930); Graphite pencil and crayon on paper; Bequest of Mme Lucienne Rosenberg 1995 CNAC/MNAM/Dist.RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
If memory serves correctly, it was the critic and artist Sidney Tillim who observed that the Surrealists couldn’t paint well because they were too preoccupied by bad dreams. The point is sardonic, but not off base. In privileging imagery or, to use parlance particular to the style, putrefaction over aesthetics, Surrealism erred on the side of illustration—on rendering, instead of embodying, “bad dreams.” Once an artist begins delineating visions gleaned from the unconscious in an insistently conscious manner, how genuinely surreal can they be? Notwithstanding exceptions like Joan Miró, whose forays into automatism were emboldened by an encompassing playfulness, the Surrealists employed paint not as a forum for possibility and pleasure, but merely as a means, often perfunctory in character, to otherworldly ends.
But what about the famously direct medium of drawing? Drawing lends itself more readily to quixotic musings—the route from the imagination to the page being less fettered by materials and more open to curious fancies and untested ideas. That’s the impression left by “Drawing Surrealism,” an array of over 160 works on paper by seventy artists. The usual suspects are present and accounted for at the Morgan: Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Miró, André Masson, André Breton (the self-proclaimed “Pope” of Surrealism), Man Ray, and, alas, the overly prolific Max Ernst. Lesser lights and