slime, snails, puppy dog tails

finally the Edinburgh Surrealist collection is reopened!

I’ve been in hell because my electric blanket broke and the heating in my flat doesn’t really work as a ground floor, 1920s tenement. It was a rare aesthetically pleasing electric blanket, royal blue with peacock feathers instead of the elephant skin or giant band-aid looking ones you can commonly buy. I’ve been taking too many baths though the water goes lukewarm in about five minutes so am dreading my energy bill and have been working under a pile of duvets. I can only find one of my slippers so I put two socks on the other foot and I carry around a hot water bottle like a second bladder. My whole personality is being cold at the moment which I have to say is something I never once experienced in Canada which is kind of famous for being a cold place. If you are thinking or daydreaming of moving to Edinburgh read Fungus the Bogeyman first and ask yourself if thats what you want your life to be, dreary ennui, wet feet and constant proximity to mould. I blame the broken blanket and missing slipper on the Edinburgh curse, so I have stopped writing my Edinburgh novel and am working on a cosy London novel instead to prevent a giant frozen boulder falling on my head or my bathtub eating me alive. When I first moved here, I really loved it though I curse the day now. luckily the Surrealist collection at Modern One of Edinburgh National Galleries has reopened, a thing I which made me happy to move here ( along with the glass buildings at the Botanical gardens which are still closed) As far as I know the collection was out the last few years earning bread and butter as the modern galleries have had dire straits (in 2022 one of the national modern gallery buildings had to close for the winter because it couldn’t afford heating. Same gallery, same.)

The Surrealist collection is in a tucked away attic place on the second floor, which can give it a magic attic feeling, but you feel the tucked away aspect too, when shockingly mediocre contemporary artworks are given prominent space elsewhere in the museum for arbitrary reasons like the artist living in Scotland, when how and why all these surrealist works came to Scotland is a more interesting story. A lot of loved old familiars are back, by Leonora Carrington and Edith Rimmington but some now are in storage ( Magritte’s wonderful La Gâcheuse is shockingly in storage as is a Joseph Cornell though there are still a number of Magritte’s on display, they have a substantial collection of him) and you cannot help but wish the bland ‘terrain’ room nearby with contemporary abstracts had been pulled to let more of the surrealist collection be out of its cage. The description labels for the Surrealist works are informative, contextual and enlightening I felt creative urges after reading them unlike a lot of museum labels these days. The surrealist collection has had some triumphs in the last decade, like the purchase of Dorothea Tanning’s Tableau Vivant in 2019 and The Encounter by Remedios Varo but visiting the two surrealist rooms when according to the website inventory there is enough for a third, you get the vibe of passionate curators perhaps being undermined by the bigger national gallery structure and Government box ticking which demands Scottish nationalist narratives which the collection, filled with European, American and English artists can’t provide at least on a simplistic level. On a more poetic level they do. Magritte’s bizarre and crisp paintings are, I would argue, the closest visual equivalents of Muriel Spark’s novels and who better than the Surrealists to think about living in a city with Escher like geography, skullish streets and death mood and dotted with the sinister humps of extinct volcanoes, one of which is grazed upon by zebras. A special painting in the collection for Barbara Comyns fans is After The Bombardment by John Pemberton her first husband and the inspiration for Charles in Our Spoons Came from Woolworths and Eugene in A Touch of Mistletoe. Though I think it was painted after they divorced you still get this uncanny wonderful feeling of encountering something physical from her universe:

If I had a billion dollars I would give it to them to expand and display the collection in full flashy glory. In the meantime, I wish more tourists would visit it though the modern galleries are weirdly hard to get to.I think there should be a shuttle bus from the National Gallery on Princess st. Literally every time, including this weekend , I get lost on the way to the modern galleries and end up crying near a random roundabout. It doesn’t help that the private parks and paths of Dean Village aren’t marked as so on googlemaps. Kind of knowing I would get lost again, I listened to the Labyrinth soundtrack on the way there and brought along a thermos of hot milky tea and Babybel cheese. Please go on the quest to it, it is worth the effort. it makes me depressed that people come to Edinburgh and the only work of art they see is the ghastly ‘Monarch of the Glen’ , along with windows filled with mass made harry potter plastic higgledy piggledy and heinous pictures of anthropomorphic highland cows in baseball caps.

Anyway, here is a reading list inspired by the collection.

Lisa Tuttle- My Death

One of my favourite novels set in Scotland about a bereaved author researching the life of a forgotten writer and painter who seems inspired by Leonora Carrington.

A Touch of Mistletoe- Barbara Comyns

The narrator of A Touch of Mistletoe, Victoria, is married to Eugene a painter in 1930s London who goes mad. Eugene’s descent into madness, from not being able to live the life he wants to is completely relatable to me at the moment!!

The Hearing Trumpet- Leonora Carrington

Edinburgh is a city of old ladies, so this Carrington novel a 92 year old is perfect. Leonora Carrington was a rare creature who excelled at both painting and writing.

The surrealist collection has one of Leonora Carrington’s paintings of Max Ernst as a bird like creature. You really need to see one of her paintings in person to appreciate the level of detail and style which makes me think of Northern European masters like Bosch and both Cranach the Elder and Younger. Such kinship makes me wonder why modernist art is always put in the same museum as contemporary .

On the Calculation of Volume 1- Solvej Balle

I read this in one day it was so addictive. It is about a woman who lives the same day over and over like in Groundhog day, but does it in a completely different and ingenius way. It is set in a France of old coin and antiquarian bookshops, with a deep melancholic ennui. It does what a lot of surrealist leaning or inspired literature fails to do, which is ground the narrative in a sharp physical reality, strewn with objects and smells instead of offering pallid abstractions.

Not to Disturb-Muriel Spark

This novella is set in a mansion in Switzerland with a mad man in the attic in a strange zippered outfit and a meticulously planned death narrated by the servants of the house

Also I recently discovered that Giorgio de Chirico wrote a novel, published by David Zwirner books. So far it feels like being in one of his paintings though he doesn’t have the talent for words of Leonora Carrington.

Remedios Varo’s The Encounter:

Primitive Seating by Dorothea Tanning and below her painting, with the dog Tableau Vivant beside a painting by Paul Delvaux

some of their Magritte’s