Gertrude Abercrombie. The Courtship, 1949; oil on Masonite; 21 3/4 × 25 1/4 in. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Such cavalier unconcern is indicative of The Conjured Life, a restaging of an earlier show at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition, which posits the influence of surrealism on a disparate miscellany of contemporary works, almost completely fails in its promised “legacy.” I can accept Francesca Woodman with her disquieting photographs, or Jess, with his collages that begin where Ernst’s end, as inheritors of Surrealism. And Willie Cole, with a pair of 1992 assemblages made from old electric irons, plausibly makes the grade. But most of the more contemporary works indicate little genuine engagement with Surrealism’s theoretical underpinnings or even more generalized implications of Surrealist techniques or innovations. The worst offenders here—Buzz Spector’s Mallarme [sic] (1987–88), a curio cabinet with lines by its titular poet painted in gold leaf on the glass, or David Noonan’s untitled 2012 work, a monumental silkscreen on linen photo collage of a couple of goofy-looking dudes—smack of a fetishized craftsmanship utterly alien to Surrealism’s aspiration to pierce the boundary between art and life. Donald Roller Wilson’s use of Old Masterly oil technique in The Transformation of Helen’s Brother Larry (1980) achieves something of Dali’s grotesquery but none of his paranoid psychological depth or genius for trompe l’oeil; it’s just a fat kid in a monster mask and skirt. This is “surrealist” only if you take that as a synonym for “weird.”

Francesca Woodman. House #4, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1976; gelatin silver print; 8 x 10 in. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Yet however misguided its legacy claims, The Conjured Life succeeds in its substantial historical presentation of the international Surrealist movement led for over 40 years by poet André Breton. The cases devoted to Surrealist print culture—Stanford’s contribution to the otherwise visiting show—are compelling and thoughtful. In a section on precursors—a vital part of Surrealism’s self-conception—we find, for example, photographs by documentarian flâneur Eugène Atget (1857–1927); as I struggled to recall whether the group explicitly acknowledged him, my attention was drawn to the June 1926 issue of La Revolution Surrealiste, and behold, the cover featured one of the same Atget photos. The value of seeing issues of such magazines as View, Minotaur, and Medium firsthand cannot be overstated. The impact, say, of the Big Toe photographs (1929) by erstwhile May Ray assistant Jacques-André Boiffard is far more palpable seeing them occupy full pages of Georges Bataille’s dissident Surrealist mag, Documents, as opposed to their stingier reproductions in the secondary literature. Nestled among such items in the biggest case, Duchamp’s Boite (1941)—a box set of miniaturized reproductions of his most significant works to that point, including readymades and The Large Glass (1915–23)—underscores just how inventive the Surrealist sense of printed matter could be.

Enrico Baj. Angry General with Decorations, 1960; oil, fabric, leather buttons, medals, etc. on canvas; 51 × 38 in. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

No one’s going to drive to Stanford just for printed matter, so let me assure you that the actual Surrealist paintings in this show are well worth the trip. While it leads with The Wonders of Nature (1953), a nautically themed oddity depicting clouds and stone fish people by perennial crowd-pleaser Magritte, the show refreshingly relies on canvases of less-heralded figures like Enrico Baj—subject of one of Breton’s last major catalog essays (1963)—whose Angry General with Decorations (1961) features collaged elements of military finery (buttons, medals, epaulettes) painted into the canvas, with pigment serving as glue. The show includes substantial paintings by the likes of Paalen, Seligmann, Tanning, and Matta. But the most startling piece is Yves Tanguy’s Untitled (The Fluidity of Time) (1930), a singular oil-on-canvas piece for viewers familiar with his work; in place of his tonally graduated skies and unearthly landscapes inhabited by distant, inhuman figures, Untitled features an ochre yellow sky rendered in uncharacteristically vertical brushstrokes, with a single, large biomorphic abstraction in the foreground. The sheer unexpectedness of this canvas suggests our time might be better spent exploring Surrealism’s own less familiar depths than straining to find a link to contemporary figures where none exists.

Yves Tanguy. Untitled (The Fluidity of Time), 1930; oil on canvas; 47 1/8 × 39 5/8 in. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Photo: Garrett Caples.

The Conjured Life: The Legacy of Surrealism is on view at the Cantor Arts Center in Palo Alto, California, through April 3, 2017.

Bruce Conner. PRINTS, 1974; mixed media (steel lockbox with documents, photographs, fingerprints); dimensions variable. Courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

If PRINTS is anomalous, however, it is very much in keeping with Conner’s obsessive questioning of artistic identity, in both the value created by the artist’s signature and the imperative to develop and market a signature visual style. Conner’s reluctance to sign the front of his works led to a shrinking, sometimes hidden autograph that in turn gave way to a thumbprint, epitomized by a 1965 lithograph that reproduces his thumbprint twice, as both the subject of the work and the signature of the artist. Late in life, he would resort to pseudonymous and anonymous works. But Conner’s stubborn resistance to a recognizable style or even medium is ultimately the dominant note of It’s All True, as the viewer is confronted with room after room of almost bewildering variety.

A wall of early, clotted, oil-on-Masonite paintings—UNTITLED (1957), bright red with gold leaf, stands out from the austerely colored group—gives way to two rooms of assemblages, which then lead to rooms dominated by drawings, collages, inkblots, and photographs. The whole is punctuated by six of Conner’s films, a pair of his videos, and thematic rooms, like those devoted to his 1962 sojourn in Mexico or his 1964 TOUCH/DO NOT TOUCH gallery show. The latter—a series of twelve raw canvases with “DO NOT TOUCH” printed in their center, leading to a thirteenth canvas labeled “TOUCH” beneath Plexiglas—derives from Conner’s fur-lined, bead-laden, oil-and-shellac painting DARK BROWN (1959), being the only work with a label instructing patrons not to touch it, in the San Francisco Museum of Art (the former name of SFMOMA). The constant interplay between his conceptual works and his conventional artwork lends the former much weight.

Bruce Conner. UNTITLED, from MANDALA SERIES, 1965; felt-tip pen on paper; 10 x 10 in. Courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

For his conventional work is anything but. Throughout his career, Conner exhibited an inventiveness and virtuosity that places his oeuvre among the high points of late-20th-century art. Take, for example, any one of the untitled black-felt-tip-pen drawings from his 1965 MANDALA SERIES. With their surfaces almost entirely covered in ink, these works turn drawing inside out; figuration emerges from the white unmarked spaces, and drawing becomes the absence of ink, even as the drawn lines provide much of the visual drama. This tendency reached its apotheosis with STARS (1975), a black-ink-on-paper work whose subject becomes the tiny flecks of paper still visible. Similarly, in Conner’s intricate, folded, and manipulated inkblot drawings, which served as the ailing artist’s primary mode of expression in the 1990s, one can trace a line of development from the totem-pole-like columns of individual blots to the later, more crowded examples that blur the divisions between and within columns; these again activate the negative space but to a lesser extent than the felt-tip works. Conner’s drawings alone might have sufficed to secure him a permanent reputation. With his groundbreaking assemblages, meticulous collages, and exquisitely edited films, they contribute to one of the most significant artistic oeuvres of his time.

Bruce Conner. STARS, 1975; ink on paper; 22 ¼ x 18 5/8 in. Courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Bruce Conner. INKBLOT DRAWING, April 24, 1995; ink on paper; 9 5/8 x 9 1/16 in. Courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Breathtaking in its scope, It’s All True is still forced to neglect whole bodies of Conner’s work, such as a series of black-and-white acrylic paintings from the early ’90s, alluded to only by Brian Lucas’s 2011 photograph of HOMAGE TO JAY DEFEO (1991), depicting the work installed in a friend’s backyard to set in motion a process that concluded with the painting’s destruction by the elements.[2] The exhibition catalogue, sadly, is a mess. Many of the reproductions are so small as to be worthless, particularly those of the black-ink and felt-tip-pen drawings, whose individual lines are almost entirely lost. The poor-quality images indicate hasty production, which the meticulous Conner would never have permitted during his lifetime. Yet there inevitably comes a time when art is out of an artist’s hands, and the exhibition has done a commendable job with the vast and eclectic nature of Conner’s work to make a case for his enduring importance.

Anonymous (Bruce Conner). HOMAGE TO JAY DEFEO, 1991; acrylic on canvas 91 ½ x 69 ¾ in. Courtesy of Brian Lucas. Photo: Brian Lucas, 2011.

Bruce Conner: It’s All True is on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through January 22, 2017.

[1] This text complies with the artist’s preferred title style, as documented in the exhibition catalogue: “In keeping with Bruce Conner’s clearly articulated wish, the titles of his works are given in all capital letters without italics.” Rudolf Frieling and Gary Garrels, eds., Bruce Conner: It’s All True (University of California, 2016), 13.

[2] Garrett Caples, “SINCERELY, BRUCE CONNER: A Final Work-in-Progress?” Poetry Foundation, June 29, 2011, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/06/sincerely-bruce-conner-a-final-work-in-progress/.