Exhibition celebrates Dali, Miro, Magritte and Man Ray
120 views · Published 15 October 2018 · 6:13 · Indexed 26 September 2026
Channel: AP Archive · 2018 · News & Politics
(10 Oct 2018) LEADIN
Dali, Miro, Magritte and Man Ray among the artists celebrated in an exhibition in Pisa dedicated to Surrealism.
Some 100 works of art are on loan from the Pompidou in Paris, some of them for the first time in Italy.
STORYLINE
Works by some of the biggest names in Surrealism are on show here in Pisa.
The cultural movement that began in the 1920s included Belgium artist, Rene Magritte, Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti, the German atist and poet, Max Ernst, plus Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso and of course the Spanish Surrealist, Salvador Dali.
The exhibition's titled "From Magritte to Duchamp. 1929: the Great Surrealism from the Center Pompidou " and is held in the Palazzo Blu.
Marcel Duchamp was a French-American painter and sculptor whose first work 'Nude Descending a Staircase' sparked controversy at the time.
Many of the artworks here date back to between 1927 and 1935. They've been selected by Didier Ottinger, curator of the exhibition and Deputy Director of Centre George Pompidou and one of the world's leading experts on Magritte, Picasso and the Surrealist movement.
The Surrealist movement was founded in 1924 in Paris by poets André Breton, Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, and was described in the Manifesto of Surrealism as a "psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought."
"Among the 20th-century movements of modern arts, Surrealism has a very peculiar character and an exceptional longevity. Cubism, Futurism and other movements last just a few years, while Surrealism lasts 40 years, and 40 years means that we can identify specific moments in its history, that allows us to show different images of what there would be from the beginning to the end of the movement," Ottinger explains.
This exhibition is focused on the year 1929, which is seen as a turning point in the history of the Surrealist movement.
It's the year Dalì and Spanish director Luis Brunuel made "Un Chien Andalou" ("An Andalusian Dog"), considered to be the first Surrealist film.
Also on show here is "Partial Hallucination: Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Grand Piano" which came to Dali in a complete image before he painted it.
Ottinger says Dali is: "A character who, according to André Breton himself, embodies the spirit of Surrealism for many years, arrives on the Surrealistic scene in Paris in 1929: this is Salvador Dalì, from Catalonia, he arrives with Luis Brunuel with whom he makes a movie, "Un Chien Andalou" ("An Andalusian Dog" in English), which will be shown in Paris the same year; but in Paris there is also Magritte, an important figure of the Surrealism who lives near Paris until 1927 and actively participates to the activities of the surrealist group from 1929 onwards."
Otitnger adds: "Surrealism was a movement which was contemporary to the spread in France of Sigmund Freud's ideas, and all the main characters of this movement during its foundation, such as (Louis) Aragon, (André) Breton, are young people who have a deep knowledge of Freud's theories and all those who will join the Surrealism movement over time will be Freudians or readers of Freud. The unconscious, the free expression of the unconscious, sums up the poetic ambition of Surrealism, that means to express what man possesses that is freest most inventive, without constraints, above all moral".
The exhibition runs in the Palazzo Blu from October 11th to February 17th, 2019.
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