Surrealism is no longer considered modern today | Leonora Carrington

Art in London didn’t seem quite modern enough and I began to want to study in Paris where the Surrealists were in full cry. Surrealism is no longer considered modern today and almost every village rectory and girl’s school have surrealist pictures hanging on their walls. Even Buckingham Palace has a large reproduction of Magritte’s famous slice of ham with an eye peering out. It hangs, I believe, in the throne room. Times do change indeed. The Royal Academy recently gave a retrospective expedition of Dada art and they decorated the gallery like a public lavatory. In my day people in London would have been shocked. Today the Lord Mayor opened the exhibition with a long speech about the twentieth-century masters and the Queen Mother hung a wreath of gladiola on a piece of sculpture called “Navel” by Hans Arp.

From Leonora Carrington’s 1976 novel The Hearing Trumpet.