Untitled painting by Humphrey Jennings, c1936

British surrealism aspired to be a radical art movement but remained a sadly stunted growth. Surrealism proper was born in Paris in 1922 when André Breton gathered a group of artists, poets and writers who wanted to free creativity from the restraints of reason by exploring the unconscious mind. To do this, they developed an interest in recording dreams, automatic writing (streams of unconnected words), word games and artworks which juxtaposed unusual objects.

The surrealists wrote about beauty being 'convulsive' and they invented evocative phrases such as: 'Are elephants contagious?' In their art, they exhibited 'ready-mades' or 'found objects', like Marcel Duchamp's urinal, or created pictures by chance, using splashes and rubbing grainy surfaces, as Max Ernst did.

Strange bedfellows

Untitled photograph by Humphrey Jennings, c1936
The surrealism of everyday life. Close-up of the photograph above, showing a stone elephant on top of a bleachworks in Bolton

Salvador Dali, René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico painted strange events in hallucinatory landscapes. The surrealists found inspiring phrases in literature, such as 19th-century French author Lautréamont's simile: 'Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.'

Surrealists also used the new medium of film in imaginative ways, from Man Ray's atmospheric photographs to Luis Bunuel's short films. His Un Chien Andalou (1928) had a stunning scene in which an eye is slit by a razor blade to reveal a swarm of ants; this film was followed by his deliberately blasphemous L'Age d'Or (1930).

The First Surrealist Manifesto was published in 1924, and the group staged its first exhibition in Paris a year later. At the same time, the surrealists' delight in public scandal, and their feverish search for the unexpected and dream-like, also took a serious turn as, through Breton, the group became associated with communism.

Inspired in Paris

Since he began painting as a young man, Humphrey Jennings's work had always been figurative and modernist. However he had a lively interest in the surrealists and their heady mix of quirky fantasy and political radicalism. He visited Paris and met surrealists such as Breton.

It was not until June 1936, when the first International Surrealist Exhibition was held in the New Burlington Galleries in London, that a British surrealist group was officially formed. Jennings was a member of the exhibition's selection committee, which was led by painter Roland Penrose and anarchist critic Herbert Read. André Breton and poet Paul Eluard helped choose the European exhibits, which included works by Dali and Ernst as well as examples of primitive art.

The London exhibition provoked enormous, and mainly hostile public reaction, but attracted support from young artists such as Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and Paul Nash. The first publication by the English surrealist group was approved by Jennings, Read, Penrose, Moore, Nash and Man Ray, among others.

Causing controversy

Although European surrealism was a radical activity, and intellectuals were fascinated by its fusion of imaginative art with revolutionary politics, in Britain it was perceived as a blot on the landscape. Often caricatured as 'foreign rubbish', surrealism could only survive in Britain by abandoning its radical theories. British artists tended to downplay its revolutionary aspect, and many early members became famous only after they left the group.

Surrealism's 'foreignness' caused considerable controversy among its British adherents. Read proposed a native base for it in the English literary tradition, with British surrealists dubbed 'the Children of Alice' [in Wonderland], while others stressed its international character.

The British group, joined by the painter Conroy Maddox, carried on publishing tracts, manifestos and holding exhibitions during the war years but Jennings moved on to embrace activities that brought him nearer the hearts and minds of ordinary people: Mass Observation and documentary film.

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