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Exhibit: From Mickey Mouse to Dali
WASHINGTON (AP) -- One artist claimed to have been hatched from an egg in an eagle's nest. Another is known for painting a flexible watch dial wrapped around a tree branch. A show of painters who were pushing the artistic envelope in the troubled Europe of the mid-1900s is on view at the Phillips Collection, Washington's first museum of modern art. Some of them came to America and helped to shift the world's art capital from Paris to New York. "Surrealism and Modernism" -- 59 works by Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and others -- was put together by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, another pioneer of adventurism in painting. It was not shown there but will go to three other museums in the United States after it has closed in Washington January 18, 2004. A. Everett Austin Jr., who directed the Atheneum in midcentury, had his own explanation of surrealism -- or superrealism, as it's sometimes called. "It is essentially an attempt to exploit, with paint, the more exquisite reality of the imagination, of the dream, even of the nightmare," Austin wrote. "We have all met it, and some have recognized its spirit, more diluted and more popularized, in 'Mickey Mouse' and the 'Silly Symphonies."' Austin bought the first Dali painting to be placed in an American museum, "Solitude," which depicts a half-length nude leaning against a green rock. The nubbly texture of the canvas, clearly seen through the nude, the rock and everything else in the picture, gives the whole scene a surreal look. Dali -- known for his flexible pocket watch -- spent World War II in the United States. He was so successful that Andre Breton, a leader of surrealism, made an anagram of Dali's name: "Avida Dollars." "He was an impresario unto himself," said Susan Frank, curator of the Washington show. Dali's work has been widely reproduced and imitated in the United States, where Frank said he is better known than in his native Spain. He lived quietly in Catalonia and died in 1989 after 15 years of increasingly difficult health problems. An influential exhibit of work by artists in exile was mounted during World War II at the New York gallery of Pierre Matisse, son of French painter Henri Matisse. It introduced some of the surrealists to the American art world. Among artists most admired by American painters were Roberto Matta, a Chilean, and the German Max Ernst. Both had been working in France. Ernst was in at the beginning of French surrealism and wrote a version of his own birth in surrealist language. "On 2 April at 9:45, Max Ernst hatched from the egg which his Mother had laid in an eagle's nest," he wrote, "and which the bird had brooded over for seven years." Ernst gave a more sober account of a painting in the Washington show, called "Europe After the Rain." He wrote in a letter to the Atheneum's Austin that he started it in southern France two months before the French collapse of 1940, was interrupted by a stay in French concentration camps and finished it in New York in the next two years. Matta was in personal touch with Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, among the more famous American 20th-century artists whose works include important elements of surrealism. Matta died last year in Civitavecchia, Italy, at 91. An exhibition of his work is in planning for the Washington headquarters of the Organization of American States. Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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