The Secret Red Orchestra The Birthday

The Birthday

A brush with Surrealism

The inspiration for this piece is the painting above entitled The Birthday by Dorothea Tanning. Through Dorothea’s association with The Surrealists, she married one of the founder members of the movement, Max Ernst, in Arizona during 1946.
On a visit to the London Tate Modern a couple of years ago, I walked into one of the upper galleries and clapped my eyes on Max’s The Elephant Celebes. I got such a kick out of this having previously only seen the painting as a colour plate in my well-thumbed copy of Surrealism by Uwe M. Schneede. Not only that, but the Elephant shared a wall with a whole clutch of Rene Magritte masterpieces. – I thought all my birthday’s had arrived at once.

Thanks to Marilyn Monroe for her vocal collaboration on this. As Marilyn once said, “It’s all make believe isn’t it?”