The exhibition, ‘Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100,’ has been displayed across Europe this year, from the Pompidou Museum in Paris, to Brussels, Madrid, and Hamburg. Now, it is on view at its final stop and the only one in the United States: the Philadelphia Art Museum.
I went to the exhibition on Nov. 8, the day it first opened to the public. The gallery was packed. Visitors moved slowly through the space, stopping at each piece and responding to the famous surrealist paintings and artists with whispers of recognition.
Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, on display at the Philadelphia Art Museum from Nov. 8 to Feb 16., celebrates the 100th birthday of the art movement. Moving through the gallery, the visitor gets a chronological picture of the evolution of Surrealism. The final room is specific to the exhibition’s run at the PMA and features art from Surrealist artists who came to Mexico and New York City when fleeing Europe in response to World War II.
The movement started in Paris in 1924, and this is where the exhibition begins as well. From the very start, in André Breton’s ‘Manifesto of Surrealism,” the movement has been about tapping into the wild imagination all people are born with but tend to suppress as they grow older. Surrealism suggests that imagination is essential for expanding one’s consciousness, and therefore for freedom itself.
The section, titled ‘Waking Dream,’ begins with works from this early stage of Surrealism, many of them graphite or pen on paper sketches. The exhibition also includes a projection of the 1923 film ‘Return to Reason’ by artist Man Ray, which is a series of shots in black and white moving shapes and shadows.. Encountering these relics of early Surrealism, one sees how essential abstraction is to the point of the movement. From its very foundation, Surrealism was about breaking away from the expected.
In the second room of the ‘Waking Dream’ section, paintings by René Magritte (‘The Secret Double,’ ‘The Murderous Sky,’ and ‘The Six Elements’) are on the right-hand side, while Salvador Dalí is featured to the left. The exhibition also explains the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, in which players take turns drawing different body parts to collectively compose an absurd creature.
‘The Spectral Cow’ by Dalí shows a transparent body before a pink sunset and seems to depict the experience of simultaneously feeling embodied and elsewhere. The wall text explains that Dalí’s ‘First Day of Spring’ and ‘Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion,’ are inspired by psychoanalytic theory. In the former, Freud himself emerges on the right side of the painting, and a photo of the artist as a child is at the center. In the latter, Dalí was experimenting with a technique of painting based on paranoia, or irrational thoughts, and superimposes the figures of the woman, horse, and lion over one another until they become unrecognizable, overshadowed by a huge pillar in the background.
Dreamworld introduces us to the Surrealist interpretation of nature in the room entitled ‘Natural History.’ Surrealists found themselves turning away from the man-made world and looking for aspects of magic and wonder in the natural world. The paintings in this room show absurd landscapes as metaphors for the unconscious mind and mythical creatures or hybrid beasts, which similarly tended to represent the imaginative potential of human consciousness. ‘Surrealist Composition’ by Suzanne Van Damme depicts a train of hybrid creatures following one another, connected with bright lines like constellations. Max Ernst’s ‘Chimera’ is a triangular iteration of the beast with geometric wings, punched-out circles for eyes. The chimera is not only a hybrid of species, but a hybrid of color, shape and form.
The room, ‘Desire’ shows the Surrealist fascination with the female form. Artist George Hugnet made collages out of images of the female body. Hans Bellmer’s work centered around dolls as erotic figures. Dalí’s sculpture ‘Aphrodisiac Telephone,’ a phone with a lobster’s body, displaces desire, which is not literally depicted in the sculpture, and asks the viewer to imagine the desire elsewhere.
Dreamworld organizes the next room under the category ‘Premonition of War.’ Since Surrealism was popular from the 1920s to the 1950s, it was very intensely shaped by war in Europe. The paintings in this room are situated in political contexts and include Picasso’s satirical etchings ‘The Dream and Lie of Franco,’ as well as other pieces that literally reference political figures and regimes. Here too, hybrid beasts return to foretell the outbreak of war, in André Masson’s ‘Labyrinth,’ which depicts the body of the Minotaur as the labyrinth itself, and Picasso’s ‘Minotaurmancy,’ in which the monster represents Picasso’s alter ego, who stands at the border of civilization and barbarism.
War in Europe sent the Surrealists both to Mexico and New York City. In the ‘Exiles’ portion of the exhibition, the Philadelphia Art Museum adds their American reinterpretation of this celebration of the Surrealist movement. Visitors can see works by Wifredo Lam, Frida Kahlo, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. Just before the exit, the exhibition focuses on the friendship between the artists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, two women whose paintings centered around themes of mysticism and often featured scenes of alchemy.
‘Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100’ is a beautiful celebration of the Surrealist movement, from its foundations in Europe in the 1920s, to its spread to the United States. On view in Philadelphia until Feb. 16 2025, ‘Dreamworld’ sparks the imagination and inspires a deeper exploration of human consciousness.
