n his vast collection of over 500 artworks, German-born surrealist painter Wolfgang Lettl rarely misses the opportunity to depict the human body, although not in the form we are accustomed to seeing in real life – a severed hand or head, a punctured body, missing limbs and torsos, elongated legs. The human figure is an enduring source of fascination for the surrealists, as it was for artists in classical Greece, who idealised the beauty and athleticism of the human form, or artists in the Italian Renaissance, who became anatomical masters in their quest to produce a more lifelike portrayal of the human figure – even going as far, historians have noted : “Before dressing a man we first draw him nude, then we enfold him in draperies. So in painting the nude we place first his bones and muscles which we then cover with flesh so that it is not difficult to understand where each muscle is beneath.” Anatomical perfection, or the idealised and beautifully-proportioned nudes in Renaissance art, were not the goal of the surrealists, however. Rather, as Lettl, who became exposed to surrealism while working as a communications officer in occupied Paris from 1940 to 1943, puts it: “Surrealism attempts to retrieve images from the unconscious.” Adding, “They are not realistic images, but fantasies, strange, unreal, confusing, beyond our grasp.” Interestingly, the human body still features prominently in surrealist art, even if the bodies are often distorted or deformed in some way. French writer and poet André Breton, the leader of the surrealist poets and artists in Paris, defined the art movement in his (1924), as “pure psychic automation, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought”. During art-making, the artists suppress conscious control over the making process, as happens, for instance, in ‘automatic drawing’, which involves moving a hand freely across the paper.
