Surrealism has been practiced for more than 100 years on a global scale, outlasting numerous art trends embraced by art markets and critics. There are trends that had  staying power over decades past but faded, though immured in museum collections for the public benefit and in galleries as well as auction houses for investments. If antecedents of surrealism are considered, the time span for expressions in that art form is much longer. According to Amy Dempsey, the Museum of Modern Art included in its  1936 exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” 700 objects created by 157 artists from 1450 to 1936. This month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) housed in its   Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition hundreds of art works from 45 countries. Like the 1936 show, the current exhibition is international in scope. Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibits art from all continents where surrealist art could be located by the MET curators Stephanie D’Alessandro, Matthew Gale, and their associates. The MET exhibition will be held from October 11 – January 22, 2022 before leaving  for London’s Tate Modern.                                

Umi (The Sea) (1929) painting by Koga Marue who also coined the label Scientific Surrealism.

This massive overwhelming endeavor is thematically organized in eight galleries and offers related seminars and outdoor film screenings. The audience encounters surreal art in all possible media forms including painting, sculptures, film, photography, poetry, print, and exhibits well know works by Georgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Salvadori Dali, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. Attendees of the exhibit can also  discover illuminating surreal work by relatively unknown artists like Koga Marue from Japan and the Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer whose brief 1968 short film The Flat {BYT} can be viewed on YouTube. Reproduced below is Man Ray’s 1920 Enigma of Isidor Dukash, a sewing machine wrapped in black wool, a classic surrealist object with a status in art history that  Christo and Jeanne-Claude never reached with their small and monumental wrapping projects.

From Paris, surrealism spread to most European countries in the 1920’s with its DADA roots, but also to the Middle East, North and South America, and Japan. The decline of democracies and catastrophes from the beginning of the last century to the contemporary period, with its chaotic developments, led to the creative response by artists to the destructive times they lived in. Surrealism was never beholden to any political ideology. Many of the artists’ works condemned authoritarian and totalitarian governments and the violation of human rights. During the first decades of the twentieth century, their creations were hardly shaped by market considerations and art institutions.

Surrealists embraced the notion of disjuncture, going beyond linear reasoning and opposed  enlightenment based logic and rationalism. Surrealism requires established modes of thinking or the structured perception of reality to be overcome. Our customary ways of seeing are challenged to escape the cognitive cage immuring the individual. Modes of artistic productions and realistic presentations had to be abandoned and new ways of seeing introduced. This meant the transformation of traditional presentations in all art forms and the abandonment of assumed straight-line reality. Going beyond reality, the unconscious, and the power of dreams, had to be explored as pathways to reflection and truth. Surrealists seek to destruction ordinary boundaries, creating stochastic, startling, and disturbing modes of perception for the individual.

Claus Mueller New York

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