surrealism / metamorphic shape-shifting in chalk talks

Chalk talk panel sequence

When I spoke recently at the Hearst Center for the Arts about Salvador Dali’s visit to Iowa in 1952, I noted the resemblance between the Surrealists’ use of metamorphic shape-shifting, in which a familiar form is made to look like something else, and the use of visual puns in cartooning and other popular art.

Long before the Surrealists, visual wit was commonly used by artists, illustrators, cartoonists, and countless others. This may be of particular interest because the faculty committee who arranged for Dali’s visit was headed by a University of Northern Iowa faculty member (theatre and radio) named Herbert (Herb) Hake.

In addition to his well-known work as a theatre set designer and founder of the campus radio station, Hake gave comic cartoon talks on aspects of Iowa history. He did this through “chalk talks,” a traditional stage presentation that used metamorphic picture sequences in which a thing's identity evolves from one panel to the next. An excellent example is reproduced above.

In Hake’s presentations (from A Cartoon History of Iowa) as shown below, he begins by talking about one thing (on the left), then adds to that drawing to make it into something else (on the right). In other contexts, this “trick” of concealing one thing in another is also commonly known as an “embedded figure” or a “camouflaged figure.”

Herb Hake, chalk talk drawings

 

endless dalliance / no need to encourage his talking

Dali Visits Iowa (1952)

Martin Birnbaum, The Last Romantic: The story of more than a half-century in the world of art. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960—

After his exhibition and just when I began to pride myself on having introduced a salient figure into our art world, Herbert Crowley suddenly disappeared. Only after I retired did I discover that he had enlisted in the camouflage division of the British Army. In 1926 [other sources say 1924] he married Miss Alice Lewisohn who, with her sister Irene, had founded the remarkable Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street, New York, an admirable account of which was written by Mrs. Crowley [titled The Neighborhood Playhouse: Leaves from a Theatre Scrapbook].

[Herbert and Alice Lewisohn Crowley lived in Zurich after World War I, where they were closely associated with psychologist Carl Jung.]

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Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols. New York: Doubleday, Anchor Press, 1964—

Freud made the simple but penetrating observation that if a dreamer is encouraged to go on talking about his dream images and the thoughts that these prompt in his mind, he will give himself away and reveal the unconscious background of his ailments, in both what he says and what he deliberately omits saying. His ideas may seem irrational and irrelevant, but after a time it becomes relatively easy to see what it is that he is trying to avoid, what unpleasant thought or experience he is suppressing. No matter how he tries to camouflage it, everything he says points to the core of his predicament. A doctor sees so many things from the seamy side of life that he is seldom far from the truth when he interprets the hints that his patient produces as signs of an uneasy conscience. What he eventually discovers, unfortunately, confirms his expectations. Thus far, nobody can say anything against Freud's theory of repression and wish fulfillment as apparent causes of dream symbolism.

Dust to dust / Dali, skulls, and reminders of death

C. Allen Gilbert, All Is Vanity

Ten years ago, we blogged about an American illustrator named C. Allan Gilbert (1873-1929), who was also an early contributor to animated films. Unfortunately, if and when he is remembered, it is inevitably because of the continuing popularity of one of his illustrations, a memento mori (reminder of mortality) titled All is Vanity (1892). It is a double image or visual pun in which the scene of a woman admiring herself in a mirror appears instead to be a skull when viewed from a greater distance. During World War I, Gilbert was also among a number of US artists who worked for the US Shipping Board (the Emergency Fleet Corporation) in applying dazzle camouflage to US merchant ships.

Gilbert's skull illusion is skillfully made and undoubtedly deserving of its popularity. But it is somewhat less than original. Throughout history, there have been repeated attempts at designing scenes of daily life that, from a distance, change into icons of death. Below is an example of one made by a German artist in 1866, in which two young people take on the shape of a skull when viewed from a distance. When translated, the label beneath the image reads "blood and decay." The Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali alluded to the same symbolism when he devised a "double image" (in a 1940 painting called Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire) that at first appears to be a bust of the French philosopher Voltaire, and then, at other times, perhaps an image of two nuns.

Anon, Blood and Decay

And at last, below is another example, also German, from the 19th century.

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage Schemes | Part 5

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes (2016) by Roy R. Behrens, "in the style" of four famous artists. Can you name them? Answers are at the bottom of this blogpost. more>>>

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Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Random House, 1933—

Another thing that interested us enormously was how different the camouflage of the french looked from the camouflage of the germans, and then once we came across some very neat camouflage and it was american. The idea was the same but as after all it was different nationalities who did it the difference was inevitable. The color schemes were different, the way of placing them was different, it made plain the whole theory of art and its inevitability.

Answers (top to bottom) John Everett Mallais, Salvador Dali, Edward Wadsworth, and Max Beckmann.

Annie Dillard and Dali

Above An embedded figure drawing from a 1907 issue of The Strand Magazine. Compare that with this observation by Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, from his Gestalt Psychology (NY: Liveright, 1947), pp. 92-93—

…sometimes we see from a distance a strange object which later, when we approach it, splits into a well-known thing and parts of other objects… The puzzle-pictures which years ago amused the readers of magazines were examples of this kind of thing. In modern wars it has become a real art to make objects such as guns, cars, boats, etc., disappear by painting upon these things irregular designs, the parts of which are likely to form units with parts of their environment.

Or this from Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (NY: Bantam 1975), p. 18—

Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children. Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot?

This drawing shown here is reminiscent of a double-image painting by Salvador Dali (two nuns who suggest the shape of Robert Houdin's bust of Voltaire), who remembered his interest in puzzles in his article titled "Total Camouflage for Total War" in Esquire Vol 18 No 2 (August 1942), pp. 64-66, 129-130—

Every Saturday [as a child] I received a juvenile publication to which my father had subscribed for me. Its final page was always devoted to a puzzle picture. This would present, for instance, a forest and a hunter. In the tangled underbrush of the forest the artist had cleverly concealed a rabbit; the problem was to find it. Or, again, a doll must be discovered, lost by a child in an apparently empty room. My father would bring me the puzzle, and what was his astonishment to see me find, not one but two, three or four rabbits, not a single doll but several—and never the one which the artist had meant to conceal.

Dali: Submarines and Sardines

From Salvador Dali, "Total Camouflage for Total War" in Esquire Vol 18 No 2 (August), 1942—

Some young sardines are making their first outing under the supervision of their parents. A submarine passes by. The little fishes, alarmed, question their father:

"Papa, what's that?"

"That, my children, is our revenge which is passing: a great tin made of sheet-iron in which men, covered in oil, are held inside, pressed against each other."