Salvador Dalí is conspicuously absent from At the Heart of Change: Surrealism and Anti-Fascism, which opens this week at Warsaw's Museum of Modern Art.
The omission is deliberate: Dalí openly supported the Franco regime, and the exhibition has no room for him.
What it does have—works by Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, René Magritte, Pablo Picasso and the Czech artist Toyen, among many others—amounts to a sweeping reinterpretation of one of the 20th century's most recognizable art movements.
"Because of its dominant aesthetic, surrealism is regarded as a movement in which art is created for art's sake. We show that nothing could be further from the truth. It was created in response to the social situation," curator Magda Lipska told Poland's PAP news agency.
"Paradoxically, it is a movement of socially and politically engaged artists," she added.
Co-curator Dorota Jarecka said the exhibition deliberately shifts the central concept of surrealism away from imagination and toward revolution.
"The exhibition changes the key word—from 'imagination' to 'revolution,'" she said.
Where imagination suggests creativity and invented worlds, the surrealists were after something deeper: a method of making art not controlled by the rational mind, rooted in Marxism and Freudian thought.
Surrealism was born in 1924 with André Breton's founding manifesto, initially as a response to World War I rather than fascism.
But as totalitarian movements gained strength across Europe, the surrealists grew more outspoken—against Hitlerism, the Nuremberg Laws, antisemitism and war.
The show is organized into 12 chapters, each set in a different country where surrealism took root: Paris, Czechoslovakia, Spain during the civil war, Egypt, Germany, Britain and the Americas, including the Caribbean, Mexico and the United States.
The first chapter centers on a 1930s clash between surrealists and a fascist militia at a Paris cinema screening Luis Buñuel's L'Age d'Or, considered a feature-length surrealist manifesto; the film was subsequently banned in France.
The exhibition also makes a point of including a Polish chapter, challenging the notion that surrealism had no presence in Poland and showing how it was used to address wartime trauma, including the Holocaust.
Women artists feature prominently—not through a feminist lens, the curators said, but as participants within the surrealist milieu. They include war photojournalist Kati Horna, who documented the Spanish Civil War, as well as Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Claude Cahun and others.
The curators said the show is intended to resonate today.
They argued that today's reality is alarmingly similar to the world in which the surrealists lived and that the slogans those artists carried on their banners—including opposition to racism and authoritarianism—remain highly relevant.
The exhibition opens on Friday and runs through January 10.
(jh/gs)
Source: PAP