![]() In curator William Rubin’s account, two years after Breton’s death, European Surrealism is officially done as a living, breathing movement, the advanced art baton long since handed off to Abstract Expressionism and Pop in New York. Three decades later, with the 1968 exhibition “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage,” MoMA revisited the movement, this time retrospectively. ©The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York View of the exhibition “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage,” 1968, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Per Hugnet: for the Surrealists, “what a work of art expresses formally is of no importance-only its hidden content counts.” This, for Barr, explains the fact that Surrealist artistic output tended in two formally irreconcilable directions: on the one hand, the dream imagery characteristic of Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte, in which impossible scenes are rendered with naturalistic precision, and on the other, the biomorphic pseudo-abstractions of André Masson and Joan Miró, rooted in the practice of automatic drawing. Surrealism was not a style, but a “mental attitude and a method of investigation,” as writer Georges Hugnet contends elsewhere in the show’s catalogue. As Barr suggests, Surrealism is inherently resistant to the kind of formalist reading that anchored the previous exhibition: in the catalogue, he writes that under Breton’s leadership Surrealism springs from the ashes of Paris Dada after its 1922 demise, harnessing its predecessor’s anarchic anti-rationalism into a more systematic theoretical program, rooted in the exploration of the unconscious mind-but not in a corresponding aesthetic program. Whereas “Cubism and Abstract Art” advanced a causal history of modernism, tracing a direct genealogy from the broken brushwork of Impressionism to the faceted planes of Cubism, and from Cubist dissection of form to the abstract geometry of Suprematism and De Stijl, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” introduced a more haphazard lineage: the loose, transhistorical category of “fantastic art” encompassed an eclectic range of materials, from the work of premodern fabulists like Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Hieronymus Bosch, and William Blake, to art made by children and the mentally ill, advertisements, and even a Walt Disney cartoon. ![]() This comparative ambivalence extended to the show’s contextualization of the movement. ![]()
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