Rêve d'Alice, 1945
Dream of Alice
Two dream-paintings, 1945 & 1958, by Clovis Trouille
The Surrealists saw Clovis Trouille as one of their own--André Breton called him "the grand master of anything goes." He painted entirely for his own pleasure, utterly rejecting commercialism. Only a handful of his paintings and collages are labeled dreams; it's ambiguous what he means here by "of Alice" (d'Alice); is he merely inspired by Alice's fictional dream in Through the Looking-Glass... or did he himself dream of Alice? Alice, her cat, the looking-glass and the boat are all straight from the book; but that tall, skullfaced guide? The mysterious ruins? The groping trees, the psychedelic waterlilies, the highwire act? Not so much! I think we're looking at a dream of Trouille's provoked by Lewis Carroll's book.
The first painting, Dream of Alice in an Armchair, shows the opening scene of Through the Looking-Glass, but in the mirrorworld are no talking chessmen or flowers--only night, ruins, a tree with clutching hands. And instead of the Red Queen, her guide is... Death? But with a vaginal outline, flowers for pubic hair, and a skull for a clit!
The second painting, Dream of Alice in a boat, refers to the rowboat scene in Chapter 5 of Through the Looking-Glass. But instead of the book's gentle White Queen (in the form of a knitting sheep) as a befuddled guide, we again get Death, now playing gondolier. The carnie on the wire, the kiteflier, the donkey-rider in the shadows... none of them are in the books. And unlike the fields and streams in Looking-Glass, we're on a lake or sound, and the perspective's not a flat chessboard, nor convex like the waking Earth; it's concave. The ruined tower looms over us, yet we look down on the mid-distant castle, and the water and hills beyond seem to be from an even higher angle. As if we're inside a hollow Earth. Pellucidar!
The Alice books have plenty of darkness in their dream-narratives, but these paintings strike me as twentieth-century dreams--by a man who's seen war and death. Who values, perhaps, momentary joys more for that.
WEEKS LATER
Interlibrary loan sent me Clovis Trouille, 1972, with comments by Raymond Charmet and Trouille himself on some of his paintings. He reveals these two are deeply personal: "I was inspired for the title by my daughter, who was called Alice." She liked Lewis Carroll and the fairytales of Perrault. A third painting commemorating her, Le brame, calls her "a girl who was lost at age 12 years." So the "Dream of Alice" refers both to the dream-adventures of Lewis Carroll's Alice and a memorial to his own daughter's unrealized dreams--and perhaps his own dreams of her, years after her death.
SOURCES: Surrealism.website, Wikiart and various auction houses (for higher-res images), plus Clovis Trouille, Paris 1972, Editions Filipacchi, pp 40-49.
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