The Weinstein Gallery Opens ~ "Surrealism: New Worlds", A Major Exhibition

Written by Harvey Bainbridge Saturday, 05 May 2012 23:37

San Francisco, California.- The Weinstein Gallery is pleased to announce "Surrealism: New Worlds", on view from December 10th through January 27th 2012 at 301 Geary Street in San Francisco. The exhibition will be the largest survey of Surrealism to be mounted by a private gallery on the West Coast and includes over 80 original paintings & sculptures by 22 leading Surrealists, This comprehensive exhibition represents five decades of this long-lasting, influential, and ever-present art movement and features many works that have until now been held for decades in private collections.

The exhibition includes work by the original members —Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Marcel Duchamp. It also features artists who came into the movement in the 1930s, drawn to the magnetism of its leader, André Breton, and his promise for a surrealist revolution, including Kurt Seligmann, Oscar Dominguez, Victor Brauner, André Masson, Marcel Jean, Alexander Calder, Wolfgang Paalen, Roberto Matta, and Gordon Onslow Ford. And, the exhibition looks at New World artists, who had studied surrealism from afar and then had it land in their backyard when the European surrealist artists were forced to flee to America during World War II. Among these are Enrico Donati, Jimmy Ernst, William Baziotes, David Hare, and Gerome Kamrowski. This show also features work by some of the underrepresented women artists, who were integral to the movement but who have received less attention for their critical role: Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, and Stella Snead. The accompanying 152-page catalogue features a new essay by Surrealism scholar, Mary Ann Caws. In it she writes that as the movement transitioned to America, “Surrealism reencountered a revolutionary aspect of which this remarkable exhibition is a manifestation, another sort of new world manifesto in visual terms.”


The word surrealist was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, which was first performed in 1917. World War I scattered the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and in the interim many became involved with Dada, believing that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought the conflict of the war upon the world. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued. During the war, André Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from shell-shock. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché, Breton felt that Vaché was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry. He admired the young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, "In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most." Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault.

They began experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault delved deeper into automatism and wrote The Magnetic Fields (1920). Continuing to write, they attracted more artists and writers; they came to believe that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada attack on prevailing values. The group grew to include Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise, Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy.

In 1924 they declared their philosophy in the first "Surrealist Manifesto". That same year they established the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and began publishing the journal La Révolution surréaliste. Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage and decalcomania. Soon more visual artists became involved, including Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Francis Picabia, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Alberto Giacometti, Valentine Hugo, Méret Oppenheim, Toyen, and later after the second war: Enrico Donati. The group included the musician, poet, and artist E. L. T. Mesens, painter and writer René Magritte, Paul Nougé, Marcel Lecomte, and André Souris. Giorgio de Chirico, and his previous development of metaphysical art, was one of the important joining figures between the philosophical and visual aspects of Surrealism. In 1924, Miró and Masson applied Surrealism to painting, explicitly leading to the La Peinture Surrealiste exhibition of 1925, held at Gallerie Pierre in Paris, and displaying works by Masson, Man Ray, Paul Klee, Miró, and others. The show confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts. Breton published Surrealism and Painting in 1928 which summarized the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the 1960s. Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions.


Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dalí joined the group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935. From 1936 through 1938 Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Roberto Matta joined the group. Paalen contributed Fumage and Onslow Ford Coulage as new pictorial automatic techniques. Long after personal, political and professional tensions fragmented the Surrealist group, Magritte and Dalí continued to define a visual program in the arts. This program reached beyond painting, to encompass photography as well, as can be seen from a Man Ray self portrait, whose use of assemblage influenced Robert Rauschenberg's collage boxes. World War II prompted an artistic exodus from europe, and many of the surrealists including Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst became influential in the USA.  Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Roberto Matta and later, Mark Rothko all became involved with the surrealist movement, while in England Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Paul Nash used or experimented with Surrealist techniques.

The Weinstein Gallery in San Fransico is situated on 3 floors in Union Square. The Gallery specializes in contemporary and modern masters, including Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Enrico Donati, Raoul Dufy, Jimmy Ernst, Leonor Fini, Roberto Matta, Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell, Gordon Onslow Ford and Pablo Picasso. The gallery made the news in 2011 when a Picasso was stolen from its walls in broad daylight, although it was quickly recovered and is now no longer for sale, its fame generating so many more gallery visitors! Fortunately, the gallery have not allowed the theft to deflect them from their aim of making art as accessible as possible, and they are well-known for their friendly and knowledgable staff who are helpful to every visitor, whether they can afford the art on the walls or not. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.weinstein.com

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