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Lot Essay
This collage featured at the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries in June 1936, bearing no.144.
One of Jennings's surrealist strategies in his collages is to create a double-focus vision so that, by telescoping the two distant realities, the mind will create a deeper reality of symbolic or meta-physical meanings. Here, the clash, and the resulting interaction, of the two images, one, a flower garden bathed in summery warmth, the other a cast-iron fire-screen suggesting wintery cold, obviously reveal multiple layers of contrasts and tensions: outside and inside, bright and dark colours, lightness and heaviness, organic and inorganic, vegetal and mineral, nature and culture. Eventually, the vast openness of the garden and its profusion of colours which may evoke Paradise, strongly contrast with the sinister-looking fire-screen whose two folding doors are like two monstrous arms expecting someone or something to close upon like the mouth of Hell. The title does encapsulate this crucial duality.
Altogether, approximately 23,000 visitors attended the International Surrealist Exhibition. Included in the exhibition there were 360 collages, paintings and sculptures, 30 African and Oceanian objects, two walking sticks and several objets trouvés. Sixty-nine artists, representing fourteen nationalities, were on show, 27 of them British.
One of Jennings's surrealist strategies in his collages is to create a double-focus vision so that, by telescoping the two distant realities, the mind will create a deeper reality of symbolic or meta-physical meanings. Here, the clash, and the resulting interaction, of the two images, one, a flower garden bathed in summery warmth, the other a cast-iron fire-screen suggesting wintery cold, obviously reveal multiple layers of contrasts and tensions: outside and inside, bright and dark colours, lightness and heaviness, organic and inorganic, vegetal and mineral, nature and culture. Eventually, the vast openness of the garden and its profusion of colours which may evoke Paradise, strongly contrast with the sinister-looking fire-screen whose two folding doors are like two monstrous arms expecting someone or something to close upon like the mouth of Hell. The title does encapsulate this crucial duality.
Altogether, approximately 23,000 visitors attended the International Surrealist Exhibition. Included in the exhibition there were 360 collages, paintings and sculptures, 30 African and Oceanian objects, two walking sticks and several objets trouvés. Sixty-nine artists, representing fourteen nationalities, were on show, 27 of them British.