Mutual Congratulations

Details

John Banting (1902-1972)
Mutual Congratulations
oil on canvas
40 x 30 in. (101.6 x 76.2 cm.)
Painted circa 1937.

Literature

London Bulletin, The Surrealist Group, October 1938, illustrated. Exhibition catalogue, I Surrealisti, Milan, Palazzo Reale, May - September 1989, p. 456, illustrated.
Exhibition catalogue, Anxious Visions - Surrealist Art, Berkeley, University of California Art Museum, 1990, p. 77, pl. 92, illustrated.

Exhibited

Milan, Palazzo Reale, I Surrealisti, May - September 1989, not numbered.
Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, Die Surrealisten, November 1989 - February 1990, not numbered.
Berkeley, University of California Art Museum, Anxious Visions - Surrealist Art, October 1990 - December 1991, as 'Mutual Friends', not numbered.

Special notice

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Lot Essay

In the present work the two figures are skeletons reduced to their skull and jaws, one vaguely masculine, the other vaguely feminine. They are engaged in a polite, if not obsequious, conversation which, even if it says something, is no more meaningful than the two empty forms themselves. Man as a social animal has lost his humanity and identity and is as dead as the plaster column on which the left hand mandible is posed. 'The rich kill time, and the poor are killed by it', Banting wrote in the June 1940 issue of London Bulletin, the Surrealist magazine. Similar drawings illustrate his Blue Book of Conversation (1946), a scathing, morbid satire of high society mores. Banting was the only British Surrealist who remained faithful to his earlier commitment to Stalinist communism.

M.R.

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