Surrealism To Die For

By Mark Nelson, Sarah Bayliss, Jonathan P. Eburne
reviewed by Peter Plagens

I was just a little kid, not quite six years old, when Elizabeth Short was murdered in Los Angeles. For years afterwards my parents, like many Angelenos, talked a lot about the case, the most famous of L.A.’s many unsolved homicides. Since then, I’ve read most of the newspaper and magazine articles offering speculative solutions to the crime, and bought most of the relevant books, both fiction and nonfiction—including, most recently, two very good books relating the murder to Surrealist art.

Short was a 22-year-old lost soul with a thing for men in uniform. She’d come to California from Massachusetts looking for a career in the movies or modeling or something. Pretty but not terribly bright, she was always nearly broke and depended a good deal on what Blanche DuBois famously called “the kindness of strangers.” People around a soda fountain in Long Beach that Short frequented dubbed her the Black Dahlia after the color of her clothes and a then-current movie titled The Blue Dahlia. On Jan. 15, 1947, her nude body was discovered in a vacant lot on Norton Avenue between Coliseum and 39th streets in the south central part of the city.

According to Exquisite Corpse authors Mark Nelson (a graphic designer who works with museums) and Sarah Bayliss (an art journalist), police reporters at the scene said the victim looked like a “disassembled mannequin or discarded marionette.”

The murderer had manipulated the young woman’s dead body in disturbing and extraordinary ways. He had cleanly cut her in two at the waist, yet her organs remained almost wholly contained in the two halves of her corpse. Her arms were laid out in a squared-off position above her head. The right breast was missing, and a small geometric section of flesh had been removed from the side of her left breast. The top part of her body lay above and to the left of the lower portion, calling attention to the fact that the woman had been cut in two.

A rectangular shape had been carved in her left thigh. There was a deep, vertical slash in her lower abdomen, similar in placement to a professional hysterectomy incision, and there were lacerations on her limbs. Long cuts had been inflicted on either side of her mouth, creating a grisly smile. The specific positioning of the body indicated that the victim had been not just dumped but purposely readied for discovery.                     

The corpse was clean and had been completely drained of blood. . . .

The writers go on to assert that “whoever killed Elizabeth Short . . . was someone familiar with the art and ideas of surrealism.” And they even raise “the question of whether the murder was a real-life version of a surrealist parlor game turned deadly. That game was called Exquisite Corpse.” The rules of the game—invented by a group of Surrealists including artist Yves Tanguy and poet Jacques Prévert in Paris in 1925—were that each participant would contribute by secret lot, and in order, one of the following: noun, adjective, verb, object and adjective. The first result, when translated into English, was: “The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.”

Subsequently, practically all the Surrealists made “exquisite corpse” drawings by folding a piece of paper into three or four horizontal strata and having each artist, going top to bottom, draw in one section without seeing the others. Tanguy, Man Ray, Max Morise and Joan Miró, for example, got together in 1926 to create what looks like an electric eel with a dartboard stomach and amoeba feet. In 1935, Tanguy teamed with Victor Brauner, André Breton and Jacques Hérold to concoct a woman fondling her own breasts while standing in a beaker that grows from the back of a dog-lion with a huge scrotum. Doubtless, thousands of such drawings were made. It’s not impossible to see the disposition of the Black Dahlia’s body as a real-life—or real-death—example of the game.

Surrealism certainly had roots in an imaginative obsession with torture and killing. First, there’s the Surrealists’ admiration for the Marquis de Sade and his hope of fomenting social revolt through sexual libertinage. (Although Sade advocated, and indulged in, sexual torture, he drew the line at murder and became an opponent of the death penalty.) In addition, there’s Europe’s appetite, from the late 18th to the mid-19th centuries, for the roman noir (translated in Jonathan P. Eburne’s Surrealism and the Art of Crime as the “novel of terror”), especially in France, home to the grisly horror plays of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignolin the first half of the 20th century. Many avant-garde artists believed that free imaginings, even at their most gruesome, would help render people unsuitable for social or commercial bondage. “The surrealist experiment, then, might be understood as the attempt to mobilize art to ‘suppress the exploitation of man by man’ by causing an insurrection within thought,” writes Eburne (a professor of comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University). But after you read about André Breton saying that “the simplest Surrealist act” would be to fire a pistol into a crowd of people, and find Eburne himself saying that “the crimes thematized or depicted in many surrealist works are thus metaphorical: dismembered corpses and tortured, violated forms,” his summation that the “path of surrealism through the twentieth century is littered with corpses” seems more on the mark.