Date: Fri 13-Feb-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: SHANNO

Quick Words:

Surreal-Bruce-Museum

Full Text:

The Surrealist Vision: A Major Look At A Recognized Movement

(with cuts)

GREENWICH -- Through April 5, the Bruce Museum will be presenting its major

winter exhibition, "The Surrealist Vision: Europe and the Americas." Featuring

85 examples of Surrealist paintings, sculpture and photography, many of which

have rarely been shown in public, the exhibition examines one of the most

recognized art movements of the 20th Century.

Surrealism was officially born in Paris in 1924, with the publication of

Manifesto of Surrealism , by Andre Breton, a charismatic leader and

self-proclaimed "pope" of the movement. In his document, Breton outlined the

Surrealist vision: the search for a higher truth, which would resolve the two

philosophical states of dream and reality, seemingly so contradictory, "into a

kind of surreality, if one may so speak."

The Surrealists' broadly based philosophy reflects a ruptured, fast-changing

world, unstable and irrational. It has become one of the foundations of 20th

Century thought.

On view are important paintings by Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Joan Miro,

Paul Delvaux, Yves Tanguy, Roberto Echaurren Matta and Gordon Onslow Ford.

Masterpieces of Surrealist sculpture include Max Ernst's "The King Playing

with his Queen" (1933-34) and Hans Bellmer's "La Poupee" (1935).

World-class Surrealist photographers Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, Andre Kertesz,

Raoul Ubac and David Hare are represented in the exhibition. The show also

includes important women associated with the movement, such as Leonora

Carrington, Kay Sage, Leonora Fini, Jacqueline Lamba and Nunsch Eluard, whose

work remains relatively unknown.

"Surrealist issues and imagery [continue to] pervade our daily life, our

pop-culture media and advertising, from MTV to Vogue magazine to car

advertisements," says Nancy Hall-Duncan, Bruce Museum curator of art and

co-curator of "The Surrealist Vision: Europe and the America." "It is not only

art but all of 20th Century thought which has been profoundly influenced and

changed by Surrealism."

The first section of "The Surrealist Vision" focuses on the concept of chance,

one of the major themes of the movement. Chance ruled everything the

Surrealist did, from walking down the street to creating art. It was the

entire theoretical and technical rebellion underlying the movement.

The exhibition documents numerous "automatic" techniques developed by the

Surrealist artists, including frottage (the technique of creating a design by

rubbing, as with a pencil, over an object placed underneath paper), collage,

handprinting, the rayogram and others, all intended to give artists access to

the unconscious. It also shows the chance encounter of objects in the

illusionist paintings of such artists as Magritte and Dali.

A second section of the exhibition deals with rupture, fragmentation and

metamorphosis. At the beginning of the 20th Century, the developing fields of

science and psychiatry were aggressively challenging standard conceptions of

time, space, reason and relativity.

"The Surrealist Vision" investigates, through its images, how time could

suddenly expand or slow down; how objects could take on new dimensions of size

and scale relative to each other; and how the human body could be transformed:

melted, fragmented, disjointed, pulled and transmuted into vegetal or geologic

mutations.

The third section of the exhibition focuses on the American artists influenced

by European Surrealism. This area includes works by Jackson Pollock, William

Baziotes, Mark Rothko and others, who would form the New York School. It also

looks at the role Peggy Guggenheim played in bringing Surrealism to America,

and how automatic techniques influenced the young American painters in the

early 1940s.

The work of these painters has been characterized by co-curator Sam Hunter, an

internationally-known art historian, as "quite novel and exhilarating, hybrid

plastic forms of the early Forties."

"The Surrealist Vision" was drawn from major public and private collections as

well as galleries and private dealers specializing in the subject.

Participants include the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and

Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Meyer Gallery

in London, and the New Britain Museum of American Art.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Ms Hall-Duncan,

who has written Photographic Surrealism and pursued doctoral work in the field

of photography and Surrealism, and Mr Hunter.

The museum is at 1 Museum Drive in downtown Greenwich; telephone 869-0376.