Modern Art Discovers Pompeii (1): Surrealist Views of Pompeii and Gradiva.
If there is one solid link between Pompeii and surrealist art, then it is Wilhelm Jensen’s 1903 novella Gradiva: A Pompeii Fancy; or, one could argue, Sigmund Freud’s commentary on Gradiva which became more influential than the novella itself.[1] Gradiva gave Freud plenty of material to work on as it is the story of a neurotic archaeologist Harold Norbert who becomes obsessive about the young woman of the title who he believes lived in ancient Pompeii. Norbert associates the girl with an ancient relief, buys it, and pursues Gradiva to Pompeii itself. For Freud, the archaeology within this story became a model for the process of psychoanalysis: the analyst dredging things from the patient’s subconscious was analogous to the archaeologist uncovering different strata. Freud owned a cast of the original “Gradiva” which is now in the Vatican; it would have been this image that would have confronted patients lying down on his couch in his consulting rooms in Vienna or London. Many surrealist artists like Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, and Andre Masson were heavily influenced by Freud’s ideas so it is unsurprising to find Gradiva appearing as a theme in their work. Breton, a doctor, was the leader of the surrealists, and his Surrealist Manifesto is heavily dependent on Freud’s writings. In 1937 Breton opened a gallery on the Rive Gauche which he christened Gradiva. Marcel Duchamp was responsible for its design; he gave its door the form of a double cast shadow. The Spanish surrealist Salvador gave his wife Gala the nickname of “Gradiva.” In Dali’s eponymous Gradiva, the ancient Pompeiian is a symbol of his wife whom he married in 1934; Gradiva thus became “Gala/Gradiva.” The ruins in the background do not specifically reference Pompeii, but Dali certainly knew about its excavation. According to Picasso, “Dali had become obsessed with the human body cats from Pompeii and proposed casting entire sections of Paris to create a similar record of a simulated modern mass destruction.”[2] The most jarring interpretation of the Gradiva story was left to Masson who depicted the scene of Gradiva’s death during the eruption of Vesuvius (above).[3] The actual figure is based on the Vatican Sleeping Ariadne; but the bright colours seem to evoke the vivid wall painting of Pompeii, while the whole yokes the ancient and the contemporary together in some surrealist dream fantasy in which Gradiva is cast as a symbol of the female ideal, another obsession of the surrealists.
[1] Victoria C. Gardner Coates, “Pompeii on the Couch: The Modern Fantasy of Gradiva” in Last Days of Pompeii, 70-77, and no 14.
[2] Last Days of Pompeii, no. 15.
[3] Last Days of Pompeii, no. 16.
Comments