Surrealism USA

PHOENIX, ARIZ.

:Surrealism, one of the Twentieth Century's most provocative and disturbing cultural manifestations, is today the subject of intense interest among artists, scholars and the general public. With its all-out attack on convention, morality, rationality, psychic repression and traditional means of visual representation, Surrealism continues to offer food for thought in the context of current attention to subjectivity, gender roles, and the status of art and its images.

"Surrealism USA" was organized by the National Academy Museum, led by senior curator Isabelle Dervaux, and was on view there earlier this year. It will be at the Phoenix Art Museum through September 25. The first exhibition devoted to American Surrealism in a quarter century, it features some 120 paintings, works on paper and sculptures created in this country between 1930 and 1950.

Displayed are works created by influential European émigrés in the United States during this period, notably Salvador Dali, Roberto Matta Echaurren, Max Ernst, André Masson and Yves Tanguy. Among the prominent Americans represented are Ivan Albright, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Arshile Gorky, Isamu Noguchi and David Smith. Works by Louise Bourgeois, Jackson Pollock, Man Ray, Kay Sage, Dorothea Tanning and John Wilde suggest links to contemporary artists.

As the show's organizers emphasize, while considerable scholarship has been devoted to European Surrealism, relatively little attention has been paid to its American counterpart. This exhibition takes advantage of recent research and newly discovered works to advance understanding of the Surrealist impulse on this side of the Atlantic.

To a large extent, Surrealism superseded the anarchic and irreverent Dada movements in France, Germany and Italy. Appalled by the senseless slaughter of World War I and disenchanted with Western culture, Dadaist writers and artists rebelled against artistic convention and sought to release new psychic energies based on instinct.

Dadaism had pretty well run its course by 1924 when French writer Andre Breton formulated the ideological platform of the Surrealists, calling for a new way of seeing. Surrealism went beyond simply trying to subvert the status quo, aiming to remake society and the world. Drawing heavily on Freudian theories, participants endeavored to stimulate the imagination, expand limits of awareness, and tap into dreams and fantasies.

Surrealism established a foothold in this country in the 1930s, when several New York galleries, such as Julien Levy's, started showing the work of European Surrealists. The larger public learned of the movement through major group exhibitions, notably the much-derided "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936.

In spite of adverse public reaction, Surrealistic touches became apparent in such traditional fields as American scene painting and social realism. After the outbreak of the Second World War, the presence in New York of European Surrealists in exile, particularly group leader Breton and the flamboyant Dali, gave the movement new vitality and great impact.

In this country, artists largely eschewed the rigid group organization that characterized the movement in France; on their own they experimented with all manner of Surrealistic vocabulary, eventually stimulating the development of Abstract Expressionism.

Needless to say, Surrealism attracted a diverse cast of characters, artists and writers alike, who produced a body of work that puzzled, shocked and stimulated critics and the public. Numerous works in this expansive and welcome exhibition document the creative extremes to which painters and sculptors went.

Cornell, who was one of the first Americans to create Surrealist works, is represented in the show by nine objects, ranging from enigmatic collages of the 1930s - in one, a kilted bagpiper serenades a cow as a uniformed maid lingers in the background - to the more familiar, yet puzzling, box constructions of the 1940s.

Controversy was stirred in 1934 when Peter Blume's "South of Scanton," 1931, a markedly illogical composition in which a coal mine, a row of houses and sailors jumping ship are strangely juxtaposed, won first prize at the prestigious Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. One outraged critic labeled it "pictorial gibberish"; it is now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dali's distorted, weird imagery and his histrionic behavior garnered much publicity during regular visits to New York in the 1930s. He came to represent Surrealism in the public mind several years before he emigrated when the war broke out. Two drawings and a vivid oil, "Honey is Sweeter Than Blood," 1941, loaned by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, suggest why the Spaniard caused such a stir. "American Surrealism," writes curator Dervaux in the exhibition catalog, "was dominated by Dali's influence."

Spanish-born Federic Castellon, described by Dervaux as "the most gifted of Dali's emulators in the United States," has two unforgettable paintings in the exhibition, "untitled (Horse)," circa 1938, and "The Return of the Prodigal," late 1930s. Each is a beautifully crafted, eerie image.

Surrealism had effects far away from New York. In the mid-1930s, a loosely organized group of West Coast artists calling themselves Post-Surrealists emphasized carefully composed, enigmatic works. Among them: Lorser Fitelson, Philip Guston and Helen Lundeberg.

An unexpected standout is Southwestern artist Alexander Hogue's large "Erosion No. 2 - Mother Earth Laid Bare," 1936, from the collection of the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa. In this canvas, a Dali-like female form animates the undulating contours of a drought stricken landscape.

Some Dali followers came to be known as Social Surrealists. They focused at first on socioeconomic issues at home before taking on the horrors of war.

Responding to fascist air raids and mounting civilian casualties in the Spanish Civil War, painter O. Louis Guglielmi envisioned the aftermath of a bombing of the Brooklyn Bridge in his graphic "Mental Geography," 1938. The imaginary attack on this recognizable American landmark, said the artist, left the bridge "by the process of mental geography a huge mass of stone, twisted girders and limp cables."

Two quite different émigrés, Gorky from Europe and Noguchi from Asia, teamed up to mark the onset of World War II with "Hitler Invades Poland," 1939, a striking mixed-media-on-paper work. The versatile Gorky later thinned his paint to depict puzzling biomorphic forms in "One Year the Milkweed," 1944, and "The Unattainable," 1945.

The leading Surrealist artistic couple, Sage, an American, and the French-born Tanguy, eventually settled in Woodbury, Conn., not far from Gorky. Tanguy, already an established Surrealist painter when he came to this country in 1939, continued to create images featuring assorted, strange objects juxtaposed against endless plains and skies, as in "Infinite Divisibility," 1942, and "Naked Water (L'eau nue)," 1942. The often overshadowed Sage more than holds her own in this show, especially in her powerful "I Saw Three Cities," 1944.

Dorothea Tanning, who is now 95, weighs in with three suitably enigmatic oil paintings created in the 1940s.

As National Academy Museum Director Annette Blaugrund notes in the forward to the catalog, "Surrealism still exerts a strong appeal today, more than fifty years after its heyday." Tracing its evolution in this country and showcasing a broad range of works by a diversity of artists, this exhibition confirms that judgment.

By encouraging a reevaluation of Surrealism's importance in Twentieth Century American art, this rewarding show demonstrates, as Dervaux observes, that "fundamental characteristics" of Surrealism remain "an enduring influence on the art of our time."

The lavishly illustrated, 192-page catalog was edited by Dervaux, with contributions by Michael Duncan, Robert Hobbs, Gerrit L. Lansing, Robert E. Lubar, Marshall N. Price and Scott Rothkopf. It is published by the National Academy in association with Hatje Cantz Publishers.

The Phoenix Art Museum is at 1625 North Central Avenue. For information, 602-257-1880 or www.phxart.org.