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.

Woodman most often acted as her own model, and the small black-and-white compositions, usually nudes, are visually straightforward but conceptually complex.  What complicates the work is the knowledge that Woodman is not just the vulnerable nude, but also the architect of that condition.  In many photos Woodman’s gaze is directed at the viewer; and yet knowing she was also the photographer mediates that directness, because ultimately what her model-self was looking at was her photographer-self, backwards through the lens of the camera, posing for her own view.  In this way, she was able to explore her femininity as a construct of at least partially her own making, bringing a feminist awareness to her investigations.

Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print, 5 1/4 in. x 5 1/4 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Take, for example, Polka Dots (1976).  Wearing a spotted dress, Woodman crouches against a decaying, dilapidated wall.  Over her head there is a fist-sized hole punched through the plaster and lath.   Similarly, her dress is unzipped at the side, revealing part of her torso and the curve of her left breast.  Splayed fingers hide her mouth, heightening the vulnerability of her posture and semi-nakedness, and her messy hair corresponds to the ruined nature of the room.  Her awkward, submissive pose and undone dress belong to a madwoman—but her eyes are not crazy, they are guiltily sexual.  They dare the viewer to compare the hole in her garment to the hole in the wall and to see how they might be similar.  And yet the title is neutral, focusing coyly on the pattern of the dress and the concurrent black spots on the wall, redirecting the viewer to the composition as a whole and reflecting the conceptual slyness of the work.  Contradictions and ambiguity create depth as Woodman refuses to provide an easy summary of femininity or desire.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979-1980. Gelatin silver print, 3 7/8 in. x 3 7/8 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Woodman’s understanding of formal compositions was truly remarkable for someone so young.  Consider Untitled, New York (1979-1980), in which a nude body reclines on a striped mattress.  Echoing ancient Roman and Greek statues, the head is missing, cut off by the camera’s framing. The clean, bold stripes of the sheet direct the eye across the width of the photo, providing a strong horizontal pattern that is softened by the zigzagging line of the torso and knees.  Gentle folds in the flesh at the waist echo the soft ripples in the fabric.  An open barrette scattered on the sheet implies the sensuality of unbound hair that the viewer can’t see, yet the idea of that looseness is physically present in the undone fabric billowing from under the bed’s front edge. Two mysterious black disks lie near the ribcage, like pupils, alluding to sight. The configuration of elements appears intuitive, but the many correspondences indicate that it was very carefully composed.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print, 5 1/4 in. x 5 5/16 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Identity is the main issue that arises repeatedly in Woodman’s work.  If she is located in front of and behind the camera simultaneously, then her sense of self is similarly flexible.  Nowhere is this idea more apparent than in Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island (1976) in which three naked women stand in a row in a dilapidated room. Each woman holds a photograph of Woodman’s face in front of her own visage.  The posture of the two women on the left indicates that their hidden faces are turned to each other behind the photographic facades.  The third woman, however, faces the camera.  Comparing this woman’s body to the other photographs in the exhibition, the viewer can deduce that this is Woodman herself, cheekily replacing her own face with a representation that claims to be her.  This tableau is further complicated by a fourth photo of Woodman’s face tacked to the wall, and by the paint that divides the wall horizontally making the row of women into an ersatz police lineup.  There are four Francescas in the room: which one is the criminal, which the innocent, or even the “real”?  Further, each woman is naked, but her face—the principle social marker of her individuality—is concealed, questioning what constitutes feminine identification.  Woodman’s own pose, leaning toward the viewer in knee socks and Mary Janes, seems to say you can see me naked, but I am unrevealed; exposed, I am protected.

Woodman committed suicide at the age of 22, and it would be easy to let this cast a pall over her work, robbing it of its sly humor and replacing its youthful sincerity with something darker. Knowing this fact, her nude body can suddenly look isolated, her propositions for selfhood change from playfully unfixed to confused, her blacks even more opaque than before.  But subjecting her oeuvre to armchair psychology is the wrong strategy: it’s too convenient to attribute her imaginative choices to the facile cliché of the tortured artist.  Although her photographs expose her physical body and her thoughts to a public audience, it is in the privacy of the darkroom that I imagine her: coaxing an image from light and shadows, sliding paper into chemical trays, bringing an ever-changing idea of herself to life, over and over again.