Paris puts on a grand display for 100 years of surrealism

Paris. The Pompidou Centre in Paris is exhibiting a large selection of surrealist masterpieces from today to mark the centenary of this artistic movement, including pieces by Dalí, Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst and Joan Miró, among others.

Around 500 paintings, sculptures, drawings, texts, films and documents, including many exceptional loans, will be on display in a space of 2,200 square meters until January 13.

All these works show that this movement, born around poets such as André Breton and spread throughout the world, was visionary and remains relevant in its desire to change the relationship between man and nature.

Regularly exhibited in Madrid, San Francisco, Stockholm or New York, emblematic works such as The great masturbatorby Dali, Personal valuesby Magritte, the Dog barking at the moonby Miró, appear in the catalogue.

The exhibition, which was already on view in a reduced format in Brussels until July, will then travel to Madrid, Hamburg and Philadelphia.

The scenery plays with optical illusion, so appreciated by the surrealists, and the route is in the form of a labyrinth, which takes the visitor to a huge circular room in the center of which you can see the original manuscript of the Surrealist manifestoby Breton. An immersive audiovisual projection sheds light on its genesis and philosophy.

The tour follows literary figures such as Lautréamont and Lewis Carroll, as well as reviewing mythologies and themes that fueled the movement (dreams, the unconscious, eroticism).

Another relationship with the world

More than an aesthetic dogma, than a formalism, surrealism is a philosophy that brought together for more than 40 years men and women who believed in another relationship with the worldMarie Sarré, curator of the exhibition together with Didier Ottinger, deputy director of the National Museum of Modern Art, explained to AFP.

The Pompidou Centre had already dedicated an exhibition to surrealism in 2002.

We wanted to show that this movement not only has a point of view on the course of history, its critical moments (world wars, the Spanish civil war, colonialism) and the political movements that tore Europe apart, but also another vision of the relationship between man and the cosmos.Ottinger noted. His message is one of the most contemporary we can imagine.he added.

Sarré recalled that most of the artists of the movement He had the experience of the trenches and questioned the values ​​of the modern Western world, of the Age of Enlightenment.such as rationalism, progress or industrialization.

They had the intuition that it was urgent to reinvent the relationship with the worldheld.

Women artists

The exhibition examines the international spread of surrealism since the 1930s, with works that show its arrival in places such as Australia and translations of the main texts by Louis Aragon and Breton in China.

Also featured are works by Rufino Tamayo, Tatsuo Ikeda (Japan) and Wilhelm Freddie (Denmark), among others.

The catalogue places a strong emphasis on women, with works by Remedios Varo, the British Ithell Colquhoun, the French Dora Maar and the American Dorothea Tannin.

“Still in the minority in the 1920s, when the movement was founded, they soon proved essential and found ground for emancipation. Their involvement will go growing up“, explained Sarré.

Surrealism was officially dissolved in 1969, but that did not mean the end of its influence. It remains a powerful source of inspiration in contemporary art, cinema and fashion.