Surrealism in the USA

1. The 1930s: Surrealism comes to the U.S.

The first exhibition of Surrealist painting in America took place at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1931. Entitled Newer Super-Realism, it featured only European artists, including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, André Masson, and Joan Miró. In January 1932, Julien Levy showed a slightly different version of this exhibition in his New York gallery, adding the Americans Joseph Cornell and Charles Howard. In the following years, a few Americans began incorporating Surrealist biomorphic forms in their work, as in the examples by Jan Matulka and Arshile Gorky in this room.

In the second half of the thirties, Surrealism in the United States was primarily associated with Salvador Dalí, whose popularity rested as much on his paintings as on his provocative behavior intended to attract the attention of the press during the artist's frequent trips to New York. Dali's characteristic use of limp forms, double imagery, and shifts of scale can be seen in the works of George Marinko and Federico Castellon, two of his main American followers. Dali's style was also central to the so-called "Social Surrealists" -- O.Louis Guglielmi, James Guy, Walter Quirt, and David Smith -- who plumbed the repertoire of Surrealist images and techniques to convey political and social commentary.

2. California Post-Surrealism

In 1934, a group of Californian artists led by Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg, exhibited together in Los Angeles under the name of Post-Surrealists. Although they used such Surrealist devices as scale contrasts and odd juxtapositions of objects, they distinguished themselves from the European Surrealists by their rejection of the irrational in favor of a contrived symbolic program connecting all the elements of their compositions. Their rebus-like imagery may appear strange at first but can actually be deciphered as logical explorations of such themes as love and creation.

The Post-Surrealists, who also included Philip Guston, Reuben Kadish, Harold Lehman, and Knud Merrild, formed the only organized Surrealist group in the United States. They exhibited together for about six years and published several theoretical texts spelling out their cerebral conception of art.

3. Artists in Exile

When World War II broke out, many European Surrealists came in exile to the United States. The German Jimmy Ernst and the Swiss Kurt Seligmann were among the first, followed by Yves Tanguy, Matta, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst. The leader of the Surrealist group in Paris, André Breton, emigrated to New York in 1941 thanks to Peggy Guggenheim's financial help, while André Masson's passage to America was financed by Baltimore collector Saidie May.

The arrival of these artists marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of Surrealism in the United States as both Europeans and Americans were affected by this migration. The artists in exile found inspiration in their new surroundings while the Americans began exploring some of the themes and techniques of their European counterparts.

One of the highlights of the Surrealist activities in New York in the early 1940s was the publication of the Surrealist Portfolio VVV (shown here in its entirety), which brought together works by eleven European and American artists.

4. The 1940s: Myth and Magic

The contribution of the Surrealists in exile to American art was primarily twofold: the technique of automatism and the subject of myth. Automatism, which consists in drawing or painting with little control of reason in order to release the creative unconscious, led American artists to experiment with a freer handling of paint, as seen here in the work of Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and the Californian Knud Merrild. At the same time, the elaboration of a new myth for our time became a central preoccupation both for Americans and for the artists in exile. In 1943, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko described their paintings as "the poetic expression of the essence of myth."

The search for new beginnings linked myth and automatism. Collective myths of origin expressed the beginnings of humanity, while the release of the unconscious through automatism represented the primordial stage of the individual. Such explorations laid the groundwork for what would become Abstract Expressionism.

The 1940s also saw the development of Magic Realism in the work of Eugene Berman and Charles Rain, for instance. Adopting highly traditional techniques, these artists favored incongruous juxtapositions to evoke a mysterious atmosphere in works painted with great naturalism and precision.

5. Surrealism After the War, New York and Beyond

After the war, the artists who had come to the United States in exile went back to Europe, with a few exceptions. Yves Tanguy settled in Connecticut with Kay Sage, while Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning lived in Arizona until 1953. The main galleries devoted to Surrealism in New York, Julien Levy Gallery and Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery, closed, and the movement was declared dead by several artists and critics. It was still, however, a source of inspiration for younger artists, such as Louise Bourgeois and George Tooker. It also remained a significant force in other parts of the country, notably in Chicago and the greater Midwest where a group of artists whose work was based on fantasy and mystery emerged in the late forties, including Gertrude Abercrombie, John Wilde, and the printmaker Vera Berdich.

The strings stretched across this gallery recall the installation of the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism held in New York in 1942, curated by André Breton and designed by Marcel Duchamp. Photographs of the original installation can be seen in the display case in the center of the room, together with other documents related to the history of Surrealism in the United States.

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