Art
Nancy Cunard's 'Black Atlantic'
PARIS — The display for Black Atlantic by Nancy Cunard at the Musée du quai Branly evokes a period when the artistic and literary avant-garde became intertwined with the political and the glamorous.
Surrealism
Art
From Lynch to the Lynchian and the Dreams in Between
Hypnotherapy, a group show at Kent Fine Art, gives David Lynch fans a chance to revisit the iconic filmmaker’s alarming artwork a year after his solo turn at Jack Tilton. But that's only one, conspicuous though it is, of its strengths. What really matters is the opportunity to experience a museum-qu
Opinion
Model/Surrealist/War Photographer Revealed Through Thousands of Images
Some people manage to live many lives in their one existence, and Lee Miller with her journey from Poughkeepsie to the Surrealist scene of Paris to the front lines of World War II was definitely a woman whose life could not be singularly defined.
Opinion
Artist Who Embodies Teenage Intellectual Angst Is Getting a MoMA Retrospective
What will this new retrospective at MoMA, which opens September 28 in New York, reveal about the psyche of the Belgian artist who loves the radical juxtaposition?
Art
Automatic Transmission: Drawing Surrealism
Surreal. It’s one of those words like insane or awesome that’s taken a beating from aggressive misuse. I’ve heard the term applied to both a bus driver wearing a funny hat and the sight of the second plane hitting the tower. “It was so surreal,” that long e sung out like an animal’s cry of distress,
Art
Slithering Toward Us: “Drawing Surrealism” at the Morgan
How much more powerful to say “drawing surrealism” than something like “surrealist drawings.” It gets the action into the art, which is, often, exactly where it is. Unweighted by color, untrammeled by, oh you know, something like the history of painting and how the surrealists (in whatever grouping
Books
Surrealism in a Minor Key: Recent Translations of Ghérasim Luca
Considered through Deleuze and Guattari’s somewhat idiosyncratic interpretive lenses, Ghérasim Luca is a minor writer — minor in the sense that he relentlessly pushes language toward its limits, that he deterritorializes it, that he transmutes it from a mere instrument of representation into an extr
Art
Unnatural Uses
BRISTOL, UK — Do you ever wake up in the morning and think: I must do something with that cow's head today? If so, you have something in common with artist Geza Szollosi.
Art
The Best Show At MoMA Is Not What You Think
With the hype surrounding the Cindy Sherman blockbuster retrospective on the 6th floor, which critics have almost unanimously praised, I was surprised to find that the most invigorating, exciting and generally mind-blowing exhibition at MoMA right now is Exquisite Corpses.
Art
The Uses of Dismemberment: MoMA’s Exquisite Corpses
Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, as discussed in last week’s post, was assembled out of discarded body parts — an exhumed limb here, a torso there — with everything “awkwardly sewn into a corporeal pastiche.”
Art
Surrealist Visions and California Chic
LOS ANGELES — A visiting friend from New York afforded me the chance to check out two shows currently on view at LACMA. They're quite different — disturbing surrealism and cool California chic — but as they're in the same Resnick Pavilion, we had to see both. It's a great combination.
Art
The Summer Exhibition David Lynch Wishes He Curated
While exploring the New York Academy of Art's 5th Annual Summer Exhibition at Flowers, all I could think about was one person: director David Lynch. Not only because I am a fan of the master of the surreal psychological horror, but many of the works in the exhibition featured a similar eerie atmosph