| Surrealism USA | |
| A Special Exhibition Review by Stan Parchin |
About
the show:
Surrealism is in full bloom this Spring 2005 with three major special exhibitions on
the East Coast. Surrealism USA, a real feast for the eyes in content as well as design, is the National Academy Museum's
monographic exploration of the American Surrealist movement, an often neglected
subject, from 1930 to 1950. The last show on this topic was in 1977. The current
one will be on view in New York until May 8, 2005. After its presentation in
Manhattan, Surrealism USA's only other scheduled stop is the Phoenix Art
Museum in Arizona from June 5 to September 25, 2005.
The exhibition features more than 120 paintings, sculptures and works on paper
borrowed from public and private collections here and abroad. Together they
describe the history and development of American Surrealism and its enduring
artistic legacy. Some of the artists represented may be unfamiliar to the
viewer. But the psychologically penetrating works of Americans such as Kay Sage
and Joseph Cornell are comfortably juxtaposed with those by their equally
prodigious European counterparts. Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst (the subjects of
this year's two other Surrealist retrospectives), amongst others, painted in the
United States while in exile and are represented here, too.
The show is arranged chronologically into five thematic sections. The museum's
elevator opens up into a narrow, fourth-floor hallway whose silver mylar wall correctly reflects the introductory text to the show
purposely printed backwards on the opposite wall. Painted piercing eyeballs in
the hallway look menacingly in the direction of the first gallery. Another
ingenious innovation of the show's design, with a decidedly Surrealist touch, is
the use of severed mannequin parts to direct the visitor through the show's five
galleries on two floors.
The first room documents Surrealism's arrival in the United States in the 1930s.
There a descriptive wall label is cleverly held by two mannequin hands attached
to but seemingly protruding through the wall. Works in this room, particularly
those from the second half of the 1930s, incorporate biomorphic forms and
optical illusions characteristic of the oeuvre of Salvador Dalí (1904-1989).
Double imagery and limp shapes attest to his growing influence on a select group
of American artists who came to be known as the Social Surrealists. They
employed Surrealist "art as a weapon" (their slogan), with its
fantastic imagery and illusionistic techniques, to broadcast visually their
intellectual response to the Great Depression and widespread unemployment, their
fear of the spread of fascism and their disdain for capitalism.
O. Louis Guglielmi (1906-1956)
Mental Geography, 1938
Oil on masonite
Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) expressed his horror of the slaughter of defenseless
civilians during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) with his monumental
Guernica (1937). The Social Surrealists here had similar political
anxieties, eloquently expressed in Mental Geography (1938) by O. Louis
Guglielmi (1906-1956). This oil on masonite painting is an apocalyptic vision of
the Brooklyn Bridge after an imaginary air raid bombing. The bridge's twisted
cables, entangling the remnants of a suit of medieval armor, mimic Dalí's
melting watches in his The Persistence of Memory (1931). And an
unsuspecting woman, a working-class martyr to the capitalist cause, astride a
twisted metal beam and transfixed by the mutilated American landmark, is pierced
from behind by two bombs.
The show's second room explores works by a group of California artists in the
1930s who called themselves Post-Surrealists. While the European Surrealists
favored unusual arrangements of objects in their compositions to examine the
irrational, the Post-Surrealists conceived cohesive programmes for the symbols in their paintings to explore
ideas such as aesthetics, love and sexuality. With California not yet
established as an art capital, its relative isolation from New York and the
overwhelming presence of its burgeoning movie industry with its optical
advancements, Los Angeles proved to be fertile artistic ground for the
Post-Surrealists. They exhibited their works as a group from roughly 1934 to
1939.
Reuben Kadish (1913-1992)
Untitled (Dr. Entozoan), ca. 1935
Oil and mixed media on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Among the West Coast masters was Reuben Kadish (1913-1992). Kadish moved beyond
the mysterious placement of objects in stark architectural settings, pioneered
by European Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) to convey deep
metaphysical ideas. Kadish's works, like those of his California contemporaries,
transcended the deliberate placement of symbols espoused by the Italian
Renaissance masters through the use of psychological introspection. In
Untitled (Dr. Entozoan) (ca. 1935), an oil and mixed media on canvas
composition, the artist explores the process of art-making. An eyeball flying
through a darkened sky is cross-sectioned to reveal the inverted diagrammatic sketch
of a beggar. It faces a pedestal on which rests an amputated lower torso
supported by a crutch. Above the bowl of fruit seated on the torso's waistline
are two floating hands holding an abstract drawing of a face (adapted from the
sketch of a parasite). The portrait includes a partially colored illustration of
the human digestive system. Beneath the eyeball is an office set in a stage
wherein the shadowy figure of Dr. Entozoan is experimenting, perhaps preparing
to cure the beggar patient. In keeping with the Post-Surrealist canon, all of
the images in Kadish's work are indisputably linked in a systematic arrangement.
Surrealism USA continues with a gallery devoted to the works of the
European Surrealists created while in their American exile. Among the highlights
in this room is Salvador Dalí's Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood (1941). This
oil on canvas painting features a naked female torso, face obscured and floating
effortlessly in clouds. Her skeletal left hand squeezes her left breast, an
obvious sexual reference but perhaps also a modern memento mori
(pictorial reminder of her own mortality). To her right and in smaller scale is
a centaur, known for its unbridled sexuality, holding a staff, possibly an overt
phallic symbol. It was during this period in the 1940s that the European and
American Surrealists cross-fertilized each other intellectually through the
exchange of their ideas and imagery.
The exhibition's fourth gallery one floor below explores the American
Surrealists' experimentation with automatism (painting or drawing with a
freer hand and minimal control of reason so that the artist could release his or
her own creative unconscious). The viewer can see the lyrically abstract canvas One
Year the Milkweed (1944) by Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), a leading member of
the Abstract Expressionist movement in America but also classified as a
Surrealist. It's complemented by Composition with Pouring II (1943) by
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), another proponent of Abstract Expressionism
influenced by American Surrealism. This same room houses Fist (1946) by
Enrico Donati (b. 1909). The bronze sculpture of a clenched right fist has the
power of any similar sculpture by French master Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), but
it holds two rather disconcerting glass eyeballs.
Kay Sage (1898-1963)
I Saw Three Cities, 1944
Oil on canvas
Princeton University Art Museum,
Gift of the Estate of Kay Sage Tanguy
One work not to be missed is I Saw Three Cities (1944) by Kay Sage
(1898-1963). Among the most abstract of the American Surrealists, her
uninhabited imaginary landscape is populated by crisp and clearly delineated
geometric forms. The shapes with their muted tonal qualities are a perfect
contrast to the righthand vertical beam almost completely covered by a flowing
white drape. The painting exudes a strange kind of serenity, peaceful and
desolate at the same time.
The show concludes with a room devoted to Surrealism in America after World War
II. The middle of the gallery has an oversized vitrine containing interesting
archival materials. String is unobtrusively stretched from various points across
the room in an homage to the installation of the First Papers of Surrealism show
by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1942.
When making your tour of Surrealist special exhibitions this season, make sure
that Surrealism USA is on your itinerary. The National Academy Museum's comprehensive look at this revolutionary art movement's
origins, influences and heritage makes for an enlightening and enjoyable
experience.
Special thanks to Hilda O'Connell-Harris, MFA, distinguished painter, art
historian, instructor of Fine Arts at Regis High School and professor of Art
History at Marymount Manhattan College, for the archival information on Reuben
Kadish that she provided to the writer.
About the catalogue:
Dervaux, Isabelle, et al. Surrealism USA (exh. cat.).
New York and Germany: National Academy Museum and Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005.
Highly readable and accessible to the generalist as well as the scholar, Dr.
Dervaux's 192-page hardcover catalogue, with color and black & white
illustrations, should be required reading for anybody seriously interested in
the history of Modern Art and Surrealism.
For further reading:
Dearinger, David B. The Archer M. Huntington Townhouse.
New York: National Academy Museum, 2002.
An excellent, concise and affordable introduction to the National Academy
Museum.
Zafran, Eric and Paul Paret. Surrealism & Modernism: From the Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (exh. cat.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
The National Academy Museum is located at 1083 Fifth Avenue (between East 89
Street and East 90 Street), New York, NY 10128 (website: www.nationalacademy.org; tel.
no.: 212-369-4880). It's open Wednesday and Thursday from 12:00 Noon to 5:00 PM
and Friday through Sunday from 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM (closed on public holidays).
Adult admission to the museum is $10.00 plus a $2.00 surcharge for the
exhibition. Admission for seniors and students is $6.00 plus a $1.00 surcharge
for the show. Docent-led public tours are available every Friday afternoon at
2:00 PM for a separate fee.
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From
your Guide: Stan Parchin, Senior Correspondent for Museum/Special Exhibitions,
is a specialist in ancient, late-medieval and Renaissance art and history. His
interests include: the art and culture of Old and New Kingdom Egypt; the Italian
and Northern Renaissances; Church history; and witchcraft, heresy and social
dissent in late-medieval and early Modern Europe.
