The Brooklyn Rail

Surrealism was the art movement that most attracted dilettantes. With less of a premium on the technical quality of painting, and more of an interest in sign systems and constructions and illustrations, amateur artists with a literary bent and an active imagination could find some traction around the more accomplished practitioners. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s impressive and expansive Surrealism Beyond Borders show in 2021–2022 revealed, there were many talented adherents who usefully propelled the movement after its Parisian beginnings in the 1920s and the work of heavy hitters such as Picasso, Miró, Dalí, Breton, Maar, Masson, Man Ray. (It was enlightening to see competent and revolutionary Surrealists banging away at their ids and superegos and the British Empire in Cairo in the 1940s!) But on the other hand, extensive displays often do not serve artists such as Meret Oppenheim, whose bloated show at MoMA in 2022–2023 was fascinating in terms of her history, but less engaging visually in eliciting wonder at much beyond that furry teacup, saucer, and spoon.

Stanislao Lepri falls into the latter camp. And the present show at C L E A R I N G, with ten oils and two drawings, gives a sufficient sample of his aesthetic aims. Biographical information is spotty. Born in Rome in 1905, he was descended from some level of what is referred to as the “black nobility,” the late-nineteenth-century equivalent to the Guelphs, who supported the Papacy against the unification of the Kingdom of Italy. Lepri nonetheless went into public service, and flipping the Peter Paul Rubens script, who was trained as artist before becoming a notable diplomat, Lepri was working as the Italian consul to Monaco during World War II when he met the Argentine-Italian Surrealist untrained painter Leonor Fini (1907–96) in his thirties. He moved to Paris with her permanently in 1946, by which time he had declared himself an artist and through the late 1970s exhibited widely in Europe while also designing sets and costumes for ballet and theater productions. His last exhibition in New York was in 1970, until Tommaso Calabro showed a number of his works at the Independent in 2022.

If Lepri’s surfaces and employment of paint do not necessarily make one want to sing, there are a few themes and designs that prove striking. In the main, his career appears to be a reaction to Italian art—a working through of the Renaissance and then an embrace of Mannerism, a movement low in reputation in the mid-twentieth century but in tune with Surrealist weirdness. An early work such as the low and wide Figure e risciò [Figures and Rickshaws] (1950s) includes four spectral figures in a frieze who seem drafted from the marginalia of a murky Parmigianino picture. They stand against a crepuscular pseudo-Medieval town that has a marked Giorgionesque glow. The leftmost character has a skull-like face and enlarged teeth, and it is hard not to see this as a response to the war and the ascendant nuclear age. In the most striking work here, the 40-inch high Le Créateur des anges [The Creator of Angels] (1969), a bald, small-headed but attenuated-bodied man in a cardinal-red long coat and stockings faces left in a desiccated landscape and produces eleven winged male and female angels from the inner reaches of his vestments. Some flit towards the dim light of the sun in the upper left corner. Flailing, one settles to the ground.

Angels face similar uncertainties in two ink drawings. In Sans titre (Le Diable) (1970s), nicely executed with fuzzy ink cross hatching, the Devil, shown standing and seen from the rear, his burly tail visible, holds three bodiless angels or seraphs by the wings like chickens. They squirm, shed feathers, and mouths agape, look concerned. In Diavolo ed angelo (1952) a delicately drawn female devil, kneeling on her left knee, her leafy epiderma peeling and revealing a skeletal armature, embraces the figura serpentinata form of an ephebic angel straight out of Bronzino, whose blissful grin belies a cruel fate. Lepri’s drawings are his strong suit, especially those of his apparent spirit animal—the rhinoceros—and numerous depictions of cats. More would have been welcome here.

Surrealism proper comes out in paintings such as Tour de force (1965), a combination Tower of Babel, tiered wedding cake, and cheerleader pyramid, constructed of seven levels of hollow-eyed male nudes holding at the top of this human ziggurat the Three Graces, each with an apple. The background is a Frederic Edwin Church sunset sky. Lepidoptères pirates (1972) is a cross between Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) in its industrial wasteland of a setting with a five-stacked factory belching smoke into the sky in the distance and the female/nature complexities of Wyeth’s Christina’s World (1948). Throughout are post-war horror film giant butterflies, the pirates of the title, who swoop down to grab the women’s naked babies with their taloned legs and, like the Jovian eagle abducting Ganymede, drag them bleeding into the air. At the left, babushka-wearing women grasping their children flee like in scenes of the Massacre of the Innocents. It is silly and somehow striking in equal measure, if clumsily painted.

The eponymous inspiration for the show is Haute école (1975), a portrait-format oil of a bucking white horse frightened by a small mammal (some kind of weasel or stoat) in a rocky landscape, the arid ground cracked and fissured like the surface of an Old Master painting. At the right and under the horse’s agitated tail is a naked child with penis, full breasts, and too mature a face, who steams forward in space, right arm outraised, as if to help. The frightened horse recalls Stubbs’s many reworkings of the classical sculpture of a lion attacking a horse from the Capitoline Museums. But the title also refers to horsemanship and dressage, usually performed without hermaphroditic children and Eurasian mustelidae. Surrealism went there when no one else did: the psychology adding up is not really the point. The willfully strange predominates, and Lepri added a healthy sense of Catholic art-tinged humor. Whether this amounts to post-war anguish, ironic disillusionment, or emanations of eternal silence, as some writers have loftily claimed, Lepri’s reflective figuration in the face of war and the rise of abstraction is worth consideration.