The Stillness of the Day

Maddox was a prolific artist, who was fully active as a surrealist from 1935 to 2003. Not surprisingly, he became incensed by the tendency of art historians to restrict the surrealist movement to a limited time period. Maddox's anger came to a head in 1978, when The Hayward Gallery mounted the major exhibition Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, which postulated that surrealism had ended in the late 1940s. To prove this wrong, Maddox organized a simultaneous protest exhibition aptly titled Surrealism Unlimited, which demonstrated that surrealism was a movement in full swing. In addition he employed a technique of deliberate mis-dating of some of his works, making them earlier or later than their date of production. His intention was to cock a snook at the art world intelligentsia. In Maddox's own words this was intended as 'a surrealist joke' to rebuff those who considered the date of a work more important than the work itself. There were two methods of mis-dating: 'primary', when the hoax dating would be made from the outset, or 'secondary' with an alteration to a pre-painted date, sometimes years after the work's completion. Like Passage de l'opéra (1940/1970) in the Tate collection and The Balcony (1946/1976) in the Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Stillness of the Day incorporates one of the 'primary' hoax datings. The dates of execution of all of Maddox's works will be established in a forthcoming catalogue raisonna©.

We are grateful to Silvano Levy for the above catalogue entry.