Surrealism in New York City
Art Movement Defies Definition, But Curators Keep Trying

Listen to David D'Arcy's report.

March 5, 2002 -- Think of surrealist art and you might think of a clock melting in a painting by Salvador Dali or a woman's eye slit open with a razor blade in the film Andalusian Dog by Luis Bunuel.

René Magritte. The Lovers, 1928 © Charly Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York  enlarge photo

Salvador Dalí. Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937 © 2001 Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation/Artists Rights  enlarge photo

Max Ernst. Men Shall Know Nothing of This, 1923 © 2001 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris  enlarge photo

These images were created in the name of freeing the unconscious, and they were intentionally shocking.

Now the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is featuring a broad "survey" of surrealist art, made by artists who called themselves surrealists -- and by many who didn't.

David D'Arcy reports for Morning Edition that the art movement itself defied rigid definitions, but curators keep trying.

Like impressionism, which is now a term used to describe almost anything from movies to interior decoration, surrealism has become an everyday term to describe anything weird or disturbing.

The word surrealist was first used when the poet Guillaume Apollinaire described a Parisian stage set designed by Pablo Picasso in 1917 for the ballet Parade. In 1924 author Andre Breton codified it with a manifesto that laid out strict rules for its followers. He decreed that art should be created for art's sake in the name of freedom.

In their paintings, surrealists tried to reproduce a world of dreams, like Joan Miro's Constellations of the early 1940s -- which filled the skies with body parts -- or Salvador Dali's landscapes, in which human figures sprout animal appendages and an empty table stands in the desert.

World War II arrived and the core group of surrealists broke apart, fleeing the Nazi takeover of Europe. Yet their influence was still enormous.

Jackson Pollock, one of the most important artists of the post World War II era, began making abstract paintings while working with the surrealist Andre Masson in the 1940s.

By the 1950s, Salvador Dali was designing dream sequences for such films as Spellbound by Alfred Hitchcock.

Dali became an adviser to fashion designers and surrealism reached the consumer masses, violating its founders' rules. Posters of his work and that of Rene Magritte became fixtures in college dormitories and dentists' offices.

Other Resources

• Learn more about the surrealism exhibit at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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