When the Prince arrives at the enchanted castle, in ‘La Belle au Bois Dormant’, the famous story by Charles Perrault (first published in 1697), he finds the court arrested in time; the scene is like a tableau vivant; petrified, he sees ‘death’ everywhere, in figures that should be moving, frozen in their daily tasks. Centuries later, (to quote André Breton) the Surrealists became enamoured of the ‘reciprocal relationship that joins an object in movement to the same object in repose’ (Breton, 1978: 39).
The body of work presented in this paper constitutes an imposition of one image of dialectical stillness on the other, the surrealist ‘convulsive beauty’ on the ‘patient’ La Belle au Bois Dormant. It consists of a series of painted ‘illuminations’ of Perrault’s tale, derived from magazine pages, cut up and reassembled to make fractured ‘living pictures.’
This hybrid method evolved in response to a technique of Surrealist collage; the use of mass-printed media to generate disturbing compositions; combined with translucent paint to evoke an atmosphere of luminosity and delicate precision (hallmarks of fin de siècle depictions of fairy tales, that shaped the culture industry’s perception of this form).
In this paper I locate these formal tropes (the sharp cut and the glowing stain) as aspects of the crisis of enlightenment, foreshadowed in Perrault’s murderous fairy tale, and recurring in Surrealist art. By extrapolating these methods, I seek to materialise the formal and ideological conditions under which fairy tales are both amenable to and resistant of Surrealism.