Birds have long been associated with freedom, flight and escape, but for the Surrealists they offered something far stranger. Across the movement, birds and other winged creatures were transformed into symbols, companions and fantastical beings, their familiar forms lending themselves to the Surrealists’ fascination with desire, transformation and the irrational. As Desmond Morris writes in The Surrealist Menagerie: Strange Beasts & Fantastic Visions, ‘Symbolically, birds represent freedom. Many of us envy their ability to fly, to escape the confines of the earth, and wish we could do the same.’ Yet in the Surrealist imagination, flight could lead almost anywhere. In this extract from Morris’s book, he looks at four types of birds that took on particularly strange and unexpected lives in Surrealist art.
Swans
The swan fascinated the surrealists for several reasons. First, they were drawn to its iconic shape, with its heavy body, its huge, powerful wings, and its long, elegantly curving neck. Then, there is its dramatic plumage, pure white or jet black. And, for a bird, it is unusual in its behaviour – hissing like a snake and liable to attack if approached too closely. Above all, according to Greek myth, it was a swan – the god Zeus in disguise – that coupled with Leda, a story that inevitably appealed to the surrealist preoccupation with desire, sex and metamorphosis. Although Leda was raped by Zeus, artists through the ages – from Michelangelo to Cézanne – have often cast the god in the role of ‘seducer’.
In Leda Atómica (1949), Dalí shows the swan being given a tender caress by Leda – modelled by the artist’s wife, Gala – who sits naked on a pedestal. His is an ethereal vision of the story, with Leda appearing weightless as she reaches out her left hand to touch the swan’s head. Here, Dalí uses a concept he called ‘nuclear mysticism’, fusing elements of traditional Catholic iconography, mathematics and atomic physics. The various objects we see in the painting – a book, a set square, an egg – appear to be held in a state of suspension, charged with an invisible energy but never touching. [...]
Salvador Dalí, Leda Atómica, 1949. Oil on canvas, 61 × 46 cm (24 1/8 x 18 1/8 in.). Dalí Theatre-Museum, Figueres. © Salvador Dali, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí
Parrots
The parrot was a favourite subject for the Mexican surrealist Frida Kahlo and the American Joseph Cornell. They appear in a handful of Kahlo’s paintings and in many of Cornell’s famous ‘boxes’.
Saddened by her inability to bear children, Kahlo surrounded herself with animals. She had pet dogs, cats, monkeys, doves, turkeys, an osprey, a chipmunk, a deer, and two species of Amazon parrot – the Yellow-headed Amazon and the Lilac-crowned Amazon (Amazona oratrix and Amazona finschi). Her favourite, a Yellow-headed Amazon called Bonito, appears in several of her works. In her most famous parrot painting, Me and My Parrots (1941), she sits with a bird on each shoulder and with two more cradled in her arms. Bonito, the largest of them, is perched on her left shoulder and a second Yellow-headed Amazon is held on her right forearm. On her left forearm and on her right shoulder there are two Lilac-crowned birds. With Kahlo festooned in this way, it is as if she has given birth to a whole clutch of parrots.
Bonito was reportedly so tame that he would nestle under her blankets when she was resting on her bed. At mealtimes, he was allowed to fly around the table and would kiss the diners with his curved beak. Rather oddly for a parrot, he was especially fond of butter and would help himself at the butter dish. When he died in the winter of 1941, Kahlo gave him a special burial and, in a letter to a friend, wrote: ‘I cried for him a lot since, you remember, that he was marvellous.’ [...]
Frida Kahlo, Me and My Parrots, 1941. Oil on canvas, 82 x 62.8 cm (32 1/4 x 24 3/4 in.). Private Collection.
Owls
The ancients referred to the owl as the human-headed bird and it is this feature that has given it such wide appeal to artists. Its round head, its flat face and its large eyes give it a human quality that no other bird can match. Symbolically, it tends to have been cast in two contrasting roles: the wise old bird or the stealthy nocturnal killer. So there are ‘good owls’ and ‘bad owls’ in popular thinking, and the surrealists were fascinated by both.
Max Ernst’s masterpiece Attirement of the Bride (1940) shows us one of the strangest owls ever depicted in a work of art. It has given rise to endless scholarly debate and a variety of interpretations. One thing is clear: Ernst set out to mystify the viewer of this work and in this he certainly succeeded. But as with much surrealist painting, it is the dark mystery that is at the very centre of the basic concept of the movement – the pleasure that is to be taken in the irrational world of dreams. As Ernst’s great love, Leonora Carrington, once said irritably during an interview with her cousin, the journalist Joanna Moorhead, who was asking about the meaning of one of her paintings: ‘It’s a visual world. You want to turn things into a kind of intellectual game; it’s not.’ [...]
Max Ernst, Attirement of the Bride, 1940. Oil on canvas, 129.6 x 96.3 cm (51 x 37 7/8 in.). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976 (76.2553.78). © Max Ernst Estate
Eagles
In Western cultures, the eagle has long been a symbol of power and strength. Its thick neck and heavy, curved beak, along with its sharp talons, make it a visual metaphor for dominance and controlled aggression. As a result, it has repeatedly been used as a heraldic device and as an emblem of might. The American bald eagle, for example, has become a respected national icon, despite the fact that, in nature, this particular species happens to get much of its food from scavenging. Its proud shape overcomes this unfortunate fact.
When William Blake wrote ‘To see a world in a grain of sand’, he was expressing the idea that, with imagination, in the smallest detail of nature we can see the riches of the universe. In a series of works inspired by a colour photograph of a mountain later found among his papers, René Magritte finds the extraordinary in the ordinary. A drawing by the artist on the back of the photograph reveals that the shape of the mountain ridge reminded him of an eagle with outspread wings. It was a simple matter to add an eagle’s head to this image and, in this way, to celebrate the mighty power of the great bird, now transformed into a massive wall of rock. [...]
A number of other surrealists have enjoyed depicting eagles in their work. One of the most impressive examples is by the Belgian Jane Graverol, who worked in Magritte’s shadow but gave us some images that were just as powerful and mysterious as any of his. Her painting The New Melancholy (1956) shows a huge black eagle filling a whole room. [...] Another intensely ambiguous eagle is created by Toyen in The Dangerous Hour (1942). In place of sharp talons, this bird has delicate human hands, which rest on a fence, one hand on top of the other. The top of the fence is protected by a line of sharply pointed, upright shards of broken glass, to deter anyone from climbing over it.
René Magritte, The Domain of Arnheim, 1938. Oil on canvas, 73 × 100 cm (28 3/4 x 39 3/8 in.). Private Collection. © The Estate of René Magritte
Words by Desmond Morris.
The Surrealist Menagerie: Strange Beasts & Fantastic Visions by Desmond Morris is available now. Explore other books on Surrealism here.
