Conroy

The Boy 1942		Farewell 1942

Maddox 

CONROY MADDOX, 1912-2005

 

Painter, essayist and collagist, Conroy Maddox made contact with the Parisian surrealists in 1937-38. Despite his protest against the inclusion of non-surrealist exhibitors in the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries in 1936, Maddox did join the English group in 1939. Since then, he has taken part in all of its activities and collaborated in its various publications, London Bulletin, Arson, Message from Nowhere and Free Unions Libres 1946, for which he designed the cover. Maddox’ pictorial creativity had unfolded mainly along two complementary, but very different axes. On the one hand, he has pursued investigations in automatism, in particular by way of ‘écrémage’, a process he invented combining the techniques of ‘décalcomania’ and scratching, producing semi-abstract landscapes in which weird wiry creatures pop up, reminiscent of Yves Tanguy’s work at the time. On the other hand, Maddox has tirelessly surveyed the eccentric quarters of an imaginary city where each street, each house and each park is the site for strange encounters and baroque conflicts. In this respect, one may say that Maddox’s paintings have added more than one enchanting page to the book of the ‘great surrealist promenades’, which go from Breton’s Nadja and L’amour fou to Aragon’s Paysage de Paris. Maddox possesses in the highest degree the art of arousing the genius of the place; it is probably he who, with the metaphysical stride of de Chirico and Magritte, has evoked the mystery of passages and arcades with the most lucidly critical spirit, without ever losing the sense of the marvellous.

Maddox organised the landmark exhibition Surrealism Unlimited 1960-1978, at the Camden Art Centre in London and participated in numerous other surrealist exhibitions in England and abroad, notably in London, Zwemmer Gallery, 1940, Paris, 1947, Exeter, 1967, London, 1971, Chicago, 1976 and Lyon, 1981.  

The Strange Country 1940

 

This sculpture was conceived by Maddox in 1940 after he spotted a mannequin which was about to be thrown out of a shop. He took it home and added various found objects - a plastic lobster, a painted bottle, netting and other elements - to transform it into the 'Cloak of Secrecy'. Maddox feels that his surrealist objects, such as this piece, discredit the world of reality as we perceive it. He has remarked that this piece 'took on the absurd quality of a dream with its lack of apparent reasonableness.'

Silvano Levy

Conroy Maddox discovered surrealism by chance in 1935 and spent the rest of his life exploring its potential through his paintings, collages, gouaches, photographs, objects and texts. From his early twenties he set out on a quest for `the marvellous liberating power of the imagination' which the surrealist movement promised. Inspired by artists such as Max Ernst and Oscar Dominguez, he rejected academic painting and began to produce works which expressed the surrealist spirit of rebellion. His creations not only challenged the conventional view of reality, but they also pushed pictorial expression to the disturbing margins of unconscious desire. In 1945 some of his collages, together with works and texts by other surrealists, were seized by Scotland Yard's Special Branch on suspicion of being dangerous to the war effort. Maddox is generally considered to be Britain's most committed, energetic, and enduring exponent of surrealism. This book traces his involvement in the surrealist movement over sixty years and examines the principal themes in his work.

 

Silvano Levy has published extensively on surrealism, with learned studies on René Magritte, E.L.T. Mesens and Paul Nougé. His research on the surrealist group in England produced a book and a film on Conroy Maddox, while a wider interest in the movement led to the publication of Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality and the subsequent Surrealism. Levy has curated national touring exhibitions of the work of Maddox and Morris, and published a major study on the latter entitled Desmond Morris: Naked Surrealism, which was followed by an enlarged re-edition entitled Desmond Morris: Naked Surrealism. Silvano Levy's research on Morris culminated in the catalogue raisonné of the artist's twentieth-century oeuvre. Dr. Levy is a senior lecturer at Keele University, England.

 

 

 

 

 Collages by Conroy Maddox ...2001

 

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