5 March, 2007

Not merely weird

Here's an interesting, if a little too wide-ranging article by Jonathan Jones on surrealism, which is supposed to be about the influence of the Spanish landscape on Dalí, apparently.

There's also a related article by another Jonathan, Glancey, on surrealist architecture. In the first draft of this entry, I explained, thankfully briefly, that Glancey was wrong. Gaudí wasn't a surrealist, though his work was very novel, organic and influencial on those who were surrealists. Likewise, the further supposition that the Scottish Parliament building is Gaudí-inspired, and therefore surrealist, is flawed. However, I then realised that that was Glancey's exact point: the best surrealist architecture wasn't the product of deliberate surrealism.

My headline is the key point, which seems to have eluded Glancey's subeditor (who I presume wrote the introductory paragraph): there's far more to surrealism than merely being 'weird and wonderful'.