The Philadelphia Art Museum presents Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100

Originally a literary movement, Surrealism’s credo began with a value-based question: how should we perfectly live? The answer: in freedom! Surrealists believed it necessary to reestablish a childlike imagination, to be irrational. Freud’s writings, experimental poetry (automatic writing), and waking dream seances fortified these philosophies. Surrealists perceived their methodology as scientific, and their work as anarchic.

Waking Dream and Desire

Dreamworld curator Matthew Affron, with Danielle Cooke, assembled 180 works of art (in all media) by 70 artists. The exhibition’s first rooms, titled Waking Dream, provide an introduction, with experimental photographs, paintings, poetry books, and sculptures by various artists, including Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico. There are also examples of exquisite corpse (a collaborative practice of blind drawing). Projected onto a wall is Man Ray’s film Return to Reason (1923), a two-minute pastiche of rayographs with close-ups of light and shadow playing across a woman’s torso. It’s Kiki of Montparnasse, a celebrated model and chanteuse. Female muses were simultaneously objects of fear and desire; their bodies often depicted as fragmented, deformed, or dismembered.

For example, in the gallery titled Desire, Hans Bellmer’s unsettling photograph The Pregnant Doll (1936) shows anatomical parts assembled on the floor, Frankenstein-style. Works in this room emphasize Surrealism’s celebration of the irrational expressed through passionate love and the erotic. The display also includes artists who explored gender identity and non-heteronormative desire. The painting Leopard Boy (1935) by openly gay painter Pavel Tchelitchew portrays a male figure wearing only a red dance belt and gladiator sandals. Viewed from a low angle, he lounges in a chair, flesh marked by leopard spots. Nonbinary multimedia artist Claude Cahun’s 1927 gelatin silver print Self-Portrait (I am in training don’t kiss me) uses role play: they sport weightlifter attire, face playfully painted with pouting Kewpie lips and heart shapes.

Nature, war, and exiles

In the gallery titled Natural History, Surrealists evoke wonder by exploring nature. Plant life and nonhuman animals exist beyond reason, making them subjects for aesthetic exploration. Paul Klee’s Fish Magic (1925) is an endearing ichthyo-meditation. Alexander Calder’s Mobile (1934) gives childlike naivety with its bits of dangling colored glass.

A Premonition of War gallery finds artists who deployed symbolism to address the rise of fascism in the 1930s, depicting monsters. Portrayals of mythological creatures, such as the Minotaur and Chimeras, along with caricatures, express horror at the brutal political and military actions leading up to World War II. Don’t miss the case holding Picasso’s etchings Dream and Lie of Franco I and II (1937), satirizing Spain’s dictator, Francisco Franco.

An Exiles section surveys Surrealist artists who emigrated to Mexico and New York because of the German campaign, with the gallery walls divided geographically. On the Mexican side, two paintings by French-born poet Alice Rahon stand out: Self-Portrait and Autobiography (1948), which pictographically alludes to her journey as an artist, and The Valley of Mexico (1946), a quixotic landscape in oils with multi-colored sand, creating an inviting surface quality.

Healing and reunion

Touchingly, post-war Surrealism embraced shamanistic philosophies as a form of healing for the damaged world. A Magic Art section features sculptures, film, and paintings. On one side of the gallery, art that explores the occult, spirits, and magic; on the other, artworks included in an extensive 1947 Paris Surrealist exhibition. Brazilian artist Maria Martins’s large, mysterious sculpture made of bronze and wood, The Road; The Shadow; Too Long, Too Narrow (1946), is dynamically animated by complex shadows. Gallery notes mention how its original installation included a pipe to create a mock rain shower.

The final exhibition room focuses on Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, French painter/exiles who fled to Mexico to escape the Second World War. As creative soulmates, they shared theories about the feminine supernatural. Some of their paintings are presented in the manner of delicate gilded altarpieces; all their works feature women as otherworldly beings in ethereal spaces, conjuring up benevolent magic. Here is a rare opportunity to see so many of their works together.

An important exhibition

Although Surrealism is now technically a geriatric movement, it still manages to be the cool kid in the room, and it’s certainly relevant today. My two visits to Dreamworld deepened my understanding of Surrealism. This is a strong and important exhibition, offering the context that helps to place the movement’s significance in history. Having a frame of reference allows the audience to engage more thoughtfully with the work. There is no single style for Surrealist art (like Impressionism), so it sometimes challenges viewers as confusing or daunting; the artworks require slow, careful viewing.

Editor’s note: Before you go, did you know that BSR is celebrating 20 years at our Party with the Critics event on January 15? All are welcome! Get your tickets now.