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.

René Magritte. La Clairvoyance (Clairvoyance), 1936; oil on canvas, 21 1/4 x 25 9/16 in. © Charly Herscovici.

Magritte’s paintings, while traditional in technique (often oil on canvas), are innovative and witty in concept. Doubling, fragmentation, displacement, and irrational juxtapositions are his favored strategies. Like Marcel Duchamp before him, Magritte used his background training in commercial sign painting to execute his works. And as with Duchamp, language games are a preeminent concern. “This is not a pipe,” proclaims Magritte’s painting of a pipe. The paradoxical proclamation is correct: It is a painting of a pipe. Near this work is a small painting of a piece of cheese resting inside an actual glass cheese tray. Title? This Is a Piece of Cheese. Gotcha! Through the combination of text and image, Magritte questions not only reality, but representation itself. This is art about art. Given the continued post-conceptual trend in contemporary art and the continued questioning of the politics of language, the popular appeal of Magritte comes as no surprise.

René Magritte. La Trahison des Images (Ceci N’est Pas une Pipe) (The Treachery of Images [This Is Not a Pipe]), 1929; oil on canvas; 23 3/4 x 31 15/16 x 1 in. © Charly Herscovici. Photo: Digital Image © 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA, Licensed by Art Resource, NY.

Latent sexuality, anxiety, menace, and violence interlace the works thematically. L’Assine Menace [The Menaced Assassin] sums up both Surrealist painting’s fascination with the irrational and the movement’s obsessive and sexist attitude toward women. Multiple well-dressed male “assassins” hover around the victim of a crime: a murdered naked woman, bleeding from the mouth. One male assassin holds a prehistoric-looking club, another a voluminous fishing net, and an incongruent third man listens to a gramophone, perhaps on the verge of being ensnared further in the mystery. The assassins’ black bowler hats are a nod to the pre-WWI serial-fiction character Fantômas, favored by the post-WWI Surrealists. Magritte took up wearing the same type of hat as his signature piece.

René Magritte. L’assassin Menacé (The Menaced Assassin), 1927; oil on canvas, 59 1/4″ x 6′ 4 7/8 in. © Charly Herscovici.

MoMA’s tone deafness about Surrealism’s obsession with decapitated or fragmented naked women is evident when a nearby shaped canvas of a naked female torso, centering on the genitals, is praised by the wall label for its “technical virtuosity and debt to Old Master tradition.” The painting’s title is a giveaway to its ambitions: La Representation (Representation). The achievement here is the blending together of representation with the object represented: The painting is curved exactly around the depicted woman’s curves, with a curving gilt frame. The subject and its representation (the painting) strive to be one and the same: an icon, in the religious sense. It is also as artful and problematic a crotch shot as Courbet’s Origin of the World (1866).

René Magritte. La Clef des Songes (The Interpretation of Dreams), 1935; oil on canvas, 16 1/8 x 10 5/8 in. © Charly Herscovici. Photo: Jerry Thompson.

Revelations in this show are the works from private collections, rarely seen by the public. For example, the exhibition brings together a whimsical series of untitled cut-and-pasted paper collages from 1926-27 from private collections and different museums. In these collages, Magritte cleverly utilizes sheet music (with lyrics in English and German), cut into his trademark grelot shape resembling a chess piece and meant to stand in for the human form. In one collage, the chess-piece-shaped sheet music is tilted on its side to float like a cloud in the sky. From the same years, we are treated to Magritte’s graphic-design work for avant-garde Belgian journals such as Le Centaure (the centaur, cousin to the Surrealists’ favorite Greek mythological monster, the minotaur). His commercial advertisements—for a jewelry store or a restaurant in Brussels—feature weird juxtapositions of elements unrelated to jewelry or restaurants per se, echoing the same concern to unfix realistic representation as his paintings of the same period.

In Magritte’s La Lumiere des Coincidences [The Light of Coincidences], painted in Brussels in 1933, a realistic candle set on a table casts a shadow into a painting of a sculpture of a torso, illuminating the body inside the painted frame. A painting of a painting of a sculpture of a body—Magritte peels back the onion of representation in a way that keeps today’s viewers looking and wondering: What is real?

Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938, is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through January 12, 2014. The exhibition will travel to The Menil Collection, Houston (February 14–June 1, 2014), and The Art Institute of Chicago (June 29–October 12, 2014).

Ben Aqua, Hunter, 2010

Perhaps most surrealistic of the group is the work of Ben Aqua, including a haunting photographic portrait of a man dressed in head-to-toe camouflage in the woods. Without seeing his face and the seamlessness of shifts from the man’s patterned clothing to the branches that surround him, the only human characteristic evident is his bright orange cap, without which we might mistake him for a semi-human woodland character from the X-Files.

Helen Maurene Cooper, Junknails with Jam and Mexican Cookie, 2009

Helen Maureen Cooper’s photographs of nail art follow in this investigation of pattern and its relationship to the body. In this case, Cooper’s large format color photographs focus on the elaborate decorations that define Chicago nail art styles, revealing the subtle influence of race and class.

Yumi Janairo Roth, In Situ Houston, 2009

The sculptures by Yumi Janairo Roth combine authoritarian objects that are usually associated with drab unadorned order with bright, shiny and festive decoration. Also included are photographs of these objects in particular sites. For instance, one image of a barricade as disco ball covered in mirrored mosaic is placed on street corner in front of a deadpan policeman.

Thomas Cummins, Unit B, 2010

The exhibition also includes works by William Betts with his pixilated paint fields on mirrors suggesting the surveillance of 747 jets as well as works by Thomas Cummins , Michael Eddy and Matthew Noel-Tod. All together, these works evoke strange uncanny combinations that are beautiful and wild.