The press trip that burst my art world bubble

“It’s our national dish – I’m not a picky eater, I’m a patriot” I explain to friends, trying to justify the chicken tikka masala I choose every time we order Indian food. I am fooling no one: I am a picky eater. So it was out of character to find myself blindfolded, being hand-fed a mystery combination of haute cuisine in the Loire Valley, having eaten a dinner the previous night which included “a whisper” in its ingredients list.

I had been invited by General Assembly gallery and Freudian Bites (an intimate dinner club run by independent curator Huma Kabakci) on a Surrealist-themed, three-day trip to rural France, as part of their Patrons and Collectors weekend. I am neither, so was invited on a ticket generously gifted by a patron. The guests were put up in hotels in the ludicrously picturesque village of Azay-le-Rideau, and my room at the L’Auberge Radieuse was so beautiful and art-filled that I couldn’t tell what bits of furniture I could touch, so kept everything in my bag just in case.

The info pack sent to us beforehand explained that for their first collaboration, Freudian Bites and General Assembly were centring this trip around Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, the Surrealist power couple whose home lies just a few miles away from Azay, near Huismes. The trip coincided with the second half of General Assembly’s summer residency, based in the palatial home of gallery founder Melanie Ashton, hosting four artists, Kathryn Armitage, Laura Grinberga, Hélène Pavlopoulou, and Ranny MacDonald.

I’ll be honest, I expected to find this trip tricky – was I diving into the part of the art world that is among its worst: a pay-to-play dreamworld where the canapés are delicious, but its soul is rotten because it lacks the diversity of normal lived experiences? This article, I knew, would be a good place for me to wrangle with these feelings.

How truly Surrealist was this trip going to be, given that I had been told the eye-watering price of the gifted ticket ahead of time, and the itinerary was centred on luxurious meals?

But that’s how many of the Surrealists lived their lives, in a bubble of privilege. This may be a more accurate dive into Surrealism than I had thought. It was Frida Kahlo who described it best, sharing her vitriol about the group people so desperately wanted to categorise her in, explaining that “these people make me want to vomit” who “sit in the cafés for hours warming their precious asses” talking “endlessly about ‘culture’, ‘art’, and ‘revolution’”. “Let them eat shit.” Was I just in for a good ass-warming?

We arrived the first night at Max Ernst’s house, meeting the artists of the residency as well as a small group of Ashton’s local network. Kabakci kicked off the evening expertly with a walk around the neighbourhood, giving us an insight into Ernst and Tanning’s life together here in rural France. We were told about the other houses in the region in which major 19th and 20th century artists lived and summered, from Auguste Rodin to Alexander Calder. One member of our group chimed in that Max Ernst also used to live in her Parisian flat. God, that guy got around (and not just among the female Surrealists). “No one has lived in my house,” I muttered sarcastically.

The weekend was catered by local chef Miyako Ueno, creating a menu designed in collaboration with Kabakci. Every single thing was delicious, with attention paid to curating the food to Surrealist themes. There was one particularly good moment where guests were invited to eat cooked chicken from a large bird cage, in a nice nod to the abject.

I found it hard to keep Ernst at the forefront of my mind while I wandered about his garden drinking local organic wine. I think I always expect the homes of historical figures to be like the Black Country Living Museum, so maybe I had hoped there would be costumed roleplayers drinking pretend absinthe and talking about dreams where they want to fuck their mums. What struck me, despite the grandness of the house and grounds, was how normal it was. Of course, it was huge and gorgeous, but it was – fundamentally – just a house. Ernst was just a guy. Sure, a guy who created some absolute artistic bangers, but for the majority of his lived experience, he was just a guy.

The same cannot be said, however, for the brunch venue the next morning, when we gathered at the Château de l’Islette, having met the owner the previous night, whose family moves out of the *literal castle* in the summer to a smaller property on the river so the grounds can be opened to the paying public. It was the opposite of the previous night: I couldn’t stop thinking about how this was someone’s home.

The brunch, as with the apéro dinner the night before, was aesthetically beautiful and just as delicious, and the four artist residents were joyous company. We sat for a relaxing sound bath played by Kabakci on her crystal bowls before doing a workshop on automatic writing, a method used by the Surrealists to unlock parts of their unconscious mind during the creative process. For three, then five, then ten minute sessions, we wrote without pausing, allowed to draw inspiration from wherever we liked. As soon as we finished I couldn’t really remember what I had written, other than that at some point I ended up writing about canals (you can take the girl out of the West Midlands…) I really enjoyed this, and thought “I wish I were the sort of person who woke up and did this every morning”, knowing full well I will never be that person. Some members of the group shared their writing, which was lovely, but felt quite intimate, like they were showing me their pants.

That evening we met at Ashton’s home and were taken through the house and grounds to see each of the four resident artists’ projects, with personal highlights being Armitage’s painting of a reimagined Baroque banquet starring a set of particularly hypnotic Baroque knees, and Grinberga’s 38-foot veil strung up in the woodlands. We sat down in the garden for the weekend-crowning meal, themed around the four seasons (a key element in Ernst’s practice). We started – as all Freudian Bites events do – with a “bite” to foreshadow the rest of the evening – rolled grilled aubergine filled with salsa verde. Soon we were cycling through courses: ‘Wind’ – “fried rice paper embracing local farm vegetables” inspired by Grinberga’s ethereal work, ‘Earth’ – “pasta sheets with mushroom sauce”, based on Pavlopoulou’s practice that is deeply attuned to nature and what the artist calls the “aura of the land”, ‘Fire’ – a “tempura of summer vegetables with yuzu pepper” referencing the ‘heat of the moment’ captured in Armitage’s dramatic tableaus, and ‘Water’ – “cold noodles with coconut broth and soft egg”, a nod to Ernst’s 1962 painting Le Jardin de la France. I may not eat that nicely again for as long as I live.

As we strolled the grounds, I couldn’t silence the part of my brain that asked “How is this fair?” How am I in rural France enjoying an eight-course dinner, spending the day strolling through châteaus? How is this anyone’s life full time? In the world in which we live, how is this fair? The answer, of course, is that it isn’t.

But, if you are lucky enough to have this lifestyle, what you should be doing is sharing it. And that was exactly what we witnessed at the General Assembly residency. The opportunity for artists – selected through an open call rather than by private invitation – was clearly appreciated by the residents, who moved through Ashton’s home with a lightness that could only be achieved by three weeks in nature, away from the pressures of everyday life.

Historically, artists have rarely been able to achieve what we celebrate as humanity-defining artworks without the backing of patrons willing to share their spaces and wallets. Even Kabakci typically hosts Freudian Bites in her own front room. This weekend was grounded in generosity.

I came on this trip with a chip on my shoulder (something which wouldn’t have been out of place on the Surrealist menu). The experience reminded me that the artists we now venerate were, for almost the entirety of their lives, just doing the things that everyone else did – eating, tying their shoelaces, shagging each other. When we misremember these historical figures as fundamentally otherworldly, in a state of perpetual genius constantly creating mind-blowing art and only speaking in motivational postcard-worthy aphorisms, we do a disservice to the living artists around us, undervaluing them unless they present as a 24-hour superstar. The artists in Ashton’s attic were creating beautiful work, but they were also making cafetieres.

The same is true for artistic patrons. It is easy to dismiss their wealth as some kind of moral failing, that the art world is too full of privileged people with ballroomed houses (it is, but that needs to be addressed with opportunities from the bottom up). But they, too, are also just people, and without them, a lot of art wouldn’t happen. Thanks to the General Assembly residency, some genuinely exciting work was being developed in the Loire Valley, and a cohort of early-career artists were getting an all-too-rare opportunity to prioritise nothing but creating.

People have lived in my house, and they’re no less important than the Surrealists.