Today in yet another glorious art history class, our typical discussions of the spiritual nature of disproportionate tables and bright green nudes were abandoned in favor of a guest lecturer’s thoughts on Surrealism.

This guest lecturer is a British man called Anthony Penrose, son of painter Roland Penrose and photographer Lee Miller, here to talk to us through the sub-Saharan heat of the lecture hall about the nature of the Surrealist art movement.

You would think Surrealism would be confined to painting. And you’d be wrong.Surrealism is, he explains, more an approach to life than some exclusive school of painting, and extends to film, photography, and poetry. (I highly… highly… recommend listening to the audio sample in the link to poetry, by the way. Highly.)

One of the Surrealist poets was Paul Eluard. He wrote a poem in 1940, originally dedicated to his wife but later renamed “Liberté.” According to Penrose, copies of this poem was dropped by the thousands by Allied planes during World War II as a rallying point for the French.

That struck me. I think — I hope! — we’ve all seen Casablanca. Assuming (yes, I know) we all have: you know that scene, where the French start singing against the Germans, and everyone at Rick’s starts crying and there’s lots of soft light and teary eyeballs and things like that? Well, that’s a nifty scene, but I always thought it was a little goofy. Good for a movie, but for real life…? Well, I wasn’t there for it, but this poem seems to have had a similar effect. I don’t know, something about the image of thousands of sheets of paper wafting down onto bombed buildings (okay, maybe just normal towns, but let me romanticize it) kind of struck me.

Just figured I’d share.

Anecdotes, Literature