Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 31 October 2018-20 January 2019

We often describe things as “surreal”, but how many of us know about Surrealism?

This exhibition at the Fundació Joan Miró aims to show Britain’s Surrealist art from a new perspective: the camera of one of its leading players. Lee Miller (female) was a model and photographer who worked alongside British Surrealists in the late 1930s.

You could describe Miller as a historian of British Surrealism. Her photographs of its artists, and her own collaborations with them, help to tell the story of that movement. In particular, we see Miller’s footage of British Surrealists brought together by joint shows and creative retreats.

But this is no niche-interest event. Miller’s story is told with the aid of works by artists whose fame has outlived Surrealism itself: Salvador Dalí (melting clocks) and René Magritte (“this is not a pipe”). Also featured are Max Ernst, Eileen Agar, and Henry Moore.

The iconic paintings by Dalí and Magritte go some way to showing what Surrealism was about. Emerging in the 1920s, Surrealist artists had a number of aims. Some wanted to represent the “unconscious” mind of the modern person, with paintings showing the frantic association of thoughts, the meeting of technology and psychology. Others sought to free art from photography, moving away from “realistic” scenes to those which were warped, strange, and even nightmarish.

Miller captured Surrealism when Britain was becoming its epicentre, but the movement had its origins in France and Germany. There, the almost absurd, mechanized violence of the First World War had caused “Dada” artists to reject rationality or realism in their portrayals of the world. Surrealism largely grew out of the Dada phenomenon.

Thus the exhibition shows a crucial point in art history: the point at which realism was left behind, perhaps for good. It offers context for this departure, and therefore context for our own ideas about “modern art”.