MY PSYCHIC TOLD ME I NEEDED TO GO ON A PILGRIMAGE to see a work of art. “They want you to travel,” she said, speaking of my spirit guides, “as an act of devotion, and then write about it.” As soon as I received the assignment, I knew exactly what I needed to go see. There is a painting by Max Ernst in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice called The Robing of the Bride. This painting has been important to me for many years, so much so that I have a detail of it tattooed on my hip—quite faded now. I recently reached out to the tattoo artist who did the work about getting another tattoo, thirty years later. She no longer works out of her Lower East Side studio, keeping a place upstate on the Hudson instead. The Lower East Side of New York has changed since then, as have we all.
I have never been to Venice, but my boyfriend and I were already planning a trip to Europe, so I added a forty-eight-hour detour, without him, to my itinerary. I dropped off my bags at the hotel that first morning, too early to check in, and headed out to the Peggy Guggenheim. The streets of Venice are like an elaborate tale with gratuitous twists and turns. I follow these to the Plaza San Marco, then take a gondolier ferry across a canal to the museum. The entrance is inconspicuous, like the entrance to a home, which it once was. I buy a ticket, a program, an audio guide, and I begin my search.
Each room I enter, I scan for my beloved. Quickly I come upon The Antipope, a painting by Ernst so similar to the one I seek, though unfamiliar to me, that for an uncanny moment it seems that time has transformed the painting. The figures have repositioned themselves into a different tableau. Donned new masks. As if, searching for your wife in a house with many rooms, you came upon her sister and for a moment were lost in confusion.
A young woman, probably still in college, is describing The Antipope to a small group. She speaks with such a lack of confidence that it seems doubtful she is any kind of official guide, but she knows a great deal about the painting, and about the life of Peggy Guggenheim, who was married to Ernst for a short period. During that time Ernst was in love with another woman, Leonora Carrington, a surrealist painter like himself. They frequently put each other in their paintings, often in the form of animals. Peggy Guggenheim bought two of the paintings Ernst made about their love triangle, and they remain part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection today. There continues to be discussion as to which of the figures is Ernst, which Carrington, which Guggenheim. One can imagine Peggy Guggenheim herself participating in such discussions here in the villa where she lived out her later years, still captivated by the paintings long after the love affair with Ernst was over.
The museum is not large. I check every room twice. It seems impossible, but there is no denying it. My painting is missing.
In 1924 André Breton wrote the “Manifesto of Surrealism.” This would later become known as the “First Manifesto,” because Breton had a fondness for manifestos. His are, appropriately, unusual. The text feels hallucinated. He begins by abruptly introducing “that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny,” a figure who quickly falls victim to a kind of spiritual malaise until he “is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything.” This longing for ease becomes a sentimental image of a happy childhood: “Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine.” But Breton believes this is an illusion:
But it is true that we would not dare venture so far, it is not merely a question of distance. Threat is piled upon threat, one yields, abandons a portion of the terrain to be conquered. This imagination which knows no bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance with the laws of an arbitrary utility…. He henceforth belongs body and soul to an imperative practical necessity that demands his constant attention.
We do not travel to that fantasy world of ease, because we live in a world where imagination is made subject to practicality. We may only imagine what we can use, which is to say, we do not imagine at all. Imagination, by Breton’s description, will refuse such conditions. Breton writes, “Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.”
Breton wants us to disavow rationality, not because it is inefficient or morally wrong, but because it cannot satisfy our unsatisfiable longings. He thanks Freud in the text, but looking back now, it seems to me that Freud’s patients were the true surrealists, those whom Freud gained his fame by diagnosing and curing.
Breton might agree:
If in a cluster of grapes there are no two alike, why do you want me to describe this grape by the other, by all the others, why do you want me to make a palatable grape? Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable.
Breton wants us to recognize first of all the paucity of rational thought—and then the richness of another category of thought, at the time barely understood as thought at all. Surrealism sustains its power even now because its premise continues to shock us anew, as if we are unable to take it in, returning always to the rational, analytic mode.
We look at surrealist paintings and immediately it begins: the unraveling of the mystery. Which one is Ernst? Which one is Carrington? Which one is Guggenheim?
The Robing of the Bride and its sister, The Antipope, were painted during World War II. Ernst fled Europe with Guggenheim, and they lived, with her daughter Pegeen, in New York, where Carrington also had fled. Carrington would later continue on to Mexico, where she spent the rest of her life. She rejected Ernst. The Robing of the Bride has three prominent figures accompanied by a strange green figure the size of a child but not at all childlike. There is some consensus that the bird figure on the left, carrying a spear-like tool and urging the central figure forward, is Ernst, appearing as a version of Loplop, his bird alter ego. The central figure, in a spectacular red headdress and cape that give her the appearance of an owl, seems to be walking through a doorway on the right side of the painting, where she faces another woman, nude but seemingly submerged in a faded purple light that turns her pale skin an even more ghostly shade. The green figure, blessed with four breasts like a pregnant dog, weeps at their feet. At first glance the red owl figure seems to be gazing impassively out at the viewer, but on closer inspection one sees this is an elaborate bird mask: Her human eye peeks through the red feathers as she gazes with tenderness at the pale woman in the doorway, who will not meet her gaze.
When I first came to know this painting, I was lost in my own fraught romantic drama. I was nineteen years old, living in a dorm room, sleeping in a bunk bed above my girlfriend and her lover, while my lover (this was a secret, because he didn’t want anyone to know he had sex with men) stayed in the bunk bed opposite. No one needed to flee the Nazis, but eventually they all moved into a loft in Williamsburg and I was left to wander New York City alone, getting tattoos. When I saw a reproduction of the painting in a book of surrealist art, I was hit with a shock of recognition. I didn’t know who Max Ernst was. I certainly didn’t think he was the bird figure who seems to be coercing the red-plumed woman away from her true (queer) love. She is being prepared for marriage, it seems against her will. Everything about the painting seems to be opening us into the subjectivity of this central, masked figure. Even the mysterious woman at whom she gazes could be a kind of reflection—another version of her, latent, unrobed.
The painting spoke to me—speaks to me—not with knowledge of its history and the artist’s biography, but by reflecting back to me my own profound, unsatisfiable longing. This is not the longing of a coercive spear, nor of an analytic mind who says, “This one, here, means that. That one means something else.” This is a longing that calls for action, not words. As in Rilke’s poem about looking at a work of sculpture:
…here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
A couple of years ago, my mother went on a pilgrimage. She had just entered retirement and went to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago. This is an ancient route, traveled in medieval times from various locations in France through the Pyrenees to the town of Santiago de Compostela. Though the route fell into disuse for a few hundred years, interest in it was revived in the 1990s, and today one can find many people walking the route, staying at various monasteries and refugios. This usually takes about a month. Some of these people are Christians making a Christian pilgrimage, perhaps as a form of religious penance. Many are not Christians, or not religious, but are using the form of the Christian pilgrimage for their own purposes. They know what a pilgrimage looks like, because the Christians made this one, and they are imitating it closely. My mother had just ended one chapter of her life and begun a new one; she wanted to mark this passage. This is the nature of ritual.
If we are going to treat a pilgrimage to see a work of art as something new, it is worth noting that at the time the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela was being constructed, there was no art, as we think of it, except devotional art. The cathedral itself is both a collection and a work of art. All pilgrimage was pilgrimage to see art. Then, sometime in the seventeenth century, Descartes writes, “I supposed that all the objects that had ever entered into my mind when awake had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams.” And in the next sentence: Je pense, donc je suis. And (perhaps it is only coincidence) not long after, the social boundaries of society changed, moving religion into its own sphere and creating something called “secular life,” an experience one could express by making something called art.
I have traveled to see art before, but have I made a pilgrimage? In August of 2020 I took a pandemic-era road trip to see an exhibit of Francis Bacon paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I had never seen one of his paintings in person. A few years before that, I went to Oakland to see an opera. A few years after, I went to Chicago to see a Cézanne exhibit. If these journeys achieved the quality of pilgrimage, I didn’t know it at the time.
A pilgrimage is a journey with a specific kind of why. It is possible to ask why one makes a pilgrimage, but one’s answer can contain nothing of practicality or utility. One does not make a pilgrimage in order to live a life of greater ease and convenience. One makes a pilgrimage in order to transform, to become someone else. One could say, as Breton says of imagination, that pilgrimage has an unsparing quality.
In celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Breton’s manifesto, a massive exhibition of surrealist art was mounted in Brussels, later to move to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This is where my beloved had gone. Fortunately, I already had plans to visit Paris in August and needed only to extend my trip a few days to be there when the exhibition opened. This pilgrimage has overtaken me as much as I have undertaken it. I submit.
If one wants to visit this exhibition, one might first prepare by visiting the Musée Gustave Moreau in the ninth arrondissement. Breton, Ernst, and Dalí were all avid admirers of Moreau. Breton spent hours in this museum, once Moreau’s home, and frequently brought friends and other artists to see the visionary works inside. Women seduced by animals. Scenes of sexual transgression and abandon. Unfinished paintings, figures with blank faces, landscapes disappearing from the page as if receding from memory—like a dream.
After this, one could walk downhill to the Centre Pompidou. But as one gets closer to the postmodernist building, one becomes aware of the increasing foot traffic—crowds of tourists clogging the streets of the Marais. One might become disoriented, walk too far, find the banks of the Seine, dive into the water in a frenzy of fear and desire.
The water of the Seine, it is said, has become so polluted with sewage that even after the city spent over a billion dollars to clean it, the Olympic triathletes who swam in the river as part of their competition fell ill shortly after.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen The Robing of the Bride in person. Not long after I got a piece of it tattooed on my body, I made a trip to Europe to meet some friends in Bratislava, Slovakia, where they were rehearsing a play. To save money, I bought a discount plane ticket to Brussels and then took an overnight train to Vienna, where I changed trains and continued on into Bratislava. During my afternoon in Vienna, I had just enough time to see one museum, so I went to the Kunsthistoriches. The lower level was under construction, but in the upper level alone I saw countless powerful works, including Breughels that had fascinated me in reproduction. The museum is laid out in a circle, with two large atriums separating two U-shaped galleries of rooms. When I had seen half the museum, I was already exhausted. Still another half a floor to go? And this was with the entire downstairs cordoned off. Too much art.
Just then, I walked up to the next painting, and it was the Ernst. I was as shocked as if I had run into one of the people who lived in that college dorm room with me in the spring of 1997. Why was she here? Did she know I was coming? There were no other paintings like her, nothing from the twentieth century at all. This was the only painting in the atrium. She seemed lost.
I walked up close to look at the brushstrokes. I stepped further back to take in the size and composition. I gazed in awe. I bathed in her.
Demanding an explanation, I soon found one. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, and the Kunsthistoriches were engaged in an exchange, where each sent one work to visit one of the other museums. And she had come to see me.
In her autobiography, Peggy Guggenheim describes discovering an Ernst painting, one she calls “Mystic Marriage,” that was later reworked on a larger canvas into The Antipope. She sees her own face on one of the figures—not her face as an adult, however, but a “startling likeness” to photographs of her as a child of eight years old, photographs Ernst had never seen. She was overwhelmed with emotion and broke down in tears—she had always wanted Ernst to paint her the way he painted Leonora Carrington, and finally she had found herself in one of his paintings.
Guggenheim understood the language of surrealism. She looked at the painting and saw a version of herself that the artist didn’t know. Ernst did not represent his soon-to-be-ex-wife; he revealed an aspect of her until then unknown to him. He may have intended the figure to be Leonora Carrington. But he painted his lover with his wife’s face as a child. This is the logic of dreams and prophecy. It brings Guggenheim to tears, satisfying her need to appear in Ernst’s imaginary world. If he does not paint her, does she even exist for him? The ordinary is invisible.
After all, their marriage was not surrealist. It provided him with American citizenship while in exile, the logic of bureaucracy.
The exhibit is on the top floor of the Centre Pompidou, and we ascend the escaliers mécaniques inside giant transparent tubes to reach it. Along with a group of several others, we follow the passageway at the top (another tube), which leads to a dead end, as the poor signage makes the exhibit difficult to find. This does not seem intentional, though I imagine the truly surrealist gesture would be to have no signage at all. If you ask a member of the staff, they tell you they have never heard of the exhibit, and then at the moment you walk away they whisper, “It is on the sixth floor. N’arrête jamais de chercher.”
The exhibit itself is presented in such a way as to be recognizably surreal. The entrance is a giant mouth, and the first gallery is a circular room with a film about surrealists in Paris playing on all the walls simultaneously. I believe this is intended as an immersive experience, though I can’t help but wonder at the expense of this technological marvel. What if instead they had paid someone to sit in the corner, reading Breton’s manifesto in a whisper. For the price of the video and its 360-degree projection, they could likely have filled every corner with whispers. In the center of the space, the handwritten manuscript of Breton’s manifesto is laid out in a circular glass display case, glowing in the dark room.
It seems heretical to describe the rooms of the exhibit in this way, as the manifesto begins with Breton declaring his disgust and boredom with the descriptive passages of novels. “I am in no mood to admit that the mind is interested in occupying itself with such matters, even fleetingly…. The author…is wasting his time, for I refuse to go into his room.” The rest of the exhibit is less self-consciously unusual: rooms with paintings and sculptures, each organized by a theme such as “Forests” or “Political Monsters.” Slices of walls are missing here and there, allowing one to see into the rooms one has not visited yet or look back to where one has been earlier. Some rooms are dark, with paintings lit so they seem to glow.
All these aesthetic choices make sense. Darkness. Walls that are not walls. There is a sense that we know already what surrealism is, and if, when we come to the surrealism exhibit, we don’t get it, we will be disappointed.
In one room a tiny excerpt of Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou is looping. It is the famous scene where an eye that is also a moon is sliced open. In the original, they intercut the shot of a razor held up to a woman’s eye with a shot of a moon and a close-up of an actual eye of a dead calf, sliced open. The sequence is quite shocking, but the excerpt at the museum leaves out the shot of the real eyeball. The result is that the clip is recognizable but not affecting.
I look at all the paintings, trying not to rush toward the one I know I want. When I see her in the room ahead, I purposefully look at every other painting in the room before I approach. She is as big as I remember, a powerful presence. But because she does not have a helpful explanation in English and French below her name on the wall, she does not attract much attention. There are crowds around certain works, but not her. Sometimes I see a parent approach with small children who point and ask questions. One young woman, perhaps a college student, tells her friends in Italian that she has seen this painting at the Guggenheim in Venice. Some people take a picture of the painting. This seems the greatest compliment we know how to offer. I take several pictures.
I look at the painting until I see something new in it. It doesn’t take long. I keep looking. I find myself unable to leave, unable to walk away. This is why I am here. What do I want to achieve by us spending time together? She is holy; I am ordinary. She is set apart, but by being near her I hope that I will be transfigured.
We see a painting differently in person than in reproduction. Most obviously, we see the paint. Ernst uses a technique, decalcomania, in which watered-down paint is pressed against the canvas with a pane of glass, creating swirling organic textures. These he shapes into the red-orange robes and purple headdress of the two central women in the painting. I can see where the decalcomania layer came first and the negative space around it was painted on the canvas after. It is most obvious in the picture within a picture on the wall behind the central red owl-figure. This miniature version of the painting seems like a key to its own construction. One can imagine Ernst seeing the smaller robed figure first, shaping her, creating the picture within the picture—and then creating the painting as a whole. I notice, for the first time, how the orange feathers painted over the large figure’s red robe inexplicably end just below the knee, leaving the decalcomania technique exposed and untouched from there down.
I see the gesture of the woman dressed in red as she reaches toward the pale purple figure. She could be pushing the other woman aside; she could be tenderly caressing her. The ambiguity layers over itself again and again, provoking deeper and deeper fascination.
I notice that the bird figure, the one frequently identified with Ernst, has no eyes but such a prominent earhole that it looks like it has been drilled into the canvas. In this way the bird bears no resemblance to Loplop, Ernst’s bird alter ego, who usually has prominent eyes as well as a sense of childlike whimsy and antic movement. None of that is present in this armed sentry.
I look at the small green figure, who I always see as a woman though she in fact has male genitalia. She is weeping, her deformed face twisted in sorrow. Some have unkindly suggested that this figure represents Peggy Guggenheim. Left out. Is she pregnant, or is her belly swollen with disease?
The strangest visual element of the painting is the purple woman’s headdress. Its texture, created with decalcomania, resembles purple sea coral, but its shape defies gravity—even logic. The edge follows exactly the line of the doorframe, as if pinned there, but it maintains a consistent gap, floating a hand’s width away from the line of the door all the way down. Is she blocking the doorway? Is she part of the doorway? Is she doorway? Her face is hidden from us as she turns away from the eye of the other woman. She seems to be offering her cheek to kiss instead of her mouth.
On the wall, the title of the painting is not translated into English: La Toilette de la Mariée. There seems to me an urgency about the way no one discusses other possible translations for this phrase. It is always robing or attirement. Never The Bride’s Toilet, unless of course you enter it into Google Translate. It means this; it does not mean that.
When André Breton defines “surreal,” it is something more than the simply uncanny:
I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its possession.
He aspires to an “absolute reality” so exacting that you could only pursue it if you forgot your own mortality. A pilgrimage seems to have greater value as it incurs greater hardship. Sacrifice and self-sacrifice are inherent in the form. Yet my pilgrimage is indistinguishable from vacation. Have I lost the capacity for sacrifice? Am I too soft and corrupt to be touched by something holy? Paris is the city of the flaneur, the libertine pedestrian who spends the day looking in shop windows. Is a pilgrimage possible as an act of leisure? Will I be sanctified?
We are lately, in our society, concerned with care. Where the work of caring for one another is devalued and destroyed, care and self-care become politicized. One way to fight against the cruelty of capitalist society is to be gentle with yourself and each other. Offering myself time and space for a pilgrimage seems a specific kind of self-care, however. It is not a spa day. It is an act of imagination, inexorably tied to desire. Rationality serves only to justify what already exists. In this way, activists who rail against capitalism and industrialism are also a new generation of surrealists. They tell us: There must be something better than what is. We imagine another world.
But we must have parking lots, otherwise where would we put the cars? Capitalism has its problems, certainly, but do you have something practical to replace it? Do you have a plan? A program? Of course we can make pragmatic changes, but we can’t change things overnight. It isn’t realistic.
The flaneur as dreamer, the dreamer as prophet. Idleness as revolution. When Breton urges us to look at dreams, to take them seriously, it is not in order to analyze them. He wants us to live inside them—he sees dreams not as incoherent messages to be decoded but as a continuous stream of surreality to be experienced. The surrealists were all occultists—alchemy and magic were part of their work and their world. What we know as real can be transformed.
If a work of art functions in this way, it is not a message but a vision. A sacred vision, perhaps. The Robing of the Bride, in the exhibition, has been placed in the room titled “The Philosopher’s Stone,” with other pieces sharing alchemical concerns. The image of the red king and the white queen is central to alchemical imagery—either a coded reference to oxidized iron and white foam in a chemical process used to transmute base metal into gold or a spiritual allegory for joining the inner forces of our being into a higher integrated state. Unless there is no difference between the two: an absolute reality where the gold is no longer a metaphor. It is a spirit itself.
The text printed on the gallery wall next to one of Ernst’s other works offers a list of the “key surrealist issues”: dreams, madness, eroticism, and—this last one stands out for me—anticlericalism. The alliance between the museum and art has always been as uneasy as the alliance between the church and God. The institution is created in order to house and protect that which needs no house and no protection. Surrealists are compelled to visions, prophecy, direct access to the divine. There will be no priestly intermediary. When pilgrims traverse the Camino de Compostela, as they have for a thousand years or so, they walk a path that terminates at a cathedral supposedly built on the once-secret burial site of Saint James the apostle. What would be the surreal version of this pilgrimage? Do we allow the apostle’s burial site to remain unmarked?
Why do we make a pilgrimage? In order to be near something sacred. That word.
As renegade surrealist Georges Bataille knew well, sacred means set apart. The sacred is purified of unholiness and filled with an excess of that which is revered; this delicate imbalance must be protected. The painting in the museum is protected from damage, but is it protected from desecration? The miracle of holiness: The more we approach to revere its sacredness, the more its sanctity is reified. We gain meaning because we give it meaning. The pilgrimage is what makes the painting holy.
For some, the holiness of the church is indisputable, sanctified by ritual and definition. In the same way, art becomes art as soon as we hang it in the museum. The proto-surrealist Marcel Duchamp understood this phenomenon when he exhibited his Fountain, a urinal signed R. Mutt, his Dada alter ego. What is a surreal cathedral? A surreal museum? It seems to me the entrance to these would be the ordinary counterpart’s exit. The surrealists have no use for a sanctified church. The desecrated church is of greater value to them than the cathedral. The sanctified toilet.
Surrealism, like an alter ego, seems an attempt to create an escape route. But one cannot escape from reality into fantasy—reality accompanies you there, speaking always of practicality, reminding you of what is possible and what is impossible, until you find you have been nowhere at all. It is only by surpassing reality with a more absolute version that one finds the exit. This ordinary, base life, what you call real, is merely a shadow of something greater, something you may have only glimpsed in dreams. Breton tells us we can go there. You begin by wanting it. Ernst has been there. Carrington has been there. Guggenheim has been there too; you can see the proof here. She is in the painting. You are in the painting too. The journey begins.
The exhibition Imagine! 100 Years of International Surrealism will be at Fundación Mapfré Madrid, February 4 through May 11, 2025; the Hamburger Kunsthalle, June 12 through October 12, 2025; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, fall 2025 through spring 2026.
Eli Rarey is an independent filmmaker, performance artist, playwright, and poet. His feature film The Famous Joe Project premiered at Outfest in 2012 and is currently available on streaming platforms. His play Seagull: True Story opens in May at La Mama in New York City. Rarey was a founding member of Science Project performance collective. His films are available at www.elirarey.com.